WAIST

The mosque on Ouakam beach in Dakar.

Me, Lindsay and Holly at the lighthousem, recovering from teh bus ride.

View from the lighthouse.

Peace Corps Mali had the best uniforms! Those are Dogon hats.

Stephanie and Amy cheer on the team.

I just returned from the West African International Softball Tournament, which is held yearly in Dakar, Senegal. It was absolutely fantastic.



There were 50 Peace Corps volunteers from Mali going, so we actually chartered a bus to go from Bamako to Dakar. My dad checked online last night, and apparently this is a distance of 675 miles. Well. My trip began with a bus ride from Sikasso to Bamako, which I actually made in record time -- under 6 hours. I spent the night in Bamako, and in the morning we all boarded the bus, intending to go to Kayes, a city in western Mali, and spend the night there at the Peace Corps transit house. It took about 9 hours. There are about 8 beds at the transit house, so most of us were on the floor, including me. It was uncomfortable, but we left early the next morning for the really uncomfortable part of the trip -- the bus ride from Kayes all the way across Senegal. We were anticipating that it would take somewhere between 18 and 30 hours.



It took 20, and that was with absolutely nothing going wrong -- the bus didn't break down or anything. Basically, we were zooming along out of Kayes and across the border, but after a town in central Senegal called Tambacounda, the road turns into the worst road you can possibly imagine. It lookied like the surface of the moon because it was so covered in potholes. The bus could only go 15 or 20 mph the whole time. So we rolled into Dakar around 3 a.m., but we had no hotel reservations for that night, so we slept on the bus for a few hours until we could check into the hotel.



Having studied abroad in Dakar, I was surprised that even just glimpsing Dakar again at 3 in the morning, I was blown away. I was blown away by how developed and nice and clean it looked! Some people tried to pee near the bus and got yelled at! That would never happen in Mali! There were tall buildings, and we were parked by a wrought iron fence, that enclosed a LAWN. The streets were all paved. I wondered for a minute if it had actually been that nice when I was there!



In the morning I went straight to the Club Atlantique, the venue hosting WAIST, with a few other people because we were going to be staying at homestays instead of hotels. (Embassy workers and other ex-pats allow participants in WAIST to stay at their houses during the tournament. It turns out the embassy actually gives them mattresses to do so.) The Club Atlantique has baseball fields, tennis courts, a volleyball court, a pool, a bar, and a snack bar. After two days on the road we were filthy so we showered there, then relaxed by the pool and had some food, then went and walked to a lighthouse up the coast.



We hung out at the pool for the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening got paired with our hosts. My friend Amy and I were together, with a 30-something embassy worker. His apartment is in the heart of the downtown, and was just a few blocks from the hotel where the rest of PC Mali was staying. His apartment looked just like an American apartment. He had a great entertainment system, but most excitingly, a WASHING MACHINE! And a dryer. We did a little laundry every day. Four volunteers from Senegal and one from Benin were staying there was well. He was a great host and we were really glad we decided to do the homestay rather than the hotel.



Peace Corps Mali did really well in the tournament itself. We were late registering so we had only one team, in the competitive bracket, but the rest of us had a great time going to their games and cheering them on. After a four-game winning streak we were defeated by a bunch of high schoolers, but we figure, hey, those kids actually practiced!



At the end a bunch of the volunteers from Mali went down to the Petite Cote, the area of Senegal with the nicest beaches, and rented a house for a few days in a town called Popenguine. It was so much fun, so relaxing, and very inexpensive.



I ended up flying back to Mali. After encountering volunteers who left before we went to the beach to go overland and ended up in Bamako at the same time as me, and hearing their stories, I am glad.



There was lots of stuff going on at my site before I left, but I don't really feel like going into that now. I'm going back tomorrow, so maybe I'll write about village when I go back to Sikasso again.

Old Pictures

This is Soumaila, the vaccinator, with one of his wives, Assetou (who is chopping green onions), and their youngest child, Bafin.

My homologue, Salimata, and her son, Farsi, who is a year and a half old. He was not cooperative with photographs.

My kitty wants to ride my bike!

I encountered this scorpion on a late night trip to the bathroom. It was 2 or 3 inches long. Not pleasant.

This is my kitten in the thing I use to draw water from my well. Cutest kitten ever!

My host family stores the harvested millet in a granary.

All of the women came with large bowls to gather the millet and pass it to the guy at the top of the granary.

Two of the women in my host family pound something (probably millet) in a mortar and pestle. They take turns on the upstrokes and downstrokes. The woman on the left has a baby on her back.

Training and beyond!

So it’s been a while since I wrote on my blog. I spent two weeks in January in Bamako for “In-Service Training,” with all the other volunteers that arrived in the same training group as I did. It was really fun to see everyone again after three months at site, but it was also pretty hard to go back to my village afterward. However, I had a bunch of new ideas for work. For our first three months in our villages we were just supposed to be improving our language skills and getting to know the community; now we can start planning what we want to accomplish at our sites.

One of the main things I needed to do right off was to start doing baby weighings for slightly older children. This was because since my arrival, the CSCOM staff wanted me to weigh babies at vaccination days. However, babies’ vaccinations are complete when they are 9 months old, which is before they are at the highest risk for malnutrition because they are not weaned at that point. During the months that I had been weighing babies, the vast majority were at healthy weights for their ages, and I wondered whether we really even had a problem of malnutrition in my village. The occasional baby that was underweight was usually an exceptional circumstance, like the mother had lost her milk or died.

I had brought up the idea of weighing older children (ideally we would monitor their growth until the age of 5) multiple times with the CSCOM staff, but the matrone did not think that women would come if the kids weren’t getting vaccinated. When I returned from training, I told them again what I wanted to do. I said I would weigh children once a week at the CSCOM. That way not too many people would be there at once so we could actually give nutritional counseling to the mothers of underweight kids, and the women would know that if they missed one week, they could always come the next week.

This past Friday I did the first weighing day for children up to 5, and more than 80 children showed up to be weighed. I was extremely pleased – we hadn’t even done a very good job of getting word out in the village, and that many women showed up. Furthermore, many one- to two-year-olds were in the “yellow zone,” i.e. somewhat underweight. These are the kids that we really want to find through this kind of activity, because by the time they are severely malnourished they need medical intervention, not just nutritional counseling. Even if attendance is not as good at future weighings, I now have some mothers that I can start working with on ameliorated porridge.

Speaking of, the most encouraging thing happened last week! A woman came looking for me, carrying containers of peanuts, millet and corn. She said that she and four other women wanted me to show them to make ameliorated porridge, and here were the ingredients. I told her to get the millet pounded into powder, and the peanuts made into peanut butter or powder, whichever was easier, and what other ingredients we needed. We all got together the next morning to make the porridge. Salimata (the matrone) wasn’t able to come (it was a Sunday), which was too bad because she understands my Bambara very well, but I think the demonstration overall went well. Mostly, though, I was just unbelievably happy to see women so motivated to improve their children’s health that they sought me out.

One of the interesting things about living in a farming community is seeing the seasonal changes in work. When I left for Bamako, the men were planting potatoes and women were “beating” rice – once it is cut and dried, they have to hit it with sticks to get the grain off the stalks. When I returned, the men were still working in the potato fields, but the women were done with the rice and instead going every day to collect firewood. I went with one of my host mother’s last week to see how it’s done. We walked to a place about a mile away, where there were a bunch of bushes that had sticks that were probably 4 inches in diameter. We cut them off with machetes and axes, then bundled them with ropes to carry them back to the village on our heads. Yes, I did carry some, but I have seen 10-year-old girls that can carry as much as I can. I was able to make it back ok but my head and back ached a lot since I’m not used to carrying things on my head.

In less than two weeks I’m going on vacation to Senegal, for the West African International Softball Tournament (WAIST). Basically, a bunch of PCVs and ex-pats from Senegal, Mali and Mauritania get together for a couple days of playing softball. About 60 volunteers from Mali are planning to go, and we’re chartering a bus to Dakar. More on that when I get back!