7th September 2009 - Mosquitoes

A couple blogs ago I promised that I’d share with you my love of mosquitoes. Well, although I try to be kind and non-violent to all God’s creatures, when it comes to mosquitoes I have to admit that my principles become a bit compromised. When we moved into this house, there were SO many mosquitoes. One reason, most certainly, is that fairly near the back of the house there’s a water hole which, I think, collects a good deal of water during the rainy season. That water is used for building especially when there’s no water coming out of the taps. At this point, very little water remains, and what’s there is green and slimy and probably an optimum place for mosquitoes to breed. And so when daytime turns into dusk they gather by the multitude trying to get in the house. We do our best to keep the doors closed, and all the windows have good mosquito netting on them, but somehow they manage to get in. We try to figure out how they do it, and here are some theories: 1) We haven’t managed to get rid of those that were in the house when we moved in (what’s the life span of a mosquito anyway??). 2) They squeeze in under the doors. 3) Some windows we keep open all day and night and the screens don’t fit 100% tightly so maybe they find those places. 4) There’s a conspiracy in the mosquito world that is aimed at annoying us……

Anyway, however they do it, there are always mosquitoes in the house. By the time we finish eating dinner in the evening they’re beginning to make themselves heard and felt. And when we pray after dinner they prove to be a real distraction. We have this “zapper” – a tennis racket-shaped apparatus that is charged in an electrical socket and when it hits a flying insect it zaps them. Sometimes we resemble Serena and Venus chasing mosquitoes instead of tennis balls, but if the mosquito population is any indication, it seems we won’t be winning any tournaments. We sleep under mosquito nets, but should your foot or hand touch the net during the night, you’re sure to wake up with a welt. It would be nice to be able to read in bed at night without the benefit of the net between you and the light, but that’s impossible. I usually do a mosquito hunting detail before going to bed, and have become pretty adept at killing them as they sit on the wall. It’s their hiding places that can’t be gotten to easily: under the bed, behind the bookshelf, in the curtains. Anyway, we can only thank God that we haven’t come down with malaria, and hope that remains to be so for a long time to come.

Speaking of malaria, here is some information from an article that was in the newspaper this past week. Most shocking is this statement: “In sub-Saharan Africa, malaria is the single biggest cause of death in children under five, killing a child every 30 seconds.” (The Guardian, September 2, 2009) The focus of the article was really about the cost of malaria, and how it often determines how much money a family has to live on during a particular time. It talks about how the cost of malaria ranges from the purchase of a mosquito net, transport to and from a health facility when a member of the family gets malaria, the fee at the hospital or health center, the cost of anti-malarial drugs, and other costs like caring for the sick and therefore time away from income-generating activities, or the wage-earner her/himself being unable to work and earn money. So the endless cycle of poverty and disease goes on. The article also was encouraging the use of ITNs (Insecticide-Treated Nets) and told about how the incidence of malaria has decreased as families begin to use the nets. There is a well-known initiative in Tanzania to provide these nets to expectant mothers and children under-five, those who suffer a high mortality rate from malaria. Support from the government of Switzerland has helped this initiative, and the Swiss Ambassador is quoted in the article: “Malaria is a poverty-related disease, both in cause and effect, which may explain why it tends to receive relatively little attention from decision makers in the rich countries. But malaria is preventable and treatable.” I’m reminded about the debate going on in the U.S. now about health care, and how some of us are afraid that we won’t get all the choices that we think we deserve in regard to our health care. What about the rest of the world that gets almost NO choice, not even between the life and death of a child?