Kailahun field visit

They said, "Send your family greetings from the field agents out in the far east of Sierra Leone!"

We spent a week in Kailahun District, way out on the eastern border of the country, attending malaria trainings for mothers. This is where the war began in the early nineties and where the rebels made their base. It has been called the "forgotten district," and burnt out houses remind you that the war wasn't so long ago. Fewer than 10 years have passed.

Getting there and away was quite the adventure- one 77 mile section took 5 hours by car. There was a spot where a couple of men were building a small bridge over a creek, and the interim bridge was a few palm trees in a row. Not exactly 4x4 worthy. As might be expected, we got stuck for two hours and nearly missed a training.

While we waited, a women walked by with a child strapped to her back. When one of the men asked how she was, she said the baby was having convulsions. She was walking to town to try to get treatment and still had miles to go. Luckily, a man with a motorcycle was helping with our car, and my coworker convinced him to take her. I watched as she unstrapped the small child and climbed onto the bike. The girl was maybe 3 years old, her hair in braids and her body limp. It was probably malaria, and she would die if she didn't get treatment soon. What do you do when your child is sick and treatment is miles away? When you don't even have money to pay for the medicine when you finally get there?

To us in the States, mosquitoes are an annoyance. They give us red marks and they make us itch, but they don't kill us. The New York Times says that mosquitoes kill more people worldwide than any other creature (though it is actually the parasite the mosquito carries, not the mosquito itself). How, with all of our knowledge and technological capacity, are people in our world still dying from mosquito bites?