New community ambulance, market gardens and salt mines

We hope you’ve enjoyed the first two posts of our Senegal series. In this last blog, Fiona and Jane share their favourite stories of how World Vision supports the local communities by providing healthcare and income-generating opportunities.

The new community ambulance

by Fiona Thompson:

Imagine being in a complicated advanced labour, squashed in the back of a small car, on a hot day being driven for a hour over bumpy roads to get to hospital surrounded by anxious family battling through traffic with no way of communicating to your fellow road users that you have an emergency on board.

Ambulances are something I am familiar with – usually for positive reasons. I was therefore interested to hear that one of the items asked for by the Area Development Programme (ADP) we were visiting, was an ambulance.

The roads in Senegal aren’t good and it is easy to understand why: you have seven months of dry, followed by five months of near continuous rain. Even the wealthiest of countries would have difficulty maintaining a smooth ride with those conditions.

Add to the road conditions the lack of large vehicles, the shear size of Senegal with the sparsity of main hospitals, and the lack of an NHS, and you start to see why the ADP needed its own ambulance. They had no safe and reliable way of transporting people to a hospital or giving them medical assistance whilst en route.

Thanks to the support of the community’s child sponsors, the ADP now has an ambulance of its own. It was basic but had on-board equipment for emergencies: oxygen, a bed, neck collars, airway support, dressings. It may not have been cutting edge, but for Senegal it was appropriate and what was needed.

Casualties from this ADP will now have a more comfortable ride, safer, with medical support and the assurance that they will no longer have to scrounge a car in an emergency and squash together in the back in 40 degrees. Just the thought makes me cringe…

Market garden

Later, in the middle of a very hot day, we were taken to see a Market Garden project, funded jointly by the EU and World Vision. Vegetable growing is something I am very interested in, particularly as I was acutely aware that all my veg planting at home was on hold due to my trip to Senegal!

During our travels around Senegal, I had noticed that most of the communities had wells – there is water, you just have to dig to find it. I had wondered why, therefore, irrigation wasn’t used more to increase productivity. Even at the end of the dry season you could see water in the well and only needed a bucket to fetch it up.

The Programme Manager explained that water being underground and not in rivers is exactly the problem: people couldn’t irrigate as without wells the water could not be accessed. Irrigation was consequently not a part of Senegalese agriculture.

World Vision was pioneering teaching the community near the project how to use underground water to irrigate plants on a trickle feed system, so that they had fresh vegetables and fruit all year round.

The water has to be used carefully and efficiently but the scheme was clearly working. We saw a variety of plants growing including tomatoes, chillies, hibiscus (used to make a drink), cassava and maize.

Composting and manure was also being used to improve the soil. The income from selling the produce from the garden was split three ways: to those who work the garden, into a bank account for emergencies, and to finance the garden by buying seeds, irrigation equipment, and so on.

The project has been so successful that a further market garden scheme has now been started within the Area Development Programme.

The salt mines

by Jane Slater:

It was towards the end of a long, inspiring and extremely hot last day. We had only one more project to visit and in many ways it was the most unusual one. One wonders what World Vision’s involvement could possibly be in the running of a salt mine! All we knew was that it is a place where women work.

We took a long drive through a very flat, sandy and empty landscape. Our air-conditioned bus protected us from the searing heat that greeted us as we got out.

We were welcomed by an amazing man, dressed like an Afghani horseman with a cloth wound around his head, a long fierce-looking knife and a wonderful smile! We were told that the women who worked there had to leave to go back to look after their families.

The temperature was so extreme that we could feel the heat of the ground through our shoes and had to wear sunglasses against the glare. We were all acutely aware that we were only looking whereas the women had to work in these difficult conditions.

As it was so hot, we were taken by bus a few hundred yards away to where the salt mining was taking place to find out about World Vision’s involvement.

Much of the available water in Senegal is salt water which this project is taking advantage of. The women dig large shallow “pans” and carefully flood them with the salt water. It is crucial to introduce the right amount of water; too much would result in it taking too long for the water to evaporate leaving harvestable salt and too little would mean that a great deal of effort was being expended to produce little salt. The area was covered with pans in varying degrees of evaporation as we walked along the narrow walkways between the pans.

The salt dries into large flakes which we tasted; it was very intense. The women harvest it and then it is purified, packed and finally sold on and exported all over West Africa.

Towards the end of our visit, we were all melting in the heat and in awe of the women who work in such a hostile environment. World Vision made it possible for them to earn an income by providing three simple things; boots, gloves and sunglasses.

These inexpensive items made this work bearable and have given these women an opportunity to support their families during the dry season when there are few sources of income. We were so impressed by the courage and effort that the women made to support themselves and so proud that it was World Vision that made it possible for them to do so.

A huge thank you to all of the ambassadors who kindly shared their photos and inspiring stories with us. If you missed them, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

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