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When you’re travelling to a country like Rwanda where Malaria and Yellow Fever exists, preventing mosquito bites is essential. It’s not something you wonder if you can get away without doing, it’s a basic morning, afternoon and evening ritual. Even more so when you are travelling with children. I mean you can take decide to take risks for yourself, and sip an evening gin and tonic instead for the quinine but you can’t take those risks for them.
Having booked a lot of the accommodation in Rwanda without actually seeing any of the rooms we were to be staying in as websites aren’t as all singing and all dancing as we have got used to here, I wasn’t sure if all the rooms would have mosquito nets in all the right places. I was convinced that the double bed in the middle of the room would have one over it (although not totally convinced in what state it would be) but with us adding 2/3 beds for the children into the same rooms I just didn’t know what would be available. So we turned to Lifesystems who have everything you might need to help with preventing mosquitos. They have single mosquito nets that can be hung up or pop up ones for use in tents. We chose to take with us three additional single hanging nets that come in three very small bags, thus not taking up a lot of room, a mosquito net repair kit (which we did use on a couple of occasions) and lots and lots of DEET.
We thankfully didn’t need to use all three of the nets as most places had thought of the children and had installed them but there was a couple of times we did use one, and we did use the repair kit. I am however really glad we took them with us, especially as they were light and took up little room in our bags, as the peace of mind they provided us as we moved our small people round Rwanda was very important to me.
We can also highly recommend the DEET repellent from Lifesystems. On the first part of the trip we took part in the Friends of Rwandan Rugby tour and people on the tour had brought with them all sorts of different products to prevent mosquitos. A lot of the other products didn’t spray properly and some even ran out after a couple of days. We had no problems at all with the Lifesystems DEET, the spray worked effectively for all of us, and 2 bottles lasted 5 of us a week. We also didn’t get bitten at all (when people around us did) which has to be the best indication that the product definitely worked for us.
If you’re travelling to a far flung destination where you need to avoid the mosquitos definitely check out Lifesystems products.
NB: We were sent Lifesystems products to take with us to Rwanda but all views and opinions are my own.