Volunteer visit and a brief introduction to Kaolack

Hello world!

This is pretty cool, I just checked the stats on my blog and it seems there are a lot of people interested in my life out there! One of the big linkers to this page is PeaceCorpsJournals, which I connected my blog to on purpose to help out all you aspiring PCVs out there wondering what it was like. I know I religiously stalked that site a few months ago, so hope I'm not wasting all your time ;)

At any rate, I am currently at the Kaolack regional house for the night where I will be able to come to throughout my service to hang out with other Americans, cook food on a real stove, take a real shower, watch tv, go on the internet (most of my future blog posts will be typed here) and play some guitar! Yes, there is a house guitar here. It's a shitty guitar with no picks or capo, but it is fantastic nonetheless. For those of you who are unaware, I have been spending much of my procrastination time over the last year learning to play, and I even took lessons this past summer for a few weeks courtesy of my lovely boyfriend back in the states. So yes, music has re-entered my life, if only briefly. In the meantime, I have taken to singing to my host family, mostly the little children. When I first arrived at homestay and could say absolutely nothing in Wolof, I saw that people sometimes sang to themselves, so I started to sing in English to myself too. They thought it was hilarious and fascinating, and it was a great bonding experience to share music, which has always managed to bridge cultures and language barriers. And my voice got better. Or maybe I just haven't heard good voices for so long that it seems like it did. Damnit, I'm going crazy and I've only been here a month and a half. But I digress.

Volunteer visit was fun, if not as useful as I had hoped it to be. Since I am opening a new site, I do not have former volunteer (onCN in PCSenegalese) to go visit, so I had to visit another AgFo Wolof volunteer in a different subregion. I found out that when I install, I will be the only Wolof Agfo volunteer in Fatick, which is fine. The more I learn, the more I realize that you really can do whatever project motivates you, even if that means doing something partially outside your sector. That means I can work with volunteers in all sectors on everyone's projects. In fact, I just learned that a whole group of volunteers in the Kaolack region are working together from different sectors this coming weekend on a mangrove restoration project. Too bad I could not have sworn in a month sooner; I would love to see how that works. Overall, the visit was fun though. I did get to walk around the village, see what a standard PCV hut looks like and get some information on install and how the first few weeks after swear-in will run, and hear some fun stories. Most of the volunteers that were in the stage a year ahead of us can't believe that a year has gone by so fast, which is promising. I can't wait to be done with training, have a place of my own and be able to establish some semblance of a routine. Moving back and forth every few days gets tiring quickly, and it's annoying to feel like you have no real home. The stage ahead of us seems so well adjusted and comfortable here in comparison. (god help me if one of them reads this blog) The other fun occurrence we got to experience was public transportation- we had to take an Alhum back and forth to my volunteer's site when we went to go visit some other volunteers in Nioro, her local town. Alhum are old vans with some seats installed in them that serve as the public bus system in Senegal, but there are no such things as tickers or money counters like there are in America, so often the people on it argue and try to jip you for being white around here. That was the first time I felt real racial discrimination based on my race here. I had already gotten used to the constant shouts of "toubab!" but having someone put their foot down and tell you that you have to pay more because they think you have more money is a really upsetting experience. We also took a sept-place this morning, which is for longer-distance transport and works between towns and cities rather than stopping off to pick people up along the way. They get there names from the French word for 7 and "place" or places. Sept-place=7 places. They are Peugeot station wagons that must be filled in order to go anywhere. You first go to a "garage" in a town where you find a sept-place to take you where you want to go. You then put your stuff in the car (bags in the trunk cost more so pack light, argue that a small backpack is like your baby that you must hold in your lap, then just get in before they can respond), and finally wait until there are enough people who want to go to the same location as you. It generally doesn't take too long for larger cities such as Kaolack because there is a lot of traffic between those locations, so we only waited 10 minutes or so. Then you pay your fare and go. Upon arrival, you arrive at a ridiculous mess of people, taxis, sept-place, alhums and vendors known as the Kaolack garage, and you get out and book it as fast as you can out of there until you find a taxi that will take you to the house. Finally, you arrive at little America where the relaxation can occur.

Speaking of relaxing, I am about to embark on just that. I will update more soon, no worries!

~E