A Health Club in Action

Well I’ve officially hit the milestone of 1 year in Senegal! It truly is amazing how quickly time flies, especially when I am so absorbed in throwing myself into this amazing work and culture while I have the chance.

One thing I knew from the beginning of my service is that I really wanted to work with kids. Kids just have such a fresh and fun energy that I love being around. After attending the malaria conference in December, I was inspired by the health club that a volunteer from Namibia started. So, I returned to site and decided to start my own. My principal was on board with the idea and pretty much gave me free reign.

I decided to work with just the 3 older classes of students out of the 6 at my school. There are NO extracurricular activities at the school, so the concept of a health club was a bit unusual to the students, but after explaining the idea, I had about 40 students sign up! And since the program is after school, I can run the entire thing in Pulaar. School is conducted in French, but since the kids are learning French at the same time that they are receiving instruction in that language, they are not as comfortable conversationally. It was important for me with health club that we spoke Pulaar so the kids could freely express their thoughts.

My one main concern about starting this health club was that I don’t really run the club with a counterpart – it is just the students and me. I know that, from a sustainability standpoint, this means the club will likely end as soon as I leave my community. However, not long ago, I was fortunate to receive a visit from a delegation from Peace Corps HQ in Washington DC who was in Senegal and visited a few volunteer sites. I brought up my concern, and one of the people from the delegation said to me something to the effect of “Sometimes volunteers get caught up in the idea of sustainability, and so if they don’t have a counterpart they don’t do certain ideas or projects. Just remember that education in itself is sustainable, and that is exactly what you are passing on to these kids.” It was one of those A-HA moments, and that sentiment has really stuck with me.

Using paint, bread, and "flies" to demonstrate food contamination

Each Tuesday, I gather my health club (usually about 20-25 attendees) for whatever activity we have planned that week. We started with a session about food contamination where we used paint and these hilarious flies I crafted out of construction paper and pipe cleaners to demonstrate how flies touch dirty things and contaminate our food. I think wasting a loaf of bread by covering it with paint was not something they had seen before, but it led to a good discussion on how to keep our food and water clean.

The next week we talked about what happens when we drink unclean water, and how to prevent diarrhea, a common health issue here, from causing further health problems.

Recently we’ve been doing a few sessions on hand washing. The school has newly built toilet facilities but no water source. I asked the students what they do then when they have to go to the bathroom. For pee, it’s just the squat and air-dry method. But for poop, when the answer I got was “Sometimes we use sticks” and “Then we just go back to class”, I knew something had to be done.

After a little research and a test batch at the PC regional house, we made homemade soap as a club!

  

Stirring the soap mixture

Showing the difference washing hands with soap vs. just water

Letting the final product set-up

Once the soap was dry, we built handwashing stations in front of the toilets at the school and provided the principal with the bars of soap.

The boys were super into cutting the sticks, probably because they
were in love with my Leatherman tool (thanks Uncle Dick!)

Putting the final touches on our "Tip-Tap" handwashing station

The club has been a big source of pride for the kids. We often have a group of other students outside the windows of the classroom peering in and wondering what we are doing. And unfortunately, due to my somewhat erratic schedule, there are a lot of weeks when we have to take breaks. But each time a kid says to me “Weli, you’re teaching us today, right?” I am reminded how awesome my job is here.

Our health club with a finished handwashing station!

Next lessons with the health club include personal fitness/exercise, healthy teeth (thanks to you who sent toothbrushes!) and a malaria curriculum that incorporates soccer.  I’ve got so many more ideas, but at least there’s still next year!

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

First Trip to Africa: A Guest Blog by Ken & Vicki Swisher

Well as I'm sure everyone knows because I couldn't stop talking about it, my mom & dad just came to visit me here in Senegal. I've asked them to blog a bit about their experiences.

KEN/DAD

We arrived in Senegal and were met at the airport by Lindsay, thank goodness. We were accosted by young men, some with partial English, wanting to befriend us. With Lindsay's help we pretty much avoided them as we discovered they only wanted money for directing us, unloading our bags, or whatever they could think of. Then we got to the Budget rental car office to find no one was there.

Budget Office at the airport

A call was made and a few minutes later a nice man came and unlocked the door to a small room that constituted the Budget office. He indicated that no one told him we were coming. All that aside, he took care of our need and provided us with a Ford Focus, complete with more dents than any car I've ever owned, and that's saying a lot.

My first impression of Senegal after leaving the airport was the mass of humanity everywhere, what appeared to be extreme poverty, and a lot of trash.

View out the car as we left the airport

 As we drove to Tambacounda, Lindsay would indicate we were approaching a "major" town or village. Outside of each was a large trash area from the town, and the town itself consisted of small stands, dirt, horse drawn carts (charettes), lots of people, and vehicles all crammed into one place. The magnitude of dirt, poverty, and trash was a bit overwhelming.

Roadside stands

On to Lindsay's village. We were greeted by virtually everyone in her host family as well as others who she works with. What a welcoming, friendly, and warm group of people. They all made us feel like a part of their family.

Greetings as we arrived

Lindsay's host uncle lives in France and only comes to the village for about 2 months a year. He has built his own hut including tile floors, two outdoor patios, electricity powered by a solar panel, and a facility in back that has running water, a western-style flush toilet, a normal shower, and electric lights. Compared to Lindsay's hut, and those of the other villagers, we were in a mansion.

Our hut for the trip

Backyard of the hut

Lindsay's more simple accommodations

I was so impressed with their warmth and simplicity, and the fact that they seemed to have accepted Lindsay as a part of their village family. They kept telling us that she was Senegalese now and would not be coming home. Lindsay disagrees, as do we. While living in what we would likely describe as abject poverty, these individuals seemed happy and content in their lives. The children played and laughed. The adults socialized and worked with what appeared to be complete acceptance of their environment. The simplicity of their lives was refreshing.

The elementary school in the village consists of 4 rooms in 2 separate buildings. The buildings have no electricity or running water. There was a hand pump installed by some group, but the handle was broken so water was hand drawn from a nearby well.Everything at this time of the year was dirt and dust, which we understand turns to mud during rainy season.

Elementary school kids

Handing out school supplies to the staff of the school

One classroom is still held in a hut because there is no space in the building for them

The middle school was a 10-15 minute bicycle ride from the village. This school was also without electricity or running water. How great it would be to help in bringing electricity & running water to the schools. I truly believe improved educational opportunities may dictate the future for Senegal.

Middle School - these buildings were just built last summer

Meeting with the principal

VICKI/MOM

Yay! We have arrived in Dakar. There is our Valentine Lindsay. We are not in the US anymore - small, plain airport - no stores, merchandise, food, etc. Oh, and NO ONE at Budget car rental either but many young men wanting to help us for a fee. Lindsay is our Mom this trip and is rocking the language with her French & Pulaar (poo-lar).

We have had such a spectrum of experiences. Dakar is a big city with modern big buildings, autoroutes, but also dirt, garbage, Senegalese people everywhere selling foods, shoes, fabric, and more.

Ken kicked butt with his driving skills! Lindsay navigated and I hid behind her (sometimes) in the back seat while we maneuvered around sept places (taxis) with goats, luggage or people on top and often several people hanging on the back. Not to mention driving through towns with people lining the narrow streets and cows, goats, and donkeys randomly crossing. Truly that doesn't even touch what we saw in the hundreds of kilometers we covered.

Typical public transportation

My favorite time (not from a comfort standpoint and 3 days was enough) was interacting with Weli's (Lindsay's) family, villages, schools, putting faces with names and stories, playing with children, watching the tea ceremony, etc. 

Playing with a kid in Lindsay's house

 Her family essentially has no material wealth but is happy and work hard with known division of roles daily. The sounds of 5am call to worship, donkeys braying, roosters crowing, goats "sounding like screaming children" as Lindsay says were sleep disruptive but also comforting.

Walking around the village and hearing people of all ages call out "Weli, Weli, Weli" - it was obvious Lindsay has developed relationships with so many people who care for and respect her. It was wonderful to get some insight into the many things she is doing to improve their lives. It feels overwhelming and life is culturally 360 degrees from ours. Lindsay shared with us a verse one of her friends wrote to her: "Don't become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." (Gal 6:9)

With Lindsay & her counterpart

Visiting some of Lindsay's host family in another village

I feel blessed to have visited Senegal and spent time with our amazing daughter.

Thanks Mom & Dad!

From all 3 of us, thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay, Ken, & Vicki

Who Needs Michigan Leaves? I’ve Got COTTON!

Ok so that’s a total lie… nothing can replace the sensation of raking leaves all morning just to create a massive pile and jump in it (or maybe snow is more accurate at this point). But I have to admit, when I saw the piles of cotton recently gathered in my village for our cotton harvest, all I wanted to do was jump!

 

Add cotton to the list of things about which I had no idea how it grew. When I saw my first cotton plant I was expecting lots of sharp thorns, but instead I saw beautiful flowers and these funny pod looking things that eventually open up to reveal bunches of cotton.

A cotton bud

Once all of the cotton had been harvested, the cotton company in my region, SODEFITEX, came to weigh the harvest and truck it away. The entire process took about 4 days. It was a whole village activity – men loading up horse carts all across the village and driving them to the weighing location. 

Using a mosquito net to cart cotton - this man got a stern talking to haha

Each household then just dumped their cotton in a pile, and somehow everyone knew which pile belonged to whom. It was definitely one of those organized chaos things…

The cotton is then loaded into these large sheets and brought to the scale. Once weighed, all of the cotton is loaded into a truck and driven away.

              

A new social hangout

My host family is actually one of the few in the village that does not grow cotton. When I asked my host dad about this, it turns out he has very strong feelings. He said that the company sells the farmers the cotton seed and fertilizer to grow the crop, but doesn’t give the price of those items until they come back to actually collect the harvest. At that point, they weigh the cotton, subtract the cost of all the items they provided the farmer and then give out the farmer’s profit. According to my host dad, it’s a lot of work for not a lot of payout. That being said, it is one of the main crops we grow. I didn’t help with the harvest like I did with the peanuts, so I’ve got something to look forward to next year!

This is too funny - just wait for it!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all! My valentines (Mom & Dad) are on their way right NOW! Stay tuned :)

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

Mr Peanut’s Got Nothin’ On Us

I’ve never lived in a community whose main livelihood is farming or agriculture related. Besides picking out good-looking produce in the grocery store, my knowledge pretty much extends to the mid-western corn adage of “Knee-high by the 4^th of July”…

What I’ve come to realize is, that as consumers of a lot of processed goods, we sometimes lose sight of what our food looks like in its original form. I’ve been embarrassed by this a few times as people in my village were shocked when I learned how peanuts grew.

When rainy season came to a close here in mid-November, our harvest went into full swing. It took a lot of time to prepare the crops in the fields, but then cartloads of food started appearing in our compound.

Millet is one of the main crops we consume, along with corn, peanuts and sorghum.

Millet stalks growing in our fields

The millet gets cut off the stalk and then left to dry in the fields before it is brought in. But man do we have a lot of millet – an entire hut dedicated to millet storage in fact!

MILLET

Preparing to store the millet (it's all in that hut now!)

Peanuts are really what Senegal is known for in terms of farming, and I have to admit, I’ve eaten a lot of peanuts and just never knew…peanuts grow under the ground!!! When the peanuts were finally ready to be harvested, it was like a party in the fields. My counterpart rallied a bunch of people to come and pick peanuts, and as his kids brought peanut plants in from the fields and dumped them in a large pile, we sat around and pulled the peanuts off. I lasted about 4 hours before calling it quits, but this process went on for days! (Other people wait for the plants to dry out and beat the peanuts off the end with these hook-looking things).

Carrying in the peanut crop

Group Peanut Harvest!

However, the peanut harvest doesn’t end there. When the peanut plants are pulled from the ground, a lot of peanuts get left behind in the dirt. As the dirt dries out with dry season, women then go into the fields and literally “find peanuts” for hours. When they called it that I just thought my Pulaar translation was off, but it’s exactly as it sounds – finding peanuts.

How many peanuts can you see in this picture? Kinda like one of those Guidepost for Kids activities..

COUNT EM'

I spent a few good mornings searching for peanuts while listening to NPR podcasts!

Our peanut field fit for "finding" missions

The fun doesn’t stop there! While some peanuts are sold or left in shell form for later use, others are turned into peanut butter. In order to make PB you need quite  a few peanuts, and thus enters this grinding type machine we used to break all the peanuts free from the shell – I seemed to excel at this particular task.

Then the peanuts get toasted over a hot fire (this can take HOURS depending on how many peanuts you are toasting) and dumped out to cool. 

Dumping out the peanuts to cool

You can actually hear the crackle. Mmmm

Finally, they are taken to a special grinding machine in Tamba and turned into buckets of peanut butter, one of the main ingredients in a lot of sauces we eat here.

All in all, I’ve developed a strong appreciation for trying to know what my food looks like when it is originally being grown. I am so removed from the growing process most of the time that I didn’t even know how a common food looked when it was in its natural state. Food for thought.

Part 2 Coming Soon – The Cotton Harvest

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

Gettin' NGO's Together - A Shameless Donation Request

Some of you have had the pleasure of listening to me vent about my experiences with NGOs in my village here in Senegal. I think most NGOs are fantastic and have wonderful intentions, but one thing I've learned from my time in Senegal so far is that the collaboration of some of the NGOs with each other is less than stellar. For example, there are 3 separate NGOs each working in my village of 600 people. One oversees my health hut, and the other 2 are mainly involved in various ad-hoc projects. However, a lot of those projects overlap. For instance, each month, each of the NGOs wants us to monitor the growth of babies and children under 5 years old, but each organization has its own guidelines to follow and its own notebook in which it wants the data recorded. This creates a lot of confusion and duplication of work for my community health workers (volunteer positions!). If we're not going to pay them, we should at least make it easy for them to do the work, right? This is just one example of a personal frustration I have faced during my Peace Corps service.

SO, the Peace Corps volunteers in the region of Tamba (that includes me!) are coordinating a gathering of all of our local NGO and government partners for a day of relationship building, networking, and information sharing and we need your help! Though this may not be the sexiest project we do, it is one of the most important! Opening the lines of communication between all of these parties will not only make the jobs of local partners and Peace Corps volunteers better, but it will hopefully make everyone's efforts more impactful in the right ways.

Interested in donating to help us make this event a reality? Click on the link below:

https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm…

Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of your contribution will go towards our project.

Thanks for listening to my shameless plug!

And thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

Working Towards Malaria Elimination – Because There is No Other Reasonable Goal

First let me acknowledge that I have not posted on my blog in quite a while and for that I am sorry. After the few somewhat traumatic events in a row, I took a break from writing, but I’m back at it now!

Merry Christmas from Senegal! This was definitely the strangest & most unique Christmas I have ever had. I stayed in village until Christmas morning due to a couple of baby naming ceremonies in my house (yay for new babies!), which also meant that I spent Christmas morning surrounded by people who know some kind of Christian holiday exists, but they think it runs from the 24^th – 31^st and don’t know anything else about it.

I then took a lovely Christmas bike ride into the Tamba regional house and met up with about 14 other volunteers. We made a wonderful family style dinner, got dressed up, set off some fireworks (which drew Oohs and Aahs from all the neighbor kids who came running outside to watch), and then capped off the night by watching Elf. It was nothing like my Christmases past, and I missed my family and all of our traditions dearly, but it also gave me an appreciation for this community of volunteers and the family we make for each other.

Now back to my original post topic – MALARIA!

I was fortunate to be selected for a 2-week intensive Malaria training held in Thies, Senegal the first two weeks of December.  This training was unique because it brought together volunteers serving in countries all over Sub-Saharan Africa, so 30 volunteers in total representing 13 countries.

Team Senegal: Sarah, Laura, & Lindsay 

I learned a lot about malaria basics in our original training when I came to Senegal, but this training took that education to the next level. We Skyped with people working in malaria from the CDC, President’s Malaria Initiative, USAID, and other organizations. We Skyped with doctors conducting research on malaria as it relates to HIV, pregnancy, and future innovations for controlling malaria (ex. Vaccines). We learned about behavior change strategies and how to most effectively plan malaria projects in our communities. And we presented in front of all the other volunteers about the best practices from our own countries. Needless to say, my To-Do/Idea list was out of control by the end!

Perhaps my favorite part of the entire training though was the series of field trips. First we visited a man whose daughter had died of malaria, which motivated him to start his own malaria prevention organization in his village. 

Posing with the photo of his daughter

They work with local women’s groups, schools, and soccer clubs to do malaria education, and they even have a committee that conducts random bed net checks in the village and charges a fine if they catch someone without her net hung! He was inspirational, and as a result of his efforts, his village has been malaria-free since 2009!

Showing us samples of other work they've done

For our next field trip, we split up and visited various structures in the Senegalese health system. I visited a health hut, the same level at which I work in my village, to see how mine functions compared to others. Here I met a woman who is solely in charge of her health structure and who now has to keep the medications at her house because the hut recently experienced a break-in and she is worried about all of the medicine getting stolen. She’s extremely motivated and spends much of her day doing health work in the community, despite this being a volunteer position. It was cool to experience this with volunteers from other countries and see the health hut through their perspectives.

Volunteers checking out the health hut

Posing questions to the head of the health hut

Lab grown mosquitoes

Lastly, we visited the Senegalese government’s entomology lab in Thies. I have to admit, I have not nerded out this much in a while… at this lab, they grow mosquitoes and then use those mosquitoes to conduct experiments on the insecticides used on the bed nets distributed around West Africa. They test new insecticides to see if they could be used on bed nets, and they also do longevity testing on existing nets to make recommendations to the Senegalese government about how often universal net distributions should occur. It was SO cool!

Showing how the lab mosquitoes get their blood meal.
A bunny gets strapped to the top of that...

Pumping mosquitoes into a chamber that houses a
sheet to test new insecticide

The whole two-week experience was mentally exhausting, but filled me with so much energy and motivation to do malaria work. After some of the tough emotional challenges I’ve had at site, this was exactly what I needed leading into Christmas.

Volunteers from across Africa

Now if you haven’t heard, I’m on a less-than-2-month countdown before my parents come visit, and shortly after I’ll hit my one-year mark. It’s crazy how time flies when you’re loving life.

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

RIP My Miriama

Freak accidents are one of those things I find utterly frustrating because you never see them coming and can't usually do anything about them. And sadly that makes them that much more tragic.

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day at my health hut in village weighing babies to screen for malnutrition. I had told all the women in my house about it, but despite that, none of them showed up, which I found frustrating. However, when I came back to my compound at 5pm I found out why. Miriama Kande, my brother's youngest daughter in our compound at just 21 months, was kicked in the stomach by a horse and taken to the Tamba regional hospital.

One of my first pictures of Miriama...what a doll :)

Let me paint the picture that, while I love all the kids in my house, this was MY kid...that kid you find an instant connection with. I was constantly picking her up and playing with her. I had given her the American nickname Anna after my best friend and teased her parents daily about taking her home to America with me at the end of 2 years. I called her my kid, and truth be told she's the closest thing I've had thus far.

By the time I got home that evening, they had returned from the hospital with a bottle of kids ibuprofen syrup and a recommendation to come back on Monday the 10th. Miriama had a large bruise on her stomach and just seemed out of it. I sat with her and her mom on their shade structure that night and tried to comfort her as she rolled around and groaned in pain. She kept sitting up to throw up water, the only thing she'd been able to consume all day.

Around 10pm I finally went to bed, and when I came out in the morning, Miriama's mom, Aminata (who is also about 1 week away from giving birth), informed me that my host dad had taken Miriama to the hospital in the middle of the night. At one point that morning he called to say they had given her 2 IV bags and done an x-ray, which led them to decide she needed an operation. The hospital then sent my host dad to purchase the materials needed for the operation - needle, scalpel, meds - a fact that still blows my mind. By the time my host dad returned to the hospital, Miriama had died. She was just 21 months old.

Miriama with her mom Aminata

I've experienced death before, but never something this traumatic or someone so young. I've been struggling for the last few days for obvious reasons, but part of what makes this so hard is the grieving process here. As soon as my host brother told us she had died, her mom and I both instantly starting sobbing and ran into our respective rooms. I was followed by my cousin who just patted me on the shoulder and told me to "hush and not cry. This was God's will." I believe things happen for a reason, but I also think crying is part of the natural grieving process in the USA. And never in my life have a craved a hug so much. So instead I called my parents in Michigan at what turned out to be 5:30am, because even though I'm 27 and an adult, sometimes you just need mom and dad.

Miriama in a picture I took just a few weeks ago

Over the next 2 days, people dropped by our compound to greet our family and give us their condolences, but there was no real funeral. When I asked why, they told me that big funerals are for older people, but little kids are just buried and that's that. She was actually taken to the village where her mom's parents live, and my host brother promised to take me there in the next few weeks. Honestly, if no one told you what had happened, you'd probably walk into my compound and think everything was normal.

Even though Miriama wasn't my child, this experience has been devastating for my heart. But she played a big part in the first 6 months in my village, and I will continue to carry her with me.

The only picture I have of just me and my Miriama