A little slice of Heaven...

Over the years, we have spent a lot of money looking for good mangoes - our search propelled by the occasional decent mango - but have had to eventually conclude that there was no such thing as a good mango in Sault Ste Marie! So when we learned that the clinic was on the grounds of a large mango orchard, we were ecstatic!

How even more exciting to learn upon arrival that we had 3 mango trees (and a lemon tree) in our very own yard. We envisioned waking in the morning and harvesting breakfast (and lunch, and supper…) and quickly sought to learn when they would be ripe enough to eat. After 2 months of borderline agony watching the mangoes grow and turn colour (you know the saying ‘a watched pot never boils’), they are FINALLY ready to eat!

One of our 3 very own mango trees!

Imagine our bitter dissapointment when JP and I finally bit in to our first mango from our very own tree and found it to taste worse than many we’ve had in Canada! Turns out that there are many varieties of mangoes and the small stringy variety in our yard is only 1 of dozens of local varieties. Thankfully, the orchard has a number of other FABULOUS varieties that we have been steadily feasting ourselves on all week!

Dinner prep chez les Duchesnes...

But, truth be known, even the best tasting mangoes can get tiresome when eaten ‘en masse’ every day. So…we want you to send us your favorite recipes using mangoes by email or you can post it as a comment so others can enjoy them too!

Looking forward to your suggestions...

Water we gonna do?!?

“It’s a crushed pipe (underground)” we were told over and over. That’s why there’s no water to the houses in Niaguis.

A seemingly random claim, for how could a PVC pipe buried 2 feet underground get crushed, cutting off water to the house? Instead, we knew there were a number of more likely problems with the plumbing setup that would prevent water from coming to the house. Below is a mere sampling of the process we’ve been through.

Problem #1 – Since water supply from the village couldn’t climb all the way up into the Dispensaire water tower there musn’t be enough pressure

Solution – We ignored the water tower and rerouted the village water supply directly to the house we’re staying in. Voila! Running water to the house!


Problem #2 - Since the village didn’t always have diesel fuel to run their water pump and fill their reservoir (or at least, the diesel they did have wasn’t used to fill the tower…) we often had no water for several days at a time.

Solution – So we figured we’d better now fix our water tower supply problem. We installed a smaller diameter hose at the tower to increase pressure, and voila! Water filled the tower!



Problem #3 - Water still wasn’t coming to the house so there must be a blockage between the tower and the house, a mere 60 metres distance

Solution - Dig! We started digging every 20 or so feet, trying to find the pipe each time to see in what general direction it headed on it’s path from the tower to the houses. We discovered that it took the most unexpected path – right through the root system of a very large tree!


Problem #4 – A crushed pipe!

Solution - We dug a new channel about 35m long to get around the tree and attached the new PVC to the existing pipe and voila! We now have a constant supply of water! No more drawing water from the well using our 70 ft rope and bucket! No more ‘bathing by the cup’ or hand filtering water to drink using our little filter pump we used when camping back home (it takes about 600 pumps to fill a 5L bottle!). The reservoir holds well over 1000litres (maybe even as much as 2000), which hopefully will be enough water to bridge between days when the village pumps water that we can use to refill.



But it gets even better…
- We also have a small electric hot water tank (~30-40L) that automatically refills from the reservoir when it empties. Not that we use the hot water showers - a cold shower is much more inviting here in Niaguis – but it’s nice to was dishes with hot water.



- In the kitchen, we also have a wall spigot leading to two filters – one ceramic, one carbon – from which we refill our drinking water bottles. It’s good water and we know it’s not chemically treated!
- AND last but certainly not least, we have a ‘Bonne’ (housekeeper) that does all of our laundry…by hand of course…Tammy will tell you more about that another time.

Life is good!

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Problem - since drafting this blog entry offline a couple of days ago, we are now without running water again! We’re back to bucket showers and maybe hand-filtering water again if the village doesn’t pump water soon. But as of this morning, there’s a diesel fuel shortage in the area that might mean no water for a little while yet… we’ll see. Just when we thought we had it made!

Solution - We’re now working on fixing an old hand-pump that was in storage so we can pump from our own well into buckets, or even up to our own tower. Gotta be resourceful around here!

Canada still has reliable running water, doesn't it?

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Earlier this week, we also got water of another sort. Rain water. It was only a light spray for 10 minutes or less – a mere introduction of the torrential downpours we’re repeatedly being told to expect. We both love hard rainstorms and thunderstorms (not sure our cats will be that fond of them), but it’s the mosquitoes and snakes that come with the rain that have us worried… bet your gonna hear more from us about these critters...

Kitten update...

We made it through the night…just barely.

The kitten was understandably distraught, as I’m sure it missed it’s mother/siblings, and would only sleep if I either had my hand on her or if I snuggled her in closely. As you can imagine, she slept…I didn’t. Annie and Samson, on the other hand, we’re not at all happy to have a third little one share their parents. Annie went psychotic and ran away (we found her the next morning…she’s only now starting to act ‘normal’) and Samson had to be locked up in the kitchen/hallway for the night to spare the kitten’s life.

Needless to say our need to find a good home for her became a little more urgent, so off to work we went…all 3 of us…in search of an adoptive family. I tried first to convince any of the clinic staff but had no takers. Then I showed her off to every patient that came to see me…again no luck! (I’m not sure which they found more humourous – the fact that I had ‘wasted’ my time to save her, was spending my time caring for her, or that I was hoping I would actually find a home for her!)

In desperation, I paraded the kitten around a large group of children who had stopped by the clinic for a National deworming and Vit A program in the hopes that one of the children would run home to their parents and ‘beg’ them for the kitten…it works in Canada! But sadly, no such luck.

"Mariama" hard at work...who wouldn't want her?!?

The work day was coming to a quick close and I still hadn’t found a home for her and was not at all liking the idea of leaving her at the clinic for the night all by herself. Then, Fanta (our housekeeper) a self-proclaimed cat hater, who has since fallen in love with Samson in spite of herself, asked to take her! Thank God!

Apparently, the kitten is doing well (her name is now Mariama) and peace has been restored once again to the Duchesne household...

Places you wouldn't expect to find things...

What else would you do with a freshly knocked out tooth but put it in your ear?!?

A man escorted his 9- year-old son into the clinic today and sheepishly explaining that his son’s tooth had fallen out but was now stuck in his ear! I looked inside and sure enough at the very bottom of his ear canal sat the tooth…and it didn’t look like it was going anywhere anytime soon. I had recently sorted through some donated medical supplies and remembered seeing just what I needed…a pair of very long, very skinny tweezers. Within seconds the tooth was out, but how I wished I had my camera…the thing was huge! Like any good nurse, I followed up the ‘tooth-ectomy’ with some health teaching about sticking things into your ears. It’s got to be a boy thing…I can’t imagine a girl doing such a thing :)


Looks like the family has also gotten a touch bigger with the temporary addition of a new little one. On my way out to our water tower tonight, I heard a tiny ‘meow’. I followed the sound until I reached an old abandoned well and a tiny black and white kitten laying at the bottom! Well you all know that I couldn’t leave it there, so over I went, skirt and all, to climb down the 30 feet to retrieve it (I had a friend tie me off mom…I was safe). Of course I had drawn a crowd of young onlookers who all thought I was rediculous for trying to save a cat…people don’t care much for cats here…which is why it ended up tossed into the well in the first place! But, thankfully, after a few minutes, I had the little one safely in my arms. She’s a tiny little thing, probably not more than 3 or 4 weeks old.

First things first…a bath! She cleaned up real nice too :)

Eating was a bit of a challenge though…I don’t think she’s quite got the hang of it yet. The plate is a tiny saucer...

A melange of rice, beans, cheese, egg and milk...improvised kitten chow

After a little food and a lot of love, she snuggled in for a lap nap.
Now comes the tough part…finding a home for her…

“Demain c’est ferier”

Or ‘tomorrow is a holiday’ - 3 words we've heard many times since our arrival in Senegal!

Senegal seams to enjoy a near uninterrupted chain of public holidays - 15 that we know of – 3 civil holidays, 4 Muslim and 8 Christian – very interesting given the country is 95% Muslim (the other 4% Catholic and 1% Protestant)! Since our arrival only 2 months ago, we’ve already experienced 6! This week (Thursday) was “Premiere Communion” (1st Communion)…which I didn’t realize was celebrated anywhere as a public holiday…but then I noticed on the calendar the official holiday is for the Day of Ascension. Excuse my ignorance, but do Canadian Catholics all have 1st Communion on this same day? Like back home, we knew which were the little Catholic children because they were the ones donned in very fancy white dresses with flowers in their hair!

The Muslim holidays are determined by the lunar calendar (the Islamic calendar is based on 12 lunar months) and therefore occur on different dates each year (usually about 11 days earlier than the year before). Strangely, the exact dates depend on what hour the moon is seen, and by whom, so the exact dates of the holidays are only announced just before they occur (I don't pretend to understand it all...for more information click here).

Today, the Muslims from surrounding communities are flocking into Niaguis to celebrate Gamou - the death of the prophet Mohammed. They have been working to put the finishing touches on their temporary pavilion beside the mosque to house the overflow and the Imam (the head teacher in the mosque) and his helpers have been chanting their Arabic prayers over the mosque loudspeaker all day long (instead of the usual 5 times a day). The celebrations don’t actually start until this evening so it may be a sleepless night for us since the mosque is only a few hundred feet from our house!

Earlier in April we had celebrated Eid al-Moulid – Mohammed’s birthday – with friends and their family. Mohammed’s birthday is typically celebrated by returning to your hometown for prayers and feasting. We joined our friends Binta, Rocky and Tida in their hometown of Bagnagna (20 km from here) where we met their 60+ relatives! The evening started with prayers for their dead at their little home cemetary – at which time gifts of money or objects of white (candles, rice, sugar, etc) were offered, followed by standing in line to touch the ‘white flag’ of prosperity before siting to eat Chebu Yap (rice with meat – the festive version of Chebu Jen - Senegal’s national dish of rice and fish) Senagalese style (ie. sans utensils).

JP's messy with a fork so eating with his hands was almost disastrous...there is actually a skill to making the perfect bolus of food in the palm of your hand (without using the other)! It's messy but boy is it tasty!

The festivities were actually continuing all through the night with the reading of the Qu’ran and lots more food, but JP and I chose not to stay the whole night since a friend of ours needed to a ride back to Niaguis.

Everyone anxiously awaited to touch the white flag!

Next up is Day of Pentecost…

Counting Sheep

Further support that women can multitask better than men…notice the second baby being delivered.

It was a slow afternoon at the clinic today which freed us to watch a sheep deliver her babies in the quietness of our courtyard. Seems our clinic ground’s a popular place for ungulates!  During dry season, sheep and goats are left to roam freely to forage for food. Believe me when I tell you, with no rain since September, it’s pretty slim pickings…they have already eaten everything they can reach standing on their hind legs! Come ‘l’hivernage’ (rainy season…which is coming soon) families somehow track down and tie up/pen their animals to keep them out of the rice fields and gardens. As you can imagine, our new privacy fence wasn’t just for the children… Actually, our ‘guard kitties’ do a great job of keeping the yard ‘goat-free’ -they are living every cats dream stalking ‘big game’ animals. It was too cute watching Annie stalk and put the runs on her first goat who high-tailed it out of our yard when he noticed Annie coming at him full tilt!
You’ll all be happy to know the little ones were on their feet and at the breast within a couple of minutes of delivery…just as nature intended!

What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Cashews

This week has been the week of burns! I have been dressing, cleaning and redressing burn wounds on a number of young children all week - some more severe than others and all kept home until the family realized the toothpaste they were smearing on the wound (a common practice here) was not helping and the wound had become seriously infected.
The worst was a 2 year old little boy who had burned his entire stomach, 2 weeks before, while he and his family were roasting cashews. His stomach was charred, swollen and full of pus. It took everything I had to hide my tears as the little one cried and screamed “doucement madame, doucement” (gently madame, gently) while I cleaned his wound.
I first saw him Monday and have seen him again both Wednesday and today and am happy to report that his burn is healing beautifully and the little boy almost likes me now (especially after I gave him a balloon and stickers that I had brought with me from Canada!)

Cashews, by the way, are not only a burn risk (especially to unsupervised children) they are a whole lot of work too! Like many of you, we’ve often grumbled over the seemingly high cost of cashews…but no more!
The following are the steps a person needs to take to for us to enjoy the taste of a single cashew.

Step 1: Plant cashew tree – cashew trees usually bear fruit 3 times a year



The dispensaire has a number of cashew trees planted amongst the mangoes and many families have a few trees of their own in a very large cashew orchard several kilometers south of Niaguis (following a dirt path into the bush). Notice a single cashew hangs from each ‘apple’.

Step 2: Harvest ‘pomme de cajous’ (cashew apples) with their attached cashew



In order to ensure the largest cashews and the sweetest apples, you have to wait for the cashew apples to ripen and fall to the ground – which makes for painstaking work of searching for and gathering only a few cashews at a time. The cashew nut is separated from the apple (you only get one nut per apple) and the apples either eaten fresh or pressed to make juice/alcohol. The apples are VERY juicy and the juice is potent – a little juice dripped onto your clothes stays there for life!

Step 3: Roast cashews



Cashews are covered with a thick green husk that is apparently best removed if burned. So the cashews are placed in either a tin can with holes punched in the bottom or on any other piece of metal a person can find, and roasted over a fire. After only a few seconds over the fire, natural juices in the cashew will ignite and the cashews become engulfed in flames. Stir to ensure even ‘roasting’ of the cashews – you have to be careful all is charred but not overcooked (very important). Quickly take off of fire and toss with sand to extinguish fire and cool cashews.

Step 4: Shell cashews

My least favorite step for a number of reasons –
1. you get full of char which is really hard to wash off
2. you have to hit the nut with just the right pressure if you still want some cashew left to eat when you get the shell off - there is a reason we pay more for whole cashews!
3. if the cashews aren’t grilled just right, the juices, which are toxic to your skin, are absorbed by your skin during shelling and will later burn a layer off…be careful with your lips too! AND lastly,
4. it takes a long time to shell just a few! - 10kg of cashews (which we bought for 150 cfa/kg = 35 cents/kg) took a group of us 2 nights to shell and yielded about 2 kg of nuts!

Step 5: Apply cortisone cream twice daily until healed



Ok…maybe this was my least favorite step. Not sure if it was a reaction to handling the cashews, eating them, or both but my finger tips all peeled, my fingers blistered (that's actually a picture of my finger...but it's back to normal now) and I have a mean looking rash that has been with me for over a 2 weeks! But boy are the cashews tasty :)

So…the next time you find yourself enjoying a cashew, savour the moment - a lot of work went into preparing that cashew for you!

Is that snow?

No, the snow didn't follow us here...it's table salt!

It’s been great enjoying these last few days with Luc and Anita and the kids before they leave for their annual summer vacation. We spent an afternoon at Lac Rose – ‘Rose’ because the high concentration of minerals causes the lake to shimmer pink - but more famous for being the final destination of the annual Paris-Dakar rally.

The water here is actually 10 times saltier than the ocean so it’s also the location of a small-scale salt collecting industry.



The shoreline is bustling with locals and their piles of salt they have harvested from the lake bottom. Since the lake is pretty shallow, people wade up to their waist and scrape the salt off the lake bed and into flat bottomed pirogues (wooden boats). When the canoe is full (ie. Any more and the canoe will sink under the weight), they make their way back to shore and the salt is carried onto the bank in buckets – usually by the women.



Each salt collector builds his own pile of salt – marked either by a number or his initials. The good quality salt is put straight into 25 kg sacks and sold to middlemen from Dakar and the poorer-quality salt gets loaded in bulk and taken elsewhere for processing. It’s hard, nasty work for less than $1 for the 25kg bags of ‘good quality’ salt and even less for the more abundant lower-quality!

The neat thing about the lake is that it’s high salt concentration makes even lead weights buoyant – tried as we did, it was impossible to sink! The swim wasn’t all that pleasant though as the water stunk and the salt stung and left a slimy coating on our skin…we didn’t stay in the water long.



The area also attracts visitors for its miles of beautiful sand dunes that surround the lake. Luc deflated the tires [a little trick he learned to keep from getting stuck in beach sand] and we had a ball 4x4ing around the dunes and enjoyed a picnic supper in what could have been the middle of the dessert.


Oasis in the middle of the dunes

Dakar and the Dispensaire

We've spent the past few days here in Dakar with Luc and Anita Sabot and the kids. We arrived last Friday morning on the passenger ferry that travels overnight between Ziguinchor and Dakar twice a week. Since then, we've been doing a bit of shopping for things we can't find in the Casamance, relaxing a bit and Tammy spent a 1/2 day in a clinic here in the city to get some training and ideas for our own Dispensaire. It's nice to spend some time in 'modernity' here, but the bustle of the city is definitely a jarring change from the peace and pace of Niaguis. That said, the exceptional meal at a very nice Indian restaurant in honor of Anita's birthday yesterday almost makes up for the negatives of city life! [Check out the Sabot's blog here] 'Happy Birthday' to my brother Andre today, too!
Our minous are holding down the fort at home, alone except for the daily check-in from our housekeeper : ( I'm sure they're building character...

[The photo is us in Dakar in March, before we went to Niaguis. We look much more haggard and grizzled now ;)]
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I ain't no accountant, but it doesn't take one to figure out that the Dispensaire has been operating at a loss for some time now and in fact has a substantial dept for employees social security payments (over $1000Cdn). We currently don't bring in enough revenue each month to cover our expenses. We don't have all the medications on hand that we would like, especially as we prepare for what will be a busy rainy season, where malaria is apparently as common as the mango trees. The Dispensaire has a fertile, irrigated, walled-in garden space that the village women used to love to come into to garden, but there are some much needed repairs required before we can offer the land for community gardening again (which will cost ~$500 to $1000Cdn).
There are many other great projects that we could be starting right now if the funding was in place. The clinic operational needs may be met by support that ADRA Spain is currently proposing; we hope to hear in the next couple of months. But the garden, a wall around the grounds, improvements to currently abysmal staff salaries, and other projects will depend on whether we can find other donors and sustainable means of support.
One of the items on our shopping list here in Dakar is a vehicle that we can use as a 'taxi' between the villages surrounding Niaguis, and Ziguinchor. There is a shortage of vehicles travelling between the villages and the city, especially when mango season arrives and villagers want to sell fruit in the city. Since there are also not many people who can afford vehicles, let alone the travel to Dakar to find one, we're exploring the possibility of buying a mission vehicle that can be a fund-raiser to support the Dispensaire. A $5000 vehicle, for instance, could bring in as much as $1200 per month, which would be a great help. There are logistical and administrative challenges to work out, but it could be a very positive project, allowing the Dispensaire to operate at a much higher level. As the Dispensaire services improve, we expect the surrounding communities will once again begin using the clinic as their primary care center, which will then help increase the clinic's own operational revenue and lessen our need for the 'exterior' support from a transport vehicle. Then, these funds could be used to develop the other projects that would greatly benefit the villagers and help restore the Adventist reputation in Niaguis. It's tough to consider evangelism in these villages when our highly visible Dispensaire is in such disarray.
From a Canadian perspective, a little money will go a long way here. We made a wish/priority list of projects that would conceivable bring the Dispensaire completely into good repair and the total cost was under $20,000Cdn. If we can raise the funds and Tammy and I can carry out even 1/4 of the projects and repairs on the list, the Dispensaire would be in great shape to serve the villagers for the next several years as other volunteers take over for us. We recognize there are lots of equally worthwhile projects that need financial support in North America, but perhaps some reading this would like to contribute to the work in Niaguis as well. If so, please email us at soosenegal@gmail.com for more specific information about the various projects and the various ways to make a contribution.
But most important to us right now, is your support in prayer and encouragement via emails and comments posted to our blog. We've often been tested and challenged beyond our own limits and each time we know we can rely on the One who brought us here to sustain us. He has. Your agreement with us before God in prayer is priceless and we thank Him for the support we continue to receive!