Malaria!

Farmers all over Burkina are staring hopefully (and more than a little desperately) at the skies these days.  The skies are lovely, sunny, cloudless--a perfect day to relax under a mangoe tree and chew on kola nuts--and 100% empty of the monsoon like rains that are usually in full force by this time in June.  The earth, just beginning to erupt in little patches of green grass from the early rains in May, has begun to draw back in, re-drying and baking into clay basins.  When one of those cataclysmic rains does finally come, all that dry soil is going to have a hard time soaking it up--instead, it's going to collect in little ponds all over town.  These little ponds will be the cause of death for hundreds, thousands of children all over Burkina and Mali in the next six months, all from a seemingly innocous little creature, smaller than the tip of my finger, with a big appetite and an unbelievable ability to spawn--mosquitoes are on the prowl.

The female anopheles mosquito is the culprit, and her weapon of choice is malaria.  Malaria is probably much different from what most peope think, especially if you've never lived in a country as inundated with and jaded to malaria as Mali or Burkina Faso.  In these countries, malaria is thought of and treated like the flu--it's everywhere, it sucks, everyone gets it, it's definitely no fun, but your not really afraid it's going to kill you--just a week or two of misery.  Some people, most people even, live with it in their system most of the time and just don't have symptoms until their immune system is weak.  There are even some people, by a genetic quirk called sickle cell anemia who don't get it all (their funky shaped red blood cells just hold no apeal to the virus).  Pregnant ladies and children, however, are not so lucky and are most often victims of fatal cerebral malaria.

The most frustrating part? IT IS SO EASY TO PREVENT! The female anopheles mosquito only comes out between 10pm and 4am (generally speaking)! Literally, just sleeping under mosquito nets would prevent such a huge number of cases that it would for all intents and purposes rid the world of malaria (from an epidemological perspective). So, why oh why don't people just sleep under a damn mosquito net? Here are the reasons I hear:

1) Those nets don't let in any airflow (Answer: A little true, but rainy season is cooler anyway)

2) I never get malaria anyway (Answer: Maybe not, but it could be in your system and you could unknowingly transfer it to your pregnant wife or little child)

3) And anyway, malaria doesn't come from mosquitoes, it comes from Mangoes and Corn, you silly toubab!

(Answer: Raaaar! This one frustrates me the most, not because it's silly and not because I get mad at the people that think this, but if you have ever tried to have an intellectual show down with an uninformed or ignorant thought shared by several people who don't know or care about the scientific method and years of research in labs, you can't begin to understand my frustration.  At home, if you want to prove a thought, you whip out that smart phone, you punch in that question, and blast the oposition with your superior knowledge.  Burkina Faso: Non-applicable on so many levels, and further more, we toubabs are always coming up with the craziest ideas anyway (remember when she wanted us have gardens in water bottles! Ha!))

So, I'm going on a mosquito rampage this year, by golly.  Just handing out gazzillions of mosquito nets is clearly not enough (Burkina has been doing that for a while).
Step one: Sweet mural of a lady and her baby under a mosquito net
Step two: A little harassment of villagers in the streets of my village, namely badgering them to enter a contest for a super cool american mosquito net by  promising to sleep under one during rainy season

Step three: Make mosquito repellant with my assocation out of shea butter and neem oil to sell all over town.  Step four: Save babies! End malaria!

Denmisenw/ Kids

Denmisenw means kids or children in Dioulla and it's a word I use a lot as pretty much everyone has at least 5 in Burkina.  Kids here have blown my good moods to smithereens plenty of times and have made my day just as many.  They have the luck here to have a whole village in which to run amuck, a village full of mango trees to climb, crumbly mud brick walls warm from the sun to scale, lizards to catch, animals to chase with sticks and roars, other hooligan kids to wreak havoc with, and, lucky for the kids in my village, a toubab to watch and pester at their leisure.  They have the unforunate luck of getting the last pick of meat, the worst hand-me-downs, the fewest baths, the most wacks across the butt with skinny stinging switches, and a disproportianate share of the most grueling housework.

They are shockingly obedient to their parents and their teachers, as they know the serious consequences of anything but perfect behaviour. They tie their baby brother's and sister's on their backs and go mango hunting while mom pounds the corn to make flour for 'to', and dad fixes shoes, drinks tea, or wanders unhelpfully through village.  They steal from each other greedily and give selflessly in a ten minute span.  They play dress-up with rice-sacks, tumble and wrestle in sandpiles, braid each other's hair, make bizarre rhythyms with recycled instruments, help the toubab with her 6th and still pitifull garden, ride bikes 10 times too big for them, collect bottle caps and make games with them, create cars with boxes and card board wheels, and generally look for anything at all to do.

They are usually totally gross with all this fun, full of sand and dirt and snotty noses and sticky mango finger and gaping holes in their clothes until their mom finally dumps  a bucket of water on them and scrubs it all away. They tranform for holidays and weddings into little adults, in matching out fits with their brothers and sisters, shiny with shea butter on their skin, eyebrows drawn in arching lines that sometimes make them look angry or surprised, much to my amusement.  They are darling devils!

you can see my pictures of some of my favorite kids at  https://picasaweb.google.com/102639843968564284925/DenmisenwKids

Famine

FAMINE is a word that brings up images of biblical scenes involving locusts and first sons as well as little African babies (from the country of Africa) with scrappy clothes and fly covered faces.  Before coming to first Mali and then Burkina Faso in West Africa with the Peace Corps, I imagined that hungry babies would haunt my dreams; that people would just be miserably hungry all the time.  As it turns out, those scrappy clothes are a point of practicality on the part of parents who do not want to change their children's clothes fifteen times a day for no reason (an advancement over some germaphobe American parents I've seen).  I can attest to the fact that it is HARD to stay clean here, impossible if you are a drooly two year old who thinks dirt is the most brillant food item since breast milk.  And those flies harass everyone, regardless of race, creed, gender, nationality, or hunger level and everyone gets sick of batting them away at some point.  I don't mean to imply that there are not malnourished kids here--that's part of my job--but like most illnesses and diseases, it probably doesn't look or work like you think it would.

Thus, I have become somewhat desensitized to the intensity of the hunt for food here in West Africa.  I sort of forgot about this word Famine until my French tutor, Mr. Dakio, brought it up last Satuday during our lesson.  He'd prepared a little comprehension paragraph, which I read aloud, fumbling over the words and trying to dig out the meaning.  At the end, he asked me very seriously "Have you ever seen a famine?""Nooo," I replied hesitatingly, "but I almost did before I left Mali," as if it were a CBS special I intended to watch but missed due to another engagement. "Have you?,"I asked, mentally preparing for the deluge that was always Mr. Dakio's long-winded response to questions, wondering what he would think of grocery stores..  He told me that the first famine he experienced happened in the 60s, when he was still a kid.  That year the rains  didn't start in May or June like they usually do after the hot, dry season that proceeds them (the hot season, incidentally, being the beginnings of the hurricanes that later tear across North America).  All the way to October, they barely managed to squeeze out a few drops, choking even the drought-resistant millet and sorghum.  The functionaires (government employees whose salaries, though still pretty measily, by far surmount what most villagers make in 20 years), including Mr. Dakio's family, simply bought grain to make to, the grain blobs everyone eats here.  He told me that for kilometers around the village, not a green leaf could be found.  People ate leaves they'd never looked twice at before, boiling it two and three times to get rid of the bitter taste.  Some people eat clay, just to fill their bellies.  The elderly passed away quickly, as only a day or two with no food was more than an already frail body could handle.  The protestant church came to the Upper Volta, as it was not yet Burkina Faso, with bags of red sorghum, the stuff we (Americans) usually use as animal feed.  This was available in tiny amounts for huge families, offered with the stipulation that the family would join the church (being catholic didn't count).  This red sorghum became famous and the words American and Protestant were tied with it.  To this day, when Burkinabe find out that I am American and not French, they are almost instantly friendly and pour out doting words on Americans.  People tried for a while to keep to local beliefs, sacrificing animals, dances, masks, even some particularly devout who ran around to all the old places of worship naked, arms flailing--the whole shebang.  Unfortunately, this method didn't seem to work and many soon switched to Christianity, not surprisingly. 

This place is always just a harvest away from famine.  It's like living month to month with your paycheck, versus having a sound savings that could stand sometime of no income.  I think at worst in America we could live on spam and twinkies, which are sure to survive a nuclear fallout, for at least a year or two.  When I try to think of why these two countries are so different and really think about what the problem is, my thoughts start running at a hundred miles an hour and I come to 10 minutes later with a sigh, pulling on the uneven parts of my hair and staring at the wall.  It's not called a "developing country" for no reason--infrastructure (roads, buildings, water pumps, storage, factories, public bathrooms, transportation), education (an old system of memorization, catered to boys, poorly managed and run, the idea of savings and investment), illness/disease (malaria, meningitis, and diarrhea are rampant and misunderstood, poor and distant medical facilities, lasting effects of childhood illness, vaccinations, free medicines that exacerbate problems like HIV as people seem asymptomatic, unwanted pregnancies, the list goes on) and the job market/economy (no real buyers, instability <coups happen!>, no jobs for even the educated, economy worldwide) for starters.  All of these factors line up like dominoes, both individually and nationally, and with no external forces they seem good enough, their fragility forgotten.  But one little push, one little breeze, and one breaks on another, wreaking havoc and starting everything back on square one....again.  Say what you will about America's imperfect system, but I don't think our economic brinks even comes close to the one Burkina Faso has been tip-toeing for a while.  Throwing money at these big problems, as a lot of development has been doing for some time, is also clearly not working.  Throwing money at Africa, as far as I can see, has only made things worse!  Just asking for some jerk to gobble it all up for motorcycles, fancy cars, and mad parties.  A lot of villages and people here are also now spoiled for money and especially projects, a word that makes most people here's eyes sparkle as if it is a free present--which it has been.  Not a simple problem, not a simple solution.