Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
“Anyone?” Dwight said.
Everyone remained silent, hoping he would take the clue that it
wasn’t a reasonable request. But Dwight had never registered silence
as disapproval, just timidity and indecisiveness. He asked Bennie
what he thought: “After all, you are our group leader. In fact, maybe
you should go.”
Bennie thought Dwight had said the words “group leader” with
an excess of sarcasm. And to counter the slight, he wanted to say
he was willing to go. But he had now been without his anti-seizure
medication for more than two weeks. He had experienced some
warnings: flashing lights, phantom smells, and more recently, that
familiar sinking feeling of being pulled down into the earth, of his
mind’s dwindling as if he were becoming smaller yet heavier, shoot­
ing backward straight through the earth’s core and out into hyper­
space. He would get that warning sense of doom, and it took all his
strength and concentration to resist panicking. In the past, some of
these episodes had been auras that heralded the arrival of a more
generalized pattern, the synchronous neuronal firings that spread
throughout the whole brain and led to a grand mal. He felt he was
building up to a big one, and that would make his going into the
middle of nowhere a very bad idea. He could die out there, tumble
off a cliff while unaware, or suffocate in all those sticky plants, while
leeches and gigantic carnivorous ants crawled into his nostrils and
eye sockets. And what if they ran into another tribe who still had a
Stone Age mentality? They might think he was possessed by a bad
spirit and beat him to set him free. He’d read stories of things like
that; he remembered one in particular about an American diver in
Indonesia who swam at night with a headlamp and was clubbed by
fishermen who thought he was a magical manatee.
Before Bennie could respond to Dwight’s suggestion that he go,
Marlena interjected: “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, splitting up
the group like that. What if you didn’t come back when expected—
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