Peer Support and All-Volunteer Conference

So far the month February has been a veritable festival of meetings. Things got started with a Peer Support Network (PSN) workshop preparation meeting, followed by a training of this year's new Peer Support Contacts (PSCs) and another meeting. New PSCs were oriented and trained, and outgoing PSCs lead workshops on dealing with issues frequently faced by Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) serving in Senegal. Topics ranged from basic coping skills to domestic violence to body image and it was great to hear about how Volunteers have helped each other in dealing with some really tough situations.

Peace Corps Senegal's Peer Support Network 

PSN fed right into our Close-of-Service (COS) conference, which overlapped with Work Zone Coordinator (WZC) presentations and meetings. Katie O. and I are the current WZCs and hopefully my replacement will also be interested in doing some coordinating once they get settled in. The PCVs in our area really like working on team projects (radio shows, world map murals, grafting trainings, etc) and it's nice to have someone who's centrally located (and has occasional access to electricity) to help out with getting things organized. In any case, I could be more pleased that Katie O. in taking over, the work zone ins in very good hands.

Work Zone Coordinators

All the WZC meetings lead into the Annual West African All-Volunteer Conference (All-Vol), where PCVs come from all over Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, and Cameroon to present and discuss case studies, development in West Africa, and Peace Corps's work in the region. Usually Mali and Cape Verde would also send delegates, but the Cape Verde program was closed due to excessive fanciness (they're doing just fine without PCVs, apparently) and Mali is still in disarray. Ambassador Lewis Leukens came to speak about his work in the Foreign Service and the ongoing problems in Senegal's Casamance region. After his talk we chatted very briefly about U.S.A.I.D./Ambassador-supported community radio station in Salémata, which has proved to be both useful and extremely popular. (It turns out that PCV Marsha H. was taking pictures, which she kindly sent my way. I am not sure why I appear to be clapping. I am maybe applauding the success of the radio station?)

Chatting with Ambassador Leukens 

Current and former volunteers and gave presentations on a wide range of topics including malaria prevention, data collection, talibé support centers,  mercury harm-reduction projects for small-scale gold miners, and personal narratives reflecting on the many kinds of lessons that one learns while serving as a PCV. (My favorite quote from that session was "People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou)

During All-Vol my friend Marielle and I also opted to do oral language assessment interviews, which went much better than I'd anticipated. After too much instant coffee and over a week of nothing but English I was completely sure that my interviews would be a sweaty, semi-coherent slew of unconjugated verbs, but Djéba, my evaluator, was gracious and patient and I muddled on through. To my relief they placed me at the Superior level in French and Advanced- Low in Pular/Pula Fuuta, which isn't particularly spectacular but, hey, it gets the job done. 

Meetings & Millions

It's been a busy few weeks here in Kédougou. We got four new Agriculture PCVs (and they're awesome), it it suddenly freezing cold (68°F out at night! I have to sleep with a blanket and a fleece!), and the latrine project I've been working on has been making good progress. 

People have been steadily talking about the project, and now that the rainy season is definitively over  the ground has dried out enough to dig a pit without it collapsing. My host father (who is also the chef du village) informed the neighborhood that it was time to get together and called a meeting last week. One representative from each interested household came, along with Mr. Sow, the Coordinator of the Salémata Sanitation Committee and a couple committee members. Thanks to past causerie info sessions and a training at the Catholic Mission last year most people (and all the masons) already have a pretty solid idea of why latrines are important and how to place and build them. During the meeting I explained (and then Jarga Sada repeated more clearly) exactly what the requirements were and why I chose to work on this project. They discussed and then decided upon details of how things would play out -- where to get sand, who would manage the cash, how to dig the holes, all the logistical things that I'd hoped they would sort out during the meeting. 

Everyone decided that Jarga ("traditional chief") Sada Souaré, my host father, should be in charge of collecting the community contributions, checking each family off the list, and paying the masons once the work in complete, which is great. He's well respected, very trustworthy, and cares a lot about improving health in his village. Mr. Sow (above, in the blue shirt on the right) was really helpful, particularly with the technical aspects of the project, and Jarga Sada (below, in the pale blue with the notepad) made sure that everything ran smoothly. I'd forgotten my camera but luckily the Sanitation Committee members took photos and then e-mailed them to me. All in all the meeting went really well and I couldn't have been more pleased (and relieved) at how it went. It even started on time (meaning that it was scheduled for 2:00pm and everyone promptly arrived at 4:00pm)!

Jarga Sada aking the list of participating families

Once the participating families were all signed on, committed to making the cash contribution, and started getting their sand, crintin privacy fencing, and pits going, the next step was to finalize the order for building materials and arrange for transport. To do that I came in to Kédougou, talked to the hardware store employees who had given me estimates when I was planning the project, got a few comparison quotes for due diligence, chatted with drivers about delivery rates, and then spent four hours waiting in line at the bank to make a withdrawal.

Here in Senegal we use the CFA franc ("say-fah") and one American dollar is worth about 500 CFA. This project is fairly modest as far as construction projects go, but the budget was still over a million CFA and holding a million's worth of pretty much anything is just kind of fun. I stacked it up, laid it all out on table, fanned myself with it, and then went to the hardware store to pay for everything.

I didn't hold on to it for long, though, (which was fine with me, carrying large amounts of cash is slightly nerve-wracking) and the hardware store wrote me out a very nice receipt (so that no one can accuse me of "eating" the money) complete with both my names and an official stamp and signature and everything. 

Tomorrow I'll be hightailing it back to Salémata to meet the big old truck that will be delivering all the materials. I'm really glad that the project is coming along and - even though there's still a lot of work left to do - I'm already looking forward to seeing the actual latrines get installed. 

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. 

South by Southeast by Southwest

From St Louis I headed down to the Peer Support Network (PSN) meeting in Thiès, at the Training Center. Peace Corps/Senegal’s PSN is still relatively new, so we went over by-laws, brushed up on listening skills with  mock phone calls, and discussed issues that have come up over the last few months. We also spent sessions discussing how to best handle PCVs who are dealing with domestic violence problems in their communities and host families and how to talking with Volunteers considering early termination (ET). It was a good meeting (even though my stomach was completely off the whole time) and I liked learning more about Peace Corps resources and hearing ideas from other PCVs on how to talk about and cope with stressors and difficult situations that crop up throughout a Volunteer’s service.

Senegal's PSN 2012

After the PSN meeting it was back to Dakar to catch transport back to Kédougou. I stopped by the office, where Hadiel helped me set up Twitter via SMS (it’s more complicated in Senegal than in America), and I visited Rachel, Emily and their adorable new son Xavier.

I ate my fill of buttery pastries from the decadent Grain d’Or bakery, packed up my backpack, and headed back down to Kédougou, where I am now. I’m just sitting around, typing and waiting for the rain to let up so that I can go run errands, get packed up, and turn the internet back on so that I can post this. When it starts raining we run around the house unplugging everything important because when lightning strikes on or near our Regional House compound everything plugged in just gets completely fried. We lost several routers that way last rainy season (I hear that’s down from six the year before) when no one was around to unplug things in time.

24°C = 72.2°F and 40°C = 104°F

In any case, soon I’ll bike over to the market to pick up a seriche gift for my family (a couple kilos of carrots and dry beans), buy my transport ticket to get back to Salémata tomorrow, gaze wistfully at the closed post office (I have a package waiting but the Poste has very limited hours and I won’t be able to get it before I go back to village) and stop by the office supply boutique to buy a notebook.

I’ll be back in Kédougou in a couple weeks, but now that I’ve figured out the whole SMS-tweeting thing you can look forward to those, for as long as my phone credit lasts, anyway.