club de sante

presenting certificates to one of the peer ed students

I did a peer educator training with my neighbor Amy at her town's Lycée. This doctor in Amy's town, he's the guy 2 people down from me in the pic, is amazingly motivated to do things for the community and wanted to train some students on health topics, so we got together and set this up. We had 11 kids show up and that was a great success because the last time we tried we had 2--but that was probably because the week we had picked ended up falling right after a national strike and during the World Cup. Don't ever try to get anything done in Africa, Europe, basically anywhere in the world (outside of the US) during the World Cup. Lesson learned.

But this time it worked! We did a training on all sorts of sex health topics and the students were all shy at first but warmed up pretty quick. Maybe the homemade American goodies we brought every day helped out with that--we have now introduced brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and chips and salsa to the Fouta. We made official Peace Corps certificates and handed them out to the students in their classrooms, I'm pretty sure it was more of an honor than an embarrassment. This training is just the first step, now the students have formed a Club de Santé (health club) and are going to give presentations and plan health event in their school and in the community.

I'm really happy cus this is just what I thought I would be doing before I got out here, and I finally felt like I knew what I was doing. It's tough to have daily reminders of how little I know--can't speak the language, don't know the customs, trip over a rock in the road and have everyone around say "careful!" cus of course they were watching me--and so good to feel capable for a change. This stuff I know. Peer sex educator training, yeah, I can do that. Even in French!