first post from site

Blog Entry:

Hey lookie here! I’m updating my blog from site! My host family compound has solar paneling, and my host dad is patron enough to have a fixed line in the house, and he offered me to use it to get internet access once the AC/DC converter was up and running. Basically, I got sick of waiting and bought it myself as a gift for Tabaski and to provide myself with free electricity for the 2 years that I am here. It turns out the internet I get through the fixed line is quite cheap and faster than the internet in Kaolack since there are normally 10 or 11 computers trying to use internet at once in the regional house, so this is a pretty good option.

At any rate, I will be here for 2 more days, then I travel to Thies for our all-volunteer conference. We get two days of meetings about best-management practices in the field with volunteers from all over the country and a few from surrounding countries. Then, IST starts, and I have two more full weeks of sitting in class learning about agroforestry technologies. Ironically, I am actually super excited. It will be nice to see the rest of the stage again, be out of the village for a bit, eat training center food (it’s amazing the things you appreciate being in the village) and have a bit of fun. I also plan on visiting my homestay family and seeing how they’re doing, considering they’ve been calling me continuously since I left. It’s cute, but the fact that I haven’t really called them back on a regular basis makes me a bit of an asshole by Senegalese standards. There are a few times when I absolutely refuse to be part of Senegalese culture- calling everyone I know on a regular basis just to see if they’re doing ok is something I do not plan on doing.

I came to a realization though- being a PCV is strikingly like being an RA at site. Everyone is watching you all of the time, they see you as some form of authority figure but that does not necessarily mean they respect you, you are living “in a fishbowl,” you have to plan program and projects in your community, and you are responsible for presenting a good image all of the time to represent American culture. It’s also funny; I was remembering the weekly reports we used to have to fill out about our floors, and all of the questions still seem to apply: which new resident (villager) have you interacted with this week? What situations have you encountered and how have you followed up on them? What are you doing to keep yourself healthy and deal with stress? The list goes on. When all else fails and I am going crazy, I usually remember how in some ways, nothing has really changed. The sad part is, I used most of those comparisons during my interview for Peace Corps. I now realize why my recruiter decided I was a good candidate. Apparently, I said the right thing.

In terms of work, yesterday was actually somewhat successful! I sat down with my counterpart and two very motivated local farmers to decide what the overall needs of the community were and what types of projects they were interested in carrying out so that I can do the research for them while I am in Thies. I explained some of our training and offered some ideas, but it seems that people are particularly interested in “diversifying” types of fruit trees being planted, protecting fields, starting a bee-fodder project, fish farming in our little pond, and soil stabilization to prevent continued erosion. We’ll see how many of those projects get started or turn out to be successful, but now I feel like I’ve made connections and have a goal in life. It’s a pretty good feeling.

So I’ll check in again when I’ve made it safely to Thies. Remind me not to overuse my computer at site- I found myself looking through old pictures a lot in my hut halfway through writing this entry; I’m hoping that does not become an addiction. Homesickness is a painful thing sometimes, but I’ll leave it at that.

Love and miss you all!

~E

Tabaski and Thanksgiving. Yummy x 2

Wow, I have failed miserably at this whole blogging deal over Thanksgiving, as normally I would be much better about getting a good entry or two up as soon as I got to Kaolack. But here you go.

I successfully made it through 5 weeks of sitting at site, not doing anything particularly productive with my life, not quite knowing the language or people who live there, and essentially wondering what I got myself into. I made it through Tabaski and endless hours of sitting, peeling and cutting onions to cook the Tabaski meal, and watching them kill sheep. Little background information- Tabaski is the Islamic holiday that celebrates the story of Abraham and his willingness to kill his own son to prove his faithfulness to God. Most of you know the story or some variation thereof: at the last minute, God informs him that he should sacrifice a ram instead. In order to celebrate this, Muslims decided that they should do the same, so everyone kills sheep throughout the country and has large, meat-eating celebrations. However, the process of killing and cooking the sheep is not exactly the clean, well-run operation that you would imagine in the states. People dig a hole in the ground to drain the blood, everyone brings their sheep or goat over to the communal killing location, and they ceremonially saw off the sheeps’ heads with machetes. There are a few pictures of the killing in the Tabaski album if you’re curious to see the gore. I’ve got a video too if anybody is really sick in the head.

The problem with this whole Tabaski process is that it is almost entirely based around the cooking process, and in Senegal, cooking is exclusively the women’s job. This gets really annoying when you consider that my sister Umi went home to her family in Foungioune for Tabaski, my mom Arame got very sick, and I have a small enough family that much of the cooking responsibility fell to me. After spending hours peeling onions and cutting up chunks of meat, we had to wait until 3 in the afternoon to be able to serve the men food. Another hour later, finally, women were able to sit down and actually eat the food they had been cooking all morning. But before they could do so, they decided that the whole community must eat exactly the same meal, so they put all the cooked food from all of the bowls from all of the families into one large bowl, mixed it, then redistributed it back into the bowls brought by all the women. It was a rather odd process. Everyone then dressed up, and many of the younger people went out dancing each night. I did my best to make an appearance, but I have decided that Senegalese dancing is probably better watched than done, especially if I am going to be here for two years.

By the end of the five weeks, I was definitely ready to get out of site. After days of sitting in another culture, isolated from friends and family and not having much to do, I was beginning to lose my patience. A visit to Cassie’s site did the trick. I traveled down to her site just north of Karang to see her lovely agroforestry projects and get inspiration for my own in the future. We wondered around all morning, chatted, saw some lovely live fencing, and decided that it made no sense for us to sit around and do nothing all night when we had a free afternoon to travel into Kaolack, so we came into the house for the night and had a chance to hang out with friends a bit before the madness of Thanksgiving occurred.

Thanksgiving itself was lovely. I was responsible for making pies, because as those of you who know me probably know, I am much more of a baker than a cook. I really miss baking in the states- our ovens have pilot lights, temperature gauges, and are big enough to put more than two tiny pies in them on its single rack at once. However, it was still a good time hanging out in the kitchen, listening to music and baking with friends. After two full days of cooking and baking and 5 mil (about 10 bucks) a person, we put together a true Thanksgiving feast of turkey, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, a few other vegetable dishes, corn bread (we actually had to pound the corn meal from scratch), sangria with orange slices actually floating in it, and pumpkin, squash and apple pies. I am pretty sure I have never been more full in my entire life. Definitely a success. And what do you imagine happens when you have 41 just out of college kids in a house after a good meal hanging out in a house together? You’re probably wrong. We sat around, complained about how full we all were, watched a movie, and went to bed. Thanksgiving, no matter where in the world you are, is not a giant party. That tryptophan gets you every time.

I bought an AC/DC converter for my family so I will be able to charge my computer at site! That means I will have internet access as soon as that gets hooked up and I can secure a wireless key, so I look forward to skyping and emailing all of you on a more regular basis very soon. Also, I found a volunteer who is leaving soon and is actually planning on GIVNG me his guitar, so I will be saner at site in the future, inshallah. At any rate, it seems that the worst of the at-site insanity is over, but I have a long way to go, so we’ll see how this journey plays out. In the meantime, I will be traveling into Thies for our all-volunteer conference on Thursday, so I will soon again have internet and bring you the next episode of these ramblings.

Until next time,

~E

Almost Thanksgiving

Day trip to Sokone! I’m pretty sure that I need to stop showing up at other volunteer’s doors asking to use their computers to type blog entries. If I get into that habit, it may not fly so well when this whole adventure is over and I’m back in the land of the free. Can you imagine- “Hey neighbor, how’s it going? Just gonna sit and watch your TV for a while because I don’t have one yet. I’ll only be a little while, thanks!”Maybe not.

Public transport situation is getting slightly better. One of the advantages to living in a remote village is that there is only one or two cars you can use, so you get to know the drivers pretty well. In fact, I now have the phone numbers of the two bus drivers that go to Saloum Diane or Keur Andalla saved in my phone, which makes it much easier when I go into a crowded garage and the one car that is going to my destination recognizes me and makes sure I am on it. When I got off this morning, the driver left me with strict instructions on where I should sit and wait for him, what time he will be back this afternoon and how much it will cost to get back. This is all well and good, other than the fact that to get here, I woke up at 4:15 am to catch the bus at about 5, then sat as it drove over rough bush roads honking its horn to wake everyone up and alert people of its presence for the 2-hour trip into the city. You give a little, you take a little I guess. Everything in Senegal is a tradeoff.

At any rate, the 5 week challenge is coming into its homestretch! We are more than 3 weeks in now, and within the next week Tabaski will occur, which is sort of equivalent to Easter in the States. It comes about 2 months after Korite, as you may have noticed, and involves many of the same traditions- women braiding their hair and buying new clothes, getting dressed up and cooking fancy meals involving meat and onions. It should be a good time. I am, however, avoiding markets at all costs from here on out until after the holiday is over, because I do not want to deal with frenzied Senegalese trying to buy their goats last minute to kill for the holiday. So maybe it’s not exactly like Easter but you get the idea.

I’ve noticed lately that very little goes to waste around here, though an outsider would never know it by all the trash in the streets. Things get reused all the time for various purposes that Americans would never think to do. This is mostly because we have access to buying products that usually fill that purpose, and the old saying of reduce, reuse recycle is rarely taken to heart when a vendor has a product that fills the exact purpose you were looking for. I have started following along with this trend, and have become increasingly more creative with my use of products I may have previously disposed of. For instance, when the cable to my hut broke and I was solar lamp-less for a few days, I had to find a way to hold a candle.Given that the boutique next to me doesn’t even sell bread never mind candlesticks, I used a small cardboard box that had contained the lighter for my gas stove and filled it with dirt to hold the candle in place. When I painted my room, an old coke bottle with the top cut off proved to be the perfect container to mix paint and paint thinner. When I was breaking up the soil in my garden-to-be, a ripped up plastic sheet that was stuck under the ground seemed to be the perfect cover for my compost pile (banana tree leaves work well too), and the chaco box that my parents sent a care package in work great as a clothespins holder. Senegalese use a cleaned-out tomato can as a cup for water so often that when cooking, the can itself has actually become a unit of measurement. I feel like this is a good trend that I should bring back with me- if anybody is in, we should start a club. The 4 Rs- Reduce, reuse, recycle, for real. Please don’t make fun of my humor, I’m a geek and I’m proud of it.

My village had a big day yesterday! As I was chilling and reading my book in the afternoon, my family told me that there were a few Toubabs walking around. I found that hard to believe, so I got up to investigate, and sure enough a group of three white people and two other Senegalese were wondering around taking pictures of trees. Much as remote peanut-farming villages in Senegal seem like the most desirable place in the world for a nice relaxing vacation and this seemed entirely normal to me, I decided to go introduce myself anyway. It turns out that and NGO collaboration consisting of Plan Vivo, BioClimate and some professors from the University of Dakar were investigating a group of villages in the area and scouting out potential host sites to start some research on agroforestry techniques there. Hah! Now I know that as a PCV I am expected to find out what other organizations are active in the area and try to form connections and collaborate on projects, but I did not expect one to show up knocking on my door. They were unaware that a PCV was present in village, since most of them are based out of Denmark and Scotland, so we talked a bit and tried to figure out what each organization was up to in the village. They proceeded to sit my chief of village and half of the village down and explain the benefits of agroforestry and try to gauge their interest in participating in projects with the NGO. As far as I have gathered, there is no definite that they will return, and they are simply trying to do surveys of potential sites before selecting specific villages to work with. An exciting day for the village for sure, but no guarentees that anything will happen. I still feel as though my work has officially started; I got to act as a delegate for the village, share information, speak in Wolof (they had to bring a translator) and gain some contacts that may be useful in the future.

Chillin in Toubakouta

Yay I have a computer! I apologize in advance- this might be long. I don’t have computer access that much these days, so I take advantage when I can.

Biked into Toubakouta to hang out with Garrison and Amy and see civilization for a few hours. Sometimes I forget what it looks like. Granted, our definition of civilization is a bit different here- if I can get a bean sandwich in a little shack and speak English with another volunteer for a few hours, I’m a pretty happy camper. The ride in is really beautiful- it is about 4 kilometers to Saloum Diane on a sand road, which is a pain, then a little over 20 or so into Toubakouta on a laterite clay road. It’s about a 2 hour ride, so you can imagine I will be in pretty damn good biking shape after 2 years of this. Pan-Mass challenge, anybody? I showed up at another volunteer’s door randomly since the internet café next door was going to charge me a mil an hour to use the internet, which is ridiculous in comparison to the 300 I paid in Sokone. Now I am sitting and typing on his computer while he does laundry, and I will upload this in a little while at a campemont with internet access. Eventually, I will have internet at site, so that should solve that problem.

Last Thursday, I went to a groupemont training down in Karang on the border of the Gambia. To get there, I stayed overnight with a study-abroad student in Saloum Diane and caught a sept-place at 6 am down to the city, and a Peace Corps car brought us over to the garden. Translation, for those of you who are not yet fluent in PC-Senegalese: a groupemont is a small organization of women who share a garden space and help to maintain it, then split the profit of what they make as a result of selling their produce. This is one of the major goals of the agriculture section of PC Senegal- working with women’s groups to enhance gender equality by providing women with the means to create their own income aside from what their husbands allow them and teaching them agriculture and agroforestry techniques to increase yield and sustainability. I watched as women dug zai holes and terraces into the land, and helped a bit despite the heat. Zai holes are small round holes about 20 cm deep that you dig into a slope and plant field crops in such as millet or corn, and you form a berm around the downhill side to catch water when it rains. Most of you are familiar with terraces- flat areas of land built into the side of a hill where you can plant crops. Senegal is not exactly known for its rolling hills and slopesides, but it is a useful technique even in a very minor slope where any water that can be caught should be use effectively. Both the zai holes and the terraces are then amended by digging the crop area and adding composting materials such as green leaves, brown leaves, manure, and charcoal as a carbon source. Sometime in the near future, planting will begin for dry-season gardening. Believe it or not, this concept actually exists- some plants can tolerate a drier climate, and if watered to a certain extent, can be a productive use of time and effort during the dry cool season in December and January into the warmer dry season later in spring. I’ve got some pictures of all of this, but you have to wait until I get back to Kaolack to see. Gotta keep everyone in suspense somehow.

Enough of technical stuff. Want to know how we buy things in Senegal? We go to Loumas! Loumas are open markets that occur weekly in certain villages, and comprise much of the major economic exchange in remote villages where regular markets don’t exist. Aside from a few boutiques scattered throughout larger villages (my village only has 1 because nobody likes us) most people do their shopping and selling on a weekly basis in the market. The major louma near me is in a village called Touba Mouride, and it occurs every Sunday. I have two options for getting there- pay 250 CFA to take an overcrowded car there at 6 am over a horrible road with tons of products to sell strapped to the top and wait at louma until 5 to leave, or bike. The bike ride is about an hour long, but entirely worth the trip, as you can well imagine. The other day, I biked there and met up with my sister Umi and Amy, my neighboring volunteer. Probably spent too much money (because the equivalent of 20 bucks American is a huge deal here) but I came home with some lovely spoils: a giant clay pot to keep water cool at site, materials to build a door for my backyard, extra paint thinner to finish painting my room, margarine, some bananas, and some bread. Yesterday afternoon, Umi and I attempted to finish painting my room- still a little bit short on the paint thinner, so I bought some more today in Toubakouta, but it’s an activity and a welcome break from going to the field. As you can imagine, transporting everything home was an adventure in itself, so the clay pot was strapped to the top of the car that Umi took home, the wood for the door was lashed to the horse charet that my brother took into louma, and I biked home with a backpack full of bread and bananas and not quite enough water. (I learned my lesson, I have more than enough water for today.) Most of my time in market, I found myself missing the malls back home- the food courts there are a far cry from the small tin shack that I got a bowl of rice with a piece of fish in for lunch, and lord knows some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream afterwards from Providence Place would have been lovely, but you learn to live without it.

I know my sister (my real one) has been dying to hear about my “daily routine,” so I will do my best with what semblance of a routine exists in my life. When staying in village, I usually wake up at 7 am- right after the sun comes up, and heat up water to make coffee. I turn on my ipod and sit on my plastic mat in my room and set up everything to make breakfast- usually some bread with some jelly or honey- and chill out while drinking coffee and taking my sweet time to get ready for the day while it is still cool outside. I brush my teeth with a water bottle and put out my solar charger for the day. I will eventually be able to charge everything in the house where there is solar electricity, but I’d prefer not to take advantage all the time. Afterwards, I emerge from my hut around 8 am or so to go greet my family while they are cooking breakfast and sleeping- Umi is still sleeping if she’s not teaching that day, and my mom and taking care of baby Diama. She is my 1-year old younger sister, and I love her probably more than anyone in the village. I then go back to my hut and leave the door open so people can greet me while I do a little bit of work preparing to the plant my garden- I have a small compost pile going and I’ve broken up the soil and constructed some bad-ass handles with eucalyptus branches with a machetti. (Sorry if I’m repeating anything, I don’t have internet right now to check back on my old entries.) When my mom is ready, I go out to the field to help pull up peanuts until noon, then we come back and I take a short bucket bath and rest for a while before lunch. We don’t eat lunch until 3 normally, so I have a small snack and hang out until then. The afternoon really has no rhyme or reason to it. Eventually, I will use it for real work time, but right now I spend a lot of time hanging out with the women, picking peanuts off the plants we brought back to village, having tea, and doing other random tasks (such as painting my room) and needed. We eat dinner around 8 or so- lately we’ve had millet and beans just about every night. It’s not that bad, at least it’s palatable. In some villages, I’m pretty sure it’s difficult to eat whatever was made. On the other hand, some people cook for themselves or are more urban and live with patron families that cook better dinners. I’m in the Peace Corps- I take what I can get.

Speaking of taking what I can get, many of you are wondering what strategies I use to stay sane while living in a remote village with no good electricity, pulling water out of a well, no internet access, difficult transportation and no English. I have a few things that keep me relatively happy. My morning routine is a big part of that- it’s amazing what an hour of having a cup of coffee and listening to familiar American music does for your morale each day. My sister is another big part of that. She gets that it’s difficult to come live away from your home and give up comforts that you are used to, especially when you are educated and can look at the world around you with a more critical eye. I have had many conversations that have ended with “Xamunu dara u aduna…” They don’t know anything about the world. Just hearing that she gets it, even if she doesn’t speak English or has never been out of Senegal, is a huge help. I can tell her whatever, and she doesn’t judge. She knows what skype is and has relatives in the States, France and Italy, so she understands a bit more about where I’m coming from. It’s also nice that I can put on a Goo Goo Dolls song and she will have actually heard it before, which is more than I can say about Senegalese music before I came here. Talking to people in the states (echem thanks Tim) and writing letters home makes a huge difference too. I really do love sharing my experiences with people, hence this blog, and hearing what is going on back home. Just knowing that someone had a difficult day at work or that the Patriots won or lost makes me feel a bit more connected to my life back home. Things like today, biking into Toubakouta for the day, make a big difference as well- like I started this entry with, a bean sandwich and a good English conversation makes a world of difference. Feel free to call me any time you like, you might be lucky and I’ll have reception and we can talk about your life. I don’t judge. And before I ramble for another few pages, I’ll leave it here for today. Probably will update again when I get to Sokone for my mail and language seminar in a week or two. More about that then.

Mucho Senegalese Amour,

~E