By David Dennis
Linda and I were still infallible to our children when we my employer decided it was somehow worth the company’s expense to relocate my family Madrid for an international assignment. The details of my expat compensation package remain confidential, but suffice to say that we lived large in the land of ham and paella.
After just a few hours in our newly rented townhome on the outskirts of Madrid, Linda and I had already grown tired of sipping sangria and feeding each other nibbles of manchego cheese. The kids were famished and on the verge of meltdown after a laborious day of swimming in our private, rooftop pool (when you’re living the good life on your company’s dime, you use words like “laborious” and “famished”). And so, we ventured outside the gates of our exclusive neighborhood to get a pizza.
“Okay kids,” I said as we plopped down at a table. “We’re going to be living here for two years. You need to pay close attention, so you can learn the language.”
Jacob, who was eight at the time, groaned and, having recently perfected his eye rolling, rolled his eyes. Amaya simply rested her six year old head on the table and closed hers.
The waiter approached. I winked at Linda, and puffed up. It would soon be clear, once again, that dad, with his fluent Spanish, could do anything.
“Buenas tardes señor. Nos trae una pizza con hongos, por favor.” Jacob and Amaya perked up, cocking their little heads slightly. Dad wins again. The waiter cocked his head slightly, too. “¿Como señor? ¿Con hongos?”
“What’d he say, dad? Are we getting our pizza?” asked Jacob, blue eyes rolling once again.
I put up my hand. “Just hold on. I think he’s confused. It must be my accent.”
“Did you fart, dad? He looks like he’s smelling a fart.”
“No, Jacob, I did not fart. Just hold…”
“Honey, I don’t think hongos is the right word,” Linda said calmly. The kids looked at mom then nodded at each other, clearly impressed at her insight.
I held up the menu, touched the photo of a plump, white mushroom and repeated my order. “Una pizza con hongos. Aquí, hongos.” I tapped the mushroom for emphasis.
The waiter started to speak, but a laugh escaped instead. “Champiñónes. Quiere una pizza con champiñónes, señor.” He tapped the mushroom for emphasis. “Aquí, champiñónes.” He shook his head and made a beeline to the other waiter on duty. After some pointing and gesturing, both waiters were laughing.
I whipped out my pocket dictionary. Sure enough, Linda had it right. While hongos is used interchangeably in Latin America to mean both mushrooms and fungus, in Spain it refers only to the latter. Dad loses…again.
My request for a fungal pizza in Madrid wasn’t the first time I’d been shamed by hongos in a Spanish-speaking country, though. Many years before kids or marriage, when living large in a foreign country meant staying at a hostel with walls that went all the way to the ceiling, Linda and I decided to move overseas for a year. We had almost completed our graduate programs and had begun discussing destinations. The previous year I had travelled for a few weeks with a friend in Costa Rica. We had taken language classes, where I learned, among other things, the word for mushrooms and other assorted vegetables. On a weekend excursion at a bus stop in the small cow-town of Liberia (now home to a Burger King, shopping mall and international airport), I wrote Linda a postcard regaling her with details of the country’s beautiful rainforests, beaches, volcanoes, wildlife and people. Liberia, however, was an armpit so I added a post-script: “Someday, it would be great to live in Costa Rica, but NOT in Liberia. It sucks.”
Although Linda had never been to Costa Rica, she had fond memories of family travels in Mexico and trusted my glowing review of the country. We had already decided that we wanted to be teachers, and we figured that a year teaching English at a school in Costa Rica would be great résumé fodder. Bilingual teachers were in hot demand in California and what better way to improve our Spanish than to live and work in Central America. Still, spontaneous decision making and only the vaguest sense of responsible behavior was our norm. Our conversations generally went something like this:
“Hey, it’s only 3 am. Let’s break into that McDonald’s Playland and make out. The cops seem to be avoiding this busy street.”
“Sure. Boost me up.”
“Hey, the sun’s down. Let’s go hook up on the roof. Our friends probably won’t shoot bottle rockets at us this time.”
“Sure. Hold my beer.”
“Hey, let’s go live in Costa Rica.”
“Sure. You think they have sturdy roofs and McDonald’s Playlands?”
To be safe, usually not a strong suit for either of us at the time, we decided to line up jobs before leaving home. In the days before search engines and email, though, the only source of information we had was the Costa Rica guidebook I had used on my trip. Buried in the back was a short list of schools. We readied our cover letters and résumés and faxed them off to each school on the list.
Linda had just completed an intensive credential program specializing in teaching elementary school students with severe special needs. Over the past year, she had been patiently instructing inner city students and kids with serious mental handicaps. She did amazing work helping her pupils improve their skills and their ability to thrive in the community. She also handled incredible challenges with aplomb. During one incident on a neighborhood outing, a sixth grade student sat on the grass, chewed dried dog shit, then blew his breath in her face as she was scolding him. Needless to say, Linda’s résumé was enough to make Mother Teresa feel inadequate. I, on the other hand, struggled to fill a single sheet of paper. Thankfully, one of the few skills I had learned at San Diego State, which at the time was ranked the top party school in the nation, was how to adjust margins and font sizes to make words spread from the top of a page to the bottom. I wasn’t fooling anyone though. Nobody in Costa Rica was going to care that I had just completed a Master’s thesis entitled “Political Semantics: An Application of the Hierarchical Model of Constraint.” My main qualification was that I spoke English. I would have been just as successful finding a teaching job if my résumé had simply said:
David Dennis
I speak English
Responses from schools began to roll in within a few weeks. Linda had three or four job offers at some of the best private schools in the country. I, on the other hand, received only one offer. Lucky for me, Linda received an offer there, as well. My excitement was short-lived, however, when I realized that the school was in Liberia, the same rural town to which I swore in ballpoint pen that I’d never return.
“Isn’t that the town you hated?” Linda asked innocently.
“Um, well, I wasn’t feeling very well when I wrote that postcard. I’d eaten a lot of mushrooms that day, I think. I’m sure it’s fine. Cows can be pretty friendly and dust never hurt anyone.” I quickly changed the subject.
(To this day, we cross our fingers, spit twice and throw grains of salt over our shoulders whenever we pass through a town and one of us says, “I’d never want to live here.” Oh, and sorry for spitting and throwing salt on your ground Fargo, North Dakota; Bakersfield, California and Tacoma, Washington. If we ever move to your lovely towns, we’ll clean it up.)
Still, my lone job offer, even one in Liberia, was better than no offer at all, so we accepted the positions and began preparing for the move. We would each be paid $400 a month plus a small housing stipend, but Linda had to send home $150 of that to begin paying off her student loans. So, we wouldn’t be rich by any stretch nor could we afford to rent a terribly nice place, but we’d have enough money to eat and to explore the country a little on weekends, assuming we hitchhiked or took the local buses.
When we arrived in Liberia, the chairperson of the school board, a calm, wealthy and intelligent woman called Doña Ana, set about hooking us up with local families. Linda insisted that we live in separate homes given that we were not yet married. Rooftop hook ups? Sure. Living in sin? Not a chance. When I protested, Linda reasoned that we’d learn Spanish more effectively if we lived apart. I couldn’t argue with that. But, after neither Linda nor I got on well with the families selected for us, she had a change of heart. Doña Ana happily discussed our options with us but explained that we’d have to lie to the townspeople by spreading word that we were, in fact, married. It was simply too scandalous for us to shack up out of wedlock. Apparently, on the continuum of egregious sins in Costa Rica, cohabitating trumped lying. For Linda, though, the opposite was true. She refused to lie to anyone that we were married. So, Doña Ana set off to lie to our first set of families about why we would not be staying with them, and dedicated herself to finding shiny, new families.
The arrangements were complete within a few days. Linda moved into a converted laundry room that nearly made her father cry when he came to visit. She lived with the director of a local public school, his wife, two kids and various farm animals. I moved into a room as wide as my outstretched arms with a cement floor and a cold shower. Not living with Linda, the cold shower was a plus. My room was tucked away off the back patio of the house of a man who’d recently lost his wife to illness. Don Lalo was the principal of our school, but it took a while for Doña Ana to convince him to let me live in his home. His only experience with gringos had been sneering at filthy hippies walking through Liberia’s central park on their way to the bus depot. Having one of those in his house was not on his bucket list. There was no air conditioning in Linda’s nor my abodes, and the heat was always stifling. My cold shower got plenty of use, and I choose to believe that Don Lalo’s housekeeper never saw me lounging on my bed in the nude to cool off.
Unfortunately, our teaching jobs required that we wore clothes. And, lest we appear too effeminate, men had to wear pants. As the dry season heated up, my pants began to feel like wool long-johns in a sauna. And, as the temperature peaked, so did an itch in a region of my body that did not lend itself well to scratching during classes. At first it required little more than a surreptitious scratch behind my teacher’s desk. Soon, though, I was racing to the bathroom multiple times a day to splash cold water on myself and let it all hang out for some serious self-abrasion.
After nearly two weeks of suffering in silence, Linda suggested that I ask Doña Ana for advice. Although couples living together out of wedlock was the stuff of scandal, discussing genital issues was a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation. Doña Ana and her husband were not only the owners of a ranch, a local hotel, and the town’s two gas stations, but were also the proprietors of a pharmacy. I made a bowlegged beeline to their store after teaching my classes.
The pharmacist was a kindly grandmother with reading glasses hung on a chain over her neck. I explained meekly in my broken Spanish, careful not to let the other customers hear, that I had an itch and subtly pointed to its location. The woman pursed her lips, scratched her chin and motioned for me to follow her through a curtain and into the store room. She put on her reading glasses (apparently assuming she’d be looking at something small) and glanced around to ensure no one else was within eye shot before requesting that I drop my pants. Although she was not a doctor, I was desperate for some relief so I obliged. As soon as my chinos hit the floor, she threw her arms in the air and shouted, “¡Qué horrible!” Her screech was barked with such surprise that I was concerned the other customers might rush in to rescue the pharmacist in case the gringo was attacking. I quickly pulled up my pants lest others shout at my package, as well. By now the woman was snickering.
Before visiting the pharmacist, I knew only that my frank and beans were red and swollen. Clearly, I had not been able to inspect them at the proper angle in the mirror. Her reaction made it clear that they were far less attractive than I had thought. And, as if having a grandmother shout and laugh at my balls wasn’t enough, the pharmacist misdiagnosed my ailment. She sold me a tube of steroid cream, and I rushed back to my concrete room, kicked a few cockroaches out the way and slathered the cream on like mustard.
Now, if you happen to work in the medical field, you are already laughing. There are few things worse than steroid cream for a fungal infection. It works great if you’re trying to treat the itch caused by jellyfish stings or mosquito bites but, unless you’re looking for a nutrient to make your fungus flourish, keep it away from hongos. You know those Ballpark Franks commercials where the guy puts the hot dogs on the barbecue and they plump right up? Well, that’s all I’m going to say about the effect of the steroid cream. Of course, at the time, I just assumed that my itch needed more treatment, so I upped the ante and began applying the stuff at every free moment. After a week of cursing the pharmacist’s diagnostic skill, I couldn’t take the genital clawing anymore. I found a pay phone and made an embarrassing collect call to my mother. Exposed on a street corner, I tried to hide my scratching under the baggy shorts I’d taken to wearing as I waited the few minutes for our family doctor to call me back. I nearly ripped the phone from the wall when it rang. After a good laugh over the steroid cream, my doctor diagnosed fungus (AKA “jock itch” AKA “hongos”) and told me take Diflucan (fluconazole). When I returned to the pharmacy to buy the pills, I explained to the old woman that she had been mistaken and asked if she wanted some of my hongos on her next pizza. Well, not really that last part, but if I had it to do over again you can be sure I’d be slinging mushroom jokes like pizza dough. The pills started the healing process within a day.
My fun with fungus in Costa Rica, among other experiences, has turned me into something of a travelling apothecary. Whenever I find a cream or pill that helps with some ailment, I stock up. After the Costa Rican hongo affair, one might think I would have added Diflucan to my permanent dispensary in case my mushrooms decide to sprout again. But, alas, while I used my expired Costa Rican stash a few more times over the years, once the pills ran out I didn’t bother to replenish them. Bad decision. A number of years passed without a toadstool outbreak, so I assumed I’d built up a tolerance. As it were, they had simply taken a long term hiatus before returning to work. And return with a vengeance they did.
Those many years later, living large as we were in Spain, we were endowed with the kind of money that afforded us travel to distant and mysterious places. Jacob and Amaya had chosen an exotic trip to mark our second holiday season in Madrid. They hadn’t started asking for umpa-loompas yet but requesting a visit with the lemurs of Madagascar seemed like a stepping stone.
Fort Dauphin, a coastal town near the southern tip of Madagascar, is the kind of place that, if you squint hard enough, you can see a prosperous, French-colonial past. Well, prosperous for the French anyway. Most of the Malagasy natives got the raw end of the colonial deal. Today, it’s a town of transparent contrasts. There are formerly elegant buildings and grand hotels that continue to crumble as they wait for French yuppies to fly south and start renovating. The ocean is the blue of travel magazine covers, but the bays are peppered with the hulks of rusting shipwrecks. One can buy freshly caught fish straight out of row boats on the beach, but the sinewy young fishermen also carry overfished hammerhead sharks across the sand to sell in the local market. As a family of ocean-lovers, our outrage over the shark slaughter was only tempered by seeing the poverty in which most Fort Dauphin residents live. If I were providing for my family, I can’t say I wouldn’t be scooping up sharks by the boatload myself.
Memories of Fort Dauphin still make me smile. Jacob and I playing soccer on a beach at sunset with the locals; Linda and Amaya teaching yoga near the waves to a group of girls in tattered shirts; even the water and power outages at our hotel added to the adventure. As you’ve probably guessed, though, our stay in Fort Dauphin also marked the return of the Costa Rican hongos. As my case worsened, and I realized that airing it out by “going commando” wasn’t cutting it, I set out to find a pharmacy. Given that I speak no more than a few words of French and would find little benefit in having a taxi driver serve me escargot or place items in an armoire, I asked the bilingual hotel clerk to hail a cab and explain to the driver that I needed a pharmacy. Within minutes a rusted car shuttered to a halt in front of the lobby. It was a tiny French auto that had seen far better days and looked nothing like a taxi. As I climbed into the tattered back seat, I checked to be sure the driver hadn’t installed one of those wide-angled mirrors that might allow him to see what I would be scratching during the trip to town.
As we drove, I tried to ignore the itch by quietly repeating the word “Diflucan” with a French accent. I shifted in my seat but succumbed after a few minutes. As I scratched, I craned my neck in search of anything that might approximate a pharmacy, but by now we had turned into a neighborhood of shanty houses where there was nothing more than shacks held together with rusty nails and broken boards. Kids played betting games in the dirt using candy wrappers as currency, and the driver had to avoid hitting roosters and pigs in the muddy road. Suddenly the car slid to a stop in front of one of the hovels. At worst, I thought, this wasn’t actually a taxi and I would be parting with my wallet and left to find my own way back to the hotel. At best, if this was in fact a pharmacy, I only hoped that I wouldn’t have to do the polite thing and drink a home-stewed remedy meant to cure my fungus. Regardless, I wasn’t dropping my pants for anyone.
As we waited, I started to panic, wondering if I should make a run for it. A tall, white foreigner scratching his nuts and bolting through a Madagascar shanty in the middle of the day seemed less than wise, though. As I weighed my options, a neatly dressed teenage girl appeared, opened the car door and slid in next to me. It had simply been the first stop on the driver’s route. I was so relieved that, when we arrived in town, I paid the girl’s fare. As I pushed open the rusty car door, I pointed to my watch, held up a finger and hoped the driver understood that he should wait for me while I was inside the pharmacy.
The store seemed clean enough and was quite well stocked. I asked the friendly female clerks for Diflucan in my pathetic French accent and was met with blank stares. I wrote the word Diflucan on a piece of paper. Still nothing. I was exasperated. I’d sworn off dropping my shorts and didn’t think it appropriate to pantomime crotch scratching in a public place. So, desperate to stem the itch, I stepped outside to see if my mobile phone could find a signal. I held the phone high in the air, did a little twirl and, amazingly, got a few bars. I speed-dialed our doctor in Madrid.
Dr. Mihic was a fabulous physician who still made house calls with a well-worn, black leather doctor’s bag. He was originally from Croatia but, for some reason, split his professional time between Madrid and Quebec. As the phone rang and rang, I hoped that with the time difference, he was awake in Spain rather than asleep in Canada. Finally, he answered. I could hear party noises in the background, and Dr. Mihic had to shout to be heard. I explained the situation, he chuckled and told me to ask for Lamisil cream. I was nervous about putting any cream down there again, but once he assured me that Lamisil was not a steroid, I raced back inside and bought a tube. Within a day my hongos were in remission.
Back home in Madrid, on my next visit to see Dr. Mihic a few months later, I thanked him profusely for helping me in my hour of itchy need and asked him what all the noise had been when we’d talked. He explained that he had been at a dinner party in Madrid. I can only imagine the story he told about the fungal American who had just made a desperate phone call from the tip of Madagascar. I like to imagine the guests eating champiñónes at the party as he told them a tale of hongos.
THE END
Traveler’s Tip: Stock up on creams and lotions before you leave, although is some countries even more hardcore, prescription stuff can actually be purchased over-the-counter. We always travel with Lamisil cream (generic: terbinafine hydrochloride, 1%) for fungal infections, steroid cream with Hydrocortisone 0.5-2.5% for jellyfish stings, mosquito bite itches and the like (Hydrocortisone 0.5-2.5% is considered a class 4 steroid cream. For the really powerful stuff, get class 1, even though you may never need it. Still, I bought tubes of Class 2 and Class 1 creams in Nicaragua where they sell it over-the-counter. The Class 2 worked wonders on my jellyfish stings.), Neosporin (generic: combination of bacitracin, neomycin and polymyxin), aloe gel (we keep it in a refrigerator if we can) for cooling sun burns, sun block (there’s no need for anything over SPF 30 and waterproof really isn’t, so reapply often if you sweat and swim) and mosquito repellant with DEET. The Center for Disease Control recommends 30-50% DEET, but you can go higher if you want protection for more than a few hours. We once overheard a tourist in Nicaragua telling his travel mates that he’d found a repellant with 101% DEET. Good luck finding that. I hate anything oily, sticky or pungent, so we generally buy a fresh smelling spray of the drier variety. We like the OFF Family Care line. It seems to work quite well even though the DEET percentage is low.
At least in the tropics, mosquitos are your worst enemy. Three of the four of us have had dengue fever, so we know the risks first hand of mosquito-borne illness. Visit an Infectious Disease doctor at least a month before your trip to determine what the risks are in your destination country and what shots you’ll need. If your kids throw a fit about getting shots, spend some family time on the web reading about tropical diseases, hepatitis and parasites. They’ll be begging for the shots…or perhaps to stay home. Some countries require proof of certain vaccinations or they won’t issue you a visa. I had to pass an HIV test before Russia would issue me a travel visa for a work trip. (Apparently, tourists don’t spread HIV as the Russians didn’t require the test for a tourist visa.) Note that some mosquito-borne illnesses have no known cure or vaccine, so DEET really is critical. Ex-Officio makes some nice pieces of clothing impregnated with mosquito repellent that they claim can withstand up to 70 washings. Their clothing seems to have worked well for us in the past. Finally, while we’ve never done it, travelling with mosquito nets to drape over beds seems smart.
David Dennis is a mediocre surfer, a photographer, a product manager, an environmentalist, a world traveler and the co-owner of Ventana Surfboards & Supplies.
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