Brief update, since I am consistently being told that there are more of you out there than I originally believed. Back in Theis for the night! Korite was lovely, it was nice to have a chance to just hang out with my family a bit rather than having to schedule around going to class. They made a special dish for lunch and dinner consisting of meat, onion and garlic sauce, potatoes and peas which was served with bread, a welcome change from the normal day to day dish of rice and fish or beans. Everyone dressed up too, and it was cool to see everyone’s korite outfits. It sort of reminds me of Christmas in the states; kids have those cute little dresses that their parents pick out for them. The hair is the best part. People spend days ahead of time braiding their hair and adding in fake hair and beads or other sparkly things. They didn’t have time to do mine- sorry to anybody who was looking forward to more Emily-with-braids pictures, but I have some great pics of the kids. And for those of you parents out there who were wondering how mothers in Senegal got their kids to sit still for long enough to have their hair done, they don’t. It is either done in small amounts of time with many breaks over a few days, or the kid is held down kicking and screaming while her mother makes her look beautiful by Senegalese standards. Generally the former occurs, which leads to several days of many Senegalese girls walking around with half-done hairdos for several days leading up to Korite. It’s actually quite funny, and for a minute there I seriously thought I had been transported back to the 80s when some of my younger sisters looked like they had a hard core mullet. Wish I got a picture of that one.
Anyway, I had another cultural point I thought it would be interesting to share. We had a class session here in Theis the other day on marketing agro- and agroforestry products. The girl who was presenting explained how she had helped her counterpart to market the hand-made soap she makes in her house. Many women like her make home-made products to sell to the village, but have very little education and do not understand the concept of supply and demand or marketing, or even oftentimes basic mathematics. Originally, soap-woman was making her soap and selling it for the exact price of the materials. Many women also do not factor in transportation cost if they are lucky enough to travel into a regional market to sell their product, and may lose money on it. One may think that the logical answer would be to sell their product for more money, but that’s where an interesting cultural component comes in- women here often feel guilty for making money off of something. I do not know why since I do not yet have personal experience with this, but some people speculated that it may be because they believe that it is the man’s job to make money and not a women’s or because they know that others expect to pay a certain price and feel bad changing it. That fact really hit me for some reason when we talked about it because it has so many cultural and economic implications, and reveals a small hint as to why many developing countries are just that- developing. Think about it, research it, do what you will. I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.
Another quick cultural note- I have yet to learn the word for “Please” in Wolof. I asked once, and somebody told me, but I have never heard anybody use it. People also laugh whenever I tell them thank you. Nobody else uses that either. In class, we learned that people don’t normally say thank you, they just remember whatever you did for them and do something for you later in exchange. It just occurred to me today how that is so drastically different from how we were all brought up in the US. There are no Barnie songs for little kids here about how please and thank you are the magic words. Sorry if that brings up any scarring memories for anybody.
I meant for this blog post to be relatively short, which clearly I did not accomplish, but here’s the life update section. I go to volunteer visit tomorrow. We will be taking a bus at 7 am down to our regional house in Kaolack where I will meet up with my host volunteer, and we will travel together to her site. I get to spend a few days doing some of my first technical observations about my region and learning about the life of a regular PCV, so I am pretty excited. I have to take pictures of stuff anyway as part of an ecological assignment that is due on Friday (make a powerpoint and tell us in 10 minutes about the ecology you observed) so I will have plenty to share next week. Until next time…
~E
No comments:
Post a Comment