Dresses and Clothing

So yesterday we spent a big chunk of the morning spraying the clothes with Permethrin, a heavy-duty mosquito repellent fabric treatment. It goes fast - the 24-oz trigger bottle is designed to spray only four outfits, meaning basically 8 pieces of clothing and 4 pairs of socks. Multiplied by 6 people and the number of pants, shirts and socks that we are taking... uh, we ran out of 2 bottles in a hurry. The local outdoor store carried a different brand (a Coleman product in an aerosol can) with the same 0.5% Permethrin content so I went out mid-morning for more. Even so we only we finished spraying 3 people's gear and 2 mosquito nets. We'll work on the rest on Monday. We are under no illusions that it will protect us all month or that the fabric treatment will last through rough washing (it's supposed to last about 6 washes) - since we are not taking a lot of clothing anyway, all of our clothes will be washed many times. But it's better than nothing and seems worth the effort.

It has some innocent-sounding name, just "Clothing Insect Repellent," but on the advice page of the KCMC hospital, they recommend spraying the corners of your room at night also with something called "Doom." They don't mess around over there with pansy product names, apparently!

And...

on a completely different note, a lovely feature article was published in the Mormon Times this week about a recent service project in our congregation, sewing adorable toddler dresses for a charity called Little Dresses for Africa. It's a Christian organization which delivers handmade dresses to small girls in 13 countries of Africa that started in Malawi. Kudos to our Relief Society for connecting with such a beautiful cause and for mobilizing a huge group of women to work on the project. We had quite a factory production line going - I was at one of 5 ironing stations for an hour and a half and there's nothing quite so Zen and therapeutic as steaming things flat. (I say that now, but also on the KCMC advice page, we are advised to iron everything that dries outdoors on a clothesline because mango fruit flies lay their eggs in clothing. I may come home with a different perspective on ironing). At any rate, our ace reporter friend James Davis quoted me about our Africa trip and also gave me the article's last word, which is nice. Check out the article here.