babies and children and sheep, oh my!

I’m back in Sikasso after a little over a week in village. Salimata, Soumaila and I have continued to go to the other villages in the commune doing vaccinations and baby weighings. It’s been really nice to have some scheduled time where I feel like I’m actually doing something useful. Plus I’m getting to see some other villages and ride my bike a lot. While they had been weighing babies at the vaccination days before, according to the records they weren’t weighing nearly as many of the babies.

Now that I’ve been there a few times, I’m sure this was because it’s really hard to coordinate with all these women who are trying to get their baby vaccinated as quickly as possible, while filling out all the paperwork and actually administrating the vaccinations (not to mention crying squirming babies that don’t want to be shoved into the baby shorts and hung from the scale). I’ve definitely been useful as another set of hands.

I’m looking forward to expanding the activities that we do on these days even more. I was supposed to do my first “animation” (an informal education session) yesterday, but the vaccination day didn’t end up happening because somehow the women didn’t end up being informed that we were coming that day. Right now we’re not really doing nutritional counseling with the women after we weigh the babies. With our current system, I haven’t figured out yet how we can incorporate that smoothly, but I think it will come.

I’d heard a lot of stories about children that wouldn’t leave volunteers alone in their villages. For the first few weeks, I had no problems. Children didn’t even try to come to my concession. Then, about a week ago, some children started showing up to visit. It was a small group of girls, and they came, stayed for a while, and left, and it was no problem. However, this caused more children to come. A few days ago I started kicking them out after a few minutes. First of all, because they wouldn’t respect the fact that if I locked the door to my concession in the early afternoon, that meant I was resting before my language tutoring session and didn’t want company. One night they also came in the evening, when I was just reading and winding down before bed. Again, the door was locked, and despite the fact that I’d explained to them (that afternoon) that if the door was locked I didn’t want visitors, they wouldn’t go away.

I just need to be firmer about kicking them out. Even when it’s just a few kids and they’re not doing anything, I can’t comfortably go about my normal activities in my concession with them staring at me. They don’t come to talk or anything, just to watch me. I had an older girl come in the other day and tell me I should “shoo” the kids away, so I did. I was glad she’d told me that, because I had been worried that it was culturally inappropriate to send them away, but now I know it’s not.

I have, however, started to welcome sheep into my concession. The yard is supposed to be just sand, but lots of weeds grow in it. I sometimes will spend some time weeding, but it just grows to fast to keep up with. Sometimes sheep would wander in and I would chase them away, but then one day I thought – hey, maybe we can work together on this. Soon an entire herd of sheep was in my yard and doing a better job than I would have done spending an hour weeding while sweating profusely.

A few things I forgot to put on my previous list of stuff I would love to receive:

granola bars

CDs! Please please burn CDs and send them to me!

I just want to mention that now that Ramadan is over, I'm able to watch Au Coeur Du Péché again in my village. There is a car batter-powered black and white TV at my homologue's house. Au Coeur Du Péché is a Brazilian soap opera dubbed into French (and for the non-francophones, that translates to "at the heart of sin," so you can imagine what an awesome show it is). For the duration of Ramadan, they had moved it to 10 or 10:30 at night -- or so I heard, because that's way past my bedtime! Two nights this week it wasn't on because of soccer, and I was very bitter.