Eight Months In

Hello all,

It's now been eight months since I walked into the Senghor airport in Dakar, and six months since I came to the village of Boustane. It seems amazing how time has flown!

The last month has been quite eventful. On October 10th, my program director came to my village to create health and environmental action plans with the villagers. The health problems (lack of medications, equipment, absence of a birth attendant) cited by the villagers centered around a ill-equipped healthcare facility. In order to solve this problem, we decided that the best course of action would be to create a committee to oversee the running of the health hut. Currently, the committee consists of one person and the duties are a bit much for just one person to deal with. Consequently, I have spent hte past few weeks going from village to village to get the villages served by the health hut to choose their representants for this committee. Each village is to have representatives from three groups: male adults, female adults, and children/adolescents. In December, after Tabaski (Eid al-Kabir), we will have a meeting with the head of the local health post and the health hut worker to create this committee. My goal is to have the committee sufficiently equipped by next March/April in order to be prepared for the rainy (and malarial) season.

Other tasks include a latrine project in the village (though I will wait until after the health committee meeting to begin tackling that), and a community garden (to teach about nutrition). The environmental action plan centered on the planting of nitrogen-fixing trees and a tree called Moringa (the Indian drumstick). While I will hold off on the trees for now (the tree planting season is not until March or April), I have set November aside to start the garden up.

The other major event of the past month was...THE ELECTION!!!

As you can imagine, the possibility of having a president of African descent has been of great interest to the locals here. I have been asked an uncountable amount of times about whom I was voting for. Of course I told them that I was from Chicago and Obama was from Chicago- the locals figured out the rest on their own. However, I needed to get to a TV to be able to follow the elections properly because the BBC cuts out at about 11 pm, just when the race would be getting most interesting. So I went to Kaolack and met up with a group of other volunteers. We made arrangements with the owner of a small restaurant with CNN to let us stay there all night. We got to the bar about 9-9:30 and began to watch. I'd prepared for the night by drinking a cup of coffee at about 8:30 so as to be able to stay up for it all. We brought a few games just to entertain ourselves before the polls closed. From that point until about 4:00, when the race was called, I was unable to take my eyes from the television. There was the visceral feeling among all of us that we were witnessing history and though it was wonderful to be here with all of my friends, I wished that I was in Chicago, in the thick of it all. The next morning, when I went to the local boutique to pick up some bread for my breakfast, the owner told me about the elections and gave me his congratulations. When we went into town for lunch, the people at the restaurant started to talk to us about how happy they were that Obama had been elected. The TV in the restaurant was showing a Senegalese news show in French, which focused almost exclusively on the election. When we walked through the market to find a cab back to the regional house, the main topic of discussion among the locals was Obama. I heard some people listening to wolof radio, with the DJ talking about Obama. It makes me incredibly proud to be American and to be from Chicago. While time will tell about Obama's presidency, this was a truly wonderful moment that I will remember for the rest of my life.

With that, I will sign off.

A la prochaine,

Rithvik