30 April 2005 - 20:28
And right now, I’m a big sucker. I’ve been trying to coast along without doing much here, and all of a sudden, I have a million things to do. Now, normally, I wouldn’t talk about work because work is boring. But I get the impression that some of you think that I’m actually not doing anything here but wasting your tax dollars, so here’s what I’ve been up to lately…
Vegetables are only available here during the cold season from around October until May – it’s the only time vegetables can survive the sweltering heat here, and even then it’s a stretch. So there’s not a lot of variety in the diet during the other four months of the year, which is actually when people need a nutritious diet the most. Alicia learned how to can vegetables a few months ago, so she requested funding from World Vision, a US-based NGO, to set up a vegetable preservation demonstration and training for representatives of each of the 25 women’s cooperatives in Tidjikja. I helped Alicia set it up and then gave a lesson on nutrition (and why we need to preserve vegetables to eat during the hot season) to the 60ish women that showed up over the course of the 6-day training last week.
Jill has been trying to get funding for AIDS awareness trainings for a year now, and the money from the US embassy finally came through…after Jill had already scheduled a flight home a couple weeks ago to go to a wedding. For some reason, the Mauritanian parties involved in the trainings are so anxious to get them started that they decided to set them up and get them going while Jill was gone (the sooner we start, the sooner they can try to skim money off the top, I suppose). I, being the other health volunteer in the region, had to pick up the project and make sure things are going smoothly, coordinating the efforts and resources of the Peace Corps, the DRPSS (health head honcho), EcoDevelopment (local NGO), the US embassy, and an uppity legislative representative who is coming up to do the trainings. We’re starting the first phase next Thursday – an AIDS awareness training for 15 local imams. The second (AIDS awareness trainings for local health workers) and third (community presentations done by local youth groups) phases will start in a few weeks.
I gave my first health presentation in Hassaniye a couple weeks ago, and it went pretty well. I talked to the girls at the Girls Mentoring Center here in Tidjikja about nutrition and the importance of a healthy diet. All the other Tidjikja volunteers are out of town this weekend, so running the GMC was left up to me today – I gave them a lesson about hygiene and disease prevention, started a fake newspaper project, and then, when we ran out of stuff to do, taught them how to say hello and thank you in German, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Hebrew, American Sign Language, and Pig Latin (they already knew French, English, and Arabic).
After the locust swarms ravaged the crops earlier this year, individuals connected to Peace Corps began looking for money to fund pesticide trainings and food distribution centers to combat the eminent food shortage this year. So one of the associate Peace Corps directors showed up a couple weeks ago and told me that they have money and want to open up two feeding centers in Tidjikja, and I’m in charge of getting them opened. My pal, Brock, has been working with an NGO in Selibaby that is running several feeding centers down there, and he made it sound like it was a piece of cake. When you’re working alone (as opposed to having an NGO do all the legwork for you), IT’S NOT. I have to find an NGO to fund the supplies for the centers, prepare a budget and proposal to request the funding, get it approved, buy all the supplies needed, arrange for the purchase and transportation of materials that I can’t buy here, locate buildings to house the operations, convince the community to donate the aforementioned buildings, recruit people to volunteer to cook the food, arrange for the food to be transported up here, recruit local health workers to help with the initial weighing of children in the center areas, organize and conduct the initial weighing, and make sure the governor is cool with the idea. I hope to get it all going by the time I leave…wish me luck.
So that pretty much fills up May. After I’m done with these projects, I think I’m going to go back to just hanging out, reading, and (after I get back from America) sitting in my pool.
