Aning dookuwo dun?

This is one of my favorite Mandinka greetings, meaning “And what about the work?”

The answer depends on whether you are asking Cibyl or Nafi. The latter might tell you about her accidental tomato crop or her new banana plant [This might be the only time in my life I’ll have a chance to grow bananas in my backyard! I’ve named her Bernice.] or her experiences harvesting rice, which, by the way is insanely labor intensive – they cut it all by hand, blade by blade, stooped over for hours. Cibyl on the other hand has been at site now for five months and has a much harder time pointing to the things she’s done in that time. The work is slow to take shape- partly this is Senegal, partly this is Peace Corps, partly this is me. But finally things are moving.

One of SPB’s biggest problems at the moment is the “non-functional” status of our health hut. In Senegal the health structures at the village level are very basic – small two to three room buildings that carry some basic first aid supplies, administered by volunteer health workers. When the health hut and its supplies are available to the population depends largely on how dedicated the health worker is, how busy he is in the fields and the availability of supplies at the nearest health post. And because these workers aren’t paid for their time, even technically “functional” health huts may be otherwise in practice. Now take Saré Pathé, where we have a beautiful new health hut, where my counterpart, a trained birth attendant is very motivated and hardworking and where we can’t get any supplies because the guy the community has chosen as the local health worker has yet to be trained. Who’s going to pay for it? After some frustrating conversations with the president of the village health committee and the doctor at the nearest health post (7 km away) I finally feel like I have an ally and a sponsor in this effort. An NGO that is run by one of our own, a sort of Saré Pathé hometown hero, has offered to put up the money for the training, which will start in December and last three months. By March our health hut should be up and running - what that will mean in practical terms has yet to be seen.

While I feel a sense of victory at having this plan in place and the money to carry it out, it doesn’t feel like my victory. The community picked the health worker and HOPE 87 is paying for the training. It all could have been done without me, which is great, but the fact of this NGO and its multi-faceted role in the community has challenged me to think really hard about what I want my impact here to be. Most of the more visible projects (think wells, garden fences, latrines) I could work on would normally require writing grants, which doesn’t interest me in the least. And besides, what does SPB need a grant for when they have HOPE 87 to pay for all that kind of stuff? The tricky thing is that a lot of people in my village have come to expect these kinds of bigger projects from development organizations, especially since they have this close relationship to one in particular; people assume that the American volunteer has come to build them something and I sometimes get the sense that they are waiting for me to roll into SPB with bags of cement and a construction crew. I don’t want my villagers to be disappointed in the Peace Corps or think that they got a slacker volunteer. I want to serve the needs of the community, which means trying to give them some of the things they ask for, but I also have my own ideas of what I want my service to be. I didn’t sign up to be the foreman of a construction project or even an NGO liaison. I signed up for the grass-roots community development and the cultural exchange… which is why I’m excited about my Care Group.

Within the last month I’ve recruited five women from different corners of Saré Pathé to be my Care Group. The idea is that each of the women is responsible for five or six compounds, including her own, and every few weeks we’ll meet to go over a health intervention, then they go out into the community and teach other women what they’ve learned. The hope is that it will be a more sustainable way to disseminate this information than if I were to always be the one hosting demonstrations. These five women will become the local experts and hopefully continue to be role models of healthy practices in the community after my two years is up. People here have a complicated relationship to the “miracles” of Western medicine; they don’t know what is in the pills they take but they want them for everything and that’s frustrating because they often can’t afford them (or think they can’t). I want to remind people that there is a lot they can do to take care of themselves and their families and that they can reduce their reliance on medicine from the health post if they learn how to prevent some common health problems. I want these women to feel empowered. We had our first meeting last week and made mosquito repellent from locally available ingredients. It’s been a great success so far – the women are enthusiastic about being part of this group and are already sharing their newfound expertise with their neighbors. There’s even talk within the community of expanding the group to other nearby villages, something I was planning to suggest at a later date if the group proved successful. I’m thrilled and encouraged and optimistic. This is a project I can take ownership of. This is a direction in which to run.

Click here for new pictures: rainy season landscapes and vegetable harvest!