Senegal native clears up misinformation

MOSES LAKE - Abdoulaye Bamba Dieng said he wants to make sure people have got the facts, the big facts about Africa and diseases like Ebola. Dieng is a native of Senegal, on the west coast of Africa.

Senegal borders on Guinea, one of the countries most affected by the current Ebola outbreak. In Senegal itself, however, there's been one case, Dieng said, and that didn't originate in Senegal.

(Senegal has been declared free of the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control website.)

There's a lot of misinformation out there, he said, about Ebola in particular and Africa in general. "When you say 'Africa,' people think it's a country. Africa is a continent," he said.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Ebola is that it's a relatively new disease, he said. "It's been there for a long time," he said. "So it comes up and goes down," he said, the outbreaks expanding, then dissipating. It's not the only serious disease that follows that pattern in Africa, he said.

The current outbreak is the largest recorded, according to the CDC website. Suspected patients have been killed in some African villages, Dieng said, and that possibility caused a Guinea man to flee across the border into Senegal. "He got scared and he ran," Dieng said. He survived.

He was the only case in Senegal, according to the CDC.

Dieng was born in the Senegalese countryside, in the village of Nioro, south of the capital. "You don't hear about the villages and you don't see the villages on TV," he said.

The village isn't rich, and its residents rely on each other, cooperating to grow crops, maintain their houses and land. There's also a network of former village residents, some now living abroad, who donate time and materials to improve village life.

"They don't wait on the government," Dieng said, in part because Senegal struggles with corruption. When it's time to get something done in Nioro, the residents consult the village elders and the traditional doctor. Family issues, he said, are governed by the female elders, the village's "wise women."

Dieng recommended that people who want to get involved in charitable activities in Africa check out the charities before they donate. People also can work with the networks of expatriate villagers, he said. That way they know the aid goes directly to the village.

"Go local is best, he said."

Nioro now has a well; the villagers (those who stayed and those who moved) got together to dig one, and they are working on a pumping system to get water to the vegetable fields. The well in the village saves women a five-mile walk to the nearest water source. "My mother used to do this (walk to the well) every day," Dieng said. It required getting up in the predawn hours, to be back at home in time to help the kids get to school, he said.

Most of the cooking is done on an open fire, although some villagers also own camp stoves. Houses are made from thatch and other local materials; the local elementary school, about eight miles away by foot, has classrooms with thatched roofs and walls of netting.

Dieng is one of 20 children, he said. He left the village in 1994, "in search of a better education, better life. I didn't want to accept that what I grew up with was it, there was no more." He moved to an urban area, was sponsored to the United States. "I first came to New York. That was a shock. A big, big shock." But not as big a shock as North Dakota, he said, where he met his wife. A new job brought Dieng, his wife and three daughters to Moses Lake, where the weather is a lot better than North Dakota, he said.