Senegal Study-Service Term » Summer 2012

Returning: Homeward Bound

David — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:45:30 +0000

The students final day in Senegal began with a Sunday service on the roof of Chez Goshen. We had a final Senegalese meal at the hotel and then traveled to Dakar. In Dakar we spent the afternoon on the beach at the most western point of the African continent. Around six o’clock we left for the airport and around seven o’clock Christine and the Yoder Linds waved good-bye and watched the last student pass into the airport.

The post Returning: Homeward Bound appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Returning: Thiès Day Two

David — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 23:36:08 +0000

Our second day back from service started off with more student presentations, which lasted most of the morning. In the afternoon we discussed re-entry and ended our formal sessions with another story time. In the evening we went to the home of Christine (our local coordinator) and David Yanon. We ate, celebrated, and did a little Senegalese dancing.

The post Returning: Thiès Day Two appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Returning: Thiès day one

David — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 06:25:21 +0000

Students were responsible for arranging their own transportation back to Thiès. They all did a fine job of it and began trickling back to our study term home in Thiès late Wednesday evening. By Thursday evening everyone had safely returned and were either resting at the hotel, Aux Berges du Ciel, or off visiting their host families from the study portion of SST.

On Friday we began our official re-entry retreat. We started the day sharing about our service experiences and then, after a coffee break, moved into a story time. Students have been working on stories, being conscious of the power of stories to convey complex insights in an accessible way, as part of the academic expectations of the program. During this story time students shared stories from their experience with poverty and economic inequality more generally. The afternoon was taken up by the first half of student project presentations.

The post Returning: Thiès day one appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

A naming day in Denn Guèye

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:15:26 +0000

A quick excursion to Denn Guèye on July 16 turned into a longer visit and a meal when it happened to fall upon the day of a naming ceremony for a new member of Aaron’s family. The child had been born one week prior to one of the women in Aaron’s concession and having survived the first week was being given a name. To celebrate we visited under the shade tree, shifting mats occasionally to keep in the shade, and drank tea. And, of course, there was a wonderful meal.

The post A naming day in Denn Guèye appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Festival in Grand Mboa

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:15:00 +0000

To celebrate the end of the school term, the Association Humanitaire les Amis de l’Ecole holds a festival for family and friends in the local community. The festival includes everything from traditional dances to karate displays and to break-dancing. As part of their service assignment Billy, Daniel, and Karin helped to organize this years event. They also participated in a theatrical number and a song and dance number.

The post Festival in Grand Mboa appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Service Visits – Saint Louis

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:25:59 +0000

From Ndombo Mbodjienne we traveled to our last service location in Saint Louis to spend a day with Amanda, Jess, and John. They are all three working at Yoonu Njub a mission outreach center of the evangelical church Assemblée des Frères. The center provides a host of services from computer literacy classes to cooking and tailoring for women and girls in the community. John’s host parents, Feluine and Malick Fall are the directors of the center and John and Jess have been teaching English and computer literacy skills. The center is also home to a small clinic where Amanda has done her service assisting in consultations with her host father Yocouba Amadou who is the primary nurse practitioner in residence. Her mother Tening also works in the clinic’s pharmacy.

After a tour of the center, we continued to Jess’ home north and outside of the main city. We visited with her family the Bindias and learned that Jess has taken up baking and has made a number of cakes to the great pleasure of her family. From there we continued on to John’s house where we met his father and several of his siblings. We ended at the Amadou’s home where Amanda’s host family provided us with a meal.

In addition to their service assignments the Saint Louis SSTers have been busy with small research projects. Amanda is uncovering the order of the Senegalese market place and has made friends with a wide variety of local vendors. Jess is exploring the inspiration behind Senegalese art, and John is creating a video report that documents Senegalese musical preferences.

The post Service Visits – Saint Louis appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Service Visits – Ndombo Mbodjienne

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:38:02 +0000

On Thursday, we traveled north to Ndombo Mbodjienne, a small village just south of Richard Toll on the Mauritanian border. Lydia and Maddie have been living there with Alionne Mbodj and his extended family. They have been doing some work at a small organization called AESCAW, which is an economic initiative run by local women that processes milk to produce a sweet yoghurt that they sell. This job comes with a lovely pink uniform and has taken up some small portion of their time. The first half of their service was defined by their host father’s participation in a local political race, which he eventually won. It turns out that politics involves a lot of parties and the two SSTers attended meals and dances and fetes on an almost daily basis for the first couple weeks of service. Parties often include dancing and Lydia and Maddie have both become fairly accomplished, or at least well-recognized, dancers in the community.

The post Service Visits – Ndombo Mbodjienne appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Service Visits – Niakhar

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:31:05 +0000

The day after our visit to Dakar we headed southeast in search of Niakhar, the village where Jessie and Jessica have been spending service. Initially, plans were that the two students would be working in a clinic in Niakhar itself, but when those plans fell through our local contact Ferdenand helped get the two placed in a Clinic in the more remote village of Soma. They now spend Mondays and Tuesdays in Soma, which entails a 30 minute motorcycle ride down sandy pathways with backpacks, mattresses, and students strapped on tightly. We arrived on a Tuesday which meant that we were able to visit them at the Soma Clinic. The Clinic is an annex of Bartimeé Hospital in Thiés which is a mission of the Evangelical Baptist Church. We arrived to find the students assisting with a consultation. After a tour of the clinic and surrounding facilities, we piled back in our taxi and headed back to Niakhar.

In Niakhar we met Jessie and Jessica’s large extended N’Gom (mother) and Faye (father) family. After several hours of visiting we were served a meal of ceebu jën, a rice and fish meal that is something of a national staple here in Senegal. Jessie and Jessica seemed well acclimated to their service placement despite only having two days of formal work. And, they have been having their share of adventures, including a horse cart ride to a local wedding that triggered Jessie’s horse allergy and gave her family a bit of a fright. The event has become something of a family joke, as such things sometimes do in families, and the father insisted that before we left we come out back and take a picture of Jessie holding the lead rope of the family horse.

The post Service Visits – Niakhar appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Service Visits – Dakar

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:05:15 +0000

After a day of rest from our Segou visit, we left on July 2^nd for a day trip to Dakar to visit Erin, Lynn, and Matt. Erin and Lynn have been working every morning in a center that provides breakfast, showers, medical care, and some entertainment for the Talibé. The Talibé are young boys, primarily from poor rural families, who live and study with an Islamic teacher called a Marabou. The Talibé typically spend the mornings and evenings memorizing the Koran and much of the rest of the day seeking donations of food and money to help support their dara (Koranic school). A variety of Christian missions and secular organizations have emerged to help meet the needs of the boys when alms giving is not enough. The project that Erin and Lynn work with is a joint effort of the Senegalese Baptist Mission and the Assembly of God. When we arrived a crowd of young Talibé boys were finishing up their breakfast and watching television on long wooden benches. Erin and Lynn were washing dishes in the kitchen and came out to give us a tour of the facilities, during which Lynn was called away to tend to an injury that one of the boys had sustained. The center is located in a building that also houses a school named La Renaissance des Sourds, which provides classes for deaf children. The two GC women taught computer skills to these deaf children until school let out for break at the end of June.

From the Talibé center we traveled to the Keur Yakaar Clinic where Matt is working full time and Lynn part time. The Clinic was developed by Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and provides a full range of general health services including dental care. Matt and Lynn have been warmly welcomed and have been able to experience a wide range of services from working in the pharmacy to providing first aid for a wide variety of injuries. When we met up with Matt he was assisting in the treatment of a woman with severe burns to her leg caused by an iron. Matt and Lynn introduced us to their colleagues and gave us a comprehensive tour of the facilities before we set out to meet their host families.

Matt is living in the Scat Urbaan neighborhood of Dakar in an airy third or fourth floor apartment with the Koba family. His family includes a mom and dad who are both working professionals, two precocious younger brothers, a medical student and the young woman who cooks and cleans for the family. Erin and Lynn live in the Maristes neighborhood about a twenty minute ride from Matt’s family. They live with pastor Robert Makalebo his wife Nanette and two young sisters.

The post Service Visits – Dakar appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.

Service Visits – Segou

David — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 02:56:05 +0000

On June 27^th we began a four day trek to the southern village of Segou to visit Ali, Kate, Laurel, and Rebekah. Segou is located in the southeast of Senegal a few kilometers from the border with Mali. While Senegal is only about the size of Missouri, the trip highlighted the wide range of landscapes and associated cultures and livelihoods that define the country. The trip began with a thirty minute stop in Gambia where the six Yoder Linds renewed their passports. We then continued south and east for two days of driving. On the way we passed through the salt flats surrounding Kaolack where large piles of drying salt dot the landscape and define a major form of economic activity in the area. Later as we passed through the Niokolo-Koba National Park and into the south of the country, wood became a major roadside commodity and all manner of passing traffic stopped to load up on cheap fire wood and coal, including our driver who managed to squeeze two bags of coal in with our luggage and piled the rooftop high with firewood. The architecture changed as well from cinderblock and squared concrete dwellings to round mud huts with grass roofs. Even the cattle changed from the tall humpbacked breed of zebu cattle of the drier north to a stouter stockier breed (probably N’Dama) that I must assume is better suited to the hilly, rocky, greener terrain of the south. We were also lucky to be traveling south just as the first rains were falling in central Senegal. All along the way farmers were out in their fields with horses, donkeys, and cattle plowing and planting for the rainy season. After a day and a half of travel we arrived in Kedougou where we hired a four-by-four that drove us out to Segou and the concession where the four SSTers are spending their service.

The students are working with an organization called 10,000 Girls, which is conceived and run by an American ex-pat, Viola Vaughn, who has dedicated much of her life to working in Senegal to help empower Senegalese girls and women especially by encouraging them to stay in school and get an education. Madam Vaughn has established a small concession outside the village of Segou which serves as the incubator of a number of different projects. Ali, Kate, Laurel and Rebekah, along with a number of other young Senegalese women from around the country, live in newly constructed huts nestled into the crook of a forested mountain. The evening we visited a storm rolled in over the mountain just as the sun was setting. Announced by dark clouds and a strong wind the rain was quite a treat for those of us coming from Thiès who hadn’t seen it for some time.

In Segou the four Goshen women are each responsible for various chores like strolling into to the village center every morning to buy bread, cooking meals, cleaning, and gardening. They are also responsible for following through on a number of small projects. Laurel spent much of the first half of her service cataloging donated books and organizing a book mobile in the trailer of an old truck. Ali and Rebekah tend to a small garden on the concession and in the afternoons visit with the village girls and assist with their gardening. Kate is helping to organize and develop hibiscus production. Hibiscus is the main ingredient of a favorite drink in Senegal called bissop, and 10,000 Girls has a contract to sell the organic flowers to a US company. Also noteworthy are the connections the students have made with the Jane Goodall Institute which has also begun to develop projects in the area to protect habitat for and reintroduce chimpanzees. The students are working on a number of projects with that organization including surveys of local fauna and interviews with local people.

We left Segou for Kedougou and made the journey from Kedougou to Thiès on Saturday.

The post Service Visits – Segou appeared first on Senegal Study-Service Term.