Happy World Malaria Day! For those of you not in the Peace Corps circle, World Malaria Day is a day for people from all over the world to get together and share experiences, ideas, and projects they've been doing to help stop the spread of malaria.
For those of you who aren't religious readers, malaria is a parasitic disease spread by the pregnant female anopheles mosquito. It is spread mostly at night, hence the promotion of insecticide treated mosquito nets. I'll just summarize the most important part by saying that malaria is easily the biggest killer in Africa (yes, even over HIV/AIDS!) and the most common victims are children ages 0-5.
So how did I spend my World Malaria Day? Inspired from my recent training with Grassroots Soccer, an organization that uses soccer to get out key messages on HIV/AIDS, women's health and rights, and, (you guessed it!) malaria, and brought the malaria curriculum to my primary school.
Grassroots is amazing for a lot of reasons, but one of my favorite things about it is the focus it places on encouragement. Aside from snapping to show agreement, there's also something called a kilo. This is busted out anytime someone has done or said something super amazing. The most basic one is clapping three times on your left, three times on your right, then shouting "WOO" and pointing at the person you want to congratulate. There are also more advanced ones,my favorite one being the Obama kilo ("YES WE CAN.") Encouragement can sometimes be lacking, and I think it's great to have something like this incorporated in the program. The teacher helping me out even got into it by the end!
The lesson today was focused on making the children aware that malaria is the number one killer in Africa, that anyone with a fever should go to the health post immediately, and that the best way to protect themselves is to sleep under a mosquito net every night, all year. The core of the lesson involved a game called Bed Net Ball. We split the kids into two groups and gave them each a sheet and a soccer ball. They had to throw the ball into the air, using the sheet to catch it, using communication to make sure the timing was on. We paused, read some "key messages" and resumed with a twist: the sheet represents a mosquito net, and the ball represents a mosquito. The whole team has to throw the mosquito into the air and quickly get under the sheet before the mosquito hits the ground. If they're not under the sheet, they're infected with malaria. I played the health worker, and anyone who didn't make it had to run over to me and give me a high five- this represents quickly seeking treatment.
We ended with a bed net demonstration, which I made one of the girls do by herself. She did a wonderful job and we all gave her a kilo.
We sat down with the kids afterwards. "What did we talk about today?"
"Mosquitoes! ""Nets!"
"What about them?"... cue really long explanation on how to take care of a net and how nets stop mosquitoes.
"What else?"
"Going to the hospital!"
"Why?"
"Because if you go quickly it keeps the disease from getting really serious and painful." Perfect.
It was a really encouraging start to what I hope will be a long partnership with Grassroots Soccer (check out grassrootssoccer.org for more information). I'll be doing three more lessons with this class, and other teachers seemed interested, so we'll see what the future holds! In the meantime, if you'd like to see what you can do to STOMP OUT MALARIA check out our website at stompingoutmalaria.org and keep reading!
(No pictures today due to lack of AA batteries, but inshallah next week I will be able to post some!)
Jam tan,
Kim
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