Everything has continued to go very well here in Dakar. I am finishing up my thesis about speech, language and voice disorders in Senegal.  I will defend it before an academic jury before I leave in July.  My time in Senegal as an ambassadorial scholar has been incredibly enriching.  Not only is this a period of cultural and academic exchange, but a period of deep personal growth.  My eyes have been opened in new directions that I never even knew existed before.

Last week I joined my Rotary host counsellor in going to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso for the 36th annual district conference for district 9100. The district is comprised of 14 countries in West Africa.  The diversity at the conference was astounding. There were Rotarians of all different ethnicities and cultures.  Some Rotarians wore formal black suits, some wore colorful bubus with Rotary emblems on the fabric, and some from Mali were wear traditional Tuareg robes and turbans. There were head-sets available for instantaneous French to English translation. In spite of any superficial differences though, everyone was united under the Rotarian ideologies of advancing goodwill, understanding and peace through service and community support.

During the conference, we frequently discussed The New Vision Plan, which will be the focus for the new Rotary year, starting in July.  The New Vision plan focuses on peace and conflict resolution, disease prevention and treatment, water and sanitation, maternal and child health, basic education and literacy and economic and community development.  My favorite part of the conference was a small discussion group that focused on water and sanitation.  We discussed how all six topics of the New Vision Plan are profoundly influenced by water, and how water is a particularly important issue in West Africa.  Rotary is involved with over 6000 projects worldwide involving water.  The goal is to have a 50% reduction in people with no access to clean drinking water by 2015.  Just a few weeks ago one of the Rotary clubs I am involved with in Dakar installed wells in a village so there will be better access to clean drinking water.

In Dakar I am finding great satisfaction in my service activities.  I am co-leading a speech therapy group for autistic children in the pediatric psychiatry unit of a local hospital. I co-lead the group with a Senegalese speech pathologist.  She corresponds with the children in Wolof, whereas I focus on teaching the children linguistic skills in French, and also basic Wolof.  I have supplied almost all of the materials that we use for speech and language therapy in the group.  After six months, the results are amazing.  I will share with you the story of Medune, a five-year-old boy in the speech therapy group.  Medune was placed in the clinic because he was thought to be autistic, but I only recently found out the real story of his past.  When we started the group in November, Medune was totally non-verbal.  He did not know how to speak.  Months later, I learned that Medune had been abandoned as a very young child when his parents left Senegal to move to Mauritania, leaving him in the street.  Medune was homeless, living in the streets with no one to care for him.  Years later, Medune was recently found by a social services organization and placed in his grandparent’s home.  It is natural that Medune never learned to speak as a young child if he had no linguistic stimulation or loved one to take care of him.  Very quickly after we started doing speech and language exercises in the group, Medune started imitating sounds, then talking, and then singing! Now Medune is a model for all the other children, singing, paying attention, and talking regularly.  He will most likely start going to school with normally developing children of his age in less than a year.  It is an amazing success story!!

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to learn and grow in West Africa.  I have had some of the most rewarding experiences of my life!  Would you mind forwarding this on to other Rotarians in the district I don’t have the email addresses for?

Sincerely,

Stephanie Jozefowicz