Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Dogoloya

A CARE staff explaining CARE's projects with the youth.

After breakfast at the Kabala headquarters on Wednesday, the Kabala CARE staff shared why they were excited to have us visit: to gain a new perspective on their work.

They explained that three years after the civil war, most people from the area had moved back into their villages as Kabala shifted from a state of crisis to a development mode. Kabala CARE staff have since helped villages and individuals restore livelihoods and promote social reintegration and human rights.

CARE Kabala’s major projects seem varied and critical to the successful redevelopment of the area. Through the child survival projects run by the Community Health Clubs in each village, CARE staff members teach leaders in the community methods of disease prevention for children. These local volunteers then teach their communities simple techniques to prevent the deaths of their most vulnerable such as using mosquito nets to fight malaria. After their training sessions, CARE staff members monitor the sharing of this information to ensure quality education. A similar CARE-sponsored workshop series trains local adults how to teach youth about sexual matters. CARE monitors school activities and community discussions in which adults help children understand the risks and responsibilities involved in sex.

The Kabala CARE office promotes food security in Kabala through swamp rehabilitation, market building, blacksmith training, and farmer training. Staff members focus especially on helping women practice their preferred methods of farming. Because public health must be in good shape for farming to be successful in Sierra Leone (sick people cannot farm successfully), CARE's health and agricultural promotion projects go hand-in-hand.

After our office meeting, our group split into two groups for our rural community visits. Four of us--Annie, Caroline, Mariano, and I--journeyed to Dogoloya, a large village on its way to becoming a town with about 400 adults and 150 youth. Members of the Fullah tribe, these people speak both Fullah and Krio. They almost exclusively practice Islam with African influences.

Community Health Club members in Dogoloya village.

The village chief and various community leaders and members welcomed us with a beautiful ceremony in the community hut. All of the leaders of the village--men and women, though men were more vocal--introduced themselves to us and talked about CARE influence in their lives. It was extraordinary to see how much they have accomplished in such a short time, moving from survival mode to development. Members of Dogoloya's Community Health Club (CHC) talked about their child survival program, commenting on how valuable CARE’s newly taught information was to the health of their villagers. The CHC has even lowered the rate of disease in Dogoloya through this communal disease prevention curriculum. CHC members regularly visit all the homes in the village, keep careful records of who is sick, and annually dispense vaccines on National Vaccination Day. The CHC goes to the hardest-to-reach places to make sure that all children are vaccinated.

Dogoloya leaders also discussed the vital role of the Village Development Committee (or VDC) in this community. VDCs are official bodies in most rural communities in Sierra Leone that coordinate community development activities with organizations like CARE. According to Dennis, a CARE staff member from Freetown, having functioning VDCs is integral in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. VDCs ensure that villages learn what CARE teaches, and they bridge CARE's activities to wider communities. If CARE helps a village build a well, for example, the village's VDC ensures its sustainable maintenance and care. When we visited, Dogoloya's VDC was organizing an "agricultural field day" to bring farmers to the local market, and were formulating plans for a much-needed secondary school in the village.

Children playing with bicycle tire and stick.

Full of new information, we ate a lunch of rice, goat meat, and fish at the Dogoloya chief's home. We marveled at the beautiful dress of his wives, particular their head dresses. Afterward we walked around the town and took in the simple beauty of the area. The streets were void of litter or sewage but trafficked by the occasional sheep and goat as well as children carrying bundles of wood far heavier than anything I could carry. Children who were not engaged in chores rolled a rubber bicycle tire with a stick.

After lunch, we were invited to something truly amazing: a traditional baby naming ceremony. We were given VIP seats to watch a group of women and one male religious official name a two-week-old baby, who lay in his mother's arms. A boy sacrificed a goat and the man read holy verses while a group of women danced and sang festively. Another group of women beat rice into powder with a large pestle to give to guests. Later, they would cut off all of the baby's hair to complete the ritual.

The infant naming ceremony. Woman sitting is holding her two-week-old baby, who is being named.

Following the celebration, villagers toured us around the village. We drove to one of the two other parts of Dogoloya (the village is divided into three parts since it is so large) to observe other CARE health promotional projects. The lessons taught are basic but effective. CARE staff members encourage villagers to hang clothing to dry on clothes lines, and dishes on simple drying racks, instead of on the ground where animals could dirty the clothing and spread disease. We saw a large rice and grain drying platform on the ground that was built with CARE's help to be twice as large as that the village could afford to build on their own. Villagers now hope to build a better storage facility for their dried grain.

Our visit to a farming field school taught us how farmers learn new techniques and skills through trial and error while under the supervision of CARE staff. Alfred, one of these staff members, explained how CARE is trying to encourage farmers to plant their main crops--cassava and sweet potato--in the lowlands instead of moving from plot to plot on the highlands.

After this discussion, we drove back to our section of Dogoloya and visited the primary school there, a very small three-room building housing three teachers and over five hundred students from around the area. Next door was a partially-constructed addition to the building that has been incomplete for two years due to lack of funds (this is not a CARE project). Walking around the area, we also passed a well, one of several that CARE helped to build. Only women and girls were there pumping and carrying water, a laborious duty. I was amazed by the strength of these young girls.

At dinner, I tried to imagine Dogoloya during the war. During this time, most villagers fled to Guinea, but some stayed and hid in the bush without shelter, trying not to make a sound. The rebels burned many buildings, Mariano, Caroline, Annie, and I talked about how peaceful and hopeful it felt here despite the recent upheaval. After dinner we sat outside and watched children play next to a nearby mosque.

Later that evening, enjoyed a "cultural evening." This was incredible, like the naming ceremony had been, but much bigger! The whole village came, it seemed, including many children. The community sang us welcome songs and women danced in the middle of a large ring of people. After their welcome song, we also performed, singing "Do Re Mi" from The Sound of Music. Community members then performed a skit about HIV/AIDS and its transmission. Our friend and CARE intern Feremusu translated for us. It gave straight-forward details about sex, which surprised me considering the small children and elderly people in the audience, but AIDS here is a threat for everyone and must be understood by every age.

After a few men performed traditional dances, we told the story "Jack and the Beanstalk." Dennis translated, and the crowd enjoyed it! After we finished, the crowd began discussing the lessons of the story, which we found so interesting. The moral, they decided, was that you have to work hard like Jack did for everything you get. After this, the graceful older women of the community engaged us in dance.

While heading off to bed, Feremusu told us that the village appreciated how involved we were with the community during our visit, which challenged their commonly held view that white people prefer to stay separate from black people in Sierra Leone. That night we slept very well.

The next morning we spoke to the Community Health Club once more and watched a demonstration of how to make an anti-diarrheal solution for babies. Before heading back to CARE headquarters in Kabala, we saw a moving series of maps depicting how Dogoloya looked right after the war (devastated), how it looked now (mostly rebuilt), and how the VDC hoped it would look in the future (complete with a health clinic, a secondary school, and even Christian churches). All of us left Dogoloya feeling grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know--even for a day--such a vibrant, hard-working community.