There was a cholera epidemic Touba recently, a region of Senegal neighboring my own beloved Fuuta. News of the epidemic prompted the nurse at the health post in my town to suggest this would be a good time to do some work on informing people about cholera. As a result, I spent the past week going from house to house in my town doing cholera education, telling people to wash their hands with soap, cover their food, etc. My Pulaar has improved considerably in the last ten days or so- I can now tell people to put three drops of bleach in a liter of water to wash vegetables, and that if they don't have a latrine, they should dig a hole in the ground to poop and cover it with sand.
That's all very well and good, but what I really wanted to tell you about is my friend Binta. She's four. Also, adorable. My town is pretty big (at least for one person trying to go to every house in the city limits), and to make it seem more manageable, I started the house to house tour in the quartier (neighborhood) of Falbe. Most of my previous excursions to Falbe consisted of visits to my aunt, her twelve year old son, and four year old daughter, who are particular favorites of mine. Binta lives next door to them.
Falbe turned out to have way more houses than I originally thought, which resulted in me spending a good chunk of the week wandering around the twisty-turny paths of the herder neighborhood without knowing exactly where I was going. The second or third day of my tour, I ran into Binta, who was quietly lurking around the streets of Falbe, and who looked delighted to see me, in her own taciturn way. I said hello to her, and the next thing I know she's tagging along with me to every house I go. Me having a four year old shadow as I went around trying to fulfill my professional duties didn't seem to faze anyone, at least not more than a toubab showing up unexpectedly in their house speaking Pulaar and talking about diarrhea. And Binta coming along had an unexpected benefit- given that four year olds are apparently given free to roam the streets in this town, she knew the entire area I was working in like the back of her hand, and was able to direct me to the next house, and the next, with an ease that had eluded my increasingly disoriented self. This was extremely useful, seeing as I was having some trouble navigating the mish-mashed jumble of houses that pass for Sinthiou Garba's gesture to urban planning. Binta has never been to the paved road before (which is all of a ten minute walk from her house), but she knew every single household on her turf. Often when we entered a household together, the head of the household would greet her and then turn to me and say, 'You know her? She is my daughter.' Turns out having a four year old guide is a better deal than you might imagine.
Really, though, the highlight of the whole experience was when, after going to about twenty houses with me, and patiently sitting through my spiel at every single one, Binta and I were walking along and she turns to and says thoughtfully, 'Aissata? Cholera is bad.' Alleluhiah! I officially succeeded in communicating a health message. I felt pretty gratified, not to mention charmed, because, come on how many people have four year old assistants in their work on health education?
Monday, November 20, 2006
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
So I've had kind of an odd responsibility this week- acting as a bouncer for a vaccination campaign. In other words, serving as crowd control for the hordes of people that show up when doctors are handing out free medicine, in this case, two pills and a vaccine for children between six months and five years of age. The government is doing a seven day vaccination program against measles, as well as providing Vitamin A supplements and a pill called Vermox. I honestly don't know what the Vermox is for (some health worker I am), but I think it has something to do with stomach parasites, which I deduced from a picture of a person with wormy-looking things in their stomach on one of the attendant pieces of paperwork for the campaign as a whole.
I was extremely reluctant to accept the job of vaccination bouncer, and I even tried to get out of it by pointing out that the crowd was likely harder to control if I came in contact with it because half the children would probably run screaming in terror the minute I got near them, and the other half would follow me around and shout 'Toubab!' incessantly, which is what happened during the last vaccination campaign. That was the excuse I offered but in retrospect what I should have said was that my somewhat reticent personality wasn't up to the task of bossing around a bunch of pushy black ladies who look like they could crush me with a baby under one arm and another on their back, especially if I had to do it in Pulaar.
However, as the only other person available for the job wasn't feeling well, she was dispatched to record the number of children receiving the vaccine, and I was assigned to crowd control along with a gregarious man named Mamadou Sow, who has the unfortunate habit of spitting when he talks and, like almost all Senegalese people, no concept of personal space. Still, he is the perfect ally in this case, because while the aforementioned black ladies tend to disdainfully ignore my orders, and ten year old children think it's the funniest thing in the world for me to tell them to get out of the way, and then go back to what they were doing the minute my back is turned and wait for me to yell at them again. Sow bypasses the idea of reasoning with people or even cajoling- he just roars at everyone in his path and chases them with a big stick if they don't do what he says- a technique which is frankly much more effective than my own more pacificistic efforts.
The first day of the campaign was pretty much completely hellish. First of all, the nurse at the dispensaire- er, health post, who is the head honcho around here, told us to be at the health post at 7 am so we could get an early start. I was not very happy with this idea, as I've grown accustomed to generally never getting out of the door before nine, but I grudgingly acknowledged that it was a reasonable request, seeing as we were helping babies, and all, and foolishly showed up that morning promptly at 7 am. Essentially, this resulted in me sitting around half asleep for two hours waiting for the rest of the team to show up, which has turned out to be a pattern. I have now adapted by showing up an hour late and and only waiting around and hour for the others.
Anyway, once everybody showed up, we trooped over to the vaccination site, where there were approximately three hundred children waiting to be vaccinated with their mothers. It started out peaceably enough, but as soon as the sun started to rise high in the sky, things started to get out of hand. Up to that point, being a vaccination bouncer mainly consisted of me telling people their children were too old (older than 5) or too young (younger than 6 months) to be vaccinated. But once the shade started to diminish, the mothers started getting surly. People started pressing forward and it was like the tide moving inexorably forward- my efforts to stop it were ineffectual at best. Nonetheless, I valiantly fought to maintain some semblance of control in the midst of people entreating me to let them go in front of the others with such excuses as 'I'm tired,' or 'I need to go cook lunch,' as though the same were not true of every other woman there. Or my personal favorite, 'The sun. It is hot.' I haven't yet figured out the Pulaar translation of 'No s---, Sherlock.'
It is impressive how quickly I made the transition from pushover to hardass once annoyance replaced intimidation as my primary emotion. I'll spare you the details, but highlights include me weilding my notebook menacingly to frighten children and me yelling at a nursing mother for trying to sit down and nurse her baby. This last makes me cringe to recall, but in my defense, I didn't really process that she was trying to nurse her baby until after I yelled at her. I thought she was just another one of the dozens of obnoxious women trying to flout my authority.
After the first day, I had had enough of the chaos that reigned, and decided we needed a system. I thought wistfully of those mazes of metal barriers used to direct lines in amusement parks and other public venues accustomed to accomodating large crowds, but since I had nothing of the sort immediately available, I was going to have to devise an alternative. The experience of the previous day had removed all my faith that Senegalese people were remotely capable of forming a functioning line (the thought 'Senegalnabbe wawaa lines' kept running through my head. The Pulaar way to say someone is not good at something is to say they cannot do it. For example, 'the white girl cannot Pulaar.' My version translates as 'Senegalese people cannot lines,' which I think is a fair statement in English as well.), so I decided to try giving each woman a number and organizing them that way. I thought this was a pretty brilliant solution, but I didn't take into account that a lot of the women can't read, so about three hundred ladies were waving tickets in my face at once asking if they were next, even if they were number 232 and we were only on number 56. Nonetheless, it was an improvement over the previous lack of system, and it gave me some way to keep straight who had really arrived before the others and who hadn't. At this point, we've modified the system, writing down the names of the mothers and then giving the first ten people in line tickets. This is a much less nerve-wracking way of doing things, and more easily understood by the women, but has not yet been tested by the sheer numbers of the first several days, and is slightly complicated by the fact that in every group of 50 mothers, there are only six or seven different names, so when I call 'Mariam Ndiaye,' for example, 13 different women answer.
This whole chaotic experience has made me realize how biddable we Americans are when it comes to bureaucracy, and my longing for nice, orderly lines notwithstanding, I find myself admiring these Senegalese ladies despite myself for their refusal to allow themselves to be regulated myself. In any case, it's nice to be doing something useful for a change, even if it is imposing my obsessive compulsive American will on stubborn Senegalese women.
To date, the team of Sinthiou Garba has vaccinated 1729 children in 5 days, with 2 more days to go.
I was extremely reluctant to accept the job of vaccination bouncer, and I even tried to get out of it by pointing out that the crowd was likely harder to control if I came in contact with it because half the children would probably run screaming in terror the minute I got near them, and the other half would follow me around and shout 'Toubab!' incessantly, which is what happened during the last vaccination campaign. That was the excuse I offered but in retrospect what I should have said was that my somewhat reticent personality wasn't up to the task of bossing around a bunch of pushy black ladies who look like they could crush me with a baby under one arm and another on their back, especially if I had to do it in Pulaar.
However, as the only other person available for the job wasn't feeling well, she was dispatched to record the number of children receiving the vaccine, and I was assigned to crowd control along with a gregarious man named Mamadou Sow, who has the unfortunate habit of spitting when he talks and, like almost all Senegalese people, no concept of personal space. Still, he is the perfect ally in this case, because while the aforementioned black ladies tend to disdainfully ignore my orders, and ten year old children think it's the funniest thing in the world for me to tell them to get out of the way, and then go back to what they were doing the minute my back is turned and wait for me to yell at them again. Sow bypasses the idea of reasoning with people or even cajoling- he just roars at everyone in his path and chases them with a big stick if they don't do what he says- a technique which is frankly much more effective than my own more pacificistic efforts.
The first day of the campaign was pretty much completely hellish. First of all, the nurse at the dispensaire- er, health post, who is the head honcho around here, told us to be at the health post at 7 am so we could get an early start. I was not very happy with this idea, as I've grown accustomed to generally never getting out of the door before nine, but I grudgingly acknowledged that it was a reasonable request, seeing as we were helping babies, and all, and foolishly showed up that morning promptly at 7 am. Essentially, this resulted in me sitting around half asleep for two hours waiting for the rest of the team to show up, which has turned out to be a pattern. I have now adapted by showing up an hour late and and only waiting around and hour for the others.
Anyway, once everybody showed up, we trooped over to the vaccination site, where there were approximately three hundred children waiting to be vaccinated with their mothers. It started out peaceably enough, but as soon as the sun started to rise high in the sky, things started to get out of hand. Up to that point, being a vaccination bouncer mainly consisted of me telling people their children were too old (older than 5) or too young (younger than 6 months) to be vaccinated. But once the shade started to diminish, the mothers started getting surly. People started pressing forward and it was like the tide moving inexorably forward- my efforts to stop it were ineffectual at best. Nonetheless, I valiantly fought to maintain some semblance of control in the midst of people entreating me to let them go in front of the others with such excuses as 'I'm tired,' or 'I need to go cook lunch,' as though the same were not true of every other woman there. Or my personal favorite, 'The sun. It is hot.' I haven't yet figured out the Pulaar translation of 'No s---, Sherlock.'
It is impressive how quickly I made the transition from pushover to hardass once annoyance replaced intimidation as my primary emotion. I'll spare you the details, but highlights include me weilding my notebook menacingly to frighten children and me yelling at a nursing mother for trying to sit down and nurse her baby. This last makes me cringe to recall, but in my defense, I didn't really process that she was trying to nurse her baby until after I yelled at her. I thought she was just another one of the dozens of obnoxious women trying to flout my authority.
After the first day, I had had enough of the chaos that reigned, and decided we needed a system. I thought wistfully of those mazes of metal barriers used to direct lines in amusement parks and other public venues accustomed to accomodating large crowds, but since I had nothing of the sort immediately available, I was going to have to devise an alternative. The experience of the previous day had removed all my faith that Senegalese people were remotely capable of forming a functioning line (the thought 'Senegalnabbe wawaa lines' kept running through my head. The Pulaar way to say someone is not good at something is to say they cannot do it. For example, 'the white girl cannot Pulaar.' My version translates as 'Senegalese people cannot lines,' which I think is a fair statement in English as well.), so I decided to try giving each woman a number and organizing them that way. I thought this was a pretty brilliant solution, but I didn't take into account that a lot of the women can't read, so about three hundred ladies were waving tickets in my face at once asking if they were next, even if they were number 232 and we were only on number 56. Nonetheless, it was an improvement over the previous lack of system, and it gave me some way to keep straight who had really arrived before the others and who hadn't. At this point, we've modified the system, writing down the names of the mothers and then giving the first ten people in line tickets. This is a much less nerve-wracking way of doing things, and more easily understood by the women, but has not yet been tested by the sheer numbers of the first several days, and is slightly complicated by the fact that in every group of 50 mothers, there are only six or seven different names, so when I call 'Mariam Ndiaye,' for example, 13 different women answer.
This whole chaotic experience has made me realize how biddable we Americans are when it comes to bureaucracy, and my longing for nice, orderly lines notwithstanding, I find myself admiring these Senegalese ladies despite myself for their refusal to allow themselves to be regulated myself. In any case, it's nice to be doing something useful for a change, even if it is imposing my obsessive compulsive American will on stubborn Senegalese women.
To date, the team of Sinthiou Garba has vaccinated 1729 children in 5 days, with 2 more days to go.
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