Work Stuff: Baseline Survey and Potential Work Projects

Before I begin working on any projects in my village I have to do a Baseline Survey and lay out an Action Plan for my service. There are three main neighborhoods in Salémata and the Quartier Mosqué, my neighborhood, has approximately 61 family compounds. So far I've  taken my survey questionnaire around to almost all the compounds in my neighborhood and a few in the other two neighborhoods, and people have been really helpful and receptive. I did my survey in Pulaar, and I asked things like how many people live on the compound, where they get water, if there's a latrine, and about the communities health challenges and resources. I'm currently setting up an Excel spreadsheet and getting ready to enter in all that data -- sometimes life in Africa exactly as exciting as life in any office in America.

Once I get all my baseline data organized and sorted out I'll have a better idea of what projects I'll propose in my Action Plan, but here are a few things I could work on that people I interviewed suggested:

Latrines: It's nice to have a toilet, even if it's a pit toilet, and many people here do not. Diarrheal diseases, like amoebic dysentery, are a major cause of suffering and death here, and a lack of latrines contributes heavily to that problem.

Malaria: Malaria is still a huge problem here and I'll definitely be working on finding ways to reduce malaria in my village. Having a training on making neem lotion, and to teach others to make it, There are Long-Lasting Insecticide-treated Nets, indoor spraying,

Reproductive Health: From basic human anatomy to ways to prevent infections to reliable family planning options, there's a need for accurate information about reproductive health, especially for young people. There are many people who have a lot of good knowledge about health, but here's also a lot of misinformation out there - for instance, I've had several people tell me that pregnant women shouldn't eat foods rich in vitamins because it will make the baby too big and cause difficulties during childbirth, which is both untrue and potentially very harmful to mothers and children.

Nutrition: From underweight babies to iodine deficiency, there are a lot of food and nutrition issues in my area. Promoting moringa gardens, use of iodized salt, and having workshops on basic nutrition and how to make simple enriched porridges to help malnourished kids recuperate are a few examples of potential projects.

Here's some more info on the Preventative Health work that Peace Corps Volunteers do in Senegal:

• Malaria
• Preventing HIV with Youth Theater
• Community Latrine Projects
• Moringa

Postcards

These are actually photos of postcards. Everyone in Peace Corps/Senegal calls these large vans "Alhams," short for "Alhamdoulilahi," which I'm pretty sure means "Thanks to God" in Arabic. Many Senegalese people call them "Njig Njai" because a guy named Njai owns a large percentage of Senegal's large van fleet, and he had his name painted across the front of most of them. If I have other options (Sept-Place station wagons, certain buses, my bike) I usually avoid Alhams. They're slow, usually totally overcrowded, and break down a lot.

An Alham, Njig Njai, oto on, un mini-bus, etc 

There are traditional Bassari villages in my area, and Initiations happened in May. I went to part of one right before I installed in my site and took some pictures, but this one's really nice. It's an impressive event, even though I was only allowed to watch the dancing part, not the stylized fighting part.

Bassari men in Initiation masks

Water.

At this very moment PCV Eric and I are stuck at the Bedik Hotel in Kedougou, eating caramel pops and waiting until it lets up enough for us to ride back to the Regional House. We were using the wifi here (I'm uploading photos of camp right now) because our wifi is still down and right when we were about to leave it started pouring. 

There are definitely worse places to wait out a rainstorm. 

Water!

For drinking, cooking, and bathing I use about one and a half 15-liter buckets of water a day. There are wells just next to my compound, but they're open and not very deep, so stuff can fall in and they could be easily contaminated by runoff or seepage, so I go a little further, to the forage hand-pump at the elementary school across the way. I have buckets with lids, so I can strap them on the back of my bike, but sometimes I just carry them on my head like most of the other women. It's about a three minute bike ride or a five-to-ten minute walk, and I only do it once or twice a day, which really isn't so bad. On days when I do laundry in village I just bring my clothes over and wash them in tubs under the mango tree where pretty much everyone else in my neighborhood does their washing; carrying the clothes over to the water is a lot easier than carrying all that water back to my hut would be. 

This blue baignoire tub holds about 20 liters, and most women carry them on their heads. They wrap up a scarf or small towel or something to make a little trivet-looking round of fabric to provide some padding, and people help each other lift the heavier tubs up onto their heads. Men don't fetch water as often as women do, and they're more likely to use bikes when they do. Most people don't use lidded buckets, but I see a lot of men and boys using empty 20 liter fuel or oil containers, like the yellow one in the background here. 

The "forage" hand-pump at Salemata's Elementary School

Pens & Paper

(I love pens almost as much as I love crayons.)

I got some really lovely paper for my birthday and was able to send out some nice thank-yous. I really like that the red-orange paper is exactly the color of the laterite roads we have out here.

Fun Fact: Rainy season humidity will seal all of your
lick-and-seal style envelopes.

Drawing notebooks from an afternoon
 of neighborhood Arts & Crafts. (I am Adama.)

Dindefelo

I'm off to help out with a youth camp in Dindefelo, a village about 50 kilometers away from the city of Kedougou. I'll be back to town and internet access in a couple weeks! 

The End of Ramadan & Korité

Ramadan is different in different places, but in my part of Senegal Ramadan was from August 1st to August 30th. During Ramadan Muslims (if they aren't pregnant or sick or too young or too old or what have you) get up before dawn to have some breakfast, and then don't eat or drink (or gossip or ogle or whatnot) until around 7:30 in the evening. In my compound, the neighbors come over to pray, and everyone who's been fasting shares bowls of mboyree porridge. I have no idea how it's actually spelled. Ours is made from finely sifted corn flour, and it has little tapioca-like balls in it, and they flavor it with sugar, a little salt, and what I'm pretty sure is tamarind.

Mboyree on a stove. And my toes. 

My host family's great, and since I'm not Muslim, didn't expect me to fast. My host sisters said it would be good to try, just to see what it was like, have the experience, and so I fasted for one day, out of solidarity and partly just to prove that I was capable of doing it. However, not drinking any water all day is pretty terrible for you, and while one day was fine I wasn't about to do that for a whole month.

During Ramadan pretty much everyone on my compound got colds, and a couple people had dysentery last month. Ramadan's hard on your body, especially for people who still do hard labor, like farming, or who refuse to stop fasting when they're ill or pregnant, which unfortunately happens pretty frequently.

Diabou, my youngest host sister, 'helping' cook. 

On the evening before Korité, Kadé, the youngest of my three host moms, was the first in the neighborhood to spot the first sliver of the moon that officially signaled the end of Ramadan, and everyone got all excited and  called out to each other and banged on bowls and pans and, even though I hadn't been fasting, it was still fun.

And then it was Korité. Everyone got all dressed up in their best complets and went around to greet friends and family, giving them treats and bowls of fancy food.

Kids in their new Korite clothes.  

Tatiana/Taki, Little Jess/Aisha, and LaRocha/Adama

This is the complet my host family during Pre-Service Training gave to me. It's not the most flattering thing by American standards, but my village was all abuzz about how good it looked. Little Jess, my sitemate, and Tatiana, who lives in Etiolo, a nearby Bassari village, came by to greet me and my family and hang out for awhile.

My host father Sada Souare and me. 

 And, of course, the food. After weeks of eating very simple lunches at the kids' bowl I was pretty stoked about having a day of nice meals. I hang out and chat during dinner prep a lot, but on Korité I even helped cook a little, chopping onions, chasing chickens away, telling the little kids to get their hands out of the pot.

Mariama Gaulo and Mariama Kesso cutting meat

Korite dinner food prep

For Korité we had fonio and meat with onion sauce for lunch, and meat with beans and bread for dinner. The meat was goat, one of our goats, and it was good, but I'm still a little squeamish about eating little bits that are still very obviously sections of digestive tract. The sauces were pretty fantastic, though.