Months to Come

Monday, February 25, 2008

While my time here in Senegal is coming to a close day by day, it is far from done. After being in the States for 10 days in early February, attending the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (W.A.I.S.T.) last weekend, and all of last week being taken up by the All Volunteer Conference and COS Conference, I am ready to get back to work. It is nice to feel rejuvenated and having a strong desire to make some positive changes.

At my main site at the Infectious Diseases Ward at Fann Hospital, I am hoping to get back into the nutrition and food preparation side of things. This is an area which I got burned out doing last year, so I am hoping I will see full commitment amongst those involved in the project this year to tackle this. Hopefully, in the end, this project will be looked at as a well rounded one.

Also, I will slowly transition myself out of the gardening portion of this site so the technicians will be better prepared when I leave.

At my new site at the Psychiatric Ward at Fann Hospital, I just secured a small amount of funding that will allow us to nearly double the growing space. While this site will probably have a volunteer at it after me on a small scale, continuing to work with the technician at the site, I want the patients to be more greatly integrated in it by the time I leave.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is most likely that I will be replaced by a new Volunteer in mid May, so over the next couple months I will be involved in some site development so the future Volunteer will have things to do as well as a place to live. Along with this, once this Volunteer arrives in Dakar, I’ll be working closely with them to try and get them more integrated into the city.

Another Volunteer and I are trying to put together a book on Dakar which will be incorporated into the training of new Volunteers. Dakar is a massive city with little source of compressed information, so we are trying to compress everything together with the Volunteer in mind.

While I am not searching for accomplishments, I am hoping by the time I leave here I can say that I got the job done or showed somebody how to do it instead of just leaving things hanging. Too many people have given up on Africa, I don’t want to be one.