Baby Party

At the end of every month there is a Growth Monitoring (AKA Baby-Weighing) and Vaccination Day at the Salémata Health Center, and it is pretty much my favorite thing in village. It wasn't that way at first, though. The first few times I helped out the whole thing was so hectic (between 30 and 60 women usually show up with their children) and confusing that it really wasn't very enjoyable. I didn't understand the register system or how to fill out the Health Booklets, the babies' names all sounded like gibberish, the mix of Pulaar and French was disorienting, and there didn't seem to be an established order for who got to go first.  Over time I learned how the registers work, got to know people's names, and became comfortable enough to make start making little changes to help things run more smoothly, like carring over tables so that we weren't filling out the registers and booklets on our knees.

Overall, though, it was really heartening to see how much people in Salémata care about vaccinating their babies and making sure that their kids aren't underweight. The chaotic as they can be, Baby-Weighing Days are very well established and the Health Center staff are committed making sure they happen every month. When moderately malnourished (Yellow Zone) children do turn up (which they inevitably do) a midwife or relais consults with them, and helps provided largely by WorldVision, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the local Health Committee. If a child is severely malnourished (Red Zone) then they're admitted into the Health Center for therapeutic feeding. 

Here are the relais community health workers in charge of baby-weighing, as well as my host sister Mariama having her daughter weighed. (She was totally in the Green Zone.) 

Basically my role is to enter everything into the Health Center's registers, fill out new Health Booklets,  try to make sure things are moving along, and to smile and greet everyone. The staff has (somewhat) jokingly referred to me as the secretary on more than one occasion, which is fine by me. The Health Center already has local health workers who give shots and put toddlers on the scale and so I'm most useful when I make myself busy making things more organized and less hectic.

Here a visiting German gap-year student who stayed at the Catholic Mission for a couple months came to help out, and my friend (and same-name tokora) Adama took a photo of me holding a stack of Health Booklets.

Vaccinations Winding Down for the Day

Blogging for PeaceCare

All the PeaceCare team members and the PCVs took turns writing entries for the PeaceCare Blog  and this is the thing I wrote for my day.

Saturday Feb 4^th 2012

PCV LaRocha LaRiviere (ou bien Adama Souaré)

Today we woke up, greeted the family hosting us, and unsuccessfully looked for bananas on my way over to breakfast at the Saraya hospital’s housing area. We had an oatmeal can filled with village-style peanut butter, a plastic sack of hard boiled eggs, and a big pile of fresh loaves of tapalapa, handmade village bread. The water was on, so I sipped my instant coffee and filled our water barrels and watched a big class of kids doing their stretching on the basketball courts. The water went out after a little while, and the doctors headed over to the hospital for rounds. A couple of the Peace Corps Volunteers worked on translating and editing the team’s PowerPoint presentations, and there were a series of meetings were we mostly talked about meeting we’ve had and arranging for more meetings in the future.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been a day in Senegal without a massive schedule disruption. Unfortunately, last night there were two serious accidents involving multiple fatalities on the Kédougou road last night, and all senior members of the Kédougou medical staff were working on that past six in the morning. Obviously, getting on an early morning car to come to Saraya for a day of training and discussion was not going to happen after that. We did our best to salvage the day’s productivity, so we strolled over to the new Saraya hospital to ogle all the shiny fancy new things that JICA (Japan’s international development agency) has built and brought to Saraya. There were so many pristine rooms and pieces of equipment - a maternity ward with state-of-the-art birthing tables and little infant beds with sunlamps for jaundiced babies; a pristine specimen collection room, with the little wall-portal for passing cups back and forth; an operating room with brand new basins, lamps, and tables, capable of accommodating Cesarean sections and other surgeries; fancy facility maps with little red arrows declaring that VOUS ETES ICI. Sadly, the hospital won’t be able to begin seeing patients until the Senegalese Government finishes their contribution to the project, specifically building living quarters for staff, a morgue building, a driveway, and a low wall around the whole complex. It looks like construction’s starting on the wall, or a trench has been partially dug, but it may be awhile before the lovely new hospital is open for business.

After the tour wrapped up the group braved the mid-day sun and walked back down the (amazing, smooth, lovely, evenly paved) road to the current Saraya hospital. While we sat around waiting for lunch to be served Amish taught us all the “Zoo” game, which basically involves a lot of clapping and snorting and making funny animal gestures. Lunch was yassa sauce, made with diced onions, little bits of carrot, and small chunks of meat (beef? or maybe mutton?), over steamed rice. It was pretty good, but my favorite part, was the amazing selection of delicious juices. There was sweet, dark red bissap (like hibiscus) juice, thick, creamy baobab juice, light, spicy ginger juice, pale green kiwi nectar-ish ditakh juice, bissap with fresh mint, bissap mixed with baobab, and Foster Clark’s Orange, which is basically really strong Tang.

(PHOTOS: Ivy and the juice)

After all the juice and yassa I fell asleep for a bit, sitting up in the afternoon heat, and then spent the rest of the afternoon translating stuff from English to French. My netbook’s battery was running low, so I went inside the hospital’s living quarters to plug in, and people were watching a TV show about people with extreme gigantism and that disorder that makes children age horrifically rapidly. It was surreal but entertaining background noise, and I wrapped up my form translation just in time to watch Dr. Isaak Manga give a PowerPoint presentation on malaria in Senegal. After the malaria talk Dr. Nate gave a presentation on EKGs and the electrical goings-on of the heart. A lot of the jargon-heavy parts were alphabet soup to me, but it was neat to have a heartbeat explained in detail. After the EKG talk we headed over to dinner, which was lovely. They made the best thing, which is meat and fries and salad with dressing and tomatoes, and also more juice. After dinner we set up the projector and had a little outdoor screening of Babies, which went over really well. We’d set up plastic chairs for all the hospital staff, but when it was over and the lights came up we realized that during the movie a decent sized crowd had gathered to look on. Everybody loves babies!

“Oranges.” And bananas.

The word for “orange” in Pular is leemune (“lem-oon-eh’) and it’s orange season now. My host father has been going around in the afternoons, handing everyone a couple oranges, and I like them.

They’re green, even when they’re ripe, which is a little weird at first, and they’re not as sweet or seedless as the Navel oranges I grew up with in California, but it’s nice to have a little extra vitamin C and potassium (I’m fighting off the cold that has everyone and their baby sneezing all over the place) and they’re fun to peel. 

There are banana plantations around here, especially over the border in Guinea, and there have been bananas at the weekly lumo market for awhile now. They’re small and dingy, but they taste delicious and make me think of this thing Iheard on NPR awhile back. 

Business Lunch

These photos are from awhile ago, but better late than never. The youth camp in Dindéfélo  that I helped out with in September was partially sponsored by several mining companies, including a Canadian company called Teranga Gold, and one of their representatives came to Kédougou and took some of the PCVs, a couple local officials, and a few interpreters out for a fancy lunch at the Bedik hotel. 

They wanted to hear bout what we do out in our villages, and it was interesting to hear about the (vastly different) lifestyles of other foreigners living and working in Senegal. Also, lunch was really delicious. 

The Lorax in Pullo-Fuuta

If you've ever wondered what it sounds like when people in my village talk, here's a reading of Dr. Seuss' classic The Lorax in Pullo Fuuta, translated and read by Ian Hartman (aka Mama Saliou Diallo). Before he COSed and went back to Amerik  last month as an RPCV Ian was one of my closest neighbors, and this version of The Lorax was one of the many pieces he did for for the Peace Corps radio show in Kédougou.

Bismillah!  

Pula Fuuta! Pullo Fuuta?

Today we got our language group assignments (which will pretty much determine the region where we'll be placed, and I will be learning a type of Pulaar called Pullo Fuuta (or Pula Fuuta, depending on which handbook you're reading). This means I'll most likely be placed in an Southeast-ish part of Sénégal (I am re-learning how to use all the accent shortcuts, have you noticed?) where there will be lots of wonderful fruit and veggies to eat with my rice and sauce. So far Pullo Fuuta seems pretty cool for a language, nouns aren't gendered and there are only seven characters that completely don't exist in the English alphabet...  Tomorrow, in groups of three, we'll be going out to our homestay families in villages around Thiès for a week of intensive language training. We'll have language and culture classes with our Language and Culture Facilitators (LCFs) during the day and will be eating meals and socializing with our host families in the evening. My LCF is a great Senegalese woman named Houssey, and she'll be coming along with us and staying in the village during the homestay. We each have our own host families (and our own rooms and all that) but since they're trying to ease us into Senegalese culture we'll all be quite literally next door to one another. We'll spend most of our Pre-Service Training in the villages, but will come back to the Thiès Center every week or so for technical trainings and whatnot.

Today we went to the market, where I bought a brightly-colored thin cotton dress, and to the Catholic compound, which is where people congregate to hang out and drink beer. We've all been told several times that it's not acceptable to walk around town taking photos of people and places, so I won't be posting many photos of Thiès outside of the Training Center, but I'll see if I can find some pictures around and post those instead.

In any case, I'm off to pack for the homestay! I'll be back at the Training Center on Sunday evening, but I won't have any internet access until then. Have a lovely week!