Stun Guns and Other Cures

Believe it or not, I have gotten a lot done already in the 2 weeks since I got here. Sooner or later I will send out a letter with more details on that. The last two days I have had fewer projects to work on so I could finally sit down and do some reading. In the good old days, when folks arrived they spent a couple of months in training in a little village somewhere. Now they have condensed those months into a bunch of readings which I am supposed to be doing.

Today's reading was horrifying. Several nurses have gone through a ton of work to create a very thorough health document for the sake of those who don't have good medical care nearby. I am glad that doesn't apply to me. Nevertheless, I read most of the document, with it's gruesome descriptions of boils, worms, rashes, infectious creatures running amuck in the digestive track and chewing your liver to pieces... very light and fluffy stuff. I did find one bit of information that I found particularly fascinating. Though there haven't been any official studies done, it seems that one way to stop the poison from a snake bite is to zap yourself with a tazer. In fact, this cure seems to work for all kinds of things, even bee stings and mosquito bites. So next time you get bitten by a mosquito, blast yourself with a stun gun and you won't get an itch! Sounds like a good deal to me.

The other option, of course, is to use the stun gun on the mosquito. Actually I found out that they sell hand-held bug zappers here. They look like a racquetball racket and fry like a lightsaber. Rather fun, I may get one for the entertainment value as well as the anti-malarial benefits. Of course, hopefully now that I plugged up the hole in my bathroom I will have fewer hunting adventures in the dark.

African mosquitos are very obnoxious because they are smaller and quieter than what we have in the Northland. Kind of like stealth stingers. You can't hear them unless they are about to bite you in the ear, and they are almost impossible to see unless they are against a perfectly white wall (those are rare here). They hide out until you are asleep and then meticulously study your mosquito net looking for stray body parts that they can stab through the net. Unfortunately I didn't realize at first that they were that industrious, and both my hands are full of mosquito bites. I now try to maintain a DMZ between my hands and the net at all times while I sleep.

All right, well I am off to play some table tennis with somebody who is probably a lot better than me. Fortunately we have an eighth inch of dust on the table, which should level the playing field both literally and figuratively as long as he is not a poor sport and insists that we clean it off before we play.

Bonne journée!