1 Month at site

Hey all,

It's been exactly four weeks since I've been at my site, though honestly, time does not always seem to fly by. However, the past few days have been rather eventful. As I've said before, my main purpose during my first 2.5 months at site is to assess the situation here and to get to know my community really well. However, the rains are coming soon and with them, mosquitoes and malaria. There are lots of neem trees in my village cluster, and as anyone from India (or Senegal) could tell you, they're great for repelling mosquitoes. But they're not enough by themselves- people need to protect themselves from being bitten at night time and thus should be using nets if it's at all possible. There is the mistaken notion that people here are immune from malaria, but it's actually a case of their bodies having a small concentration of the parasite in their blood (after repeated infections), so their immune systems can cope a little bit. But if they get bitten enough by infected mosquitoes, their immune systems will be unable to cope and thus they will get malaria. In teh case of children, pregnant women, and the elderly, their immune systems do not have the resources to build up that tolerance for the parasite, so they are even more susceptible. Thus, prevention from getting bitten is of the utmost importance, and at night time, that means the use of mosquito nets.

So, I figured that it might be a good idea to find out about mosquito net usage in my village and its two neighbors (my village is part of a cluster of three villages within 1 km of each other). I spent a couple of evenings going from compound to compound, asking the families about their mosquito net usage and also about how they store their water (because of course mosquitoes often breed in stagnant water). A word about surveying in this culture- one cannot go in and immediately begin asking questions because people will get suspicious of one's intentions and thus be unwilling to give accurate information. One must greet the families and explain what they are doing, and of course, one must go through the sometimes exhaustive greeting cycle that this culture requires. I was a bit worried about how I would be received by the people, especially because I have to conduct a survey of my community before I return to Thies in August. Indeed, a secondary reason for the mosquito nets survey was the practice it would give me with surveying my community and also that it would prep them for my community survey.

The reception was amazing- people were genuinely engaged. They know how bad malaria can be, because most of them have had it themselves at some time or another. Though I've not completed the whole village cluster yet (I'm about 2/3rds of the way through), each evening after completing a portion of the surveying I felt the happiest that I've been (workwise) since coming to Senegal. I've got to be careful not to get my hopes up too much because that is only a recipe for their getting dashed, but it was definitely an auspicious start.

On Sunday, my supervisor at his health post will be giving children vaccinations, so I'm going to spend the day there seeing if I can help him out. The next time I have internet access will probably be next weekend when I go to Kaolack for a follow-up meeting on regional strategy, so I will hopefully have enough time there to do another posting.
But until then,

A la prochaine!