Picture this: You finally escaped winter, sipping fresh coconut water in some paradise like Southeast Asia. Then, BAM! One tiny Aedes mosquito (the diva of the bug world, daytime biter with fancy black and white stripes) decides your blood is basically a free all-you-can-eat buffet and turns your holiday plans into a trial of the flesh. It delivers the dengue virus like an unexpected endurance test.
Often called breakbone fever, dengue reminds us how fragile our earthly tabernacle can be. It hits with a sudden high fever that feels like your system is running a marathon in flip-flops and without proper training. Your head pounds. Eyeballs? Feels like someone is inflating them with a bike pump. Muscles and joints? Imagine Mike Tyson and AFM missionary Sean Mays giving you the world’s most enthusiastic bear hug—everywhere, all at once.
Then comes the bonus round: nausea, vomiting, a rash that looks like your skin lost a fight with a cheese grater and fatigue so brutal you could nap through a Monster Truck rally. Not fun. Mortality is low with good hospital care, but it is a solid reminder that exotic Asia sometimes means exotic suffering.
No vaccine for every strain and no magic pills—doctors basically offer you Tylenol, fluids and a prayer while telling you to rest as if your life depends on it, because it might.
Recovery can take weeks, leaving you weaker than a paper boat in a tsunami.
You make the following prevention notes for future reference: Slather on Deet like it is SPF 1,000, wear long pants even when it is 95 degrees Fahrenheit (sorry, fashion), sleep under nets and zig-zag around standing water like walking on slippery ice.
Most importantly: Avoid the peak mosquito happy hours at dawn and dusk.
Bottom line: We deserve bragging rights for “We survived breakbone 2026!”
It was a Wednesday when I started having an unexplainable migraine headache. Deon insisted that we go to the clinic. I could not muster the strength to protest. After a quick blood test, the medical staff confirmed it was dengue.
Deon took me home and cared for me, taking my temperature every hour and checking on me throughout the night. Then he started having chills. The next day, it was evident that he, too, had dengue. Then the nightmare started.
Deon had nonstop diarrhea. On Friday evening, when he went to the toilet every two minutes, I decided it was time to go to the clinic.
The clinic was packed. When the doctor saw us, he said he only had the emergency room bed available. One bed only.
I asked him to please check on Deon. The doctor got the IV ready and started asking some basic questions, like how long he had had heart problems. (Someone had informed the doctor that there was a patient with a heart problem.) Deon looked at me, and I looked at him. “I‘m healthy,” Deon exclaimed. “There is nothing wrong with my heart. I only have dengue.” His eyes widened even more when the doctor came in with medication for a peptic ulcer to treat diarrhea.
We were wondering if we would make it out of the clinic alive.
After two hours, I could no longer sit up, so I curled up next to Deon.
The doctor decided that he should now place me on an IV drip. The male nurse came in with the medication and started rubbing my hand to find a vein. He continued to slap the top of my hand. When nothing happened, he went to the back of the clinic and returned with an infrared light. He put the infrared light in my hand, and as it heated up, he kept on slapping my hand. It was so painful! Twice, without any success, he tried to get a vein. Finally, he decided that it was time to call the doctor.
The doctor used the same strategy. I was about to shout in agony at the top of my voice when he finally told me that I could breathe, that the drip was now secure.
In the meantime, Deon kept running to the toilet. The toilet floors were wet and dirty. There was only one toilet for everyone in the building. There was no toilet paper, only a bum gun with cold water. Using this on a body with a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit felt more like using a pressure hose.
Each time I sat inside the toilet room, my eyes met with the image of a Buddhist deity stuck above the door. Feeling the way we were feeling did not make for a pleasant experience. This was not something we wanted to look in the eye, especially not as the night progressed.
Around 2:00 a.m., a little boy vomited. This did not help my nausea, and I had to sit up straight a few times not to get sick myself.
At this point, I called the nurse and said in the friendliest voice I could master: “Buong Proh, yeung till phteah roboh neh ei lo,” which means, “Little brother, we want to go home now.”
He took my hand and explained, in a soft voice, that we could not go home in the middle of the night and had to wait for daylight. So we waited.
At 4:00 a.m., smoke filled the clinic, and I thought for sure that we were going to die. I poked my head around the curtain to see where it was coming from and noticed that someone had decided it was a good idea to burn incense at the Buddhist shrine inside the clinic while all the doors were closed.
The shrine is a carved wooden Buddha, with pockets for burning incense and a spot for placing offerings of money, fruit, juice, water, makeup and jewelry.
We started coughing profusely, and when the glass container broke from the heat, I just about had it with the clinic, the incense, the doctor and the nurse.
As soon as I could see the sunlight, I called the nurse to tell him we wanted to go home. Not long after, we received our medication. It was time to go.
Why am I telling you this? It is not for the bragging rights.
I learned something important.
While we were in that clinic, feeling like we were going to die, I wondered how the other people felt. They must have felt the same way, but instead of praying, they lit incense as an offering to the gods. It broke my heart, knowing that they were bowing to a shrine when instead they could have been kneeling at the feet of Jesus. I decided there and then that this doctor needs a Bible. He will get one as soon as we feel better.
You can read about dengue; you can hear about it, but unless you experience it, you do not know what it is.
Is this not the way it is with Jesus? You can hear about Jesus. You can read about Him. You can tell others what you think you know. But what do you have without an experience with Jesus?
Do you have an experience with Jesus?
This made me wonder how other people experience me?
Intense? Moody? Sick? Unhappy? Grumpy?
How do people experience you?
The next day, I stumbled downstairs to see if I could find anything to stop Deon’s diarrhea. I was met at the door by our Pnong ladies—MaDavi, Savi, Sot, Lita and Matthey. They were all there.
They took the pot from my hand and chased me back up the stairs. The next moment, they arrived with a bowl of hot water for me to put my feet in. They made bobo—rice cooked in water to form porridge. Three-year-old Lita came upstairs to present Deon with his food, smiling from ear to ear when she saw her favorite person. They started sweeping our house, cleaning the dishes and carrying all the coconuts downstairs. They did not leave until I ate all my porridge.
The next day, we received soup. Teammates cooked mashed potatoes and baked fresh bread. Our local principal and the student missionaries brought coconut water, juice and menthol patches to put on our foreheads.
We experienced Jesus through others that week. When we could not pray, people prayed for us. We were checked up on multiple times during the day, visited, supported and loved.
What can you do today to have someone experience you?
We each can be so caught up in our own work, worries and stresses. But we need to share our burdens with each other. Life is not easy, and we can help others to help us if we share our needs with them.
Only when we are willing to be vulnerable and let others in can we receive the love we need, and then we can share Jesus with others.
We should be so infected with Jesus that we show all the symptoms.
Jesus needs to be an experience. How else can we share him?
Mission is an experience. Working for AFM is an experience. Our daily lives are experiences.
Romans 12:12 reads: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”
Join me in asking Jesus to help us be the experience someone most needs today.
