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Kristen Swanson
Come for Dinner
Our table seated twenty in Mtwara, Tanzania, but hosted the world. Attached to
our home, the mission guesthouse on Shangani beach welcomed German and Dutch
missionaries and diplomats, English and American volunteer builders, Australian and
Korean travelers, and a wealth of Tanzanian church elders, youth workers, and guest
preachers.
Stories and laughter floated above the hand-planed table and out the screened
windows, lifted by the Indian Ocean breezes up to the waiting stars. Our table heard
songs of thanks in a chorus of languages, and offered up steaming rice and beans, tiny
finger bananas, long canoe-shaped papaya strips and golden mangoes, cross-hatched and
flipped inside out, a sweet libation that dripped its blessing down our chins.
Now back in the United States, we seldom entertain unexpected visitors. Our
children, who absorbed fluent Swahili, a smattering of German, a collection of hilarious
British idioms, and an eclectic wisdom from our guests, have taken off on their own
adventures. Wistful for “iron sharpening iron” conversations, my husband and I now
exchange hectic schedules via email and squeeze in date night, trying to stay awake over
burgers long enough for genuine dialogue. Tanzania is poor in cash, but provided a
wealth of human contact.
In the stillness after a school day, after a river of middle-schoolers flow into their
busses, I can inhale physical memories of salt-scented air, a golden halo of lantern light,
and sudden silence when the generator was stilled.
My ankles remember the itch.

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As we shared meal after meal with friends, anopheles mosquitoes discreetly met
under our welcoming table for a feast of their own. Guests were cautioned to wear long
clothing and socks, to spray any vulnerable exposed skin before dusk, and to join us in
the ritual of swallowing bitter anti-malaria tablets. As we lived and worked in Tanzania
for ten years, we found it hard to follow our own advice.
Bwana Samaki, the fishmonger, waited at the door at sunrise, four feet of
swordfish ready to be negotiated by the kilo. His friend, Ali the woodcarver, lined up his
ebony figures on our porch, as our guests returned from an afternoon at the beach. They
needed translation for his wheeling and dealing, and coaching in the bargaining process.
Our lives couldn’t stop at dusk; we certainly never climbed under a mosquito net in time
to escape the cloud of insects that rose to meet us at the end of the day. Near the equator,
the sun drops behind the horizon, reflected sharply and then blinking out in the puddles
where mosquitoes breed. As our years on the sandy edge of Africa passed, malaria
invaded our our bodies as regularly as the earth tilted against the sun.
Malaria is endemic in southern Tanzania, and thrives in the tropical heat and rain.
We fought off malaria parasites with high fevers, chills, aches, squinty-eyed headaches,
diarrhea and vomiting, all of which struck suddenly and violently. Swallowing the bitter
pills that could kill the parasite as it multiplied in our red blood cells and liver became a
cruel race: twenty minutes in the stomach meant the medication would be absorbed
enough to do its job, but if our five-year-old couldn’t hold it down that long, we had to
try again.
Chloroquine, Fansidar, Halfan: in ten years we used several generations of drugs
until the parasite developed resistance to each one. If they all failed, we might try that

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nasty old stand-by, quinine, which occasionally caused temporary blindness or deafness,
or both.
Our kids could diagnose their own malaria before they were six, and performed
finger-stick blood tests to proved their claim. They impressed their friends by comparing
“parasites per 200 red blood cells” on the slip the local clinic sent back to us by bicycle.
Malaria became an almost permanent resident in our home, and we maintained illusory
peace of mind by viewing it as just a part of life in the tropics. In our American wealth
we could afford multiple tests and a wide menu of treatment drugs, so we would be fine.
Too often, that fragile sense of safety was shattered by the death of African neighbors and
friends, and even Americans and Europeans who used the same preventive strategies as
we did. When we glided out of Africa in our climate controlled jet and moved back to
Pennsylvania, we remembered that malaria killed a million people a year, most of them in
Africa, most of them tiny children and moms, made vulnerable by the babies they
sheltered in their wombs.
Half of us. Half of all of us, the human family, everywhere, have been plundered
and reduced to ashes by this tiny invader, since we first pulled ourselves upright and
began to wander the earth.
But things are changing; a new movement to eradicate this disease is growing.
Deaths from malaria have dropped by half. Nets treated with insect repellant have been
distributed in record numbers. Researchers are continuing the search for an effective
vaccine, and tinkering with genetic weapons that might render the parasite harmless.
Village teams are eliminating the mosquito larvae nurseries by covering open water in
buckets and barrels. More and more children grow and thrive.

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Grandma Tekla in Sweden and Grandma Dot in America lived to 100 or more, so
I am hoping that I live long enough to see the end of malaria on our planet. Someday I
want to return to that long worn table, share a meal of rice and beans with Baba and
Mama Baraka, hold their grandchildren on my lap, and raise our arms together to
celebrate this generation’s triumph over history’s most virulent enemy.
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