Malaria and Maladjustment

So, in somewhat record timing, I have managed to contract malaria within 5 weeks of being in the country. (I’ll do anything to bring myself one step closer to Cheryl Cole.) It’s not as devastating as you might think – kind of like mild flu, and the kind of thing I would never have gone to the doctor about at home – but it sticks around as a general exhaustion and drained feeling for longer than mild flu might. Apparently the anti-malarials I’m on (why?!) also serve to reduce the symptoms when you contract malaria, so I guess if I wasn’t taking these I might feel a whole lot worse.

So this meant a couple of trips to a clinic – a fear of life in the developing world overcome. Clutching my first aid kit and sterile needles in my bag, I entered the laboratory at the hospital (which looked like a kitchen, or maybe a 1950’s school lab but on a smaller scale), and asked the technician whether I could see him open the needle from the packet before he used it. He just laughed at me and showed me the sealed packed, saying “I’m not allowed to just open it, you know – I have to wait til you’re here to see it!”. So now at least we know a safe clinic to go to.

Helpfully, this bout of illness coincided with the move to our new house, which left me even more exhausted and really quite fed up of the whole damn thing. I’m actually a little ashamed by how spoilt and precious I was about the state of our home when we moved in. With hindsight, what we were presented with was probably better than many UK council tenants find when they move into a property; and certainly people were trying very hard to make us comfortable. But arriving on Friday to find that the builders hadn’t cleaned up after themselves, there was no water even if I had the energy to clean up and there was no NEPA (electricity) until we managed to sort out our meter did not make me happy. We trekked to the NEPA office to get our meter credit, only to be told we needed a number that was written somewhere on the meter (why didn’t anyone tell us that?!); we went to the market and bought a whole load of stuff (buckets, broom, mop, bedsheets, saucepans etc) and then carried it precariously home on okadas, only to find that the compound was locked (of course no-one had given us a key to the outside gate) and no-one home, so we stood outside and waited (whilst neighbouring children laughed at our predicament – not sweet, not funny, just annoying at that point). When someone arrived to let us in, we tried to get the meter number, which involved standing on a plastic chair borrowed from a neighbour and trying to take photos of the meter with arms outstretched because the thing is SO BLOODY HIGH UP (why would you do that??).

It was while Simon was on the second trip to the NEPA office that I discovered there was no water, and, I have to admit, called someone from the Funder in tears to say I didn’t think we could stay there that night (if I were being kind to myself, I’d blame the tears on the malaria). Needless to say, immediately people sprung into action to come to our aid, and three men drove down to our house in a pick-up truck with two large barrels of water. So lovely. And once we’d finally set up our mosquito net and got into bed, obviously I had to get up to go to the loo three times during the night, and every time there were two giant cockroaches waiting to dance around the hall floor with me. This was not a happy 24 hours.

Of course, now that the water is flowing again, we can’t turn off the one tap that works, so we have constantly flowing water in the bathroom sink, until the plumber comes to fix it. The NEPA meter seems to work, and apart from the first day – on which everything was conspiring to make our lives hell and we had no NEPA from 10pm to 2pm the next day – we have had a pretty decent supply of power.

Now that I’ve climbed down from my mountain of negativity, I can see that we are incredibly lucky where we are.

It’s by far the nicest volunteer accommodation we have seen. The whole place has been recently refurbished and tiled throughout (a lot of houses have concrete floors, so this is much nicer). We have ceiling fans in three rooms (which, when there’s NEPA, are brilliant), a brand new fridge and gas cooker, a work surface in the kitchen, a new 7-seater suite (actually WAY too big to fit comfortably in the room!), a new mattress and pillows, a chest of drawers, a large mirror and a bathroom with a bath, flushing toilet (when there’s water) and water heater (which currently works but there is no working tap attached to it – we hope the plumber will fix it). So far I haven’t seen a rat, and since the first night I haven’t seen any cockroaches, although we have some huge ants living in the bathroom.

The house is in a compound with three other houses – all of which house friendly neighbours, one of whom is the landlord and one of whom is the caretaker – which is almost always locked (we now have a key!). Our windows have two sets of anti-burglar bars and are all fairly securely fitted with gauze to keep insects out, so we’re pretty well safe from intruders of any kind! And a little boy from the next compound (Joseph) came round last night and invited us to his 10^th birthday party on Sunday – how sweet!

So all in all, life is getting a little better each day. Maybe by the time I leave here, I’ll have internalized some of this wonderful Nigerian optimism. There you go – that’s optimistic in itself.