West Africa: Digging a hole is only a start
Before I joined the Peace Corps, I had heard all the stereotypes. Volunteers were a bunch of privileged white kids, I was told. Guitar-strumming, wide-eyed do-gooders who didn't understand cultural differences and spent their time building latrines they could never persuade anyone to use.
The image of an unprepared, inexperienced volunteer armed with nothing but good intentions is no longer accurate, if it ever was — at least not here in Senegal, West Africa, where I am serving in the Peace Corps as a preventative health educator.
Sure, I was a philosophy major in college. And yes, I was assigned to a village called Ndiago, home to 300 subsistence-level farmers and their wives and children in the middle of nowhere.… Seguir leyendo »