| Mosquitoes! |
| By Dr Doris Dartey | |
| Saturday, 05 April 2008 | |
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Flashback: third week of February 2008. A certain guest paid a three-day visit to my home. Just before his departure, I found an envelope on my harmattan-dusty table. I opened it and pulled out a hurriedly written note, penned in my guest’s scratchy handwriting. The note simply reads: "Dear yaa doris: Thanks for your hospitality. From what I’ve seen, you are poor; painfully poor! Poverty is grinding you into a pulp. But beyond poverty, filth is killing you and would definitely destroy you and your descendants if you do not take drastic measures to manage your rubbish accumulation. I enjoyed my brief visit though. I danced! But I’ve to leave you now to your weird devices. In this envelope is a little cash for whatever it is worth to lift yourself up in your own lousy ways. Best regards, G." I can’t get over this bizarre incident regarding 51 year-old-independent Ghana. I don’t know about you but I’m still embarrassed that the guest, G – in the person of US President George Bush, had to leave a little something on the table for us to manage our filth-induced matters. Our conquest by mosquitoes appears like a really bad movie. We are all characters in the movie. Pathetic, but good actors! Mahatma Gandhi rightly said: ‘Sanitation is more important than independence.’ Victor Hugo also said that ‘The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers…. The sewer is the conscience of a city.’ So what is the weight of our political independence and conscience without sanitation independence and conscience? Our filth and mosquitoes should be our own business! We must properly clean after ourselves and stop junking the environment. The rains are already threatening. Large quantities of constipated plastic rubbish remain safely lodged in gutters – choked, waiting to cause floods and deaths. Yet, we have a certain disconnection between our actions and the inevitable outcomes. We don’t even have a road-map to fight mosquitoes. The matter is not on the national flow chart. Our focus is to courageously suffer from malaria and treat it with medication. So ultimately, we succumb by dying from malaria, a kind of malarial martyrdom. Mosquitoes killed Europeans during the colonial era, causing them not to stick to this land as their permanent home, nicknaming it the ‘white-man’s grave.’ Sadly, if we don’t stem the tide of mosquito conquest, we might as well nickname this land ‘the black-man’s grave’ for after all, malaria is our number ine killer. I shudder and wrestle whenever I feel a flash of malarial death. So I pray: "Dear God, I don’t want to die from the bite of a mosquito!" A WatchWoman loyalist and friend, Mr Emmanuel Brempong, is slowly recovering from malaria. He lives in serene Bogoso, far from gutter-choked mosquito-infested hustle-and-bustle maddening-crowded Accra. But yet, for two weeks, he has been dragging on, hospitalized and weak. He doesn’t need to be dragged down by courtesy of a filth-related disease like malaria because he keeps his personal environment clean. So apparently, the mosquitoes that knocked him out were not his mosquitoes. I keep my surroundings clean too. I protect my home from mosquitoes. There is never a hole in my window mosquito nets. Periodically, I spray my living space with insecticides to kill any stray mosquitoes that might have sneaked in. I don’t sleep in insecticide-treated nets though because I consider them clumsy. As a result of all the above measures, I can confidently brag that in two years, I have seen only ONE mosquito in my bedroom. However, I have not been saved from the tiny killer insects. They attack me wherever I go – markets, meetings, cars, roadside and offices. They are the cornerstones of my health. Ordinary as well as mosquito-royalty perch everywhere on the Ghanaian landscape, waiting to bite me.Any time mosquitoes settle on my flesh, I can almost hear them viciously and vindictively yell through their zeeeeeeessss: "You little woman, you think you are better than us? See, we’ve got you now!" Then I smack them hard, with vengeance. I succeed in killing some only to spill my fresh mosquito-licked blood. Whenever that happens, the really fabulous mosquitoes that dodge my hit, rush away giggling: "We’ll get you soon and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’ll bite you till we can bite no more!" And so it goes with me. Despite the multiple precautions I take, several times a year, malaria knocks me out. As I write this piece for The WatchWoman, my temperature is playing yoyo – up and down; I can feel malaria coming. I’m helpless. Brother G gave us $17,000,000 rigtht? Increasingly, many other donors are throwing money at malaria because the word is now out that malaria kills more of us than the quintessential sexy disease, HIV/AIDS, which used to get all the respect and the accompanying monetary attention. Until recently, malaria received no respect. And respect always translates into loans and gifts – loads of money. How I wish I could glean information about the total amount of money ‘development partners’ (donor agencies) annually give toward the ‘eradication of malaria’ (and HIV/AIDS too!). Is there any Ghana government agency that keeps track of who is doing what and how much is being thrown at malaria (and HIV/AIDS too!)? On Wednesday February 20, 2008, a passionate lady caller to Joy FM’s Super Morning Show reported with frustration that an old heap of rubbish in a Mallam (Accra) neighbourhood was cleared overnight prior to the visit of Mrs Bush to a school in the community. Her call was a classic moment of excellent radio. I plead that at least once a week, Joy FM should play-back that clip. It is a message that must sink in for us all, especially for the ‘authorities’ who knew that it wasn’t ‘nice’ for Madam Bush to see our filth. They saw the need to put up a good showing, demonstrating that they have some sense of shame – albeit only for important guests. They couldn’t bear the thought of a US First Lady witnessing our unsightly bombshell, fiili-fiilii. But who keeps count of the number of residents in that community who get sick and even die from malaria, our number-one filth-related disease? Those lives do matter too. My childhood best friend Eugenia Adomako, who until recently had been lost to me for two decades, has taught me that there are several categories of mosquitoes. There are home mosquitoes, market mosquitoes, office mosquitoes, slum mosquitoes and many other categories – ad infinitum. So next time your temperature takes a nose dive and begins the characteristic up-and-down yoyo and you feel nauseated and weak, thanks to mosquito bites, take a moment to reflect on what type of malaria you have. Clue: Where did you get bitten by a mosquito in recent weeks? Emmanuel has Bogoso-malaria. My on-coming malarial rush is an Accra workshop-malaria. The malaria matter must be placed firmly on the agenda in this electioneering year and – beyond. This country is old enough not to tolerate mosquitoes colonizing us, and with audacity, swipe at us saying: "We have come; We have conquered.’ The mosquitoes appear to know that we don’t have our collective act together, so affirmatively add in jest: ‘They can’t do tee!’ Ouch!
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