Mosquito Season

I can’t figure out why, but I’m feeling a bit off this morning.  I’m tired, feeling a little depressed, completely unmotivated to do anything, and all I want right now is some chocolate.  It’s a good thing I have a humongous can of Milo (South African Hot Chocolate) to hold me over, otherwise we’d have a sarcastic disaster on our hands.

 

It’s possible that I’m a little sick. Maybe I picked something up from one of the 14,000 mosquitoes have conveniently decided to move into my house and begun feasting on my body.  But I guess it’s better having to deal with them than the guy who was bathing in the sink outside my house last night (the light bulb out back burned out, so it’s dark out there…I really need to find a replacement). 

I’m covered in bites.  Not everywhere, mostly just in locations where I don’t have any body hair.  My ankles and knee caps are taking the most significant amount of damage.  It looks like a scene taken straight out of a war movie.  Ranges of small red peaks dot my barren, fleshy landscape.  Some of the bites have been torn open by the consequential incessant need to relieve the itch with a nice hard scratch. At one point I tried to count, but I had to stop after twenty-three. As the number kept growing, so too did my fear as I quickly realized that the probability that I’m already carrying the malaria virus in my blood stream is quite high. The incubation period for Malaria can be a surprisingly long time, but aside from being a little tired, I haven’t shown and physical symptoms yet.  Maybe I have the Malaria Prophylaxis to thank for that.

Jokes and sarcasm aside, Malaria is a serious issue ‘round these parts.  This week, the reality of how dangerous and fatal this disease is became apparent not once, but twice.  A few days ago I was walking to school and happened to pass by two of my colleagues.  Lucas, an animated and friendly secretary who has become one of my favorite Mozambicans thus far, was not acting his typically dynamic self.  His mood, as well as the demeanor of my other colleague, was somber.  The hung their heads as they slowly walked towards me.  After greeting them, they told me how they were heading to the home of a extended family member whose husband and son died of Malaria that same week.  Two full grown, bread winning men from the same family, both dead from the same disease in the same week.  I didn’t know the deceased men, but the way Lucas delivered the news, and the thought of how significant these loses were to the family made it feel like someone had just dropped na anvil on my head.  

While my second encounter with Malaria this week was a lot less depressing, it still had an impact.  My Zimbabwean friend, a guy named Musiiwa, has been fighting malaria for about a week now.  He wasn’t able to afford to go to the hospital, and was trying his best to recover at home. Probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had gone to the doctor anyway.  The hospital has a tendency to run out of the medication he needs to cure himself early in the day, and the fact that he’s a foreigner would mean he’s the lowest priority on a list that already packed with Mozambicans. 

It took a long time, but he was finally on the up.  He showed up at my house the other day when he was in the neighborhood and we sat and talked for a while.  We talked about what he was going through, what it felt like, his inability to afford medication, and the recovery process.  He was weak, dehydrated, tired, and discolored.  On his face, just above the up left-hand corner of his mouth was a humongous, inflamed red sore.  It had popped up along with his other symptoms.  “This is nothing,” he told me in English, “You should have seen this thing a few days ago.”  It looked like a cold sore had been injected with steroids mated with an equally mutated cold sore and had freak cold sore babies on his face.  If this was recovering, I don’t want to find out what sick looks like.

It’s odd how the threat of Malaria doesn’t even cross the minds of many Americans. Makes sense, as it’s not a problem we have to deal with.  We used to.  In fact, a hundred or so year ago, the US used to be faced with the very same predicament that many developing countries like Mozambique are facing right now.  I won’t go into the details of how exactly we solved our Malaria problem – mostly because I don’t know the intricacies of how exactly we solved our Malaria problem) – but by working together, and putting in a whole lot of effort, we did.  And now, Americans can go about their lives without having to cover themselves in bug spray between the hours of 6pm and 6am, commit nightly mass-mosquito genocide with a rolled up magazine, or sleep under a chemically-treated mosquito net every single night. 

Simply put, Malaria sucks. It’s a debilitating disease that is paralyzing developing countries, and preventing this country, and many others, from reaching its full potential.  Depending on who you talk to, the prospects of a  vaccine appearing on the market any time soon  range from incredibly optimistic to exceedingly hopeless, and back again.  After seeing how deep the lose cut these families and how much of an impact being sick has, I’m really hoping that a vaccine is on the way.

I’m sure that over the course of the next 23 months, there will be a number of other revelations in which I discover just how much our cultures and lifestyles differ.  I love these happenings, but it’s also very bittersweet.  It’s not always the most positive things that come to light.  I guess that’s part of the experience though.