First Night

The night – The night is dark, really dark. As I leave the brightly lit lab and step out into the hot night air, I am immediately plunged into black darkness. Then I step forward and the motion sensor triggers the overhead lamp to turn on. Now I can see the path back to my house. The light goes out after a minute and I am back in black darkness one again. I need to get into the habit of carrying my flashlight with me.

The sounds – Crickets chirp all night long. It is a continual drone interrupted only by the periodic barking of dogs (there seems to be lots of dogs around). The steady whine of some electrical generator close by joins the night sounds. There always seems to be the sounds of motors running somewhere, day and night. I hear the sound of children singing in the distance. Maybe it is the children from the orphanage.  Or maybe it is an evening Bible class.

The smells – The dining hall smells faintly of cinnamon. Tonight there is lasagna for dinner and cinnamon rolls for dessert. After dinner, the odors of the meal fade away.  I walk over to the lab and the dinner smells are replaced by the familiar smells of a microbiology lab. The smell of growing bacteria is the same no matter where the lab is. The smell is dependent only on the bacteria that are growing. I will find out later that one of the samples growing tonight is Shigella sonnei. I leave the lab and I pick up the smell of wood burning. Someone is making charcoal somewhere. Or maybe they are just cooking their evening meal.

The heat – The nights are hot. I go to bed at 8 pm. I was up at 2:30 am today to catch my flight from BWI to MIA to PAP, so I am exhausted.  It has been a long, hot day. There is a ceiling fan in my bedroom but I do not turn it on. I keep thinking about the opening sequence in “Apocalypse Now” where Martin Sheen is laying on a bed in a hotel room in Saigon sweating profusely while the ceiling fan revolves to the slow whooshing sounds of helicopter blades. There is a mosquito in my room. It bites me on the feet and legs several times before I decide to turn on the light and track it down. The mosquito lands on the bed. Splat! Nailed it! My hand has a small speck of my own blood from the crushed carrier of so many diseases. I just hope this one was not carrying anything. I spray on some Deet and I sleep better, despite the heat.