Getting ready for World Malaria Day

The 25th of this month is World Malaria Day. In preparation for this we are planning all sorts of cool activities throughout Senegal to encourage malaria awareness and prevention activities. Particularly we want to use this day to focus on mosquito net washing and repair. A Universal Coverage (one net for every sleeping space) happened in the Kedougou region a couple years ago. Already though a high percentage of the nets are ripped or have holes, and many others are just not hung. In the dry season right now we have about a 34% rate of net hanging. But, if all the ripped and unused nets were fixed and hung we could have more than double that rate of coverage.

So on the 24th the 15 women in our village Care Group will be meeting to tackle that problem. My health counterparts and I meet every month with this group to teach a health topic (ORS, water treatment, cervical cancer, etc). The women will then take these topics and go out to teach all of the women of their compounds what they learned. When we next meet we’ll give each woman in the group needles and thread and practice sewing up and correctly washing nets. Then the next day they’ll go out and take the village by storm for a World Malaria Day net care and repair extravaganza. Huzza!

Here’s a picture of my counterpart doing small talks about Mosquito Nets. In the dry season malaria is rare, but we still see cases of extremely severe malaria at the health post every month. He gets super animated when he does these talks, gesticulating crazily and talking a million miles a minute. It’s amazing to see!