Hot Season has arrived. As I’m sitting here I can feel the sweat dripping down my face and legs.. its hot.. hotter than I ever could have imagined. To give you an idea the temperature today is 40 C or about 104 F. No A/C no fans. A common spot to sit is in between the roots of the mango trees because its somewhat cooler than the ground. Sleeping seemed impossible until I decided to move outside in my mosquito tent. When I asked people about sleeping outside they had some qualms and said it wasn’t safe to do it alone. So I invited my little neighbor girls Lea, Amadine, and Claudia to have a sleepover. Now the students who live next door have joined us and it’s become a great way to promote the use of mosquito nets plus have a little fun.
Classes are just getting better as the time goes by. I think it’s a combination of feeling more comfortable with French and really being able to have a relationship with my students. Since the school year has began I’ve been trying to memorize all of their names.. I’m at about 80 percent, not too shabby, (remember they aren’t John and Susie). The students are doing well also and improved substantially from the first trimester. The English club was hanging on by a thread but were back into the swing of things after they took their BEPC Blanc, a practice for a standardized test they are required to take to move to the next level of school this summer. I’ve turned my house into a library with English children’s books thanks to Mrs. Pospisil’s 5th grade class’s wonderful packages! I have one student who comes at least twice a week to ‘check out’ different books. He likes to sit and translate the first half into French with me and then take it home to work on the rest. He is a go-getter and its refreshing to work with only one student at a time. His name is Prosper and I think it fits! The health club is off to a rocky start. With an unreliable counterpart I’ve been leading most of the sessions alone but the students that were chosen are perfect! The first session one of my students, Safiata, came up in front of the class and did a condom demonstration. She’s a spunky girl from the Peul ethnicity. The Peul’s are what we call our nomad people. They have lighter skin and wear copious amounts of jewelry, and are compared to being ‘gypsies’. I was proud of her courage and the other students seemed to appreciate her level of maturity. My garden is now non-existent thanks to a herd of pigs. The came in and ate everything that had been growing drop to the roots. This was a bummer but I’ll be replanting soon and hopefully I can find some better protection!
I’ve continued my work at the Maternity and have started incorporating awareness about malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, and Malaria while the women are waiting for their consultations. It seems to be unfamiliar territory for many of the women and I believe this is because it is taboo. This is a common barrier we run into as volunteers. With the mix of religious groups and culture it is easy to make a ‘faux pas’. The best way to combat this is to slowly discuss the causes of each problem and how individually it can affect a family. Along with the other tasks I do at the clinic I was able to watch a live birth. The child was still in the amniotic sac but the delivery was fast. She did not shed tears or complain about the pain. It is her duty as a women to give birth. This was her fifth pregnancy with 3 miscarriages. She is HIV positive and we can’t test her baby for 3 months. This is too typical of a story here and it breaks my heart. As I wish I could say that life is good here I can’t. Life is rollercoaster, up and down, never knowing what will happen tomorrow. What I’ve learned more than anything so far is to forget about expectations and live the life we’re given.
