Refresher

I haven’t been in Bamako in a month and except for one short day in Kati, I’ve been in Dombila for a really long time. I ran out of money, food, sanity. I came into town for the HIV Task Force meeting at Peace Corps, but might have to stay for a bit longer for some medical stuff. So I’ll get back Wednesday, leave again on Friday for an AIDS Awareness Day in my friend’s village, return Sunday or Monday, and then leave again the following Friday to get Karen (!) at the airport. I still can’t believe she’s coming all the way out here. Man, I got the best friends in the world.
Personally, I’ve still been up and down, working on really defining myself out here. I’m faced with pretty basic stuff that I’ve been forced to encounter. Things like being a good friend, being appreciative, humble, and gracious toward other people are skills that I’ve never felt like I need to actively evaluate myself on. But when you feel like Malians are always pestering you in the market and they don’t understand you, you can become quite standoffish. I need to quit complaining, especially to my American peers. It’s tough living among foreign people- it’s exhausting to say the least. But I’ve come to a point where I need to get over that and find a way to embrace it every day. It’s all part of the journey. Up and down. I’ll let loose and dance to the zylophones until 1:00 in the morning, loving my villagers, and then being an ogar the next day when all I want to do is take a nap and there are kids screaming at me outside my door.
It seems silly to complain at this point when things are really going very well. Really well. I wrote about some of the projects I’m working on in the entries that follow. But what’s really coming together right now is my goals. I feel like I have a road to follow, like I really know what my village needs and what I want to accomplish in the next 15 months.
1) My biggest goal is getting our community health workers (relais) self-sustaining, functional, and capable of keeping track of the malnourished children on their own. I started off my service doing a lot of the leg work- chasing down lost kids, keeping records at the CSCOM. But now, I’m gradually handing this off to our community health workers, who know the kids the best. We have about 30 of them- some I know better than others, for Dombila is a vast area of some very distant, remote villages. When I go out into these small villages, I work with the relais on baby weighing and ameliorated porriage demonstrations (you may remember the all-star relay Yaya Coulibaly of the village of Tomba). And the ones I work with one-on-one are really starting to understand the system. I smiled all day when one morning shortly after a baby weighing, Kulu Diarra, a relay from the very poor village of Sidian-Coro, came to me at the CSCOM with a list of sick children, asking if they had come in for nutritional rehabilitation and counseling.
“These two came in. This one did not. These two do not have their vaccinations up to date. These three do not need to come in, but may need someone to keep an eye on them to make sure they start adding some protein to their diet.” He took careful notes, and agreed to visit the families of the children. If all of the relais could do as he does, we would never let any babies get lost again.
So after some discussions with my chef de post, Dr. Boary, we contacted an NGO who gave all the relais bicycles so that they could better do their work and come in for a monthly meeting at the CSCOM. These monthly meetings will hopefully start in July. The relais have had one training session but most of them still do not understand their work- which is to go around to 30 homes a month and interview the family on their health status and practices. This summer in the fall, I hope to help the relais define their work and a system of evaluation for it and then hopefully hold another big training session in the winter. If I can leave here with this whole malnutrition program in the hands of dedicated and capable individuals, I will have done my job.
2) There’s AIDS in our village. Boary, the chef of the CSCOM know it in his heart. But we don’t know for sure because there is no test, no medical service. They just fly under the radar. This summer, I hope to be working with the medical center in Kati to help get HIV/AIDS service out in Dombila. There’s no excuse for not at least having the test. We want to bring in people who can train our staff on HIV counseling and also to hold some educational events surrounding the opening of HIV services in Dombila. It’s a long way off, but it’s a goal.
3) Water Sanitation! We have an extremely capable committee in Dombila, and some motivated workers. The sky’s the limit with these well projects, and other water sanitation projects like soak pits and wash areas.
4) Women’s garden: The women of Sidian Coro have no water source to garden in the dry season, unless they are able to walk 8 miles a day to use the neighboring village’s garden. We’re in the beginning stages of talking about this project.
5) Expand basic health education: including murals, school lessons, health center and community educational resources (books, pamphlets), and radio.
6) Get those freakin hand-washing stations fixed for the next school year. Haha. Dooni dooni right?
7) And whatever else comes up. Sorry for the extensiveness. But writing it out makes it feel more concrete, purposeful.