en brousse
this is my latest adventure:
on the morning of the fourth day of the polio vaccination campaign, our truck broke down. we were on our way back north to Selibaby from a village along the Senegal River... already a day behind schedule we had run out of vaccines. so about 9 km into the trip our volkswagen pickup descended into a dry sandy riverbed, rolled across with its usual vigor and... stopped. Issa, our driver who looks a lot like Shaft, gunned the engine. we didn't move. he tried again. it was clear we were going to be there for awhile, so we piled out of truck: me, another volunteer named Brock, and our fearless leader/infirmier (nurse), a guy named Diawara. it was something to do with the fuel line. to address this, Issa descended under the vehicle with--I'm not kidding--a roll of electrical tape.
after a half hour or so diawara rooted around in the back of the truck, coming up with a toolbox. the contents looked promising: a bottle of motor oil was among some other unlabeled containers, and there was at least a pair of pliers. but rather than give the box to issa he started taking things out and putting them on our mat in the shade. then i saw the stove. this was a mauritanian emergency kit. the motor oil actually was sugar, and the white plastic bottle was tea.. the pliers were for turning the pin on the gas canister.... eventually Issa repaired the line with the electrical tape, but in the meantime we had our three glasses with some herder guy who stopped by to see the action.
brock, who is a health volunteer in selibaby, talked us into volunteering for the campaign by selling it as a one-afternoon commitment to walking around the city vaccinating a few hundred little kids. we found out in the meeting the day before that all the slots for the city were filled; we were going en brousse, or "in the bush"... which means pretty much anything outside of selibaby in this region. when my team finally left (we waited most of the afternoon as the drivers claimed it was too hot to get started) we headed south to gouraye, a decently-big village on the river. we dropped vaccines there, then dropped more in another big river-side village, taking breakfast at this house right on a cliff looking over to senegal. we looked over at the lights and solidly-constructed buildings in awe with the the feeling of being from the wrong side of the tracks... after that we hit up our first village.
our action plan was this: find the house of the chief, explain what we were doing and have him escort us around to the homes of all the under five kids. in about 15 villages we came across only a handful of houses where there were no under-fives... in one pulaar village we vaccinated over 20 kids at ONE house; granted that's a family with perhaps four wives, but damn. brock explained it this way: "what else are you going to do out here?"... in no time i had developed the technique for squeezing the cheeks of dirty little kids to make them open their mouths and then putting in two drops. some of the chiefs were very proactive about grabbing the kids and bringing them to us; in other villages children literally ran away. all in all everybody likes to watch little kids be terrified by white people, so it was a good time. the parents also loved it when diawara would take his pen and use it to smack the kids on the head: "mote, mote (swallow)... imbecile."
my favorite part of the trip was watching diawara. although there are infirmeries within about 10 km of all of these villages, people rarely make the trip to see a doctor. after finishing with the vaccinations (sometimes it took two or three hours) we would return to the chief's house where a crowd was already waiting. diawara would do a cursory examination and either dole out some of the drugs from the cardboard box in the truck (courtesy of Doctors Without Borders) or give a dismissive grunt which i took to interpret as: they'll be fine. i saw all sorts of neat things growing on the skin and skulls of children..... a lot of skinny skinny arms and round bellies (in one village a kid was eating dirt with sugar. mmm)... and i got used to seeing the empty look in the eyes of ones that, as diawara later explained, had malaria. diawara wore a red tshirt tied around his neck for most of the campaign. i found the superhero look fitting.
four five nights we slept at the home of the chief in whatever village we had made it to by dark. sometimes we stopped after sunset; other times we decided to take the whole village that way. we started calling these 'night raids.' like an episode of COPS, these nights had us going house to house, pulling kids from sleep, shinining flashlights in their faces and giving them the drops. the good part was they couldn't run away (they didn't see us coming). the bad part was we were tired as hell too; in five and a half days of the campaign, we vaccinated 1,909 kids. ...when we finally did sleep brock and i had to sleep with our mats side-by-side as we were designated 'married.' it was easier to just go to sleep than to explain that although we are two americans of the opposite sex and roughly the same age, we are not, in fact, married. so we called it our honeymoon.
we passed through soninke, pulaar and hassaniya villages so i got to practice my hellos in all of the above. in general the people we met were amazing. everyone always pulled out their fuzzy blanket (the nicest thing to sit on) when we stopped at their house; in one tiny tiny village i was offered two babies within an hour and an old woman took my hands and kissed both sides of my face. i didn't have to know what she was saying to be moved... also in the mauritanian spirit of hospitality we were always offered something to drink: even in those villages without wells. i drank a lot of water from streams. sometimes it was brown. but sometimes it was brown and mixed with powdered milk and sugar: a drink called zhreig! other times we were given a big wooden bowl of milk that was still warm. i mean, the cow was over there. it was so good.
it's been a more than a few weeks (internet issues) so the dirt has finally washed off. it was a great experience, and it made coming back to selibaby seem like arriving in a metropolis. electricity! refrigeration! wells! etc... school actually started two weeks ago; i'll issue some report of that soon too.
a few choice pictures of this episode can be found at: photos.yahoo.com/brockafrica
ps. i got my absentee ballot today (4 nov). every vote counts!
on the morning of the fourth day of the polio vaccination campaign, our truck broke down. we were on our way back north to Selibaby from a village along the Senegal River... already a day behind schedule we had run out of vaccines. so about 9 km into the trip our volkswagen pickup descended into a dry sandy riverbed, rolled across with its usual vigor and... stopped. Issa, our driver who looks a lot like Shaft, gunned the engine. we didn't move. he tried again. it was clear we were going to be there for awhile, so we piled out of truck: me, another volunteer named Brock, and our fearless leader/infirmier (nurse), a guy named Diawara. it was something to do with the fuel line. to address this, Issa descended under the vehicle with--I'm not kidding--a roll of electrical tape.
after a half hour or so diawara rooted around in the back of the truck, coming up with a toolbox. the contents looked promising: a bottle of motor oil was among some other unlabeled containers, and there was at least a pair of pliers. but rather than give the box to issa he started taking things out and putting them on our mat in the shade. then i saw the stove. this was a mauritanian emergency kit. the motor oil actually was sugar, and the white plastic bottle was tea.. the pliers were for turning the pin on the gas canister.... eventually Issa repaired the line with the electrical tape, but in the meantime we had our three glasses with some herder guy who stopped by to see the action.
brock, who is a health volunteer in selibaby, talked us into volunteering for the campaign by selling it as a one-afternoon commitment to walking around the city vaccinating a few hundred little kids. we found out in the meeting the day before that all the slots for the city were filled; we were going en brousse, or "in the bush"... which means pretty much anything outside of selibaby in this region. when my team finally left (we waited most of the afternoon as the drivers claimed it was too hot to get started) we headed south to gouraye, a decently-big village on the river. we dropped vaccines there, then dropped more in another big river-side village, taking breakfast at this house right on a cliff looking over to senegal. we looked over at the lights and solidly-constructed buildings in awe with the the feeling of being from the wrong side of the tracks... after that we hit up our first village.
our action plan was this: find the house of the chief, explain what we were doing and have him escort us around to the homes of all the under five kids. in about 15 villages we came across only a handful of houses where there were no under-fives... in one pulaar village we vaccinated over 20 kids at ONE house; granted that's a family with perhaps four wives, but damn. brock explained it this way: "what else are you going to do out here?"... in no time i had developed the technique for squeezing the cheeks of dirty little kids to make them open their mouths and then putting in two drops. some of the chiefs were very proactive about grabbing the kids and bringing them to us; in other villages children literally ran away. all in all everybody likes to watch little kids be terrified by white people, so it was a good time. the parents also loved it when diawara would take his pen and use it to smack the kids on the head: "mote, mote (swallow)... imbecile."
my favorite part of the trip was watching diawara. although there are infirmeries within about 10 km of all of these villages, people rarely make the trip to see a doctor. after finishing with the vaccinations (sometimes it took two or three hours) we would return to the chief's house where a crowd was already waiting. diawara would do a cursory examination and either dole out some of the drugs from the cardboard box in the truck (courtesy of Doctors Without Borders) or give a dismissive grunt which i took to interpret as: they'll be fine. i saw all sorts of neat things growing on the skin and skulls of children..... a lot of skinny skinny arms and round bellies (in one village a kid was eating dirt with sugar. mmm)... and i got used to seeing the empty look in the eyes of ones that, as diawara later explained, had malaria. diawara wore a red tshirt tied around his neck for most of the campaign. i found the superhero look fitting.
four five nights we slept at the home of the chief in whatever village we had made it to by dark. sometimes we stopped after sunset; other times we decided to take the whole village that way. we started calling these 'night raids.' like an episode of COPS, these nights had us going house to house, pulling kids from sleep, shinining flashlights in their faces and giving them the drops. the good part was they couldn't run away (they didn't see us coming). the bad part was we were tired as hell too; in five and a half days of the campaign, we vaccinated 1,909 kids. ...when we finally did sleep brock and i had to sleep with our mats side-by-side as we were designated 'married.' it was easier to just go to sleep than to explain that although we are two americans of the opposite sex and roughly the same age, we are not, in fact, married. so we called it our honeymoon.
we passed through soninke, pulaar and hassaniya villages so i got to practice my hellos in all of the above. in general the people we met were amazing. everyone always pulled out their fuzzy blanket (the nicest thing to sit on) when we stopped at their house; in one tiny tiny village i was offered two babies within an hour and an old woman took my hands and kissed both sides of my face. i didn't have to know what she was saying to be moved... also in the mauritanian spirit of hospitality we were always offered something to drink: even in those villages without wells. i drank a lot of water from streams. sometimes it was brown. but sometimes it was brown and mixed with powdered milk and sugar: a drink called zhreig! other times we were given a big wooden bowl of milk that was still warm. i mean, the cow was over there. it was so good.
it's been a more than a few weeks (internet issues) so the dirt has finally washed off. it was a great experience, and it made coming back to selibaby seem like arriving in a metropolis. electricity! refrigeration! wells! etc... school actually started two weeks ago; i'll issue some report of that soon too.
a few choice pictures of this episode can be found at: photos.yahoo.com/brockafrica
ps. i got my absentee ballot today (4 nov). every vote counts!