So the clinic is about over and guess what, blindness cured world wide! oh yea thats how we roll in Kédougou. Of course its not but theres a lot more people who can see than at the beginning of the clinic. Basically it was for people with cataracts and there are rather a lot of people with that here. We had to turn away people with legitimate problems at the end just cause we were all booked up which was rather hard as these practically blind people had to be sent home with nothing. Not much to be done about that i guess. I will say that today when we were doing some for the post operation instructions and seeing just how ecstatic these people are now that they can actually see, it was worth all the depressing bits. People dancing as they were walking out and thanking allah and everyone in the room, they were truly happy. The last day for the clinic is friday morning for last minute post operation check up and then done. Weve stopped taking consultations as were completely booked up for the rest of the week and theres nothing more we can do. It was a good practice and i think everyone who helped out had a good experience, as corny as that sounds.
Theres still lots going on at the moment, we have a house meeting the day after the clinic and a ag/fo clinic at the end of next week where we get to brush up on some tech stuff and hang out with the rest of the ag/fo folk. should be fun, good people and they should be bringing seeds with them as well! so double cool. After that the new stage comes down for a visit and we get to see the replacements for the stage that COSing. and right after that is the Senegalese new years and our regional strategy retreat. So busy busy busy outside of actual ag/fo stuff.
With ag/fo tagged in im hopefully going to be checking out a couple things here in the next few days, a aids garden down by the river, a potential sight out on the road to dindefello, and check up with my counterpart on some promising leads for projects this year. So between regional helping out, ag/fo and keeping in shape, ive got full days! good times, now to actually accomplish something! ill keep in touch
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Curing Blindness and the like
So I've not written in a while as beaucoup is going on right now. I've been really busy for the past few days as there has been a eye clinic here in Kédougou with american doctors removing cataracts and giving away free eye glasses. This is quite possibly the most interesting experience ive had so far here in senegal. Not only do we open our doors at 8 and close at 6/7, but because there are so many people that come into the clinic with such a variety of problems, we have to turn people away with legitimate problems. Kinda depressing as someone who has glaucoma, theres nothing that we can do for them though so we have to tell them to go home even though they are basically blind. I mean the only thing i can take away from it is that we are actually helping the people that we are giving the surgery to. Also with the glasses that we're giving away, along with the free loaders that just come to get free glasses like the governor and the commandant of the local military camp, we do actually help some people. Today I had a kid in to get glasses that could barely see the chart that we were using for our distance tests, but by the end of trail and error, we were able to get him to see about 5 lines down the chart. with some seriously strong glasses. That does make you feel good when you know that in with these people who are just after a col looking pair of glasses there are actually people who need glasses.
There are about 7/8 of us working the clinic at a time with about 4 american doctors as our guides so to speak. My main job over the course of this past week is as the glasses guy. My job is to test peoples vision who want glasses. So basically all the volunteers who are here to help end up doing some kind of translating. most of the people who come in are pulaar speakers with a healthy mix of malinke thrown in. Those are the two main languages down here. So Its kinda important that we have the speakers here that know those two languages. Weve had a few people down for the nearest big city, Tambacounda, to help out and there will be more next week to help out as well. My french and pulaar has made my glasses station a one man operation. I only have to go get help when i get truly stumped with the pulaar or a malinke comes in as i can pretty much get by with the french most of the time.
So as well as this clinic ive been doing some ag/fo type stuff as well. On this past tuesday i went out to a village on the other side of the river from kédougou to check out some potential work partners with my counterpart and Sheila. Good meeting with the chief of the village, he seems interested in working with us and was going to go talk to the farmers to figure out how big their fields are and check interest levels. I think my counterpart is really trying to brach out for this coming year to try and find people who are interested in working with ag/fo technologies. I need to get my counterpart some tree sacks for a nursery he wants to make for this year. Also the seeds that will be coming down with some of the other volunteers for the ag/fo conference at the end of the month.
Also on the ag/fo front, i was able to make contact with a farmer on the banks of the gambia in a town called Sintiou Roudji who has a very nice looking field with a pump up from the river. I just kinda introduced myself and said that i worked with my counterpart on planting trees and helping people with their farming. He seemed interested and his field would be perfect for this type of work as hes got cement basins already made for storing water that he pumps up from the river for watering his field. He said he knew my counterpart as well so we'll hopefully swing by and talk to him next week or so when im not busy working this eye clinic thing.
But the eye clinic is going well and when i was walking round the market yesterday with one of the volunteers that come down to help out with it, we ran into at least 4-5 people who had been there and knew me because of it. Great practice for the pulaar and french though.Hopefully this afternoon ill be collecting seeds for the ag/fo clinic and maybe finishing up my bathroom fence. Thatd be great, only 4 months since I've been here and ill be done. im also going to be trying to bang out a proposal for a irrigation system for a farmer here in kedougou as well as for my counterpart as he wants a cement basin for his field to hold water for his jerry rigged irrigation system. Im thinking that i could write into the proposal a request for a pump for his well, as there are good hand pumps that could work very well for his situation. We'll see how it goes.
There are about 7/8 of us working the clinic at a time with about 4 american doctors as our guides so to speak. My main job over the course of this past week is as the glasses guy. My job is to test peoples vision who want glasses. So basically all the volunteers who are here to help end up doing some kind of translating. most of the people who come in are pulaar speakers with a healthy mix of malinke thrown in. Those are the two main languages down here. So Its kinda important that we have the speakers here that know those two languages. Weve had a few people down for the nearest big city, Tambacounda, to help out and there will be more next week to help out as well. My french and pulaar has made my glasses station a one man operation. I only have to go get help when i get truly stumped with the pulaar or a malinke comes in as i can pretty much get by with the french most of the time.
So as well as this clinic ive been doing some ag/fo type stuff as well. On this past tuesday i went out to a village on the other side of the river from kédougou to check out some potential work partners with my counterpart and Sheila. Good meeting with the chief of the village, he seems interested in working with us and was going to go talk to the farmers to figure out how big their fields are and check interest levels. I think my counterpart is really trying to brach out for this coming year to try and find people who are interested in working with ag/fo technologies. I need to get my counterpart some tree sacks for a nursery he wants to make for this year. Also the seeds that will be coming down with some of the other volunteers for the ag/fo conference at the end of the month.
Also on the ag/fo front, i was able to make contact with a farmer on the banks of the gambia in a town called Sintiou Roudji who has a very nice looking field with a pump up from the river. I just kinda introduced myself and said that i worked with my counterpart on planting trees and helping people with their farming. He seemed interested and his field would be perfect for this type of work as hes got cement basins already made for storing water that he pumps up from the river for watering his field. He said he knew my counterpart as well so we'll hopefully swing by and talk to him next week or so when im not busy working this eye clinic thing.
But the eye clinic is going well and when i was walking round the market yesterday with one of the volunteers that come down to help out with it, we ran into at least 4-5 people who had been there and knew me because of it. Great practice for the pulaar and french though.Hopefully this afternoon ill be collecting seeds for the ag/fo clinic and maybe finishing up my bathroom fence. Thatd be great, only 4 months since I've been here and ill be done. im also going to be trying to bang out a proposal for a irrigation system for a farmer here in kedougou as well as for my counterpart as he wants a cement basin for his field to hold water for his jerry rigged irrigation system. Im thinking that i could write into the proposal a request for a pump for his well, as there are good hand pumps that could work very well for his situation. We'll see how it goes.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Mali and Tamba fun, kinda long but FUN!!!
So im back from Mali. Took about 5 days and 322km but im back. It was a fun trip two other volunteers and I took off from Kédougou on the 24th and stayed in steve woods village the night which was only 25k away. I really didnt count this first little stint as we were meeting steve there and then really taking off the next day from Touge. A huge wind/rainstorm had gone through the region a couple days before which is really really weird as its the dry season and ended up doing a lot of damage. A bunch of trees got knocked over and you could see where the water had been flowing on the ground. So we stayed the night there and took off the morning of the 25th. We had a great day of biking made it about 83k and basically stayed in a village called bofeto on the border with mali. That was our best case scenario and we did it quite handily to our surprise. We breaked during the hot part of the day as its ridiculously hot. we just chilled in a village under a tree and ate our lunch that we brought with us. Its always kinda neat rolling into these little villages and seeing how the locals react. sometimes you get good reactions or sometimes people are a little weirded out by the random white people who show up. This was a little of both for lunch as they let us chill in a compound for the hot part of the day. We ate a MRE and took a nap and continued on down the road at about 4ish. basically killing the hottest part of the day.
The goal was to try and reach bofeto by nightfall and talk t the mining camp there about potential work partnership options for our mosquito net distribution in july. We basically would like to use their cars and they get the publicity of having their sticker on the side of the car that drops off free mosquito nets. It turned out that the guy who was in charge of the camp is the brother of my counterpart in kédougou so we were able to get a meeting and get some concrete results. We were thinking of trying to weasel our way to a nice bed for the night there but ended up crashing with the locals in the village of bofeto in some friendly villagers compound. They were going to kick people out of one of their huts for us but we insisted on them not doing that and taking where ever else was available. We did have a tent and made that aware, but they insisted on putting us up somewhere. We ended up staying in a unfinished hut that was all but done except for the floor. They insisted on putting wood pallets down for us to sleep on and even gave us a mat to put on top of it. This is what i was talking about with the different type of villagers there are, some will bend over backwards to help and aide you while others are a little warry of the foreigners. these folk even made us eat dinner with them, it was great and was more then we could have asked for. We left nice and early the next morning at about 7ish so as to get teh majority of the biking done in the morning. That was basically for the extent of the trip, waking up at 6 and getting riding by 7.
After staying bofeto the first fun river crossing was upon us. This being of course the international border crossing with no border guards or anyone even remotely close by. So this was the first international border crossing of the trip without any semblance of official interaction. While looking at the map of the area that we would be traveling across, the mali side of the border looked fairly sparse. We thought that that was due to the fact that we were looking at a map of senegal and they just didn't put any of the towns in mali on it, but it is actually the case! there's about jack and shit on the other side of the border. It was fun biking through as it was really pretty, mountains and gorgeous landscapes, but not many people. We made it to keneiba in about 50 odd km and by lunch time.
Keneiba is a neat little town in the southwestern corner of mali. Its bigger then kedougou but less developed, i believe that we heard they only got power a few years ago and thats still a night time thing as opposed to a all day thing. So our plan upon reaching Keneiba was to try and find a friendly family to crash with or find the peace corps volunteer there and crash with them. Well we stop at a boutique for a nice cold drink which is harder then it sounds because of the power thing only being at night. We end up finding a boutique that has a gas generator and semi cold drinks, relax a bit and start questioning about americans in the area. The guy who ran the boutique actually spoke english and said there was a american next door. So that was very convenient and we headed over thinking well heres the peace corps volunteer. that would be the wrong assumption. This woman was a who had been living in senegal for the past 8-10years who was in mali now. She was really really nice and immediately offered us a place to stay and was very hospitable. Also weirdly enough, she lived with my counterpart while she was living in Kédougou. My counterpart has been central to the whole trip which was cool.
The missionary told us some good info about the town and actually spoke wonderful malinke. She told us a nice little restaurant to go to for lunch which was great and cheap as most of these little cheb shacks are and really hit the spot after our bike ride. While coming back form the restaurant we spotted a very common sight for peace corps volunteers, a red trek bike. Standard issue for most volunteers and was a little odd for a Senegalese guy to be biking around on. We chase him down and ask him about the bike and hes more then helpful and offers to take us to meet the volunteer who lent it to him. So we make contact with the volunteer who is a little weirded out to have three white boys roll up in the middle of nowhere just to see what was going on. she is a environmental volunteer and has been there a year or so. it was nice to make a contact there as well as the missionary.
The shower and hospitality of the missionary was great, she even bought us some local food as a welcome to mali kinda thing. We again wake up early the next day after a wonderful nights sleep on nice mattresses and blankets as padding. She even had a spare room for us. But the next morning we leave her a note and head out to the garage to find some breakfast. Without a doubt the breakfast we found was one of the biggest bean sandwiches that ive ever had as well as one of the sweetest cups of coffee ive had as well. Not really the best thing to get you going right before a nice long bike ride but it did suffice. We ended up taking off a bit latter then normal because of the breakfast and it was slow going for the first part because of this. the ride back from mali was again not that interesting, passed more villages then on the way up to keneiba. So basically we did a big loop from kédougou up to keneiba and then over to saraya and then back down to kedougou. we end up talking ot Aaron in faraba, near to saraya to find a similar river crossing back to senegal as hes been over to mali before without running into any border guards. he tells us the village to go to and end up talking to a kid on the road to get him to show us the way. Another thing that people will love to do is bike with you and show you the tight way to go even if its out of their way.
So we end up making the trip back to senegal in the same fashion as we came into mali. see facebook fro pics, ill hopefully have them up in a bit. But the ride to Aarons village was good we even managed to book it into the final 20k or so which was great. right up my alley booking it along at the end of the trip. Aaron meet us at a village that was actually about 8k away from his village where there was a big party thing going on as some people from the village who had made it to france 15 yrs earlier and were back celebrating the magal, a muslim holiday. So everyone and their brother was there for this and we roll up all dirty and road weary. We basically leave as soon as we've done the compulsory greetings of everyone and their mother and head for Aarons village.
Aarons got a cool village and hes really coming along with his malinke. We only stay there the night then head off for andys village, stopping at a few more work sites on the way meet and greeting work partners. Andy hadnt been back to his village for a while but his family were all happy to see him and we had a good meal there. We again take off early to get back to kédougou only to get stopped by a meeting where andys trying to sort out a irrigation project that hes been working on. We end up leaving at 11, ie the hottest part of the day. we dont get into Kédougou till like 230 and im done by that point. Dehydrated from our last little blast into the gou trying to out race a local kid, which we did, but dead none the less. I pay for that latter when i spent the night puking up anything and everything i had eaten. But i was happy to be back and back in one piece even if i did limp into town on my first flat of the trip. good luck if i dont say so myself.
I end up leaving for tamba the next day feeling a lot better for not being on a bike and sufficient fluids in my system. Theres a public transport strike on so we kinda have to find a ride in unconventional ways in the back of a truck thats been converted to a people carrier with just a open back. It was a fun time even if it did take 6hrs for a like 3 1/2 hour trip. We make it and i have a badass time in tamba. The stage that is about to go home is such a cool group of people. They just know how to have a good time. Well the folk in tamba are pretty good at that as well. A bunch of the guys who are getting ready to leave had just gotten back from their close of service conference and were heading back to site for the last time and were hanging out in the regional house. Great time, even got to talk to a bunch of folk from the states and around senegal, put me in a great mood and i had a great night. Got my banking done in the morning and then headed out as the strike was over. The 7 place driver was a hot head young-un and was driving way to fast, never thought id say that, but senegelese public transport we'll change a lot of impressions you have. Nearly got ran off the road and now im back in gou thankfully in one piece and in 3 and 1/2 hrs. Meet my counterpart and am going on a work related field visit in a neighboring town on the 10th and things are looking pretty good. Got a initial proposal out of the way for a irrigation project here in gou, and i might end up working with him some more if hes down for doing some tree work. His field is really cool and in the center of town. Anyways back to the nitty gritty i guess but im feeling pretty good, lots is going good for me at the moment, just need to work on that lang and work bit i guess! stay tuned for the next edition....
The goal was to try and reach bofeto by nightfall and talk t the mining camp there about potential work partnership options for our mosquito net distribution in july. We basically would like to use their cars and they get the publicity of having their sticker on the side of the car that drops off free mosquito nets. It turned out that the guy who was in charge of the camp is the brother of my counterpart in kédougou so we were able to get a meeting and get some concrete results. We were thinking of trying to weasel our way to a nice bed for the night there but ended up crashing with the locals in the village of bofeto in some friendly villagers compound. They were going to kick people out of one of their huts for us but we insisted on them not doing that and taking where ever else was available. We did have a tent and made that aware, but they insisted on putting us up somewhere. We ended up staying in a unfinished hut that was all but done except for the floor. They insisted on putting wood pallets down for us to sleep on and even gave us a mat to put on top of it. This is what i was talking about with the different type of villagers there are, some will bend over backwards to help and aide you while others are a little warry of the foreigners. these folk even made us eat dinner with them, it was great and was more then we could have asked for. We left nice and early the next morning at about 7ish so as to get teh majority of the biking done in the morning. That was basically for the extent of the trip, waking up at 6 and getting riding by 7.
After staying bofeto the first fun river crossing was upon us. This being of course the international border crossing with no border guards or anyone even remotely close by. So this was the first international border crossing of the trip without any semblance of official interaction. While looking at the map of the area that we would be traveling across, the mali side of the border looked fairly sparse. We thought that that was due to the fact that we were looking at a map of senegal and they just didn't put any of the towns in mali on it, but it is actually the case! there's about jack and shit on the other side of the border. It was fun biking through as it was really pretty, mountains and gorgeous landscapes, but not many people. We made it to keneiba in about 50 odd km and by lunch time.
Keneiba is a neat little town in the southwestern corner of mali. Its bigger then kedougou but less developed, i believe that we heard they only got power a few years ago and thats still a night time thing as opposed to a all day thing. So our plan upon reaching Keneiba was to try and find a friendly family to crash with or find the peace corps volunteer there and crash with them. Well we stop at a boutique for a nice cold drink which is harder then it sounds because of the power thing only being at night. We end up finding a boutique that has a gas generator and semi cold drinks, relax a bit and start questioning about americans in the area. The guy who ran the boutique actually spoke english and said there was a american next door. So that was very convenient and we headed over thinking well heres the peace corps volunteer. that would be the wrong assumption. This woman was a who had been living in senegal for the past 8-10years who was in mali now. She was really really nice and immediately offered us a place to stay and was very hospitable. Also weirdly enough, she lived with my counterpart while she was living in Kédougou. My counterpart has been central to the whole trip which was cool.
The missionary told us some good info about the town and actually spoke wonderful malinke. She told us a nice little restaurant to go to for lunch which was great and cheap as most of these little cheb shacks are and really hit the spot after our bike ride. While coming back form the restaurant we spotted a very common sight for peace corps volunteers, a red trek bike. Standard issue for most volunteers and was a little odd for a Senegalese guy to be biking around on. We chase him down and ask him about the bike and hes more then helpful and offers to take us to meet the volunteer who lent it to him. So we make contact with the volunteer who is a little weirded out to have three white boys roll up in the middle of nowhere just to see what was going on. she is a environmental volunteer and has been there a year or so. it was nice to make a contact there as well as the missionary.
The shower and hospitality of the missionary was great, she even bought us some local food as a welcome to mali kinda thing. We again wake up early the next day after a wonderful nights sleep on nice mattresses and blankets as padding. She even had a spare room for us. But the next morning we leave her a note and head out to the garage to find some breakfast. Without a doubt the breakfast we found was one of the biggest bean sandwiches that ive ever had as well as one of the sweetest cups of coffee ive had as well. Not really the best thing to get you going right before a nice long bike ride but it did suffice. We ended up taking off a bit latter then normal because of the breakfast and it was slow going for the first part because of this. the ride back from mali was again not that interesting, passed more villages then on the way up to keneiba. So basically we did a big loop from kédougou up to keneiba and then over to saraya and then back down to kedougou. we end up talking ot Aaron in faraba, near to saraya to find a similar river crossing back to senegal as hes been over to mali before without running into any border guards. he tells us the village to go to and end up talking to a kid on the road to get him to show us the way. Another thing that people will love to do is bike with you and show you the tight way to go even if its out of their way.
So we end up making the trip back to senegal in the same fashion as we came into mali. see facebook fro pics, ill hopefully have them up in a bit. But the ride to Aarons village was good we even managed to book it into the final 20k or so which was great. right up my alley booking it along at the end of the trip. Aaron meet us at a village that was actually about 8k away from his village where there was a big party thing going on as some people from the village who had made it to france 15 yrs earlier and were back celebrating the magal, a muslim holiday. So everyone and their brother was there for this and we roll up all dirty and road weary. We basically leave as soon as we've done the compulsory greetings of everyone and their mother and head for Aarons village.
Aarons got a cool village and hes really coming along with his malinke. We only stay there the night then head off for andys village, stopping at a few more work sites on the way meet and greeting work partners. Andy hadnt been back to his village for a while but his family were all happy to see him and we had a good meal there. We again take off early to get back to kédougou only to get stopped by a meeting where andys trying to sort out a irrigation project that hes been working on. We end up leaving at 11, ie the hottest part of the day. we dont get into Kédougou till like 230 and im done by that point. Dehydrated from our last little blast into the gou trying to out race a local kid, which we did, but dead none the less. I pay for that latter when i spent the night puking up anything and everything i had eaten. But i was happy to be back and back in one piece even if i did limp into town on my first flat of the trip. good luck if i dont say so myself.
I end up leaving for tamba the next day feeling a lot better for not being on a bike and sufficient fluids in my system. Theres a public transport strike on so we kinda have to find a ride in unconventional ways in the back of a truck thats been converted to a people carrier with just a open back. It was a fun time even if it did take 6hrs for a like 3 1/2 hour trip. We make it and i have a badass time in tamba. The stage that is about to go home is such a cool group of people. They just know how to have a good time. Well the folk in tamba are pretty good at that as well. A bunch of the guys who are getting ready to leave had just gotten back from their close of service conference and were heading back to site for the last time and were hanging out in the regional house. Great time, even got to talk to a bunch of folk from the states and around senegal, put me in a great mood and i had a great night. Got my banking done in the morning and then headed out as the strike was over. The 7 place driver was a hot head young-un and was driving way to fast, never thought id say that, but senegelese public transport we'll change a lot of impressions you have. Nearly got ran off the road and now im back in gou thankfully in one piece and in 3 and 1/2 hrs. Meet my counterpart and am going on a work related field visit in a neighboring town on the 10th and things are looking pretty good. Got a initial proposal out of the way for a irrigation project here in gou, and i might end up working with him some more if hes down for doing some tree work. His field is really cool and in the center of town. Anyways back to the nitty gritty i guess but im feeling pretty good, lots is going good for me at the moment, just need to work on that lang and work bit i guess! stay tuned for the next edition....
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
kédougou to kenieba
working on a blog from my trip to mali, itll be up in a few days, but i just got back from a 322km bike trip to mali. ill update soon, it was fun.
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