So what exactly do you do as a PCV…

So a long time overdue – but I will try my best to update you as much as possible! Lots going on here, so I’ll break it up into three blog posts. I usually get questions about what projects I’m doing and what life in like in village, so I’ll start with those. The last post is just fun stories I would only experience as a PCV.

So what exactly do you do as a Peace Corps Volunteer…

It good to finally be feeling busy with work! I’ve gotten to do a lot of cool things and I’m excited for some other projects in the works. April and May were really busy because I was trying to finish things up before rainy season. During rainy season, everyone goes out into the fields to cultivate, so people are really busy, meaning projects are more difficult. I’ve done most of my work on nutrition and hygiene, but I’m hoping to get more into family planning, HIV/AIDS, and maternal health in my second year. (Can you believe it, I’ve been in country for over a year now!!!)

Nutrition:

My big project was the FARN or hearth model. It’s a rehabilitation program for moderately malnourished kids. We weighed babies in two villages in March to identify malnourished kids to participate. Every morning for 12 days, we met to make an enriched bouille (porridge) and talk about health. We started off talking about nutrition and then moved on to other topics like family planning and hygiene. My counterpart for this project is absolutely amazing!!! She is the volunteer in maternity and lives in one of our satellite villages. She’s so positive and really motivated and excited about working on nutrition. We had 6 women participate in the program. The cool thing about the program is that it is really all about empowering the mothers. The bouille is made from ingredients found locally and the women all contribute resources to buy the ingredients, so they know they have the ability to properly nourish their kids with the resources they have. The moms were all fantastic and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them every morning. Most of the babies were afraid of me, but by the end of the 12 days, they got used to me and would even sometimes let me hold them. Assetou is my favorite, mostly because she was the only one totally comfortable with me holding her and would play with me. The others were more hesitant. All of the babies gained weight after the 12 days, which is awesome. But definitely have ideas to change it next time around. Most of the babies didn’t gain weight during the month after (although it is hard because June is a tough month because people run out of their food stock from last year’s harvest and they haven’t harvested yet for this year), so I want to focus more on the nutrition education and what the moms can do at home. But not bad for the first. Definitely learned a lot and have lots of ideas for next time. That’s why Peace Corps is two years, not just one.

Hygiene

In my last post, I mentioned a latrine training I went to with two counterparts from my village. (So I sometimes forget what words aren’ t part of general American vocabulary. A latrine is the hole in the ground that is your bathroom. You dig a deep hole, put a cement square over it that has a small hole, and build a house around it.) The training focused on hygiene and then how to actually build latrines. I brought the only female Burkinabe to the latrine training. Construction is generally a male job and it can definitely be intimidating to be the only female Burkinabe, but my counterpart stepped up and did a really awesome job. The first female mason of my village now! Her name is Sibi and she’s so much fun to work with. Really positive and enthusiastic.

It was definitely a slow and frustrating process getting the latrines started. When you only have the funding for two latrines, its really hard to pick just two places out of so many options! And the politics of it all – getting it approved by all the important people. We finally decided on one mosque and one church (I’ve had trouble figuring out percentages of religious affilation in village. I’ve heard that my village is 50/50, Muslim/Catholic or Protestant. But I’m not so sure that’s accurate. But I also work in a health center that serves 16 villages. There are some villages that are predominately Muslim and some that are more split.) Anyways, we built in two different villages. After the building of the latrine, we talked at the Friday afternoon prayer (mosque) and Sunday morning service (church) about hygiene and the importance of latrine use. It would sure be a waste to build a latrine if we never explained why it was important to use it (thus encourage people to actual use it). We’re hoping to do more latrines after rainy season.

During the hygiene talk at the church, the women’s choir at the church asked me to come back teach them how to make soap to sell and promote hygiene. So I went back the next week to plan and then two weeks later to make the soap. The women decided to start with liquid soap because the start-up costs are less. The eventual goal is to use the profits to invest in hard soap making. The ingredients are much more expensive. Soap making is a great activity in Burkina Faso because it is a way to generate income and promote good hygiene practices at the same time. And while making soap, it’s a great opportunity to explain how soap works. I actually didn’t know this before (and excuse the very basic explanation, I was never very interested in chemistry), but soap works because a chemical reaction suspends oil and dirt and then you wash that off with running water. While running water isn’t an issue in the States, it’s important to explain this process while talking about soap because there is no running water here. But you can substitute pouring water, but lots of people often just dunk their hands in a bowl to wash the soap off, which doesn’t work then. And I’ll admit – I used to do that too. I thought soap killed stuff. But it suspends the bad stuff to be washed away. Learn something new every day.

Health Education:

I’ve also been trying to do as much basic health education as possible. In March and April, I went to two different literacy centers to talk about health. In one, we talked about pre-natal consultations – why they’re important and the appropriate schedule for them. At another literacy center, we talked about nutrition, hygiene, and malaria. But I think my favorite thing I’ve done so far is the health classes at the middle school/high school. I talked to the equivalent of the 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th grade classes (although the corresponding ages tend to be older) about hygiene. It was a lot of fun to work with students again – teenagers are always teenagers, no matter where they are. For the oldest class, I taught them the health terms in English as well. Next school year, I am hoping to work a lot more with the school. The director is awesome and really supportive.

Upcoming projects:

Moringa garden at the CSPS: Morigna is a tree with really nutritious leaves – tons of vitamins, iron, and other good stuff. We are planting morigna at the CSPS and hopefully selling the leaves in powder form (to add to sauces or bouille/pourridge) and using the profit to subsidize bi-monthly or monthly enriched bouille demonstrations at the CSPS after baby weighings.

Training at the CREN: The CREN is a center for the rehabilitation of severely malnourished children. While moderate malnutrition is addressed on the community level, severe malnutrition needs to be treated at the district level – it requires more intense medical supervision. I am working with a neighboring volunteer on this project. Because nutrition is something we’ve spent a lot of time on in our respective villages, we want to work at the district level as well to ensure that our efforts in village are complemented by support in the district. We’ve planned a training that covers the identification and treatment of malnutrition; nutrition education and enriched bouille preparation; community outreach and mobilization; and financing and administration of programs at the CREN. We’re aiming right now to do this the last two weeks of August.