2009-12-18
My brother Aliou Leye is my mentor in Sangalkam. I feel lucky to have him looking out for me in the village. He works for the rural village of Sangalkam youth association. In 2002 he started an organization called the Foyer des Jeunes. He started it in order to help students get into university, mentor...
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There are many different scales by which to measure poverty: less than a dollar a day, being able to provide food, shelter, healthcare, emergency funds, stability, etc. Compared to many places in Senegal, my community is pretty well off in that the majority of the population can afford at least their food and house, which...
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Earlier last week I believe I reached an important turning point in my homestay experience: I was allowed to do dishes! It has been a long month of sitting on the highest, softest chair and watching; having the choisest morsels of ceebujen into my corner of the bowl; being allowed to stir the pot but...
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This post by Fellow, Alec Yeh has been Cross-posted from the Current TV News blog. Q: What are your first impressions? Things here are incredibly different, even from Dakar [the capital]. Being in the village is just a lot more downtime. Things seem to move at a slower pace, and it isn’t a bad thing...
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One of our major projects in Guatemala is to support Soluciones Comunitarias, an NGO which trains Guatemalans to sell health related products such as reading glasses, water purifiers, and vegetable seeds. This week, we spent two (long) days traveling around northern Quiche and I produced the following video to document our journey:
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“We don’t want Guatemala to be dirty because otherwise it would not be beautiful and people would get sick,” said one of the kids in our last day during drama class when acting out how Guatemala would look if everyone kept throwing trash in the streets. It was such a powerful moment to witness such...
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(Cross-posted from the Current TV News Blog) Read on Current HERE My first impression of Guatemala was that the place I was living in was not “rural” as I had expected because everything in the little town in which I live is concrete and cinder block. There’s an internet café, and buses thundering past all...
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