A Whirlwind Month

While I typically avoid "this is what I did" blog posts and try to write about specific topics, the month of May has been such a whirlwind of experiences that could be blog posts in their own, that I have decided to condense it all into a series of mini posts in this one, to best capture the many goings-on of the hottest month of the year.

Bassari Initiations 

Each year, a group of 12-15 year old Bassari boys are initiated into manhood, and, this year, we were fortunate enough to participate in the celebrations.  The Bassaris are a minority ethnic group who live in Southwestern Kedougou (quite far from where we live).  They are distinguished from most of the other ethnic groups in the region due to their Christian/Animist traditions.  Their distinctive culture is appreciated around Senegal, and people from far and wide come to observe the initiations.  

The Kedougou Peace Corps volunteers (and a few friends from other regions) rented out a car to take us to Egath, the village where the initiations were held this year. 

We had a few too many people than would fit in the mini-bus, so I got  to ride to Egath on top.  It was exhilarating, and I only got a little sunburned (though very dirty).

Things got going on Saturday evening with the sounds of whistles and coming from the forest.  Then this procession emerged with ornately beaded costumes, goat hair ankle, and each with a scarf from the first woman he had slept with.  These were not the initiates but the older warriors.  This parade of whistling and marching continued with no breaks until about 1 am, when they retreated back into the forest.

Eventually, the initiates joined in the parade with their red and white outfits.  Most Senegalese boys and men shave their heads, and it was so different to see these boys with their braids.  Families choose the initiation dates for their boys up to three years in advance in order to prepare.

As the parade continued on into the evening, we set up camp and partook in the festivities, which included palm wine, honey wine, and millet beer.  It was so different to see alcohol consumed in a village setting.  You take a cup and go from house to house, and your cup will be filled.  Senegalese hospitality a la Bassari.

The next morning, the whistling came from a different direction of the forest surrounding the village.  The warriors emerged with their masks, their bodies covered with clay.  This parade didn't last nearly as long, and was merely a procession to the area designated for the actual initiation: the fights.

Women aren't allowed to watch the fights, but Pat was able to describe it to me.  (Children aren't allowed to watch either, but every ten minutes or so kids would come sprinting away from the fighting area, chased by a figure covered in clay brandishing a big stick.)  Each initiate is armed with a bow that serves as a shield, and a long wooden sword.  The initiate runs forward and hits the older warrior, and after a few hits, weapons are dropped, and it turns into wrestling.  In all but two cases, the older warrior won easily.  After a few hours, all of the men emerged back into the village where the women (the female Peace Corps volunteers in particular) were busy buying beautiful Bassari jewelry.  The new health volunteers were arriving in Kedougou that afternoon, so we had to hustle back to welcome them.  We are now the senior health volunteers, which is nuts.

Fighting Malaria in Paradise
Peace Corps Senegal has a great relationship with the President's Malaria Initiative, which has two resident advisors who work with the Senegalese National Malaria Control Program.  Because of this relationship, another volunteer (who also is a Masters International Student at Tulane) and I were invited to participate in a 4 day workshop regarding the roll out of an exciting new piece of the arsenal in the fight against malaria.  Seasonal Malaria Chemoprophylaxis is the provision of monthly malaria prophylaxis (like what travellers take) to kids in zones where malaria transmission is highly seasonal.  It is being rolled out in the four southern regions of Senegal this rainy season and is expected to reduce cases of malaria in the target age group (kids under 10) by 75%.  This workshop was for the National Malaria Control Program and partners to take the World Health Organization recommendations and turn them into an action plan for operations in Senegal.  Technical guidelines and tools for communication and monitoring and evaluation were created, and it was really cool to be able to help with that.  I have to say, I don't think I've ever learned so much in any other four day period.  After a year working at the district level of the health pyramid, it was fascinating to see how things work at the national level.  
 

Added bonus: the workshop was held in Saly, a beach paradise.  Pat was doing his mid-service health exams in Dakar for the first three days but was able to join me on the last day.  It was an all inclusive hotel, and the buffet of Western food was a great break...I had hit a brick wall the food at site and really felt like I needed a good break to be able to endure it for another year.

Festival du Jazz
We scheduled our mid-service health appointments in Dakar around the Jazz Festival in Saint Louis (it's such a trek from Kedougou to the coast that you have to make it count).  It was a great weekend in a really cool city.  Saint Louis' architecture really reminds me of New Orleans, so it was fitting to hear jazz music there (although nothing can ever compare to JazzFest in New Orleans).

Saint Louis--colonial city about as far as you can get from Kedougou within Senegal, in terms of geography, climate, and appearance.

Dakar

All volunteers are required to do mid-service health check ups in Dakar. Over the past year, between the two of us, Pat and I have experienced giardia, worms, skin infection, and typhoid fever.  Our mid-service check up was basically just a brief physical, a TB test, and a trip to the dentist.  It did provide a good excuse to explore Dakar while waiting for the 48 hours for my TB test to be read and then waiting a few more days in order to get a ride down to Kedougou in a Peace Corps car.

The first few days in Dakar were spent soaking up every last minute with our dear friend Ian before he left us for America.

Last blast on Ngor Island

Pat and I found these traditional Malinke mudcloth boubous in Saint Louis (we haven't been able to  find them anywhere in Malinke land, and the salesman was so stoked to meet us and told Pat that he was a real Malian (most Malinkes are from Mali and Guinea).  We got Ian a matching one as a farewell gift, which ended up being hillarious because he was given three other boubous within his last few days in Senegal.

A few girls from my training group were also in Dakar for mid-service, and we decided to go on an adventure to the Ile de Madeleine.  It involved negotiating with fishermen to get a boat out, but  all the sketchiness we encountered in that phase of the adventure paid off.  The island was beautiful, and we had a blast.

Now, after two and a half weeks out of site, it's time to hit the ground running with projects.  Pat says that rainy season started with a vengeance a few days ago, tearing apart the grounds at the Kedougou regional house.  Rainy season means malaria season, and there is a lot of work to be done to get ready for all of the interventions that are being rolled out in the next few months.  Good thing this whirlwind of a working vacation has us rested up and ready to go!

Be Cool, Stay in School

If I sit on the sidewalk in the morning to eat a bean sandwich these days, as I often do, I will see at least five cars stuffed with people on the inside and loaded down with coolers and building materials for temporary huts.  I will be surrounded by people trying to get on one of these cars.  Nearly every other sentence would contain the word “Kharakhena”.

The gold rush in southeastern Senegal has been a large part of my Peace Corps experience, but when the mining destination and boomtown changed from Sambrambougou, which is in the middle of nowhere and hard to access, to Kharakhena, a village 30 kilometers away from us on the beautifully paved road to Mali, it become a part of my daily life on a whole new level.  It is no longer inconvenient to get to the gold.  My host family is mining now.  The neighboring compound seems like a ghost town—they’re almost all in the djouras.  It is nearly impossible to buy ice or building materials here in Saraya—everything goes to Kharakhena where it will sell at between two and eight times the Saraya price.  The population of Kharakhena went from 78 to at least 5000 in two months.

Losing students to the djouras has been a big problem at the middle school/high school in town for a while, and now that things are blowing up just down the road, the problem is greatly exacerbated.  One of the first people who sought us out when we arrived last May was the former school director, who wanted to work with Peace Corps on a campaign to encourage kids to stay in school instead of going to the djouras. 

In July and August, we worked on a mural to kick off the campaign, which we called “My Future Shines Brighter than Gold.” 

"My future shines brighter than gold.  I don't leave school to go to the djouras.  To safeguard a job, a house, a family, my future, I stay in school.

Then, at our health summit last fall, our boss in Dakar approached Marielle, our former sitemate about working with Pat on a Jeune Relais (youth peer educator) project with the goal of keeping kids in school.  (Marielle and our other friend Ian had done a Jeune Relais in her former village that focused on family planning.)  We thought this was a great idea: it was a great project model and something that was really needed here, plus Pat had acquired a gang of teenage boy groupies, some of whom would make great peer educators.

Pat wrote a grant for funding from VAST, a PEPFAR funding source for small Peace Corps projects, and we planned to roll out the project in April, during the last three days of the students’ Spring Break.  We had no idea how timely the project was going to end up being. 

We developed a curriculum for a three day training for 12 kids from three middle school grades—the grades that the school administration thought were the most vulnerable for dropping out (although there was one week a few months ago where they lost 7 kids in Terminale—the last grade of high school.)  The curriculum focused both on the value of staying in school plus the dangers of the djouras.  

On the first day of the training, 5 kids showed up instead of the 12 we had planned for.  I’ve been here for long enough at this point that this was not heartbreaking to me, I would have been stunned if they all showed up (advanced planning is not a strong point of this culture, and we had invited them before they started their two week break.)  We sent the five kids back out into the community with a description of the kind of kids we were looking for (students that expressed themselves well, did well in school, and would be listened to by their peers).  They came back with 5 more, some of whom ended up being better than the students chosen by the school.

We opened with a discussion of school abandonment—why is it happening and why do we care?  It all comes down to money.  Almost everyone in the school comes from a family of subsistence farmers—money isn’t plentiful.  And then students see their friends who have dropped out zooming around on motorcycles.  It isn’t hard to imagine why the djouras seem attractive.  But when we turned the discussion from the positives of the djouras to the dangers, this is the list the students came up with:

·         -Accidents

·         -Fires

·         -Bandits

·         -Alcohol and drugs

·         -Dirty water

·         -Diseases (HIV, STIs, Tuberculosis)

·         -Toxic chemicals

-     - Violence

People are very aware of these dangers.   As much as people talk about the people who have made millionaires (which in dollars translates to having at least two thousand dollars), they talk about the highway banditry, the makeshift shantytowns made entirely of thatch and bamboo that burn down in minutes, and especially the giant fight that broke out in Diyabougou between men from Mali and Burkina Faso, killing at least five and hospitalizing about 20.  We asked the students, if you know how terrible these places are, why is everyone going there?  For them, they said it came down to the inability to get past the immediate interest of the possibilities of money to look forward to the future.  They see their friends with their motorcycles and are able to forget the risks.

Pointing to the list they had created, we told them the curriculum for the training.  In order to have credibility when talking to their peers, they had to really understand these dangers.  In this training, we focused on HIV and mercury toxicity.  We also added in a module on family planning.  For girls, although they do leave school to go to the djouras, early pregnancy is the largest factor in leaving school, as is the case just this past week with my sixteen year old next door neighbor and her fifteen year old best friend.   On the pre-test we gave them before starting, their knowledge of family planning was essentially zero.

 To balance the training on the dangers of the djouras, we had a career panel to talk about the positives of staying in school, plus a session on money management.  For the money management session, we wanted to show the advantages of studying to the point where you could have a salaried job over a gamble like gold mining.  It is also a phenomenon here that the villages that make people rich do not actually develop in any way that is sustained after the boom, so we talked about saving and investing in the community.   How bank accounts worked was a totally new concept (the fact that no one else could get to your money was received with both excitement and mild distrust), and we ended up spending quite a bit of time on that.  We also had a session on interpersonal communication to help them figure out how to express themselves when talking about these difficult subjects.

Midwife Fatou Traore explains the basics of HIV transmission and prevention

Fancy lunch from Saraya's own restaurant

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Interpersonal communication lessons with Sidy Lamine Traore from Catholic Relief Services

Mr. Cisse, who works for the local government under the title of "Responsible of Local Development" helped us do the honor of handing out certificates after his session on good money management.

Career panel with the assistant mayor and radio station manager (both from this area originally), a teacher (the original teacher we invited didn't show up--we found out later he had gone to the djouras), a police officer, and a nurse.  They talked about the triumphs and struggles in their careers and the importance of education in achieving career objectives.

Playing Jeopardy to review and catch gaps in their knowledge about HIV and family planning

Here's a video Pat took of me re-explaining the effectiveness of different family planning methods during Jeopardy (notice how my French has become totally Senegalesified).

In the Mystery category, one of the questions was "Name an American dish."  This was difficult, as you can see in this video.

They loved Jeopardy so much that they would play during breaks.    This particular  round was Saraya trivia.

For the most part, I was really happy to see how the training went.  It felt so good to be actually doing work in my site (working at the Health District level has meant that a lot of our projects have rolled out in surrounding villages).  Some of the girls who started with us didn't come back to finish, but the 7 that completed the entire training were fantastic.  They never wanted to end in the afternoon, and Pat and I would be exhausted and say that they had to stop practicing their causeries (the Senegalese expression for a talk about health or another subject in front of a group) and go home.

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We finished up the training by working with the kids to prepare a radio show.  They chose the themes of HIV and school retention, and we recorded them speaking in both French and Malinke about what they had learned and then aired it on the night of the last show.  It was a great way to conclude—we got to see how well they had mastered the material, and they got to start their peer education with a bang!

We plan to have mini-trainings with the kids every few months (they want to learn about malaria, first aid and tuberculosis), to maintain relationships with them and increase their capacity as peer educators. 

This continuity will be important.  The weeks that followed the training were a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

The evening after the training ended, I was sprawled out on my bed in my hut when three teenage faces appeared in the door.  “So the certificate we got, does that mean that we get to start sensitizing people about these issues now?”

“Yes!” I laughed.  “You are officially Jeunes Relais!”

 “Oh good, because we already talked to a bunch of people.”

I was so moved by their enthusiasm to make change in their community.  The day after the radio show, two of them told Pat that they were saving up their money to do another radio show (it costs about 4 dollars for someone to make announcements or do shows on air).  I told them I didn’t want them to spend their money and let them come and talk again the next time I did a radio show (Peace Corps has a free weekly slot). 

Three Jeune Relais doing a show they prepared, appealing to fellow students (and to teachers as well) to stay in school 

A few nights later, I was talking with Fatou, the midwife who led the HIV and Family Planning elements of the trainings.  “You know that before the training, Djiby was going to drop out.  He now told his mom that he wants to stay in school and become a doctor.”  I felt like I was walking on air.  It is not often that you get to see the results of something so drastically and immediately. 

But then, a week later, when we were going class to class introducing the Jeunes Relais to their peers, I was reading the list of names, and someone yelled out, “Djiby left school.”  He had done the supplementary radio show on staying in school just days prior.  It wasn’t gold fever, it was the opportunity to work on a car that goes back and forth to the mines, which is a respectable job.  But it did hurt.  When we saw him a few days later, he made excuses but then told us that he had been talking to people he encountered on the job about the issues we had covered in the trainings. 

You win some, you lose some.  You obviously can’t change an entire culture of early school abandonment in three days.  We will continue working with all of the Jeunes Relais, even the ones who have left school.  We designed the curriculum knowing that they would be equally talking to kids who were in school and kids who had dropped out and were encountering the djouras and their dangers.  Even if the training doesn’t keep kids away, I hope that the diffusion of information will help them to be safer, healthier and smarter while they are there.    

Ladies and gentlemen, the Jeunes Relais of the Lycee du Saraya