No Electricity and Too Many Mosquitos!

I itch all over! My arms are literally covered in mosquito, and possibly spider, bites. I'm not suffering any ill effects other than the misery of constant itching, but the $40 worth of Avon's Skin So Soft Bug Repellant is not doing its job! My room for right now is not rigged with mosquito netting even though that's what most Ugandans use, or they "takes their chances" with malaria.

Malaria is apparently a big problem here for the unprotected. Just prior to my arrival, my hostess Carolyn Wade spent 3 weeks in bed with it. And many native Ugandans get sick routinely from malaria, because they're not taking (and probably can't afford) any type of anti-malarial medication. Fortunately for me I have a year's worth of anti-malarial medication that I must take daily. Once it runs out, if I haven't returned to the states yet, I will be a prime candidate for malaria. Once you get it, treatment requires a daily injection of some kind of medication to knock it out of your system.

So that's one challenge I face here. The other is the issue of electricity, or rather the lack thereof. Since I've been here, there has never been a full day with electricity. It might be available during the day, but go off in the evening, or off during the day and turned back on in the evening. Or it can be sporadic, going off and on throughout the day, which does wonders for the computer equipment in the office. Tonight (Friday evening) is the first time in 36 hours we've had electricity. And who knows whether it'll last through the weekend.

I haven't talked specifically to anyone about the problems with stable electrical power, but I get the feeling that it's not always an issue of just generalized power failures, although that has to be part of it. Apparently this is also a big political issue. I haven't been here long enough to understand all the politics in Uganda, nor do I really want to know or understand. But my friends were laughing the other day because apparently the government has not been paying its own utility bills and to make a point the power company shut off the electricity during a legislative session. Whether the perceived randomness of the power outages is political or simply a case of just not enough electricity being generated for everyone, it's darned annoying! But like my brother Michael said on Facebook - that's why they call it pioneering!