Meningitis Vaccination Time

There was a national campaign to vaccinate vulnerable populations against meningitis A  this month in Senegal and I was able to go out with teams on several of the vaccination days. It was almost exactly like the Yellow Fever Vaccination Campaign that happened earlier this year, which went really well. I like participating' it's interesting to see how it all rolls out, it's great to get out into the bush and see new villages, and it's reassuring that big vaccination campaigns like this happen on a regular basis. 

I'm not a nurse or doctor or even an EMT, so pretty much all I did was fill out the little pink proof-of-vaccination cards. The Health Center staff knows that PCVs can write quickly and are generally pretty efficient when it comes to things like setting up a vaccination site and making sure everything proceeds in a relatively orderly fashion, so on all the days that I went out with vaccination teams that was what I did. We filled out hundreds and hundreds of little cards (location, name, age, date, vaccine lot number, expiration date, closest health structure), made our best guess when it came to a lot of the ages, and ran through a little spiel about meningitis more times than I can remember.  

There are always challenges - the vaccine must be kept cold, things tend to run late, some people are afraid of needles, it's hard to fuel up the trucks when the nearest gas station is 50 miles away, there are stock shortages, people are speaking Wolof and French and Puular and Malinke and Jahonke and Bassari all at once - but the health workers do am impressive job of keeping it all together.

Ndiaye, the nurse who was our team leader, is an extremely calm and professional person, and the Red Cross Youth volunteers were helpful. Overall it was a great vaccination campaign and it's nice to know that the vaccine lasts 10 years.

Vaccination Time!

Privy Party!

Back in August my amazing grandmother (with lots of support from my equally amazing mother and family) decided to celebrate her birthday by hosting a lovely tea party to benefit the latrine-building project I’d proposed. She called it a Privy Party and it was a resounding success. She raised so much money that I was able to expand the project, increasing the number of latrines that we’ll be able to build.

I can only hope that the latrines
will turn out as well as the tea party did ~ 

My community here is very excited about this project, and I’m eager to start building, but there are still a few weeks left until the rainy season is definitively over and building can begin. I’ll be doing my best to make the most of this time to increase awareness of the importance of latrines and of how to go about getting involved with the project - each participating family will provide a contribution, learn about disease prevention and latrine use and maintenance, and assist with the construction of their latrine. It’s not a hard sell; people around here are generally really enthusiastic about latrine use. Some compounds already have latrines, but they’re often used by a large number of people, leading to the latrine prematurely filling up and breaking down.  Many other houses have no latrine at all, and so people resort to practicing outdoor defecation (a fancy way to say pooping off in the bushes or out in the fields) or settle for using a neighbor’s latrine when they can, which is fine but tends to exacerbate the overuse problem.

I really can’t do enough to thank all the people who contributed to this project – especially my family – but I will do my best to post updates as the project progresses and to (eventually!) send out thank-you cards. It’s been really moving to see how engaged and motivated people are to help other people improve their communities.

Americans in Saraya

It's been a busy month over here in Senegal. PCVs Marielle, Annē and I spent the last few weeks prepping for and then facilitating a visit from a team of Americans from the NGO peacecare. (Honestly, Marielle did the lion’s share of the leg- and paperwork, but we all pitched in to run preparatory trainings and take care of loose ends.) The team came to work on an ongoing cervical cancer screening and treatment project, and having them here was a great experience, we had a good time and I learned quite a bit. I would write more about peacecare and the work we’ve been doing with them, but I’ve already done so, here and here and here.

Cervical cancer screening and prevention is an interesting and worthy project, one that’s very valuable both for the local Senegalese communities and for the visiting American medical students and residents who are able to spend a little time working with Senegalese health professionals and seeing how the provision of health care is carried out in another part of the world. It was really nice to see Andrew again, and great to meet Gabi, Katie, Angel and Charles. Another peacecare team is scheduled to come to Kédougou in February of 2013, to lead cryotherapy (freezing of pre-cancerous lesions) treatment trainings for local health professionals, and we’re already looking forward it. 

And now, in somewhat scrambled order (it's hard to drag lots of photos around in Blogger sometimes), are photos of some of the highlights of the October 2012 peacecare trip.

Marielle and I walking; kids playing with red rubber balls during a screening day in a gold mining village; Charles (one of the visiting residents taking an out-the-window snapshot of the Kédougou mosque.

The whole team posing after a meeting with the top Kédougou Medical Officials; someone giving me Skittles; Patrick Linn greeting the Saraya village chief as he gave out Senegalese names to the newcomers.

Me translating for Charles while Madame Diop looked on; Mariama (who's favorite joke is that she's Canadian)and I talking shop; Marielle leading a stroll out to the fields around Saraya.

Annē and Patrick's host siblings; their brother making tea on their host family's compound; the kids leading us out to visit the peanut fields.

Crossing a stream on our way to the fields; Angel (one of the visiting residents) came thisclose to sticking the landing. 

Walking among the peanuts; loading into one of the hospital trucks to go out for a screening day.

Sitting through a meeting; eating ceeb u jen (fish and rice) and maafe tiga (peanut sauce) for lunch; some boutiques in the Kédougou market.

A "Tata" car in Kédougou; Fatou and I having similar thoughts during a meeting.

The Americans giving us wonderful, thoughtful, delicious treats; Andrew reliving the delight of being given fancy American snacks in Africa.

Fatou (the main screening trainer) and I jumping rope. It was a short little kids rope. She was better.

Charles and his fan club; the most amazing little kid just chowing down on some rice.

Rocks waiting to be crushed into dust (and boiled with mercury to separate out the gold); fancy fancy ceeb u yap (rice with meat).

On the path from the peanut fields; Sajou, in her fields with the Saraya Health PCVs.

Annē and the speculums on a screening day; Charles smashing an unripe baobab pod to see what was inside. (It was unripe baobab stuff.)

Annē/Sajou, LaRocha/Adama, Charles/Ibrahima, and Angel/Mariama - screening team extraordinaire! 

Endless Trash

Waste disposal is a huge problem here; trash cans are often non-existent and littering is completely normal. Sewage, garbage, recyclables, food scraps - too often they wind up strewn about on the ground, waiting to be swept up and burned or washed away by rain or just left there forever.

Trash on a beach in St Louis

A typical debris-filled drainage ditch in Dakar

In the U.S. people produce a truly astounding amount of garbage on any given day, but for the most part it's quickly whisked off, to landfills or barges or processing centers or treatment plants, and we don't have to look at it. In Senegal everyone has to look at it. Pretty much all the time.

When I first arrived here the sheer volume of trash was one of the most striking things about the city-scape. When I travel around the country I still get hung up on how much garbage I see by the roadside, on the outskirts of towns, and just generally strewn around on the ground.

One of Dakar's many refuse-strewn lots

Batteries, old clothes, corn cobs, broken shoes, cardboard boxes, empty bottles, old notebooks, used-up pens, animal bones, mango peels, burnt-out light bulbs, candy wrappers, an ocean of plastic bags; anything you could use or grow or buy and then throw away is piled in the great swaths of refuse fanning out around the cities, towns and villages.

A village garbage pile in a field

Litter in a village creek bed

Rubble in a village ravine

People nonchalantly toss wrappers out car windows and drop soda cans right in the gutter without a second glance. For someone coming from a part of the world where littering is not only illegal but considered morally reprehensible, this is profoundly unsettling. It's awkward to watch. When there isn't a wastebasket handy (which is almost always) and no one to come by and empty a wastebasket anyway it's hard to argue with. It's a complicated problem and is difficult to change, but there are many people, PCVs and Senegalese, trying to do just that, with Sanitation Committees and public awareness campaigns and designated trash collection and burning areas.

Trash on a village path

At the end of the day all of this really, really makes a person appreciate the often unrecognized value of well-enforced anti-dumping laws, all that chiding about putting things in the proper bin, and access to an efficient garbage collection service.