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

Peace Corps Cars

So, I had step throat, which was unpleasant but at least it didn't last very long. It started when my throat was all scratchy on lumo (market) day, but I just walked around the ladies selling bananas and pretty fabric and cheap jewelry and fried bon bon donut-type things, sucking on frozen sachets of bissap (kind of like hibiscus) juice and blaming the dust. By the next morning it was clear that I had strep so I called Peace Corps's Med Office and after a little back and forth and a lot of box-reading (Salémata has no actual pharmacy and apparently I am not allowed to take the AMOX 500 amoxicillin from the Health Center because it's made by some company in India with suspect dosage reliability) I took some of the antibiotics that I had in my med kit and went back to bed. It was weird and sad to realize that the health services that I'm always encouraging people to use are considered unusable by our medical office. It's also reassuring that I have my own med kit and that there's an office full of people in Dakar worried about my antibiotics. 

The AMOX 500 that I wasn't allowed
to take looked like this.

The next day I'd been planning on meeting up with Jubal and Jackie, a couple of my PC neighbors, and biking in to Kédougou (biking is fun, and also there was a nation-wide transport strike) but I really just didn't feel up to it. Luckily Pape (one of the Peace Corps support staff guys) was coming out to my area to do some site set-up prep work in a village called Dakately, and he was nice enough to drive over and pick me and Jubal up. Getting a ride in a Peace Corps car is wonderful, so much smoother and faster and less dusty than public transport or biking, I was really happy about it. 

We rode along to check out Dakately (lovely village, worst road ever) and were impressed by their lovely community gardens, enthusiastic people, fancy new health post buildings, and spectacular cell phone reseau (reception). Really, though, there are sections of the road that seem more like a boulder field crossed with a ravine and one part is very obviously going to just be a river during wet season. But aside from that it's delightful. 

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

Language Seminar

I just got back into Kédougou from a language seminar in Bandafassi, a village about 60 km from where I live in Salémata. Houssey, my Peace Corps Pulaar teacher, came down from Thiès, the other people from my training group came in from their villages, and we all had three days of semi-formal language class. PCV Patrick hosted us, (and he really was a very, very gracious host) we went on a nice hike up to a Bedik village in the hills above Bandafassi and his host sister cooked some fantastic lunches.

Just to give you an idea of where all things are happening, Salémata is the "A" on this map, and Bandafassi is the "B," the city of Kédougou is "C," and Dakar (where all the political protests and everything were happening last week) is "D."

In case you were wondering, it takes about two days to get from Salémata to Dakar, so I'm a long ways off from any of the protests, and even when things get hectic in Dakar nothing really happens in the village, which is nice.

PHOTOS: Bandafassi Language Seminar 

Neem Mural

Neem is a tree that grows all over the place here, and you can make a natural mosquito repellent from it's leaves. I helped with a How-To mural, and here are the photos!

Beach Weekend!

The Counterpart Workshop went really well, and now we are all going to Popenguine to stay at a beachhouse for the weekend. On Monday we'll go out to the training villages for our last week of homestay with our host families, and then training will be almost over. If all goes well there will big a big televised to-do and we'll officially swear in on Friday, May 13th. (Inchallah.)

Bon weekend! En ontuma!

My Life in Acronyms

Tomorrow our Community Counterparts (CCs) and arrive at the Thiès Training Center for a three-day Counterpart Workshop (CPW) where we'll do official introductions, have some halting and awkward getting-to-know-you conversations, and talk about the work we'll be doing as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) over the next couple years.

So, what are Community Counterparts? Well. As far as I can tell, when a village or town has decided that they want a PCV and Peace Corps (PC) has decided that it's an appropriate location for a PCV, the community gets together and chooses a couple people to be our work partners. The idea is that they can show us around, explain village norms to us and our bizarreness to the village, and just generally facilitate our integration into the community. They'll also help us communicate, especially at the beginning when our language skills are still basically "Thanks to you! You have peace! Peace only! I am called Adama in Senegal! I come from America! Senegal is pretty! It is hot today! Hot, hot hot!"

My counterparts are two Senegalese men, I met them during my Volunteer Visit (VV) to Kédougou and they were really nice. One is Gilbert, a very kind and slightly spazzy guy w,ho manages a campement, a little group of rustic guesthouses for tourists, and the other is Jean-Jacques, the Infirmière Chef de Post, (ICP, the head nurse at the local health post) who I only got to meet for a few minutes on account of his busy schedule.

I have some paperwork to do to get ready for CPW, so I should go do that now.