Mefloquine: You Can’t Close Your Eyes on Adventure

At the outset of this Peace Corps venture, when the bugs started crawling on my friends, I would only laugh. They would wake telling tales of dreadful midnight manifestations: bugs all over, couldn’t find the flashlight, trapped in the mosquito net. Not of hardy constitution, I would tell myself. Then, not months later, the bugs started to crawl on me; alone, in the pitch dark, I would come to fully convinced that I was being consumed alive by ants, or cockroaches, or freshly-hatched grasshoppers.

Mefloquine makes a mockery of sleep. As a malaria prophylaxis, I grudgingly admit its effectiveness: at least, as of yet, my brain hasn’t melted into my skull. As a weekly regimen, it is a steady yet unpredictable form of low-level psychological torture. Among its legendary battery of side effects: insomnia (“is it not like 3am in Madagascar? Yea, it’s a mefloquine night…”), tingly limbs (“I have the dreaded restless leg syndrome!”), and surreally realistic dreams. As for the latter, mefloquine messes with the mind; it is like descending down the rabbit hole.

Anything goes. One night I can wake up yelling such inanities as: “it’s not a salad bar without chickpeas!” The next, debilitated by the fear that I might one day grow sick of rice and bananas. And, of course, there are the bugs. You can imagine the funhouse effect when four or five mefloquine-doped volunteers sleep in the same room. “Did you grab me?” “What were you mumbling about?” “Who was yelling?” It is only unfortunate that mefloquine cannot be blamed for corresponding frequent lapses in maturity.

For me though, mefloquine could be aptly renamed “disorientat-quin.” Often, I wake up with no clue as to where am I. For whatever reason, I usually “conclude” that I am sleeping in the woods (weird, I know, get down the rabbit hole and roll with it). Once, in what I like to refer to as the “dying ember incident,” I was spending the night with another volunteer and awoke in just such a state. Normally- regaining slow degrees of logic- I gradually realize I am asleep in a house after all. But this time, sitting up confusedly, my eye caught the orange glow of the surge protector on the floor and I thought: “a dying fire! I am in the woods!” Triumphant in my mefloquine logic, I leaned over to inspect closer, brushing the volunteer asleep next to me, and… “AAAAHHHHH!!! There is someone here!!! I am in the woods with an ax murderer!!”
That one required some explaining in the morning. But I stand by my statement about the chickpeas…