The village at the end of the road

Written on November 29, 2008 in Gourel, Senegal near Dianke Makam in the Tambacounda Region of Senegal (located in South Eastern Senegal near the Mali border).

The sun is starting to set casting a golden glow to everything around me. I am sitting under a tree in a village at the end of the road. Well actually there was hardly a road to get here. The grasses were as tall as the car and the path hardly as wide as the car. The four housing compounds around me each have several huts, typically one for each wife, one for the husband, and one for cooking.

As I sit here there are a few brave kids who say hello in Pular but as much as I understand a little Wolof I know no Pular. There is one young boy who is holding behind his sister out of fear of the white person no doubt. Those are the two reactions that I get here: tears or a herd of followers. The faces of the children around me are tinged gold as well. I wish I could take a picture, there is a particularly beautiful young girl watching me intently, but without one of my co-workers to translate I would be afraid to cause trouble among the 15 kids and a few adults milling around watching me. I almost had a bit of a riot the other night when I took out my camera. The kids loved seeing their pictures on my camera screen but started to grab at me and my camera and then a mother said in broken French that I had stolen their head in my “box”. My camera was put away then as I tried to explain that I had not stolen anything. It all ended fine but it makes me hesitate to take any pictures now. The children have started to sing me a song, a first in the 10 or more villages we have visted over the last 3 days. In the village we were just in I had 20 kids follow me around the village, when I would turn around they would scatter.

This is the last village we are surveying for today. I am supervising a team of 2 surveyors to collect data on the knowledge and practice of women with children under 5 on malaria. That is to say what they know about malaria and preventing malaria was well as what they do when they or their children have malaria and how they prevent malaria in their household. We have surveyed ten households today in 3 different villages. We traveled five hours on dirt roads to get here, being shaken about and baked by the tropical sun in our 4 by 4 without air conditioning. Here in the region of Tambacounda it is 45 degree Celsius in the shade! (That is 113 degrees Fahrenheit!) I have a thick layer of dust on me: my face, arms, and my clothes.

The children seem to have lost interest and wandered home now. It is time for dinner soon. I can hear the rhythmic beating of millet or corn coming from the compounds. Families live in villages of about 50 people 10 to 20 kilometer from the next closest village on a road that is passable in the dry season like now but I can’t imagine the difficulty in the rainy season. People have bikes or horse drawn carts or some even a motorcycle. The closest health center is maybe 20 kilometers away, to access those services you have to be able to get there, be able to pay, and the health center has to have supplies and staff. These families are mostly subsistence farmers-- they eat what they grow and occasionally maybe sell a cow or goat for cash. Their animals are the way they “save” their money there are no banks here in the villages. Some villages have a school, maybe through 3rd grade all in the same classroom with one teacher. School is nearly free but kids are often needed at home to work in the fields, to care for the goats, and to help with the younger children. Occasionally we see a phone tower that allows a village to have a telephone, but here in this area there isn’t any cell phone coverage or electricity.

Today the depth and breath of the poverty here has become a bit overwhelming. I see it everyday in Dakar but here it is more pronounced. There is still so much work that still needs to be done in this world and especially in reaching the most disadvantaged and remote populations especially in bring them basic services in health, education, clean water, and good roads. I spent Thanksgiving Day in villages like this one and could only reflect on how lucky I am and how thankful I am for the advantages I have in this world. I only hope that I can find ways to share the advantages I have been given.

The sky has turned red now; I can feel the coolness of the evening approaching. It is time for me to gather my team and leave this village at the end of the road.