"Adama"

My American name is LaRocha ("la-rock-a"), but my Senegalese name is Adama. I have a number of tokorabe (people with my same name) around Salémata. I've gotten used to it, more or less, but for several months it was profoundly weird. 

It took me awhile to really identify as "Adama," and once I actually started to feel like it was my name I couldn't really get my head around how a bunch of other people also had my name. That has never happened to me before. Ever. In my entire life. It's funny, I spent a significant part of my childhood wishing that I had a name that other people had (specifically so that I could have a personalized toothbrush and name stickers) and then when I finally did it was oddly disconcerting. 

Adama and Friends

I've gotten used to it, though, and have come to appreciate some of the perks of having a normal, phonetic, immediately understood name. Greetings and mundane daily interactions are smoother and less complicated, and when people read my name off a list they don't hesitate and look around, blinking and uncomfortable, for a few seconds before attempting to say it aloud. They laugh, sometimes, amused that such an obvious foreigner would go by such a Senegalese name, but it's always friendly and often leads to questions about my family same (Souaré, "soo-are-ay") and where I live and if my family is in peace. 


Also, sometimes people are extra nice to their tokora, which is arbitrary but pleasant, and I'm not one to argue if the peanut butter lady or the bean sandwich lady wants to give me an extra spoonful just because I'm her tokora.

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!

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.

My First 100 Days

A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast about a lady who wrote a book about Obama's mom, and it occurred to me that I was about to complete my first one hundred days in Senegal. Here are a few of the my early in-country achievements:

My language has advanced to the point where I can say "Hello Mother! I am going to with lunch Taki's friend here. There. There. I am going to lunch. Is not here, me, lunching. Lunch? To eat. With Taki from Etiolo. Friend of Taki house here. Ok? Thank you! Thank you much much much! At afternoon ok!"

All of the little kids in my neighborhood have stopped calling me "Toubab!" and started calling me "Adama!"

I built a little barrier at the base of my hut's back door so that the rat who has been digging a hole in my wall can't scamper in while I'm trying to enjoy my morning coffee.

I have established myself as the Resident Facepainter at the Regional House.

Diabou, the ten-month-old who was initially extremely suspicious about me as a person, has finally warmed up to me and now calls me "Ada!" and waves and gives me brisk little handshakes.

I new have a faint Chacos foot-tan and approximately two dozen new freckles, most of them on my ankles. 

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!

I Love Panoramas.

This is the view of the main cooking/eating/lounging area of the Souaré compound. My hut is off to the right. I spend a lot of time sitting around under this mango tree, smiling at people and trying to keep up with conversations. (Which is still really hard, and pretty tiring mentally, so I also tend to spend a lot of time zoning out and watching the chickens and goats running around getting into things.) For the first week or so I would sit around here with my host moms and drink the super-sweet tea that is so popular in Senegal, but I started to worry about my teeth melting from so much exposure to what is basically hot sugar syrup (also it kinda gives me a stomachache most of the time) so now I just sit around, shelling peanuts and pointing at the goats and saying goats! and so on.

Below is the closest well to my house. I am not so great at sloshing the bucket around to get it to fill up in an efficient way (also I don't have my own bucket on a rope and don't like having to go around asking to borrow one even though no one would mind at all) so I walk to the forage pump on other side of the field, at the elementary school, and pump my water there.

I generally pump one or two 15-liter buckets of water every day in village. I use a bucket with a lid, and I fill it up, strap it to the back of my bike, and ride/walk it back across the field and up the little hill to my hut. Even though most women (and many children) pull and haul a lot more water than that, a lot farther than that, and without the assistance of a bike, everyone clucks and says I am très brave to be fetching water all by myself.

Back to Salémata

It's been a busy morning, but I got all my paperwork printed off, picked up most of the stuff on my shopping list, and am ready to head back out to village for a few weeks.

Other than some serious laptop issues, it's been a very nice little visit to town. It was good to have a change of scenery, eat some pasta and ice-cold pineapple soda, and I had a good time staying with Melanie, one of the volunteers who lives right right near the Kédougou Regional House. Now a couple of us are just hanging out for a few hours, waiting for the next car back to Salémata to round up enough people to justify making the trip out to village.

I'll be back in wifi-territory by the end of the month, take care 'til then ~

Mislearnings Etc

For most of last week a trainee up north thought she was constantly telling her homestay family how much she liked things, but she was actually just saying "peanut butter" a lot.

Similarly, it's been really hot this week, and a trainee in my language group kept saying "teranga," which means "hospitality," until we realized that she thought it meant "it's hot!"

Overall, we had a pretty good couple days back in the village, and I'm back at the Training Center in Thiès now. It's still pretty hot, so I'm going to go sit somewhere and read and sweat until I'm ready to take a shower.

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!