The legend of the 100 mosquito bites

"You shouldn't need to sleep with the mosquito nets"


It is strange how once you leave a place, you can never go back to it the same way you left.  That is after all why they say you can never go home. July 7, 1997 was my day of no return. I have returned only once since then - April 2002. Even then, I still felt like a foreigner to a place 5 years earlier I had call home.  This same feeling coursed through me as I packed and mentally prepared myself for this trip. Unlike 2002, I had accepted that I was different

So I prepared like a foreigner, which meant buying anti-malaria pills. In 2002, I hadn't packed those malaria pills. Nothing happened during the two weeks. Actually, in my 9 yrs and 4 months in Nigeria, I contracted malaria once. And here I was in 2010, thinking that I would manage to get infected within the three weeks in Africa. But again, I was a foreigner and I must take all precautions.

Above my bed hovered a mosquito net. The first two nights, I slept under the mosquito net. On the third day, I abandoned it. Why just two days? Not quite sure why it happened. Was the net itchy? Was I imagining mosquito bites. I do know what happened. At the end of the 2nd night, I scratched myself that I ended up with 100 mosquito bite-like bumps had appeared over my body - most on my elbows and arms. After that third day, the scratching stopped. The damage was already done. My colleagues here asked me how the mosquitos had managed to cause such damage to both arms and elbows; I had to confess it was all self-inflicted.

Lesson learned: leave the mosquito nets to the real foreigners or at least check that mosquitos come into the room.