Health Summit

I came back from my Health Summit on October 18^th -19^th. Overall, the sessions were about the specifics of the baseline survey we will be administering in our communities. During the past three months, I held informal and formal meetings to gather information on the needs of Dassalami. I think it is a good idea to quantify the results so that when I do a project on latrines, the data will tell me if latrines are needed in the community or the number of latrines needed in the village.

Peace Corps is requiring the volunteers to perform 10 surveys in the villages, even though it would not be statistically significant at the village level.  This survey will be used as a platform for the surveys of all Peace Corps program. My health stage is the first group who will assess the survey.

It has been two weeks since we came back to our villages, I am already thinking about translating the survey in the local language to make it easier to run the survey. I finished the translation on November 8^th with the help of a student who goes to the University of Dakar. I am thinking on starting the survey on November 20^th to one or two households/day with my counterpart. I will give this data as proof that my community needs pumps/robinets and latrines.

 Although the Peace Corps gave us a deadline of November 30^th, I plan to continue running the survey to write a concrete report for Peace Corps and the other volunteers who will come after me. As a result, the data will be statistically significant at the village level.

After Health Summit, I went to Dakar for a few days to reach out to the NGOs I was introduced to during IST. It is difficult to get responses from NGOs sometimes because their priorities change every year or the staff can be working out of country. I have realized that the sooner you contact them, your chances to get an answer from them is higher during the beginning of the year. Two of them have responded so far to collaborate on education and health projects.