Corillo BLOG

Here are few things I fortunately was told while living in Africa, as well as stuff I wish someone would have told me so I wouldn’t have had to find out on my own. Enjoy!

Note: This is totally subjective and based on my experiences living in the Central West of Africa. A change of location and climate has a huge impact on the dimensions. Also, I am not a doctor nor a biologist, and especially with topics like Malaria you are unlikely to find two people with the same opinion about it.

Things that crawl under your skin
In West Africa, they called it “Mango Flies”. I have no idea if there are other kinds or if they’re just named differently, but this is what we were told: The Mango Fly is likely to place its eggs on wet laundry. Small, invisible worms will get trough your skin and into your body while you are wearing the clothes. Inside your body, they will start to grow and evolve to a nasty white maggot. You can eliminate a great deal of risk if you hot iron all of your clothes down to your underwear especially your underwear. But sometimes, those nasty worms still find a way to get into your body, and you will find a bump somewhere on your skin. Now it gets tricky: Intentionally, you want to get this thing out of you like immediately, but you have to be patient. If you start squeezing too soon you are likely to squish the worm inside of you, witch will cause an infection (and is super icky). You sure don’t want that! So just wait. After a few days, you will see a small hole right were the bump is. The maggot uses it to get air. You have to wait until the point where it comes back to the hole – yes, you can actually see it’s head coming out of it a little. Then, and only then, is your time to squeeze. Disinfect the area, your hands and any tools you’ll use. Make sure you squeeze with a range of a few centimetres; if your fingers are too tight you might just rip off the head. That would be crappy, so be careful. As soon as you can see a few millimetres of it, take your tweezers and carefully pull it out. Again, carefully disinfect the area. Wound cream and bandages will help.
Are you ready for some action? Check out this Youtube video.
Some Vodka shots may help to get you to the right mental place. Or let someone else do it, while you drink your Vodka. And if you want to freak out your entire family and friends, capture the whole thing on video.
It sounds horrible, and disgusting, and it kind of is, but it’s really not that bad. I mean, I know a bunch of people that had one (or two, or a Million), and they all made it and can laugh about it today.

Malaria
I already wrote some stuff about preventing to get stung by mosquitos here. Use them ALL. But no matter how careful you are, and depending on where you’ll live, chances might be pretty good that you will catch Malaria anyway. If your trip won’t be longer than 4 weeks, use Malaria prevention. For longer visits, make sure to bring some good Malaria medicine with you. We always use Malarone, which has proven to be very effective. You should bring at least one treatment per person and quarter.
If you suffer from Malaria, there are some things you can do for a quicker recovery: Drink lots of water and eat! Even if you don’t feel like it, your body needs all the power it can get. You will feel like your are dying for about 3 days, and another week where you’ll feel really terrible, but it will get better. If you can get medical support, use it.
If you are unsure if you got Malaria, and can’t get near a blood test, take the damn medicine anyway. And right away. The longer you wait the more parasites will get cosy in your body, and the more dangerous and unpleasant it gets. The sooner the better! If you don’t have Malaria, you might puke like that god damn girl in The Exorcist, but that’s about it.
(This is actually one of the points where other people are like “OMG, don’t do that!”. Go ask your doctor. Go ask a bunch of doctors. Ask other people that have been to the place. Decide who you trust most.).

Bacteria – Just dive right in
There is a whole different set of Bacteria around that your body never met before, so it will make you sick. I have seen people going crazy over using tap water for anything and never eating stuff that wasn’t well cooked and using 30 disinfection wipes a day. This might be ok if you are on a short trip, but eventually the bacteria will find you. You get tap water in your eyes while taking a shower; or you eat stuff off a plate that was cleaned with tap water; or you simply eat outwards. It’s not worth the abstinence and carefulness; you’ll loose a lot of your life quality, you’ll miss out on many things, and in the end you’ll still be chained to a toilet seat. A LOT.
So we did the total opposite of being super careful: We just weren’t careful. We dove right into it. The second evening I ate a big Salad and Fish at a local Restaurant (and when I say Restaurant I’m talking about a roof made of corrugated plate, a grill, a bucket of frozen fish, some plastic furniture and a big fridge filled with beer, Tonic Water and the most disgusting pineapple lemonade one can possibly produce.).
End of the story:
First of all: We had an amazing dinner.

Second of all: We were sick for a couple of days, but afterwards, we were fine. I know a bunch of people that were super careful with everything (called me bat-crap crazy for eating a salad!), but they had trouble all along. I much more prefer to be really sick for a week or two and then being fine instead of feeling almost constantly shitty for two years. But that’s just me; it’s your call!

I hope you liked the little trip to (some of) the issues we had to deal with. I know it sounds all horrible, but your braveness in going there anyway will reward you with an inside view of a place so special, beautiful and breathtaking, that it will be worth all the trouble. I promise.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 11:34 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.