To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story.
--Barbara Kingsolover, The Poisonwood Bible

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Xa wulu, Xa faxa: Entering and leaving the world

"Ritual is necessary for us to know anything." -Ken Kesey

Rituals give meaning to life.  For me, observing and participating in rituals have been a great window into Malinke culture, times when old traditions come to light in this modern world.  In the past few months, I have felt closer to the rituals associated with birth and death because of their proximity to Sira Diaby, my neighbor, Peace Corps designated community counterpart and closest Malinke friend.

Sira gave birth to her second baby boy on May 3.  I spent quite a bit of time in the maternity ward of the hospital with her after the birth, and was several times struck anew by the harshness that life can bring sometimes.  She shared a room with several other women, had to bring her own sheets, and bathed standing on a patch of dirt behind the administrative office building, with only a wrap skirt I held up for her for privacy.  I felt so uncomfortable watching such a dignified woman recover from giving birth in such an undignified set of circumstances, but the hospital has no means to improve these conditions.

After she left the hospital, Sira spent one week in isolation with the baby in her mother in law's hut.  Even though her leg was cramping and her foot kept swelling, she refused to go to the health center to let the midwives examine her because of the belief that if she is seen by certain eyes before the baby's first seven days, the baby will die.

On May 10, the Koulio took place.  This literally means "head shaving", and is a baptism and naming ceremony.  Some people do it big and kill a goat and have music, but since Sira's older baby hadn't done that, they kept it simple and just did the ceremony and gave rice paste to the guests.  I have been to many a Koulio, but I usually show up mid-morning.  This time, I came early to help Sira get ready and was thus exposed to all of the rites that are performed before the big crowds arrive.
Sira preparing for her big day.  Her big day, you ask?  At Senegalese baptisms, the focus is much more on the mother than on the baby.  Women get very dressed up and often wear immense amounts of bright make-up and take lots of glamour shots.

A pre-baptism ritual wherein a bowl of water with traditional herbal medicine is placed next to some burning straw and sprinkled onto the straw to create an ash with medicinal powers for the protection of the mother and the baby.  Next, the piece of gourd bowl to the left is stomped on by the mother.  It is a woman in the nimakhalo group of the caste system (metal workers, story tellers, leather workers, all determined by last name) that carries all of this out I'm not exactly sure what all of this means, and when asked, people have a hard time explaining the "why" of the different elements of the rituals.

In Senegal, babies are almost always carried strapped to their mother's back.   I didn't realize until attending this part of the baptism that they don't nyoun (carry on the back), until the seventh day.  Sira held the cloth behind her, and a knife was dropped through the space three times.  After that, the other women helped to balance the baby on her back (the babies eventually become trained to balance themselves during the strapping--it's amazing to me).

After a while, more and more people began to arrive and the washing head shaving began.  Here, Sira looks on as the baby's head is shaved, with the pieces of his hair collected for yet another small ritual later on.  After the head is shaved, the baby is held up, and in a much more casual manner than you would think, the name is announced.  Karamba Danfakaha.

At baptisms, party favors are always plates or balls of deego, a kind of paste with a playdough like texture, prepared the day before by female friends of the family from pounded beans or rice.  I don't really care for it but it would be an insult not to take it...I just wish that everyone didn't offer it to me.
Depending on the family, these rituals can then turn into a big party with dancing and a feast or can be more low key like this one.  The important thing is that the baby is named.  And with my favorite Malinke name.  Ay, Karamba.

***

While I have been to more baptisms that I ever thought possible during the course of the last year, until this week I had never been to a funeral.  Neither of these events have invitations, but it feels much more comfortable going to a baptism of someone I don't know than to go to the funeral.  I have gone to greet the families of several people who have died, and I have heard the wail, the shrieking of women after a death is announced.  But I had never felt comfortable staying and observing an entire funeral rite.

When I got back from a weekend camping on the border of Guinea, I stopped by to greet my family and upon asking for my host-mom and namesake was told that she was at the "bandula".  The official word for "to die" in Malinke is "xa faxa", but "xa ban" is used more often.  It literally translates as "to end".  So I was told that my mom was at the place of the end.  It followed that the Immam, my friend Sira's father and the religious leader of the community had died the previous evening at the regional hospital in Kedougou.  This was a funeral I needed to attend.

I changed into nicer clothes and approached the Diaby compound.  A tent had been set up in the street outside the compound for the overflow, and I took a seat amongst the women there and tried to take in what was going on.  I have never been in such a somber atmosphere in my site.  A small group of women was cooking in the sun, and I was surprised to see that they were finishing the meal so early in the day (it was not even noon, and meals at big gatherings like this are usually not ready until 3 or 4, necessitating a pre-lunch during a quick break from the festivities).  I saw my host mom emerge from the compound to help with the process of dividing the rice from the. giant cooking pots into bowls for the guests to eat out of in smaller groups, and I went to greet her.  In return, she handed me a giant piece of meat (the closest thing I have seen to a steak in the region of Kedougou).  She mistook my bewilderment as a reaction to how hot the meat was, so she  gave it to another woman who had a spoon with the orders to accompany me and the meat.  The spoon woman didn't even blink at these orders, while I had no idea what was going on or where I was being accompanied to.  I followed her dumbly into a neighboring compound and then into a hut where she left me all alone with a sleeping baby.  I'm usually suspicious of meat in Saraya, but this was actually quite good, and I chuckled as I ate it with my hands, just me and the baby in this hut whose owner I had never met.  After more than a year here, I can still get caught off guard.  

Emerging from the hut, I saw groups of people crowded around bowls of rice and meat, each summoning me to join them as I passed.  It looked like people were returning home after they ate, and I joined my host sister Mballou on her walk  back to the family's compound.  I had actually never met her before--she had walked 13 km from the village where she lives with her husband's family, joining the scores of mourners who had descended upon Saraya for the funeral. 

Things got started again at afternoon prayer time.  I donned a headscarf and headed towards the mosque, but it was so full that I just stopped and sat with the crowd of women lined in the small strip of shade provided by the cement wall across the street.  After a while, crowds emerged from the mosque.  I have never really seen Malinkes cry before.  Some women were doing the wail, and some openly weeping.  I heard one woman sob, "He taught all of the people of Saraya".  The men accompanied the body from the mosque to the graveyard (the location of which I had never known before), while the women sat in and around the Diaby compound waiting, some crying softly to themselves.  The men returned, and the benedictions began.  I had imagined this part of the process to be a simple receiving line, each person saying the blessing that I had memorized before coming over: Allah mu yamfama kela aye (May God forgive him).

Instead, men from each major family in Saraya and men from other villages each took turns proclaiming blessings on behalf of the village or last name they were representing, their words echoed by a griot.  This lasted a really long time, and I had made the unfortunate choice of not bringing any water.  I waited it out, and went into the compound to try to find Sira.  I approached her, took her hand and mumbled my memorized blessing; she opened her mouth to speak but couldn't find any words.  Even when you know the official thing to say, there is no right thing to say in any culture.  But rituals help.

“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down."
-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

This Senegalese Life

When I think back on how drastically different everything seemed to me when I first came to Senegal, it is hard to believe how normal everything has become.  My moments of “Holy cow, I live in Africa…this is my life” are much diminished.  Though I do make an effort to maintain a sense of wonder, I have adapted to this new normal.  Patterns of a typical day have emerged.  Welcome to a day in the life of Annē Linn.

I am a huge fan of sleeping in, however, despite my talent for it before joining the Peace Corps, I typically wake up around 6:30.  We sleep outside whenever possible because of the heat, so it’s usually a combination of sunrise and the noise that wakes me up.  What noise, you ask?  Mostly goats.  I had no idea how crazy goats were before coming to Senegal. People don’t tether their livestock, so they are free to roam about making their ridiculous sounds that have inspired many a game of “Goat or Child”.  This Youtube video provides a very, very accurate rendition of my daily alarm clock. 


Upon getting out of bed, the number one priority is to get water.  This is not as simple as it may seem.  Our site has serious water issues (they basically chose the worst village possible to transform into a Departmental Capital—rapid population increase+very limited groundwater=very bad situation).  At the height of the dry season, water from the water tower only came on in the town’s outdoor taps for about a half an hour each day, if at all.  There are huge crowds of women at every tap—thankfully they usually let us cut to the front because we fill just fill up our small buckets.  It’s not the carrying the water on my head part that’s difficult (at this point anyway—at first it was incredibly hard), it’s calculating when the water will come on and where to get it that can get tricky.  We pay 25 CFA (about 5 cents) per bucket, but that water is worth more than the gold that has brought thousands of people to an area without the geology or infrastructure to support them.
Waiting for the water to turn on--got their before the crowd this particular morning

The next morning calculation is when the fresh bread will come in from the Pulaar bakers on the outskirts of town in a cardboard box on the back of a bike that is not capable of going in a straight line .  Sometimes this coordinates well with the water timing, sometimes not.  Breakfast is the only meal we do on our own, and I have come to really cherish it.  Sometimes we buy bread and take it back to our hut, sometimes we go to the little breakfast shack next to our family’s compound.  I don’t have much of an appetite later in the day when it’s so hot, so I really try to have a big breakfast.
Ousman preparing breakfast for the miners waiting for cars to  Kharakhena, the most recent gold mining boom town

Other morning activities include brining our bedding and mosquito net inside—it’s annoying to do every day, but totally worth it to sleep outside.
Mosquito nets...they protect against a lot more creepy crawlies than just mosquitoes
I usually give myself until 9 am to enjoy the cool mornings.  We brought a French press from home and get coffee sent from Amerik (thank you, loved ones), and I have really come to appreciate these small reminders of home.  Pat and I usually take this time to read individually or together, from the Economist (which, since Pat had a subscription in the US, we get delivered to Kedougou in an incredibly timely manner compared to the rest of our mail and for now extra charge), New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, Guerillas of Grace, or the Book of Common Prayer.  It is this time of quiet that prepares me for the day and whatever challenges (work-related, cultural, or physical) the day may bring.

Then, it’s off to the office.  Since we really don’t have set work hours, I made it a priority to try to work outside of our hut.  That way, our hut feels more like home and I don’t have to feel like I should be working if I’m there (I don’t always succeed at not feeling that way).  The shade structure outside a building known as the Colonial Room that the health district uses for meetings and trainings has everything we need: electrical outlets (electricity is on in the morning from 8 to 12), shade, a table, and a collection of broken chairs that we can stack in order to make two functional chairs.
Where the magic happens

I had noooooo idea how much of my Peace Corps service would be spent on my computer.  In fact, Pat and I were only going to bring one computer between the two of us,  but then, my father-in-law gave me the amazing going away present of my own lap top.  Good thing he had more insight into how much screen time my service would entail.  I spend the mornings preparing and revising budgets, creating training outlines, writing grants or project reports, endlessly editing study protocols, emailing district or regional health staff or Peace Corps administration, scheduling (and rescheduling every time) different components of projects.  And blogging every once and a while, of course.

We work until about 1:00, when we head home, drop off our computers and grab spoons, and head over to our host family’s house for lunch.  Waiting for lunch is prime playing with kids time.  Lunch is usually rice with a leaf or (if we’re lucky) peanut butter sauce.  The family gathers around three different food bowls.  We are with the young adult crowd, while the grandparents/grandchildren and students from outlying villages that lodge with our family each have their own bowls.
Around the foodbowl (this is a way fancy meal with veggies and meat in honor of my parents' visit--not typical)

After lunch, it’s time to figure out how to get through the hot part of the day.  This is the time of the day when we do most of our sitting around with our family and neighbors, usually drinking tea or shelling peanuts.  Lots of people take naps, but I have lost my napping ability as well as my sleeping-in ability–-I just can’t get my mind to turn off.  Afternoons are the hardest part of the day for me.  I think that as integrated as I’d like to think I am, I can’t get deny some of my American ways of thinking.  I want to do work-ish things from during the day and have the evenings off.  So then, during the afternoons, it’s hard to really relax, and I find myself thinking constantly about productive activities I can be doing to fill the time instead of just sitting around, which is what everyone does.  It’s also just really hot, which doesn’t make anything easier.
Sample afternoon activity: our neighbor Bintou teaching us how to make a tasty snack out of Baobab fruit
In the late afternoon, I like to hang out around the hospital.  The hospital staff congregates under their shade structure then (their timeline is different than the Malinkes—they are all from cities and therefore tend to eat lunch much later) and I can usually count on tracking down the people I need to talk to about different things at that time.  I have recently started learning Wolof in earnest (mostly so I can understand the conversations flying around me under this very shade structure), and the hospital staff is a group of very enthusiastic teachers.  

It starts to cool off around 6.  And that means basketball time.  There is a great group of teenage boys and a few health staff that play every night, and I have started playing with them whenever I have time in the evening.  It is such a blast—gotta love team sports.  The rules for half court are a bit different on this side of the Atlantic, so it took me a while to understand what was going on every time the ball was taken out (or not), but I’ve got the hang of it.

After basketball, I take a bucket bath and head to my host family’s compound for dinner.  This used to be a race in order to get there in time to watch “A Castle for Two”, a ridiculous(ly good) Colombian telenovela dubbed into French that everyone was super into, whether they spoke French or not.  That show ended, though, and was replaced by one I haven’t been able to get into, which is ok since now the days are longer so basketball doesn’t before the time slot anyway.

Dinner is usually varying combinations of rice, peanut powder and oil.  One person holds a flashlight as the meal is shoveled down.  People retreat from the food bowl to their evening sitting positions—the students in front of the TV, waiting impatiently for the news to end so that they can switch it to music videos, the kids falling asleep in their clothes on the stick beds.

We sit for a bit and then return to our hut, despite the protests to stay and “xa sumun” (to stay up late talking).  Evening is a time we try to take for ourselves, reading or watching a show for a quick escape back to America.  We set up our outdoors sleeping set up and collapse under the mosquito net.

This progression of days is the backdrop to most other posts I’ve written.  Here, as in anywhere, days go by slowly and months speed by.  I have grown to find comfort in the daily routine, knowing a little bit of what comes next in a place that, no matter how adapted or integrated I am, can always manage to surprise me.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Coming to America

I have managed to write nearly fifty blog posts about my experiences as an American in Senegal.  But what about the other side of the coin—a Senegalese’s experiences in America?  With as much as I’ve talked about the struggles and delights of cultural differences, what would those differences look like to a Senegalese person? Just over a year ago, representatives from the embassy, including the Ambassador, came to visit my site.  Afterwards, they asked the health district to select someone to go on an exchange trip to America with health care professionals around Africa.  Fatou Traore, the mid-wife who serves as the Reproductive Health coordinator for the district, was selected, largely for her work with Peace Corps volunteers.  The trip was three weeks, and they visited DC, New York, Atlanta, Little Rock, and Los Angeles.  I was so excited to see Fatou had returned this week and promptly peppered her with questions, which she agreed to let me share here.
Fatou in New York (photos courtesy of Leah Moriarty)
ANNĒ: What did you think of my country?

FATOU: I didn’t want to come back!

ANNĒ: What was your favorite place that you visited?

FATOU: Little Rock—the landscape reminded all of us of Africa, and we got to visit smaller villages.

ANNĒ: Was there anything that was hard for you about America?

FATOU: The situation with homeless people.  In Los Angeles we went to a soup kitchen and fed over 900 people.  They said that there are that many people to feed every day.  I couldn’t believe that America is the richest country in the world and that there are still homeless people.  Also, the AIDS situation was surprising.  I had thought AIDS was just in Africa.  But it’s so different there.  Here, nearly all of the transmission is from unprotected heterosexual sex.  But there it primarily is injection drug users and MSM.  In the US, even though medication isn’t free, almost everyone who is HIV positive is on ARVs.  Here, the government pays for it, and we can’t get people to get on treatment.

ANNĒ: What else did you do?

FATOU: [Grinning] We went to Disney Land, the Bill Clinton Museum, the Jimmy Carter Museum, and the Native American Museum in Washington.  They organized lots of meetings for us and dinners.  We met people from Peace Corps administration (I told them I loved working with Peace Corps volunteers, that they were great people who have left their comfortable lives to come and do good in Africa), and we had dinner with several women who were over 60 who had done Peace Corps in Niger and Congo.  The woman who was in Congo still had not forgotten the language!  I saw New York with Leah [the volunteer who Pat and I replaced) and had dinner with Fode Mady’s [Ian’s] family in Atlanta. [Ian told me that it was so wonderful for his family (especially his sister who hadn’t been able to visit) to meet someone who had been part of his experience in Senegal.  As they were driving to drop her off, they passed a parking lot, and Fatou remarked, “Cars must be really cheap here.”  He had to figure out how to best explain that, no, they are the same price, people just have so much more money to spend on things like cars.]  We went to a small village outside of Little Rock, and they compared it to a Health Post, but it was a hospital.  It was better equipped than the new [and as of yet unopened] Saraya Hospital.

Fatou and Leah reunited.
ANNĒ: Was there any cultural differences you noticed?  When I first came to Senegal, I was quite struck by our cultural differences.

FATOU: Well, you know, here we are used to doing this in meetings. [Raises her hand and snaps her fingers repeatedly and aggressively.] You all don’t do that. 

ANNĒ: Yes! I was completely shocked the first time I ever walked into a classroom here!

FATOU:  But you know what really made an impression?  The hospitality. [It should be noted here that Senegal considers itself the country of Teranga, or hospitality.  For her to say this is a big deal.]  I thought that in developed countries I wouldn’t feel welcomed, but on the street, people greeted me.  I’ve heard that that doesn’t happen in the other countries, like France.  If we were lost, sometimes people would stop what they were doing and help us by looking up directions on their phones and steering us in the right direction.  And my veil.  I was very nervous about wearing my veil after everything that has happened in America with terrorism, and I thought that I would feel ill at ease and judged.  My younger brother actually told me that I shouldn’t wear it.  But I did, and it was fine.  I never felt uneasy and felt like people were just looking at me as a person.  No, everyone was very welcoming.  We were even met by a translator at the airport!  And hospitality was also shown to us at the dinners in families that were arranged.  I had dinner with a retired lawyer and social worker.  The other cultural thing is the volunteerism.  People give of their time and money to NGOs.  Here, the rich do not help the poor like that.  And everything was so clean!  The streets, the hospitals.  At the hospitals, people were always talking about hand washing.  You could be driving and not see a single piece of trash.  What else?  Obesity.  That was very shocking to see.  They say it is a public health problem in the US.  And diabetes too, it’s all caused by obesity. 

ANNĒ: Speaking of obesity, what did you think of the food? What did you really like?

FATOU: Mexican food [which happens to be the food that is generally agreed upon to be the most missed amongst volunteers].

ANNĒ: Anything you didn’t like?

FATOU: What was it called? Oh I don’t know…usually we asked the waiter what everything was on the menu, so I always got something I liked.
I guess that means she liked this ice cream!

I have to say, I was surprised about some of her answers, particularly because of the questions that people ask me based on their impressions of the differences between Senegal and America gleaned from TV.  I was so glad to hear her impressions of American hospitality, because it is commonly believed that we are completely inhospitable to each other in the Western World.  It’s so great that the Embassy provides this kind of program.  People often ask me why I can just come here to Senegal like it’s nothing, and it’s next to impossible for them to get a visa to see America.  I typically say something about how long and hard the Peace Corps application process is, but really, that’s just an easy answer.  It’s not the same, and I have not only access to a super easy American life but the opportunity to up and visit places where life is not easy.  It’s a tough question to grapple with, like so many other questions of inequality that I constantly encounter. Giving someone like Fatou a chance to visit the US and have an overwhelmingly positive experience there, however, is a great diplomacy tool, and I hope more programs like it emerge. 

It also made me even more excited for our upcoming trip home.  Just two months to go until we get to stuff our faces with MacKenzie River pizza and salads, drink Montana micro-brews, hike in the Bridgers, go to a movie, sit out on my parents deck and watch the Alpen Glow, chat with family and friends without having most of the conversation be “Can you hear me now?”, dance and be merry at two weddings of dear friends, celebrate 30th and 91st birthdays.  Oh, America.





Monday, June 3, 2013

I'm just in it for the t-shirt

May 15th 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.)





http://lineoverthee.blogspot.com/2012/09/camp-la-senegalaise.html



http://lineoverthee.blogspot.com/2012/10/peacecare-and-disease-that-sits-in.html

http://lineoverthee.blogspot.com/2013/04/2013-kedougou-youth-leadership-camp.html
http://lineoverthee.blogspot.com/2013/05/be-cool-stay-in-school.html