A Happy & Healthy Good Year!

From Senegal, I’d like to wish you a very healthy and happy 2013! This past year has brought many changes for me personally, for my family, and for my World Renew colleagues and our programs in Senegal. It has only been a few months that I arrived in Senegal. It took me some time to find my way around, but luckily there were many people willing to point me in the direction of, say, an apartment, a good beach, or a hairdresser. After six months of housesitting for a family on deputation, we are now living in our own permanent apartment.

This past year has brought many changes for me personally, for my family, and for my World Renew colleagues and our programs in Senegal.

It has only been a few months that I arrived in Senegal. It took me some time to find my way around, but luckily there were many people willing to point me in the direction of, say, an apartment, a good beach, or a hairdresser. After six months of housesitting for a family on deputation, we are now living in our own permanent apartment.

For my newly adopted children Djessou and Solu, it was possibly an even bigger transition: from a village in Mali to a big city and an American school. With the school library, birthday parties, taxis, and so on, there was something new to explore every day. Though daily activities like the walk to school have become normal and maybe a little boring at times, there’s still enough to explore to keep them interested. I mean, Friday’s birthday party had a magician who made a real bunny appear out of an egg!

The partners of World Renew in Senegal have not experienced changes quite as dramatic as we have in our own family in the past year, but much has happened nonetheless. EELS, working in the poor and crowded suburbs of Dakar, where there are more than 300,000 inhabitants, has worked in the same neighborhoods for a long time.

This year, our staff and partners got together and decided to include a number of new communities in our project areas. Newly included areas may have more potential participants (adolescent girls with little or no education), but they are harder to find as the EELShaslessofanetworkin these neighborhoods. In the end, they found most of the new peer educators through an announcement on local radio. These educators look for a group of participants themselves, in their own neighborhoods, where they know many families.

Now that the classes have started, EELS is working hard to draw all those new communities into the program by setting up neighborhood councils that support the girls who are participating in the program.

CECS is getting ready to start a similar adolescent health program in several of the towns where it works, including St. Louis and Loul Sene, where local health committees are preparing to supervise educators and manage participants. Many girls in smaller Senegalese towns are illiterate (44% of female youth nationwide) and are not taught about reproductive health or the risk of STDs. To help young women and girls care for their health, the adolescent health program includes a ‘learning group’ to teach participants to bring up this topic in conversations with their parents and other relatives who make decisions for them.

In this new year, our partners EELS and CECS will work with many new communities, building their organizations in the process. We hope and pray that the changes they engender in 2013 will be as positive as those achieved in 2012.

Happy New Year to you and yours!
Grace and peace,