I completed my field experience in St. Louis, Senegal. There were three main sectors which constituted my field experience: teaching and delivering health care to Talibé children, interning at the local hospital known as District Sanitaire or in Wolof as Hopital Ousmane Ngom, and volunteering at the Red Cross (La Croix Rouge Sénégalaise).

Each morning of my field experience I worked at one of two Talibé Centers created by Projects Abroad in St. Louis. My project was titled "Medicine.” This meant that my main duty was to deliver first aid to the children both at the center and in the unsanitary daaras where they live. The problem of Talibé children is unique to a few select countries in Western Africa, but Senegal remains the center for Talibé trafficking with at least 50,000 boys, known as Talibés. Not many know about these children outside of these countries, and it is a mostly neglected issue both inside and outside of Senegal. Talibé is a word derived from Arabic that means disciple or follower. But today in Senegal, the term talibé is the term used for a boy who is forced to beg on the street as a part of his Koranic education. Once a respected tradition, sending your child to a daara to learn the Koran from a marabout has now become synonymous with poverty and cruelty. The children receive the most basic education, if any at all. This education focuses solely on learning the Koran in Arabic, a language that the children do not understand. The marabouts force the children to beg to pay for their education, and if they do not meet their daily quota, then the children are severely beaten. In addition, the marabout does not provide any food, clothing, care or even a clean environment for the children to live in. These corrupt marabouts have been known to pocket the money they receive from the children, and thus profit from the misfortune of these children whose ages range from four to eighteen. In order to deliver medical care to children who lived too far away from the center or were unable to leave where they lived or begged, I would go into various daraas or street areas where children without a daraa were located two to three times a week. The rest of the time I spent in the clinic and dealt with walk-ins. Most commonly, I treated external punctures, cuts, wounds, and infections like scabies. I also treated many ear infections, ameliorated the pain of a boy with inoperable cancer, administered antiparasitic drugs, and treated a burn victim over an extended period of time. Skin conditions were the most common reason for which children came to receive care. After talking with many of the children, and visiting the locations where they live, it became clear that their open wounds most often resulted from beatings they had taken from the marabout, and the consequent exposure of their open wounds to the squalor in which they live. Often I would also teach the children about hygiene in French (with translations in Wolof as well), giving talks about topics like diarrhea, dehydration, and preventing infection.

In the afternoons I split my time between the hospital and the Red Cross. In these locations I started out by mostly observing, and as time went on I was allowed to do simple procedures, and interact more with patients. At the hospital I spent time in maternity and pediatrics, and with the Red Cross I was working under the umbrella of general and emergency medicine. Throughout my time in these locations, I was allowed to take blood pressures, temperatures, heart rates, evaluate breathing, and listen to the baby’s heartbeat in expectant mothers. At the end of my internship at the Red Cross, I was able to give stitches to trauma victims and treat simple external wounds. In these settings, the prevalence of malaria became most apparent to me within only a few days of working there. By the end of my time working in theses settings, I was easily able to recognize the symptoms of malaria in a patient, and diagnosed this in children and mothers most often.

My field experience encompassed a wide range of age groups and medical issues. I was able to gain a broad perspective of what health care looks like in Senegal and also what global health issues are prevalent in St. Louis. The treatment of Talibé children is the issue which commanded my attention the most, due to my proximity to the boys, and the first hand accounts I received from them of the utter inhumanity of their treatment, and the lack of care they received. Three of the boys I was treating regularly at the Talibé Center died while I was working there. I will never forget this. One drowned in the dirty Senegal River where the Talibés regularly went to bathe, another died of cancer, because he had a tumor, which he could not afford to have removed, and another was presumably beaten to death by his marabout. And the worst part is: no one cared, no one loved them, and I am probably one of the only people who will ever remember that they even existed.