蚊はDEETを好きになる → アフリカで一番危険な動物、南アの水問題 (South African teacher)

The weather went crazy today. I was driving and got hit by a sudden downpour, then two hours later it was blazing sun. Classic Japanese rainy season.

Honestly the rain itself I don't mind -- it's the muggy aftermath that gets me. Wet streets plus sun equals a sticky mess. Does it get that humid where you are, or just hot?

Today I'm trying something: slow down and keep my sentences short and clean. Usually I race through long messy ones. Bear with me.

I figured out my problem -- I talk fast to hide that the grammar's falling apart. So today the experiment is the opposite: slow, short, on purpose. Tell me if I actually sound clearer or just slower.

I think mosquitoes just aren't into me. I played baseball on a swarm-infested field in high school and never got bitten. Maybe my blood tastes bad.

It's almost insulting -- everyone else is a five-course meal and I'm the dish nobody orders. Is your wife the opposite, the one they all swarm? Households seem to have a designated victim.

Right, because it carries disease -- malaria. The tiny one is the real killer.

It's a strange ranking -- the smallest thing on the continent outkills the lion. Size and danger have nothing to do with each other. Do people there actually fear mosquitoes, or is it just background noise?

Hippos -- because of the sheer power. And apparently they can run fast.

That's the part that breaks my brain -- something that round and heavy outrunning a person. It looks like a slow animal. How fast are we actually talking?

We always picture crocodiles as the river danger. Turns out the hippo is worse. That flips the whole image.

The crocodile gets all the horror-movie fame and the hippo quietly tops the list. Reputation and reality don't match. Is that common knowledge there, or does everyone still fear the croc?

But what's the hippo's motive? A crocodile attacks to eat -- we're food. A hippo isn't hunting us, so why?

So it's not hunger, it's territory -- you walked into its space and it answered. That's almost scarier than being prey. You can avoid being food; you can't always avoid being in the way.

Here's what confuses me -- is that water even drinkable? In my head a hippo river is all mud and filth.

I think I just heard my own privilege out loud. I'm worried about taste; they're worried about reaching it alive. Is the water treated somehow, or do people simply have no other choice?

In Japan that's unthinkable -- tap water is drinkable everywhere. We constantly replace old pipes, and that public spending keeps construction workers employed. I'm in construction, so I see that loop firsthand.

It's funny -- the same thing I take for granted as a citizen is my paycheck as a builder. A leaky pipe is both an inconvenience and a job. Is it that your country lacks the money, or the system to spend it?

A serious one might take weeks. We had a deadly sinkhole ten minutes from me -- one person died. But normally Japan patches things in days.

Wait -- I said 'weeks' like it's slow, but I suspect my slow is your miraculous. What's the real number on your side before a road like this gets fixed?

Red tape -- yeah, bureaucracy. The slow official machine.

We have our own version, it's just faster -- the paperwork exists, it just doesn't hold up a road for a year. Is it the funding approval that drags, or the decision-making itself?

In Japan you'd see hundreds of cones, plus three or four people hired just to stand there and wave you away from the hole.

It's almost overkill -- a guy whose entire job is pointing at a cone. But after hearing your version, maybe overkill is the point. Would that many workers even be affordable there?

This is exactly why I study English. Most Japanese can't reach stories like yours, so they never see how different life is elsewhere. They don't know how lucky we are.

The language barrier isn't just inconvenient -- it's a wall around our worldview. Without English I'd assume my normal is everyone's normal. You widened mine in one lesson.

Honestly, the Japanese image of South Africa is wealthy white people in Cape Town -- advanced and developed. That's the picture in my head.

And I'm guessing that picture is backwards from the reality you live in. The tourists who reach Japan are the 5%, so that's all we ever see. What would you want us to picture instead?

So -- build a wall, Donald Trump style. That tracks.

It's oddly comforting and depressing that the same script runs everywhere -- different country, same wall. Scarcity turns neighbors into threats. Is it turning violent, or still just protests?