On mosquitoes

I can't tell you how happy I was to see my whole Kamenge wedding post intact. As I was posting it last night it didn't seem to load and then I thought I'd lost the whole thing and I was about to weep at the thought of having to do it over again.

I want to say a quick thank you to my friend Allan Mayfield whose emails about his own work in Burundi are largely responsible for the fact that I'm here today and from whom I also learned valuable information about the proper way to set up mosquito netting over one's bed from his detailed account in one of those emails. Just in case any of you should find yourselves in a malarial region I'll go over the salient points. You may have this image in your head of diaphanous clouds of fabric festooning a giant four poster bed. What I actually have is a little twin with a foam mattress and a net which gathers to a point hanging from the ceiling. It is important to tuck in the bottom of the net very tight under the mattress with a generous overlap in the split for you to get in. It's best to have a fairly taut coccoon because the other important thing is that the netting keeps mosquitoes out but will not stop them from biting you if any part of you comes in contact with the net. So the sleeping area is reduced even further because your arms and feet (and all the rest of you) need to keep at least a mosquitoes nose distance away from the net on all sides. Allan, I believe, also had to deal with the difficulty of having to set up his net anew each night which meant dealing with the mosquitoes who get trapped inside the net while you're setting it up. Fortunately I'm able to leave mine set and only have to maintain the tightness of the tuck.

We're actually not bothered at all by mosquitoes in the daytime. Only at night when we're sitting around in the office do they really trouble us since once we go to sleep we're safe in our nets. Well that's not so true for Red who keeps stretching out her feet and wakes up in the morning with a dozen bites. Andrew was joking that if we could just work out a cadence for our frequent clapping at the mosquitoes buzzing around us, we could could have a musical number worthy of STOMP! (Yes that's right, even though 3 of the 4 of us are peace loving Quakers we kill, kill, kill every chance we get. Light of Life in every creature or no Light of Life in every creature. Here's how I see it, if you look at any given mosquito, not as a being unto itself but as part of a larger, whole Grand Mosquito Entity, then what we're doing is not so much killing as clipping the toenails of a monster trying to give us malaria. I know, I know the mosquitoes aren't trying to give us malaria that's just an unfortunate side effect of how they naturally live their lives. Here's where all that pacifism breaks down. I'm willing to invade the personal sovreignty of a mosquito to reduce my- and others- chances of getting malaria.)

Speaking of which I'm getting tired of, rather ineffectually, clapping at mosquitoes so I'll retire to the safety of my expertly maintained net.

Tomorrow we go up country!

PS. It was my birthday today and it was fantastic.