Ode to the Mosquito Net

First mosquito net over our bed.

Oh the wonderful malaria preventing canopy bed of the third world subtropical regions.  I know many people are aware people use mosquito nets but I wanted to share my personal experience of living under one the past year and a half.

"Why use a mosquito net?"

Malawi is home to the most deadly form of malaria P. falciparum.  It is transmitted, not by person to person, but through mosquitoes.  For example if a mosquito bites a person with malaria, it carries the parasites from their blood and injects it into another person when it goes to bite them.  

There currently is no medicine to prevent malaria.  The current medications just linger in your liver so once you DO get infected, it starts attacking the parasite.  Some medications can mask symptoms and fail to prevent spread of the parasite causing symptoms to show up at the last minute when it is difficult to treat.  Our family currently does not take any preventative medicine.  The mosquito that transmits malaria is mainly nocturnal.  SO we are very diligent about sleeping under our mosquito net!

Zahara and I under our little mosquito nets in the hospital.

I know that sleeping under a mosquito net sounds really awesome like indoor camping but there are a few annoyances that kind of ruin this experience.

• Is the buzzing noise coming from INSIDE or OUTSIDE of the net?  
• Your hand touched against the net while you slept so you have 30 bites in a 2 inch radius.
• There was a small gap that didn't get tucked in and there is now 20 mosquitoes trapped inside the net feeding off you all night.
• When killing said overly fed mosquitoes, the blood squirts all over your hands.  No one makes me bleed my own blood!

Other than that we are very thankful that something so simple can save our lives.  It gets dark around 5 pm so a lot of time is spent under them.  

...And it works as a great baby mobile.