Name That Rash!!

As many people know, Peace Corps Volunteers love to describe in unsolicited detail all the positively revolting things that have gone into (and come out of) their stomachs, burrowed into their feet, or raised nasty welts across their torsos. I, alas, am no exception. 

So, a couple months ago I started getting this rash on my right knee. It wasn't particularly terrible-looking, but it was unbearably itchy, oddly hard, and started to flare up angrily in bright red swaths around both knees and across my lower back. I talked to Med, sent in some photos, applied hydrocortizone cream, and things improved. This was right when the nail of my big toe was threatening to become painfully ingrown, but after a few weeks of no closed-toed shoes (which I only wear for jogging) and soaking my foot every day my toe was fine and I went back to my normal routine, toes intact and rash-free. For a few days, anyway. 

To: Med Re: Recurrent Mild Knee-Rash

And then the rash came back with an irritating vengeance. I happened to be on my way up to the Thiès Training Center where two Peace Corps Medical Officers were kind enough to spend twenty minutes looking at my knees, running their fingers over the rashy parts, and deducing the cause of my discomfort. They immediately decided it was contact allergy, and guessed that it was caused by some sort of fabric that, combined with rainy season, my skin finds intolerable. We talked about my clothes, they asked about this and that and if I have any knee-length synthetic pants, maybe ones with seams around my knee and across my back. 

And then I realized - my running pants. My stretchy, frayed-at-the-synthetic-seams, capri-style running pants. The rash went away when I stopped jogging because of my toe. I am allergic to my pants. Problem solved. They gave me some strong anti-itch cream and, only a few days later, the rash has almost entirely disappeared. 

On a related note, while looking through my photos to find this picture I realized that I have an entire album's-worth of photos of rashes, stings, blisters, infections, and swollen lumps, taken by myself and  my fellow Kédougou PCVs and e-mailed to Med in the hopes that they can diagnose us from afar and spare us the long slog up to the Med Office in Dakar. Of course, I thought "Wouldn't it be funny if we all sent these photos in to the PC/Senegal Volunteer Newsletter? They could have a little matching-game-thing in the next issue, where people guess who was afflicted by what. Name That Rash!! Hilarious!" 

My suggestion went over pretty well with the Newsletter editorial staff; it might actually happen. 

Map of Senegal

After our World Map Mural went so well the director of the Primary School asked me to do another mural, an outdoor one, to beautify the school. Actually, he didn't really ask so much as declared, in a loud, jovial way, that I must come back and do another mural, as soon as possible. I agreed, got my paints together, gridded a little map of Senegal I had lying around, and got to work. 

I got this far in one afternoon, but the holes in the wall were a stumbling block. Fortunately, there were some Bassari guys doing a construction project at the school, putting a cement floor in a new classroom, and it was pretty easy to convince them to come put some extra cement in the wall. 

After the cement dried I used bits of leftover paint to smooth things over (and because it's fun to smush colors around) and then came back the next day to paint a background for the school title. I also touched up the places where some little kids had scribbled with charcoal and left dusty little hand-prints in the still-tacky paint. Ugh. Kids.

Most of the kids were pretty cute and extremely respectful, actually. They'd sit near me, asking questions, bickering with each other, or reading the names of each department aloud. There was one kid who greeted me and then sat in the shade, making little things out bits of trash and singing made-up songs using the text from the wrappers and tins he was playing with. (He was my favorite.) The morning after that I came back again to add text, a fancy ribbon, and general finishing touches. 

The director requested that I write "Discipline - Work - Success" across the bottom, and I obliged, even though it isn't the slogan I would have chosen for an elementary school. I might have gone with something like "Friendship! Learning! Dreams and Rainbows!" or something similarly American, but he's the director and he seems to care about improving the school. I also misspelled "Discipline" but realized it only a couple hours after I'd finished up, while jogging by to admire my own handiwork, so I'm pretty sure corrected it before anyone noticed. Success!

Spell-Checked.

World Map Project

My neighbors in Salémata and I have been working on painting World Map Murals in each of our villages and last month it was Salémata's turn. After chatting with the Primary School Director and choosing a place to put the mural I spent an entire day setting things up and gridding the map outline. (Gridding is where you have an image drawn on a small grid and then you draw a big grid and copy the image over square by square.) I had a very handy grid plan printed out but it still took hours and hours to lay out all the lines and copy everything over.

The next day Jubal and Jackie came to help with the painting part, which was great. I took pictures every few minutes to show how the mural progressed from start to finish. Here's a link to the album; if you play it as a slideshow on the fastest setting it has a nice flipbook-ish feel to it, I'm really happy about that.

Salemata World Map Montage 2012

Thanks to the wonderful people who send us care packages we had some decent paintbrushes, but prying the paint cans open took quite a bit of effort (no screwdrivers on hand, unfortunately) and the mixing of some of the colors was challenging. The blues and reds came out bright and vivid, but the oranges and purples came out a little flat and drab. (Sorry, Canada.)

The painting was definitely more fun than the gridding, both because it was colorful and also because I had good company all day long. We even had music (faintly) playing in the background, thanks to my ipod touch.

  

We also had an audience, which got to be somewhat annoying at times. I made a rule that only a few kids could come in at a time and they had to leave if they touched wet paint, were rude to each other, or made too much noise. For the most part the kids were endearingly enthusiastic and pretty respectful about the precarious jars of paint, smelly old wine bottles filled with paint thinner, and the grid papers and country name lists scattered about. The teachers and Director were very impressed (it was funny how surprised they were with how well it turned out) and pleased with the mural; they've already asked if we can come back and paint a map of Senegal in one of the other classrooms.

It was great to work on a team project, and also really nice to do something tangible, straightforward and finite. This month I'm planning on going back in to draw outlines around countries, double-check the border we made between Sudan and South Sudan, and write "La Carte du Monde" along the bottom with our fancy golden paint pen, and then it will really be finished.

(I'm just awkwardly pretending to have a chair here.)

"Adama"

My American name is LaRocha ("la-rock-a"), but my Senegalese name is Adama. I have a number of tokorabe (people with my same name) around Salémata. I've gotten used to it, more or less, but for several months it was profoundly weird. 

It took me awhile to really identify as "Adama," and once I actually started to feel like it was my name I couldn't really get my head around how a bunch of other people also had my name. That has never happened to me before. Ever. In my entire life. It's funny, I spent a significant part of my childhood wishing that I had a name that other people had (specifically so that I could have a personalized toothbrush and name stickers) and then when I finally did it was oddly disconcerting. 

Adama and Friends

I've gotten used to it, though, and have come to appreciate some of the perks of having a normal, phonetic, immediately understood name. Greetings and mundane daily interactions are smoother and less complicated, and when people read my name off a list they don't hesitate and look around, blinking and uncomfortable, for a few seconds before attempting to say it aloud. They laugh, sometimes, amused that such an obvious foreigner would go by such a Senegalese name, but it's always friendly and often leads to questions about my family same (Souaré, "soo-are-ay") and where I live and if my family is in peace. 


Also, sometimes people are extra nice to their tokora, which is arbitrary but pleasant, and I'm not one to argue if the peanut butter lady or the bean sandwich lady wants to give me an extra spoonful just because I'm her tokora.

Baby Party

At the end of every month there is a Growth Monitoring (AKA Baby-Weighing) and Vaccination Day at the Salémata Health Center, and it is pretty much my favorite thing in village. It wasn't that way at first, though. The first few times I helped out the whole thing was so hectic (between 30 and 60 women usually show up with their children) and confusing that it really wasn't very enjoyable. I didn't understand the register system or how to fill out the Health Booklets, the babies' names all sounded like gibberish, the mix of Pulaar and French was disorienting, and there didn't seem to be an established order for who got to go first.  Over time I learned how the registers work, got to know people's names, and became comfortable enough to make start making little changes to help things run more smoothly, like carring over tables so that we weren't filling out the registers and booklets on our knees.

Overall, though, it was really heartening to see how much people in Salémata care about vaccinating their babies and making sure that their kids aren't underweight. The chaotic as they can be, Baby-Weighing Days are very well established and the Health Center staff are committed making sure they happen every month. When moderately malnourished (Yellow Zone) children do turn up (which they inevitably do) a midwife or relais consults with them, and helps provided largely by WorldVision, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the local Health Committee. If a child is severely malnourished (Red Zone) then they're admitted into the Health Center for therapeutic feeding. 

Here are the relais community health workers in charge of baby-weighing, as well as my host sister Mariama having her daughter weighed. (She was totally in the Green Zone.) 

Basically my role is to enter everything into the Health Center's registers, fill out new Health Booklets,  try to make sure things are moving along, and to smile and greet everyone. The staff has (somewhat) jokingly referred to me as the secretary on more than one occasion, which is fine by me. The Health Center already has local health workers who give shots and put toddlers on the scale and so I'm most useful when I make myself busy making things more organized and less hectic.

Here a visiting German gap-year student who stayed at the Catholic Mission for a couple months came to help out, and my friend (and same-name tokora) Adama took a photo of me holding a stack of Health Booklets.

Vaccinations Winding Down for the Day

2012 Bassari Initiations

Last weekend I (along with half my village, a dozen other PCVs, a few European tourists, a handful of Canadians) went to the Bassari village of Ethiolo ("Etch-il-o") to see the annual coming-of-age initiation ceremonies for young Bassari men in the area. 

PCV Tatiana, AKA Taki Bendia, our gracious hostess

We started by hanging out with Tatiana's host family, greeting people, eating fried dough beignets and watching things get started. I don't have a super comprehensive understanding of all the aspects of the ceremonies, but one of the first things that happens is that people from each initiant's family bring out live roosters, slaughter them, and then hang them all from a tree. (The men in the photo below left are taking the roosters down, to pluck and butcher them.) The people running everything fire off blank shots to signal that the initiants have started coming down from the trees, dancing in lines that wind slowly though the crowd before heading off to a hill for the battle portion of the initiations. 

The battles take place a little ways off form the village, out of the sight of women; we heard that this is because it's embarrassing when a man loses a fight (and every fight, even the highly ritualized initiation fights, has to have a loser) and they'd rather not have the women knowing who all the losers are. In any case, while the guys all went off to the battles we passed the time looking at the jewelry vendors' wares until Marie Christine (our wonderful housekeeper at the Regional House) invited the ladies over for snack time. The snack turned out to be chunks of fresh bread with a sautéed onion and green pepper dipping sauce, and it was pretty fantastic. 

When the battles were over and then masked Bassari men and the younger initiants, lead by a man wearing a heavy-looking wooden mask, came streaming back up the hill. Many of the younger kids fled in terror (they are pretty intimidating up close) and everyone clambered up onto rocks and logs to get a better look. 

 After the frenzy of the arrival of the masks we retired back to Tatiana's family's corner to drink water and sample the Bassari palm wine, honey wine, and millet beer. (The Bassari are mostly somewhat Catholicized traditional animists, so there's no religious prohibition of alcohol in Bassari areas.) The honey wine is pretty good, as is the millet beer, but I'm not really a fan of palm wine and none of it is particularly easy on the stomach (especially if you're getting over some sort of stomach bug, which I was) so I didn't drink much.

 We ate a big chunk of peanut butter candy (above left) made from cornmeal, peanut butter, and sugar, and Tatiana's family cooked us a wonderful lunch of chicken and cabbage sauce over rice. Over the course of the day I ran into pretty much everyone I know in Salémata, including my friend's little brother (above right)who really wanted a photo of himself with the masked men. He's a good kid and his family hadn't come to watch the initiations, so we invited him to have lunch with us and he showed us the random things that the tourists had given him -- specifically, a pair of nice ladies' dress slacks and a navy blue skort.

This last photo is of an initiant with his family, standing on a mat with the gifts that have been offered to him to commemorate his achievement. He's standing in a tub of rice and onions, and there's a sack of rice, some corn, millet, and other foods on the mat as well. He's looking over at his family members who are in the process of slaughtering a goat in his honor. I lost count of the number of roasting goat (and sheep, even a cow) heads I saw over the course of the day. Most people don't eat meat or fish on a daily basis, but they really pull out all the stops for holidays and special celebrations.

Adios Amigos

When it comes to living in Senegal there are hard parts (e.g. the heat, the awful transport cars, the skinny skinny babies, the pockets of abject poverty, the unwanted marriage propositions, the complete lack of dental care...), there are nice parts (e.g. the wonderful host families, the chubby babies who try to steal my glasses, the total strangers who take us in and feed us just because we're there, the tailor who refuses to accept payment for fixing the holes in my pants, the beautiful waterfalls, overwhelmingly delicious holiday dinners, everyone's Halloween costumes, N'ice Cream...). And then there are sad parts (e.g. the good-byes).

The new stage of Health PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) are almost done with PST (Pre-Service Training), which means that the last stage of Health Volunteers has gone up to Dakar and COS-ed (Close-of-Service) and we miss them already. Especially these ones:

Frosting with Meera

Meera taught me everything I know about tailors in Kedougou, making pancakes at the Regional House and dancing like an old Bedik lady. We are an amazing food-making team and breakfast will not be the same without her. I took most of the clothes she left behind and pretty much plan on dressing up like her for the rest of my service. I'm currently wearing her pants. 

Laterite Spray-Tanning with Leah

One time Leah let me come to her doctor's appointment to get an x-ray looked at, just because I had nothing better to do that day and afterwards the doctor bought us both ice cream, which was awesome. Another time I completely covered her kitchen basket with pictures of babies, because she totally has Baby Fever. One of the most unexpectedly best times I've had in Senegal was on a bike trip when Kate's tire sheared open and we all spent the afternoon slogging through ridiculous mud fields and pushing our bikes across rivers. It could have been completely miserable, but because Leah was there it was hilarious and fun.

Hamburgaling with Eric

Ohhhh Eric! Whether we were taking imaginary vacations, making Joseph into a real person, watching tonic magically freeze, or trying to discretely mix Fant-angria in the back seat of a sept-place, we always had the best times and the funniest nonsense jokes. When I got really sick and completely fainted while coming out of the latrine Eric went into EMT mode, put me in a recovery position, cleaned up my scrapes, set up a straw system so that I didn't have to sit up to drink ORS, and pointed out that at least I fainted coming out of the latrine or things could have been a lot worse dignity-wise.  Fun Fact: Eric coined the term "John Boehner Laterite Road Tan."

On a side note, I can't help noticing that the John Boehner Laterite Road Tan makes my teeth look so pearly white. And also that I maybe should wear a different tank top sometimes. 

Yellow Fever (Vaccinations)

Over the last few months there have been some cases of yellow fever around the region of Kédougou, so the Ministry of Health got a vaccination campaign together. Along with enough vaccine for pretty much everyone in the region, they sent out banners and hats and t-shirts and posters that proclaimed "One Injection = 10 Years of Protection." I had to get a yellow fever vaccination at my staging in Washington D.C. in order to be allowed into Senegal, so I was all set. Every person who got vaccinated got a little card, very similar to the one I have now, as proof of vaccination in case they need to cross a border that requires proof of vaccination. My role during most of the campaign was to provide comic relief (A toubab who speaks Pulaar! Hilarious!) and also to fill out hundreds and hundreds of these little cards.

Neighborhood Vaccination Station

Vaccination station in a
village without a health structure.

Sedenbou: A ramshackle mining village with no wells. 

Maybe my favorite part was on the last day that I went out en brousse and we went to a tiny little Pulaar village called Medina Jam Weli. It's just a few compounds, the road out to it really isn't a road at all -- It's just a tiny little village wayyyyyy out in the bush. We pulled up, and the health workers (many of whom have been sent out from the cities and do not speak Pulaar or live in huts) were wondering who on earth lives out here, and I realized that I recognized the moto leaning up against the mango tree. One of my host brothers was randomly visiting the village, dropping some stuff off for my host father. Everyone in the car thought it was really funny when I exclaimed "Omigod! That's my brother!" and went off to greet everyone in the village. It turns out that Kade, my youngest host mother (my host father's third wife) is from Medina Jam Weli, so I got to meet her parents and siblings (I took a lot of pictures, which she was super pleased about when I got back and showed her) and they sat me down and made me eat some steamed rice with peanut sauce, which was great because I was really hungry.

Adama (me) and Ibrahima (my host brother)

People were really receptive to being vaccinated, and to getting their kids vaccinated. Many community members helped out with spreading the word about the vaccinations and with running the logistics of the campaign. There were still many problems (communications, transport, gas, and so on) but it was a really encouraging to see a big group of people working so hard to help their communities avoid a really nasty illness.

Vaccinations under a mango tree