It’s Blog About Malaria Month (BAMM)! April 25th is World Malaria day
and to celebrate it, my friends over at the Stomping out Malaria initiative are
sponsoring BAMM in order to show the world what volunteers all over Africa are
doing to eradicate malaria!
So, I’m here to do my part and tell you my story. Malaria prevention was my first project in
Senegal. If you’re a loyal follower of
my blog (or a new reader who has clicked back to 2010), you might remember the
story of my first Senegalese meeting where we discussed Universal Coverage, or the
time I fell in mud to deliver Malaria Education materials to health workers, or
when I touched so many mosquito nets that I got nauseous. In 2010, before the Stomp out Malaria
initiative was created, I participated in the Universal distribution of insecticide
treated nets in my area. At that point,
health volunteers were given basic training about malaria and projects that we
could do in our villages. We told
villagers to sleep under their nets (even though at that point, a majority of
people didn’t own nets), we taught them how to make neem lotion (which could
ward off mosquitoes), and told them to go to the hospital for medicine.
Malaria education has come a long way since the beginning of
my service. In April 2011, the STOMP
initiative was launched. June 2011 was
the very first boot camp, an intensive two week training where volunteers would
learn all about malaria and become a part of the “Malaria Team”. I was invited to share my experience with
Universal Coverage at that first boot camp (which, looking at the presenters
now, I feel extremely under qualified and wish I had the opportunity to learn
from them). Since that point, volunteers
have been doing magnificent work in the realm of malaria prevention. I wish I could say that I had a more active
role in Malaria projects, but in the second year of my service, my focus
shifted to nutrition. I participated in Malaria
trainings involving traveling theater troupes and taught children the
importance of sleeping under a net, but in retrospect, I could have done a lot
more.
In my third year, I moved from my wonderful village to
Velingara in order to work with a NGO on nutrition interventions. I cherish the opportunity I’ve had to work within
a NGO, but I missed the daily interactions with villagers (although I do love
the air conditioning). In September
2012, Sarah, a fellow volunteer, asked if I wanted to partner with her on a
region wide mosquito net repair and care tour.
I jumped at the opportunity to be working in villages and to be
interacting with people again. Sarah was
a rock star, taking the lead on village visits, seeing as I could only go out on
weekends. It turned out to be a
beautiful partnership. I would go to
weekend events and during the week, when I had time, I would input data from
the events and crunch the numbers. At
the end of our project, we visited a total of 20 villages, repaired/washed over
700 nets, and impacted over 1,850 people.
You can read the case study for more details.
Last week, I went on
vacation to Sierra Leone and was able to see what their volunteers were doing
to fight malaria. Over 20 volunteers
participated in a Malaria Bike Ride, where they went to villages and presented
skits, asked questions, and sang songs in order to promote malaria
awareness. It was so fun to see
volunteers in other countries working on similar projects, but utilizing their
local languages and integrating aspects of their culture. It is truly a continent wide fight!
This is only the second year of the Stomp initiative and
there has been so much collaboration between volunteers within the same country
and internationally. So much has changed
in my three years in Peace Corps with malaria prevention and I can’t wait to
see what new innovations volunteers come up with to combat malaria. Here’s hoping that we eradicate malaria
within this generation.
