BAMM

12 Apr 12

I haven’t been feelin the blog buggie lately but I wanted to post a quick one about malaria as its Blog About Malaria Month. PST is draining and takes a lot out of you. I’m excited to have a month behind me with only one more to go. We swear in a month from yesterday on May 11 and go to our official sites on May 14. This is where we will live, all going well, for the next two years. I couldn’t be more stoked for my site placement!

In the meantime it’s important to stay healthy during PST, as much as possible since so much else is taxing. Taking anti-malarial meds and sleeping under a mosquito net and using insect repellent or wearing clothes that cover you well does well to reduce ones chance of getting malaria. Malaria claims over one million lives per year if I’m not mistaken. Pregnant women are the most vulnerable.

Peace Corps Africa has a campaign to stomp out malaria: http://stompoutmalaria.org/blog-about-malaria-month/. There are some 3,000 volunteers serving in countries in Africa where people are vulnerable to this disease accounting for 6,000 stomps (because we each have two feet…). Senegal has done well to provide mosquito nets to almost every community being served by volunteers. But again, it comes down to behavior change to get people to actually use the nets. Some volunteers from Senegal have also taken it upon themselves to help make the net more appealing by beautifying it with colorful pretty fabric along the border and in the center re-engineering the square net to be a circular net so that it can hang from one hook instead of from four posts. This makes it much easier to hang as well as provides aesthetically pleasing incentive. Local tailors can beautify these nets for us for at a fairly affordable price if we so desire where volunteers are creating patterns for tailors.

In other news, The Gambia is AMAZING. I don’t regret the friendships and connections we were able to make with the Senegal volunteers and trainees and staff but it feels wonderful to finally be home in The Gambia. The collaboration was great but short lived as it’s too expensive to call or text Senegal volunteers or trainees from Gambia. Hopefully we can work out some way to stay in touch so that the connections weren’t in vain. But honestly, if D.C. in particular is reading this, I would never ask another training group to go through what we went through. It wasn’t terrible by any means but after finally being able to be in The Gambia, it feels like we very much have to start over as Senegal and The Gambia, believe it or not, are very different countries. It’s more expensive financially, physically, and emotionally, as well to train during PST like this, in my opinion.

But it was their experiment, it’s done, and hopefully they’ll come up with the best way for all to work together in the future. It’s just amazing to be home, as I’ve said, which is probably hard to fathom stateside. Words can’t describe.