Scenes from Senegal: Netlife 2005 trip

Bandafassi is a medium-sized village about 18 kilometers west of Kedougou on the laterite road to Salemata (road in picture). It is significant in that it is one of the local Senegalese government headquarters, but if you roll into Bandafassi, you'd never guess it. Mud and grass huts are the norm and the "electricity" presence consists of a couple of top-loading refrigerators in which you may find a luke-warm Coke, or a street light that may or may not illuminate the dirt path passing through the village.

Bandafassi also is home to the regional "Poste de Sante", or Health Post. This is a 3 roomed-cement structure that functions as the primary clinic for approximately 44 villages spanning over 100 kilometers. It is staffed by a nurse. That's right, one nurse, with the help of a handful of community health aids, of which I was one during my Peace Corps service 1999-2001. This photo at left is of Mactar Mansaly, the nurse who runs the health post and my friend. Below is actually the Health Post at Bindefello, another post 40 k to the south on the border of Guinea. It looks similarly to the Bandafassi post, of which I have no digital photo. We worked extensively with the nurse in Bindefello, as well. His name is Badji and he, too, has been a wonderful friend and resource to us.
When I returned for a visit in the summer of '05, I was able to see patients with Mansaly at the health post and to catch up on what's been happening in the area. In the above photo, we were reviewing statistics he keeps in his clinical log on malaria illness in the surrounding villages. I was trying to get a sense of where the disease hits hardest from the numbers of visits to the health post. This information is only so helpful, of course, since the distances from some villages to the clinic are great and those people would clearly be less likely to seek treatment there, even if they lived in a village by a stream with rampant malaria. Nevertheless, I was there to collect some numbers for my friends Andy and Jesse.

Andy and I served as health workers in the Peace Corps together. His village was a 45 minute bike ride from mine and we trained health educators from the surrounding area. I in fact preceeded Andy in the Peace Corps by one year, so I set up his village. He claims he'll never forgive me for biking him out for his first trip to the village with only the stars to light our way. I say he loved it ; ).

Anyhow - these two crazy dudes founded a non-profit based out of St. Louis where they attend med school at SLU. Their organization is called NETLIFE and they basically fundraise money to purchase mosquito nets to distribute to villages in the Bandafassi area. Partly because this area is the farthest from the capital, it is the most underserved from a health perspective of all of Senegal. Finding nurses to work there is difficult; it is the bush, afterall, and well-educated health practitioners would much prefer to live and work in nice areas of Dakar, the capital. Mosquito nets for sale under subsidy from the Minister of Health often don't even reach the Bandafassi area, so its villagers rely on torn, older nets and the clothespins we used to use to patch the holes at night. And, this is the part of the country with the most substantial rainy season. It rains twice a day for about 4 months starting at this time of year. Having lived through 2 rainy seasons, and having contracted falciparum malaria myself, I can attest to the hardship faced by this population during what we call "summer".