Fodé Bayo Health Hut Well - Senegal

Location
Fodé Bayo Health Hut (Casse de Santé), in the village of Fodé Bayo, Senegal, West Africa

Community Description
Fodé Bayo is a small Mandinka village of 197, settled deep in the bush of Kolda, Senegal. While living in the jungle provides for a beautiful, lush environment, the distance from the road is restricting. The villagers have little access to professional health care and they constantly feel the burden of growing everything they will eat year-round.

Though determined and resilient, Fodé Bayo is extremely poor and daily life is a struggle. Progress appears in the form of Fodé Bayo’s busy school and determined little health post. Both the school and the health post serve Fodé Bayo and the five surrounding Pulaar villages. Thus they are both extremely overcrowded and constantly strained for resources.

With the help of the village’s first Peace Corps Volunteer, Kirsten Bloomberg, the health hut has become more active and efficient. Kirsten helped to establish a pharmacy that goes through a weekly inventory and a schedule of outreach activities for the hut’s health workers.

Because of these efforts, the villagers’ trust and pride in Fodé Bayo’s health hut has been gaining. The next step now, is to make the health hut more effective in patient treatment.

The head nurse and midwife do what they can, but when emergencies strike, precious time is lost when villagers need to run to fetch water to do tasks as simple as cleaning wounds.

Project Description
This project is to construct a well at a health post in an isolated rural village. The project will provide Fodé Bayo Health Hut with water to enable it to effectively render routine and emergency health services.

Fodé Bayo’s fight for health care has been a long struggle. Villagers were ignored by the Senegalese government, and health hut workers often stole what precious resources and money the hut had.

After Peace Corps volunteers entered the village though, the villagers have gained the courage to stand up for their needs and face corruption. Progress has been made with the village’s first volunteer, and now that the Health Hut is beginning to run effectively, the state of the facility is being addressed.

A latrine was built and live fencing was planted. Currently, Peace Corps Volunteer Amanda Wybolt is working with two local NGOs to build a permanent cement fence around the Health Hut’s compound. The well will be built within the compound, making it readily accessible and protected.

Amanda reports:

Frustrating is not apt enough of a word to describe the situation when our midwife kneels on plastic sheet over the cold cement floor of the health hut, trying to help a thirty-eight year old woman through her last pregnancy, and has to pause to wait for water. Pregnancy doesn’t wait. Neither do gaping wounds from accidents out in the fields, when a spade is accidentally dropped on the head of another field worker, splitting his head open.

Project Impact
197 people in the village of Fodé Bayo will directly benefit from improved health care. Over 10,000 people in the six villages around Fodé Bayo, who have access to the facility, will be indirectly affected.

Peace Corps Volunteer Directing Project
Amanda Wybolt

Comments
A well in close proximity to the health hut will add a precious resource to an extremely strained medical situation. This project exemplifies the mission of Appropriate Projects to fund high-impact, low-cost projects that will immediately impact upon the health and wellbeing of an entire community.

Dollar Amount of Project
$500

Donations Collected to Date
$500.00

Dollar Amount Needed
$0.00 - This project has been fully funded, through the generosity of David Weidenfeld, Buffalo Grove, IL, USA, in memory of Nicholas Wybolt, father of Amanda.

We encourage others to continue to donate using the Donate button below, and we will notify Peace Corps Volunteer Amanda Wybolt of your donation. Additional funds will be used to fund the next project by Amanda and/or those of her counterpart PCVs in Senegal.

This project has been finished. To read about the conclusion of the project, CLICK HERE.

Conclusion of Fodé Bayo Health Hut Well – Senegal

Peace Corps Volunteer Amanda Wybot concluded the Fodé Bayo Health Hut Well – Senegal on schedule and within budget. To read about the beginning of this report, CLICK HERE.

Her final report is so complete and descriptive, we are left with nothing more than to convey to her our heartfelt gratitude for a spectacular job, and await the submission of her next project.

Amanda’s Accounting:

Received: $500.00

Payment to well mason and helper: $250.00

Supplies:

16 bags of cement: $140.00
10 bars of rebar, size 6: $25.00
10 bars of rebar, size 8: $36.00
1 libar of findefeer: $1.00
1 wheelbarrow: $40.00

Total price supplies: $242.00

Transport: $8.00

Final Report:

Work for the well at Fodé Bayo’s Case de Santé began on November 16th. A few hours after sunrise, our local well digger, Kindi Baldé, along with every village elder in Fodé Bayo, met at the Case de Santé to scope out the perfect spot. After excess shrubbery from the rainy season was cleared, we all knelt around the chosen spot while our Imam (village religious leader) blessed the project. Less than five minutes later, Kindi began digging.

34 days, 16 bags of cement, 1 hired village helper, and three celebratory dance parties later, the well was finished. The finished well is 12 1/2 meters deep, complete with a cover and latched door on top to ensure that the well water stays as clean as possible.

The project was able to be completed on schedule due to the extraordinary efforts of our well mason, Kindi Baldé, and his hired helper from my village, Walli Janko. They chose to begin digging before I returned to village with their money and supplies (hence the project duration being 34 days instead of 30), and didn’t take a day off until it was completed on the 19th. Materials arrived via a four-hour bumpy tractor ride on Saturday, November 21st. We barely got all of the sacks of cement off the tractor before Kindi and Walli were ripping into the bags and mixing cement to continue work.

On December 13th, after weeks of hacking away at the tough crust that is the Sahel of sub-Saharan Africa, Kindi and Walli struck water. Word spread like wildfire through the village, and soon everyone was crowding around the well, trying to get a drink of the first water, rubbing it on their faces, blessing each other, and dancing around the well. My host mother waited a few more hours for the water to be deep enough to fill a bucket, and proudly pulled the first buckets of water from the well to make dinner that night.

The most difficult part of the construction was the last few days, in which huge cement cylinders only inches smaller than the diameter of the well had to be lowered into the well – 12 1/2 meters down – so that they could help to retain water during the dry season. This effort, to quote a cliché, really did take a village; five men would lift the cylinder as six men were pulling a rope, and then of course you had the fourteen people standing by watching the effort, (though if you asked them, they were helping too).

On the morning of the 19th, the cover was cemented on the well and the project pronounced finished. Though the final product is 12 1/2 meters deep, Kindi has promised to come back when the water table goes down during the hot season (thus causing the well to run dry), so we paid him for 14 meters of construction.

This was the first “big” project completed in my village. It seems like a simple project- a well, near a small regional health hut. But for me and my village, this project meant so much more than just building something. As is, our health hut that struggles to get recognition and supplies from the area’s doctors, as they usually look down on my rural villagers and their “primitive” ways off into the bush as we are. So for my village, having a well built by their proud, little health hut, something that made the health hut more official and like regional hospitals, was a matter of immense pride for them. From the soles of our dancing feet, we want to thank Appropriate Projects for their help in making this momentous project run smoothly and easily. As we say in Senegal, Alhamdullilah!

By every measurement, this was a perfect project. If Amanda’s description and pictures are as stirring to you as they are to us, please click on the Donate button below, and your funds will be used for her next project and/or those of her counterparts in Senegal.

You will note on the project page that this project was dedicated in memory of Nicholas Wybolt, Amanda’s late father. Her excellence as a Peace Corps Volunteer stands out as a true memorial.