You Know You've Been In Village Too Long When...

• You start using Pulaar word order and phrasing with English words: 

"If tomorrow comes, I'll go. If God wills it"  

"Rain came!"     

"Where shoes your are?"

• Your hair falls out in chunks, which doesn't help support your claim that its not a weave or a wig: "really- look, I can't take it off, its attached to my head- oh, well, not that piece..."

• A volunteer says they are looking up how to do an exorcism in order to fix the jinn (genie spirit thing) in the regional house computer and you think its a great idea

• You crave sweet, hot tea every day at 4pm every day (even if it is over 110°)

• You have no idea what legs even look like anymore

• You associate the smell of burning plastic and dung-fueled fires with home

• You sleep through the 5 am call to prayer and the numerous yells of goats, sheep, roosters, and donkeys but wake up from coma-like sleep if you hear anything related to water

• You think you'd look good in cornrows

• Anything- tin can, book, rock, stick- can be your pillow for a midday nap

Probably only people from my region will understand this, but I think its a decent representation of the random things that are important in my life these days. 

In other news, I'll be spending a month in America starting June 27th! Clearly I've been spending a lot of time being integrated to village life and I think I deserve a good dose of America. And as much as I appreciated Ramadan last year and had a great experience, I'm going to bow out this year. 

Well, so...

I've been wanting to use that clip on my blog forever. I think it captures the ambiguity involved in Peace Corps work. I know you have all thought at one time or another, "ohh, so she's a Peace Corps volunteer! So, uh, that means..." And I have definitely thought to myself, "wait, what is it that I do here?" over the past year. Before I got here, I really really didn't know what I was getting myself into going to do here.

It's taken me a while to write this post because I've been waiting to have a marginally substantial answer. I've written a bit about nutrition work in this sappy post and talked about Peace Corps goals 2 and 3 in this post, but I haven't really said much about what kind of work (goal 1 work, that is) a Health Extension Volunteer does.

Naturally, the work you do here varies by person, by site, and by country. Peace Corps is, by nature and design, both a top down and bottom up organization. Its essence is grassroots on-site work with Peace Corps Volunteers identifying and filling needs, mostly through building the capacity of host country nationals. After all, Peace Corps goal 1 is "to help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women." But Peace Corps is also (increasingly, I believe) working as a top-down organization. We are trained in specific areas and assessed in our completion of tasks. I am a health extension volunteer, so I am given a framework with three goals relating to malaria, maternal and child health, and water and sanitation. A total of 31 indicators mark and track my progress towards completion of these framework goals. Some people love the rigidity of the top down aspect, some people hate it. As a pre-med who majored in Gender and Sexuality Studies, I'm fairly used to sometimes contradictory forms of experience expression or the often messy intersections of quantitative and qualitative data. I guess I'd say I enjoy the way Peace Corps is structured these days. Tangential trajectories aside, this is the situation a Peace Corps volunteer starts with.

Then you are dropped in the middle of nowhere with a village of very nice complete strangers and you go from there.

These are things I have done or am working on right now:

Case de Sante (also called a Health Hut)

Getting the Case de Sante* up and running is my primary work in village. I took a long time to start this because I wanted to feel out my village's commitment and make sure the project would live on far beyond my time here. Up until now I've been working with the health workers (called relais) on their duties, just without a functioning central structure. Luckily, I have a wonderful village and great relais and we are finally really ready to get the Case open. I will be posting a "before" picture soon, hopefully followed by an "after" in a few months. Materially, we need furniture, paint, basic medications,and  trees and an outdoor structure for shade. Functionally, we need the relais to come to work every day and we need the village to be aware of us as a reliable resource. (Opening day party? I think so.)

Causeries, Weighings, and a Hearth Model

As I mentioned above, I have been working with the relais on the usual Case duties even though we don't have a functioning Case. The biggest part of this was getting the Health Committee in my village to communicate with each other and the village, an ever ongoing project. Information transmission seems to be extremely difficult in Senegalese culture, and it's not just me or because my language is bad. I can't tell you how many times people have complained to me about not hearing about things. "O tinani kam" ("s/he didn't inform me") is one of the most common phrases in my host mom's vocabulary. So, one of the first things we started was monthly meetings for the Health Committee to plan all of the monthly activities together. It has worked fairly well, but is still a struggle to keep it regular and we are still working on the best way to inform the village about activities. Hopefully having a working structure where we can base our efforts will help those problems in the future.

Once we do have a schedule set, things go fairly smoothly. We have about two causeries each month on topics like exclusive breastfeeding, diarrhea, family planning and nutrition. We have monthly baby weighings  and every three months we go house to house for arm band measurements. We schedule in regional and national events like vaccinations and bed net distributions. We are struggling on the consultation side and many women go to our Poste de Sante for birth control instead of talking to our relais, again something that should hopefully improve with an open Case.

SeneGAD

I am pleased to announce that I have recently been elected as the Senegal Gender and Development Board (SeneGAD) President! The elections occurred at SeneGAD's 6th annual West African Gender and Development Conference coupled with the quarterly SeneGAD meeting, both held in Thies. See, you thought that majoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies would never come in handy! Far from it! I have found a position amazingly, beautifully, fantastically tailored to my interests and experiences and I couldn't be happier.

For more on SeneGAD, visit http://senegad.wordpress.com/

So far as president I organized a radio broadcast of Senegalese Peace Corps staff talking about women's issues for International Women's Day. The spot was recorded in three different languages and sent out to PCVs for use on their local radio. Here is me and SeneGAD Communications Coordinator Juliana at our radio in Ourossogui.

It was sunny out

Next up is the April Quarterly Meeting, a GrassrootSoccer partnership training, the Michele Sylvester Scholarships and a whole bunch of other things I'll save for another post.

Girls Camp

March 27th-31st is the Matam region's annual Girls Camp! All of the Matam volunteers invite girls from our villages to a five day camp in Ogo where we talk about staying in school, goal setting, reproductive health, domestic violence, and life skills. We also do fun stuff like making collages and friendship bracelets, doing dance routines, and watching movies. These are topics that girls here almost never get to explore or learn about and it is a favorite Peace Corps experience for many volunteers. I am co-coordinator this year and I can't wait for it to happen. Stay tuned for a blog post about this special event.

Malaria Tourney

Before I know it, its going to be June with Ramadan and after that July with rainy season. A fellow PCV and I are currently writing a grant to visit up to 10 villages to talk to people about bed nets, rapid diagnostic tests, signs of simple and grave malaria, and precautions to take when you are pregnant.

Trees

If you have seen any pictures of my village or of Northeast Senegal in general, you know that there are few to no trees. I started a moringa intensive bed at my Case de Sante and will be working on a 400 tree pepiniere for the Case and the elementary school soon. Getting trees to grow in the desert is a serious undertaking so this is a pretty big project for me.

Well Project

I have talked to some people about a well project in my village and as eager as I am to improve water sanitation and village hygiene practices, this one is going on the back burner for now. I may return to it next winter depending on how everything else goes, or I may leave it for my replacement.

Books

I read a LOT in village. When I am at my busiest, my work includes house to house tourneys, village meetings, and travel here and there for supplies. It can be exhausting, but some days it can really only take a few hours... for example, if I have a big meeting in village it is a big deal and can mean a lot of progress, but that only happens every couple months and it only really takes 3-4 hours. I have 20-21 more hours to kill that day. I do other village-y things like pull water, water my plants, and sew blankets but I also do a lot of reading. My book count since May is around 40.


Whew. Well, this list will probably change (and hopefully grow) as I go on, but hopefully it gave you a taste for the kinds of things a health volunteer can do in Peace Corps Senegal. Back to village now to keep working!




*The Case de Sante is a fixture of the health system that works on the village level. Larger towns and cities have hospitals that can do surgeries, have more complex equipment and have trained doctors. The next rung down is the Poste de Sante, present in towns and usually overseeing a large local area (my local Poste is 4km away and covers 11 other villages around us) and is staffed by what we would consider a nurse. They organize vaccination tourneys, treat minor wounds, have consultations, have a maternity ward staffed by a trained midwife, prescribe medications and have an attached pharmacy. The Health Hut/Case de Sante is the lowest health structure present in some villages (but not all) and staffed by volunteers trained in basic health issues. The Case is supposed to diagnose and treat the most common ailments found in village, such as diarrhea or malaria, do baby weighings and monitor malnutrition, consult on family planning, and give health demonstrations (causeries). I say that a Case is "supposed" to do these things because while the model makes sense, getting everything actually functioning can be a challenge. There are breakdowns in the system at every level (don't even get me started about the medication distribution clusterfuck) but especially when the entire structure relies on volunteers like a Case does, reliable work can be tricky. 

Wait, what am I doing here?

I haven’t written in a long time, I know, I’m sorry. I have a million ideas for posts building up in my head, but for starters, I wanted to update everyone on what I have been up to recently.

Now, Peace Corps has three goals that summarize the mission of the organization and the work of volunteers all over the world. Impressively, these goals have remained unchanged for the entirety of Peace Corps’ existence, which speaks to the purity and long-term utility of the goals. They are:

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served 

3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans

I am going to have to be a bit more organized in order to write a blog of my work towards goal number one. This is what is typically considered the ‘work’ portion of my service, in the most literal American sense. I talked a little bit about the hearth project I did in my last post, but I promise a more extensive account will be coming soon.

Apologies and excuses aside, I wanted to write a bit about the work I have been doing towards goals two and three recently. The cultural and diplomatic exchange that is embodied in these goals often gets overlooked. We are Americans, and work with billable hours and quantifiable outputs is typically the only currency of productiveness that we accept. Even within Peace Corps we have to twist to turn our experiences into numbers so that Washington can understand our value and work as volunteers. (If this sounds a bit ridiculous to you, it should. If it doesn't, please read my last post and let me know how to best express that in numbers.)  

My service thus far has gone a long way to change my views on this, to say the least. A large portion of my job is earning the trust and support of my community, which is completely necessary and sounds great, but in reality it translates to a lot of sitting, a lot of drinking tea, a lot of simple conversations. At first, like most any American, this drove me crazy. Where was my desk? My checklist for the day? My papers, my completed reports and activities? What was I doing? But then, slowly, I learned the value of sitting with my family by the fire, of holding babies, and making fun of the middle school boys with the middle school girls. I've embraced goals two and three whole-heartedly recently, and I've had an amazing time doing it. I've accepted at this point in my service (almost a year in!) the truth that my village will give me far more than I will give them.

I still hope, however, that even if my more tangible projects fail I will have been a  positive representation of America and Americans. With foreign wars, cultural ignorance and misguided giving, there are a lot of things going against the American image these days. Every country immediately surrounding Senegal has been closed to Peace Corps volunteers because it is no longer safe for Americans to be there. My village is in a corner of Senegal bordered by Mauritania and Mali, and when groups from those countries come to Senegal looking for supporters, I want people in my area to remember me. I want them not to remember me for a well I built or money I gave for scholarships, but for kindness and for the fact that I cared to get to know them and learn their ways. And I want to help people back home learn a bit of what I have been so fortunate to learn so far. I am already a changed person because of this country and my work here, and I want to share as much as I possibly can of the wonderful or even the awful parts of my service and my experiences here. Thus, the cultural exchange portion of my service will probably be the most important thing I do here. Whenever I feel alone, or like I'm not getting through to people, or projects are moving slowly or not at all, when I ask myself "wait, what am I doing here?" this is the answer. 

The things I do each day and each week are small. They don't seem like much and to the busy people reading this they probably seem even smaller. But everything I do adds up to the person I am and the person my village gets to know. This week to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans and to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served I:

Learned how to draw water from the well

 Got way better at balancing water on my head

Learned a complicated sewing stitch from my aunt

Finished sewing a mobula, which is used to carry a baby on your back, and I am sending it to my cousins in America for their new baby. I don't exactly expect them to use it that way, but it totally still counts as cultural exchange. 

In addition, I do have to also report that I went on a rather heavenly vacation in St. John in the USVI with my family for Christmas. To bring bits of Senegal to them, I gave my family Senegalese gifts for Christmas- Pulaar knives carried by herders (called gaynaakos) for the boys, a purse woven by artisans in St Louis for my sister, a skirt-scarf for my mother, a blanket for my grandparents. In addition, I had American-style clothes made out of Senegalese fabric (in this case, it was actually from Cote d'Ivoire) for the whole family

And then I made one of my favorite traditional meals for my family, maafe gerte (with way more meat than I would ever get in village)

Which my family enthusiastically ate with their hands, kneeling on the ground. 

It was a pretty great success of cultural exchange. I hope you all enjoyed this quick update on some things I've been doing and why it matters. If you have any ideas on how else I can accomplish goals two and three or you want to participate with me somehow, let me know!