Nguekokh, Senegal: An
Introduction
I
went to law school because I was turned off from development work by my
numerous experiences that demonstrated that much of current developmental
theory is at worst neocolonistic, at best horrifyingly out of touch.
I
have heard good things about the effectiveness of the Stomp Out Malaria
initiative, but when I was in Senegal in 2009 in the Peace Corps, we were under
the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Goal 6 of the MDGs is to Combat
HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Other Diseases.[1]
A major part of this initiative was to provide mosquito bed nets to every child
in Senegal, and assumedly in other affected African countries as well. In 2009, funding for this initiative
reached $1.5 billion, far short of the estimated $6 billion that was needed for
2010.[2]
When
the infamous white pick up trucks rattled down the dusty dirt road into the
center of our village, everyone poured out of their family compounds to get
their handout. The deal was that if parents produced an ID card that showed
they had registered their children for school and gotten them the necessary
vaccinations, they would get one bed net per child. What I knew, from living
there for over a year, was that almost every child in the village already
had a bed net. And too many of
didn’t use them for various reasons –general laziness (I grew to comprehend
this quickly –sometimes you just want to, or just do, pass out and don’t want
to go around your bed tucking in your mosquito net. It’s not like you will
instantly get malaria –and so the human risk taking/laziness streak kicks in
fast), fear (older people especially felt some sort of spiritual apprehension
and didn’t like waking up and thinking they had died/were seeing a ghost),
force of habit (infuriating!), or others. But perhaps the bigger problem was
“mosquito hour” was past its peak by the time people got in bed. The huts and
cement buildings would be too hot, after collecting heat all day, to go to
sleep in right away. Families would gather outside on cement platforms built especially for laying down,
chatting, watching TV, and eventually falling asleep. In my family compound,
the grandmother would innately know when the hour was right to retreat to our
huts, and would wake from her sleep, rub her arthritic knees, and rouse all of us up to go inside. By
this time, all of us had been laying outside for hours, from dusk until 9 or 10
pm, getting eaten alive during the high tide of mosquitoes. One of our rather
rambunctious volunteers had an idea to make giant sized mosquito nets to put
over the (word for cement thing) –his idea sounded so comical that it didn’t
get off the ground. But his idea was better than the MGDs.
Most
of the women who got a second mosquito net for their kids sold it, and continued
not to use the first one. But the most tragic scene was created by my host
family. We were the village chief’s family –and so although by tradition we
were borom dekk “the village
owners” –in actuality everyone regarded them as the village jesters –no one
took them seriously for their pompousness and belligerency. Said
characteristics were demonstrated that day when my host mothers ran out into
the village center screaming and disheveled. They had “lost” their children’s
ID cards (I doubt, and I bet the villagers did more, that they ever got their
children the vaccinations) –but they still wanted their free bed nets. The
USAID staff politely told them that they were sorry, they couldn’t give my host
mothers bed nets without the ID cards. Well, after an ebullient public
demonstration, my host mothers huffed off, robes a flutter behind them, into
our family compound, where they gathered the drawers out of their dressers and
carried them back into the village center. There they dumped the contents out
into the dirt, in front of the entire village, screaming “We are the village
chief’s family! You cannot refuse to give us our bed nets!” It was such a
disturbing scene the USAID workers complied. My family took the bed nets to the
market to sell the next day, and all the children in our compound slept without
bed nets the whole time I was there.
Meanwhile,
I was trying to find funding to multiply a sex education course I had started
at the local middle school. Teachers had reached out to me to create the
program because of the drastic rate in female drop-outs during middle school.
While girls and boys graduating elementary school was relatively 50%/50%, once
girls hit middle school the pressure from local boys to get married, subsequent
(or previous) pregnancy, and the duties of home life made the middle school
graduation rate more like 75%/25%.[3]
The sex ed program was a solid success –in fact, it is the only work I did in
Senegal that continues to this day. (And I attribute that, in large part, to
that it was community –and not “from above” –initiated.)
There
was a desperate need to reproduce the program in the surrounding villages.
Teachers were willing and able to do it, and came to us, the Peace Corps
volunteers, or the teachers and administration at the middle school, to find
out how. Their level of initiative was something Peace Corps volunteers don’t
often experience. Community driven initiatives are somewhat the “golden egg” of
Peace Corps service. I had a close working relationship with the local USAID representative,
who was Senegalese, and –perhaps at least in part consequently –let me bend the
rules to bring a USAID summer camp to the middle school the summer before,
after I demonstrated to him how motivated the faculty was to facilitate the
camp. When I approached him and the Peace Corps administration about getting
support for the sex ed class, however, they told me that if we could somehow
incorporate AIDS education, MDG money was bursting out the dam. Senegal’s adult
AIDS rate in 2009, at .90%, makes it 53 in the world. The U.S. is ranked at
.60%, 64th in the world. Swaziland is first and has 25.90% of its
adult population living with AIDS. In 10th place is Malawi, with
6.50%.[4]
Somehow in the planning sessions of the MDGs, the stereotype of African as a
place of AIDS had looped Senegal in to receive a large amount of money for a
comparably minor problem. Meanwhile, we struggled to find funding for a lot of
the real needs of our communities. Although AIDS education is no doubt
important for Senegal, and part of any good sex education program, this answer
was the default for any kind of
project that came up that year. And we didn’t come for an AIDS program, we came for a program that would empower women to value
education and stay in school and resist the pressure to get married young.
Similar, but different, and when multiplied by the number of projects going on
all across the country, and all across the world, these small differences, like
wearing a pair of jeans one size too small, greatly contribute to the
unsustainability of projects.
The
village I lived in had been somewhat of a “pilot” village for international
projects since the 1980’s. A walk through the village and the surrounding
fields with an old farmer would yield a similar picture replicated throughout
Africa –the sun-scorched carcasses of abandoned failed development projects. A
bigger tragedy than the money lost was the faith lost in the community. They
were jaded. They had experienced hope brought from the outside, time and again,
only to have it dashed for various failures to assess the local needs or
capacities to sustain initiatives created from outside. They were weary of
people coming in with proscriptions for what they should do. They were tired of
jumping through hoops to “please the white man” and get money they desperately
needed. And so when I came back in
response to many of their initiatives that year and said “you know the deal,
guys, as long as we can pitch this as an AIDS initiative, we can get money,”
the disappointment in their faces had a lasting impact. AIDS education is
important, but more important is letting local people shape efficient tailored
programs that will work for them. My reasons for leaving the development sector
and deciding to become an advocate are more complex than just this, but they
were mostly born during those walks through the fields, during long talks with
families in the village. During my second year of Peace Corps, I lost all
interest in filling out paperwork representing my compliance with proscribed
Peace Corps goals. They did not fit my village. I saw myself as an advocate –a
simple filter of my village’s goals to the outside world and back.
[1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/aids.shtml.
[2] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/aids.shtml.
[3] These statistics are from personal observation and
discussions with local teachers and school administrators.
[4] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2155rank.html.
