Last week we had 7 girls to come to the Haven Clinic with malaria. Nurse Sherry didn’t get her Sunday off, because she was tending to all the cases!
The treatment for malaria is a week-long course of IV infusions. It requires a temporary canula that is left in for the whole course of treatment, as well as the nurse to administer the medication. With 7 girls currently receiving treatment, that’s a lot of medicine and supplies!
Malaria makes you feel terrible, but left untreated it can cause brain damage, or lie dormant in the liver only to cause relapse and illness later. We had a boy in the basketball camp we held in 2013 who had been quite severely impacted by cognitive impairment due to untreated malaria.
Why now?
It’s rainy season, and that means lots of puddles, filled drainage ditches, and other areas of stagnant water. While we have mosquito nets in our residential houses, those do get torn, or mosquitoes can be trapped inside during the day.
Currently, the tailoring class is repairing all of our mosquito nets, but that still leaves all the girls in our program who go home to houses without. We have a project up on DonorSee right now for 25 nets, the first effort to get nets to 100% of our students and staff.
You can help – a donation of any size gets us closer to a net for everyone!
