Pup-date

Since I'm destined to be that crazy dog lady upon my return to America, here's some gratuitous footage of Tigi running around my yard. Also, it's 5am and I can't sleep...

My Game Plan

I spent last week working at a USAID sponsored camp that’s meant to jump start students' summer vacation-addled brains before the school year begins in October. The camps are a week long and offer middle school students refresher lessons in math, French, life-skills, singing (?) and a few other generally silly subjects. Two other health volunteers and I provided lessons on malaria, hand washing, oral-rehydration solution, home-made mosquito lotion making and sex-ed (FYI bananas aren't always the best choice for condom demonstrations). Although the ratio of time spent napping under a tree to time spent actually teaching was less than ideal, it was great practice (plus, free t-shirt!).

I’m back in Kolda for two days this week to do another USAID sponsored event, a “training of coaches,” that’s meant to teach skills for youth outreach. I’m hoping it will give me some ideas for working with the local school (assuming I understand any of the training, which is always a question) and potentially doing some life-skills sessions once classes restart in October.

After this it’s time to head back to village to start some “real” work. The game plan for the next few months is:

-repair community garden fence

-dig garden beds and plant the first round of seeds with the women’s group

-install a hand-crank pump in the garden well

-visit nearby (and supposedly awesome) community gardens for inspiration

-dig and plant my own backyard garden (including fun flower beds)

-improve 8 wells in Sare Sara and surrounding villages (a continuation of my anciene’s work)

-2011 health summit in Thies with all health volunteers the last week of October (and subsequent visit to the beach)

-Celebrate Halloween

-continue monthly baby weighings (and hopefully a few causeries)

-Action Plan meeting with Peace Corps officials and my entire village

-observe a 2^nd year volunteer’s nutritional porridge project (more inspiration)

-help with another volunteer’s enriched flour project

-Celebrate Thanksgiving

-Potential bike trip to work off my “turkey” indulgence

-Christmas! Family! London!

-Mama P comes to Senegal

-All volunteer conference and annual West African Invitational Softball Tournament

For those of you working 8-hour days in a cubicle I’m not sure if this seems like a lot or a little, but I’m excited and now that I’ve written it on the blog I can be held somewhat accountable. I’m sure that other things will come up, some will get dropped off and nothing will go according to plan but so be it.

All toads, no prince

No this post is not about the (rumored) rampant intra-Peace Corps incest, it is actually just about frogs...

They say there’s a season for everything. In addition to the cornucopia of weeds that has recently taken over my backyard, critters of all shapes and sizes emerged from the saturated ground this rainy season to inhabit the once barren landscape. Most notably, the frogs. I’m not talking your typical spring-time level of amphibious visitation, but a plague-level invasion. After a week in Kolda I returned to my once semi-clean hut to find the floor covered in hardened droppings. My closest neighbor claims to have once thrown 100 frogs down his latrine in the course of one week (he claims it was an effort to control the flies…). Each night I return from my evening shower to find a dozen would-be princes staring up at me, as if I’m the unclothed intruder. I’ve awoken to find them trapped in plastic bags, backpacks, on my headboard and under the bed. And Senegalese frogs aren’t just abundant, they are clearly a few cards short of a full deck - often jumping straight into my oncoming broom, a nearby wall or an obviously too small crack under the door. While I assume this proliferation of hoppers happens annually, Senegalese people are comically afraid of them – which is amusing until I find myself shrieking in shock as one pops out of an open trunk.

In addition to the transient amphibian visitors, my hut is also home to one human, one dog, one mouse and a nest of baby birds. It’s a full house here at Chez Koumba – a real wildlife adventure!

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten (through 5th grade)

Last weekend I sat in on two days of a training session for community health workers – called relais here in Senegal. The four-day “formation” was organized by a second year health volunteer – Kelly – and was led by a World Vision employee and his assistant. It took place at Kelly’s health post and brought together volunteer relais from all around the post’s catchment area. The training covered the basics of communication – how to introduce yourself to a group, how to ask the chief for permission to hold a causerie (small, semi-informal health lesson), how to do a home visit – and a range of common health topics including malaria, diarrhea, nutrition, respiratory infections, pre-natal care and STDs. A relais’ primary function is to provide basic information and counseling for his or her community, not to practice any sort of hands-on medicine. In the highly decentralized Senegalese healthcare system they essentially provide the same information that web-MD or middle school health classes do in America. Relais are generally volunteers but midwives, nurses and doctors can also assume the role when they perform causeries and general health outreach. The event was really great to see and something I’m looking into doing in my own village, which lacks anyone with such training (limited as it may be). This post isn’t really about the training though, it’s about what I was thinking as I watched many of the participants (mostly the females) during the 8 hour days…

I’m fortunate to have attended a great high school and fantastic university, and I really try not to take those for granted. What I don’t often think about is the education I received before that – especially in my first few years of elementary school. In those years I learned to read and write, to ask questions and to solve problems. Whatever can be said about the American educational system, even our worst schools can usually perform these tasks. Even if all American students aren’t reading at the proper grade level, at least most of them can read. For the majority of my village friends – especially the women – this isn’t the case. I’ve given embarrassingly little thought to the limitations of illiteracy until coming here, since it is certainly something I do take for granted in my own life.

I’ve started to think of all the things I do on a daily basis that would be impossible without the education I received so early on, and how that may explain the behavior of my village friends. It’s nearly impossible to find out what time an event will take place – but without basic numeracy, is it fair to expect the entire women’s group to arrive at the same time? Every day I send and receive a dozen text messages from friends and Peace Corps staff, but even simpler is that I can dial a phone number to call my family – something my host sisters can’t do because they never went to school.

For students who make it through the earliest grade levels and become semi-proficient readers, the Senegalese school system still falls short on other fronts. The problem solving and critical thinking skills so emphasized in my early education – I still remember the math games I played in first grade and red herring word problems we did in third – are completely absent in this memorization and regurgitation heavy system. Granted, the ministry of education just implemented a massive curriculum overhaul that focuses more on critical reasoning and application than rote memorization, but I imagine it will take years for this new style to become the norm.

Back to the training I went to – how much information could you retain from 4 straight 8-hour days of health lectures? How much could you retain without writing down a single word? Or without reading any of the notes on the blackboard? I remembered being in Asia last summer and looking at the signs around me in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian thinking, it’s all just scribbles – that can’t possible mean anything. Fortunately there are some great visual aids available to health workers that can fill in the literacy gaps, unfortunately there aren’t nearly enough to give to every relais so they often must make due with memory alone.

Experts say that the single greatest predictor of childhood health is maternal literacy. After four months in country, I can see exactly why. I’ve seen the community health worker at our neighboring health hut hand two packets of seemingly identical white pills to a young mother and say, give him one of these three times a day and the other one twice a day for a week. No further explanation, no differentiation between identical pill packs, nothing written down. During baby weighings every mother is supposed to bring a health-post issued card that contains all of their pre- and post-natal health information as well as the baby’s vaccination history and weight gain chart. Not that medical charts in the US mean much to the casual observer, but at least I can discern when my follow-up appointment should be or how much my baby weighs. Here the cards are essentially useless to illiterate mothers since health workers take no time (or have no time) to explain what each section means. If pre-natal care, vaccinations, growth monitoring and proper dosage of medicines all require some amount of literacy it’s easy to see why maternal literacy is so crucial.

I’ll stop ranting and end on a positive note. Even though many of the young mothers in Sare Sara missed out on school the first time around, things may be looking up. The organizations that just built the beautiful new community center will be starting literacy classes in October – I happened to wander into a planning meeting this afternoon. Both of the women in my compound – Khady and Coumba – will be attending and I’m hoping to check it out to see if I can get to know some of the young moms a bit better. I think the end goal is to help women make money by running their businesses more efficiently – basic accounting, record keeping, new revenue producing ventures – but I'm hoping there’s a health benefit as well.

So Cliche

This will be short. About two weeks ago I had one of those truly nauseating “this scene would be in the Lifetime movie of my Peace Corps experience” experiences, but actually it was great. A Spanish NGO that works in Sare Sara (and built the pre-school and I’ve covered in murals) gave the women’s group a large quantity of follere (hibiscus) seeds. Not quite knowing what to expect, I followed the women out to a nearby field and ended up helping about 35 of them plant a huge plot of land. I had thought the NGO was returning to do a training session, but these women knew exactly what they were doing and had a whole team-oriented system in place. About 20 women lined up in a row and started walking across the field with their hand hoes chopping the ground every 6 inches or so. Then a second row of women (me included, this is the low skill part) followed in their footsteps to scatter the seeds and tamp down the ground with our bare feet – I got reprimanded for my shoes fairly quickly, Koumba no one else is wearing shoes, don’t you see that? Even though I was a bit slower with my scattering, the women seemed genuinely pleased with my technique and presence. By the end of an hour they were all saying that I “waawi awde” – can plant – with the subtext meaning I’m a somewhat competent human being (this has been doubted for a while now since I can’t cook, clean or dress myself properly). Lots of laughing ensued, usually at my expense, but fun nonetheless.

That night I got home and heard from Oumar how happy of the women were with my willingness to help out, especially the president of the women’s group (who is a bit of a hardass and likes to give me a tough time). Then he went on to say essentially what I’d been thinking all day - how it was such a cliché scene of African community and I should have taken a picture to send my mom in America. It was, and I should have.

While drinking tea and shooting the breeze is a fine way to bond with the men of Sare Sara, this outing proved yet again that the women aren’t going to give me anything until I break a sweat and prove I’m willing to get my hands dirty.

Do's and Don'ts

While I’ve gotten a ton of invaluable advice from older volunteers and lots of patient cross-cultural advice from Senegalese nationals, most of my day-to-day lessons on living in a Senegalese village come from experience (and often times, failure). Here’s a list of do’s and don’ts in case you find yourself in a small African village in the near future…

Do ask your fellow their villagers their names when you first get there, it’s awkward to have to ask 5 months later…or just never address anyone by their name

Don’t put on your fancy clothes a 10am on holidays, no one else will be getting dressed until 4pm and you just look silly

Don’t buy the light brown hair extensions because you’ve developed “natural highlights” – you may be white, but you’re still not blonde

Do make sure to always have enough books in your hut, and always carry one on your person when using public transportation

Do not hesitate to bring your machete into the bank, you will be met with quizzical looks but excellent service

Do ensure that your bike straps are securely fastened before setting out – they will unravel and become wrapped around your gears when you are in the middle of the woods and out of cell phone range

Do eat that piece of mystery liver meat tossed to your section of the bowl – it has a nice smoky flavor and is less rubbery than it appears (and since you’re probably anemic you definitely need the iron)

Do heed local expertise – your neighbors have lived through a lot more rainy seasons than you have

However, don’t believe everything Senegalese people tell you – mirrors and cell phones do not attract lightening, eating lemons doesn’t cause abortions and the flood waters are not up to your neck

Do be careful cooking with propane tanks, minor gas leaks lead to major gas fires

Dressed to the Nines

Korite: Feelin' Fancy