One of the biggest tasks we are charged with our first few months a site – aside from moving into a remote Senegalese village, learning the language and not contracting dysentery – is conducting a baseline survey of the community. As a health volunteer especially it’s important to know where I’m starting, and hopefully be able to show that things have changed for the better after two years.
Now, waltzing into a community with, at best, a tenuous grasp on the local language and culture isn’t the best time to begin asking about their latest prenatal visit or post-bathroom use habits. Everyone thinks I’m weird enough, thank you very much, I need to be building bridges not incinerating them. To ease into the process I decided to begin with a census of the entire village. Over the course of a few mornings, my female counterpart Mata and I visited every compound in Sare Sara to learn the age, sex, marital status, number of spouses, number of children and occupation of every man, woman and child. In somewhat broken Pular I explained my rationale for writing all of this down – “in order to help the village, I first need to know the people” – and Mata pretty much did the rest. Fortunately, everyone was incredibly receptive and seemed happy to be included in my first “project.” In addition to getting important demographic information on my village, I now have a cheat sheet with everyone’s names (which I admit I’m still far from knowing).
The second piece of my baseline entailed a visit to the nearby health hut in the neighboring village of Salamata (my closest Peace Corps neighbor, Jason, is a sustainable agriculture volunteer there). The health hut is a relatively nice building – thank you World Vision – constructed a few years ago but almost entirely empty of supplies and almost never open – thank you Senegalese health system. I arranged with the ASC (community health worker in charge of running the health hut) to get access to the health records and spent a morning copying 14 months’ worth of data.
After a bit of number crunching here are some of the preliminary results from Parts 1 and 2. Hope this gives you a better idea of what – and who – I’m working with out here…
Total number of compounds: 46
Total population: 422
Men: 128
Women: 116
Boys (14 and under): 90
Girls (14 and under): 88
Children under age 5: 72
Youngest: 1 wk
Oldest: 100 years
Number of farmers (men): 64
Number of gardeners (women): 59
Number of tailors: 3
Number of fishermen: 1
Number of students: 160
Number of pre-schoolers: 49
Number of university students: 1
Number of students enrolled in Koranic school: 4
Number of women of child bearing age: 98
Number of women with at least one successful pregnancy: 89
Babies born in the last year: 13
Average number of children per woman: 3.86
Visits to the health hut in the last 6 months: 114
Visits in the last 12 months: 290
Visits during the last 5-month rainy season: 112
Percentage of babies weighing in the healthy “green zone” September 2010: 53%
And in the moderately malnourished “yellow zone”: 47%
Percentage of babies weighing in the healthy “green zone” November 2010: 64.5%
And in the “yellow zone”: 35.5%
Most common health hut diagnosis: Upper respiratory infection
Other popular diagnoses: Trauma, Malaria, Headaches, Parasites and “infectious syndromes” (exact translation pending)
Less common diagnoses: High blood pressure, conjunctivitis and diarrhea
That’s just the beginning of what I’ll be finding out through direct questioning and covert observation over the next few months. I finally feel like my language and overall comfort within my village has reached a level where I am able to ask the trickier questions. In all honesty, I think I have more trouble asking these questions – I feel so nosey! – than people have answering them. I’ll just have to get over myself.
So how many latrines do you have?
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