Notes on Youth Camp

As evidenced by This American Life's oft-mentioned "Notes on Camp" episode, for many Americans summer camps are a fun and exciting part of growing up. Kids get to meet new friends, do arts and crafts, play sports, sing songs, act out skits – the list of possible activities is endless. Good summer camp programs can be really fun, and they also help young people develop independence, confidence, social skills, critical thinking, athleticism, and creativity. I had the good fortune to be a camper (and then counselor) Camp Unalayee, the best summer camp in the whole wide world. I learned to backpack, read a map, cook over a fire, improvise costumes, climb mountains, and make friendship bracelets - all skills that have come in handy as a Peace Corps Volunteer. 

Go Camp U! (That's me in the red.)

The Trinity Alps, CA, USA

In Senegal, most boys and girls not only miss out on the chance to go to summer camp, but they also don’t really get to spend time in places where creative thinking, problem-solving, and appreciation for the natural world are encouraged. In an effort to bring these things to local young people volunteers have worked on a variety of camp programs over the years, through Peace Corps, USAID, and NGOs. Last year my host sister Mariama (below, center, with two of her camp friends) had a great time at a Peace Corps-facilitated summer camp. This year, we decided to coordinate a Youth Leadership Camp for middle school students from around the region this coming March. This camp will have classic team-building activities, life skills sessions, interactive environmental education activities, career talks, health education sessions, and time for kids to just have fun with other kids during their spring break.

The volunteers of Kédougou are excited about the camp and are really looking forward to giving Senegalese kids from our local communities the chance to experience all the joys and growth experiences that a camp has to offer. Our camp is a Peace Corps Partnership Project, which means that it will be funded by a contribution from the community and by the financial support of donors from around the world. If you're interested in participating in this project or in making a donation in honor of a friend or loved one this holiday season, please take a minute to check out the link: https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-224

UPDATE: Thanks to the generosity of a number of donors this project has been fully funded! 

Milk Tasting 101

Despite being fairly lactose-intolerant, I happen have opinions about the different kinds of powdered milks that are available, both here and in America. As a camper and then counselor at Camp Unalayee, a fantastic backpacking summer camp in Northern California, I developed an appreciation for Milkman low-fat powdered milk, with its bright orange box, hermetically sealed pouches, and "a kiss of cream!" Compared with the generic non-fat sacks of milk powder, which had a dull flavor, looked grayish, and always left behind gummy little clumps of residue, Milkman was a delicious, smooth, slightly rich-tasting treat. I experimented with powdered soymilk, which was fine but somewhat unimpressive, and eventually went back to Milkman and started carrying little packets of LactAid tablets around with me to mitigate the rather unbecoming symptoms of my digestive tract's inability to process lactose.

When I first arrived in Senegal I avoided milk products altogether, figuring that my poor stomach had enough to contend with already. Eventually, though, I started mixing a little bit of powdered milk into my morning oatmeal and making NesCafé-au-lait-en-poudre. When I started buying more milk Wouri, one of the local boutique owners, gave me a crash course in the merits and characteristics of different brands of milk powder. According to him, Halib, which is made in Senegal, is the best because it's pure whole milk, just dried and powdered. The other brands, VitaLait and Bonilait, are actually made by taking powdered non-fat milk and adding in vegetable fats to "refatten" it, giving it the richness and texture that people here prefer. Pretty much all the people I talked to in my village preferred Halib, but also liked VitaLait quite a bit. 

There are a few other brands but Halib and VitaLait are by far the most widely available and most popular. I wondered if other PCVs had a similar interest in powdered milks. They didn't, but they agreed to participate in a blind taste test of three kinds of powdered milk anyway, and the results were somewhat surprising. 

Of all the milks, VitaLait (Jar B) was the clear loser. It was described as "watery", "bland rice water", and "sour." It didn't mix in as smoothly as the other brands and left little globs of milk powder on the sides of the jar. Personally, I don't mind VitaLait, but I think it tastes a little plastic-y, and has a slight chemical aftertaste, but that could be partly because I don't like the idea of it being stripped of its milk fat and then artificially" re-fatted." It reminds me of how nice chocolate is made with whole cacao nuts, with the cocoa butter left in, and cheap, waxy chocolate is made by extracting the rich  cocoa butter for use in other products and then adding in cheaper, worse-tasting oils and waxes as fat-based fillers. 

Halib (Jar A), the brand that left in the milk fat instead of replacing it with vegetable fat, had mixed reviews. Some tasters really didn't like it, describing it as "dry", "enh", "fruity rotten" and "slightly fecal-tasting." However, it turned out that some of these people didn't drink cow milk in America, which might have created a bias. We realized that people who did drink cow milk back in America seemed to tend to prefer Halib, saying that it tasted "more milky", "grassy in a nice way", and "no poop taste." I think Halib is good, and agree that it has a grassy, bovine taste and I'd prefer Trader Joe's Unsweetened Organic Soy Milk, but it's not bad for the time being. 

Finally, to me Bonilait tasted exactly like non-dairy creamer. It was the whitest, finest, most opaque of all the milk powders, and it didn't taste bad. It just tasted like plain Coffeemate. The people who didn't drink cow milk before Peace Corps really preferred it, saying it tasted "good", "like Momma's teat", and "good." The people who didn't like it described it as "malt-starch-sugar", "meh", and "no."

Everyone agreed that powdered milk was not their preferred dairy or dairy-ish drink, and also that room temperature milk, powdered or otherwise, isn't very appealing. Also, all of the powders tasted pretty good if you mix them with instant coffee and sugar and leave them in the freezer for awhile.

(Many thanks to Chrissie, New Frank, Janet, Flatrick Bair, and Katie O. for making this post possible.)

Friendship and Bracelets

Awhile back Troll (one of my dear friends from Camp Unalayee) sent me a package filled with band-aids, antibiotic ointment, and other super handy things. She also sent a bag of embroidery thread and some very sharp little scissors, perfect for making friendship bracelets. After brushing up on my knot-tying skills (it's been a few years since I made any bracelets) I showed all the thread to a few of my host siblings and we got to work.

(I love all things reminiscent of Pantone color cards.)

Kindi, below left in the striped shirt and right in the red shirt, picked it up very quickly. That really wasn't a surprise, considering how good she is as braiding intricate patterns into her friends' hair, and the boys weren't far behind. They did a good job of showing each other how long to cut thread, explaining that more colors means longer pieces and more complexity, and making sure no one hogged all the bright reds, yellows, and greens, which were most people's favorites.

This pink, yellow and green bracelet on the left was my first attempt; it came out pretty well. The photo above right is me trying to get Fatou, my favorite chubby baby, to look at the camera while my three-year old host brother Mankaba took photos.

It was fun, and over the next few weeks everyone wound up with bracelets, even the little kids. It was nice to share something American that matches up so perfectly with Senegalese sensibilities - bracelets, bright colors, and friendship are all as popular here as they were at summer camp back in California.

Craft Time Under the Mango Tree

PeaceCare: Part I

So, the PeaceCare team arrived in Kédougou about a week and a half ago and was made up of doctors, residents, a med student, and a couple communications people. (One of the doctors is from Callahan, CA, near where I went to summer camp, it's where we pick up camp mail and stuff, but it's a town so small that GoogleMaps doesn't quite know where it is.) We started out in Kédougou, where we did a lot of meeting-and-greeting and then the American doctors lead a refresher course for the Senegalese trainers.

The next day the trainers lead a refresher course for health workers. 

Training tools:
Speculums, models, and dictionaries. 

Of course, this is Senegal, so there was a nation-wide gas strike, transport issues, long power outages, equipment problems, disruptions in Dakar related to the upcoming elections, and so on. After much rescheduling, re-rescheduling, and re-re-rescheduling the team made it to Saraya.

Saraya is about as far from Kédougou as Salémata, where I live, but Saraya is a magical Malinke wonderland of paved roads, sidewalks, post offices, pharmacies, fancy boutiques, and vegetable ladies. (There's also a water shortage and since it's becoming a trucking route to/from Bamako there are also more semi trucks and HIV.)

The Saraya Health Center is the regional hub for the Saraya Health District, and we went out in teams to facilitate cervical cancer screening days in villages around Saraya. I went out to Bambadji, and it was really interesting trying to get around a village where pretty much no one speaks Pulaar, just Malinke. A lot of women came to get screened, which was great, and I bought a little bag of Youpis (like Chupa Chups) to give to their little kids while they waited. (It's hard for a kid to wail and eat candy at the same time.) Everyone was really nice (I'm assuming, if they were insulting me they were smiling while they did it) and I had some fun pantomimed conversations about lollipops. 

Back in Saraya, the hospital staff kept us very well fed, and also had an entire big freezer just for juice - red bissap, white baobab, green ditakh, yellow ginger, orange Foster Clark's... I really can't overemphasize how pleased I was with the rainbow of juices. 

Back to Kédougou

MERRY HAPPY!

Chrishaunakwanstice, Fancy Baking Day, Christmas Adam, White Elephant Night...  I love the holidays. And Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwaanza, and Tamharit, New Years' Eve, those are nice, too. 

This year I'll be spending Christmas in  Popenguine with some Peace Corps friends (including Emma and her family visiting from Amerik) and I'm sure that Christmas on the beach will be fantastic, but I know that part of me will be thinking of another West Coast. 

Family time, gingerbread houses and a Cheeseboard cheese platters... winter in California is generally pretty lovely, and last year was no exception. And now I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Merry Happy, Everyone! 

More Notes on Camp

The radio show This American Life has an excellent episode called Notes on Camp, and it's totally work a listen.

Here are a few more photos from youth camp:

Tatiana running a Marketing activity for selling
 locally made bug repellent and the weekly village market.

Host Sisters: Mariama Gaulo and Adama

Eric & I, exhausted from teaching First Aid. 

Also, doorways here tend to be really low, and everyone hits their heads pretty frequently. One evening Patrick, one of my Peace Corps neighbors, hit his head one time too many (he had a couple scrapes on his scalp that were actually bleeding a little bit) and went and got his bike helmet. That night was also spaghetti night, and they ran out of utensils at dinner (usually we'd get spoons to eat with) so some of us wound up eating with our hands. It was a total mess, and also almost pants-wettingly funny. Almost.

Patrick, Meghan, & Tatiana

Meghan and me, eating spaghetti with our hands

Tatiana and Patrick on Spaghetti Night

You can tell who sat where by how much pasta
 was left on the floor afterwards. (Those are my toes.)

All in all, I'm lucky to be in a region with such awesome and entertaining people; even when things got hectic and confusing (which happens a lot when cultures and schedules and languages collide) we still managed to have a lot of fun.

Also, just for the record, my summer camp, Camp Unalayee, is still the best summer camp of all time.

Afternoon Coloring Time

So, the kids who live on my compound love to write and color, but there's an almost complete lack of art supplies in Salémata, so they don't get the chance to draw very often. There aren't any art activities for the kids at the primary school, and many kids don't make it to middle school, when art classes start being offered. The Senegalese school system's curriculum is in the process of being reformed and I've been told that the administration is trying to include more opportunities for creativity and critical thinking, but it still tends to be pretty rigid, relying heavily on rote memorization in French, which, since people speak local languages in the home, is everyone's second language.   

In any case, a wonderful friend of mine from Camp Unalayee sent me a fantastic box of art supplies, and so one afternoon my host brother Mamadou (below, on the right) helped me wrangle the rest of my host siblings and some of the neighborhood kids while we made little drawing notebooks and drew and colored.

Kids were really into it, but it took a little while for most of them to think of things to draw. Several kids kept checking to make sure that they were really allowed to draw anything, and everyone thought it was really funny that no matter what they drew I said it was really nice and that they'd done a good job.

Mamadou is a really responsible kid and was doing a good job of helping the littler kids, making sure they didn't eat the crayons or lose the marker caps or draw on each other. After our informal art session I gave him a stack of paper and some of the markers and crayons and made him officially responsible for coloring with the younger kids.

Fatoumata Kindi was in charge of the big kids.

Littler kids drawing under the mango tree.