Mosquito Nets

Mosquito nets remind me of ads for hotels in Sumatra where the furniture is made gently gleaming teak wood and there is a massive steamer trunk with ornate brass hinges at the foot of the four poster bed. Tropical and exotic. I love them.

But for our lives at the moment they are an entirely practical matter. Our windows here at UCU have screens, but a number of the screens have holes, so everybody sleeps under mosquito nets. Of course the problem with the mosquitos here is that they carry malaria. In our family only our oldest son Wesley has had a case of malaria, and that was after visiting a heavily malarial area on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. Malaria is definitely something one wants to avoid. 

Mosquitos can smell your blood in your little safe haven under the net, and they try their best to get in. If they are doing that near your ear you will hear this buzzing that goes in cycles as they approach the net and bounce off and approach again. At certain seasons there will be multiple ones outside the net, and the sound is truly symphonic, though I find it uncomfortable to think that a chorus of predators is singing for my blood just inches away. You have to be careful that you don't rest a hand or foot against the net as you sleep or you may wake up with red dots all over a tiny portion of your body where the mosquitos were able to bite you through the net. (I have no biological information on this, but it's clear to me that mosquitos in east Africa are a different species or sub-species than those in North America, because when they bite you it doesn't raise a whelp, and if you can refrain from scratching it for the first few minutes it won't itch again.) If you get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, in addition to fending off the mosquitos that follow you to the toilet, you have to lift up and replace the net very quickly so none of them slip under and get you later. 

This morning I woke up to find a mosquito had been inside the net overnight and, judging from red dots all over my ankle, feasting rather well.

Photo 1: Traditional Mganda religious shrine to river spirit at a waterfall down the road. You can see the calabashes for offerings of traditional beer if you look really closely.

Photo 2: Mosquito net