Wasp Attack!

On Wednesday morning, I went for a run with R. We ran the village loop, and when I got back to my house I decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: climb the water tower behind my house. This is a metal tower about 10 meters high, on top of which is the big green water tank. Standing up there, you get a lovely view of the village in the morning, and I used to climb it about once a week. Wednesday morning, I climbed up with my camera and got a few nice shots, then started back down.

However, one critical thing had changed since the last time I climbed the tower: some very large red-orange wasps had made a nest at the top. I disturbed this nest as I placed my hands on the top rungs, and had just enough time to hear the angry buzzing, see the incoming wasps, and think SHIT! before bracing myself for the stings and starting to scramble down the ladder as fast as humanly possible, taking the rungs two at a time. The wasps came at me and stung me three times: once on my forehead, and twice on my left arm. I swatted away the last wasp, hit the ground, and dashed away while swearing my head off.

The stings hurt, but I considered myself lucky to have gotten away with only three, and after about ten minutes the pain subsided. There were tiny puncture marks but no swelling, and only mild itching. The stings got a bit worse throughout the morning, but never became more severe than a bad mosquito bite. I had a trip to Grootlaagte and Qabo scheduled for the afternoon, so we packed up the Land Rover and drove out to Grootlaagte around two. That night we camped out on the floor of a VDC house, laying out sleeping bags and mattress pads on the linoleum floor. I had trouble sleeping due to the heat and the itchiness of my arm; but again, no worse than a bad mosquito bite. Okay, maybe a really bad mosquito bite. Still, I thought nothing of it.

When I woke up on Thursday morning I thought my eye felt a bit funny, like it was clogged with sleepers or swollen the way your eyes will be after crying. No problem, I thought. Wash it out with water, blink rapidly. Solved.

Then I looked in the mirror. The whole left side of my face was swollen, an ugly line dividing my forehead into the level, normal plane above my right brow, and the Frankenstein-esque bulge above the left. I could barely open my left eye. My left arm was swollen and angry red above the elbow, and itching with a fiendish intensity.


What to do? I was torn between dismissal – it's just a wasp sting, you'll get over it! - and concern – this has never happened to me before, what if it gets worse? Also, I have a party to go to this weekend and I cannot show up like this....

After a brief conference with my companions, we decided to go and see the clinic in Grootlaagte and ask them for help. Unfortunately, the nurse had gone on a mobile clinic trip to provide services to the people working on nearby cattle farms, and without her the clinic was closed. “I'll be fine!” I said, optimistically. “We can try the clinic in Qabo when we get there later today.”

The rest of the day proceeded in an extremely embarrassing fashion. The purpose of the trip had been to introduce the new manager for the Huiku Trust to the relevant village authorities, and of course we carried on as planned. This meant that I met such important village figures as the kgosi (chief), the Huiku board members, the councillor, and the chairman of the village development committee while sporting a giant lump on the left side of my face. “Dumela!” I said to each of them, holding out my hand and ignoring the curious looks. “This is our new manager!”

We drove to Qabo in the afternoon. By this time, my left arm felt like it was permanently encased in one of the inflatable arm bands doctors use to test your blood pressure: the swelling from the stings was pressing in on the rest of my arm. When we drove over bumps I could feel my fluid-filled, Popeye-sized biceps jiggling. My eye was a little bit more open, but the swelling was moving down, and – more worryingly – over to the other side of my face. “We are going to the clinic as soon as we get to Qabo,” I said, firmly.

Unfortunately, the Qabo nurse was in Ghanzi. We decided that it was time to take matters into our own hands and chanced a visit to the traditional doctor, while waiting for the nurse to come back.

The traditional doctor was a plump, jolly old woman in a blue dress with a lot of plastic beaded necklaces around her neck. She sat back from her laundry bucket and listened as P explained the situation in Naro, and then gave me her advice, which consisted of three main points:
1.People that complain about wasp stings are huge wimps.
2.She didn't know much about plants/herbs to help stings; that was the specialty of the other traditional doctor, who was very conveniently out of town.
3.However, in a pinch, she suggested that I rub the swellings, vigorously, with soil. She demonstrated, picking up handfuls of soil and rubbing them roughly into her arm.
This was not what I had hoped for – I had envisioned a steaming hot poultice of some kind of bitter-smelling, mashed-up roots and leaves. The poultice would burn at first, then soothe and immediately relieve the itching, draw out the poison, and visibly reduce the swelling before I even left the doctor. Alas, it was not to be.

We trekked back to our camp site and I began dutifully rubbing soil on my arm, though I couldn't bring myself to rub it on my face. It didn't seem to have much of an effect, but it did feel wonderful to itch the whole area.

After that I had a short nap, and a brief board meeting.

Following the board meeting, at about 6:30, we decided to go and see if the nurse had returned from Ghanzi. She had, but was not at the clinic, so we ran around the village searching for her – eventually, we found her, and she agreed to come back to the clinic and help me out. Nurse K, a cheerful 28-year-old woman, spent about 15 minutes telling me about her dreams to move to Canada to become a nurse there (and could I get her a visa?), and then searched the clinic for some appropriate medicine. “I want to give you an injection!!” she said, with more gusto than I felt comfortable with. “I want to give you ____, but I'm not sure if we have any left. Otherwise I'll give you hydro-cortisone.”

Soon enough she returned with a needle and a little bottle of hydro-cortisone, set up a white folding screen, and without further ceremony asked me to lift up my skirt. I did, and she stuck the needle into my butt, injected, swabbed, and it was all over. She filled out a patient record card for me, gave me some Panadol for any pain that might result from the shot, and then showed me out.

I know that there must be at least one person reading this who is thinking something along the lines of, “Dear god! INJECTIONS? In AFRICA?! At a clinic in the village, where they don't even have electricity?!?! Is she TRYING to get HIV?” To this I respond, calm down. There are problems with health care in Botswana, but the nurses are well-trained, the clinics clean and well-supplied (in fact, some people make a living stealing anti-retroviral drugs from clinics in Botswana and then reselling them over the border in South Africa), and a dirty needle is not even a possibility.

And it worked! My arm is back to its normal size, my eye is open, and I was not disgraced at my party over the weekend. I guess we'll never really know, though, if it was the soil or the hydro-cortisone that did it...