photo melange

These are all out of order from the last month and a half..

You will find a few edibles, the cofounders of the socks and sandals club, good-looking co-workers, and friends of mine...

Response to my own musings

"There is something about open air that I just can't get enough of", you may have read in my previous blog. That's all very well and dreamy, all-natural and flowery...but on the other hand, let's be honest. It may just be that I am a bit lazy and simply find very little desire to go inside the office to work. I turn out to be very creative in ways of procrastination and avoidance when it comes to that on a beautiful day. In many ways I think I was made to live outdoors more than I do, but I was also made quite human and humans like to get out of things they aren't motivated to do...

okay, enough blogging. off to the office. (case in point :)

Fruit

(a view from on top of big rocks in Zinder)

We eat very well around here. The daily allotment we are given and that we pool collectively for food is far above what one can spend in a rural town like this. A large portion of our food is brought from the city and we enjoy the luxury of fresh vegetables almost daily. So I can't stomach it when I hear complaints or bickering over food. Especially when we have paid cooks who prepare our meals and wash dishes.

But fruit is another thing. That is a very limited luxury and a recent trip to Zinder, a lovely historical town 6 hours from here, reminded me of it. Fruit there can be found in carts and on street corners, sold from basins on children's heads, and found sliced on the table at every meal! It's not completely tropical there either, but they are much closer to Nigeria, where fruit is abundant.

Fruit! brings gladness, sweetness, refreshment to life. I never realized it before, in this tangible, physical way. Yes, food has biological properties that nourish and construct our bodies, but there is undeniably another aspect that is furnishes: delight!

The trip to Zinder was enjoyable and helpful for our work, but I remember mostly …the fruit. Today I munched a precious banana that I had squirrled away in my room; I let its perfect ripeness please my tongue and awaken my tastes and fill me with some physical joy.

Sanctuary

(one corner of the table on Christmas evening: Italian, Congolese, French, Belge...)

You might be surprised where a sanctuary pops up, just when you need it. It was Christmas evening here in Niger, I had spent much of the day preparing food for our dinner together, darkness had fallen and time was past to be at the other house with my dishes. A teammate said she'd wait for me while I got showered and ready (what fun to have something to get dressed for and go to!). My part of the house was blessedly empty…and in a flash, those four cement walls of my bathroom became a sanctuary that rang with the carols of Christmas. I belted them in breathless freedom, relieved to recognize my own voice singing from the heart, careless if anyone heard me- life is too short to worry about that. So I sang and sang and joined the rest of the world giving back the song that the angels sang.

The following day, my bed, canopied with mosquito netting, became a sanctuary. A guitar, a hymnal and solitude eased my voice into song and I celebrated the Advent. It has been a good Noel here in Niger.

Knees

Knees are used a lot here. Five times a day they bend to the ground in prayer, facing east. Knees suspend the squatting cook by her fire and cradle an infant in the back of a bouncing vehicle. Knees conjoin the walking leg bones that travel formidable distances across the Sahel. I know of no one who has had ACL surgery here. I think I'm with Hippocrates when he said "walking is man's best medicine". Knees also sport an array of colors. Here is a landcuiser full of knees. You can probably guess which ones are mine…

Project

This country has vast populations who are far from "the grid" of transportation, goods, services. So ideally the health system is set up to handle simple cases in rural health posts, referring to bigger centers as the need warrants. Needless to say, there are many barriers to its success.

There is little effective medical or nutrition care for children 0-5 yrs old, which is where malnutrition hits the hardest, so our work attends to this effort. We have tin-roof, almost tent-like clinics set up along side the state clinic buildings in various rural towns. Each site is staffed with a team of about 11 who triage, teach, weigh, register, consult, monitor, give medicines, and finally give plumpy-nut rations and mosquito nets to the children who come to our clinic.

I supervise two such clinics that lie to the north east of our town. They lie 100km and 60km from here, and in a place with few cars, that is a log way to travel on foot or animal. Their source of goods and services are the weekly markets that gather in various towns between. We see a mix of ethnicities: Peuhl, Tuareg, and Haoussa. So I can't speak much to the women who come, much more than the greetings in Haoussa. The staff are always trying to teach me their respective languages J besides my wanting French.

Since we know nutrition isn’t just as simple as sufficient calories, we also run the pediatric and maternity wards at the hospital in town as well as prenatal care in some rural centers. We also have an intensive therapeutic feeding center for children referred from our outlying clinics who are in serious trouble with nutrition and related illness.

The clinic set up is simple, the numbers served is impressive (thousands and thousands in yearly total), and offer tangible witness to the problem of malnutrition. Besides the physical need, our presence here is advocacy.

My work takes the role of a connector, communicator, supervisor in the project. Since I don’t speak the local languages, I could do very little directly with our beneficiaries. I oversee the work of the local staff, serve as a connector back to the base, and offer a perspective of an expatriate and as a (well-taken care of) volunteer, to compliment the perspective of our national colleagues.

That's a taste of what I am doing here.

Nutrition

Nutrition

I have not written a lot about our project here. Since this blog is public, I remain pretty general.

It is true. It is hard for all the kids (and adults) to get good nutrition here in the Sahel. The main staples are millet and sorghum and beans and around 80% of the population lives off the land and animals. It is a lifestyle that waxes and wanes with the provision of the land and weather.

The limited nutrition from eating only starch grains and little else is one issue, since kids need animal fats and proteins to grow properly. But factor in, then, the process of GETTING the food. Crops here are planted, travelled to (easily 2 hours to your field by foot or donkey cart), tended, harvested, and processed all by human power. Once the food portion of the crop is harvested by hand and carted home, stored or sold, then you go back out to harvest the stalks which, laced together in tight formation, construct your home and grain storage for the next year. Oh, let's not forget you still have to pound the grain to get it off the stalk to prepare the meal.If you do the math of energy consumption, this demanding lifestyle often leaves the human wanting for calories.

Why not drink lots of milk and cheese, you might ask? Well, the milk and meat production of the animals is directly linked to the availability of water and nutrition for the herds, which is parallel in its harshness to humans. The Sahel is not exactly a forgiving place to live.

So it ain't easy and handing out sachets of peanut paste is not the one and only answer. Families are large here, averaging about 7 children per woman, and up to 4 wives per man. In this environment, you can start to see the challenges to having enough to eat, let alone educate your children, let along take them for health care.