Toothpaste, right?

That's what I thought, too. Until about 1.5 seconds after I put the toothbrush in my mouth. It didn't take long for me to realize that something was terribly wrong.

(Insert gagging noise here, followed by excessive rinsing out of the mouth with parasite filled tap water.)

What was wrong was that, in my haste to brush my teeth as we were running out the door two nights ago, I grabbed a tube of something that wasn't toothpaste at all. That was made evident by two things that went down shortly before I started gagging:

1) The mystery paste didn't foam up, at all.
2) The mystery paste didn't taste very minty fresh.




Not many tubes of zinc oxide diaper rash ointment do, I suppose.

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Before you judge, let me just say that this could have happened to anyone. But especially to someone in our position.

For over a month now, Hunter and I have essentially been homeless. The house search that was supposed to take a week, tops, is now in Week Six, and it's not showing any signs of abating. In other words, the search has not proved as fruitful as we had anticipated, back when we closed up shop in Patandi and bailed on our lease at the beginning of February. What started as a temporary set up in a local bed & breakfast in nearby Usa River slowly devolved into a permanent encampment.

But an encampment doesn't quite denote a home, does it? Which is why I hated that bed and breakfast. For a night or two, it would've been fine. For a night or 40, it sucked. With the women who run the place constantly all up in our bidness -- simply by nature of the fact that they were there, nothing else -- we were essentially guests in our own home. Guests with a whooooole lot of luggage.

Every single thing that we own, and that our NGO owns, was being stored under our two single beds, and in our closet. It was like a warehouse in Room 3. Aside from our own personal effects, 100 percent of the inventory fell under the "Stuff Donated for the Kids" department: soccer balls, jump ropes, shoe polish, soap, t-shirts, toothpaste, and, as I learned two days ago, diaper rash ointment.

Had I seen this photo, it might have tipped me off. Just maybe.

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"Hold up, real quick, I'm gonna brush my teeth before we go."

Hunter, Meghann, and Meghann's Kenyan friend Lali were all waiting on me. It was Jamie's last night in TZ, and before she headed off for a month in the Punjab, everyone was getting together at Nick Pub for a little going away party of chicken and chips.

The toothpaste on the sink had been teetering towards the edge of doneskies for days at that point -- earlier that morning, it had officially been kicked. Remembering this, and remembering the yellow plastic bag I personally stored under my bed during the move from Patandi -- the one that held eight brand new tubes of excess toothpaste meant for our students -- I blindly moved my hand around the warehouse until I felt it: the crinkle of the bag, the feel of the unopened toothpaste containers. Bingo.




It was a matter of bad luck, nothing more. Heads or tales style bad luck. Had I grabbed it from the other direction -- actually seeing the label, rather than a bunch of meaningless words printed on the back -- this story never would have been written. But it is being written, because I didn't see the picture of a mother caressing her sleeping child until the damage had been done.

But in my defense, did I really need to look? I'd handled enough toothpaste tubes in my day to know what a toothpaste tube felt like. And this, my friends, was toothpaste. Definitely toothpaste.

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"Hunter!" I yelled in a hushed, yet urgent tone, not wanting to draw the attention of Meghann or Lali. "Hunter!"

He walked into the room. "What?"

"Dude." Panic reverberated in my voice as I handed him the Desitin. "I thought it was toothpaste!" I hissed.

There are moments in life that you just never forget, no matter how old, gray and wrinkly you become. Something tells me that this was one of those moments for Mwindaji.

"HO-LEEEEE SHIT!" His jaw dropped. Then he started cracking up. "Oh my God! You brushed your teeth with that?!"

I hadn't even known exactly what it was until I'd finished gagging, at which point, panic stricken, my eyes frantically sought out the "Warnings" section of the very label that hadn't tipped me off as I got up off my knees and walked into the bathroom. What I found made my body run cold:

"Did I swallow it????"

Poison Control Center?!

There ain't no Poison Control Center in our neck of the woods. Last week, when I was taking one of our students, Rosie, to the St. Elizabeth HIV clinic to get her CD4 count checked, they didn't even have a Band Aid to give her after sticking her six-year-old little arm with a mondo needle that sent a rivulet of blood dripping onto the ground -- HIV-infected blood. If they don't even have Band Aids at an AIDS clinic in Africa, how do you expect me to find a Poison Control Center as I froth at the mouth on the verge of death by diaper rash ointment ingestion? I mean, isn't zinc oxide bad? Isn't that the stuff you put on your nose when you go skiing?

"Dude," I told my supposed best friend, who instead of sharing in my concern that I might be on the verge of death, was still laughing uncontrollably. "I'm really freaked out!"

"You'll be fine," he assured me, not even knowing whether or not I'd actually swallowed anything. "Don't worry."

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But I was worried.

"Yo, I know I'm probably just paranoid," -- Hunter was unlocking the gate so we could get out of the driveway, and he was clearly amused by my panicked state -- "but I'm bringing this stuff with us just in case I go into cardiac arrest or something on the way. And also," -- I pulled the card out of my back pocket -- "I brought this Med-Evac stuff. It's right here." I motioned to the back pocket of my Carhartt's.

Looking back, preparing to be life flighted to Europe because of a toothbrushing mishap seems a bit much. At the time, though, I wasn't thinking so rationally. "I just swallowed baby diaper rash cream, and there isn't a Poison Control Center on the continent." That's what I was thinking.

And don't think that I don't hear you laughing. What would you have done in my situation, tough guy?

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The entire ride to Nick Pub, I was counting every heart beat like it was a gift from God. Not that ever breath isn't a gift from God when you're not thinking you've just poisoned yourself; it just seems especially precious when you are thinking that.

"This is how I'm gonna go out," I castigated myself, silently. Still freaked out by the "do not swallow" stuff, I wasn't swallowing. At all. For 30 minutes. "'R.I.P. Bayless Parsley. 1984- 2008. Death by baby rash diaper ointment poisoning."

Beat -- thank you. Beat -- thank you. Beat -- thank you. Keep on coming, baby. Beat...

Not quite the stuff that "Braveheart" is made of.

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I never told Meghann and Lali. Mainly because I was already getting enough grief from Hunter, and I was still kind of worried. Every little pain in my chest equaled an, "Oh my God! What was that!" in my brain. But I did tell Jamie. And only because she was leaving.

I figured it'd be a great gift to send her off with: a story that can make you spontaneously combust into hysterical laughter is certainly a gift that keeps on giving. How foolish it was to think it could have been "our little secret," though. Soon, Sam and Tait were on the scent; they wanted to know what all the commotion down at the end of the table was about.

Sam, fever stricken and trooping it just to be there, almost spit out her food. Tait, who was perfectly healthy, had a little less crazy reaction, but not by much. And Jamie, a nurse back in the States, shook her head in horror at the list of ingredients.




"Oh my God, zinc oxide?!" she exclaimed, jaw agape. "That's like the stuff you wear when you go skiing!" (I knew it). "You put this in your MOUTH?!"

"It looked like toothpaste!" I yelled for the billionth time.

"I know, but still..." her eyes continued to scroll as her voice trailed off for a hot second, coming back to life with the next revelation. "Oh gross, barbadensis, too."

No idea what barbadensis is, but it definitely doesn't sound good.

Sam grabbed a hold of the tube to have a look for herself.

"Oooh, 'goes on smoothly!'" she read from the label.

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It's been two days, and I still haven't brushed my teeth. I finally got around to buying a new toothbrush today, though. And some toothpaste, too.

Don't worry, I checked the label three times before I paid for it.