Mosquito net insecticide treatment and the challenge of being a helpful foreigner- Ben C.

• Jul 7, 2008 Posted by Caitlin Cohen
  Today was a glorious day. Glorious is really one of the only ways to describe it. It was a Saturday and the day was largely filled with fun, as Saturdays should be.
  
  I woke up early to help Niang set up our mosquito net impregnation station  in one of the communities we work with. "Impregnation" is chemical treatment to kill mosquitoes, and it is responsible for about half of the preventative effect of a mosquito net. This was a great way to follow our recent survey, which found that mosquito impregnation and use was a huge problem.  While overall, project participants seem to be doing what they can do stay healthy, many individuals are still not sleeping under mosquito nets. When asked why, a lot of them said that they are only free for pregnant women and children, so they don't want to spend the money or don't think it's worthwhile for other family members to use them. However, that having been said, a large number of individuals still DO use mosquito nets but don't know how to properly impregnate them. Therefore, we set up a bunch of water containers, brought tons of bloc (the treatment packages), and basically just set up camp at the top of Sikoroni's big hill by Caitlin's house. We were there for about two hours or so and in that time, the combination of our previous attempts to spread word of the impregnation day and the peculiar presence of two toubabous sitting with Niang in an open lot seemed to attract quite a few children with their families' respective mosquito net collections. I was not surprised, but happy to know that they all knew WHY they were treating their nets and furthermore, that it was necessary. The entire operation went very smoothly and we treated dozen nets with the supplies we had before we called it quits. All in all, I was really pleased and it was one those I really felt like I was making a measurable impact in Sikoroni, though again, I was really just a spectator.
  
  
  One of the strange things about this encounter was the duality of being a toubabou trying to help. On the one hand, we are white foreigners trying to bring health equality to underprivileged Sub-Saharan Africans, yet our identities as toubabous also helped our cause in that the oddity of us being there likely attracted more mosquito nets to be treated. The crowd was appreciated, especially because each packet of bloq came with an educational image pamphlet describing how and why to treat a mosquito net, which we figured was good information to distribute; however, because toubabou were distributing the information, the pamphlets were treated more like baseball cards than actual information. It continues to prove difficult to walk the line of being helpful and being overbearing as a white person here, but again, I am comforted in knowing that this line will never be clear.
  
  - Ben Colburn
  
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