St. Louis and Ndonba

A visit north took us to the service sites for Ally and Theodore in St. Louis and Katrina and Dominique in Ndonba, a village near Richard Toll. Ally and Theodore have been spending time at Yoonu Njub a socio-cultural mission outreach center of the evangelical church. The center provides a host of services from computer literacy classes to cooking and tailoring for women and girls in the community. Ally’s host parents, Feluine and Malick Fall are the directors of the center and Ally has been participating in classes there and has learned to crochet. The center is also home to a small clinic where Theodore has done his service assisting in consultations with Yocouba Amadou who is the primary nurse practitioner in residence.

After a tour of the center, we continued to Theodore’s home north and outside of the main city. We visited with his family the Bindias. Theodore has been focusing some of his study on the distinctly Senegalese drink called Café Touba, which is found throughout the country and increasingly abroad . With the help of his family he has begun preparing the drink from scratch.  

After a day in St. Louis, we traveled north to Ndonba, a small village just south of Richard Toll on the Mauritanian border. Dominique and Katrina 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. The first few weeks of their service was defined by their host uncle’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 had hundreds of people converging on their home on a daily basis. They also attended meals and dances and fetes on an almost daily basis for the first couple weeks of service.