Tech II Update

Hello!

February is a busy month for my training group. For the first two weeks of February, all of the health and agriculture volunteers from my training group went down to Lokossa for a two week long training in further technical skills we will use for the rest of service. For the second two weeks of February, all of the English teacher volunteers will be in Lokossa for their in-service training. What is great about Tech II in comparison to other trainings, is that we bring our work partners to the training as well. It's an awesome opportunity for people from all over Benin to see what Peace Corps is all about and also a great networking opportunity for them as development workers in Benin. 

For RCH, we brought two different homologues for our training. The first week, we brought our work partners who have been our primary homologues in work at site for the last five months. For me, that was hands down Tychique. He has had my back in everything I have wanted to do at site. He acts as translator for all of my health talks in the neighboring smaller villages, takes me wherever I need to go, helps round up the troops when I need to have a meeting with important people at the Health Center, and so much more. He is my go-to when I need something in village. He does all of this on top of being a husband, father, farmer, and treasurer of the health center. Also recently, as he is one of a handful of university educated people in my village, he was asked to register youths to vote in the upcoming Mayoral election in April. So he is pretty impressive to say the least. 

For the first week of Tech II, Tychique and I learned about a program called Community Led Total Sanitation (L'assainissement totale pilote par la communaute) which is a program used all over the world to motivate communities to take charge of their health by putting an end to open defecation practices and build their own latrines. Up until a few years ago, the development model for ending open defecation practices was to have a big NGO come into small villages, build latrines, and leave. This resulted in the latrines almost never being used because the community had no buy in, and had no understanding of the importance of latrines. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has several principals, one of which is no outside funding. The entire approach is based on health talks given in local language with specific tools to show people why open defecation is bad.

For example, the very first thing typically done in CLTS talks is, after greetings, you ask someone from the crowd to come up and help you draw a map of the community in the dirt with labeled notecards to mark important places in village, such as the school, the market, the water sources, and maybe the chef du village's house. After having made a beautiful community map, you ask everyone if they have eaten today or if they ate yesterday. They say yes of course. You respond, is the food still in your stomach? And they say no of course not. So you ask, well where is it? Where did it go? (This is a delicate way to bring up bowel movements, as I'm sure you can tell.) So then people are asked to come up to the community map and show you where they defecate, whether that is in latrines or in the bush (most often it is in the bush).

So by now you've marked everyone's area where they defecated this morning or yesterday, and now you ask "who wants to take me to see it?" Of course there will be some hesitation here, but one of the tools of CLTS is the "walk of shame." Shame tactics are tough for us as Americans to use, because we don't believe that anyone should feel ashamed of the way they behave, but this tool has been proven to change behaviors much faster than anything else. So after you've gone on a poop scavenger hunt, you come back to your original meeting spot with a little sample for another demonstration.

This demonstration is about the oral-fecal route. You ask everyone if they're thirsty, and of course everyone is because they just walked around in the sun (it's Benin, it's always hot). So you all drink some water. Then, you take a cup of water, pluck some of your hair, and put it in the water. Then you offer this to the chef du village, who of course will refuse to drink it. You offer it to others, who will also refuse. This part of the talk is a little more difficult for me, especially in French, but essentially you explain that the little legs of flies have little baby hairs on the ends. So when flies land on the poop that is out in the bush behind someone's house, and then flies inside onto your food... people get the idea pretty quick. To really drive it home, you take a small stick, and pick off a little sample that you've taken on your walk of shame, and mix it in with the hair water. You'll offer it again to the chef du village and others who are at this point absolutely disgusted. Everyone understands now that they cannot continue to open defecate. So you, as the facilitator, ask them what are you going to do? They'll inevitably say "you're American, give us money and we'll build latrines." But that's not the point, and yes I am American but I don't have any money (poor young 20's, what are ya gonna do). So a few ways to combat those comments is to say, "I'm here for two years, but then I'm going home to America. This is your home, you need to make it better for you and for your children." Anyways, this will turn into a huge discussion and debate, but hopefully at the end they accept and agree to start digging their own latrines until they can save enough money to build cement, ventilated latrines. 

During Tech II, we went to a village outside of Lokossa and got to see this process in action. It was incredibly well received, which I attribute to the incredible facilitator from the Ministry of Health who came to teach us this method over three days of sessions and who helped run the practicum in the village. Anyways, Peace Corps hopes that we will all implement this approach in our respective villages, and Tychique and I have already made plans to do so. 

The second week of Tech II was also good, though it was less new information for us as volunteers. My second week homologue is named Djamila. She is the younger sister of my original local language tutor at site, Samirath. Samirath was supposed to come to the second week of training, but she got pregnant (yay!) and has had a really hard first trimester (bummer..) so she couldn't travel. Djamila is 26, unmarried without children, and officially my new best friend. She is the most generous, caring, intelligent, absolutely hysterical woman I have yet to work with in Benin. We spent the second week learning about Malaria and Care Group, a project to share health messages among women who don't speak French. Djamila and I are going to be very busy for the next few months, but I'm so excited.

That was a long one, thanks for reading, until next time! (Sorry the pictures are out of order, computers are weird.)

These are my RCH gals, not all of them, but 8 of us squeezed into a taxi on our way to Cotonou for the weekend after Tech II. So lucky have such incredible women as my co-workers and peers. 

Since I was coming back to Lokossa, of course I had to go out and see my host family in Koudo. I brought everyone small gifts which they loved so much, doesn't maman look stunning in her northern veil??

This is me and Djamila, my new bestie. I also got meme tiss with her, because I love her a lot. 

For the second week of training, we did a practicum in my old host village, Koudo, and my maman got to meet Djamila. Worlds colliding!

From left to right this is Tychique, Judicael, Mary Louise, and me after week one of Tech II. Mary Louise and I got meme tiss for our homologues to say thank you for coming to the training.