After the Sunset

It’s been almost two months since I left Senegal as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, and a final wrap-up post of some kind seems long overdue.

For some people, serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer is a childhood dream, infused with the same sort of magic and optimism usually associated with moon-landings and spiritual quests. That was not the case for me; I became a PCV because professionally and personally it seemed like my best option at the time, and because my application went through so quickly I didn't have much time to start job-searching. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a valuable and challenging experience. With the exception of my relatively unhappy Mephaquin stint, throughout my service I felt like I was putting most all of my previous endeavors and experiences to use – backpacking at Camp Unalayee was excellent preparation for rural life; studying French and Art and International Studies and Global Health all turned out to be quite helpful; working with small children was good practice for dealing with irrational drivers and cranky bureaucrats; working at a bookstore was great preparation for being broke. In addition to feeling well-prepared, I was very, very lucky in a number of important ways – with my site, with my health, with my host family, with my PCV neighbors, with a wonderful World Wise Schools correspondence match, and with having supportive friends and family back home. Many thanks all around! 

Now, after what was quite possibly the best vacation ever, I am in Conakry, Guinea, preparing to start a Peace Corps Response position. If you’re interested, my new Guinea-focused blog is called The Kankan Express ("kahn-kahn") and will be doing my best to keep it up-to-date.

Whether you’ve just skimmed a few photos or have been following my adventures with intense scrutiny, thank you for reading, and I hope you found it worthwhile. Merci beaucoup et à la prochaine! 

West African Sunset 

Cute Overload

So, maybe you thought that just because I'm single and childless I wouldn't be churning out look-at-this-baby posts, but I'm here today to tell you about Fatou. Fatou is adorable. That is just a fact. She’s chubby and boisterous and as gregarious as a person can be without being able to actually talk yet. Now that she’s old enough to not forget me every time I leave for a few days, she likes to come over stand in the doorway of my hut, waving "bye-bye" and chattering away in baby Pulaar.

A few weeks ago, at the Tuesday lumo market, her grandmother bought her a new complet outfit and her mom, Mariama Kesso, bathed her, dressed her, doused her in baby powder, and brought her by for an impromptu photo shoot before she had a chance to get it all dirty.

Look how cute this baby is. Cute and smart and sassy. She's got the adorability trifecta going on. I cannot even handle it.

Costa Rica comes to Senegal

Nisha finished Peace Corps in Costa Rica and then came to visit her sister/my friend Emily in Dakar for a few weeks. While she was in country she caught a ride down to Kédougou and I had the pleasure of showing her around Salémata. The ride out was dusty and slow, but we made it, and after a crash course in Pulaar greetings I put her to work painting names on bowls for my host moms. 

We spent a lot of time comparing Peace Corps service in Costa Rica and Senegal, and there were a striking number of similarities. For instance, the roads are terrible, public transport is difficult, host families can be wonderful, acronyms abound, and you eat the same thing every day.

Candid under the mango tree

We spent some quality time with my host family, took the obligatory snapshot in front of the absurd castle that a creepy French man built, had much with my friend Maimouna, and threw rocks at trees in a middling attempt to knock down a few mangoes. 

Having just done her own Close-of-Service, she was really understanding of the miscellaneous loose ends I had to wrap up and gamely hung around during my last work-related meeting. I'd asked my host father to call the meeting so that I could thank everyone who'd participated in the latrine project, solicit feedback and suggestions, and distribute the bars of soap and plastic screening that I'd purchased with the last bit of the project money. (The plastic screening was to replace the metal screening on the ventilation pipes, which already seemed to be rusting on some of the latrines; the soap was a last plug for hand-washing and a token of thanks for all their hard work.) It also gave me a chance to start my good-byes, explain how I would be replaced by another volunteer, and talk about what an honor it's been to spend these last two years with the people of Salémata.

The next morning we day-hiked out to Ethiolo, a nearby Bassari village, and walked around, greeting people, stopping in at the Health Post, and hanging out with RPCV Tatiana's former host family. They invited us to stay for lunch, and then we stayed for tea, and then we stayed to sample some of the local palm wine. Nisha scored big points by offering a giant cup of palm wine to two older ladies on the compound, and then we headed back to Salémata to check out the market.

It was a Tuesday, and Tuesday is Salémata's market day. Everyone comes out for the market, and we ran into all of my host moms, including Mariama, who was selling vegetables and palm oil. 

I feel like Nisha got a really good sampler of all of the things that I do while in village. It was really fun to have her around, she was up for eating out of a communal bowl and carrying water on her head, and really nice to have PCV there for all the acronym talk about COS forms and DOS reports and SPA grants and getting NCI and being an RPCV. There was downtime, day-hikes, work stuff, market day, lunches with friends, and little kids piling in to my hut to ask for photos and band-aids.  

Sajou Ba gets a band-aid for a small scrape on his head. 

Afterwards, I realized that taking her on a tour of all my favorite parts of my life in Salémata was also a really wonderful way for me to revisit the things and people that defined and enriched my Peace Corps service. It was lovely to take some time to really just enjoy being in Salémata before beginning the bittersweet process of saying my final good-byes and I'm so glad that her visit gave me an occasion to do so.

Maternal and Child Health Training: The Last of the Work Stuff

In March the maternal and child health training for "Neighborhood Aunts"that we've been trying to get off the ground for months actually happened, and despite some communications difficulties (the cell phone network went down for a week and a half) it went really well. “Neighborhood Aunts” are women who have been selected by their villages to serve as point people for disseminating important health information and encouraging healthy behaviors. Because they live and work in the community they are ideally placed to serve as health resources and can encourage healthy behaviors, such as attending pre-natal visits and seeking early treatment for malaria. 

For the most part, the midwives would lead a discussion or lecture, and then the women would break into small groups to practice leading health talks and having conversations about a given topic. Then, one by one, they would practice leading a health talk with the whole group, and the midwives would add or correct things as needed. The training was based on the "Neighborhood Aunt" curriculum laid out by the Senegalese Ministry of Health, and the schedule went like this:

Day One

·        Orientation and discussion of roles

·        The importance of advocating for ante-natal care

·        Pre-natal visits, attended births, post-natal visits, and miscarriage

·        Family planning and reproductive health

Day Two

·        The importance of advocating for child health (0-5 Years)

·        Vaccinations, seeking early treatment for illness and injuries

·        Community mobilization methods, implicating community leaders

·        Creating and managing community health funds

           

Day Three

·        Planning, implementation, following up, and reporting activities

·        The importance of the "Neighborhood Aunt"

·        Evaluation and distribution of monthly activity reporting forms

·        Review and closure

There were also group discussion about why maternal health is important, and the participating women spoke frankly and passionately about how women are often undervalued or seen as replaceable, and how that needs to change. They had the chance to ask all sorts of questions, talk about the reasons that people in their communities wait until the last minute to seek medical care, to discuss why some people are opposed to family planning, and to reaffirm the importance of having "Neighborhood Aunts" in a village.

The Community Center where the training was held is also where local youth can take vocational courses for trades like tailoring and catering, so the lunch and coffee break prep for our training also served as a practicum for a group of catering students. It was really fun to hang out during lunch and coffee breaks, both because the people serving the food were intent on showing off their skills and because all of the women were so obviously delighted at being served a fancy lunch that they didn't have to make from scratch themselves. I think it made them feel important, which made the training feel more important, too.

Once the chairs were rented, the radio announcements made, and the lunches all paid for, my main role was just to sit in the back of the room, taking pictures, occasionally holding fussy babies, and nodding approvingly whenever anyone looked over at me. About half the participants came from other villages, took three whole days out their lives, to attend the training, and it was great to see most of them really enjoying the training, asking good questions and taking their role very seriously. Best of all, the midwives were really pleased, and after the training wrapped up they talked and talked about how to best implicate the newly-qualified "Neighborhood Aunts" in their attended birth and pre-natal visit promotion activities. 

Cups and Kettles

Diabou is now the second-youngest kid on my compound. She’s taciturn, obstinate, and small for her age. She doesn't like new people and refused to acknowledged my existence for my first three months at site. She has a big head and little arms and thick, slightly bowed legs, like a tyrannosaurus. She understands things just fine, but frequently pretends to have not heard when people tell her what to do, and she doesn't speak very often. When she does talk, it’s in this raspy, high-pitched little mouse voice, like a gravel-filled squeaky toy come to life.

Obviously, she is my favorite.

After the initial cold shoulder she warmed to me, and now we're friends. She sits on my feet when I'm trying to read, delivers little piles of mango leaves to my doorstep, brings me her peanuts to shell because she knows I don't like raw peanuts and will not keep a portion for myself.

She calls me “Ada” and she's taken to padding into my hut in the early mornings to perch silently on the corner of my bed and watch me boil water, attempt to sent texts, organize the junk on my table, whatever I happen to be doing. Sometimes after lunch I'll let her come in and play around, like this:

She spent about thirty minutes pouring water back and forth, seeing how high she could lift the pouring cup and swishing things around. She spilled a lot, but nothing disappears faster than water off a cement floor in hot season, so I didn't mind. Also, it was kind of mesmerizing, like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Coloring

No matter where they come from, pretty much all kids like to draw and color, and while coloring they like to say “Look! Hey! Hey, look! Hey, look, look here! Look! Hey! Look!” until you look over and say “Oh, that’s great! Good job! You’re so good at coloring!” Also, there always seems to be a kid who gets all bent out of shape if another kid loses a marker cap or puts the crayons back differently, and there’s always a littler one who sneaks in to gnaw on the crayons and chew off the marker tips.

I really like that coloring has become part of my routine at site. Kids, mostly host siblings and neighbors, show up in groups of three to six and ask for the mat and books and crayons and markers, and then they're usually pretty content to just sit there and color for an hour or so. Then, someone's mom will call them home, or it'll be time to fetch water or help with dinner prep or play soccer, and they roll up the mat and return all the supplies.

All this coloring has largely been made possible by Troll, my friend and fellow Camp Unalayee alum, has been sending wonderful packages filled with band-aids, ointment, embroidery thread, paper, and markers. My friends and American family have sent paper and markers and all sorts of fun stuff, too, and I've given some of the art supplies to my host siblings and their friends, kept some in my hut for the little kids to use a few times a week, and stashed some in my trunk so I’ll be able to give them as a going-away present next month. 

Fatoumata Bineta Souare

While I was away in Thiès and Saraya last month, my youngest host mom, Kade, had her third baby. I knew she was pregnant but hadn't realized that she was that far along, and was disappointed that I missed the baptism. Of course, I still brought some baby gifts over to her hut - a soft blanket, some fancy soap, a pretty new shirt, and a baby outfit in a little purple bag – and she told me that she’d wanted to name the baby after my mother in America, but when she was visiting everyone just called her “Neene Adama,” literally “Adama’s mom,” and so no one was completely sure how to pronounce or write her actual name, so they named the baby Fatoumata Bineta instead. Maybe next time, though, if she has another daughter.

(Father Sadat and big sister Diabou; new baby girl Fatoumata Bineta; mother Kade)

Bows & Arrows

While he was visiting my village my brother and I walked over to the market area and on our way back we saw some boys playing under the trees. I thought "Huh, it looks like they're shooting arrows in the air." As it happened, that was indeed what they were doing. Not real arrows with tips or anything, just little stick bows and little arrow sticks and bits of cloth or twine as a drawstring. 

They were all cheerful and super proud of their bows, so we reminded them to be careful (wouldn't want to put an eye out, after all) and then obliged them and took some pictures, which they immediately viewed and declared to be very very nice. (Made me I wish I had a bigger screen on my digital camera.)

Once I get back to America I'll develop these photos, along with a whole bunch of other ones (it is excessively costly to develop photos here) and then send them to my village care of one of the other PCVs in the region. It's odd, to think that I'll be leaving here in a few short months, but it's reassuring to remember that there will still be volunteers around - my replacement, my PCV neighbors - to pass on letters and photos and greet the family. 

Snacktime for the Kiddos

The kids on our compound are really adorable. Much more so than most kids. They do have their disgusting moments - the runny noses, the peeing on my lap, the grubby little hands trying to shove gnawed-on biscuits into my mouth - but they're funny and affectionate and they listen when I tell them that I'm busy and they have to go play somewhere else. They're also healthy. My host dad once worked as a community health worker and one of my host sisters is training to be a matrone, which is a kind of birth attendant/women's health worker, and I think that helps. It also helps that he's the traditional village chief and the family has enough corn and rice to go around.

Some people in our area have some pretty unsettling ideas about maternal health, such as the all-too-common misconception that pregnant women shouldn't eat too many vegetables and fruits because vitamins will make the baby fat and cause a difficult birth. Very few women go to all four of the recommended pre-natal visits and many don't make it to any at all. Thankfully, while she was pregnant my host sister made a point of going to all her appointments, of drinking lots of milk, and of eating as well as is possible in our area. She practiced exclusive breastfeeding during those early months  (which is particularly important in areas with unreliably potable drinking water), made really nutritious weaning/supplementation porridges, and ensured that Fatou, her daughter, got all her vaccinations on time. And it shows. It really, really shows. 

Afternoon snack for Fatou and Sajou

Fatou just turned one, she's walking (and dancing, in her wobbly little way), and is quite a bit taller and bigger than a lot of two-year-olds in town. People are always saying that she's "all cheeks" because she has such a chubby little baby face, which is exactly how toddlers are supposed to look. In an area where it's not uncommon to see little kids with the brittle, orange-tinged hair that signals chronic malnutrition, she has dark, thick hair that's already long enough to braid. As a Health PCV I could do a thousand talks about proper nutrition and healthy weaning foods and the importance of vaccinations and still not make as convincing of a case for improved nutrition and preventative care and Fatou and her chubby cheeks do simply by existing.

Winter Morning Delivery

Last week the last of the materials (the PVC pipes for ventilation) were delivered to my host fmaily's compound. The truck showed up really early - I had just woken up and was still sitting around my hut, wearing my warm socks and waiting for water to heat up when I heard it rumbling up the path. 

PVC pipes being delivered

I was happy to see them being unloaded and got out my camera to document the occasion, so of course the little kids (who are always up early and full of energy) bounded over, as much to gawk at the truck as to pester me for pictures. I complied, even though I hadn't had any coffee yet. Mankaba took a dozen pictures, mostly of his feet, but also of me and Sajou, and of my arm and Sajou and Daouda. Then Daouda took about a dozen photos of the back of Mankaba's head and then Mankaba told him to stop it and then I said "Ok, that's enough." and padded back to my hut for breakfast and to get properly dressed.

"Ok, that's enough, give it back now."