Worst. Date Night. EVER.

The story I am about to tell is humiliating and gross.  It is only in the interest of literary truth-telling that I am sharing it. 
The weekend started out well. The Lilongwe Wildlife Center had a showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 on Friday evening.  We had a quick dinner of pizza and showed up at the center, which had a fabulous child-sized mountain to climb, replete with a knotted rope that the kids used to pull themselves up. They did so repeatedly, sliding down the dirt afterwards, so that they were completely orange with dust within minutes of arrival.  There was a fabulous wooden playground, and a small thatched-roofed bar selling drinks and chips. The movie was being shown on a makeshift screen that consisted of a white sheet folded in the middle and held together with a clothes pin.  There was a bowl of marshmallows for toasting (not too bad), and bags of cheetos which substituted for the popcorn that had been promised, as the machine had broken.  In typical African fashion, the movie started an hour late, and suffered multiple technical problems before it went into full-swing, and the fold in the sheet tended to distort the character's faces to the point that they were occasionally unrecognizable, but overall it was really enjoyable.
Saturday was Date Night. I put it in capital letters because anyone who has been married for a long enough time recognizes the importance of that sacred night when adults shed their stained sweatpants, pry the sticky hands from around their legs, and briefly escape together in pursuit of that illusive and legendary holy grail of parenting: Adult Conversation.  This night was going to be special.  One of the Baylor doctors was having a party at her house (to celebrate "the revolution"), and I took the opportunity to dress up in my snazzy black leather boots and apply makeup.  I even went so far as to pilfer a gorgeous African print skirt that belonged to my (much younger and hipper) nanny. 
When we first arrived at Leah's house we were handed a glass of white wine and given a tour.  Her husband Jared is a truly talented artist, who does murals of famous people, as well as family and friends, using stencils he has created from photographs.  The work is amazing, and as I admired it their home filled with people and I had my second glass of wine. The partygoers were doctors, peace corps workers, Malawian nationals, and aspiring med students. The conversation was interesting, the wine was sweet, and I was out with my best friend.  I was having a great time.
Suddenly, I felt a rumbling in my belly.  It was not a pain, but it was enough to make me put down my glass of wine.  Within 5 minutes I had begun to sweat, and felt a cold chill sweep over my body from my scalp to my fingertips.  A searing pain began in my back, between my shoulder blades, and my heart began to feel as though it was exploding in my chest.  The world around me became gray and distant, and I held on to furniture as I made my way to Dave, interrupting his conversation to say that I had to go home.  Now.  I must have looked something like I felt, because he immediately stopped his conversation, gathered our belongings, and sheperded me toward the door.  I muttered my apologies to Leah through thick lips, stumbled to the car, and dragged myself into the front seat.
I have given birth twice.  I know what pain is.  The pain I was in last night was as profound and intense as labor, but without the blessed relief that comes between contractions.  My abdomen convulsed, my chest burned, and I felt consciousness attempting to flee as I struggled to keep from passing out.  I lay in the front seat and moaned, begging Dave to get home, wondering if I was dying, and trying to imagine where he could take me if I went into cardiac arrest.  And then it hit.
"Pull over", I begged Dave, and he drove onto the dirt at the side of the unlit highway.  I commanded him to roll up the windows and plug his ears, and fell out of the front seat.  I hunched over and was violently, explosively ill for several minutes.  I defaced my fancy boots and decimated my borrowed skirt as I hung onto the side of the truck and lost half of my body weight to the anonymous Malawian roadside.  Dave, growing concerned, rolled down the window to ask if I was OK, and I hoarsely asked him to find something, anything, I could use to clean myself up some before I got back into the car.  He found a sweatshirt of mine which I limply used to wipe myself down before hoisting myself back into the car.  Miraculously, I felt better, although still weak and lightheaded.
Despite having been together for a decade and a half, my husband and I have the kind of relationship where we do not discuss our bodily functions.  We prefer, instead, to maintain some semblance of romance by keeping these things to ourselves. As physicians and the parents of three children who have survived potty training and multiple rounds of rotavirus, and who consider flatulence to be a weapon against their siblings, we certainly discuss other people’s habits.  However we are both private people who prefer to see each other in a more idealistic, more romantically ideal way, and so we keep the bathroom door shut, both literally and figuratively.  I was humiliated, and, even with the windows rolled down and the wind in my face, I was sure that he was overwhelmed by the evidence of my roadside misfortune.  I promised, with tears in my eyes, never to drop embarrassing stories of his sleepwalking misadventures into casual conversation again, and made him swear that he would never share the details of this night with anyone.
It turns out that Dave had been having GI distress for about 24 hours, as well.  However, given the nature of our relationship, he had opted to keep this information to himself.  We do not know exactly where it came from, but we strongly suspect the Cheetos on Friday night, as the bag had been passed among multiple children before reaching us, and Laura and our children did not have any.
So why am I sharing this story?  Because, as much as the golden sunset over the burnt-amber fields behind our backyard each day, it is part of life in Malawi.  Plus, even one day later, it's pretty funny...