World Malaria Day

Today is World Malaria Day, and Peace Corps Africa has been busy all month in preparation, with volunteers holding workshops, doing surveys, giving lessons on how to use a mosquito net (here's a hint: it's not for catching fish), and doing everything they can to educate both Zambians and Americans on the importance of fighting malaria in Africa.  On top of working in our communities to promote malaria awaremess (which I can't do, since I no longer really have a local community), we are also encouraged to write blog posts (or facebook posts or tweets or texts or whatever) to spread the word about this issue to people back home (one of the lesser-known but major goals of Peace Corps is to teach Americans about the world outside its borders).  It's certainly a noble goal and nothing to be scoffed at-- malaria is one of the top reasons so few African children reach their 5th birthdays, and for a disease that is so easily (and cheaply) treated and prevented the death toll is shockingly high-- but I'll be honest, I wasn't originally planning to do anything to acknowledge World Malaria Day.  It's not that I don't care-- nothing could be further from the truth-- but this month I've been a little busy leaving my home of two years and moving 6 hours away and packing and unpacking and repacking my stuff and learning the ropes of a brand new job and planning my first trip home in 2 years, and I just didn't think I could find the time, not to mention the energy or clearheadedness, to make a blog post.  But in Kasama the World Malaria Day packet had been cleverly pasted to every bathroom wall, and as I sat reading the information on the wall I realized malaria is not something to be overlooked for any reason-- it's been overlooked long enough.

Malaria has an interesting distinction in rural Zambia: there may be no other disease in the world that is taken less seriously in the local population in proportion to its actual seriousness and the number of deaths it causes within that population.  I have often heard Zambians in my village say they are suffering from a "touch of malaria" in the way an American might say they were catching a cold.  Often, the sickness in question is not malaria at all-- the person merely has a headache, a stomachache, even a hangover.  This may seem lucky-- at least the person isn't seriously ill-- but the mindset itself is troublesome.  For every sickness called "malaria" that isn't, there are several cases of actual malaria that are casually dismissed and left untreated-- after all, the thinking goes, that cold I called malaria went away on its own, so surely this will too.

And even when the patient knows (s)he has malaria, that does not guarantee that the patient gets proper treatment.  About a year into my service, my own host grandmother was overtaken by the parasite-- at first I thought she may just be tired and overstating the issue, a habit I had become used to encountering amongst my fellow villagers, but after a day or two it was clear she was not getting better, and I insisted that she get some coartem.  So she asked me to run down to the tuck shop and buy her a pill called "panado," which I found out later that evening was merely a type of aspirin.  There ensued a very, very long conversation (in Bemba, hence its arduous length) in which I explained to her the difference between a painkiller and actual medicine-- and with malaria, you always need real, actual medicine.

What is truly troubling about the ongoing malaria epidemic is that the problem-- in Zambia at least-- is not about the treatability/preventability of the disease, or even about the availability of coartem and mosquito nets.  It is about education.  Many Zambians don't know that they can get free mosquito nets from the government health facilities (assuming they are stocked), don't know that coartem costs only $2 (not cheap in Zambia, but much cheaper than seeds, fertilizer, or bags of maize meal), and most likely don't know how to use either one.  This issue is emblematic of the idea that you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it-- more mosquito nets and drugs are not enough, what we need is education.

And that's where Peace Corps comes in.  Rich or resourceful we certainly are not, but when it comes to teaching people new things, sharing ideas and encouraging education and growth, no one does it better than a Peace Corps Volunteer.  So this month (and hopefully every month), volunteers are working to teach Zambians in the village about malaria-- about putting mosquito nets over every sleeping man, woman, and child, about making sure everyone who needs to take coartem takes it in a timely manner, about avoiding mosquitoes and not leaving still, open water near the house where mosquitoes can breed.  And when we come in from the rain, drenched and shivering, or wake up with a backache or a headache or a cold, and our Zambian counterparts say "ahh, you are catching the malaria," we say "no.  You can not catch cold, malaria, or anything else from getting caught out in the rain.  And malaria comes from mosquitoes."  Happy World Malaria Day, everybody.  And if you're in an infected country, sleep under a mosquito net, and don't forget to take your meds.

Well, I'm back

Turns out, 27 months goes by fast. It looks like a good long time from the front, but before you know it you're looking back on those 27 months and wondering what happened to them. Only 3.5 years ago I sat in front of my computer, alone in my enormous senior college dorm room, staring at the Peace Corps application button and wondering if I had the courage to press it. Turns out, pressing that button was the beginning of an enormous and life-changing adventure.

As I sat in my mudhut in the African bush last week sorting objects and packing bags, I flashed back to my senior year at Smith, nearly 3 years ago now, sitting in my dorm room and crying in frustration because I couldn't get all my stuff (and God I had SO much STUFF!) to fit in my bags and boxes and bins-- sure, there was more going on than the pure stress of packing, I was sad to be leaving and nervous about the giant next step in my life (and the uncertainty of it-- I hadn't been given a Peace Corps assignment yet and wouldn't be for another 10 months) and absolutely terrified of change, but even without all that baggage (haha) packing is by itself a stressful experience. You never know what to pack and what to toss and what to give away, and what to put in which bag and what you'll need again before you leave and shouldn't pack at the bottom on a bag just yet. And it was 20x worse the following February as I stuffed obscure objects like clothes I didn't like and a tent that was hard to set up and a bag of white rice (turns out they sell rice in Zambia, who knew?) into my bags and then out and back in again, having never lived in a mudhut in Africa and having no idea what to pack. 2 years later I knew exactly what to pack, and my stress and neurotic anxiety stemmed not from nerves or fear or uncertainty or confusion, but from pure and unadulterated sadness. Because this ramshackle hut made of lime-coated mudbricks and thatching grass was my first "apartment," my first adult home, and it is hard to leave. 2 years ago I would have stressed neurotically about the hows of packing; this time around, all I could think about was the "why." Every object I packed, every item of worn clothing or small gift I gave away, every piece of cookware I put aside for my replacement, left a big lime-white hole in my hut, another reminder that this experience, improbably, is finally ending. 2 years ago I sat in this hut and thought "man, I've got 24 months here, that's all the time in the world!" Now I know better. No time is enough time, and I am always going to miss this place.

I had hoped to make my last month in the village an awesome month: I was going to bike all over, take pictures of my beautiful mountains, visit all the farms I could, say good-bye to farmers, sit out in the sun with a good book, spend time with my host family, visit and sit with my counterparts, and just generally make the most of what little time I had left. But 2 years in Africa has taught me that things rarely if ever go as planned. First I was sick with a different fluke illness each week. Then in the last 2 weeks the rains-- the ones we were waiting for back during the drought in December-- arrived with avengeance. They wore holes in the road. They flooded roads and bridges. They washed away bridges. Bike paths became rivers, and rivers became floods. One day I biked an hour in the rain and then walked (with my bike) across a bridge 8" underwater. Another day I had to climb over a bridge that was really a series of tree branches draped carelessly over a river that was surging up over the dark, wet logs, and then I lost my shoe in the mud and had to chase it down the river. Every day I was splattered with mud and water, wet and cold and frizzy-haired. I joked with my host family that between the illnesses and the rain, Kashitu must be punishing me for having the gall to try to leave.

On my last day it drizzled all day long, and though I started the day with a nice long bucket bath I was soon shivering cold and frizzy-haired. I alternated between shoving things into bags (and out of bags and back into bags-- old packing habits die hard) and sitting with my host family around their fire, shivering (the night before I had to walk home in the dark cold of an evening rain storm, through an ex-path-turned-river with a bike that kept stalling and sandals that kept falling off-- even with the hot bucket bath and nshima my grandmother prepared for me, I was still feeling sensitive to the cold). I wanted to go for a walk, harvest the last of my garden (lettuce! Big healthy leaves of lettuce, all wasted by the rain!), sit outside with my book, but none of these things were an option, because there was too much rain. Instead I smiled with my host family, helped them shell yellow maize and bake a chocolate cake (this was my "leaving cake," and it didn't turn out half bad), and occasionally hid in my dark, empty hut and watched it grow progressively emptier.

But finally overnight the storm broke, and on my last morning (Tuesday) the sky was cloudy and grey, but there wasn't any rain. I packed the last few things (sleeping bag, mosquito net, etc.) as the sun was rising, ate a power bar from America (all my dishes were packed), took down the last items (a poster of an elephant in a game park I'd left on my wall to keep it from looking too barren; a pair of sandals I didn't want to bother taking with me; a pair of capris that had been attempting to dry on the line in my house since Sunday) and went out to sit with my host family and the counterparts who came to see me off. I brought out my guitar to keep my hands busy, and spent the next 2 hours watching my host family and dodging smoke from their fire. The cruiser came at 8:30 and loaded my stuff (there wasn't much, and it was over fast), I hugged everyone good-bye (hugging is a bit of a no-no in Zambian culture, they're more into handshakes, but on special occasions they will do a hug/cheek kiss that makes me think of Europe), got in the back of the cruiser and watched my house and family fade away. The cruiser brought me to Serenje and dropped me and my stuff at the house, I brought my bags in and unpacked (I have stuff to leave at the house and stuff to take from the house, like clothes and electronics and food, so now I'll have to pack all over again), and that was that. Now I can no longer say "I live in a mudhut in Africa with no electricity or running water." The end of my first hard-core African adventure, and the beginning of a new one.

So now I'm in limbo: at the PC house in Serenje for Easter and waiting to head up to Kasama and begin the next stage of my PC experience. In case you're interested, my new mailing address will be:

Elise Simons

PO Box 410374

Kasama, Zambia

And since I'll be living in town, I'll have pretty reliable cell phone/internet reception, so keeping in touch will be much easier for me than it was before. And of course, I will soon be coming home on my month of homeleave. So stay tuned!