Case of the Mondays

Next time I have a case of the Mondays, I'll always remember this Monday's experience driving back from interviews in a rural market to put things in perspective. We completed our interviews for the day in record time and were poised to make it back to Saint Louis in time for dinner when the approaching rainstorm arrived.

We had driven a solid 2+ hours to arrive at the market that morning. The last hour of the journey required a 4x4 truck (or a quatre-quatre en francais), as the road became more of a well-worn path than an actual road. In the rain, the mayor of the town where the market was held was worried we'd have trouble getting back, as the flat terrain collected water wherever it fell and there was very little drainage.

In a display of Senegalese hospitality, the mayor housed us under his roof while the rains passed. He hoped we'd stay long enough for the trucks that transport market-goers (and thus know well where the way is least treacherous) started their next outgoing journey. It was a good, sensible option for us, since we were relatively unfamiliar with the area, but everyone was tempted by the thought of having a normal dinner at a normal time. We didn't want to wait, so we struck out on our own, promising to move slowly and carefully through the waterlogged landscape.

We navigated around as many massive puddles as we could, but contiguous dry land was hard to come by. Charging through standing water was necessary at times, but we had no way of knowing how deep the water was upon approach. We navigated successfully through several puddles, but our luck ran out pretty quickly. We navigated around a seemingly small puddle when the quatre-quatre sunk heavily into the mud.

A collective groan preceded the removal of shoes and socks and the rolling up of pants. We all got out of the car to assess the situation. The right side of the vehicle was up to its undercarriage in sloppy mud. We had no tools to speak of and the last village we passed had been several kilometers ago. We set to spooning mud away from the wheels with our hands and tearing branches off near by shrubs to set them under the wheels for traction. One member of the field team set out on foot to find a local village. We worked on the branch traction strategy for over an hour with no success, so we gave up and waited for word from the village.

Someone in the village was able to recruit men and boys from different households to come to our rescue. They brought 10 guys, two shovels and two metal planks for traction. They dug us out of the mud like Minnesotans commonly dig themselves out of snowbanks in winter. They dug a trench to drain the water away from the wheels, then dug out the wheels, then the undercarriage. It was like they'd done this before. After an hour excavating the sunk quatre-quatre, they placed the metal planks under the rear wheels. As the driver got behind the wheel, the army of rescuers assumed the pushing position and this happened:  

So we didn't make it home in time for dinner after all. But we enjoyed the most spectacular sunset on the drive back, punctuated with plenty of standing water that we didn't get stuck in (but we sent someone out ahead of the vehicle to scope out the depth and identify the best routes through the water). And perhaps most important of all, we didn't have to spend the night in the sunk quatre-quatre in the middle of the countryside.

Beaucoup des animaux

There are goats everywhere. Goats on goats on goats. On streets, in fields. Baby goats. Goats with horns. Sometimes on a leash, but mostly free range. We had one on our doorstep the other day, bleating on and on about something. They're usually foraging for garbage and maybe trying not to get hit by cars. They probably belong to someone, but its not entirely clear if they come home like the cows do. They bleat morning, noon and night, but its the roosters that make me thankful for earplugs at night... and a noisy fan in my bedroom.

Lots of garden variety domestic animals roam the streets of Saint Louis and nearby villages -- cats, dogs, roosters, horses, goats and the occasional cow, but I was surprised by some of the wildlife we just happened to see while driving to and from a village today:

1. Warthogs! Legit wild pigs with tusks and tails straight up in the air! I got a couple pictures to prove that I saw them, but they're not really worth posting. All you can really see is them literally high-tailing it away from our truck. I wonder if that's where the figure of speech came from? 
2. Monkeys! They were totally raiding a cornfield! Tens, maybe hundreds of them! Similar picture scenario -- I have the proof, technically, but its not great wildlife photography. I did a Google search when I got home and figured out they were patas monkeys. They're terrestrial, as opposed to arboreal, which makes sense, seeing as there aren't very many trees here. And their reproduction rates are super high to account for the adult mortality due to predation due to their terrestrial living habits.
3. A huge lizard! He looked like the Komodo dragon at the Minnesota Zoo. I had trouble getting a proper name out of the field team. They best I could do was "big lizard", but a Google search suggests it might have been a Savannah monitor. According to Wikipedia, they feed "almost exclusively" on insects and molluscs. Coincidentally, the one we saw was just upstream of the dam -- maybe the schisto-transmitting freshwater snails that are prevalent upstream are their favorite afternoon snack? 

It's like I signed up for a safari or something. 

In all seriousness though, northern Senegal is home to some of the best bird watching in the Old World. The Parc Nacional des Oiseaux du Djoudj is just up the road from Saint Louis and is a major stopover point for migrant birds from Europe. Think flamingos, pelicans, egrets, oh my! Take note, bird lovers. I'll be coming here for fieldwork for the next few years and would love a companion to make a trip to the sanctuary and learn about all the cool Old World birds! Look it up and plan a trip! 

On Puddle Jumping

I have flown over the pond for the first time in ten years and find myself on an entirely new continent! Given my three year absence, this blog officially earns the title of my “international travel” blog. I haven't left the United States since I returned from the Dominican Republic in 2012 and subsequently graduated from Emory’s MPH program the following spring. And with that, blog posts have fallen by the wayside.

I think for many people, international travel and blogging go hand-in-hand. It’s an efficient way to reflect on new experiences and share those reflections with a wider audience of loved ones. As I find myself in an unfamiliar place on my next big adventure, here I am blogging again, digesting new experiences for you all to see.

I arrived in northern Senegal this afternoon. I will be here for a relatively short time (less than two weeks) this time around, but this trip marks the beginning of semi-regular trips to pursue research here. I’m switching hemispheres and disease systems to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD at Stanford University.

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease that’s a big problem in northern Senegal. Its prevalence here is associated with the ecological disturbance due to water resources management (such as dams). Dams arguably provide essential economic opportunity through irrigation to the region’s predominately agricultural society, but have had the unfortunate consequence of causing one of the most explosive epidemics of schistosomiasis ever.

In this scenario, economic opportunity comes at the cost chronic exposure to parasites. People often talk about how infectious diseases like schistosomiasis keep poor people in poverty - what is often called a poverty trap. Less often are people actually able to quantify that relationship. In a place where economic activity and disease risk are so obviously linked, I'd like to explore ways to measure that connection in concrete ways. Can schistosomiasis in Senegal legitimately be called a poverty trap?

The difficulty of quantifying this relationship is exacerbated by the way health and disease is measured. These metrics can capture many facets of health and disease: mortality, disability, quality of life, cognitive development, but they inevitably pit certain diseases against others in a competition for attention and resources. Is it worse to get malaria or tuberculosis? Would you rather die of a deadly disease at a young age or be chronically ailed by a less severe disease over the course of a lifetime? Some argue that the burden of schistosomiasis is consistently underestimated precisely because it involves chronic infection over time and doesn't necessarily kill those it infects. For this reason, schistosomiasis long been considered a neglected tropical disease. Whether its more important than other diseases or not, its a problem here and our choice of health metrics should reflect that. 

All that said, I'm looking forward to digging into discussions with research partners tomorrow and getting to see the study area for myself. I've arrived just as Senegal's rainy season has taken hold. We had a decent rainfall this afternoon, which resulted in the complete flooding in the street outside the building where I stay (due to a clog in one of the drainage pipes, I'm told). In my experience, rain often drives people indoors, but today, the kids in the neighborhood had a hay day running down the street knee deep in rainwater, chasing cars as they waded slowly through the slosh. It was a fun soundtrack for a jetlagged nap but made for an interesting quest to eat dinner. Managed to do two kinds of puddle jumping today for the first time in a long while!