Thursday, July 26, 2007

Yesterday I went into one of the sectors of Sikoroni with three of the members of the Community Health Action Group (CHAG). They were going to collect names of pregnant women and unvaccinated children for our clinic treatment/mosquito net project, and invited me along! It was a really hot afternoon, even at 5 PM as we met up and started to walk to the houses. The system works remarkably well. All the compounds have numbers on the outside specifically placed by Sigida Keneyali, 15 total in this sectors, so that the CHAG members can keep track of where the “houses” are and record which ones they visited. Though I have been in Mali before, I was really surprised by some of the places that people were living. The sheer numbers of people living in what might be a city block in the United States was also astonishing. Kids just come out of everywhere, although I did begin to recognize some of the same kids at different houses, following us around as we visited homes. I was pretty useless for the business matters since my Bambara goes about as far as greetings, but loved that I came along to see the people we are working for! The next time I go out, although this may not be for a while, I will bring my camera so that you can all get more of an idea of what this community is like! Lots of friendly people, and not a lot of space, and, as we found out, a scarcity of mosquito nets! Almost everyone mentioned that their kids were vaccinated, but didn’t have nets that were in usable shape. We can really only help pregnant women and unvaccinated kids under the age of 5 with this project, but hopefully even that will help get more nets into families. We finished just before sunset, and I came home feeling a new burst of energy for our work here!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

hey, I have an idea for you! I know my students here would love to find out how a Malian kid their age lives. If you ever had time to follow a kid around with a camera and make "a day in the life of", I could teach them about it. I did something similar with kids in northern India last year and my students ate it up! We also raised some money for their cause.