African Safari: An Uninvited Guest

There are certainly challenges to life here in Malawi. The electricity always goes out just as we are about to leave for Date Night. Our bowels have all suffered. It is not uncommon for the entire city to suddenly be out of one of the main ingredients for that night's supper. However, there are also certainly many benefits to living here. I truly believe that the work we are doing helps improve the quality and length of life for our patients every day. My children have the opportunity to attend a school filled with people from all different cultures, where one of Eamonn's afternoon activities each week is to go to a nearby orphanage and play with babies who have lost their families. Plus, we get to go on safari on any random weekend.
We chose to leave for our first safari at 5 am this past Saturday, packing our sleeping children and near-incoherent nanny into our "new" truck, a weathered 10-seat white Pajero with benches that line the very back. The road out of town was populated with industrious people carrying buckets on their heads, burning garbage, and riding bikes. The air was cool, and the mist in front of us layered over the horizon so that it appeared as though we were driving toward the ocean. The sun rose slowly on our left, majestic and orange, burning through the
haze and illuminating the silhouetted hills that pushed through the thick fog. As we left the city we passed small villages of only a few mud and thatch houses, wells where women pumped
the day's water into bright colored plastic pails, and ox-drawn carriages filled with vegetables. Saturday is market day, and each of the villagers was bringing their goods to the nearest town, where hundreds of people gathered in groups along the roadside, selling neatly stacked piles of cabbages and tomatoes, onions, potatoes, even clothing. One local delicacy, which I finally stopped to photograph, is mice-on-a-stick. Apparently when the fields are burned in preparation for the next planting season all of the mice flee and are caught by young boys, who then skewer and (?) barbeque them to be sold, stacked on long sticks that they wave at passerbys on the main road.
We entered the Liwonde National Park about 3 hours after we left home, paid our entry fee (about $2 per person), and started the drive to the campsite and lodge. The road, while pitted, narrow and dusty, was not much worse then some parts of Lilongwe. The foliage was grey and sparse, and we passed over several completely dry riverbeds. We unrolled the windows
briefly to help spot animals, and were almost immediately accosted by large, biting (but
thankfully slow and stupid) flies that entered in droves. We began keeping count of how many each of us killed, but finally decided to roll up the windows and turn on the "a/c" when the body count reached double-digits. Eamonn kept track of the animals we spotted as we continued on, and by the time we arrived at the campsite an hour later we had seen many, including impala and baboons, although the big ones we'd been really looking for had still eluded us.
Mvuu lodge is a beautiful and rustic open-air pavilion made of hard wood and thatch, and beyond the main building the Shire river floats lazily by. We could hear the grunting of hippos in the distance as we set up our tent. The manager gave us a lengthy speech about the need to be alert, as we were truly camping in the bush, and informed us that if we were to encounter an elephant at any time, we should go back into our tents quietly and wait for it to leave. I could see my poor anxious Eamonn's pale face go a shade whiter as he spoke, and I had to spend several minutes after he left reassuring him that this was very safe and that no, no
one had died at this camp, or I would certainly have read about it in the Lonely Planet. The kids put on their bathing suits and we headed to the pool, which, it turned out, was teeming with life. So, instead of swimming, the children spent the next hour catching water bugs in plastic bottles from the water's edge. We went on another game drive before dinner, and lengthened the list of animals we'd spotted, including a herd of elephants standing in a thicket of trees eating quietly.
At one point during the drive I felt the urgent need for a bathroom, as my body had not yet completely recovered it's normal bowel function. We had come to a dead end in the road which appeared to culminate in a small village. I lay, sweating and in pain, in the front seat, while a girl of about 6 ran alongside the truck, her scabbed knees pumping beneath her tattered dress, with the joyful shout of "Aaazuuunguuu!!!" announcing our presence.
This, roughly translated from Chichewa, means "Whiiiiiite peeeeople!!!!", and we were soon overcome by a flashmob of barefoot children attempting English phrases and eagerly trying to peer into the car to see and touch the family. I stumbled, after a frantic attempt to communicate my needs to the children, to a small, three-sided brick structure with a plastic flap for privacy, enclosing a pit latrine in the dirt. Several feet below I noticed a gentle stream flowing, and held my nose in preparation for using the facilities. It was then that I noticed that the movement below me was not that of a flowing body of water, but a teeming mass of maggots. I will leave the rest of this portion of the adventure to the reader's imagination...
We returned to the camp, made dinner over our camping stove, and had just finished eating when we heard drumming from the other side of the grounds. When we investigated we found several men singing and dancing around a fire, telling stories of African village life through their music, as explained to us by the guides.  Although it was captivating, the children were exhausted, so we headed back to the tent, holding hands and using my head lamp for light in the pitch-black night. 
As we approached the tent and Dave went ahead to unzip it, I looked up to the left of our site, about 5 feet from our front door, and saw my light reflected in the unblinking eyes of an enormous (must've been 10 feet tall) elephant. He gazed at me blithely and continued chewing. I held tight to my kids' hands and said, in my best "I am an ED doctor and I am in total control " voice: "OK. Elephant.  Everyone take a step back." Aine let out a brief shriek, Malawi began to whimper, and Eamonn burst into tears, but they all calmly stepped backwards, putting our beast of an automobile between us and the actual beast. We sought out a guard, who shined an enormous flashlight at the creature and banged on a tree with a large stick, and the elephant lumbered away.  Needless to say, it took many minutes of negotiating to convince anyone to sleep in the tent that night. I myself did not sleep well, as I was still having belly issues, and was far too afraid to leave the tent to use the bathroom.
The next morning we went on a boat safari, and spent two hours cruising the riverside with a guide, spotting hippos, crocodiles, and herds of elephants, in numbers too high to count.
Later that day Eamonn apologized, clearly ashamed, for having been so afraid the night before. I explained to him the difference between being fearless and being courageous, and assured him that he had in fact shown great courage by spending the night camping in the bush, despite his fear. Adventures like the one we'd had teach us lessons in a way that we could not have learned them at home, I told him, and are one of the benefits of living in Africa. Plus, they make really great stories.