Happy Malaria Month, Everyone!

Every April, it’s time once again to celebrate this parasitic disease that saps the strength of farmers, sickens students and teachers alike, kills babies, and combines with HIV to make people’s lives even more difficult.  Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite mosquito-borne affliction: Malaria! 

So, how many people reading this blog have been sick with malaria?  (April, raise your hand.)  Not very many, I’m guessing, and I’m happy to count myself among those who’ve never gotten ill from it.  But then, I can afford malaria prophylaxis (I would like to thank the hundreds and hundreds of doxycycline pills that have kept me malaria-free), and I come and go often enough from malaria zones that my body has a chance to rest from the prophylaxis—none of the drugs are meant to be taken for a lifetime. 

But when I ask my neighbors about malaria (Nawna jante, in Pulaar), they’ve all gotten it at least once.  Mariama, the head of my host family, gave me the most accurate and understandable description (she’s learned how to adapt her explanations to my very limited language skills):  You get sick, with a fever, chills, headache—so you go to bed—and the next day you feel better.  Maybe even for a few days, you’re OK.  Then the fever comes back.  Then you’re better again… then the fever comes back.  My friend Leah, who’s been trained at Malaria Boot Camp in Senegal, tells me that the cyclical fever happens as rounds of malaria parasites infect your red blood cells, grow, reproduce, and burst open the cells that harbored them; each time a new generation bursts out into your bloodstream, it wreaks havoc with your health; then you’ve got a bit of time to recover while the new parasites settle into another round of blood cells and begin breeding again. 

It’s a miserable disease.  Do some reading on it—it’s amazing how long we’ve been suffering from malaria, how it’s shaped human history, what we’ve learned about how malaria works, and all the different approaches people are taking to combat malaria.  Here in Sebhory, I’m certainly not working on vaccines or genetically modified mosquitoes… I’m not even on the front lines with the health center workers who are using the new rapid diagnostic tests and prescribing treatments… but I’m trying to do what I can.  Part of dealing with malaria is knowing what you’re up against, and kids are among those most vulnerable to malaria, so I’ve been visiting the primary school classes in Sebhory, asking students what they already know about malaria, giving them the information they’re missing and correcting some misconceptions, and asking them how they plan to protect themselves and their families against malaria.  The best things they can do are sleep under mosquito nets at night and get prompt treatment from the health centers when they do get sick.  I started by talking to the sixth-grade class, and I was pretty disheartened to find out that while most households had at least one mosquito net, the kids I was talking to didn’t sleep under a net.  But as I worked my way down to the youngest students, the story changed: the majority of the first-graders say they sleep under nets.  It started to make sense: the health center had given out nets a few years ago, and each household got one, but one net per household isn’t enough.  Families seem to have gotten the message that pregnant women and young children are the most vulnerable, and so the little kids are sleeping under nets with their moms; the teenagers in the sixth grade, though, are on their own.  Luckily, there’s another net distribution planned for this summer: this time, they’re hoping to cover not just each household but each bed.  I’m hoping that when these kids come back to school in October, I’ll be able to hear that all of them can sleep mosquito- and malaria-free. 

So here’s a few malaria myths that we stomped at school last week:

1.      1.  Malaria is caused by mangoes—an understandable theory, since mangoes get ripe around the time the rains start and the mosquitoes breed like crazy, transmitting malaria left and right.  Every kid (OK, a few adult Peace Corps volunteers, too) has gotten an upset stomach at least once from eating too many mangoes in one sitting; most kids have gotten malaria right around the same time.  So, it makes sense that people assume they’re connected, and tell the kids to go easy on the mangoes. 

BUT!  Malaria is not transmitted by mangoes.  Nor by rainstorms, dirty dishes, unclean drinking water, or shaking hands with sick people.  It’s mosquitoes and only mosquitoes, so if you aren’t getting bit (because you’re safe inside your bednet at night), then you aren’t getting sick. 

2.     2  We don’t have malaria in the Fouta region of Guinea—wouldn’t it be nice if this was true?   Talk to the old people, and they’ll tell you about how much the climate has changed—they remember the good old cold days, when mosquitoes were few and far between, even in rainy season.  Today, that’s not the case: the mosquitoes are here to stay, and malaria has moved in with them.  

3.   3    Bednets are hot and stuffy.  This isn’t so much a myth as a matter of opinion; my personal argument against this barrier to bednet use is: It’s worth it, to be just a little hotter at night, to keep the killer mosquitoes away; and frankly, it’s worth it just to keep EVERYTHING ELSE out of my bed: the mouse that haunts my kitchen, the beetles that love the light of my headlamp, the crickets that want to snuggle up with me in the middle of the night, the occasional gecko or lizard that wanders into my room and gets tempted by the sight of all that soft, comfy bedding. They’re nice lizards; I just don’t want to go to bed with them.  I am perhaps too attached to my mosquito net: it’s my security blanket that keeps out all the things that go bump in the night.  And, you know, it also helps prevent a disease that can kill you.  So, I’d say that’s a fair tradeoff for a slightly warmer sleeping situation. 

This week’s news roundup

Here’s a bee swarm that Leah and I found on our walk up to Shaikou Oumar’s house :  

Alas, I didn’t get any pictures of the monkey that I found hiding out in my avocado tree—I suppose I should be upset that he’s up there stealing avos and mangoes, but he got so scared he dropped an avocado for me (I’m sure he meant it for me), so I’m doubly tickled pink.

Meanwhile, the pine trees in the tree nursery are growing taller, while the water level in the wells keeps dropping.  Most mornings, I walk through the pine plantation to work with the pepiniere (tree nursery) group for a few hours—we water and weed, and I get a little bit of the morning’s gossip in Pulaar: who died, who’s getting married, and who is off harvesting her tomatoes instead of helping us water.  Alas, my Pulaar still isn’t good enough to get any juicy details.  On Tuesday we dug down a few feet further in hopes that our closest well would produce enough water to cover all 10 beds of tree seedlings; alas, it’s still not quite enough, so we end up making a few trips to the further well.  Where I dropped a watering can yesterday.  And unfortunately, not one of the lightweight plastic ones that floats; no, I dropped a metal one, and it sank like a stone.  I’m quite grateful to Barbe, who managed to fish it back out. 

I’ve built one more mud cookstove, and I’ve got another new request for help building one, but they’re not sure when they want to build it… my life moves very slowly.  

And it was my birthday last week!  Kim brought me chocolate chip brownie mix when she visited, so on my birthday I brought it into Dalaba and Christina and I made brownie pancakes: follow the instructions on the box but add one extra egg, drop the batter into a good nonstick pan to make coaster-sized pancakes, and voila, instant brownies without an oven.  Chocolate is SO GOOD! 

Also, this week is Malaria Month—I’ll be writing a separate blog post all about that.  But here’s one helpful hint: eating mangoes will not make you ill with malaria.  Which is a good thing, because with my current 4-mango-a-day habit, if there were any truth to that myth, no amount of malaria prophylaxis could keep me safe through rainy season.

Potatoes and Tourism... or English and Mud?

I’ve been here five months now—that’s as long as I spent in India, but it feels so different.  In India, even though the work got off to a rough start, we still got a lot done—installed irrigation systems, found local sources for parts, solved lots of problems in the field, and got a lot of ideas and feedback from the farmers.  Here, workwise, I’m still struggling.  Since the group I was supposed to work with doesn’t exist, I’ve been trying to find other ways to be useful: collaborating with my counterpart’s ecotourism group in Dalaba, teaching English to the sixth graders in Sebhory, working in the tree nursery with the local Eaux et Forets agent, Mr. Sacko.  And I’ve been trying to improve my ability to see where I can be useful:  studying Pular so I can talk to more people, working on my French so I can read and write project proposals more easily, going for walks around town and in the countryside to learn as much as I can about life here. I find I’m always drawn to everything agricultural first, so I notice what people have planted in their kitchen gardens, and where they get their water, and when the cows and goats come home each evening, but I suspect I miss many of the things a health worker or teacher would be noticing.

And that's the tricky part, isn't it? It's hard to guess about what things you don't know because you never thought to ask.  So I try to listen to everything, look at everything, and ask as many questions as I can in Pulaar, even the silly ones (Mariama, why do you do the laundry?  Why doesn't your son do it for you?  Why doesn't your grandfather? What about Hassanatou, the six year old?  Actually, the kids are pretty good: Mamadou (18) does all his own laundry, and Hassanatou is eager to help whenever Mariama or I wash clothes.) 

Most of Sebhory is still confused about what I'm doing here (the whole peace corps concept never got introduced when I moved in, and so many tourists come through here that quite a few people think I must just be on a very long holiday), but I am still so amazed and pleased that they don't worry much about that, and invite me into their lives anyway, whether it's just a friendly greeting, or an invitation to lunch, or (for the families whose houses I spent quite a bit of time in), an amazing amount of patience and trust as they teach me Pular, answer my questions, teach me how to cook, how to read the arabic alphabet, ask me to read medecine labels and decipher cellphone address books.  And I feel like I'm at home now in Sebhory-- I finally feel like I KNOW people here-- even though it's still a struggle to communicate, I know when Mariama didn't sleep well, and I know what Oumou Sadjo will say when she sees my new headscarf, and I know that if Hassanatou and Jarai are playing together and Jarai suddenly starts bawling, it's probably Hassanatou's fault, regardless of her professed innocence.  (Hassanatou pinches, and doesn't always play well with others.)

This week, Mr. Sacko is going to help me use PACA-- so, how many of you guessed correctly that if it's an acronym, it must come from Peace Corps?  PACA stands for participatory analysis for community action, and it's a toolkit of exercises to do with a community or group to clarify some of the realities of their lives, their work, their schedules, and their resources-- from there, to generate a good discussion of what could make life better here-- and from there, a few more tools to figure out community priorities: what do we want to work on first?  We'll see how it goes-- like a lot of the developing world, it seems like in Sebhory (and perhaps Guinea as a whole), there's a big difference between what people want as individuals (a nicer cellphone, a husband who listens better to their problems, an easier way to control their high blood pressure), and what they think an outsider (me, or the government, or an NGO) wants them to want as a community: reforestation, bed nets to prevent malaria transmission, literacy lessons, more wells.  But I hope there's some overlap: some things that help a significant portion of the town, not just one person, and that build towards a better future, and that people here are willing to put their time into. 

In the mean time, while we talk, and I learn, and rainy season comes closer and closer, I'll keep building mud cookstoves.  I've got two more people who'd like me to help them build a stove at their houses.  I think my six-year-old self would be very proud of my professional accomplishments in mud.  

What happened this week?

It’s not been a particularly momentous week, but I must have been doing something since the last time I wrote, right?  Let me think.

I planted about a hundred moringa seeds—Moringa oleifera is a sturdy plant (it would like to be a tree, but doesn’t always get that far) that produces copious amounts of leaves that are high in protein and vitamin A—the perfect thing for this time of year, when the sweet potatoes in peoples’ garden are all dried up and not making leaves, and the cassava leaves aren’t growing as fast as they’re getting harvested (at least, this is what’s happening at my house)—so, we aren’t eating as much leaf sauce, and I miss it.  I planted the moringas with the pepiniere (tree nursery) group that Mr. Sacko runs (he’s the Eaux et Forets guy)—next, I want to plant some baobabs—their leaves are good for sauces too—but they do take a bit longer to get to harvestable size compared to moringa :)

 

I biked up to the irrigation dam at Dounkimanya with a group of volunteers—they swam, I checked out the spillway and the flow gates and the irrigation channels.  I love irrigation.  

And yesterday, I ate my very first Guinean mango—and yes, it was amazing… I am in love with mangoes.  Right now, they’re still pretty expensive, at 1,000 FG each (that’s seven mangoes for a dollar, just to make everyone in America jealous), but I hear that soon, the market will be flooded… and then the whole countryside will be flooded… there are mango trees EVERYWHERE.  My house has three.  I whisper words of encouragement to their little green fruits every day.  

Tierno Boubacar, my tailor, is still making slow progress on my latest outfit… I think it’s been a month now since I dropped off the fabric.  I would be more annoyed if I couldn’t see for myself the literal piles of work that he and his apprentices have in front of them: the shop is always full of raw cloth, mending, and adult-sized outfits waiting to be cut down or reshaped for kids to wear.  Still, I drop by each day to encourage him to move my outfit to the top of his work pile.  

What else has changed?  The soil is drier, the baby goats are bigger each week; the chickens have (mostly) been staying out of my vegetable garden, and the veggies are growing, but slowly.  I spent an entertaining morning burning plastic trash.  This is my life. 

A walk through three worlds

 One afternoon I decided to see where the road east of my house led... 

I am still amazed by how quickly the landscape changes in Guinea.  And I'm amazed by its abundance.  Sure, this flatland can't grow much more than grass-- there's bedrock just an inch or so under the soil-- but it's still a lush growth compared to Niger, where it seemed like everything got grazed to within an inch of its life, or at least to within an inch of the ground. 

And at the edge of every rocky savana like this one, you can still see a line of green marking a streambed: come closer, and suddenly you're in the tropics.  The air is moist, the boulders slick with moss, and if you close your eyes and just listen to the water running over rocks and the birds singing, you could imagine yourself in a green forest without end. 

I've wandered through a few of those grand forests here, but this road led me back out of the valley bottom and into a third landscape:

I climbed up the hillside and over an ingenious step-over gate in a fence of thorn branches, and into a farmer's field.  This is where they've been threshing fonio, a tiny grass that produces hundreds of tiny seeds on each stem.  Once threshed and hulled, they're cooked up into a wonderfully tasty couscous-- high in protein, too.  Notice the power lines in the background-- no more wild forests or untenanted plains, we're already back in civilization.