Things about Sierra Leone, Chapter 2

+ We have a cleaning lady who is apparently within the top 5% of the richest people in Sierra Leone. To start, a cleaning lady is seen as a necessity for we fragile gringos. All our clothes are handwashed in buckets and dried in the sun on clotheslines. There would be no such thing as having a washing machine or a laundromat here, which also means there are no drying machines. This sounds like no big deal - I certainly didn't have either in Paris - but here the fact that clothes are dried in the sun is a problem. As they dry little bugs crawl into the clothes and can burrow into your skin later when you wear them. They then lay eggs in your skin leaving you with some potentially very dangerous parasitic infections. So every single item of clothing is fully ironed after its day in the sun - which means everything, underwear, socks, bras, the whole lot. No clothes touch your skin after drying in the sun without being ironed. So this is the primary reason for why it is necessary for the expats to have a cleaning lady because we need extra care in preventing illness. Our cleaning lady was first hired by some Americans who lived here before us. They had no idea what to pay her, so they figured that it would be fair if for each bedroom in the apartment they paid $100 USD. We have three rooms, so she makes $300 a month. Considering that the average yearly wage here is around $269 USD and our lady Adema is making more than that each month, she's a very wealthy lady. Adema also gets bonuses for Christmas and whatnot, which adds even more to her salary. She is a very stylish, very beautiful woman and I bet that she uses the best shampoo. I vomited all over my sheets when I had malaria and typhoid, so she definitely earned her Christmas bonus.

+ Since I mentioned that, I should also mention two things about the diseases here. When my father received word about me having had typhoid and malaria he called me in a furor, swearing at me that WHY didn't you get BLOODY VACCINTED? and WHY aren't you taking ANTI-MALARIALS?!

First of all, I have been vaccinated against typhoid. I have all kinds of neat little stamps in my carnet de vaccination that note that I have been vaccinated against typhoid, diptheria, polio, hepatits A and yellow fever. Secondly, I take 100mg of doxycycline every day to combat malaria. The problem is that these drugs and vaccines are not 100% effective. You can still get typhoid even if you've been vaccinated against it, and you can still get malaria even if you are taking anti-malarials. My father told me that the reason I got malaria anyway was because I was taking the wrong type of medication, but this is also not true. There are three strains of malaria, one of them being cerebral (which can be fatal within days,) and three anti-malarial medications, none of them protecting against any of the strains. They are a preventative medication with a lot of hope but they cannot ensure that you will not still contract malaria. They're just the beginning of a defense. The only cure for malaria is treatment, and the only true prevention of malaria is good luck and good genes. You can take all the anti-malarials you want but you still can't guarantee that you won't get it. I sleep under a mosquito net, take 100mg of doxycycline a day (just popped some five minutes ago) and use a nice botanical plant-based mosquito repellant that smells awfully nice and screams REPELES MOSQUITOS THAT MAY CARRY WEST NILE VIRUS. That may be true, but even with all of these protections you can still get bitten, and you can still get malaria.

+ Speaking of mosquitos, the bugs here have been unremarkable. I expected that living in an African jungle I would regularly find massive spiders (and some of them are indeed quite big) and indescribable insects, but they've really all seemed quite normal. Our bathtub is regularly the home (and morning deathbed) of a family of daddy-long-legs. Mosquitos are a rarity. There were probably twenty of them at the hospital in my room and that was more than I'd seen in my entire trip. The beaches are clean and there are no wierd multiple-legged things trapaising around and the most annoying bug here is the ant. There are less bugs buzzing and crawling around than at a cottage on a Canadian lake in the summer.