Malaria Kills

Nana is not coming for the 4th of July.
She just had surgery on her eye and doesn't want to travel.
I understand, I just miss her and was really excited to sit on the porch with her and talk.

I love my Nana so much. We write letters to each other regularly and talk about books we have read and experiences we have had.

Once we talked about work in life and what's important. She told me that after she graduated from nursing school she had the choice to work at Boston General Hospital (a public hospital that takes care of people with little money, people who have most likely fallen in life and need help getting back on their feet) or at some high class hospital "far away from the dirt in life", as her mother had said it. When she chose to work at Boston General people asked her why and how she did it, how she put up with people who were so low in life. She said that she wouldn't have worked anywhere else. She had a skill to offer and she was going to offer it to the people who needed it the most. Thats where she met my grandpa, who was there for similar reasons. It wasn't about saving people or coming from a higher place to "help the little people", it was about working with people, interesting people who were the same as her, they had just been dealt a different hand in life.

I told her about Osu Children's home, an orphanage in Ghana. Almost every week I went to the home, one of the 35 babies was on the brink of death or had lost the fight all together. I cradled kids who had been laying in their own excrement so long that they had bed sores and skin infections. I knew what I was getting into but every week it was harder for me to think about not holding those babies than it was to go. I stayed for hours at a time, picking up each baby once, holding it and singing to it while walking around outside. I always left covered in urine and feces, sometimes blood. I felt terrible when I put each baby down, or when I left because I always walked out to the sound of most of them crying. It's terrible to sit here now, knowing that some of those babies are still crying and that, most likely, no one is there to hold them.

That orphanage is plagued by a lack of funding. What funding does go there is generally usurped by the staff who are largely untrained and poor themselves. I actually heard the question, "My own children don't have much food or clothing so why should these things go to the orphans first?"

So many of the children died of malaria. It is not AIDS that is killing Africans in droves, it is malaria. Due to a stipulation from a loan that Ghana took from the World Bank, Ghana has to maintain open sewers. Open sewers are supposed to be easier and less expensive to clean. What no one seemed to realize was that open sewers clog continuously and create standing pools of water, in which mosquitoes breed. In Accra, the capitol city of Ghana, there are 5 of the (I think) 7 most dangerous strains of malaria. It was not uncommon to visit a village and hear of some young person dieing suddenly of a high fever.

Living in Ghana and holding those children as they suffered from a lack of adequate care solidified my desire to work in international policy.

I met some Ghanaians the other day which is probably why some of this is coming up.

Moving along. I've become pretty aware of my body and my hormone cycles as I get older. There is always one week before I get my period during which I can think of little else besides sex, pasta and vanilla frosting. Being single and an aspiring raw foodist, this week can be rather frustrating.

sleep.