Cervical Cancer Awareness Training

Along with a few other Volunteers, I've been helping out with an ongoing collaboration between Peace Corps Volunteers and an NGO called PeaceCare that is aimed at improving cervical cancer prevention and treatment in Senegal.  

We've been coordinating trainings for local health workers intended to raise awareness and improve understanding of what cervical cancer is and what resources are available to prevent ant treat it if it develops. The training that happened in my village was lead by a trainer from the District Hospital and the local midwives. They gave a presentation and then lead discussions with Community Health Workers and Community Liaisons, or "Neighborhood Aunts" as they call them here. They talked about on anatomy, the basics of cancer and cervical cancer, testing, treatment and barriers to care, and then discussed ways to broach the topic with people in their neighborhoods. My role was to arrange all the things that make a meeting happen: announcements, renting a room and chairs, borrowing a projector, hiring someone to cook lunch, and handle things like reimbursement for transport. 

Despite the language barriers - the District trainer spoke only Wolof and French; most of the local women only spoke Pulaar - the women had really valuable, engaged conversations. The midwives and the head of the women's groups did a lot of translating, I drew some basic reproductive anatomy illustrations, and everyone was impressively attentive. Many of the local women aren't literate, but I noticed that several of them had carefully copied the anatomy drawing into the notebooks that had been handed out, which really made my day. I didn't talk much at all, but I learned some interesting vocabulary ("cervical cancer" was translated as "the sickness of the stomach of the mother of the baby") and as women got more comfortable they started telling stories and jokes, some of which I even understood. It was really heartening to see how many people showed up - traveling even short distances can be such a pain in rainy season - and very encouraging to see how interested and responsive people were to the issues being discussed.

And then, just after the training was all over and I was just beginning to get a little self-congratulatory about how well it had gone, several things happened in rapid succession. First, I realized that there was a hole in my pocket and the key to the rented room had fallen out at some point during the day and after quite a bit of hurried searching I had to accept that it was lost. Since there's no back-up key I promised to pay to have the locks changed and then set about cleaning up and returning the rented chairs to the other side of village, but because the car had already gone over to the market and we couldn't call it back because the cell phone network suddenly went out a helpful neighbor kid and I had to carry the chairs, stacked on our heads, up and down the ravine that now runs through the center of our village. On the last trip I slipped and scraped up my shin, ripping my pants and making my eyes tear up a little bit.

I still had to run around to collect all the receipts, grab my backpack from my hut, and say good-bye to my host family before heading off for several weeks (for project work and summit) and my ride back to Kédougou was getting impatient. Once they saw I was bleeding and upset, though, everyone was really, really nice about having to wait a few extra minutes.

So, now I'm in Kédougou working with a couple other PCVs to finish up prep work for the PeaceCare team's upcoming visit and things are going pretty well - lots of unexpected schedule changes, but that's par for the course here. As you can see from the photos, even after just a few days, my scrape is healing up quite nicely. I'm very pleased with my immune system. 

The Joys of Transport: Rainy Season

As I may have mentioned before, traveling is by far my least favorite part of living in Senegal. Most of the time Peace Corps Volunteers (like most other people here) get around on what the French would call transport public, which here means transportation that is open to the public (as opposed to private cars and buses) and not "public transport" in the usual sense. The vehicles tend to be dirty, slow, unreliable and rickety, and (with a few exceptional stretches) the roads are often crater-filled, crumbling, or very washboard-esque.

Last month, on our way from my village to Kédougou, the car that my Peace Corps neighbors and I were riding in broke down. It wasn't a total surprise when the clutch fell out of the car floor (the engine sounded like a dying foghorn filled with wrenches) but, as we were nowhere near anywhere, it was pretty inconvenient. Luckily, a guy we know from my village drive by in his truck and wound up taking us (and, somewhat grudgingly, the rest of the passengers) the rest of the way in to town.

Salémata to Kédougou, July 2012 

Several days later, on the way back, we jinxed ourselves by marveling aloud at the lovely weather, the total absence of flooding, the cleanliness of the vehicle, and the competence of the driver. We were thinking that we would get back earlier than expected, have the afternoon to hang out, pull water, sweep out our huts. And then we came upon a big truck, hopelessly mired in a deep and slippery mud puddle, completely blocking the road. Some people opted to wait in the car, some tried to help push and dig and pile rocks under the truck's wheels, and my two PCV neighbors and I decided to walk. We didn't have much baggage and we didn't think that we were too far from Diara Pont, one of their villages. It turned out to be farther than we thought, but again, thanks to a kind man in a sturdy truck, we got a ride in most of the way.

 Kédougou to Salémata,
 July 2012 

And then there's the turnoff in Salémata to continue to the village out toward Oubadji and Kékéressi. There's a small cement bridge there where the road crosses a seasonal stream, or there was until last month. To be fair, the cement part is still there, it's just the road part that's gone missing. 

Kékéressi turnoff on the Salémata Road, July 2012

July 2012 

August 2012

Bigger trucks and less-rugged cars won't be able to go out past Salémata until it's repaired. In the meantime, the mayor and some of the men from around the village stacked rocks and sacks of clay dirt over a shallow area just upstream, so motorbikes and 4-by-4s the ambulance and people on foot can cross without too much difficulty. It's not ideal, but it will have to do for now. 

Of course, despite the terrible roads, the erratic departure times, and the falling-apart cars, I do travel. I go because it's necessary for work, because it's fun and interesting to see new places, and because it's wonderful to visit friends in other cities and villages. I make the most of obligatory trips; while in Dakar, taking care of office-type things, I stayed with my friends Rachel & Emily and their adorable baby boy, and now that I'm in Tamba for a USAID meeting I get to catch up with Emma and Marie, a couple of my favorite PCVs from my training group. After the meeting's over I'll continue to make my way south, on down to Kédougou, eyes on the road and fingers crossed, hoping for the best.