I think last I wrote was in July- we had just got done a long, tedious, but quite informative In-Service-training. So, catching up where I left off, I left IST and headed back to Missirah Dantila for August. My arrival coincided with the month of Ramadan. So I jumped write in to Sunkaro (fasting month in Jaxanke) and began fasting with my family. During Ramadan no one (except pregnant women and sick people) eats or drinks from sunrise to sunset. This is quite exhausting, and though people kept working and farming life really slowed down. At the same time though there is a great comraderie that develops, especially when people realized that their local adopted Toubab was fasting too. “Fode Mady! I be sundin? Iyo? Tonya??? Allah mu a to soneyala.” – something like: “Fode Mady, are you fasting? (me- yes indeed!) ‘Really? Amazing! May god make the rest of your fast easy/peaceful’.
Each day I’d get up at 4:30, roll myself out of bed to go break fast with my brothers. It was always pitch black, the milky way often brilliantly lit across the sky. In my brothers hut we’d all plop our sleepy selves down on the mat and crack sleepy jokes while we at left over rice and sauce and waited for the water to boil. Then we’d have coffee (as always with an absurd amount of sugar) and bread, occasionally even mayonnaise or jelly. That sounds kind of pitiful writing it now, but bread is a special thing in village, a kind of expensive treat, and something like jelly most people have never even seen. Afterwards we’d load up on water in preparation for a day of thirstiness and then head off to bed again or out into the fields, all before the sunrise.
Ramadan was difficult- tiring for the body and mind, especially when I got a terrible stomache sickness at the end of it all. But, at the same time, it was really rewarding. A sort of we’re all in this thing together thing, and my villagers really appreciated my willingness to give it a try. So, though I’m considering a nice vacation around August or so next year, I’m real glad I did it this time. And, at the end of it all, every one puts on their absolute brightest cloths, parades into the wilderness for a prayer, and then spends the rest of the day eating amazingly. So, I’m gonna make sure to be back for Korite next year!
All of my villagers in their Sunday best, out praying in the woods for Korite
As for work, I spent all of august conducting a baseline survey on health attitudes, knowledge and practice in my village. I went around, sometimes accompanied by my younger brother Karamba, asking people a whole barrage of questions about demographics, water and sanitation, malaria, HIV, pregnancy, and nutrition. The idea of a survey sort of confused folks, but mostly they were happy to chat, blabbing on about the crazy plant medicines they use for cuts or how they received mosquito nets last year but their cousin stole two of them. The information that I obtained is a little overwhelming but really interesting. 84% of people, for example, get their drinking water from the river. And, while almost 90% of them filter the water with a cloth, only 10% or so actually add bleach or other purifying tablets. In the end I will use these data to help inform future projects, but also to help evaluate their effectiveness as the projects progress.
September, though it started off a bit crappy with the giardia I mentioned, turned out to be an amazing, really exciting month. I started it off in a town called Dindefello helping out at a youth camp that Peace Corps hosts every year. The camp was a funny combination of regular old summer camp- trips to the beautiful waterfall, challenge courses, art- mixed in with development activities like making enriched porridge for undernourished children and making home-made bug cream to prevent malaria. I helped out all around, in porridges, challenge course, egg toss and sports. But my main activity was teaching creative writing/story telling.
I was a bit apprehensive about this, not sure how it would go teaching this to kids who do almost solely route memorization in school. But it turned out amazingly! The kids were really receptive, and some came up with stories worthy of a children’s book. And, I just heard from another Volunteer Larocha, histoire creative was a bunch of her villager’s favorite activity. Yes!
After that it was off to Saraya to help with a mosquito net distribution. The distribution was part of a Universal Mosquito Net Coverage campaign that was actually started write here in the Saraya region a couple years ago. Its goal is to provide free nets to every bed in every village so every person sleeps under a net, with the end result of reducing malaria incidence and prevalence throughout the region. It has since been adopted by all of Senegal and is moving out across West Africa. Strangely though, Saraya and the neighboring zone of Khosanto themselves never received nets . Though this was too bad it meant that this year I had the lucky chance to be part of the Universal Net Coverage campaign as we finished up Saraya.
A lot of the prep work was tedious as could be – all day long trainings for the health workers who would do the community censuses and distributions, and a continuous logistics nightmare trying to make sure we had the right number of nets. But we kept each other sane with many a bean sandwich from the local bean sandwich lady and making a hilarious radio show about the distribution. And, when the days of the distribution actually arrived, it was a huge success. Each day we would ride out to different villages, monitoring the distributions and net education activities, interviewing people and making sure folks knew how to attach their nets and what they were for. You had your occasional malcontents for sure, but for the most part people were really happy and thankful. And, as another volunteer Jessie pointed out, soon you will be able to watch the rates of malaria deaths fall in the villages that were covered. Pretty amazing!
And that brings me to now. I am busily doing a bunch of computer stuff- too much actually- but gonna go back to site. There I’m hoping to start some individual education projects which I will detail next time I write. I also am helping get the grant and logistics for a training of midwives in my region, so more about that next time as well. And, last but certainly not least, I’ve recently acquired a mandolin and am hard at work learning it. Life is good!
Hope all is well,
Ian
