Mosquito Net Census

Another month where I did not write any blogs. However, I did manage to accomplish a few things. Aside from the marathon, I led a mosquito net distribution in my village.

Every few years Burkina Faso does a mosquito net distribution campaign with the hopes of getting 1 mosquito net for every two people. To do this accurately you either need to a) have an extremely accurate census of every community or b) go door to door and physically count the number of people in each courtyard and go from there. We used option b. Since my major was going to be out of town and no one at my health center knows the village better than me, I was put in charge. Fun, right? Actually kind of.

The way I see it, I was brought to my village to work and I hadn’t done a whole lot of it, so I really enjoy any opportunity to help out. My major had already come up with a list of people who would help out which made it a lot easier so all I had to do was: divide them into teams, decide where in village they would go, make sure their materials were ready, tally up the results at the end of the day, monitor the results, transmit them to the district, take care of any problems, make sure all of the forms and maps were drawn correctly so that the district would be able to understand our plan if they were to supervise, and visit every team everyday to make sure they were doing what they were supposed to.

Since my village is a rather large place, I knew this was going to mean a lot of biking for me- which I was really looking forward to because it would be my first physical activity since the marathon a few weeks beforehand. We decided that the groups would leave at 6AM so I had to get to the CSPS at 530 to make sure all the forms were put together properly, that they were labeled properly, and that each group was supplied with a pen and some chalk. Then I would go back to house for a bit, eat some breakfast, and then grab my bike and see 6 teams in a few hours.

The registration process was very simple. Each team had a registration spreadsheet and a ticket book. Each family would get a ticket and each ticket had a number. The ticket would read the name of the head of the family, the number of nets they were getting, and where they were going to get the nets. The spreadsheet had the same information but the teams had to write down the ticket numbers and there were spaces for the supervisor to verify the teams’ work.

I really enjoyed the biking from team to team. I got to bike through the parts of my village that I don’t usually see and interact with people who might not come to the health center very often. I think the volunteers who got to help out with this during their first year are lucky because it allows their village to see them multiple times over the period of a few days. During each supervision I had a checklist to make sure everyone was there, had been trained in what we were doing, were counting people correctly, were filling out the forms correctly, and were giving people the correct information. Most teams were doing it right but a few had some small errors that I corrected. Often it was, “Great job! Keep up the good work!”

The real trouble came when you had people who were not home. Usually the census-takers would just find a neighbor and ask, who would find another neighbor and the two would discuss it before answering how many people lived in that courtyard. That had to be considered with cultural norms as well. For example, if a family had 12 people- but one was a teenage boy, they probably shouldn’t be sleeping with their 9 year old sister. So the teams were instructed to make sure nothing culturally inappropriate happened in the survey. Also, since the days were so long, there were routine mistakes that showed up- such as people writing the same ticket number down twice so one was skipped, or the names did not correspond with the ticket we had given them. I was pretty good about catching these errors as I saw them but one or two slipped by me.

The 6 days passed pretty slowly because I was kept so busy. Often I didn’t eat lunch until 1PM and then I had to be back at 3PM to tally all the numbers and to make sure we were on track. But I was really productive, the teams were happy, and the people who live in my village were happy. The district was especially happy, they started asking other CSPS’ why their forms weren’t as well done as ours- which is quite the compliment.

I was incredibly tired each day but with a sense of accomplishment which is always a good feeling- like a workout that hurts afterwards because you know you did a good job. And everyone else realized how hard I was working- especially since I was juggling a family planning project at the same time.

At the end of the campaign we turned all the papers in and were told that we would have the mosquito nets by the end of August- the height of malaria season.

Overall, it was a really good project to be involved in and to lead. I enjoyed collaborating with the teams and the CSPS staff to lay the groundwork for a successful mosquito net distribution.