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