Why Mosquitoes Buzz...

            As I write this, I can hear the long-awaited sound of raindrops hitting my zinc roof. As I’ve written about before, the unpredictable weather pattern this year is something that has impacted my life rather significantly. The yearly rains seem to have taken their time in arriving this year and the past few weeks have been an unpleasant return to the dustiness of dry season.

            But the past few days have brought daily rainstorms and I’m optimistic that we may have finally reached the beginning of rainy season. This means the hillside beyond my house no longer obscured by a dusty haze (giving me a renewed sense of how beautiful this place is), an increase in umbrella salesboys, and an renewed hope that running water will return to my house in the near future. But the advent of rainy season will also have a major negative impact; the rates of malaria transmission will almost certainly increase dramatically.  

            Cameroon lies just north of the equator and is solidly in the endemic malaria zone. Although the geography of the country is varied, residents of all 10 regions experience high rates of malaria transmission. And although mosquitoes directly spread malaria, these mosquitoes just serve as vectors in the transmission between humans. This means that in order for a mosquito to become infected with the parasite that causes malaria, she must first bite an infected individual. In the fight against malaria, Paul Wellstone said it best: “We all do better when we all do better”. In order to best protect vulnerable members of the population (primarily young children, pregnant women, and people with compromised immune systems), everyone needs to protect themselves to the best of their ability. This protection is widely available and simple enough; sleeping under a bed net every night greatly reduces risk of transmission.

Amadou demonstrates proper bed-net etiquette with
his younger brothers.

            This past weekend marked World Malaria Day (April 25^th), and many Peace Corps Cameroon Volunteers have spent much of the past two months focusing our efforts on malaria prevention activities. Collectively we hung nets, conducted sensitizations, and painted malaria-based murals (PCVs just love those murals!). I’m in the process of trying to organize a bed-net hanging campaign in my health district, piggybacking off an existing door-to-door yellow fever vaccination campaign. All expecting mothers are given free mosquito nets when they go to their local health center for prenatal visits, but I’ve learned that many of these nets never get hung. Over here, getting malaria is a common enough occurrence that it doesn’t inspire the same level of fear that it does back home. But there are nearly 2 million infections and over 3,000 deaths each year in Cameroon alone. But many of my neighbors and friends still openly admit to sleeping without a mosquito net, despite their awareness of the way malaria is transmitted.

            There’s no doubt that the road to a malaria-free Cameroon will be a long and bumpy one. As I’ve been reminded over the course of my service, enacting behavior change is a difficult process. But here’s to the existing efforts of health care professionals and community health workers that have stepped up to fight this widespread disease. 

Farm to Fork...and then some.

            Although my grocery options are more varied than the average PCV in Cameroon, they’re still quite limited by American standards. So when I randomly find a box of lasagna noodles in one of the “Western supermarkets”, I buy it without much deliberation. Lasagna night can be in my future! The unavailability of most other necessary ingredients is far from being a deal-breaker. Like they always say, Peace Corps is all about being flexible.

            Working in my favor is the missionary-run meat and cheese shop in downtown Bamenda. Meat-eaters find it a sanitary respite from the standard meat vendors that hawk their cuts on wooden tables alongside the road. It resembles an American deli counter, sells slices of meat and cheese by weight, and has become a popular shopping destination for the expatriate population of the greater Bamenda area. As in much of Cameroon the stock is never entirely dependable, but mozzarella cheese has been a fairly consistent offering over the past few months so I’m not too worried.

            The larger issue is going to be the ricotta cheese, which I’ve never seen for sale in the entire country. My friend Clare, who has launched this project with me, steps up to tackle this first challenge. We decide to attempt to make our own from fresh milk, an uncommon item itself. One of the dairy farmers that I have worked with procures a 1.5 liter bottle of milk for me, and I head up to his farm by motorcycle to pick it up. It turns out that I have arrived a bit too early, so I have to wait for a few minutes for the cow to be milked. You can’t get much fresher than that!

            It turns out that making fresh ricotta is much easier than I ever would have expected. Using a large pot and slotted spoon borrowed from a neighbor, (when asked what they would be used for, my answer of “making cheese” raised more questions than it solved) Clare slowly heated a mixture of milk, vinegar, and salt. The milk begins to thicken and then form clumps quite quickly, which she then spoons out and deposits in a bowl of cold water. After straining out the water, we are surprised by how much the outcome closely resembles our desired product. Cameroon is a land where anything is possible!

            Jarred tomato sauce isn’t available here, but that’s not an issue at all. Tomatoes are the cheapest thing around, and all the other ingredients are widely available and typically quite fresh. It’s easy enough to whip up a giant batch of tomato sauce, and then we’re ready to start putting it all together.

            Once we have all the ingredients, making the lasagna itself isn’t difficult at all. We layer the noodles, sauce, ricotta, and Edam cheese (of course the mozzarella was “finished” at the missionary cheese shop) and stick it in my “Dutch oven” giant pot over the burner. Add in a giant green salad, some sautéed green beans, and a good group of friends, and it feels like any other family meal back home.  

Rainy Ruminations

            After more than a month-long hiatus, running water has returned to my house here in Upstation. We’re far from completely out of the woods; the rains have just started to come over the past few days and I fully expect my water supply to be spotty for the next few weeks until the rainy season is fully established. I was better prepared for the end of rainy season this year than I was the last time; I knew which neighbors had wells and the importance of water rationing and storage. But despite my preparation and the generosity of my neighbors, the last month was extremely stressful. My cleanliness standards and remaining wardrobe fell to unprecedented levels. Even my sleeping schedule was affected-I awoke on more than one occasion convinced I heard a neighbor using an outdoor tap only to be disappointed when my sink refused to flow.

            Rationally, I can accept that the stress that I feel towards my water situation is completely unreasonable. I have never completely run out of my reserves, and there always places to fill jugs (or send motorcycle boys to fill jugs, an option that I have never yet had to resort to). Some of my neighbors don’t have any plumbing system installed in their homes and send their children daily to haul water from nearby wells or streams. Some of my fellow Volunteers live in villages with no formal water delivery system and rely on neighborhood children for their daily water deliveries. One Volunteer is so well integrated that she walks all the way across her village to the one clean tap (that only works two days each week) and hauls her own water home on her head. Now that I’m over 18 months into my service, I think I can accept that I will never be that well integrated. I allowed a high-school boy to push a wheelbarrow containing my water jugs back to my house this week, and didn’t even feel guilty about it.

            I was talking about my water anxiety with my friend Anna, and she offered me her theory of “Control and Peace Corps Volunteers”. Essentially, the theory is that PCVs come from America, the land of independence and personal freedom. Built into our society is the idea that we have an implicit amount of control over our lives, within reason. We thrive on the belief that we have control over our own destinies and can create our own opportunities.

            On the other hand, much of the Cameroonian culture and way of doing things is based on ceding control to a higher power. For children this power often comes in the form of their parents (much more than in American society), and adults and children alike are quick to defer to a higher spiritual being. When you add in the daily inconsistencies and delays that are a part of life here, the cultural willingness to relinquish absolute control is all but a necessity.

            So I’ve been thinking a lot about the extent to which American PCVs are able to integrate into our respective communities, and why something like inconsistent running water continues to be such a stressor for me. After all, there are so many aspects of my life back home that I was able to give up with much less frustration. I can handle crowded and delayed bus rides, slow or nonexistent Internet connections, and even (to a certain extent) my permanent status as a visible outsider. But for some reason the water situation continues to eat at me, and the only conclusion that I’ve come to is that it relate back to the control idea. My issue isn’t that I think I’ll never have water again. It’s that I have no idea when that water will come back and I’m completely at the mercy of the municipal water system, a less than reliable operation. If my water-a basic human need-isn’t guaranteed, I have trouble focusing on much else. My friends and neighbors have played this game much longer than I have, but they also have been subject to similar systems their whole lives. If anything is a guarantee, it is that nothing ever is.