Mosquitoes

I am being eaten alive by mosquitos. The house I live in has water leaks all around it. It's hard to even say where the leaks are. There are at least three different connections to the city water supply!

Here we all have big black water tanks on top of our houses. My place started out as a house, and then the owners built two more floors on top with additional apartments to rent out--a common scenario here. There are at least three, maybe four water tanks on top of the house. When the water comes in from the street, they fill up, then overflow, and they just keep on overflowing until the city turns the water back off. As a result, my house is perpetually full of mosquitoes that we raise right here in our yard.

In the DR, mosquitoes carry the dreaded dengue. You can die from that. It seems like you don't get it so bad the first time, but the second time it can be fatal. (Malaria is a problem too, but that is more close to the Haitian border.) Anyway, mosquitoes are not just annoying, they are dangerous.

Scratch, scratch. I put on repellent daily, and am always spraying raid around. Seems like it affects me more than the mosquitoes. There are no screens on the windows of course, nor would it be easy to put them on, with this kind of window.

Mosquitoes are just a fact of this Dominican Life.