Malaria, Malaria, Go AWAY!!

Peace Corps isn’t just about holding babies. *gasp* I know sometimes that impression is made. Peace Corps has three goals, to provide technical assistance, to help the host country nationals understand America, and to help Americans understand the culture of the host country. The second goal can be quite tricky when you have to combat popular TV shows and movies like Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, Survivor, and all of the Chuck Norris films and shows. Ghanaian’s are shocked when I describe the homeless, healthcare system, and politicians in America. “No, I don’t know President Obama, but the next time I see him, I’ll have him invite you to the U.S.” You may think that goal three would be easy, but American’s are sometimes close-minded about the rest of the world. Contrary to what some folks think, Africa’s a continent, not a country. It’s 3 times bigger than America in population and size. The languages are not all “clickey” languages. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I don’t have elephants living in my backyard. The whole continent isn’t hot. A lot of African’s DO have access to electricity, running water, internet, and medicine. Today is World Malaria Day. I’m going to focus on goal 3, and share with you about a disease that negatively affects Ghana every day of the year.

In November 2010 I got malaria. It was miserable, but I survived (much to my mother’s relief!). How’d I get malaria? Simple! I was bitten by a mosquito of the genus Anopheles gambiae carrying the protozoa of the genus Plasmodium. The mosquito picked up the protozoa from biting a human whom had the protozoa already in their system (a person who already had malaria). Once the infected mosquito pierced my skin to feast on my blood, the sporozoites in the mosquito’s saliva (yuck!) entered my bloodstream and traveled to my liver. My immune system didn’t catch it early. By the time my immune system did see it and started to make antibodies against it, the parasite changed into a protein that made it very difficult for it to catch up to the replication of the disease. I was sick, a fever of 104, shaking chills, vomiting, headache, and severe body aches. The disease can kill you within 24 hours. Luckily I noticed the symptoms right away and took Coartem, a medication used to treat malaria. You can read more about my experience here:

(http://krisandtriciapc.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-coartem-24-pills-in-3-days.html)

Every hour, over 340 cases of malaria are reported in Ghana, which adds up to a staggering 3,000,000 cases a year. In 2010, 3,000 people in Ghana were reported to have died from malaria; I have reason to believe it’s higher. An article was published in February 2012 by Richard Knox of NPR News, stating that the WHO estimate of 655,000 malaria related deaths in 2010 was actually twice that at 1.24 million people (over 2 children a minute). If that’s true, more than two times the number of people died from Malaria, than died of any cause of death in the US in 2010. Read more here:

(http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/02/02/146303865/researchers-say-malaria-deaths-are-twice-the-official-count)

No matter the actual numbers, malaria is a problem. The good news? Malaria is PREVENTABLE and Treatable!! Studies have shown that when 3/4 of people in a community sleep under insecticide-treated nets malaria transmission is cut in half. Children deaths from malaria are cut by 20% and the mosquito population drops by 90%. It’s estimated that only 5% of children in Sub-Saharan Africa sleep under any type of insecticide-treated net.

Here’s a little tidbit I just learned. The CDC was originally the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas which was formed during WWII in the southern US, where malaria was problematic. By 1949 the country was free of significant problems related to malaria.

While you’re complaining about the snow/rain/sunshine, the price of gas, or the latest app on your iPhone malfunctioning, take a minute to be thankful you don’t have to worry about your child dying before their 5^th birthday from a preventable disease.  

Want to know more/do something? Check out these links:

http://stompoutmalaria.org/

http://www.malarianomore.org/

http://www.pih.org/ (#02 2012 Top 100 Best NGOs by The Global Journal)

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/ (#03 2012 Top 100 Best NGOs by The Global Journal)

http://www.path.org/ (#06 2012 Top 100 Best NGOs by The Global Journal)

A Water Blog

How’s your water? Flowing nicely out of your kitchen and bathrooms sinks? Filling and showering nicely in your tub? With a full tank, flushing your toilets? Here in Jumbo #1 it’s a little different. For a population of 1,700 we have 6 boreholes (mechanical water pumps). It lifts water 60+ feet from below ground via the muscle and sweat of women and children. This week in the village 2 of these 6 boreholes were still working. The rest had broken or worn out from overuse, abuse by small children, and an ever-sinking water table. As a result, there was a 2-3 hour wait to fetch a headpan from each of the 2 working boreholes. The average adult needs ½ a head pan a day to drink, cook, and bathe. If you are the workhorse in your house (a 8-10 year old girl), you typically fetch water before going to school in the morning. Now those 2-3 head pans take 6-9 hours to fetch. Forget school. Don’t mind that exams are next week. If you’re the youngest wife in a family, forget going to farm to harvest cassava to sell at market during a season where there is no money in the house. You have an entire day of fetching water ahead of you.

Here’s some American perspective. Imagine that all the BPs and Kwik Trips closed down. Only one or two gas stations are open in your town. You’re gonna be waiting all day to fill your tank. Okay, so the boreholes are too time consuming, is there another option? The stream nearby! Oh wait, that dried up 2 months ago (and never was safe for drinking anyway). Another? The Kpassa river (which flows year-round). Perfect. This water has more taste AND color than boring, “safe to drink” borehole water anyway. It’s only a 4km walk one-way, so within an hour, you can have a head pan of water back at your home. Only 13% of Ghanaians have access to sanitation (a toilet of any kind). So, drinking unfiltered water from the river can lead to dysentery, giardia, and cholera. Fetching water from surface water sources could also being back guinea worm, which Ghana and outside NGOs worked very hard to eradicate several years back.

How did this become a problem in Jumbo in the first place? No one wants to pay for  water. In most places in Ghana, if you fetch a head pan of water, you pay a small fee before you can draw it. That money accumulates and is used for maintenance. In our village people do not consider that boreholes break and wear out and require money for maintenance. Furthermore, people don’t trust each other with money.  They need  to SEE that a borehole is broken before they are moved to action. And all the while everyone is complaining about water. Here’s the latest suggestion from some women: “Extend the piped water in town to the village, then it will not break down.” They feel donating 1GHC (65 cents) every 2-3 months is too much. The math disagrees, however. Piped water costs 0.2 cedi (12 cents) per head pan. If you fetch 3 head pans a day that’s 0.6 cedi…in 30 days that’s 18GHC ($11.25) per month. This, in comparison to at most 1GHC in two months?!

Now, another thing you might be worried about: how’s it affecting us!? Do I lose sleep over water? Yeah, probably, I’m a light sleeper and a worrier to boot. Are we drinking greenish brown river water? No. We are still drinking borehole water, it just comes at a price. We pay some students to fetch us this “clear gold” from one of the remaining stressed boreholes.

If you didn’t win the latest megamillions lottery, here’s something to be thankful for that is easy to take for granted in the US. If you have safe freshwater to drink, cook, and clean with, you’re better off than 1/6 of the world, or almost a billion people.

March

Before leaving for East Africa, I had learned that a former coworker of mine was coming to Ghana to work with Habitat for Humanity. At the end of her volunteering, they would tour Ghana for a few days before heading back to the US. Turns out that coincided exactly with our return from East Africa, so we were able to meet up with her and convinced her to take the grueling trip up to our site, see it for a day, then take an equally grueling trip back! We were glad to show our village to yet another “foreigner”; I’m told she also enjoyed the visit :) Our chief was also glad, and is starting to see our value to the community, because he has started asking our visitors for transportation to “America.” He is convinced that one of these days the visitor will say yes. Unfortunately for him we keep bringing “poor” people to visit :P

The day after our visitor left, Tricia went for training. It was here that she met the new health trainees and started training them for their service.

We had learned in past months that Jumbo #1 would likely get replaced with a health volunteer from this group. The result is that the new volunteer will come to Jumbo at the end of April, while Tricia’s (and my) service continues into August. The priority is with the new volunteer and their integration into the community, so it means Tricia (and I!) had to find something else to do. Tricia looked immediately to the health office in Nkwanta, who were more than happy to let her come and work with them. But what about me? I cannot stay in Jumbo, and if Tricia goes to Nkwanta I would also like to go there. This would mean, however, that I am too far from New Agou school to commute every day, and so I would have to end my work there. But what could I do in Nkwanta? I talked to an education NGO in Nkwanta (Ghana Education Project, search them online) and they were also happy to have me work for them. So fear not, we will have something to do, at least for a month or so, even though we are getting kicked out by the new volunteer! It may get boring toward the end, we’ll see!

This week we hosted the new volunteer (trainee for now) as they came for their “site visit” to see Jumbo and get acquainted with it. After the visit we’re convinced that she will be a great fit for Jumbo and is capable of doing some great things here.

One lingering question you may have is, “What about my school – is it getting another PCV?” The answer to that is no. Throughout my service there were some clear barriers to development in New Agou, including an uncooperative community and non-existent support from the district. Once the district changeover takes place I hope these issues will be resolved. I recently sat down with the chief in New Agou and explained this to him, as well as the headmaster and staff. I think they are disappointed that a new volunteer is not coming, but they understand why. They do have the opportunity to apply again, so if they have a change of heart and start to work together I can easily see another PCV getting placed there. For me this is a lesson in the Peace Corps strategy. The first PCV at a site is merely there to explain what a PCV is, live with the community (“integrate”), and identify barriers to development within the community. I am sure that teachers and the chief will spread this information (we may even have a meeting where I can explain it myself) among the community. If they choose to believe what they hear and act, they can easily change. If they decide to ignore it, no development will come to New Agou. It is sad to think about, especially since I call this place my home (for now), but it has a much greater chance at being effective than riding up in a Land Cruiser and telling people to do X, Y and Z and then leaving. The thought of wasting a “white man’s time” and declining an opportunity for development is a powerful motivator for change.

February

The month of February also went by fast, mainly due to our trip to East Africa! Why East Africa? I heard it once described to me that you come to West Africa for the people; you come to East Africa for the wildlife. While there is plenty of culture in East Africa as well, as we found, there is very little wildlife in West Africa, and how can we say we went to Africa and didn’t see a lion?

So we planned a 17 day trip to Tanzania and Rwanda, including a few days on the sublime island of Zanzibar, 6 days of safari in northern Tanzania, and a few days in Rwanda to see mountain gorillas. The pictures have been posted and they say so much more than words, but suffice it to say that it was a singularly amazing experience.

January

After the beach it was back to site. We arrived in plenty of time for the “Christmas/New Year” combined celebration that Konkombas do in our village. It consists of a very odd selection of Western Christmas traditions, including buying a new set of clothes (only one the kids will get all year), making a lot of rice and giving it away (like Halloween I guess), and multiple nights of very loud hip-hop music. Sound familiar? I thought not. We invited the new nutrition officer in Nkwanta to come and see it, as she had no other plans and was finding it difficult to adapt (she is from Accra). As it turned out, some leaders in the community had additional plans for the holiday. They used the main New Year’s celebration (held on the 2^nd for some reason) to announce new bylaws for the village, including no loud music after 10pm, no children and youth out late at night, etc. Not surprisingly, as these new rules were being announced, one of the youth pulled the fuse on the PA. The next moments were chaotic and a bit unnerving (especially for our guest), with arguments between elders and youth. Unfortunately for the leaders, they had not consulted youth about the rules prior to the announcement. Furthermore, most youth in the community do not receive any parenting, but are instead left to find out about the world for themselves. So they formed their own opinions about what is important, and unfortunately they chose loud hip hop, sexual activity, etc. The silver lining in this chain of events was that no loud music was played that night, and we were able to sleep soundly, guest included.

Some days later Tricia and the nutrition officer traveled to the north to visit a nutrition rehabilitation center there as research for the proposed center in Volta region. The difficultly with this travel was that it was over bad roads with very bad public vehicles. Using her powers of persuasion, she convinced the DCE to let her use one of his SUVs for the trip. For a trip that would take four full days of travel roundtrip, plus a day spent there, they were able to leave early on Friday and return around dusk on Saturday.

By the second week in January I was back to teaching and Tricia was back to preparing for training. She went for a one week “training-of-trainers” in the south, leaving me alone at site. Fortunately, when she came back, she brought her friend Tessa, who came from the US to visit. We showed Tessa our village, the market town, my school, anything she was interested in seeing. Her and Tricia then moved on to see other parts of Ghana.

In January we also learned that our village of Jumbo #1 had now been shifted to the district of Nkwanta North. What this means is that now Jumbonians can go to the town of Kpassa (5km) for support from the district, instead of Nkwanta (30km). This change has yet to take effect in the schools and the clinic, but it is a big step in that direction.

January 26^th saw the FIRST OFFICIAL BABY WEIGHING at Jumbo clinic, with over a hundred participants.

January also brought a truly sad event. Tricia’s paternal grandfather passed away after struggling with his failing health. Tricia was close with her grandfather, and was looking forward to attending his 95^th birthday party next September. To mourn the loss of a loved one is difficult. To mourn that same loss while separated from family and friends thousands of miles is herculean.