Care Groups and Youth Groups, Comin' Along

Life here has been busily humming along since I last posted. Work has been great for the most part. World Malaria Day was a great success in Missirah. My care group members did fabulously, doing net care and repair demonstrations all over the village. Each time one of the women was ready to do a demo for her compound women they’d send a little kid to my compound to drag me on over and take lots of pictures.

Here's all the ladies of my Care Group, lookin' fancy in their new shirts! In all the women washed and repaired dozens of nets (maybe 50- 60, though I won’t have exact numbers until our next meeting) and educated more than a hundred people on the importance of mosquito nets and proper care. I also went from classroom to classroom doing malaria lessons for the elementary schoolers in my village. The littlest class in particular got really excited, I think because I did the lesson in Malinke whereas I did the other classes in French. They were yelling out all kinds of really cute, bright answers.. “Pali man nyin!” “Suusulalu se pali di moxolu ma!”- Malaria is bad! Mosquitoes give it to you!

Here one of the women from our group is conducting a net care and repair demonstration in her compound

My favorite picture! Just after her demonstration one of the care group women is posing with her two unhappy grandchildren Just before then Marielle and I did a training of middle school students in Nafadji. 12 students participated in the training which training focused on HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and family planning, and early marriage and early pregnancy. Though the students were young these topics are extremely, sadly relevant. HIV/AIDS rates are over all very low in Senegal but gold mining and trucking bring in a huge influx of migrants from all over Africa and, with them, much higher rates of HIV. Middle school drop-out is also incredibly high in our area, usually because of pregnancy or early marriage. Just before we started the project we found out that one of our students (actually one of Marielle’s host sisters) was pregnant. If only she had done this training earlier! Still, this project was a great opputunity for her to learn about ways to stay in school and learn about family planning methods in order to educate her friends and make better choices in the future. Indeed, the ultimate goal of the project was to train the students to be peer educators, or jeunes relais, who will now educate their peers and community about these important topics.

here's some of the students. I need to steal Marielle's pictures though- hers turned out better Despite a bunch of setbacks from the beginning and a bunch of health structure hoops to jump through, the training turned out to be a great success. Our Jeunes Relais were fantastic. They were incredibly engaged in for the three days, furiously scribbling notes during the full day classes and studying in the evenings. They came up with great skits and community talks about condom use, HIV/AIDS, and early marriage, and have already participated in two big community events. And, despite a bunch of trials and tribulation getting everything organized, the community got really behind the training and did a wonderful job making it a success. Now our little relais need a bunch of practice leading classes and making skits but, with a little work, they’ll do great things in Nafadji over the coming year. Now I’m back in Kedougou, working on the very early stages of a couple big malaria projects for this summer. I’m really excited and I’ll keep everybody in the loop!