April is my favorite month, spring in
the US, flowers, sunshine, new birth and my birthday, but there
is another cause to support this month, April is Malaria month. Malaria
is the leading cause of death for children less than 5 years old in
sub-Saharan Africa and the most common cause of death for all groups
in Burkina Faso. It disproportionately affects pregnant women and children
less than 5 years old because of their compromised immune system.
Possibly the most disturbing issue with Malaria is that there are completely
curable and preventative methods available. Our job is to bring awareness and
education of techniques that can be used to help lower your risk! Malaria is transmitted by the female mosquito, a specific
type of mosquito, year round here in Burkina. April is a month
to bring awareness to Malaria all around the world.. even for us who are fortunate enough not to have Malaria impeding on our lives.
The normal everyday life has improved tremendously with the rain, it blesses us about ever three days. This of course is not normal in all of Burkina but we are fortunate and our rainy season starts technically a little early.
Lately I’ve spent some time in Ouaga working on programming for the incoming peace corps volunteer training group. I will be a facilitator for the next group of peace corps volunteers entering Burkina Faso and can't wait to welcome the new volunteers!
We’ve been making some progress on Camp Glow and have changed locations to Dedegou which is a larger village farther north. The biggest hurdle of course was getting funded, thank you to everyone who donated! I’ll be bringing six students and a counterpart who will help us facilitate sessions. We’re all really excited to get going!
Next on list is our beloved Science Camp. Some other female volunteers from my training group and I came up with the idea to encourage and motivate students to study science through using experiments. Experiments and labs are uncommon or possibly nonexistent practice in this country.
The camp is 20 girls and 20 boys from 6th grade to 8th grade for a week in Koudougou (central Burkina). Each facilitator (PCV) is bringing a counterpart to work with to make the sessions easier to replicate at our sites. We want to expose our students critical thinking, the relevance of science in their daily lives, opportunities in the scientific field and empowering teachers (focus in, train up). We're working on all of the logistics but we need your help with funding. Please go to https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=686-218 and help us out!
Well that’s a little overview for now but I promise there will be more to come! Thanks for all your love and support, letters, packages, photos and prayers.
Cutting up soap for Neem Cream
I started pushing awareness activities
with my Health Club regarding preventative care, for example, mosquito
net usage and neem cream production/usage (anti-mosquito cream made
using tree leaves). This is the perfect time of year to talk about how
to protect yourself. Rainy season begins in May and therefore
more mosquitoes, (they reproduce in water) hence more Malaria.
Along side preventative care education it is necessary to take a look
at how it’s transmitted, symptoms to be aware of and what you should
do if you do have Malaria. We, a nurse and myself, lead a total
of three classes on Malaria education for my Health Club with 2 students
from each class. Now the students are passing this information on to
their class (10 classes) and they have been doing a wonderful job! My neighbors also were incredibly interested in the Neem Cream…opportunity
presented itself, so I invited her to gather some of her friends to
come over and we made it at her house. They were so excited that they
could make it themselves and kept thanking me. The normal everyday life has improved tremendously with the rain, it blesses us about ever three days. This of course is not normal in all of Burkina but we are fortunate and our rainy season starts technically a little early.
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| Neem Cream with my Heatlh Club (and little Ashley) |
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| Neem Cream with local women's group |
Lately I’ve spent some time in Ouaga working on programming for the incoming peace corps volunteer training group. I will be a facilitator for the next group of peace corps volunteers entering Burkina Faso and can't wait to welcome the new volunteers!
We’ve been making some progress on Camp Glow and have changed locations to Dedegou which is a larger village farther north. The biggest hurdle of course was getting funded, thank you to everyone who donated! I’ll be bringing six students and a counterpart who will help us facilitate sessions. We’re all really excited to get going!
Next on list is our beloved Science Camp. Some other female volunteers from my training group and I came up with the idea to encourage and motivate students to study science through using experiments. Experiments and labs are uncommon or possibly nonexistent practice in this country.
The camp is 20 girls and 20 boys from 6th grade to 8th grade for a week in Koudougou (central Burkina). Each facilitator (PCV) is bringing a counterpart to work with to make the sessions easier to replicate at our sites. We want to expose our students critical thinking, the relevance of science in their daily lives, opportunities in the scientific field and empowering teachers (focus in, train up). We're working on all of the logistics but we need your help with funding. Please go to https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=686-218 and help us out!
Well that’s a little overview for now but I promise there will be more to come! Thanks for all your love and support, letters, packages, photos and prayers.
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