Oh yea, I actually have a job here...

Hey Friends. Once again in dirty, annoying Kaolack.

So I’ve come to the realization that my blog mostly shares the horrors and ridiculousness of my Service thus far, so maybe I should actually share a little about my job and what I’ve been doing (or should be doing) with these first few months at site (and honestly, the first few months following IST which starts in just two weeks). This has been spurred by reading fellow Vols blogs and remembering, “hey, I’m actually here to do something, maybe people are interested in that too?” We shall see.

I came here for a meeting with my new APCD over the new direction of the Health Education program. The meeting was a good chance to sit down and talk about ideas for training and what we want the program to be, and while it was a tad frustrating, it was overall good. I think I went off a little over my own frustrations with some aspects of my assignment, but I think he has a better understanding of the importance of proper site selection and Volunteer placement for the future. [Note: there’s nothing wrong with my placement, I merely commented on the fact that the Nurse (one of my counterparts) doesn’t actually speak Serere nor really know much about the Peace Corps and if I wasn’t able to effectively communicate in French, it would have been a disastrous and ridiculous pair-up. I just really wanted to make sure that they know issues encountered for future groups.] It was also a good chance to share my desire to work more with the schools than the health posts as well.

Anyways, so as many of you may know, during these first three months at site, we aren’t really supposed to do much “real work,” like projects and such. Instead, we are supposed to focus on getting to know our villages (integrating), learning about the area, and learning the language. This is hard and also basically means a lot of sitting around, or wandering around, hoping someone wants to talk to you. It would be a lot easier if I was good at small talk and/or had a better grasp on Serere, which I do not. As part of learning about the area, we are supposed to ask a lot of questions, about everything from health to crops to families to education, etc. Health Volunteers have what is called a Community Health Survey to complete, by going house to house, or otherwise collecting a decently-sized sample of the community. It asks about things such as sanitation (Do you have a douche/toilet? Do you clean it?), maternal and child health (Do you give birth at home or at the Health Post? At what age do you begin weaning your child? With what foods?), basic illnesses (What are the most common diseases in your village?), food and nutrition (How often do you eat vegetables/meat/fish?), and water management (Where do you get your water? Where do you store it? What do you do with it before drinking? What do you do with dirty water?). It is basically an attempt to learn about the health practices of the village, not to mention work on the language and meet/hang out with people. After some procrastination (and language frustration, let’s be honest), I started conducting my survey with my counterpart. It basically involved me translating the questions from English to Serere, talking over them with him, and then him basically asking all of the questions very quickly as we went house to house, me understanding about 70% of what was said (and by 70%, probably 50%, lol). We’ve done it two different afternoons so far and will do at least two more afternoons together, then I may wander alone to the places we didn’t get, though I’m getting a pretty good idea of the answers, or at least what they are telling me. The reality and what they tell me though may be very different things. It’s interesting and eye-opening to say the least.

Sometimes I wonder if my counterpart was feeding people the answers, especially to the question, “Why do you want a Volonteer? What are the major health concerns of the village?” The answer to both of those is “We should have a health hut, with medicine, and maybe a communally shared charret to take people from the village to the Health Post in Djilor, esp for those who don’t have charrets or when the charrets are in the fields and people don’t have time to take away from the fields.” That, and “we should have a millet grinder because pounding millet is hard on the body.” (Note: we do have a millet grinder, but it hasn’t worked in over a month, for some unknown reason) Great, all anyone will tell me is that they want a health hut, a charret, and a millet-grinding machine. Good start, but those are not going to be easy things to tackle or even good places to start out in my work. We are supposed to come up with a plan of things to tackle in our communities, a combo of our own ideas and what the community wants and needs. I’ll add a health hut to the list, but the village also has other issues like hygiene, nutrition, and Malaria, not to mention training people in the village to run health education programs and work with the schools. I feel like my list of things to tackle grows on a weekly basis. Exciting but very overwhelming as I have no idea of where to start, esp with my current language level. O ndang o ndang (little by little).

Part of the difficulty though with starting the survey now (though I don’t really have much choice, IST starts in 2 weeks), is that everyone goes to the fields on a daily basis here in the Delta. The millet was planted over a month ago, so it’s now coming up, as are the weeds. That basically means that everyone except the really old, really young, or very pregnant (so the men, women, teens, kids), go to the fields from 7:30 until 6:30 or so, to weed, re-seed, and who knows what else. I’ve gone a few times, but don’t go everyday because, well, I have other stuff to do, both around my hut and in preparation for IST. It’s definitely weird being around though because it’s just the 4 really old people at my compound, a few of the babies (those under 4), and me, the crazy white girl who reads and writes a lot. And now that the teachers are gone, there’s no one else hanging around that’s not a farmer with fields and crops. It makes for a creepy and deserted feeling around the village during the late morning and afternoon. The women, of course, are the champions. They are up before sunrise pounding millet for breakfast (I heard my sister once around 5am), cook, do laundry, sweep, etc, then work in the fields, one or two come back to make lunch and take back out to the fields, work, come back around 5:30 or so, pound more millet, cook, bathe children, eat dinner, and then even after dinner, around 9pm or so, sit in the dark sifting millet for the following day’s meals—While the men rest. It’s kind of ridiculous, but they are definitely the champs, so strong and yet totally exhausted by the end of the day.

Here’s a common convo I now have on a daily basis, translated from Serere:
Person: You don’t go to the fields?
Me: Yes, I went yesterday but I didn’t go today.
Person: You have a field?
Me: No, I don’t have a field.
Person: You don’t have a field? (shock and disbelief) You can’t farm, can you?
Me: I can farm.
Person: You can farm?! (shock and disbelief again)
Me: Yes, I can farm, I can gnos (basically weed, with a spade-like tool).
Person: You can gnos?! (more shock and disbelief)
Me: Yes, I can gnos. (I walk toward them in the field, take their tool and start weeding) I can gnos, I have a gnosi (the thing you weed with)
Person: You have a gnosi?! (shock and disbelief) You can gnos! Oh Khady Diouf, haha
(I walk away, glad to have shown them that I can indeed gnos, even if I don’t have a field and am not actually a farmer)

However, I have only gnos-ed for a few hours at a time, whether in the field or in my backyard, and doubt my ability to spend 10 hours a day in the fields gnos-ing. The farmers (ie everyone here) are tough, but I guess, they have to be, their food supply for next year depends on it. This is subsistence farming, ladies and gentlemen, not the big corporate or otherwise subsidized farms of the US. There’s a food crisis and the people of the Delta are doing everything they can to keep food in their bellies. Makes you appreciate what we have, doesn’t it?

Other things to work on pre-IST while people are in the fields include maps of my village and what’s around as well as a map of what’s in town, lists of activities I’ve done to “help with my integration” (uh, I sit around in the day, and walk around the village in the late afternoon and greet people…I dance at baptisms, is that enough?), and a kind of analysis of the health situation in the village, done through the help of the Health Survey. We are supposed to write something up as well as do like a 15 minute presentation at IST…we’ll see how those go.

I’m going to go now that this post is ridiculously long and full of insanely long run-on sentences. Please don’t judge me J