hello everyone, thanks again for continuing to read. I'm sitting here at the 'Big Faim' a restaurant in Thies (which means 'big hunger' in frenglish) enjoying a bottle of red wine and a cheese burger...oh how delicious food can be. I'll be here for 2 weeks of IST (in-service-training) we're learning mostly technical skills such as grant writing procedures, ideas for health demonstrations (called causeries) and other possible projects. After IST there will be an English camp here in Thies which I volunteered to help out at. It's a summer camp for local high school students who are learning English, basically we get to play games, do arts and crafts and ONLY speak English with them all day long, I'm extremely excited, this is going to be a nice month-long break from site.
In addition to updating you on my current activities I want to point out that I recently upload a bunch of new pictures on my Picasa account (a new album and many added to 'at the site until IST' album), see the link on the right side of the page. I'll also have access to internet and skype until about the 7th of august so look for me on there. Thanks again for reading I miss you all.
Shout outs of thanks to those who have sent me things!
- MoM & Dad for first package and the camelback which has been a great help, and the second package that I am hoping to pick up when I get back to Kedougou.
- Ed for sending a great card, and a great package! thanks for the new music, food, book, and drink mixes those will be the best while biking
- Danielle for probably one of the most inspirational letters that I will ever read, can't wait to get your next one
- Marc, haven't gotten it yet, but I know it's on the way, thanks again, you're a great friend
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Pellel Kindessa Mosquito Net Distribution
A few weeks ago we had the net distribution training for the local heath workers who would be conducting the net distributions in their respective towns. Like the other training events this one took place at the health post in the ever famous Dindefelo. A few nights of listening to the World Cup coverage by the BBC on my awesome short-wave radio later and we were ready to begin prepping for the net distribution in Pellel. I had tried to get my dad to loan us his donkey cart for the day to pick up the 397 nets that we needed for the distribution. And course since we were asking the day before even my dad figured he should try to get some money out of this…My counterpart Nene Galle tried doing the same thing the day before at the health post (her husband has a cart too), despite the fact that I reminded them that they were all getting FREE mosquito nets from the Senegalese government, and that it wasn’t my responsibility to get money from the US government through the Peace Corps to distribute their nets…alas both families insisted on getting at least 2500cfa a piece for using their carts (a typical cart fare for that trip should only be about 500cfa). In the end Badji, the healthpost director from Dindefelo who was overseeing the entire distribution for the area, decided to send a cart from Dindefelo and pay that other man instead. I made sure to tell both families in Pellel that because of their bickering, running us around, and wasting a day of prep, we paid someone else to do it. That might have been a little mean but I needed to set a precedent in town that I’m not there to just give money handouts.
Nene Galle and a neighbor starting to open the nets
Me doing work...
Either way the nets got there in the afternoon the next day. I immediately started with organizing the classroom at the school house near my house. Nene Galle helped out, we swept the floor, laid out a couple mats and started removing all nets from their individual plastic bags. We had to write “Pellel 2010” on each net (this is the attempt at preventing the nets from being resold). We got the net all labeled and stacked but we didn’t have the census sheets from a few weeks earlier so we couldn’t divide them into families as I had wanted to. The next morning around 10am one of supervisors from Dindefelo showed up on his moto with the census sheets. I soon got to labeling some more, which was a great help and made the whole distribution go much faster and smoothly.
The organization system...
Distribution time!
A couple small complaints from people who wanted extra nets and an extremely late lunch later, we were done! First major project in Pellel complete! Thanks to Nene Galle it went pretty well. I already had my bike packed and ready to go to Kedougou for 4-5 days, it was July3rd and I had to rush into Kedougou immediately for our 4th of July blow-out Party. The party was a lot of fun, got to see a bunch of friends I hadn’t seen since install, drink, eat, and dance a lot too. That was all followed up by some relaxing by the pool at the local hotel (where most of my friends were staying), and then some terrible food poisoning the day after (I probably shouldn’t eat steak in this country…) all was good within 24hours and I was heading back to site.
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