Prologue

 

This is a personal memoir, written from my memory, no research, no fact-checking, just my memory, a total perception and raw recollection of the way I remember my life happening. A few year ago, I had a bit of help remembering my younger days from my recently deceased foster mother; she and her husband were my legal guardians during my high school years... God bless them!

 

In 1994, during my first year serving as a World Teacher volunteer in Africa, while living in my beautiful mud hut out in the bush on the Caprivi Strip in a small tribal Namibian village of Sikosinyana, I was felled by a deadly coma brought on in a wide-spread regional epidemic of cerebral malaria. The locals do not remember when anyone ever woke up from a cerebral malaria coma... I did!

 

I was the only survivor out of three hundred plus victims bitten by female mosquitoes carrying this deadly disease. When I sat up in the hospital and grabbed the priest's robe, I scared the bejabbers out of him (the local catholic priest) who was in the middle of giving me the last rites. Both the local sangoma (witch doctor) and my treating medical doctor, whose wife died in this epidemic the day before, thought it was a miracle. Everyone talked about it in Caprivi. Although I tape recorded the experience as I remembered it the day I awoke, I refused talk about it  for many years. I finally decided it was time to write the truth about my incredible and improbable life and my very delicious near-death experience.

 

Thomas L. Little, Esquire