Its been a while

Ok so I am not good at this whole blog thing but if anyone is still checking this I thought I would give you a little update. Currently I am in the land of plenty taking a little vacation form Senegal but before I left I got a little busy with work. After all my trees got eaten at the school, myself and the school director decided to build a wall around the school so that future environmental activities will be better protected from the hoards of animals (and children) in the village. While a wall sounds like a simple thing to build,let me tell you that nothing is as simple as it sounds. To fund the wall I wrote a grant proposal which required me to submit a budget for the project and it turns out the estimate is just that an estimate. Because once I recieved the money and we started buying things i had a sinking feeling that we would not have enough materials to finish the project. The vilage was required to donatea percentage of the costs and materials and they decided they would provide the sand to mix with the cement. I assumed this would be an easy task since you know, we live in the desert but something that was schedualed to take a few days took several weeks. We had originally schedualed to finish the construction by the time I left for vacation, but due to several delays they had just begun to make the bricks when I left. I am kind of la I am not there while this wall is going up because I have visions of crumbling bricks and the materials running out leaving us with a rather shot and ineffective wall. I'll just have to wait and see when i get back what actually happened.

Despite the struggles with the wall I started a second project before I left. Currently there is no health care facility in the village. People have to walk either 2k to a private health facility or 7k to town to the public health facility or rent a horse cart. Due to these obstacles many people dont seek medical care when they are sick and women give birth in their homes. During a meeting members of the village declared that they wanted to have a health facility in the village and also have a way to get to town if there is a medical emergency. So we decided to repair a building in the village to serve as a helath hut where the trained midwife in the vilage would work. They also decided that wanted to purchase a converted horse cart to serve as an ambulance to transport people out of the village when necessary. The village is funding 25% of the costs for this project, but I need help to raise the rest of the funds. Check out the project at: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-121

Also Peace Corps Senegal is trying to bring 20,000 mosquito bed nets too Senegal. malaria is one of the major killers in Senegal and bed nets are an easy and effective way to prevent malaria. I am trying to get 1625 nets for my village so that every person will be able to sleep under a treated mosquito net. Thanks to a partnership with againstmalaria.com each net costs only $2 which is the lowest cost in the world for nets. Please try and donate if you can, for the cost of a cup of coffee you can purchase a mosquito net and help protect two people in my village from getting malaria. http://www.AgainstMalaria.com/sgilleski thanks for your help!

I'll try and be a better blogger in future