It is my fifth night in Tamatave, Madagascar.

"The first thing you need to do is find a sturdy hiking stick," Shannon tells me while we huddled inside my army-green mosquito net. "And don't worry too much about getting muddy."

I scribble Shannon's advice in my mental notepad, storing it with exhortations I had collected over the months to wear shoes at all times -- strange creatures lurked in the red-orange dirt, ready to make themselves at home in any wriggling, uncovered toe. I already know how to dig a particularly nasty breed of fleas from my foot with a needle. If I wait too long, the flea would lay her eggs just under my skin. The sack of eggs will erupt with life, burrowing and reproducing in each of my toes, usually under the nailbed, before steadily migrating up my leg. If I lose weight regardless of how many long loaves of fresh bread I consume each day, I will know that I house worms. A prescription of aptly named Verminox will take care of any that might decide to immigrate from a rare zebu shishkabob to my more hospitable intestines. I realize that many cultures value a good hostess, but this borders on ridiculous.

Shannon and I are members of two "outreach teams" sent from the Anastasis, a hospital ship docked in East London, South Africa that has been our home for the past three months. I am part of the "City Slickers," a group of eighteen people from seven countries who are between the ages of freshly eighteen to forty-something. For two months, my team will live in the developing city of Tamatave, working among street children, orphanages, and leper colonies. Shannon is one of the sixteen "Jungle Jumpers" living in bamboo huts perched upon stilts some two hundred kilometers outside of Tamatave. She and two other team members have come to the city for additional supplies.

Madigascar was in the middle of its rainy season (the wet season just ended); outside it felt like Noah's Ark would soon float by. The neighborhood mutts began their ritual barking which created the background music for team-member Tina's nightly teeth-grinding. The eleven other women in the room began snoring in simultaneous discord while our aluminum roof magnified the percussive rain.

I handed Shannon my extra set of neon orange earplugs. "You can keep them if you want," I say.

"Thanks. Now I won't have to hear the rats run across the bamboo ceiling as soon as we turn off the last flashlight each night."

"You hear rats every night?" I ask.

"Yeah," she answers, yawning. "Last night, Josea woke us all up when she screamed. One of the rats had fallen through the ceiling, onto her mosquito net, and then on top of her head." Shannon scrunches her face into cat eye slivers and wrinkles her defined nose. A soft brown smudge accented her cheek with a flourish. "It's nice to be out of there, even if it is just for tonight."

I shake my head with a shudder and give Shannon my bunk-bed, unfurling my inch-thick mattress on the cement floor and watching it gradually inflate. We talk ourselves to sleep and I soak in the rest of the details of her hike to and from the jungle. I would never have admitted it then, but I was secretly jealous that her adventure had not been my own. I knew it couldn't be as difficult as she made it sound. Heights rarely dented my courage. My childhood gymnastics lessons on the balance beam should be sufficient preparation for the twenty-four foot bridges that had terrorized Shannon. I even walked a tightrope once. My body could handle it, no problem.

I graduated early from high school in order to join the Anastasis, to live the dream that has been dancing through my imagination since I was nine. Finally, tomorrow, five weeks after her visit, I will hop off the bush taxi and hike fifteen kilometers to bring food and supplies to Shannon's team in the jungle.

Gomer, one of my team leaders, is stuffing into my already bulging backpack ridged cans of condensed milk, packets of vanilla Malagasy tea, rolls of pink toilet paper, a new coffee filter that looks like a long, filthy sock, and glass containers of mouth-watering Nutella.

"Here, Neb, how's this feel?" Gomer asks me, as he hefts the maroon bag from the table and helps me slip it onto my back. "Too heavy?"

"Nope. You can put more in," I answer.

"You're sure? Walk around with it a bit." Gomer raises a bushy eyebrow at me, peering past his nose and push-broom mustache. I've grown used to his thick glasses that magnify his eyes to comic book proportions, but I still feel like Thumbelina when I stand next to him. He's a good fourteen inches taller than me. "You'll have it on your back for about four or five hours, you know."

I nod. "I know. I'll be fine," I say. I smile while I walk around, skipping a little to prove that I can handle more weight in the pack. I enjoy surprising people who expect a degree of frailty from quiet me.

Gomer looks at me for a moment as if he's calculating the physics of the bag's weight in proportion to the size of my back and legs. He shrugs his lips and loads more anonymous cans into my bag before cinching it tight.

The rest of my teammates are nearly finished with their packing. I tap Doug on the shoulder. "Hey, Doug, how much do you think this weighs?" I ask, somewhat concerned that I may have overestimated my strength. Over the last few weeks, Doug has become our resident expert. He's twenty-six and a gym teacher from Connecticut. Doug seems to me the perpetual boy, a fifteen foot giant of energy jack-in-the-boxed into a wiry five-six frame. His hair is red and used to be closely cropped to his head; now it brings to my mind a sheep whose wool has been dyed the color of rust.

"Woah, you sure you can do this the whole way? It feels like about sixty pounds," he says as he grabs the bag in his arms. The bag knocks against the water filtration device he just managed to strap to himself. Besides being our expert, Doug is also the team's official water boy.

Only half my weight. Piece of cake. I've given countless, long piggy-back rides to kids who weigh more than this. I wrap my sleeping bag and mattress like a mummy in some garbage bags and strap it to the bottom of the pack. Shannon had told me that wading across the river had soaked several people's bedrolls.

My mom taught me to embody the Boy Scout motto: I am prepared for anything.