Good Vibes Vol. 2

So life has been treating me well lately. I started writing about this in my previous post, but felt it was too much to just put in one post, so I’ll talk some more here.

I do work with this NGO called ATBEF that works in the domain of community health. They have a local group of volunteers here, who I help train and put together activities with. I am slowly but surely having them train more people in Sotouboua to act as community health workers. I recently put a simple reporting system in place so they can record all the activities and stuff they do in the community, and I don’t have to be there to watch. I just need to have one meeting with them at the end of every month just to see what work they’ve been up to. This way I can just check up about once a week to see what’s up and if anything needs improvement. Well, it just has been going surprisingly smoothly. Hopefully it stays like that. The stuff we do is really cool too. It is all about family planning and sexual health stuff, but it is targeted at guys (A group that’s highly neglected with most health programs in developing countries. Which I think is really stupid, especially in a very patriarchal society like in Togo. If it’s the man in the house who makes all the decisions, why leave him in the dark about family planning methods and health education? If he actually knows what’s up, he will be more likely to actually wrap it up, not spread so much STIs, and actually let his wife use some sort of birth control so she isn’t popping out a bunch of kids that he doesn’t have the means to take care of.). Warning: This is about to turn into a bit of a rant. So when I first came to post, I looked through the records of pregnant women who came in for their consultations in the maternity ward. Each month, about 10% of the ladies had some sort of STI. I asked what they did for these ladies, and was told they were examined and given a prescription to whatever meds they needed. So I asked about their husbands or boyfriends, and was told the ladies were told to tell the guys to come in. I then asked how many guys actually came in, and I never actually got an answer! So these ladies are just going to end up getting an STI again from their man because he really doesn’t understand the importance of actually going to a hospital and getting checked out! There really is a view point here where guys are too ‘manly’ to admit to being sick and going to the hospital to get help. What makes this worse is there aren’t any big health initiatives directed at men. They are all at women and children. So this just reinforces their thought that this health stuff isn’t for a real man, it’s just for women and kids. This is why I work with ATBEF to try and push this type of information at guys. The Peace Corps is having us volunteers work more and more to try to incorporate guys in health and gender issues. So hopefully some positive behavior change can happen over the next few years.

Ok, I’ll stop talking about boring work stuff. I harvested honey the other day! It was really cool, and delicious, and I only got stung twice. I went out to a small village were another PCV lives. Someone she works with out there owns a bee farm, so he had us go out and collect the honey with him. He has this little plot of land that has a bunch of white boxes spread out about it. Each box contains hundreds of bees and their honey combs. We went out at night because there are supposedly not as many bees around at that time. The guy we were with had this device that looked like a tea pot, but had wood burning inside it, and blew smoke out. He would first smoke out the box. This would calm down the bees. Then he would open up the box and pull out these rectangular sheets of honey combs. There were about 10 in each box. After collecting a bunch of these things we went back to his house to tear of the top layer of honey comb. This allowed the honey to drip out, which he then collected in a big basin. I ate so much honey during the whole process that I actually started getting sick by the end of it. But now I have a liter of it that’ll last me a while.

I received some very awesome news from back in the states. I worked in a lab for a year and a half with some really great people while I was in college. The other week I just heard from them that a paper that I’m a co-author for was recently accepted for publishing! So a very big thank you to everyone over there! It is going to be so cool when I can search my name on PubMED and have that come up. It also feels good knowing that as an undergrad, I made a small contribution to science.

This next thing is probably going to freak a lot of people out. I freaked myself out a little when I did it. I ate dog for the first time earlier this week. I felt somewhat uncomfortable while eating it, knowing that in American this animal would probably be someone’s pet. I felt even more uncomfortable knowing that I actually liked the taste of it! Plus, while eating this dog meat, the freshly cooked paws and tail were just laid out on a stand in front of me. It gets weirder still. While I was eating cooked chunks of dog meat off a stick, a guy next to me was slurping down a soup that had the dog’s intestines! Even though it tasted good, I don’t know if I’ll want to eat dog again anytime soon.

One last thing I want to say is I went exploring out in the bush the other day. I stumbled across this amazing river. It was such a beautiful place. It reminded me of when I went hiking as a kid in California. There were hundreds of little frogs on the bank of the river. They were only about half an inch long. Each time I took a step about a dozen of these guys would jump in every direction.