Dengue fever and flexibility

”Ok, finally! We’ll all meet on Sunday, 8.30 am.” It is Thursday, 5 pm, and Mahmoud has just finished calling “our” volunteers. They are the ones that we are training as trainers in order to take over our workshop after we leave. We have tried to arrange for this for quite a while and now we can finally relax, go home and enjoy the weekend.

Saturday evening. Mahmoud calls to tell us that the dengue fever outbreak in Port Sudan is more severe than expected. Several people have already died. The WHO information campaign will therefore start on Sunday, and not on Monday as planned. Since “our” volunteers are working in this campaign, our workshop is again postponed, this time by a week.

For a week, the volunteers go from door to door, inform people about the dengue fever and take samples of the drinking water in every single house (there is no running water in the outskirts of Port Sudan, and the people buy their drinking water from water tanks and store it in big clay containers; potential breeding places for the dengue flies). They also take notes about how many people have the symptoms for the disease, if they have been to the hospital or not. In southern Port Sudan, one person per every five households had dengue fever. In the evenings, the office is crowded; the supervisors (all of them volunteers) are handing in the lists from their covered area of the day.


Volunteers are being trained for the dengue fever information campaign


Even after six months in this country, I am still fascinated by the Sudanese’s flexibility and strong will to help; not once have I seen a volunteer complaining after 10 hours of house to house visit followed by several hours at the office.