One of the big things that anyone going to tropical or subtropical Africa is warned about, is to avoid the malaria infested mosquitos. We take pills, wear covering clothes at night, insect repellent and sleep under mosquito nets.
People here, though, don’t seem to care very much. And since we’re living in a place for mainly local travelers, infrastructure around mosquito protection is really crap. We do have mosquito nets over our windows (that only have shutters, no glass in them), but the door that has the same kind of shutters does not have a net, only a curtain haning in front of it. This means that there’s always a couple of mosquitos in our room. We do have a mosquito net over the bed that I and Elli share (that we brought with us from Sweden), but what does that help if the mosquitos in the room have already bitten you during dinner.
The wi-fi area is outside, in a kind of gazebo and a roofed-in porch, which means sitting there at almost any time of the day means being eaten by a bunch of blood-suckers. Because, yes, did I tell you? The mosquitos here are active all day. Not in the villages, there they can’t handle the sun, but here at the hotel they never stop biting. And they are tiny and completely quiet. You only notice them afterwards, when your feet are covered in itchy red bites.
I had a low fever during our first days here. Yesterday, it was Elli’s turn. Apparently, if you take the malaria profylax medication, the malaria you get can show itself just as a minor cold. Maybe, both Elli and I have already had malaria, and we would never know. Maybe my liver is being consumed by malaria parasites as we speak.
Oh, well. I’ve managed to survive before. I slept on a tyre in the back of an open truck that had gotten stuck in the middle of a swamp in the Bolivian Amazon, in a known malaria area, in the middle of a dengue fever epidemic. If I waved my hand through the air, the mosquitos that bumped into my arm must have been hundreds. Enough to give you claustrophobia for lack of mosquito-less air. And I survived. I’m sure I’ll survive now too.
Katja Malmborg 