7 Jan 2011
I remember well what it was like trying to get back to the grind after Christmas holidays in college—everyone happy to see each other, week(s) of champions, avoiding the library for as long as possible. Well hello real world! Actually, I have nothing to complain about. While my friends in urban America were left unsatisfied by their long-weekend Christmas breaks, I had an entire month, between training and the holidays, spent with good friends, eating great food, and none of these silly snowstorms everyone keeps complaining about.
Now it’s been back to the grind of village life. Again, not that I can really complain, I spend many a rainy afternoon curled up on my living room mat reading novel after novel and many a long morning baking banana bread, drinking tea and flipping through Xmas package magazines. Doing things at a villager’s pace is what I tell myself. Integration, right? The excitement and motivation from training faded fast after I spent an entire day sitting at my shared desk in the health dispensary just waiting for someone to come seek my advice on why she should get tested for HIV or which kind of birth control is most appropriate for her or what she should feed her swollen two year old to get rid of that brittle orange hair. While waiting, not so patiently, I helped the staff put together their annual report using carbon paper, rulers and ancient calculators. I asked the nurse why, for the month of December, only five women, in a catchment area of 8,536, had come to the pre-natal care ward. “They’re using family planning!!” exclaimed the nurse happily. That led me to the newly constructed and copied chart on family planning. Only 20 women had come for FP services in December. My eyes rolled until they found more interesting information… less than 100 condoms had been distributed over the past four months despite the growing stack of hundreds of silver condoms on top of the water buckets. When I confronted the nurses about this, they giggled and said that villagers don’t like condoms. Well I don’t think anyone likes condoms, I said, but they’re extremely important, especially in a village where the HIV prevalence rate is somewhere between 7-20%. Shouldn’t it be our job to make them available and educate villagers on the importance of correct and consistent use? I was speaking about as passionately as my Kiswahili would allow but the nurse cut me off dismissively saying that the villagers were unable to understand. Well maybe there’s more of a need for my basic health knowledge than I though. The issue arose again the next morning when we were packing a box of health supplies for an outreach clinic the next morning and the nurse tossed aside the condoms to make room for the Nevirapine (an HIV drug used to prevent mother to child transmission)—sad irony.
The bureaucracy of running all over my village looking for a carbon copy of a special stamp from an M.I.A village official so that I could go meet an M.I.A headmaster to discuss the possibility of teaching a Life Skills course or watching village workers manipulate the statistics on the annual report to make my village seem better off health-wise have put a damper on the enthusiasm I had coming out of the Peace Corps Training in December. BUT waiting patiently, living alongside my villagers, I’m beginning to gain motivation for work from seeing a real need, which I think is much better in the long run!