Mosquitoes

You hear about mosquitoes & malaria in African and how it's a problem, how you need to take drugs so as not to catch it and die. It is -- no denying it -- a very real issue, but as to the mosquitoes themselves... well, coming from a Manitoba summer, I was surprised to find there were virtually NO mosquitoes, and the few I saw were so sluggish you could pluck them from the air with one hand. Here I'd steeled myself for a year of constant itching. Actually, it has, in fact, been 4 months of constant itching so far, but that's on account of the moot-moots and other insect life, not mosquitoes.

In Douala, however, they have mosquitoes -- buzzing around inside, outside, in the car -- and I've experienced their bite. Even better, I'm told the Douala mosquitoes have a particularly potent strain of malaria. (So, if I fall ill about two weekends from now, we'll know what the problem is. True to form, it would be at just the right time: around the start of translation week, the worst time possible for us to get sick.)

Other than that, my experience of Cameroonian insect life is
a) mosquitoes are a problem because they carry deadly diseases, not because they're particularly prevalent, and
b) the really annoying creatures are the ones you can't see and/or don't notice their bites until well after the fact when it's too late to do anything about it but SCRATCH.