> > I was in a church group who went to Kenya two and a half years ago,
>
> Which would have been around the same time you quit smoking, according to your earlier post about the spider and the ash. Did the trip have anything to do with it?

Hey, you're an observant feller, aren't you! :-)

Well, the trip didn't exactly have anything to do with *why* I quit, but actually, I took my last cigarette there one hot & humid night when I was quite sick from (what I thought was) a cold. So after that, I've never had the craving for cigarettes anymore.

What's more interesting, though, is that I continued the sickness after I returned home, with a rash (red dots on my stomach), and went to the Infectious Diseases ward in the city's hospital to get it checked out, but they didn't find anything special. A few months later, I got a letter from a doctor who was conducting a study on a sickness which he said was starting to spread out from Africa. I were among several people who had symptoms which would indicate that I had had it, he said, but he would like to send a blood sample to Switzerland to get accurate results. I gave him the permission, and didn't hear anything until about a week ago, where I got a letter. Among 119 persons, I was one of 16 who had gone through the disease. It was not a harmful disease at all, most people just experience it as a flu or a cold.

The name of the disease? "African tick typhus."

Anything you've had that has "typhus" in its name kind of knocks all other competition away.

"I had malaria last year."

"Big deal, I had African tick typhus once."

And after going to NY and Washington D.C. about a year later, I returned with mange. (That *itches*!) Had to freeze all my clothes for a day or two and rub salve all over myself and leave it on for 12 hours.

Seems like the most interesting things about my journeys are the various things I bring home internally.

Trav"always gets sick abroad"holt.