Jul 7, 2008
Posted by Caitlin Cohen
Today was a glorious day. Glorious is really
one of the only ways to describe it. It was a
Saturday and the day was largely filled with
fun, as Saturdays should be.
I woke up
early to help Niang set up our mosquito net
impregnation station in one of the
communities we work with. "Impregnation" is
chemical treatment to kill mosquitoes, and it
is
responsible for about half of the preventative
effect of a mosquito
net. This was a great way to follow our recent
survey, which found that mosquito impregnation
and use was a huge problem. While
overall, project participants seem to be doing
what they can do stay healthy, many individuals
are still not sleeping under mosquito nets.
When asked why, a lot of them said that they
are only free for pregnant women and children,
so they don't want to spend the money or don't
think it's worthwhile for other family members
to use them. However, that having been said, a
large number of individuals still DO use
mosquito nets but don't know how to properly
impregnate them. Therefore, we set up a bunch
of water containers, brought tons of bloc (the
treatment packages), and basically just set up
camp at the top of Sikoroni's big hill by
Caitlin's house. We were there for about two
hours or so and in that time, the combination
of our previous attempts to spread word of the
impregnation day and the peculiar presence of
two toubabous sitting with Niang in an open lot
seemed to attract quite a few children with
their families' respective mosquito net
collections. I was not surprised, but happy to
know that they all knew WHY they were treating
their nets and furthermore, that it was
necessary. The entire operation went very
smoothly and we treated dozen nets with the
supplies we had before we called it quits. All
in all, I was really pleased and it was one
those I really felt like I was making a
measurable impact in Sikoroni, though again, I
was really just a spectator.
One of
the strange things about this encounter was the
duality of being a toubabou trying to help. On
the one hand, we are white foreigners trying to
bring health equality to underprivileged
Sub-Saharan Africans, yet our identities as
toubabous also helped our cause in that the
oddity of us being there likely attracted more
mosquito nets to be treated. The crowd was
appreciated, especially because each packet of
bloq came with an educational image pamphlet
describing how and why to treat a mosquito net,
which we figured was good information to
distribute; however, because toubabou were
distributing the information, the pamphlets
were treated more like baseball cards than
actual information. It continues to prove
difficult to walk the line of being helpful and
being overbearing as a white person here, but
again, I am comforted in knowing that this line
will never be clear.
- Ben Colburn
