Long lost update

Hello! Nic and I have been installed in our permanent site of Agnam Thiodaye and life is good! We just got our own house a few days ago (unfortunately, they did not have a house for us when we arrived,so we were living at the health post with my counterpart). It was definitely interesting seeing people come and go at the health post, and it's interesting how different the concepts of privacy and medicine are. People would just show up at all hours of the day and night and ask for the doctor, and would sit and wait for him, even if he wasn't even in town. Either way around, our new house is nice, has two rooms and a small porch area. We've started to lay the foundations for our work and have been working on our language.
Nic and I just finished our language seminar in Kassak Nord, a beautiful green area on the opposite side of the country from where we live, the dry and brown Agnam Thiodaye which desperately needs a water tower. We spent the week in class learning all sorts of new vocabulary, and correcting the vocabulary that we thought we did know. There are many words here which sound very very close to each other but have different meanings that it's been pretty difficult adapting my ear to, but it's coming. For example: daanaade is to sleep, but dannaade is to travel. Luubde is to smell bad, but lubde is to lend. To the untrained ear (i.e. mine), they sound identical. The doubling of vowels doesn't change the sound, it just means you say the sound a little bit longer. One word that really caught me up was hebde, which means (drum roll please) to get.
Now, imagine this: a young foreigner comes into your town, school, and health post and proclaims proudly that she wants to help the people in your community get malaria. Wait, what? Oh, that's right... hAbde is to prevent! I told my entire town, with full confidence, that I will help them get malaria. I imagine by now they've set up the road block and are all on the look out for the foreigner who is going to come in and cut holes in their mosquito nets and leave vats of open water sitting around, not to mention hiding all of the malaria medication and burn down all the NEEM trees. Oi, vey. The pitfalls of language learning!
Right now we are in San Louis enjoying a luxurious day off after spending a very long time in our village. In Agnam, I've started attending elementary school for the purpose of learning French and mastering the French number system (one year of French was NOT enough, but I've got plenty of time to study and Nic is very helpful and patient with me). It's been an awesome time because the school was not assigned a volunteer, so there wasn't any pressure to work, and now every elementary school kid in town knows who I am. I will walk down the road and there is a chorus of Aisata Kane! Aisata Kane! (my new name). Because the school was so generous with their time and welcomed me to their school, I talked to the director and set it up so that when the fall comes I will be finding a work partner and working at the school. I wrote up an action plan and talked it over with the director, who was very receptive to gardening, murals, and clubs, and whenever we get back to site on Monday I will be going to talk to him again to finalize some details. I explained that right now I need to really focus on language learning (I think that part was probably obvious once he heard my French and Pulaar) but that when school starts if the staff is willing to work with me I'd be very willing to help start student groups, clubs, and teach about moringa, gardening, and sanitation. I'm so excited. My job is becoming more clear to me and I am more pumped every day about spending time at the health post and working with the elementary school. In my eyes, preventative health is very important for children as they are a very vulnerable group. A sick child cannot force a parent to take them to the doctor, but a healthy child can take the initiative to wash his/her hands, eat well, and avoid unhealthy habits. Nic and I have also talked over the possibility of doing health and environment themed radio programs on the local station, a prospect I am particularly excited about. I talked to the director at the school about having a student club (like a radio club) that would work together to write skits that could be recorded and played over the local station. Volunteers have done this in the past and apparently they have been very successful. Just have to wait until October and see if there is a group of students and a supportive teacher that are willing to work with me on this project.
In the meantime, our in-service training is coming up, which means that I get to spend sometime learning additional technical skills that are particularly relevant to my site and the needs of my site. It's been difficult adjusting as it's currently the hot season and we spend an insane amount of time sweating like crazy. I drink at least 5 liters of water most days and still sometimes go to bed feeling dehydrated. This, however, hasn't kept Nic and I from evaluating our surroundings and finding out our community's needs. We still have lots to learn, don't get me wrong, but I at least think we've got something to get the ball rolling.
Our 4th of July celebration is coming up and it is taking place in a very beautiful part of the country. Rumor has it that it is a land of waterfalls and forests, which sounds like a paradise as a citizen of the land of thorns and scorpions. Speaking of scorpions, I had one run up my dress and sting my three times. The stupid thing was maybe 4 inches long, sandy colored, and had big claws, and those stings hurt like H*ll, but the best part was that I panicked, my host family panicked, and I got to experience a bit of the Senegalese health care system. They took me to the health post where my counterpart (the head doctor at the health post) wanted to inject me with Novocaine in the right breast! Of course, I didn't let him (that sounded worse than dealing with the stings), but until that moment I hadn't realized how easy it was to get access to any sort of drug that I might want. At pharmacies you literally just go to the pharmacist and tell him or her what you want and most of the time you just get it. Regulations are lax at best. I don't have any inclination to hang out at the pharmacy, but it's a very different approach from the American-style have-to-sign-for-and-show-id-for-decongestant pharmacist. Our health post is actually in pretty good shape, and people definitely come to the health post with problems. One thing that observing the health post has made me realize is that a basic first aid class would go a very long way in my community. Yes, people do come to the health post for very valid reasons, but sometimes people come with simple cuts and burns that they could take care of themselves at home if somebody showed them how to do it. Infection prevention could also go a long way here, and teaching people methods of sterilizing and cleaning cloth used to cover wounds and proper care of minor injuries could go miles, and potentially relax the work load on the employees at the health post. I am going to be working on my vocabulary for the next few months and talk to some folks about the prospect of teaching a basic first aid class, and perhaps I can pull in some of the health workers in my community to really make sure I am teaching things clearly and properly. The future is formulating.
Being a health volunteer is going to be rewarding in a way that being an English teacher in Kyrgyzstan was not going to be for me. Being a teacher can be very rewarding, but I find this job a much better suit for me in terms of both personal interest and meaningfulness. Certain people are better suited for certain jobs, and this one is a perfect match for me. One of the best mornings I've had in a while was when I woke up early and headed to the health post- rumor had it vaccinations were that day, so I went to check it out. It turns out that while they were not doing vaccinations, they were doing deworming and providing vitamin supplements to the community. The staff broke up into several groups and each of these groups went into the village and provided children within a certain age range with a liquid vitamin A drop (vit. A deficiency is a big problem here) and a dewormer. I went with two staff members into the community and went to about 30 houses and gave supplements to over 100 kids, and it felt wonderful. I got to meet families that I hadn't met before, and it felt good to meet people and show that I was there to help and provide assistance. The staff I went with let me administer the drops which I really appreciated, and I got a much better perspective of the malnutrition issues that exist in my community. At the elementary school, I see mainly healthy kids whose parents have the resources to send their children to school. Sure, there are exceptions, and there are definitely malnourished kids in the schools too. However, the children that need the most outreach are the ones that are the hardest to find: they don't go to school, that stay at home, that are too sick to be in public, etc. At times I question what, if anything, I can do to serve these communities as I am not a doctor, but, when I am feeling good, I can remind myself that simply inspiring a parent to take their sick child to the health post or cook healthier meals with higher nutrient content, or even teaching someone how to make oral re-hydration fluid, can make a world of difference to one person. It's a small step but hopefully a step in the right direction. It's been said about peace corps volunteers that the biggest impact they may have in their community may be the most subtle one, and I can definitely believe that. I have no idea what an impact I will really have in the long run, if I have one at all, but we'll see, we'll see. In the end, in some ways these projects are not my projects, but instead the community's projects, and I am merely the liaison. We will see what the future holds.