Line over the E: I'm just in it for the t-shirt

May 15^th marked one year spent in our site. I’ve been told that you have to live four seasons in a place to really know it (although the four seasons was referring to Montana weather, and there are really just three here). We have come full circle and are starting up again with weather, the pests that come in short-lived plagues, and the agricultural season. But we have also seen and participated in a year of public health activities directed by the health center in our site. In addition to working on our own projects, we help out at the health center whenever we can. Not being practitioners ourselves, that usually ends up being helping out with public health activities that typically come in the form of centrally organized campaigns or events mandated by the Ministry of Health. You always know when a campaign has just happened, because all of a sudden everyone that is even remotely related to the health is sporting the same t-shirt.

I now present to you a year of health district activities through the lens of the t-shirts we have collected, which are a big deal in the eyes of our community.

Vitamin A and De-worming

In real life, the baby on this shirt is super creepy.

One of the first activities we were invited to participate in was the distribution of Vitamin A capsules and mebendazole, a de-worming medication to children under 5. This happens every six months. It’s hard to know how old anyone is, so the under/over 5 cutoff is determined by whether a child can reach their ear by extending their opposite hand over their head. While most people here get enough to eat, they are not necessarily eating well. Micronutrient malnutrition is a big issue, with deficiencies in Vitamin A, iron, and iodine being common in the developing world generally. De-worming children has also found to be one of the best interventions for increasing education rates. This was a great opportunity to go to every single family compound in town (there are about 5000 people in our site, so we definitely hadn’t met everyone). It maybe wasn’t so great for the kids, who had to take medicine and come into close contact with a scary white person. It was the first time I realized just how terrifying my skin color can be, and I made a lot of kids cry.

Vaccination Campaigns

Let's protect ourselves against Meningitis A

My first vaccination campaign happened after a measles outbreak in a neighboring village where every case was traced back to a gold mining site. (People with gold fever apparently don’t have time to take their children to vaccination days.) For the meningitis campaign, I was tasked with filling out people’s vaccination cards. This was no problem until we went to a Pulaar village and I couldn’t even ask people what their name was. At first there was a guy helping me and standing who would yell their names etc. to me, but when he was called away, I was stuck. Fortunately, I had benefited from his assistance for enough time to realize that over half of the men were named Mamadou Diallo (and being a major mining site, it was predominantly men). I decided to just say, "Mamadou Diallo?” to every man who approached. No one ever thought this was a strange tactic, and they would either matter of factly say “yes” or “No, it’s Mamadou Ba”. The age cutoff for this campaign was 29 years old, and if you were to look at age data in Senegal purely based on the formation from this vaccination campaign, you would be led to think that there were a hugely disproportionate number of people born in 1984—you can’t tell the chief he can’t get vaccinated, or anyone else really, while supplies last.

World AIDS Day

For World AIDS Day, my job was taking pictures and setting up what, in my opinion, is a terribly dangerous game that involves giving blindfolded children scissors and having them walk forward to a string laden with dangling prizes that they have to cut off in one snip. T-shirts were given out as prizes to people who either correctly answered HIV/AIDS trivia or won dance competitions. As I was walking home, my teenage neighbor yelled out “Sadio, I didn’t get a t-shirt!” I said, “Well, Bintou, you didn’t answer any of the questions.” “That stuff is not in my head,” she protested (direct translation from Malinke). “Well how are you going to protect yourself from HIV then? You should come over to my hut sometime and we’ll talk so that stuff is in your head.” I expected her to scoff at this idea, but instead she said, “When, tomorrow?” The next day, I had seven teenage girls in my hut that came with the explicit purpose to learn about HIV. I felt like such a legit Peace Corps volunteer! It was really a turning point in my relationship with the teenage girl community in my neighborhood, and I became someone they could come talk to about anything. While this has been overwhelming sometimes, because there are situations that I do not feel prepared to counsel them about, I am so touched that they feel that they can come to me. This is the power of a t-shirt in Senegal.

Schistosomiasis and De-worming

You may notice that there is no picture accompanying this section. That’s because they don’t give a t-shirt for the schisto campaign for school children. Schistosomiasis is known as a neglected tropical disease, and I guess that this is one way it’s neglected. It is caused by a parasite that lives in snails that are found in freshwater. All volunteers in Kedougou are presumptively treated for it when we leave. The meds are no fun to take, and school children are not happy to take them. I think they ask me to come along to make it seem more cool to take your schisto meds (I am also a member of the high school Spanish/Portuguese club for presumably the same reason).

I’ve already written blog posts about the events accompanying our other t-shirts, but they have to be displayed here to show you our full collection. (You'll notice that volunteers have taken the t-shirt hint for our programs.)