Ramadan in Village

It’s the 18th of August, the 29th day of Ramadan. If the consistently cloudy sky accepts we’ll see the first sliver of the new moon tonight and this long, holy month of fasting will be over. Tomorrow (or at latest the next day!), will be the festival of Korité. Everybody will don their very nicest clothing and follow the sound of the village drum out to a special field behind the mosque to pray. We’ll spend the rest of the day wandering around the whole village on an extended greeting tour, passing out and receiving little candies and small change like an August Halloween. And we’ll feast like there’s no tomorrow; oily rice, beef and mutton, and drinking water all day long. But for now we’re still fasting. Ramadan is an amazing, difficult, incredibly slow month here in village. In an expression and reaffirmation of faith, every able bodied person fasts a full 30 days. No water or food from sunrise to sunset. This means everyone gets up around 4:30am to eat a light breakfast, usually bread and coffee, and drink a whole bunch. Afterwards some drift back to sleep for an early morning nap and others head right out to the fields, trying to get their work done in the morning before the hot afternoon fatigue sets in. Later in the day folks kill time snoozing, playing cards and studying the Koran as they wait for the sunset call to prayer. This call can be heard all across the village, a long cry in Arabic belted over the solar-powered loudspeakers at the mosque signaling the end of the long day of fasting. At the chief’s compound as many as 40 to 50 people gather around huge bowls of porridge that they drink with laughably large gourd spoons. Down at the health post breaking the fast is a decidedly tastier, though less energetic, affair. My two counterparts and I and the health post maid Siré have coffee, bread with mayonnaise or beans, and dates. Afterwards is the standard greeting and prayer: “did you break your fast in peace? May God make the rest of Ramadan easy”. And folks drift off to their homes to eat a late late dinner and catch a little bit of sleep before it starts all over again the next day. This year and the last I have been able to participate in the vast majority of Ramadan. Except for a few days when I was traveling I have done it all, and am just now wrapping up my 22nd day of fasting. As I said, it has been a trying and incredibly slow month- it is amazing how slow the days go when there’s no midday meal to eat or water to drink and you’ve been up since 4:30! It also takes its toll physically. I’ve definitely lost weight (though not too much, alhamdoulilahi!), and everyone is less active in order to conserve energy. But it has been amazing overall. It has been a huge source of bonding between myself and my family and other villagers. Everywhere you go folks ask how the fast is going, you joke about how hard it is, and then exchange prayers for peace and health. Too, there is an incredible comradery in getting up with seven sleepy host brothers at an absurd hour of the morning, everyone sprawled out on the ground of my counterpart’s hut while the coffee boils in the darkness. I have also delved into the mental and spiritual aspects of this time. The long, bright afternoons leave infinite time for reading, studying, and writing music. Too, I have been praying alongside my two counterparts when we break the fast in the evenings. We face east, which turns out to be the back wall of the health post salon, and bow our heads in prayer. The point, I believe, of such rigorous rituals like Ramadan is twofold: First, you really, really to appreciate the blessings of food and drink (that first sip of water is like heaven each evening!). Secondly, fasting removes worldly distractions. When your day is open and your stomach empty you look past the things that normally take up your day and towards God.

Hello everyone. I’m sorry it’s been such a long time since I last posted here. Sometime in the spring I was besieged by a vicious bout of the ‘writersblockosis’ and am only just now getting over it. God grant me a swift recovery! Too, I’ve been out at site for the better part of the last month and a half, bouncing along in beautiful but internetless lands.

I wanted to write a quick entry to fill everyone in on the progress of life and work here. It’s been a busy, productive, and lovely past few months. In late May I shipped off to Croatia for my cousin Katie’s wedding and then off to Hungary and Italy to visit family and friends. Katie’s wedding was absolutely beautiful. It was full of fine folks, dancing, and an amazing, god-sent abundance of delicious food and drink. The same was true for visiting our dear friends Brie and Zsofi in hungary and our wonderful, perfectly stereotypically Italian family in Italy. Eat and drink ‘till you drop was on the itinerary for every day. It was heavenly! Back in Senegal I found the rainy season in full gear. The rains here bring the most stunning, wonderful beauty. Gorgeous green fields and mountains are accented by brilliant blue skies and a quickly fleeting memory of the scorched deadness of dry season. On the flip side though, the rains bring a whole army of mosquitoes and, especially in kedougou, incredibly high malaria prevalence. Malaria cases started to rise in June and are by now so common in village that you start to see this deadly disease as a fact of life, as intractable as the common flu. The news is good though, because we have met this climb in malaria with some really cool, exciting projects. In late June my good friends Ben Alex and I put together a big malaria fair for the city of Kedougou. Early in the morning on June 30th we lined the entire street from the health post to the central market with 308 rice sacks. The rice sacks visually illustrated the money that Kedougou spent to treat malaria last year. A total of 4,466,000 CFA, or almost 9,000 US$, could have gone to buying rice for the folks here had all these cases been prevented. The rice sacks also led the way to a fair ground where music blasted, a theatre group performed, and volunteers in 5 different stations taught people how to wash, repair and modify nets and make neem cream. It was a huge success and really cool to see almost every one of the 30 or so volunteers in Kedougou unite to make such a big project work. Since then I’ve been working on an overwhelming but really exciting project in my health zone called PECADOM Plus. We designed it as a complement to existing malaria interventions and systems in Senegal. It is a proactive, intensive system of malaria surveillance, testing and treatment. In early July we trained health workers from four different villages to test and treat simple malaria. Then my wonderful counterpart and I went from village to village training elected community representatives or ‘care groups’. These care groups would monitor their family members for malaria symptoms and help the health workers to identify and test potential cases. Once both of these trainings were done we were ready to start intensive, village wide sweeps in every one of the 5 villages in my health zone. Every Monday and Friday the health workers would go from compound to compound. The care group members would help them identify potential cases to test for malaria. Everyone who tested positive for simple malaria would receive free meds right there on the spot, and severe cases and negative tests would get referred to the health post. This project actually got underway just a couple weekends ago. On Monday, July 30th it rolled out in all of the five villages. Five really good volunteer friends of mine came out to help out in each village. And thanks to their and the health workers great work the first day of PECADOM Plus was an amazing success!! In some of the smaller villages we tested as much as 25% of the entire population and as many as 12% of all the villagers were treated for simple malaria in a single day. Overall we tested more than 140 people. 87 of them had positive, simple malaria and each one of these received free meds. Amazing! I’ll leave it at that though, because I’ll follow this up with another whole post about the great, obstacle strewn course of this promising project. I will do my very best to write again soon. Hope so much that you all are well and in peace.