This Week in Kédougou

I've been in village for the last week or so, and things went well, as usual. My host family, the Souarés, are doing pretty well -- there is quite a bit of conjunctivitis (a.k.a pinkeye) going around, which is gross but under control, and other than that everyone's fine.

Some host family cousins were visiting from Guinea last week, so there were even more people at the house than usual, and the corp harvest is almost ready, most afternoons there were a lot of people just hanging out under the mango tree, making tea and cooking ears of fresh corn on little Hibachi-ish grills.

I helped do paper work at the monthly vaccination and baby-weighing day at the Salémata Health Center, worked on my Pulaar a bit, and worked on formatting my baseline data and planning my Action Plan.

Today I'm going to swing by the post office, try to catch up on e-mail at the cyber cafe, download and start filling out my Volunteer Reporting Form (VRF) and just generally take care of work-type stuff, and then a few of us are going to make lentil soup for dinner at the Regional House. Exciting times here in Kédougou...

Waterfall Tourney

A "tourney" is our anglicization of the French tournée, which, as you can prob'ly guess, means "tour." So, say, if some volunteers around going around to a group of villages giving Neem Cream demonstrations we'd call it a Neem Tourney.

The region of Kédougou is known for being lush and verdant, especially compared with the northern regions of Senegal, and also for having very pretty hills, rivers, and waterfalls. So, since it's been raining and the rivers are flowing, my friend Meera's been talking about going on a Waterfall Tourney. It was a fantastic idea, and so far I've seen four of the best waterfalls in the area.

Here they are, in order of lovely to loveliest:

Dindéfélo: The easiest hike in, but it was kinda cold, and there was a pretty big snake.

Mike, Patrick, Meghan, Jess A., Eric, and LaRocha

  

We we saw a snake and almost took off
but then realized it was already dead. 

Ségou: A big hike, but the hike is almost as nice as the waterfalls. And the campement is really nice.

The campement at Segou has a lovely view.

Me, Jess A., Eric, Meghan, & Tatiana

Pélal : And easy ride, a pretty short hike, lovely falls, and not one but two snakes. And they were alive. Yay for a good zoom. Fun times!

One of TWO snakes we saw here.

Patrick

Me and Tatiana

Ingoley: There was a lot of biking and some impressive river crossings, but it was definitely worth it! And no snakes.

Patrick & Kate

Ingoley! 

More Notes on Camp

The radio show This American Life has an excellent episode called Notes on Camp, and it's totally work a listen.

Here are a few more photos from youth camp:

Tatiana running a Marketing activity for selling
 locally made bug repellent and the weekly village market.

Host Sisters: Mariama Gaulo and Adama

Eric & I, exhausted from teaching First Aid. 

Also, doorways here tend to be really low, and everyone hits their heads pretty frequently. One evening Patrick, one of my Peace Corps neighbors, hit his head one time too many (he had a couple scrapes on his scalp that were actually bleeding a little bit) and went and got his bike helmet. That night was also spaghetti night, and they ran out of utensils at dinner (usually we'd get spoons to eat with) so some of us wound up eating with our hands. It was a total mess, and also almost pants-wettingly funny. Almost.

Patrick, Meghan, & Tatiana

Meghan and me, eating spaghetti with our hands

Tatiana and Patrick on Spaghetti Night

You can tell who sat where by how much pasta
 was left on the floor afterwards. (Those are my toes.)

All in all, I'm lucky to be in a region with such awesome and entertaining people; even when things got hectic and confusing (which happens a lot when cultures and schedules and languages collide) we still managed to have a lot of fun.

Also, just for the record, my summer camp, Camp Unalayee, is still the best summer camp of all time.

Dindéfélo Youth Camp

Because Camp Unalayee, the summer camp I went to in California, is such a wonderful place I'm a big fan of summer camps. I signed up to help out with the Université des Vacances, a youth camp for local middle school students run by Peace Corps and a Senegalese organization called A.D.D.K. in Dindéfélo, a village about 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) from Kédougou.

I live in Salémata & the camp was in Dindéfélo.

Here's an overview of last year's youth camp, and this lovely map is courtesy of the Dindéfélo Nature Reserve, which works with the Jane Goodall Institute/Spain and other organizations to preserve biodiversity in general and chimpanzee habitats in particular. 


There were about 70 campers this year, from all over the Region of Kédougou, and they stayed in huts for 11 nights at a local campement. Senegalese and Peace Corps counselors ran activities, games, and day hikes. I was in charge of the how-to sessions on making Neem Cream mosquito repellent and Enriched Porridges. The camp was held in French, because kids from different villages speak different languages, including Pulaar, Mandinka, Jahonke, Bassari, and Bedik. One of my host sisters from Salémata came as a camper and it was really great to have her there.

Youth Camp 2011

Making enriched nutritional porridge from affordable, locally available ingredients is a great way to teach information on basic nutrition and also turned out to be delicious. We made several different versions, using rice, millet, and corn flour for carbohydrates, ground peanuts, milk powder, and bean flour for protein, and lime juice and tamarind for flavor, extra vitamins and as acidic preservatives. Malnutrition is a widespread problem, and since every camper knew an underweight baby, an adult who had a goiter from iodine deficiency, or a kid who'd lost a lot of weight from an illness, it was useful and relevant for them. 

Cooking up Neem Cream

There were also arts and crafts activities, a great Challenge Course, a day hike to local waterfalls, campfires with skits, and lots and lots and lots of singing and dancing. On the last day they had a sort of Field Day called Les Olympiads, where teams competed in obstacle courses, relays, and three-legged races.

Les Olympiads at the Primary School

Most kids here don't get many chances to travel, even around their own regions, and they had a great time visiting Dindéfélo, meeting kids from other villages, and doing all the summer-camp-type-things that kids like to do.

Biking en brousse

Since the start of the rainy season I've expanded my list of things that I consider "bike-able" to include rock fields, sand pits, and small rivers. The only thing around here that it turns out you really can't bike through is mud. Your wheels sink in, and the mud cakes up so thick on the brakes that the wheels stop turning. Even pushing a bike through the deep clay mud in some places requires stopping every few minutes to scrape off the rims and tires. 

A few days ago I biked from Dindéfélo to Kédougou, all by myself. I'd done it before, but in a group and from the other direction, so I was a little nervous about remembering where the turnoffs were, and about mud and water level, but it went just fine. It is en brousse, but even out in the sticks there are little villages and huts along the way, and at the one fork where I wasn't sure which was to go I just asked an old man who was sitting under a tree, enjoying his morning tea, and he told me which way would take me toward Kédougou.

My favorite part is this stick bridge, supported by tall big branches and wires attached to another tree off to the left. I felt very Indiana Jones-ish starting my day off with a 30 kilometer (19-ish mile) ride through the African countryside. Except that I had a water bottle and a helmet instead of a whip and a fedora. 

Stick Bridge!

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.