Malaria

The rainy season also means that we have a lot(!) more mosquitoes (and it wasn’t like we only had a few before…). The director, the headmaster, and some of the teachers got sick because of Malaria. Of my 26 students 7 were sick this week… Fortunately, I have not yet been infected. As you know I am not taking any preventive medication. The other civil servants wife did get infected during her stay here, even though she took the preventive medication, so I don’t know how much that helps, anyway.

The treatment seems to be a pretty straight forward process. Of course if there is one thing that the doctors here are specialists at it is at treating malaria. You take a test (I took one after throwing up after having eaten the pig at the animal farm, which fortunately was negative), then if it is positive you get some medication. After a couple of days it is gone forever. The only thing is that you need to get tested. Whatever symptoms you have, your first thought always needs to be malaria. If you don’t get tested then it can become deadly. People here still die because of malaria, because they think, “Ah I’ll be ok, it will go away.” Almost everybody has lost a parent, sibling or other close relative to malaria. They’ll tell you that “Maybe it was just their time…” But how could it be your time if you could have just taken some medication?