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I spent about one day in the east of Congo, in Bukavu in perfect health. After the flight from the west, I was just mainly tired, but excited to see this other side of the country with its beautiful Lake Kivu, mountains and much fresher air. Bukavu is at 1,500 meters (about 5,000 feet in metric-so-scary-land) which makes for a number of changes. For one, the climate is much cooler, which means a lot fewer mosquitoes. The constant sweating and thick air that is so hard to breath in Kinshasa just isn't there. While the air isn't incredibly pure due to all the trash being burned all the time, it is much more enjoyable. The other thing is that life is much slower in Bukavu. The throngs of people wandering around all the time are severely lessened. There are still a lot of folks though, since Bukavu sits right on the border with Rwanda and there is a lot of commerce traffic because of this.       It was our first day after a good night's sleep that we headed out to watch a march by the journalists of the town in support of World Press Freedom Day, a holiday that doesn't get a lot of attention in the US or Europe, but is quite important in DR Congo where journalists are killed simply for digging just a touch too deep on an issue.       It was quite a warm day for the march and we were photographing it without bringing along any water. At first this wasn't a big deal, but then we were out under the sun in the peak of the day, waiting for two hours to see the governor of the South Kivu province come out and address this march that was waiting in front of his office. Of course, as is typical with Congolese politicians, he never showed, leaving us dismayed and also dehydrated.       After lunch, I started to feel a lot less than fantastic. My head started throbbing like nothing I've ever felt before and I was having trouble seeing straight. We headed back to a friend's house and the symptoms only got worse. I decided to call it an early day and go to sleep while drinking a great deal of ORS to try and correct what was appearing to be a severe case of dehydration.       Overnight, nothing really got better and I woke up the next day feeling just as dizzy and completely out of it, barely able to walk a few steps without wanting to collapse. We called up some friends who came over and had me take some malaria medication just to be sure I wasn't coming down with that. Then it was back to bed to sleep some more, only to wake up in the afternoon and throw up all the food I had tried to eat previously, but at the same time keep drinking water. It was also at this point that some lovely intestinal disorder started up that had me running to the toilet about every hour. The next day was much the same, although I started to feel a bit better by the end of it after more vomiting.       On the third day of this, I really did start feeling better. Chatting with a friend of ours we realized that I had either gotten sunstroke and some of the lovely intestinal amoebas that are around, or it was just the amoebas. I don't really know what the case was, but I got well enough to fly back to Kinshasa and then pick up some medicine for the possible amoebas which seemed to cure that as well and was quite a steal at $10 compared to what digestive antibiotics would cost back in the US. Naturally, while in Kinshasa I got some kind of weird rash on my arm that is just starting to go away as well.       On the crappy side of all this, I missed out on getting to see the gorillas in their park at Bukavu, which was a real bummer, since it's one of the few "affordable" ($300) places to see gorillas in the wild. On the plus side, I lost about eight kilograms (15 pounds in metric-so-scary-land) but of course gained a good deal of it back once able to hold on to solid food.       It's amazing all the crap that's waiting for people in the jungles of Africa and it explains why I spent the ridiculous amount of $500 on vaccinations before going. It's just ironic that I got taken down by something so basic as the sun and it's taught me an important lesson to always drink plenty of water. You fuck with the sun and you will indeed get burnt, like the top of my head was.

I came across this CNN article the other day from the end of February. It's about the dire situation you put yourself in as an American when you travel abroad and that you must, absolutely must have travel insurance. Take a minute and read it. You'll be thrilled you did as I found the article to be ludicrous, poorly written, and most importantly completely without research.       Let's take a look at this. Who is the author? It's a woman by the name of Debra Alban. She is on the regular staff of CNN and appears to be more of a producer than a writer, although she has contributed some other pieces with sweeping generalizations such as this and this. Her approach seems to be to posit some bit of "fact" and then base the rest of her article around this with little detail given the intricacies of what she is writing. This seems to be more the style of FOX News and I suppose this is all subjective to tastes, but for comparison, look at any BBC News article and you'll see that they support what they're saying with a bevy of facts to back it up. Even what are basically op-ed pieces like Mark Mardell's Euroblog are supported by on the ground experience that is pertinent, relevant, and specific. You get the feeling from Debra's article that, while it is most likely not the case, she hasn't actually been outside the US in a long, long time.       The start of her article cites a 19 year-old girl in Spain who purportedly received less than adequate health care after an accident in Spain where she shattered her kneecap at a football match. This is Alran's prime example as to the dangers of receiving health care outside the US. Let's talk about this girl whose name is Orla Buckley. She has a Bebo page where she goes by the name of Bootiejuice, which is simply prosaic to a point of transcendence. Bootiejuice lives in Ireland now and has a great many pictures up in her profile that focus around the primary activity of drinking. There is nothing wrong with this, except that for a reporter to base an article about health care outside the US on her activities, is inane. One can only assume that this girl was most probably drunk when the incident occurred (seeing as how she appears to be drunk a lot and was at a football match where drinking is the #1 fan pastime) and that her recollection of events is greatly skewed. Then of course there is the issue of Bootiejuice stating she has "intermediate" knowledge of Spanish. Americans have a wickedly bad tendency to overstate their ability with languages. By American definitions, I'm damned near the "conversational" level in about six languages: Spanish, French, Russian, Croatia, Bosnian, and Serbian. Given this and the fact that asking what was needed to be asked by Bootiejuice in Spanish is quite basic, I can only deduce that her level of the language was indeed poor despite what she says, or that she could speak the language well, but was indeed so drunk that she was unable to speak or understand anything. Thusly, faulting the hospital for not being able to explain the problem to her is blame severely misplaced.       Oh yes, there's one other big point that needs to be raised in using Bootiejuice as a source; her incident happened in 2003. This article has just recently been published in 2008. That is about half a decade which has passed since this happened. No matter the degree of verisimilitude to the event, how can this source be used? Simple. Alban couldn't find any more relevant source from a later date, because these incidents so exceedingly rare that she had to resort to cherry picking.       In all honesty, I would gladly have any kind of heath care done in Spain as opposed to the US, seeing as it it is 7th in WHO ratings and the US is 37th. Bootiejuice was actually lucky to have the accident happen in Spain, since they will treat anyone there regardless of coverage and it's easy for the American doctors to criticize about the surgery she had now, because it's always easier to criticize when you're not there. Travel insurance would have done little to help her though, unless of course she had the "evacuation" policy. I don't think people realize that travel insurance policies are a lot like extended warranties. There are rare occasions where if one is trekking through the heart of Africa they can be useful, but in day to day issues, they are about as bad as the main health care policies found in the US. For instance, a friend of the family had a mental breakdown on a recent trip to China and while she had travel insurance (and supposedly a good one) none of the cost of getting her out and back to the US was covered. Why? Because it was a mental issue and the small print didn't cover that.       In conclusion, I felt I had to bring this up as this article has been reproduced on many sites out there, since this is CNN and supposedly a reputable new agency. But, I question Debra Arlan's journalistic integrity. This article appears to be little more than a thinly veiled guise to advertise travel health insurance just in time for when people start thinking about the travel season again. The article is so bad and her arguments so weak that I wonder as to whether she was paid by an insurers group to write it? Obviously, I have to proof of this, but then again, Arlan's article puts forward next to no proof to back up her claims as well, so touché.