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.