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.