the CREN

Hello! It's now been exactly one month since my arrival in Burkina Faso. Every day I get more and more comfortable with being here, which is good. In the beginning, it was a bit hard for me to picture spending two whole years here. That's not to say that I wasn't happy, or that I was thinking I couldn't do it, but it was just really hard to fathom how I would survive such a long period of time with such seemingly limited resources. I don't know if I really want to admit this in such a public forum, but I honestly think one of the things I miss most is being in the know about neuroscience related topics and the like. I asked my parents to send me scientific American though, which should help with that, and if you ever come across interesting articles about any subjects really, go ahead and send them my way! Well, that makes me sound really nerdy, but whatever, I need to express myself somewhere. Now, though, I definitely find myself being more comfortable with the idea of spending a prolonged period of time here. Everything takes a lot of patience. Mostly, I need to have patience with myself, because I find myself getting frustrated at times when I have no idea what my host mom is telling me to do, or when the group of us in our village spends what seems like an unsuccessful hour trying to get a point across to the Coges (the village leaders elected to be in charge of the budget and other functions of the community health centers) in our limited French and Moore. At first, I was pretty awkward about doing certain things in front of my family. Brushing my teeth, for instance. I have to spit into the corner of my courtyard, which they all watch me do. But I realized that whatever I do will be strange and foreign, so who really cares anyway. So the summation of this is that I feel like I'm adapting to life here, which is good.

We also got our site announcements this week, and I'll be living actually very close to where I am now starting in December, for the next two years. I'll be in a small village just 5K from Ouahigouya, so chances are, I'll be doing a lot of my typing of these blogs and emails from this very same internet cafe! I actually have quite a few peace corps neighbors in my general vicinity, one of which is Erik, the other William and Mary grad. I think he and I are about 7 or 8 K apart, but we're not exactly sure. I'm also close to another girl from my training class, but again, I'm unclear as to the exact distance. It'll be really nice to have such close neighbors though!

Speaking of things that don't phase me so much anymore, we took a visit to the CREN the other day as part of training. This is the Centre de Rehabilitation et Education Nutritionelle, which is basically a center for malnourished children. Severely malnourished children are referred to the CREN for rehabilitation, and they stay there along with their mothers, until they are nursed back to a healthy enough weight to sustain themselves on their own. To be honest, it seems that most kids here are malnourished at least to some degree. There's a severe lack of protein in their diets. Most of my brothers and sisters have the big bellies characteristic of malnutrition. We learned about the different types of malnutrition at the CREN, and got to see the intensive care part of the hospital where the most severe cases are. We walked in and immediately saw an 11 pound five year old lying on the table. He was nothing but skin and bones, and it looked like it took every ounce of energy he had in him just to breath. When mothers and their children are at the CREN, they stay there for however long it takes to get their children healthy. Once they're out of the intensive care, they stay in a set-up much like a miniature village, which helps to the mothers and children there to feel a sense of community. They have specific feeding regiments they go by, and they also do sensibilizations to teach the mothers how to prepare nutritious food. As part of our training, we also learned how to prepare three different types of enriched porridge, so that once we go to our villages, we can teach women to make them as well.

I think what surprised me the most about the hospital we visited was the lack of privacy. We literally just walked into a room where women who had just given birth were laying on the floor with their tiny tiny babies. A group of 10 American kids, no questions asked. In the U.S., they basically put the babies in space suits right when they come out, and no one is allowed to touch them, let alone a group of complete strangers. But here, we just waltzed right in there just to see what was up. The women, who's babies are smaller than any baby I've ever seen in my life, were all just laying on the floor, cuddled in close to each other because there's not much room in there, and they've got to fit a lot of people. There's no such thing as a private room, or private space, or a private consultation, really. The hospital consists of a few large rooms with beds, where everyone shares the space, and many people lay on the floors, because the beds are a hot commodity. The funny thing is though, people still greet you when you walk in, no matter how sick or miserable they are, and tell you that everything in their life is going great. I can't think of a good word for it, so for lack of a better one, it's startling.