Earlier this month, I finished a malaria project with two other PCVs where we hosted three festivals in our villages. Everyone loves a party, so why not a malaria party. We had the festivals to teach about malaria, mosquito net care/repair, and how to make your own mosquito repellent. Malaria is a year-round problem where I live and pretty much everyone has had malaria at least once in their life. In my village, many people know what causes malaria (although some lingering falsehoods still exist-mangos cause malaria, witches cause malaria…etc. etc.) People also have mosquito nets. There was a national distribution in November, so every house has at least one new net per every 3 people. So why do people still get malaria? It’s a really good question, and I don’t have the answer. It might be that people don’t use their net every night. It might be that people work in the fields until late at night. Or it might be that some nets in my village have holes in them as big as my face. Or maybe that I see the mosquito nets in my river used to catch fish. Whatever the reason, malaria continues to be a problem here, and a main focus of health PCVs at our sites. April 25th is World Malaria Day and PC African countries are competing throughout the month to do the most malaria activities throughout April. The winning country gets…probably nothing, but that’s okay.
The festival started at my site, and then we traveled to two other sites. I think we looked like a traveling circus-3 weird looking people (vazaha), carting around lots of stuff (100 50kg rice sacks, buckets, posters, mosquito nets…) and doing really weird things that made people gawk and stare…. Just another day in PC. The piñata seemed like a good idea in theory, but it was pure chaos. The minute candy appeared kids (and adults) dove head first into masses of people. I’m surprised (and relieved) that no one got hurt! Since it was my site, I had the job of handing out candy afterwards so that everyone would get some. Within five seconds I was pinned to a tree surrounded by one hundred grabby kids. Never again will I give out candy at my site! Nevertheless, fety #1 was a success. The next day we left for fety #2.
Our second festival was in Tampolo, a small village 6ish hours north of my site. We found a brousse from Tamatave which left really quickly. Good luck! It didn’t last though. We ended up picking up a group of women on the road who told the driver they would pay extra if the driver took them right to their destination-a 30 minute detour for everyone else in the brousse. The driver agreed and we were pissed. And then our bad luck continued. We had to find another brousse to get to Brynna’s, and after waiting a long time to find a brousse that would take us, the brousse broke down 4 minutes later. At this point we were running low on time, so we flagged down other brousses going by. Our driver didn’t want to lose our business though, so he wouldn’t get our luggage down from on top of the brousse. Brynna had to get on top of the brousse to get our luggage down, and while that happened, the driver hid her shoes. When we finally found a new car to take us, and when Brynna finally got her shoes back, the driver tricked us into paying twice the amount and then refused to give us our money back when we realized what happened. It was the worst. We eventually made it to Brynna’s house and did some last minute prep before the festival in the morning, which was another success!
Finally we headed to our final site. We had more trouble finding a brousse, and the only one that stopped for us was already packed. Brynna had to climb through a window, I had to sit on the lap of a full grown woman, and Beth was smooshed somewhere in the back. Once we unloaded some people, we got what we thought would be more comfortable seats in the front row behind the driver. A little while later we found out that the driver wanted to create an extra row, pretty much in our laps, facing us. AWKWARD and UNCOMFORTABLE. I had the luck of having a young boy sitting, facing me. He, suffered from car sickness, and spent the next 3 hours puking into a bag, about 3 inches from my face.
We finally made it to site #3 by lunch time. We found some pousse pousses (rickshaws) to take us to Beth’s house because it was another 3k on a terrible road. Her road was a series of large craters, making it difficult, and terrifying to ride down. I was convinced that our pousse pousse was going to tip over. But we didn’t! We unloaded at Beth’s house and sat down for a few minutes to catch our breath before doing more fety prep.
As we were resting, we realized that one of our bags was missing. And not just any bag, but the bag with all our materials for the festival-posters, trivia, prizes, mosquito nets, rope, markers….Literally everything we needed was in there. After retracing our steps, we assumed the pousse driver had stolen it, and we gave up the search and started thinking of a plan B. Our only real option was to redo everything as best we could. We spent the evening remaking all our posters with our 2 remaining markers. We painted our piñata with a toothbrush, and we joked about how confused that pousse driver would be once he realized he didn’t steal an iPad, but rather a few mosquito nets…sucks for him.
The next day was fety # 3. It poured the entire morning so we had a smaller crowd than the others. But, it was still a success. By mid-afternoon, we were DONE. Three successful malaria festivals and three exhausted PCVs. We headed to Tamatave to relax and recover from the week.
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