Blog About Malaria Month (BAMM 2012)

When it rains, the unpaved sandy roads of my community collect pools of water that can be so wide as to make the route impassable. Some evaporate quickly. Others, sheltered by the shade of trees, sit for weeks, are stomped through by cows on their way to pasture, collect black foam and tadpoles at the edges, become foul-smelling swamps before they eventually shrivel into nothing.

Then they come.
The mosquitoes.

There are so many, they are so desperate, they will bite through my shirt and my jeans until I am covered, and I feel like I left the house naked. Being in Mozambique is like camping all the time, even in my own home. My living room wall is dotted with smashed mosquito corpses that I don't bother to wipe off. Some days during the rainy season get to be so bad that I put on bug repellant so I can sit in my house in peace. Or I'll run to the only safe zone- under my mosquito net. A bed with a mosquito net is an amazing luxury, but one that not all people here have.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, malaria is the number one killer of children under 5. It also presents a huge danger to pregnant women, impacting fetal growth and development. It's so prevalent here that people think everything is malaria. There is a running joke among PCV's that you could have a toothache and Mozambicans would tell you it's malaria. It's common for people to say, upon returning to work, "Oh I was at home for the last few days because I wasn't well. I had malaria" and everyone nods and clucks in sympathy. Normal.

A child with a fever is usually assumed to have malaria ("guilty until proven innocent") because it's better to be safe than sorry. Anyone who comes into the hospital complaining of a headache, chills, or fever is immediately sent to take a malaria test, which involves pricking the finger, depositing a drop of blood onto a stick that looks like a pregnancy test, and waiting for a line to form to confirm negative or positive. The malaria-positive patient is sent home with a myriad of pills to take for the next couple of weeks.

So much money is spent annually on malaria treatment But the thing is... Malaria is so easy to prevent! If everyone slept under a treated mosquito net, removed stagnant water around their homes, and sought treatment at the hospital sooner rather than later, malaria wouldn't stand a chance. The problem? Lack of information.

This month, I gave a lesson on malaria at CACHES and was surprised to find that the kids knew very little about it. They didn't know the symptoms, or the groups most vulnerable to getting it, or even where mosquitoes come from. And yet, they all claimed to have been to the hospital to do a malaria test at least once in their lives. They receive tons of information about HIV, but little or none about the most common illness that impacts their community! Using candy as a motivator, I coaxed them through trivia game that taught them the basics about malaria. A week later I gave them a pop quiz on what I'd taught and astonishingly most of them had retained the information. I attribute all my success to tootsie rolls.

April 25 is World Malaria day. That week, I will ask all of my CACHES kids to share with at least one friend or family member what they know about malaria.
Maybe one day, a child won't die every 30 seconds of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. Children and adults alike will be able to sit outside under a majestic African night sky free from mosquitoes and malaria. Like that awesome scene from The Lion King, but better.