Heartly Neita AFTER THE major news programmes, locally and internationally, each night, I usually watch the History Channel on television, then a comedy or police drama. I then read a book I have just purchased, or a magazine before going to bed.
I usually fall asleep about midnight and wake when morning light floods my room. In recent nights, however, I have been disturbed by a mosquito, which buzzes around my head and dives for my ears. I keep slapping at it. It leaves for a while and then returns. Buzzing and diving.
Mosquitoes do not have a long life. By now this one should have died. - I know it is the same one for it knows exactly where my ear is and it keeps diving at it every night. One night I will hit it and it will be no more.
In my childhood years I lived in a village, which we all believed was the mosquito capital of Jamaica.
Thousands of mosquitoes swarmed our village shortly after dusk. We wondered where they spent the daylight hours. We never saw or heard them then, but as night came there they were.
We followed the instructions of the Public Health Inspectors who told us to cut holes in empty condensed milk tins, sardine tins, mackerel tins, and paint tins so that water would not collect in them. The Inspectors also came to the school and told us to tell our parents if we saw any pools of water so that they could pour oil into them to kill the larvae.
LONG DROUGHT
Where the water came from we never found out as our village and its environs suffered from drought for 10 months every year. The sun was hot then, so that any water collected in any pools was dried out in no time. Somehow, though, the mosquitoes survived.
Most residents suffered from malaria. When you have this fever, the body boils and aches and shakes. Heads throb and feel as if they will burst. Your teeth clatter. You moan and groan.
The Education Department sent a box of quinine tablets every month to my father who was the village school's headmaster. The postmistress and the corporal in charge of the small police station also received these tablets. These tablets were distributed free to children and adults.
At our school, if a child was seen perspiring and trembling, one of the teachers would give him a tablet to swallow. As soon as it was possible he or she would be sent home with an envelope containing a dozen or so tablets.
My father sent a message to Nurse McFarlane, the public health nurse and she visited the children and helped their mothers take care of them. We would not see them for at least a week. Their eyes were sunk in their faces and they looked thin.
AWFUL FEVER
It was an awful fever. Some children had to go to May Pen, four miles away, to be treated by the school doctor, Dr. L.E. Johnson. He gave them an injection, some quinine tablets and a pint bottle of pink-coloured water, which was also bitter, with a label stating, "Shake the mixture well. Take one tablespoon three times a day after meals".
The quinine tablets were bitter. My mother crushed them in a spoon and covered them with condensed milk. She also gave us a bush bath as we were roasting with the fever.
At every home in our village, the children raked the leaves of the mango, calabash, wild cherry, tamarind and other trees that had fallen to the ground in the afternoons. These heaps were lit at dusk to smoke the mosquitoes away.
It did not work. Before we went to bed, we made sure the fires were put out as there was a long memory of a house being burnt to the ground one night from smouldering fire from one of these heaps.
Over every bed in our home was a mosquito net. And yet, the insects found a way to fly inside. We did not see them as the "Home Sweet Home" kerosene oil lamps were already turned off. But we felt the multiple stings on our faces.
