Updates - February 2010
Chethana Biliyar, our first, but hopefully not last, intern arrived in Dakar early in the morning of February 13. She was supposed to arrive a day earlier and I was at the airport at 6 am to greet her. Our messages crossed and I found out when I returned to the hotel that her flight was cancelled! The following day, instead of returning to the airport, I decided to put her in the trusted hands of our preferred taxi driver whose services we have been using for three years.
She had just enough time for breakfast, I felt bad about that, but Badou and Aminata were waiting and the jeep was ready to take us for the weekend to our villages, Mbousnakh and Ndiatah. I told her that she could sleep in the car, then again on a mat under a tree after lunch.
In Mbousnakh, after enjoying a lunch of yassa poulet,( chicken with onions and mustard sauce on rice) we went to observe the women in the community group during their first literacy lesson. It was so powerful watching these women who can’t write their names actively participate in the training. “Masiin uu un o ndimle maak na rew we” was the first very important sentence they learned. The relevancy of the sentence, “The machine (grain mill) is a big help to women” facilitates learning. Oumou’s skill as a trainer emerged as she worked with these women breaking down the sentence until they were able to confidently begin writing “i”s on their individual chalkboards. Each literacy lesson begins with a sentence applicable to the daily lives of these women. It’s part of the three year comprehensive Tostan training program that we are sponsoring to ensure the success of our first economic activity—the grain mill initiative.
We spent the following day at Ndiatah Village with Kourka’s family and our sheep. In April, we began a micro-credit project involving buying small sheep in the springtime and selling them for a profit in the fall just before the Tabaski, a significant holiday for most Senegalese. An important condition of this project is that every school-aged child must attend school.
We spent the remainder of the week in Dakar getting Chethana settled in with Aminata’s family and visiting families and schools. Chethana is already learning Wolof and Puular and living with Aminata’s family is the best way for her to have a fulfilling internship experience. You can keep up with Chethana and her WFG work in Senegal by reading her blog.
wfgsenegal.wordpress.com