Damn bugs

There’s a certain point when you know you’re a real Peace Corps volunteer, and sometimes that comes when a project you put tons of time and care into fails. I came home from the regional house the other day for Christmas, and was extremely happy that I had brought home my guitar and finally had a chance to practice and play for my family here a little bit. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed is that my entire garden was wilted and dead, guava pepiniere included. There were thousands of little insects running around, and then when I showed Arame what had happened, she was super surprised. She is generally responsible for watering my garden while I’m gone, and she doesn’t mind doing it, but she failed to notice that somebody has placed a large pile of peanut fodder next to my millet fencing by the horse stable, and the bugs were emerging from it and eating everything in their path. After hearing tons of stories from other volunteers about trees being demolished by goats and people failing to water their pepinieres, I feel that I can now contribute to the pool of Peace Corps failures and be initiated into our world of disappointment. At least I can be thankful that my diet is not dependent on my garden and I will still have dinner tonight. I can’t imagine what it is like for farmers who have their harvests demolished and nothing to sell or eat. Makes you think.

Another thought-provoking conversation: women in Senegal. Learning about women and gender roles here is an ongoing process, but the last two days were especially weird for me. Yesterday, I was helping Arame cook lunch by cutting onions and garlic for her, and I noticed an empty packet of birth control pills in the binoir next to me. I asked her who owned them, and she hesitantly said that she did, and asked if I knew what they were. I replied that I did and explained, and she was embarrassed, assuming that I wouldn’t be able to answer. After reassuring her that it is more than just ok, I explained that I thought it was fantastic and many women in America use them as well, and if she has any questions she can feel free to ask me. It is extremely liberal and forward-thinking for a Senegalese woman to wait until after 20 to have a child, then go on birth control to prevent from getting pregnant immediately afterwards, and I am very proud of her initiative. On the other hand, Hadi, my younger sister who is 15 or 16, has a child a year old, and I just noticed today that she was pregnant again. This is not particularly unusual, but it is sad that I can actually notice a real difference in both Diama’s and Babacar’s mannerisms and maturity levels both at a year old. Of course every child is different, but Diama is clearly learning more about the world at a faster pace than is Babacar, since Hadi is not nearly as attentive or caring of a mother as is Arame.

The differences in education level show as well; though Arame did not make it much past an elementary school level, she can read a bit and understands a little bit of French. I don’t know any other women at the top of my head that can read anything in Keur Andalla (aside from Oumi, but she is an outsider as well) and this became a topic of conversation today. Seey, my neighbor, looked at my book that I was reading today, and I asked her if she could read. She adamantly replied that she could not, so I asked if she wanted to learn. She basically replied “Sure, if you’ll teach me” so I told her there was a class in Saloum Diane for women to learn to read. She laughed at me and told me there wasn’t any time, she has to cook lunch and go pull water from the well every day, how could she ever think of actually learning something else? Meanwhile, Arame will occasionally pull out her old French books and study with me when I get up the motivation to review my Wolof books, and she keep telling me that she wants to go back to school and continue her studies despite having to raise Diama and cook and pull water just like all the other women in the village. Remember in my last blog post how I wrote about the differences in education level and how people can compare themselves to one another easily here? Case and point.

Anyway, tomorrow is New Years! God knows how I will make it till midnight seeing as I generally pass out before 10 here, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. A group of us are meeting up in Toubakouta, renting out some rooms in a campemont, going out for a nice dinner and potentially jumping in the delta. Should be a good time- much different than the American version of the festivities, but fun nonetheless. Enjoy it everybody, and here’s to a good 2011!

Lessons learned

So I had this great blog entry going about my two weeks in Thies; what I learned, how I plan on applying it, what I did there, etc. But in the in the end, I really just spent two weeks being an American with other Americans. We went to restaurants, went to class every day, learned all sorts of interesting skills, but in the end, it wasn’t a particularly inspirational cultural exchange. I learned all sorts of interesting things in college, too, but you won’t find any blog entries detailing my new fact of the day from the last four years. Onto the village.

I am just about done spending a few days at site before I travel to Kaolack tomorrow for Christmas. Yes, I’m Jewish, but the idea of sitting at site while everyone is out partying just seems too depressing, so I will be sitting in the regional house enjoying ample free internet and kitchen space instead. In the meanwhile, I figured I’d write my blog entry at site, where I am surrounded by my inspirational African coming-of-age stories I know you’re all just dying to hear. So here goes.

At the all-volunteer conference, we got the chance to see the “universal nut sheller” in action. It’s pretty cool. It’s this crank-powered machine that will shell peanuts at the rate that 41 women can in the village by hand, thus saving time and allowing them to make a greater profit each season. Peace Corps was advertising it as revolutionary and able to really improve the lives of rural women who spend much of their free time next to little stools developing calluses. I came back to village with pictures to show Ousman and stories to tell. Then, yesterday, I was walking over to my hut when I saw some kid and an old-rusty looking crank-powered thing turning out a bunch of nicely-shelled peanuts into a sac placed clumsily underneath. It sort of reminds me of a fable I read in a Central American literature class in college- a priest gets lost in the woods and is captured by Mayans who are going to sacrifice him to the gods. Thinking he can outsmart them and trick them into thinking he has magical powers, he tries to tell them he knows the moon will go out at a certain time the next night since he knew about an upcoming solar eclipse. Instead, the Mayans sacrifice him while reading off a list of the previous, well-documented solar eclipses that have occurred over the last few thousand years. I’m glad my stakes for underestimation were not as high as that priest’s, but the lesson is the same. Don’t assume that people are innocent or lack knowledge by their socio-economic status or rural location.

In my case, I shouldn’t overestimate them either. Yesterday morning before going to the fields, my pregnant neighbor came into my hut asking me to read a doctor’s slip for her so she can know when she should go to the local health post for her checkup. The rate of illiteracy here is something crazy around 50% overall, but it is much higher for women and gets progressively higher as villages become more rural and isolated. Keur Andala is a strange place; while my counterpart is practically more educated than I am and can afford such novelties as solar panels and a tin roof, my uncle keeps asking me to buy him a cellphone, something even my pregnant illiterate neighbor owns and asked me to coordinate with my watch on the way out to the field yesterday. Apparently anything the white “toubab” owns is automatically correct.

This also changes my general perception of happiness in developing communities. Thinking I was a smart enlightened person before coming here, I assumed the general level of happiness here would be higher than I was used to; after all, people keep pointing to depression statistics in America. I have seen plenty of publications on how money actually can lead to unhappiness because it leads to a false obsession with material objects and a lower appreciation for the “little things in life.” In contrast, people have this idea that these small villages and tight-knit families are happy because they appreciate everything they have and work for. The large span of knowledge and control of money seems to crush this theory, for all intensive purposes. Now that people here are becoming less isolated and ever so slowly more westernized with their cell phones and Shakira’s “This is Africa” playing on the radio non-stop, people are more aware of what everybody else has and what they don’t have. Not that they are all out to cut themselves the way American media might lead you to believe, but at the end of a Sunday when my brother comes home from the market and I ask how his day was, he always seems to respond, “not so good- there isn’t any money.” So that’s my Peace Corps insightful story for the day.

On a less profound note, my quick life update: I’m slowly but surely starting to get into some real work here. My garden behind my hut is actually growing, I moved and rotated my pepiniere into a sunken ditch to hold in water and put berms around it this morning, and I’ve started visiting my uncle’s garden. He’s got a lot going for him, and it is a mini paradise with water and pepinieres galore- a regular nirvana as rural Senegalese communities go. The second time I went to visit it, though, I had a bit more time while I was helping to harvest rice to really observe some of his techniques, and I realized he could benefit from a lot of little changes- berms and terracing to help with water retention, pruning his mango trees a bit more, making some compost piles… there is work to be done. I’ve also spent a few days back out in the peanut fields, this time sifting through the dead plants and separating them with the wind. I’ll try to get a few pictures of that before the season’s over, but I wasted my camera battery taking pictures of the garden the other day. I’ll post those tomorrow. And PS, I figured out how to do multiple captions on google albums, so if you were curious about the subjects of my photos, now is the time to go back and look.

I’ll leave it at that for now. Hope everyone has (or had) a great holiday!

Much love from the west coast,

~E

An Intellectual Interlude

This past week, all of the volunteers in country and several volunteers from Togo, Niger, The Gambia, Mali and Burkina Faso gathered at the Thies training center to participate in the West-African All-Volunteer Conference and share best management practices from the field. Volunteers had the opportunity to present individual sessions, participate in workshops and round-table discussions, and see a few of the “appropriate technologies” that have been introduced to aid in development efforts. As a new volunteer, it was a fantastic opportunity to hear about many of the current projects, what made them successful or not, and pick people’s brains from around the country. I must say, after weeks of sitting at site, not knowing what to do or how to begin, it was an extremely refreshing and motivating experience. I attended a workshop on grant-writing in the Peace Corps, a discussion on GIS use in the field, various smaller sessions on project sustainability and environmental management, and learned a bit about projects outside my sector such as literacy and sanitation.

Some of the more interesting points I brought away included how to collaborate with NGOs and use multimedia as tools both in and out of the field. I will make sure to write a more in-depth post on development from a PCVs perspective, but I can definitely see an expanded use of technology in the Peace Corps network to start building a base of institutional memory and improve or streamline training sessions. For instance, volunteers have started using video and audio clips to help refresh technical skills of volunteers and train counterparts while carrying out a project or aid in communication when language barriers present a problem. Many volunteers now have radio shows that are pre-recorded and edited in collaborations at regional houses or in local cities, and digital on-line dictionaries help volunteers keep up-to-date on local language terminology. Every year, it becomes easier for more volunteers to have internet at site due to the proliferation of cell keys for laptops, and netbooks increase the portability and ease of that information. Most of the larger, more successful projects are conducted by volunteer cross-sector collaborations, so the benefits of easy communication, documentation and resources are clear. Some volunteers believe that having access to technology at site impedes community integration, but I believe that if utilized with an awareness of the culture and individual community, it will continue to be a beneficial tool to aid in development work.

But enough of that rant. I am currently in IST; our stage in-service technical training. We spend two weeks at the center specifically concentration on technical skills and project development, so when I go back to the village, I will really have more of the knowledge and ability to start small projects and begin to build my credibility as a knowledgeable community member. I am motivated to learn about cross-sector projects and how to integrate knowledge from different areas to really get everything you can out of a project. If I spend a lot of time and effort growing and installing a live fence, for instance, what will the benefits be in terms of vegetables grown in the garden and how will that benefit the village in the long term? A quick training on healthy diets, for instance, would encourage the villagers to consume some of those vegetables rather than selling them all for profit, or a marketing lesson would allow them to sell some vegetables at a higher profit and allow them to buy materials to make an even more successful garden in future years.

While all this is occurring in Senegal, it is the holiday season back in the States. So happy shopping people! I can’t believe that this time last year I was preparing for finals, planning ski trips and bundled up in blankets and jackets. It’s still hot here. That’s what happens when you live in the dessert in Africa. Not that I should have to ask for this, but make sure you all take plenty of snowy pictures for me! I’m pretty sure that a few good magazine spreads of ski pictures will end up in my hut before the end of the winter.

Oh, and PS: Happy Hannukah!

~E