malaria.

i can't believe i'm writing about class. environmental science class, at that. but here goes.



malaria.



do you know joyce and benjamin? sam? beatrice? rachel's sister (can't remember her name...)? they all had malaria when i met them, or contracted it when i was with them. and i didn't get it. because i took doxycicline that my parents paid for, a mosquito net (kindly provided to me, while the kids i was living with had nothing), and bug spray. (crazy strong bug-spray that i buried in my drawer because it is too powerful and it scares me)



but joyce... for some reason, all during class today, as we were talking about ddt and malaria, i couldn't get joyce and her son benjamin out of my head.



joyce. she's a mother of two children, beautiful children. she is educated and speaks great english. and lives in an idp camp. has lived there for five years. that's too long once the war has ended and most of the camp has left. her eyes pleaded with me, as i looked like (and am) a wealthy muzungu (white person). i asked her name and tried to make conversation. she was holding benjamin... i asked her how many children she had. she said "two". and i asked what the little one in her arms was called and how old he was. she answered "his name is benjamin. he's one... but he has malaria". the little boy didn't even look at me, just laid his head down on his mama's shoulder and sighed.



benjamin has probably already died. his mother had no money to bring him to the hospital, and no money for the anti-malarial drugs that he needed. so this relatively educated woman, forced to live in an idp (internally displaced persons) camp, lost her baby boy to malaria. malaria is treatable... with medicine. and if ddt hadn't been banned in the 1960s, benjamin may have lived. malaria may not have been a problem.



it took 25 years for us to completely eradicate malaria in the united states and other more developed nations. the millions of deaths per year could be just a distant memory if only we would care more about humans than we do about birds. (the reason ddt was banned was because people thought that birds' eggshells were thinning because of the pesticide and those baby birds were consequently dying).



i do think that we have a responsibility to care for creation... exercise stewardship over the totality of creation. but i honestly believe that a human life should come before the thinning of the eggshells of peregrine falcons.



this is good, what the world health organization is doing. but no changes have really been made, and the environmentalists who care more about birds than they do about humans persist in winning this war. ddt works! and yes, there are environmental risks to using it... so if it's so bad, let's find a different strain or another cure, or just use smaller amounts so we can save so many lives.



by the way, don't believe all that you hear about how bad ddt is. it's really not as bad as rachel carson made it out to be in her book a silent spring.


this is just what i'm thinking about. (that picture isn't benjamin, but this little one has the same expression that he did).