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.