It Takes a Village

Justice balances his little legs off the edge of my lap and giggles, seemingly unwitting of what happened last week -- that his precious life was compromised.

I arrived home one afternoon to find my best friend in my village, Gifty, closing up her shop and preparing to go to the hospital. She told me that her two and half-year-old son, Justice, was brought there by her husband Jackson and she was going to join them.

A little panicked, I asked what his symptoms were -- fever, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, and she described how his eyes were rolling back into his head, “like this” as she demonstrated. We hurried to find a car, with no luck. Taxis only leave my village intermittently and none were around. After an anxious hour, a man with a motorcycle returned from farm and took Gifty to see her baby.

Everyone here knows Justice is my favorite little guy. I talk about him constantly and adore just about everything he says or does. In fact, I would venture to say that Justice is a lot of people’s favorite. Men returning from farm brush off their exhaustion, put down their machetes, and come to pat his slightly-too-big-for-his-body head, chanting his nickname, “Justo!”  Usually, he’s playing car with a variety of circular objects, running back and forth with his signature boundless energy.

He’s the kind of kid who’s going places. His parents have done everything right, including saving money for future schooling and teaching him early. This little guy can already repeat the English alphabet and count to twenty. Who else did that at two?

Justice and Jackson practice shadow boxing

With the family still at the hospital, I spent the night in worry, and can only imagine how Gifty and Jackson felt.

In the end Justice was fine, but he contracted malaria. Malaria is a disease which kills nearly 650,000 people in Africa every year, most of them children under five. With limited immunities to the disease, young children are more likely to develop cerebral malaria, which can lead to severe developmental issues and even death.

But there are the “strong men” in my community who believe they have little to worry about. While Gifty and her family sleep under a bed net every night to protect against malaria, many people brush off its importance, saying it is too hot and they aren’t worried about malaria. After all, they’ve had it several times before, and they’ve survived.

But this is not always the case for the children. Many Ghanaians do not understand that if they are infected, a mosquito can bite them, and re-infect someone else, including someone vulnerable to malaria’s harsher effects. If every person sleeps under a bed net every night, all year round, we can eventually eradicate this terrible disease.

While my counterpart, Osei Nkuah, and I work to educate our community and promote bed net usage for all people, we must also rely on our fellow community members to help spread the word.

A West African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child, and in the case of surviving malaria, it is most certainly true.

I have the pleasure of working with Stomp Out Malaria, a forward-thinking and inspired malaria eradication initiave in Peace Corps. For the past couple of years, Stomp has helped train, coordinate and promote volunteer-led malaria prevention and control programs throughout the Peace Corps Africa posts.

For more information about the work volunteers are doing to Stomp Out Malaria, please visit the web site at stompoutmalaria.org.