GMC Female Health Campaign

For the past few months I have been working with Tiffany (a health PCV in Boghé) on a big female health campaign in my center, something that I have always wanted to do with my girls. Back at the end of March, Tiffany had a few intro to women’s health classes at the center and I started collecting anonymous questions from the girls (think sex ed, everyone’s too embarrassed to be the one with questions so I made all the girls write two questions down). Then we coordinated a series of seminars with local medical professionals where their questions were answered and the floor was opened up for more questions and discussions. For many of the girls this was the first time they had ever been able to candidly talk about their health and get their questions answered. An example of some of the questions are “how do women get pregnant?”, “how can I avoid getting pregnant”, “why do girl’s get their period”, “why are girls more susceptible to contracting AIDS?” and “why do some women have cesarean births?” I was so happy to see that through these seminars the girls were able to understand and control decisions made about their bodies. In a place where being married by 16 and having your 5th child by 22 isn’t unheard of, education is the most important tool to give these girls.

Following the huge success of these seminars, we decided to bring the female health campaign on the road to one of our nearby villages, Sarandougou. The girls spent 2 weeks working nearly every night brainstorming the subjects they thought were important (and weren’t too radical, villages tend to be much more conservative), researching their subjects, writing/practicing sketches and discourses and making posters. The topics they ended up presenting were puberty, AIDS, breastfeeding, female nutrition, and malaria (although not really related, very important in our area!).

When the big day came, all the girls pilled into a prison bus with me, Tiffany and Amber (another one of my sitemates who teaches English at the middle school) and headed to Sarandougou, about a 30 ride outside of Boghé. PC has a long standing relationship with Sarandougou and currently my friend Ryan is an English teacher in their middle school so he helped set the ground work for our visit. Since he is currently in America (and I am sooo jealous!), he left a lot of the day-of organizational work to the other professors at the middle school and they did a fabulous job! By the time our bus arrived, there were hundreds of girls waiting for us. The professors gave us the use of the teachers lounge to set up/practice in and then took care of dividing the village girls into two rooms, one for elementary girls and another for middle school age girls. I have never seen a better run event in all of my time in Mauritania! The professors were able to keep all the annoying snoopy boys out of the school compound and even managed to get the head nurse at the local health post to come! By the time we were ready to present, all 210 girls were quietly sitting in the desks of their respective rooms waiting for us to start.

I have never been so proud of the hard work of my center girls! The presentations were organized so well and they presented their information and sketches like professionals. This event developed their leadership skills, inspired peer education, and made the girls thoroughly educated in the area of women’s health. My biggest success story so far!

On the left is the room with the elementary girls, over 100 in one classroom! (which actually is the normal amount for a teacher in that room as well). On the right are my girls presenting HIV/AIDS with a poster describing how AIDS destroys your immune system.

On the left are the girls presenting how breastfeeding is nutritious for babies and the signs of malnutrition in children. On the right are some of my girls presenting on basic nutrition and why eating vegetables/fruits are so important for the body (a major issue here).

On the left are some of my girls presenting a breastfeeding sketch while on the left is some other girls presenting the malaria sketch (the girl outside the malaria net is pretending to be a mosquito to show how sleeping with the net can protect you from getting bitten).

On the left is one of my girls giving a discourse on malaria to the elementary girls while on the left is a picture of the middle school girls classroom.

On the left are all the center girls who participated in the prison bus getting ready to go back and on the right is me (the proud mama!) with my girls!