World famous in Sahn Malen
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That is how I feel at the moment. We’ve been here for 3 days now, and already our names are known by most of the inhabitants of the village. Every time we walk through the village children yell our names and wave. It really is quite amazing. Especially Morten’s video camera and my photo camera attract a lot of attention - the children simply love seeing pictures of themselves.
Apart from that little personal anecdote, the project itself is going well. We had a meeting with the District Medical Officer (DMO) of Pujehun today, and we’ve started handing out the nets to the households. People are very grateful and it feels very good to make a difference for some people that are really in need. Before that, we spent two days conducting surveys to figure out, among other things, how many people who live in the different houses, and how many people that have been sick (fever) within the last two weeks. The numbers are mind-blowing. Of the 50 households I asked, at least 40 of them reported sick 1 family member sick in the last two weeks. In many cases fever is a symptom of Malaria.
On the same note, it’s worth mentioning that our youngest GMin team member Hopanda, a 12 year old boy who is a good friend of David, is having 40 degrees Celcius in fever - we are pretty sure it’s malaria, so even in our own team we are affected by the disease.
However, one thing is to provide the mosquito nets to the inhabitants, another thing is to create awareness about their importance and usage. We have therefore started a big soccer cup with the name “Kick Malaria Out of Sahn Malen”. Before each game Mathias and David make speech about the importance of using the mosquito nets every single night. A lot of people watch the games and people seem to be very interested in our message and listen when we speak.
I played my first match yesterday, and the fact that a white boy is playing football has not gone unnoticed. Even though I personally don’t think I played that well, a lot of people has come up to me today and said “Hey Jacob, the footballer, good playing yesterday”.
Tomorrow we are continuing the distribution of the nets. Though we have a bit to go, we expect to finish tomorrow.
-Jacob