Thursday, December 3, 2009

Demystifying Demyst

The Niger Peace Corps has trainees go on something called a ‘demyst’ after being in country for three weeks. I got a chance to head south to the region of Gaya, on the border of Benin and Niger, right along the Niger River. This is easily the greenest area in all of Niger and it was refreshing to get away from the flat and monotonous desert-esk landscape where our staging takes place. The point of demyst is to give us a feeling about what a workers life is like after training is all finished. I visited a Health Volunteer (which is the same sector as me) who worked in a fairly large health hut for rural Niger.
His health hut consisted of three buildings, two with two rooms and one with five rooms. Two buildings were specifically meant for pregnant women and women in birth. The largest of the three conducted consultations, baby weighings, and distributed basic medicine. The health hut’s goals were oriented towards preventative treatment. It had burnt out solar panels (a common sight in Niger as the sun is too strong for the photonic-plates and has already damaged a few volunteers’ individual solar chargers) and two fridges, holding a variety of vaccines, which were powered by propane tanks. The facility was drastically less hygienic than the states, with a coat of dust covering most crevices, even though it was cleaned on a weekly basis. Thus far we have learned a small amount about the Nigerien health-system, but from my personal experience a couple days ago I saw a woman cut herself while preparing a freshly slaughtered sheep to cook and as a remedy she sprayed perfume on her cut and went right on with the preparation! Our training will focus on addressing very basic ways of preventing disease.
Apart from touring the health facility during demyst, I got a chance to explore a mesa- a plateau in the area offering some beautiful views of the surrounding GREEN landscape- try some different cuisine, see a couple different cities in Niger along with the border of Benin, and get a sampling of what the next twenty-four months will behold. In the city of Gaya crops were so much more rich and varied than what we saw at the training site. Food options, actually had options! More than just oranges and bananas could be discovered as far as fruit and we hit a protein jackpot of roasted chickens which we devoured for dinner! The four days of demyst quickly came to a close as all of us trainees reunited in Niamey to share our adventures scattered throughout different parts of Niger- each storey only making us more antsy to move into the next phase of the Peace Corps. From there it was back to staging and the life of a trainee, with only seven more weeks to go.

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