“The bed net saves my life”

By Ermi Ndoen - Health (Malaria/EPID) Officer

 Sumba Island, Indonesia, October 2014 - Martinus Lende Walu (48) counts himself lucky. Once he could have died from malaria, like two of his neighbours, but he survived. Since then he decided to not take a chance and to stay safe with the help of an insecticide-treated bed net (ITN).

His village Langgar Kampong is one of the many remarkable “stone-age” villages on Sumba Island, in Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province. It is home to some 200 people who live in 13 big traditional houses that surround megalithic tombs, each tomb belonging to a group of families. 

Travellers are drawn to Sumba Island for the houses, the megalithic tombs, the hand-woven ikat fabric, the pasola or traditional spears and horse competitions, as well as its scenic sandy beach.  But all these are overshadowed by the island’s high malaria incidence.

The story of little Neni

By Dorian Druelle, UNICEF France

Neni (center) is smiling with her classmates as she is now no longer suffering from diarrhoeal symptoms.
©UNICEF Indonesia/2013/Druelle 

Neni is a 10 years old Indonesian girl, but she has the size of a 7 or 8 years old child. Her fragile body bears the mark of stunting, a manifestation of chronic malnutrition which affects more than half of all children under five years of age in the region where she lives and more than a third in all children in Indonesia. She will probably wear the effects of stunting all her life, but her bright smile and sparkling eyes seem anticorrelated to her underweight; Neni is a shining child.