Planning the survey and organizing
the training for volunteers and host country nationals was only part of my work
in the evaluation of the bed net distribution of last year. Even as one of the organizers I still
participated in the survey itself. My
team of four, myself and three counterparts, had four villages we had to go out
and survey.
The first day we all went out
together to one of the villages to make sure we all were on the same page with
the instructions and to each practice interviewing a household. While we got a later start than we had
planned everything else went pretty smoothly.
Except for a drizzle here and there the rain held off while we did our
survey and we were able to get finished in the early afternoon.
This first village was incredible;
nearly everyone possessed a bed net, had them hung and reported the whole
family sleeping under the nets. Honestly
I was sort of surprised (in a good way) I rarely get to see inside the bedroom
of my community members and with everyone behind walls in my city I don’t even
get to play role of Peeping Tom to peer through windows and see if there are
nets. My only experience with malaria and bed nets had been prior to the
campaign, and the campaign itself fell into that awkward period when I was just
moving into my town and hadn’t really established any personal or work
relationships.
Everyone also seemed to know why
it was important to use a mosquito net and how malaria is transmitted. You
often hear of people believing that eating too many mangoes, working in the
sun, or drinking dirty water gave you malaria, but everyone seemed to know that
it was caused by mosquitos. One man let
us know that he used to believe that it was something you ate that gave you
malaria, but after the campaign he now understood that it was mosquitoes.
Having him say that he had his mind changed about the cause of the disease was
encouraging because surely there were others like him that were once mistaken
but now understand malaria a little better.
The second day of surveying our
team split up into two letting us complete two villages in one day. These villages were not nearly as encouraging
as the first. Those we surveyed still
sighted mosquitos as the cause of malaria, so at least there was some
understanding of the disease, but very few people were using mosquito nets. There were people who didn’t receive enough
nets for their entire family, or who were traveling on one of the days and
missed getting nets all together, but the bigger issue was just people not
using the nets they had. Very few people
had their nets hung at all and the majority said they didn’t sleep under the
nets. Some said they were just too tired
to hang it, others said there were no mosquitos, and one woman said she refused
to use the one she did receive because she was angry that she didn’t receive a
second for the other members of her family.
Further still there seemed to be a lack of understanding about how to
use the nets. One woman said she wrapped
herself in it like a sheet she’d go to sleep in. The man I was with asked her to demonstrate and
she through it over her head and laid down wrapped up head to foot like a
mummy. My surveying partner couldn’t
help but be discouraged and kept sighing heavily every time we found another
family not using their nets.
With our fourth village my
surveying team decided that they all wanted to do the village together, but
this time I sat out in order to save money on transportation costs. This village seemed much like the second two,
there were nets but people weren’t using them.
I had been excited for the first village and the apparent success of the
campaign in all aspects, but out of my cluster of villages it seemed to be the
exception instead of the rule. I cannot
know about the bigger picture in Togo until we do our final analysis, but it
was interesting to see other villages besides my own and get to peer into a
bunch of people’s bedrooms.
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