Global Youth Service Day -Uganda

April rains pt. i

It rains heavily every April in the equatorial province. By geographic extension, this climatic condition travels over all the countries neighbouring this, Africa’s largest mass of forest cover in the great Congo. We are in the thick of that weather just now and for the faint-hearted, today is one of those days that they shan’t be coming out of doors. I was earnestly looking forward to blogging this yesterday but I couldn’t because I got back to my home late in the night from the Muzinda village and the natural order of things seemed to place my body’s Weariness as a higher priority over my need to blog so I succumbed to the latter. In retrospect, I must have travelled at least 60 miles yesterday criss-crossing flooded roads and bushes, on my way to and from different points in this little village. I was over there twice this weekend; with Thomas my other colleague on Saturday, and by myself on Sunday.

Saturday
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Saturday went well with the children and youth sharing their experiences on malaria. The one crucial question that was posed and challenged everyone was, “If the mosquitoes carry and spread malaria, how come they don’t themselves die of malaria?”. This question later escalated into “How come the mosquitoes do not spread HIV, which incidentally, is also found in blood?”. For Roger, a 4 year old member of the group, that was the least of his worries as he was more interested in playing hide and seek with an imaginary friend while everybody else tried to put forward their theories on the issue of controversy on the floor. We had just gone through the malaria cycle before these issues cam up and on my part, I really wanted for the children and youth to realise the answer to the questions by themselves. 20 minutes later, we didn’t seem to be making any progress and Thomas was himself looking equally puzzled as well, although not forgetting to glance at his watch every so often. At this point, the group had broken out into two teams with one suggesting that that the mosquitoes were only carriers, although not telling us quite why; and the other group proposing that it was just “their nature”, i.e. to spread malaria but not HIV. The situation reminded me of a similar one I had several years ago now in my Biology class. Once again, I explained the malaria cycle to the group, borrowing the same lessons my Biology teacher used with us, while we had a similar disagreement. At the end of this process, John, the most outspoken member of the group said out loud that he had gotten it all then. “The key to our disagreement is over saliva and blood”. Eureka!! He had indeed gotten it as when I asked him to explain what it was that he had gotten, he indeed tackled it all very well emphasising how the mosquito does not inject its host with any blood but its own saliva secretion that is usually filled with the plasmodia parasites that cause malaria. Surprisingly, John is also an “out-of-school” youth and from my encounters with him, I’m very sure he is one of the brightest young men in this village. The reason he is out of school is because there wasn’t enough money to send him any “higher”. I carried my notebook computer along on this visit and with a few minutes to go, I insert the IRIN DVD on malaria into my player, for the children and youth to watch. It’s 6.00 o’clock and Thomas is already gone now. “Why didn’t he wait for you?” one of the smaller ones asks me. “I think because he lives further than I do!”, I cover for my colleague. As the children and youth watch the malaria documentary, you can almost hear a pin drop. Surely, it’s a very attentive class -the silence is only interrupted with sporadic laughs at the points where the children in the one Ethiopian village highlighted are shown giggling under their mosquito net. Of course to them the reality has already set in, the little Ethiopian boys in the mud hut whom they are now watching on the screen, could very well be some of them that are sitting right there.