Malaria. I’m guessing this is one of those diseases you’ve
heard of. You know it impacts many people all over the world, especially in
sub-Saharan Africa, but you probably don’t have any personal experience with
it.
I was in that same boat until I came to Senegal. My first
rainy season in village was relatively mild, and as a result my community kept
telling me that cases of malaria were way down from normal levels. I had no
comparison, so I took their word for it. Then, this most recent rainy season
(about July – October), I finally realized what they meant.
My health hut serves mainly my village of about 700 people.
In the month of September we had 43 cases of malaria, October 55, and November
73. SEVENTY-THREE! To say that malaria is a problem here is a gross
understatement, and Senegal has one of the lowest rates among sub-Saharan
African countries thanks to many of the interventions present here.
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| Collection of malaria tests at the health hut |
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| View of our health hut log |
Thankfully, many of the people in my village have started to
seek out a malaria test & receive treatment before the case gets severe, in
part due to the work that my health workers and I have done to sensitize people
in the village. Yet Malaria is still the #1 cause of death in Senegal. Around
the world, malaria still kills more than 1 million people each year, and over
90% of these deaths occur in Africa. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the leading
economists helping to fight against poverty, estimates that malaria costs
Africa around $12Billion in lost productivity each year as a result of people
missing work.
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| Sadio Ba in his typical window perch at our health hut, waiting for patients |
All of these statistics are shocking, yet sometimes it still
feels like the work we do is just a drop in the bucket of a much larger
problem. And THEN, people in your family get malaria. When my sister-in-law
Oumou got malaria for the 3rd time this rainy season, or my younger
brother Mahamadou had to miss school because he got malaria, it became
personal. The statistics are shocking, and the personal impact on my host
family is heart wrenching. For these reasons, malaria work is a major focus of
my Peace Corps service and I try to approach it in a variety of activities!
Hosting informational talks and events in my village is a
wonderful way to get people together to learn information from the health
workers. At the beginning of rainy season, we hosted a net care & repair
event so that people could pull out their dusty mosquito nets and get them
ready for malaria season.
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| My host mom washing her mosquito net! |
My health club continues to be one of my favorite activities
in village and a great way to disseminate important health information to kids.
We recently started up again now that school has reopened, and our first
activity was to make dream banners. The kids drew 5 mini-banners: family,
favorite activity, self-portrait, something they want to try, and future
profession. They string these up and then hang them inside their mosquito nets
to have sweet dreams about their futures while safely protected from mosquitoes!
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| Dream Banners! (Taking this photo was a ridiculous amount of work...) |
Also, during my service, Peace Corps Senegal created a
malaria committee called Stomp Senegal to inspire and motivate more PCVs in
Senegal to participate in malaria work. I was fortunate to serve as the
regional representative when the committee was first formed, and then 6 months
later was voted in as President of this committee. One of the things that our
committee recently did was organize a series of mini-boot camp trainings where
volunteers brought counterparts in to the regional capital and received an
updated and intensive malaria training. I was fortunate to come with Sadio Ba,
my main work counterpart!
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| Sadio Ba & I creating a malaria action plan for our village! |
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| A malaria mural painted at my health hut thanks to PCVs Lianna, Brian, Dario, & Devin (I helped a little too!) |
All of this work and the malaria work being done by
volunteers all over Senegal are making a huge impact on the malaria burden
here. We have a lofty goal to reach pre-elimination in Senegal by 2018, but with hard work, community integration, and the continued support of NGO’s and programs from around the world, this can be a reality.
Thanks for reading!
Peace & love, Lindsay
