Thanksgiving!

I love Peace Corps life, but the worst thing is not being able to see my family.  This is especially true during the holidays. Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday in America (no fluff Christmas, plus football! what's better than that?), was celebrated with a Senegalese twist this year with my new family in Kolda. We even got a turkey! (Please try to understand how amazing this is.)

 Yours truly even worked in the kitchen for a while.

Oh yeah, and it might have been Hobbit themed.

Getting ready the kill Boromir the Turkey.

Group Thanks.

Kolda Wall of Thanks!

Just grabbing some organs for the gravy

FEAST.

Mulled wine... yum

Malaria Tourney

The real reason I've been MIA since after I got back from vacation is that I was very busy with Kolda's Malaria Tourney. What is a malaria tourney? This is apparently very difficult to describe, because when I tried to describe it to some of you while it was happening it just came out as "We're riding our bikes around and talking about malaria."  This is the gist, but it leaves out a lot.

My dear friend Courtney and I decided to do this malaria tourney last spring.  The idea was to have people bring out their mosquito nets and we would provide the materials to wash, sew, and transform their mosquito nets.  Mosquito nets (at least the good ones) are give out with an insecticide on it that kills mosquitoes, thus eliminating the vector that spreads malaria.  Washing nets yearly is important to keep the insecticide potent.  Sewing holes obviously keeps mosquitoes out.  And transformation, meaning changing a square net into a circle net, is popular now because it's much easier to put the net up in the morning and bring it down at night.  It also makes sort nets longer, which is essential to tucking the net in at night. We had varying degrees of popularity with transformation, mostly because net distribution has been trying to give out more circle nets for the aforementioned reasons (which is good!).

So what Courtney and I did was wrote the grant, chatted with local health officials to keep them informed, buy the supplies, load up our bikes, and head out to the open road to personally stomp out malaria.  We opened up the project to the entire region of Kolda and got 18 bites. That's 18 sites, covering about 200 km on our bikes (my calves look really good right now), with baggage strapped to our bike racks.

Look Mom! A transformed net!

Part of the reason was to extend new practices and reinforce old ones.  Washing nets, for example, is an old practice that a lot of people don't do or don't do right. You have to use ordinary soap, i.e. not detergent, which surprisingly few people know. You have to hang it in the shade. These are both to keep the insecticide and maintain the life expectancy of the net. With all three practices, materials are the main problem and we wanted to remove that barrier.

After a fun filled morning of net care and repair, the day could go three ways: it could be over, the health care worker could lead a causerie, or a local group could put on a malaria related theater sketch.  Our original plan was to have every site do a theater sketch, but some just didn't have the energy, time, or resources. The sites that did causeries ended up being really great anyway. Sometimes we invited the heads of households, sometimes just older men and women, and sometimes everyone. We had a lot of productive discussion and I'm happy with how things went.

Theater sketches had varying success. Everyone who prepared a sketch did a great job, but sometimes the draw could be too much. Too many kids, too much talking, and no one would be able to hear anything, which was the whole point! The theater sketches were part of a larger contest. The top three sketches are going to be recorded and played on the radio in January! Thanks and congratulations to Stephanie McAlexander and Nathan Rehr, who came in first and second. Third was my health post, organized by our matrone, Tako Balde.

With 18 sites ranging in size, proximity to the main road and therefore education, goods, and amenities, we had a wide range of experiences through our month long experience. A generic morning would have us begin the program around 9, pulling water for washing, hanging rope for drying, prepping needles for sewing, and tubes for transforming. At our low we washed two nets in a morning and at our high we washed 65 nets. By "we," of course I don't actually mean "us."  I can barely wash my clothes let alone a heavy, rough mosquito net.


So the work was fun, but the play was also fun. First year health volunteer and friendship bracelet maker extraordinaire Lexi Merrick accompanied us for about 10 sites near her, and was therefore a part of the most biking intense part of the trip, and first year health volunteer and my site mate Nathan Rehr was with us for the five sites closest to us.  Being an on-point Pullo for that long can be exhausting, so it was good that we could switch on and off who was going to be lead person each day.

It was also really awesome to see so many of my friends, who I know in their America, Peace Corps contexts, as their Pullo alter egos. We got to see where they live, where they travel, who they live with, what they eat, everything. It's amazing how different every site is and how very similar everything actually is.

Oops.

What baggage?

Scholarship 2014

Oh hello! Just recently remembered that I have a blog, but in my defense I've been very busy! Forgive me, but I'm going to go a little bit out of order and start with my scholarship girls because I love them the most.

So as my Facebook friends will know, I did the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship at my local middle school again this year.  The goal of the scholarship is to keep at risk girls in school. "At-risk" includes risk from poverty, risk of early marriage, and risk of pregnancy. It also awards high achieving girls- all of my girls were at the top of their class.

You'll all remember my girls last year (pictured below). I had six of the smartest girls in the school in the program. This year, one went on to high school, one failed her finals but passed her BFEM (the test one needs to pass be allowed to go to high school),  two are in 3eme this year (9th grade) and were awarded the scholarship again, and two got married and will not be continuing their education. In an effort not to turn this specific post into a rant about my feeling on teenage marriage, I'll just say I'll write about it later.

MSS Scholarship Recipient 2013

This year, though, we added three more girls to the list.  Peace Corps (and by "Peace Corps" I of course mean my wonderful donors) paid for their inscription fees (about $10), bought them notebooks and pens, and the American Embassy in Dakar sweetened the deal by giving out free book bags literally full of everything a student is supposed to have and is almost always too poor to buy. This includes more notebooks, pens, pencils, protractor, ruler, mini chalk board, pencil case, and I'm forgetting everything else, but trust me, it's good. I told everyone it was from Obama, and were the mid-term elections in Sanankoro, I would now have total confidence in the Democrats sweeping it.

Scholarship Recipients 2014

I had a much better time of it this year for several reasons. 1. I speak Pulaar this year. Last year I had to get the project started my first week at site, which was overwhelming, and I'm pretty sure not everyone understood everything, myself included. 2. I have a relationship with the school this year, and they trust me a lot more. 3. I have a relationship with the girls, and getting the scholarship is actually a really big deal now. 4. I had a much better outfit.

Let just conclude with a congratuatory note to Dienabou and Khady, who received the scholarship two years in a row, Mariama Sow, Fanta Seydi, Dienaba Kande, Mariama Balde, Assette Balde, Salle Mballo, and Asmou Seydi, CEM Sare Koutayel's scholarship girls and Senegal's future presidents, doctors, lawyers, and ministers. Not that I have high expectations or anything.