Polio Vaccinations

My First Real Work:
Manda Dar Salaam (a.k.a. Manda Crossmonte “cross roads”)
May 30, 2010


I went to Manda, a road town about 25k away from Coumba Diouma, with my community counterpart, Mbarro Camara, to visit another volunteer serving there. Mbarro is a health relay in the greater Velingara area and brought me along to do some health work. Me, the other volunteer, Mike Toso, one of his counterparts and Mbarro met up to give out polio vaccinations, deworming medicine and vitamin A.

Manda is a road town of about 5,000 people. We walked door-to-door asking if there were children under the age of 5 in the household, how many and if they were around. Since there is no official census of the area, this served as one. We then got all the children in the household together and administered the polio vaccination, vitamin A and the deworming pill. After we were done, we marked each child’s left pinky with permanent marker so we didn’t give them two doses by accident; after a while I started drawing smiley faces on the older kids’ hands to get them to smile. For the most part, the vaccinations went fairly smoothly however you’d be surprised with how many children are scared to death of white people. I’m not talking about shyness. This was kicking and screaming, clawing their way to free themselves of these scary “whities” making them take icky medicine while forcing their mouths open. It was actually pretty comical.

After schlepping around Manda in the hot sun for 8 hours we managed to get around to most of the households that were on the list for that day. We picked up where we left off the next morning and continued until late in the afternoon. Unfortunately, we ran out of medicine and the health supervisor ran out of refills as well. That is a common problem here. There is not enough money to supply medical workers with enough resources needed. This is especially true in hospitals and in schools where resources are needed the most. Even though we didn’t have enough medicine to complete the job it was a good experience for me to have. I really enjoyed trying my hand in medical work and it felt good to do something tangible.