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 4^th 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.

Ingeli Waterfalls

Last Sunday Zach and Alan, two other volunteers, came down to make a trip over to the Ingeli waterfalls. Those falls are located on the boarder of Guinea and Senegal 14k down past where my town is, they were also supposed to be much more amazing than the Dindefelo waterfalls. We met up in Dindefelo and continued on down through Pellel (my village). The ride was fun and despite the fact that we had to ford a couple rivers, it was beautiful with the mountain ridge on our side along the way. We finally got to the site of the falls in the late afternoon and met up with Frank and Meera who came down from the other side of the region. Before it got dark we went swimming in the falls. These were really beautiful and fun to swim in because there were so many different levels of pools and cascades. We got back and set up our camp, built a fire and cooked a surprisingly delicious dinner. The five of us then managed to cram into two tiny little tents, which was fine while we could keep the door open for air….but then the rain came, and there was a lot of it, all through until the morning. I wound up getting a little wet on the side of the tent but it was actually slightly refreshing. In addition to making our morning fire a little more difficult to get started, the waterfall was roaring. I finally took some pictures at that point (you can see them below) but the falls were so different from the day before when it was much calmer. Either way we decided to go swimming again, which was pretty ridiculous considering the amount of water flowing through. In the end the sky cleared up and it wound up being a beautiful to go swimming, break down camp, and bike back home.

The morning after when the water was really coming down

On a side note, I’ll be back in the Thies region for IST (in-service-training) starting next week, so I’ll hopefully be able to post a bit more often and regularly then. With the better internet there (our router at the regional house got fried by a recent lightening strike) I'll get up the rest of the recent photos, along with a post about my recent mosquito net distribution in Pellel