November, and Tabaski, and those other things

Here I am, November 10th, sitting in the Kaolack house for installs. The new agriculture stage is finally here, and they are all living through that first terrifying day of newness and confusion. I don't envy that first day when you know nothing and nobody and are suddenly cut off from all your friends. But just as my stage made it through last year, they'll all make it through just fine this year.

It's nice to have all the sites full again, and my subregion is up to 15 people. 15! We started off with maybe 8, so it has almost doubled in the year I've been here. I'm pretty stoked for us too; we've got a really diverse and motivated group of people who I know will do great things. I'm proud I get the chance to help them as one of the coordinators of our work zone this year. And if nothing else, typing up meeting notes and visiting other people's sites gives me something to do in the non-agfo season.

In other news, it was Tabaski this past week, and I got to really celebrate with my family this year in a way that I was not quite able to do last year when my language skills and relationships were just starting to develop. I helped cook, watched the men kill and clean the sheep (a fascinating biology lesson) and went out dancing at night. I actually put a bunch of American dance songs on a flash drive and played them on a radio that one of my neighbors have and started teaching the girls what American dancing looks like. Felt a little silly showing little girls how to move their hips and get into it, but they loved the music and laughed a lot. Besides, Senegalese dancing is awkwardly sexual in its own way, and it's not uncommon to see women at baptisms jumping around and lifting their skirts up to show everyone what they've got under there (sometimes just underwear, but sometimes not) so I did not feel THAT bad teaching them how to move.

Tomorrow I'm on my way back to village to stick out the next couple of weeks until Thanksgiving, and I will hopefully be giving this health tourney I'm putting together a test run. See, my Poste de Sante doctor and I were putting together a mini health tourney for teaching first aid to villagers and how to take care of injuries until they can see a doctor. There was some miscommunication about funding and timing, which is essentially the downfall of every good Peace Corps project, and now I'm left with a bunch of visual aids that I paid for and drew myself and no real schedule or plan for how to use them. My next task is to convince the doctor that we can do this project informally and just do a test run to see how it works. I could also try to get my school gardens up and running, and forget the whole health tourney thing ever happened.

Basically, I just have to find ways to distract myself until mid-December, when I go on vacation to AMERICA. When you've been away for over 15 months, the last few weeks before you finally get to see your family is relatively unproductive. I have no high hopes for changing the world at the moment, only dreams of Dunkin Donuts and ski lodges. I'll update on how the whole village thing goes soon. Again, got to keep myself distracted, right?

~E

Another random reflection on life

Yesterday, I used cashed in the grant money I got for two school gardens that I am in charge of, and put down about $300 dollars at a local hardware store on chicken wire, watering cans, rakes, shovels, and gardening picks that will be used by students to create their very own little vegetable plots. Well try to, anyway. The process involved biking over to another larger village about 40 minutes away, negotiating prices, waiting for the car to come that goes each day between Saloum Diane and Kaolack, and getting all the materials and me and my bike onto that car to take back to Saloum Diane and unload at my friend Mbaye’s house there. Considering the general lack of organization and quality transport in this country, I’d consider it a pretty successful day.

It got me thinking how much harder that whole process would have been even a couple of months ago before I had the same relationships with everyone in the area that I did. Knowing the owner of the hardware store, the car driver, and the people over in Saloum Diane really expediated a process that could have been much harder had I not known all of these people. This, in turn, got me thinking about where I live now. I don’t think of myself as living in Africa so much as living in Keur Andallah and being a part of the Kaolack region in Senegal. I don’t spend every day now thinking “Wow, I’m in Africa” just as we don’t think every day in the states “Wow, I live in North America. Isn’t that special?”

I guess this just happens naturally over time, and speaking of time, it has now been a year since swear-in, and a year ago tomorrow was the day that I first set foot in Keur Andallah. So congratulations to anyone in my stage reading this, and let this be my own personal “yay for me” moment. With a little bit of perspective, it’s been a really rewarding experience thus far, and it just made me realize how little time I have left here. If I’ve already been here half my total time, that means I have that same amount of time to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish in Senegal before I’m out. I took a little while the other morning to write down a short list of goals that I’d like to at least attempt before I leave here so I can start planning now. Time, just as it does anywhere, slips by when you’re not looking, and before you know it your time’s up. I wrote down mostly projects I’d like to try: painting a mural, grafting some mango and ziziphus trees, establishing a couple more live fences, etc. Then I still have to consider the places I want to visit before I leave…

Sort of a weird analogy I came up with while making my list is that your service in Peace Corps is like a whole human life cycle condensed into 2 years. You get here ,and you are an infant who does not know anything about anything- the language barrier is obvious, but how do you feel when you look at the hole in the floor where you’re expected to do your business and realize that your really are back at square one. Then a few months go by and you’re an infant- blabbing in baby language and learning how to eat or greet properly, and after that you are swearing in- more like your high school graduation- and off on your own learning how to be an independent human being. Over time you pick up the language, make friends, find a purpose (even if it is just to water a couple of seeds you planted). Then a year in, you have your mid-life crisis. Believe me, every volunteer I’ve talked to has had a mid-service crisis, which usually comes just before your actually halfway point. You struggle to find meaning in what you’ve done so far and how to make the best use of your remaining time here. Time goes on, and you start to realize that your time really is limited here, and you should see all those places that you never got to see and spend time with people you became friends with. By the time you leave, you have to accept what you’ve accomplished, knowing your time’s run out, and you’re going to say goodbye to all your friends and your host family knowing you probably won’t see any of them again. By Peace Corps life-cycle standards, that makes me about 50 years old right now. Got through my mid-life crisis, and now it’s time to buckle down and start seeing places, spending time with friends and getting projects done that I want to accomplish before I leave.

Time to get to it. I’m starting with a new herb garden. Wish me luck.

~E

Just a cute anecdote for the day:

As I was walking out to the field this morning, I said good morning to one of my elderly male neighbors and greeted him as usual. He said that there was a lot of grass now and if you walk in it there’s laeye. I looked at him slightly confused since I had not heard that word before, and after he confirmed that I did not know what it meant, he went on to explain that it is water in the grass in the mornings. I exclaimed,

“Oh, dew! Yeah I know what that is.”

He replied that yes- it’s water, and it must come from up above in the trees at night or maybe it comes from the ground, but either way, it goes away each day when the sun comes out and gets hot, then comes back again at night.

Helpless without the vocabulary to explain the concept of condensation and temperature difference in Wolof, I just smiled and agreed with him and went on my way. Sometimes Senegal amuses me.

~E

English in Dakar

So I've been to Dakar a couple of times, but never for such a long time. I made the trip to participate in the Access English Camps sponsored by the US Embassy, and it was a really fun and rewarding experience. We worked with middle school-aged students and put together a typical American summer day camp for a week, conducting activities in English and teaching them about our culture. We had them sing camp songs, participate in field day activities like the 3-legged race and tug of war, played basketball and ultimate frisbee, taught them capture the flag, and let them organize little skits in English to perform to the group. We also had a few classroom based activities involving a geography game show ("who can point to New York on this map?") and American music history ("Anyone ever hear of B.B. King?") At least now they know that American music does not consist solely of Beyonce and Rhianna. Oh, and you can't forget Justin Beiber. When we had the kids translating lyrics to their favorite songs, a couple of them could recite all of Beiber's "Baby." Keep in mind, English is the 3rd or 4th language many of these kids are learning.

It was a bit difficult to put together a week's worth of educational and fun activities in the spur of the moment, but between six of us, I think we did a pretty good job. In fact, the local TV station came and interviewed us on the day the US Ambassador made an appearance. I was apparently on national TV speaking in Wolof for an interview, though I haven't had the opportunity to watch myself. It's probably better that way.

After the camp was over, I stuck around in Dakar for my mid-service medical exam and to say goodbye to one of my good friends who finished her service and left. Now I will go back to Kaolack tomorrow with a clean bill of health (woot woot!) and as an official second-year volunteer to welcome the new trainees of the agriculture stage that is scheduled to swear in a the beginning of November. Then it's back to the usual grind, but this time with schools! Finally, school will be starting sessions again, which means that I get to return to my favorite project of school gardens and my Senegalese friends will all return to the villages. Time is really flying now. I'll be home on vacation for the holidays before I know it!

~E

Mangrove Madness

Sometimes I find that I’m so busy it’s hard to stay on top of everything going on here, and some days it just stops and I’m back to being bored again. You can never really fall into a routine. The past week I was up in Thies teaching the new stage for a day, then traveled through Kaolack and onto Toubacouta for a mangrove reforestation, and now I’m back to site for a week before continuing onto Dakar for an English camp and my midservice exam. These days, I live in this perpetual state of disbelief; it’s been over a year already in country, I still have a year left to go, I get to go home for vacation in a few months, I’m teaching the new stage and becoming a second-year volunteer, running meetings and actively planning projects and trainings. You never quite get over these things.

Peace Corps has made me, however, one of the world’s greatest travelers, because I can be stuck in a car for long periods of time and not notice it, even when squished in the back of a sept-place with large Senegalese woman on either side of me and breathing in fumes. Podcasts of “This American Life” and “Radiolab” do help matters, but when it’s over and I still have to bike 30 km over a dirt road back to site, I don’t blink an eye. Traveling in America will be heaven for me when this is all over.

At any rate, training was enjoyable, and I got to try my hand at teaching an hour-long session and using my experiences as teaching tools. I probably was a bit nervous at first, because at one point a trainee raised his hand and jokingly asked “Do you always talk this fast? You’re not from California, I assume.” I slowed down after that. Overall, it went well, and I then got to take advantage of a free afternoon in Thies to go buy stuff at the toubab stores downtown.

The mangrove reforestation went swimmingly as well. To save money in my travels, I camped out at one of the campemonts where the Tobuacouta volunteer lives. Some other volunteers were staying in a campemont with a pool, and the people working there let us all come over and use it, so everyone hung out in the pool at night and caught up. The reforestation itself involved a trip to the delta, an hour long boat-ride out to the reforestation area and a couple of hours of sticking mangrove seeds in the mud out in the sun. It’s more fun that it sounds, but also very sunscreen-intensive. There were large groups of kids that were enthusiastically running around and sticking the seeds in the ground as fast as they could, which limited the work that we had to do, and the whole event culminated in a water fight and some sharing of some boisson. It was a pretty successful day.

Now I’m just in transition. Outplanting is done, the rainy season is starting to wind down, I’m waiting for the teachers to get back to start the school gardens up again, and I’m planning some other tourney-type of projects with the doctor and some other volunteers that I’ll write about in the coming months. For the time being, my days consist of reading, playing guitar, blogging, and getting caught in the rain in Pape’s field. Fun times.

~E

Trainings and such

Wow busy week. Tuesday I conducted a training for the women’s group to get them to outplant their pepiniere that they made a while back and promptly forgot about, Wednesday I outplanted all morning with one of my farmers, yesterday we did the moringa tourney part 2 teaching about nutrition and how to use moringa powder, and today Garrison and I finally got the pump in my village up and running, once and for all (inchallah.) All of a sudden it’s Friday. Funny how you forget how time goes by fast when you’re busy.

The women’s group day went smoothly- it’s a weight off my shoulders knowing that several hundred trees will actually make it into the ground this year and all that work will not have gone to waste. Now I’m hoping that they all see the value of the work they were doing once the trees finally start to take, and we’ll be able to get everything done sooner next year and not put it off until after Ramadan is over. Working together with some of the kids from the student association in Saloum Diane was really helpful. They got here much later than expected so we didn’t get the training started until around 10:30 or so, but this is Senegal, and therefore the only thing you can be certain of is that nothing will ever start on time.

The exact same problem occurred yesterday in Saloum Diane. People are not used to being told to get their act together, so the whole idea of rushing is a foreign concept. You can even see it in the way they walk- they sort of just saunter along not really caring about where they are going. Granted, I know plenty of Senegalese people who understand the concept of timeliness, but they are all generally the educated ones who have gone to school and been in trouble at some point in their lives for being late. Therefore, my perspective on this country is a tad bit skewed by the isolation of the village life. But I digress…

Once the moringa training got underway, it was actually quite successful. The doctor from our Poste de Sante (health post) came to the event and helped to translate our sketchy wolof into understandable wolof and was able to take into account cultural knowledge and get the point across better than we would be able to. The training was just a talk in a classroom about what vitamins are, what each one does, and how to incorporate them into your diet using moringa powder. We demonstrated how to make the powder with some dried leaves and pestle and mortar, and then we asked some women to participate and help us cook a standard Senegalese porridge called Rui. We then put the powder they made into the porridge to show that it doesn’t change the taste at all but it is much more nutritious.

Overall, I think we got the point across pretty well, but I still wonder how many people are actually consistently going to put in the effort to change their diet and add moringa powder. The general culture in Senegal is that you don’t do a lot more work than you have to, and this represents another task that the toubabs are asking them to do. Garrison and I were chatting yesterday and we realized that even if every single person in that training taught every other person in the village about moringa powder and they all made an effort to use it, how much would that change the quality of their life? It’s basically the same thing as taking vitamins, and I know people in the states who take vitamins and people who don’t care, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that one group is happier than the other. Still, we do the best we can, and for what its worth, the doctor told me he thought the women would actually try what they learned in their own homes. And besides, I get the satisfaction of knowing that we’re still doing the best we can, so I’ll take it for what it’s worth.

~E

Highs and Lows

Highs and Lows

Anybody reading that from RWU, remember that game? Granted, probably anybody who has gone to college recently or been in any sort of club knows highs and lows- you say the high point of your day and the low point.

Today: I went to Saloum Diane to meet up with my counterparts there and prepare for moringa tourney and our women’s outplanting formation. Went to the school to check up on the intensive beds. My low for the day: Some kid actually broke open the side door of the schoolyard to let their livestock in so that it could eat the grass and destroy the intensive beds, which are all now pretty much grazed to the ground. We (and by we I mean the school director) yelled at some kid walking by with his donkey, who the school director had seen grazing yesterday, and the kid just mumbled some stuff, looked away and continued walking. Real respectful. If it was me, then much as it would anger me I would understand more than the school director himself. Anyway, we met up with the chief of village and some other people, and explained the project and the upcoming follow-up nutritional tourney that we are planning, and they are all on board with it, so that redeemed it little.

The high of my day, though, was when we went back to Mbaye’s house so I could go through all the parts of the project so that he could present it better in native Wolof, and during the conversation he said how he liked the project and actually started a moringa bed himself. We walked behind the house to the garden and voila! A tiny little rudimentary moringa intensive bed was germinating away, complete with trees off to the side to provide seeds for replacement in the future. That was one of those very rare times that I actually get to see our skills applied and carried on.

And on a more personal note- one more high and low. High: I started jumproping in my hut since it is hard to get out and run when it is raining all the time, and I needed exercise. Discovered that it is really effective way of avoiding gawking Senegalese while the Toubab girl runs around in shorts first thing in the morning.

Low: I don’t remember the time my calves hurt this badly.

~E

New SEDers

A couple of days ago, we welcomed a new group of Small Enterprise Development volunteers to Kaolack, and seeing as everyone was on vacation, COSed or not wanting to deal with it, I ended up in charge of coordinating their installation. Luckily it was a small group, and only 9 new volunteers were here, but this continued the bizarre year-in-country experience. I found myself standing in front of them all with my notes going over rules of the house, places to eat and shop in Kaolack, and apologizing in advance for our slow annoying internet.

Our subregion is welcoming 3 new volunteers to replace my friends Byron, Cassie and Cail. This is probably the weirdest experience of all, since those people really helped me get through my first year in country and were my go-to people when I had a question about anything, and now I'm supposed to be the one responsible for having all the answers. I really do remember thinking the year-in volunteers knew everything and were totally comfortable in this country, and now I realize that nobody ever has all the answers to anything. Yes, I've adapted and I can more comfortably navigate this developing country in a language I previously did not understand a word of, but by no stretch of the imagination do I have all the answers. We'll see if it's any different a year from now.

Well I'm out.

~E

Year in Country

Last week, I passed my first year in this country, which I aptly managed to forget to blog about and thus am now getting around to my public reflections on life. Rather than reflecting on how far I've come, etc, I'll share a quick little anecdote. Most days at site, I go out of the field in the morning with a bag containing my water bottle, planner (because I'm a geek) and my journal, so I can sit in peace and write about life without being bothered by people in the compound. The other day I was reading back in the journal to earlier in my service, sometime right after install, and got to a line that read almost like "man, I can't imagine how much I will have adjusted to all of this after a year has gone by." Ironically, this was almost exactly my year mark in country when I read this, and I could very clearly remember writing that statement in the first place. It was sort of a surreal talking-to-myself-from-a-year-ago experience. I guess you could also call it a time capsule.

Then, talking to my dad on skype yesterday, he commented about how weird it will be to read back on the journal after I've been back in the states for a while and whenever I'm having a hard time there, I can remember "at least I'm not in Senegal anymore." That's still seems like forever into the future, but I'm sure when it does happen, reading back on it will seem quite recent. Funny how time works.

The point of this whole thing is that despite the fact that I feel like I've been in this country for eternity sometimes and am bound to while away the rest of my life here, I'm really almost halfway done. And that's sort of a scary thought. I've been thinking "Ok, what have I accomplished so far? Now I've got about that amount of time to accomplish everything else I'll do in this country." And yes, I realize that I haven't quite yet reached a year at site, but as we speak the stage a year ahead of me is in the process of ending their service and going home. I'm starting to get that same feeling that I had in college of "what next?," you know, the feeling you get when you don't know where you'll be or what you'll be doing in a year or so. But I guess that's part of the excitement of it all.

Ok enough sentimental ramblings on time. Back in the here and now, I currently find myself piled high in planning programs and installs. The new SED volunteers are due to arrive in Kaolack for their installation on Sunday morning, and being the overachiever that I am, I had to volunteer to coordinate the process. This means that I will go back to site today, only to return again 3 days later to continue my online ramblings to you all.

In addition, we had a training for our upcoming moringa health tourney yesterday. If you remember correctly, we did a region-wide tourney training how to plant moringa intensive beds a month ago, and I installed one in the primary school in Saloum Diane with the help of some other volunteers and some very motivated Senegalese counterparts. Now, we are returning to all of those sites armed with dried moringa leaves to make moringa powder, ingredients for making a nutritional porridge, and visual aids to help us explain the benefits of vitamins and importance of eating healthy foods to combat illness and malnutrition. I am lucky enough to have some friends in Saloum Diane that are extremely motivated to make this program work- the primary school director and one of the high school students that is home for the summer have both proved to be indispensable counterparts who want to educate the community. The high school student, Mbaye, has also expressed interest in coordinating an outplanting day to help with the women's garden pepiniere in Keur Andallah, so we will hold a training in my village in few weeks to help the women understand the importance to live fencing to protect their field and the trees to improve the soil. Hopefully, we will manage to outplant a few hundred trees in one day with the help of the communitarial student association, the women's group, and a few key Senegalese counterparts that are willing to get the message across.

Hopefully, when everyone is done starving themselves for Ramadan and people are once again willing to work, September will be a very productive month. Sometimes you really just have to set small goals for yourself, like making it through the next two weeks. I'm ready for this boring lull in my service to be over.

~E

Ramadan. Second time around.

I’m currently sitting here in my hut on a rainy Tuesday, which also happens to be the first day of Ramadan, cooking myself a lovely little lunch of mashed potatoes and hiding from the world. For those of you who are unaware of the outside world and don’t know what Ramadan is, it is the Muslim month of fasting to teach humility, patience and submissiveness to God (thank you wikipedia). They are permitted to break fast every evening, and in Senegal we do so with coffee dates and bread. I was in homestay last year during Ramadan already, so it is not a foreign holiday to me now. However in training, the family was briefed on the fact that we had just gotten to country, had no resources and didn’t understand the culture or language, and they were expected to cook us lunch. Here in the village, no such briefing or expectation occurs, and as a full-fledged volunteer, you’re on your own.

Many volunteers choose to fast along with their families, and people in the village often expect that you do fast with the rest of the community. However, many of us also resort to hiding in our huts and treating ourselves to all the foods we generally don’t cook for ourselves on a regular basis in village. I talked to a couple of Senegalese friends and family members about this, and the understand. Yes, the villagers will joke about me having to fast with everyone, and yes, I have to be very discreet, but according to my Senegalese uncle Babacar, they understand that I’m not Muslim and there’s no real spiritual gratification in it for me. I can try to be integrated to a point, but in the end I’m still me, and when all my friends are getting out of village to go on vacation or COS, I really feel no remorse if I’m still here in village and I don’t want to starve myself.

So that will be my August. Hiding to cook myself lunch, breaking fast with the family each day, and being jealous of everyone going on vacation. However, the AC converter was fixed a little while back, giving me the ability to charge my computer once again, so maybe I can pass the time by blogging more often.

~E

Pumps and Planting

It's not as strange as the title sounds, I swear. I am working on both, and it's been keeping me very busy indeed. Outplanting season has been in full swing while I've been complaining to you all about this country. That means that all the while I've been moaning about how annoying Senegalese people can be, I've also been out in the field every day with a shovel and a knife, cutting off all those bags I so lovingly filled and planting the little buggers in the ground. Mind you, these are mostly thorny species we're talking about, so this is a task that must be done with care.

In the meanwhile, my friend Garrison has shipped himself out to my site on a couple of occasions to install our village rope pump! After collecting a community contribution of 20 thousand CFA (about 40 dollars), Garrison's partner Water Charity has helped us fund a pump that will benefit a major portion of my village by increasing the ease and speed at which people can pull water for themselves and their animals. Here's the link that explains his overall project, 52 pumps in 52 weeks if you're curious about the details about how the pump is made, and I posted a few pictures of my village's project in the albums. Check it out.

At the moment, I'm in Kaolack, baking chocolate cake with Cassie and trying to get out a grant proposal for the upcoming school year's gardens in Babou Njittiy and Saloum Diane. I'll update more on the actual projects in the future. If I'm not mistaken, it is still July. According to Peace Corps, that's about when I need to be applying for money to get these gardens off the ground for a school year that starts in October. The take-home point from this: Peace Corps, despite it's reputation for trying to save the world, is still a government organization, complete with piles of paperwork and red tape. Remind me never to go into politics.

I'm pretty sure the chocolate cake takes priority right now.

~E.

Ups and Downs

I should start by apologizing for the dismal tone of my last blog entry. But that’s life in Senegal for you- first you are at the top of the world, wondering at how you managed to come to a new culture, integrate yourself into a third-world village and learn a new language, and the next moment you turn around a realize that you did in fact just leave everything you ever knew behind and it will be a long time until you can come back. That is what is known by PCVs, lovingly, as a mid-service crisis. But it’s not one major event that happens and passes, as I originally thought. I’m coming to realize that it comes and goes, just as everything in life. Even if I was in the States right now, I’m sure I would have bad times as well as good. The difference is that in the States, you usually have more of an open line of communication to vent and an ability to walk around the corner at all times, buy yourself some ice cream and move on with your life. Here, that angst manifests itself as angry blog entries.

In reality, I’m doing alright overall. I’ve been back in village for about a week, getting over a cold that I had, and getting my hands dirty outplanting all of those pepinieres I wrote about a while back. It’s a lot of work, but it is somewhat calming to work quietly in a field outside for a couple of hours and just let your mind wander. I’ve also taken the time to write in my personal journal every day, a practice I started years ago as a little kid, and I have taken up again while here as a way to process, record, and vent about my experiences. At some point I’ll be able to go home, re-read about all of these difficult times that I’ve made it through, and write new blog entries about how much I’ve learned.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to rant about my life and try to document all my experiences here to my loving readers. May you all keep enjoying TV, ice cream and internet every day. And may you all send me care packages on a regular basis.

Much love,

~E

Complaining. Feel free to disregard.

In Kaolack today, but going back to site in a little bit. It always is difficult mobilizing enough energy and effort to actually make the trip back down there- have to get a taxi to the market, walk to the garage while ignoring all the obnoxious moto drivers hissing at me to get my attention, find the car, wait forever for the thing to leave, endure the bumpy, 4-5 hour ride back and end up in my village where work and Wolof people await me. As you can imagine, it's always tempting to spend an extra day here, drinking cold water, eating real food, watching movies on my computer when I don't have to worry about the battery dying, speaking in English. Sigh. But that's what America is for, right?

Disclaimer: I'm going to complain a little. There's no reason one can't vent in public on their blog to the world, right?

Senegal gets really tiring sometimes. You're exhausted by the heat, the culture, the lack of communication because of language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, the work, the food... the list goes on. Not that I don't think this is a rewarding experience and I'm going to toughen up and push through, but sometimes you've just got to give up for a day or two and stop trying to be the perfect volunteer. Even if you are the perfect volunteer, you will probably leave this country having made an impact on a few people's lives, maybe taught some new skills or started some good projects, but that doesn't mean that what you do will be continued or remembered forever. Volunteers are not gods to Senegalese people, they are foreigners with money that occasionally you can interact with. Ok that's a mild generalization, but it's hard to really have a full life conversation about what my job is as a volunteer and the purpose of Peace Corps with every single person I meet on the street. Sometimes you have to just look down at the ground and keep on walking.

I do have good days here. I have a fantastic relationship with my family, great work partners, a beautiful site, and some very good friends (though most of them are currently home on vacation). There are times though when that's not enough- being here is a constant reminder of who you are because you are very aware that you don't fit in. It's a study in human psychology- group mentality always singles out the person with different color skin, who doesn't speak the language or do things the same way as everyone else. I don't always want to drink attaya, I don't want to wear a complet everyday and yes, I do like to read for fun. What gives. My host uncle, who is home in Keur Andallah for school vacation but normally teaches in Sokone, had a conversation with me the other day. He asked why I always just like to sit and read in the evening. What is my job here in Senegal? He is a teacher after all, and he knows that it is difficult to always have conversations about things like early marriage and having many children without the ability to support them, but he still said I could try using my time by having conversations with villagers about problems in Senegal and how they can take small steps to fix them. I do that, I really do. I've sat in the field and talked about culture and families and environmental issues and education.

But I'm only human. Humans have limits. We need friends, a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort. That's hard to come by in this country for a volunteer. We do our best, but we get sick and tired just like everyone else. Sometimes you just have to face that and make it through another day. So I'm still going back to site today. I'll continue to deal with the frustrations of being a volunteers and handle them in whatever way I can. I'm blessed to have this opportunity, but I've gotta say- sometimes it's just easier pretending I'm not here for a little while.

Rainy season and the 4th of July

First of all, I apologize for that very rushed and very nonsensical previous entry about the rain. That is apparently what happens when you see a weather event that you have not experienced in the last 9 months of your life and decide to blog about it on limited battery life. The AC converter is currently not functioning in Ousman's house because they are too lazy to maintain the batteries that the solar panels charge, so I am currently without an ability to charge at site. Kaolack house it is.

Happy belated 4th of July everyone! If you are a facebook stalker of mine, you already know that we ate BBQ chicken, a lovely menu of various side dishes and desserts, chocolate rice-crispy treats notwithstanding. So now you understand what makes a PCV happy. I have to admit though, after eating small amounts of rice and millet and secretly snacking on a granola bar occasionally in my room for the last 2 weeks, it's a bit difficult to stomach an entire Thanksgiving-style feast, and needless to say it was an early night for me.

In other news, the rainy season has really commenced, emphasized now by the return of the giant lake in the middle of Pape's field and the muddy disgusting streets that Kaolack is famous for. Gratefully, they are paving the road in front of the regional house which will help prevent the giant puddle that prevents all ease of movement to or from the house we lovingly dubbed "Lake Kaolack."

The arrival of the rains signals a change in my general schedule, since now my goal for the next couple of months focuses almost entirely around outplanting all those pepinieres I so lovingly nurtured since April. This is the part of my job that feels like you are actually helping the earth, since now I am actually taking baby trees and putting them into the ground. It was especially rewarding the other day planting a grafted ziziphus tree that I bought up in Thies a few weeks ago during the agfo summit. Assuming this tree takes off well, it will provide me with copious amounts of scions to graft onto other baby ziziphus trees and ultimately allow the village to make a profit off of selling little jujubee fruits. Now if I can just figure out how to go about actually grafting them successfully, that would be useful.

The other piece of exciting news is that Garrison will be helping to install a rope pump onto one of our village wells within the next couple of weeks, and it will likely improve the quality of life of many women in the village by speeding up the time it takes to pull water. It's not exactly the same as having running water in your compound, but it's a change nonetheless, and it's something that the village can get excited about. Stay tuned for updates on that!

One other quick thing- if people have questions about any aspect of my life that you think I should post about, feel free to shoot me a note or a comment. I realize my blogs are getting less frequent since nothing seems quite as new and amazing to me anymore, but my life is probably still pretty foreign to many of you states-bound readers, so ask away. It's good to hear feedback.

Until next time,

~E

RAIN

tiIt rained today, in case you haven't figured that out from the title. The first significant rain of the year today, June 25, 2011. Last night it was extremely hot and humid, which during this part of the year means that rain is coming, but also means you cannot sleep well. This morning, I woke up and went to the field to make a small pepiniere, and it started thundering in the distance and sprinkling a bit. I finished up what I was working on and got back to the village as the mist was winding down, then as I was discussing issues with my roof with a neighbor, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped and I found myself huddling in my room while the rain started pouring down all around. I've got a video but since my internet is slow and my battery is dying I'm going to cut this entry short. I just wanted to share the wonderful phenomenon of water falling out of the sky with you all. You should appreciate it more when it occurs.

~E

Bonjour, tout le monde

Well it's been quite a whirlwind these past few weeks. I'm like the oracle volunteer of Senegal- never in the same place twice. First in Saloum Diane for mosquito net distributions, then to Toubacouta for a French language seminar, and finally off to Thies for our Agroforestry Summit, and here I am currently sitting in Kaolack.

I've noticed that your service gets much busier as it goes on for the obvious reasons that your language gets better, you gain confidence and feel more integrated. And as all overachievers know, that also makes time go by faster. Here I find myself looking at the new SED stage getting to country, and suddenly I am the old, experienced volunteer blabbing away in Wolof and bargaining for taxis like a pro. I'm not quite halfway through my service, but the stage a year ahead of us just attended COS conference and will begin to trickle out of the country next month, and I will be faced with the prospect of saying goodbye to many people I have formed good relationships with over the past 10 months or so.

But that's life, right? Before I know it I'll be the one leaving people behind and blah blah blah life goes on.

On a less depressing note, I actually am really anxious to get back to village all of a sudden. Despite the fact that many of my Senegalese friends left for a few months for school vacation (they are ironically all teachers) I am excited to bareroot bed a couple of citrus seeds I managed to obtain in Thies, meaning that I will put them in a shallow pepiniere and transfer them to tree sacs once they germinate. I also have the next few months to spend writing a grant for school gardens for this coming year. The Peace Corps decided that it had to conform with the rest of the American government by making grant applications 1300 pages long and involve questions involving everything from why your proposed project will be sustainable to your mother's shoe size.

Meanwhile, I have to give a quick an unrelated shout-out to something that has improved my quality of life over the past month or two: podcasts. It's amazing what a good episode of NPR's Fresh Air or This American Life can do for one's general sense of well-being and morale sometimes. At least my sept-place rides are much faster these days.

So that concludes my rambling for today. Give America a hearty Asalamalekum for me.

~E

I haven't forgotten about you I swear...

I am aware that it has been far too long since I have last written a blog entry- in fact I managed to skip the month of May altogether and pretty much get caught up in stuff so that the more I didn’t write the more it seemed impractical to do so and really give a good sense of everything that has been going on.
Don’t be mad at me, I haven’t forgotten you, my dear admirers. The opposite in fact, I still miss you all more than you know and have simply been trying to make time go by faster.
And indeed, faster it has started to go by. All of a sudden, I find myself waist-deep in several region wide projects, faced with the prospect of spending the rainy season trying my hand at grant-writing, and invading people’s personal space by counting their mosquito nets. Allow me to explain.
Now that the pepiniering season is essentially over, our job as good African Agroforesters is to make sure that those pepinieres get watered and are weeded. That leaves is all this free time to think of new and unique ways to keep cool as the humidity rolls in, or finding other projects to distract ourselves from the sorry state our lives have become. As a region, we are planning a Moringa tourney at local primary schools teaching kids how to dig beds, amend soil, and seed moringa beds. Later, a follow-up tourney will occur teaching kids about nutrition, the vitamins that moringa provides, and how they can be incorporated into your diet.
Another upcoming project is known as the “Louma circus,” aptly named because we will be a bunch of white kids invading African open markets with sound systems and mosquito net demonstrations and giving away little sachets of Neem lotion. For the sake of not making this entry 50 pages long, I will refrain from details until the event actually occurs. However, I did participate in the associated project that was taken over by the NGO USAID, in which mosquito nets are distributed to the entire region of Kaolack. Originally, some volunteers down in the Keidegou region (a long, long way from here) decided that it would be fun to provide “universal coverage” of beds in the region with mosquito nets in an effort to slow the transmission of malaria. If you do your share of blog-stalking, you will find out that their version of the program involved biking tons of mosquito nets over long distances in an effort to effectively give away the nets without allowing the recipients to sell the nets for profit or use them on their gardens. In the end, the government decided it liked the project but could do it more effectively than us ill-equipped volunteers, and took the program over in conjunction with an army of NGO partners who provide funding. Since it was originally a Peace Corps project, volunteers are still encouraged to help out in conjunction with their local health posts. As such, I found myself in Saloum Diane the other day walking around with another Senegalese volunteer for the project and writing down the number of people in each household, beds and mosquito nets available, then checking to see if those nets didn’t all have holes in them. It’s a long, hot day of invading people’s privacy, but on the bright side, it gave me and opportunity to hang out with the teacher contingent of Saloum.
So that brings me to projects I am excited about- school projects! I met the English and Spanish teachers of the village college, which means middle school in America-speak. Despite being the English teacher, his English wasn’t exactly flawless. If I were to have a conversation at normal speed, I doubt he would understand the majority. But I digress- I was invited to help teach a class this morning, and ended up standing in front of a class of confused middle school students trying to slowly express my dislike of the word “toubab” in English and listening to the teachers explanation of his love for Obama and hope that he will help to unite the African people. Well, an education will get you so far anyway.
So that’s a brief overview of my life at the moment. Most of June I am out of site traveling to a French seminar, Agroforestry summit in Thies, and the occasional volunteer visit or meeting. I’m getting to the point where I really need to start reviewing my French; all these doctors, teachers and educated community members insist that I speak with them in French and I’m beginning to look like an idiot for forgetting it. Wolof will only get you so far in the world. On the other hand, I am not exactly a fluent Wolof speaker either, and probably sound like an idiot anyway, so it might be a lost cause.
Life in Senegal is starting to seem less bizarre in a way; I mean, why not get woken up by hawing donkeys at 6 in the morning every day then listen to the call to prayer, that’s normal, right? It helps to be busy, but I’ve given up all hope of every feeling entirely at home here. Things become normal and routine, you can get used to almost anything, but I still miss being able to have educated conversations on a regular basis with people who actually want to listen. Oh well. I’ve made it this far, so moving right along…
~E

Senegalese out of Senegal

One of my favorite conversations to have with Senegalese people is about my life in America; what my English name is, what the climate and food is like, what our favorite sports are, etc. It gives me a chance to reminisce while holding a captive audience, and every Senegalese person I've ever met wants to go to America. I always end the conversation with something along the lines of "but if you went there, you'd hate it. There's no attaya (Senegalese tea they drink out of shot glasses with tons of sugar), it's really cold, and you wouldn't get to eat rice out of a single bowl with your hand ever single day. Also, Americans are addicted to work, much as we don't think we are. Most of us can't sit still for long periods of time without any real goal. Instead, we're always working at some sort of chore or following some sort of plan, even if that plan involves things like going to the gym or going out to meet someone for coffee- there's still a plan. Many people I talk to agree with me; they think they're better off here and might as well stay. Many people don't care and decide that all American have tons of money and live happy careless lives. Some really just want to go to see it for themselves as a vacation then come back to tell about it, which is okay with me.

Lately, though, I've really started wondering what Senegalese who do make it to America actually think of it once they see it for what it is rather than just through a TV screen translated into French. I've now been here long enough to have made enough contacts that I've gathered various opinions on the matter. Surprisingly, these opinions really run the gamut from hating it to illegally staying there because they can't stand to come back to their own country. For instance, the other day I was visiting my host dad Ousman in Saloum Diane for a meeting, and met one of his collegues who had gone to America and lived in New York for a couple of years a while back. I asked him if he hated it because of the cold, and he said no, that wasn't really an issue. The problem is that there's no real rest. If you're accustomed to spending every afternoon resting and drinking attaya, then you go drive a taxi through Manhattan for two years where you don't quite speak the language, I can understand that. When I was talking to my host mother Arame last week, I wondered out loud what Seneglase think of America, and she said that whenever she's had friends that went there they always return saying "Senegal am na jamm. Men nga toog fi." (Senegal is in peace, you can stay here.) Another person I met yesterday who I am collaborating with had a younger sister who managed to go through an exchange program for the better part of a year, and she came back to Senegal saying "Amerik nexul," or rather, America isn't very nice. Her experience there was focused more around the American education system, which varies drastically to the Senegalized-version of the French system here. I'm guessing it was more rigorous and she was held to higher expectations than she was used to, but I can't say for sure.

Some people think that they will love America and are not disappointed when they get there. Pape told me the other day that he knew a man when he was a kid in our neighboring village of Keur Theirno, and he left two wives and all of his kids to go to America and work at a hotel there. He's been there now for 30 years and as far as anyone knows, he has no plans to ever come back. One of the boutique owners in Kaolack across the street from a restaurant we like used to work in a boutique in New York for a few years also, and he enjoyed his time there greatly. He makes a special effort to import some of the same boutique-type products we value there such as orbitz gum and other brand names I can't quite remember.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to write in this blog entry as a conclusion, until I realized that just as people from America differ drastically, so do Seneglaese. Every experience is an individual one. Some PCVs come to Senegal and fall in love with the culture here, and others simply can never get the taste for it, and it is really no different the other way around. Another way of explaining my point: when I was talking to my work partner yesterday about his little sister, I later thought to ask what state she had lived in. He responded that she had lived in Kansas. Being my loyal Bostonian self, I joked, "Well that's why she didn't like it." If I went to Kansas, the culture there alone differs so drastically from my own American experience that I probably would have been saying the same thing. (Sorry to anyone from Kansas reading this, I promise it's not personal.)

All in all, this just motivates me to find a bunch of Wolof-speaking Senegalese whenever I go back to America and throw out a couple of "Asalam alekum"s. Could make for an interesting international social study.

~E

Welcome to Pepiniering Hell

Ok, so it’s not as bad as the title of this post might insinuate, but it’s about as hot as hell here, and for a couple of weeks, I am out in the field pretty relentlessly filling tree sacs, scarifying seeds, and trying to organize farmers and the women’s group to get their work done so the seedlings will have enough time to root and grow before they get outplanted over the rainy season. The majority of the tree nurseries will be devoted to local thorny species that will be used in live fencing. Now is the season when the need for decent fencing is best demonstrated, since the rains have been gone long enough that there is really no natural grass that goats, sheep and cows can graze on, so they are highly motivated to try to break through any man-made barriers that are placed between them and the yummy dry-season gardens that are lovingly watered and taken care of on a daily basis. Monday morning, for instance, while watering my garden out in Pape’s field and waiting for the rest of the women to get there and begin their pepiniere, a small heard of cows broke through the tree-branch fence they had constructed to begin feasting on the okra, onion, and tomato planted there. Diego, being a curious puppy, and I ran over there yelling (or barking) to get them to leave. The damage was noticeable though, and hopefully now the women will have learned that it is important to begin seeding live fencing and inspecting their dead fence regularly for gaps or weak areas.

While I spend my mornings filling plastic bags with dirt and manure, I am trying to figure out the best way to keep cool in the scorching afternoons. Oumi finds it highly amusing that I have taken to soaking a bandana and wrapping it around my head, or even just soaking my entire tshirt and fanning myself to take advantage of evaporative cooling (I’m such a geek.) My canary, the French word for the large clay pot used for storing water that I purchased in a louma a couple of months back, has been put to good use in its original intended purpose: storing and cooling water. Granted the water is not ice cold, but it is significantly cooler than if I drank it directly from a plastic filter or a Nalgene bottle. Sleeping, however, is a different matter altogether. While I have not yet been forced to set up my cot under a mosquito net outside, I generally adapt the wet-bandana concept to put over my to help me keep cool trying to sleep, or even a larger piece of wax fabric to put over my whole body. By the time May rolls around, I will attempt to not fill up the majority of my blog entries complaining about the horrors of the hot season. The beginning of June is equally painful, but the first rain is generally due in mid-June, so I eagerly await that watery reprieve.

Also, in case anybody in the land of online-ordered pizza deliveries has been keeping track, I have no been in this country over eight months. Can you believe it? Looking ahead, I still have a long way to go, but going from the comfortable life of living in a university with close access to all of your friends, good food and regular wing nights at your local pub to pulling your water from a well and eating millet porridge for dinner ever night, it’s easy to see that I’ve come a rather long way. Not to get too sentimental, but it is amazing what a couple months working and living in a third world country will do for your general perspective. It no longer weirds me out if I find myself stuck on a rickety old bus with a bunch of people who have a different skin color than yours and are yelling at each other in various languages in the middle of the desert with a screaming baby next to you, while it very well may have thrown me off a little bit before I arrived in this country. It’s a lot easier to just anticipate that everything will go wrong here and be extra happy when something goes right than if you take things like bus schedules for granted and get overly upset when you find yourself waiting at 4 am for two hours to get on that aforementioned adventure.

In the meanwhile, it is time for me to go pull water so I can go seed some Acacia mellifera and reward myself with a cool bucket bath. You should try one sometime, it can be rather refreshing. Come help me fill some tree sacs while you’re at it.

~E

New Mail Box!

Hi Everyone!

Sorry it's been a while since my last blog post. Here is a short recap of my life since the last one:

I sat at site for 2 weeks or so preparing seeds, working in the garden, and getting the school windbreak off the ground. Check out my pepiniering season photos if you're curious.

Then, I traveled to Foundiougne to visit Oumy, my teacher/sister. It was bizarre seeing a more developed Senegalese town where the majority of the population is educated and relatively middle-class. She took me to the beach where we went swimming in clothing that I would never consider wearing in the more conservative village, and even wearing a one-piece bathing suit I was still more covered than some of the Senegalese women wearing bikinis on the side of the water. Her house also has something your don't expect to find in the majority of Senegalese households- indoor plumbing! Not to the degree a standard American household does; there is no kitchen indoors and you still do your laundry by hand, but I was pretty floored to see a real shower and flushing toilet inside a house.

Alas, after my short beach vacation with my Senegalese friends, I had to return to site for a little while longer before returning to the regional house to work on my volunteer report form and pick up tree sacs. Over the next couple of weeks, all of my time will be occupied by sticking dirt and manure mixtures into small plastic bags, putting some seeds in them and praying to Allah that they will grow before the rains come. Wish me luck.

In the mean time, enjoy this video that I have been trying to upload for the last couple of weeks and finally managed to work. It's a tour of Pape's garden where I spend most of my working hours, and I am sick of typing to you all, so this is my alternative:

Welcome to Pape's Field

Also, as the title of this post would lead you to believe, I got a new mailing address!! When I first installed, I did not realize just how far Sokone was from my site, and even though it is closer to my site than Kaolack, it is simply not convenient for me to get there either as a day trip or while I am in transit. Therefore, this should both speed up the arrival time of the package and the ease of checking my mailbox and pick-up for me. From now on, please send packages to the new address:

Emily Tran

B.P. 299

Kaolack, Senegal

West Africa

It's also posted on the side of the blog if for some reason you didn't make it this far in this post. Maybe you're rewatching that video a few times, I never know.

Peace Corps How-To: Staying Sane at Site

For all of those [non-existent] devout followers who want to know my every move here, or for those [more likely existent] occasional readers who simply wonder how an average American recent-college-grad deals with long-term cultural isolation in a desert, I’ve started compiling a list of things I do at site that keep me relatively sane. This actually originated in my journal as a list of things to do when I’m bored, but I figured it might be of some interest to people in that vast first world country that I’ve heard exists somewhere. Here goes-

For anyone else who finds themselves sitting in a hut in Africa for two years, here are a few ways of dealing with it, in no particular order:

1) After going to work in the morning, whether it be to the field or to a meeting with the farmers, teachers or communitarial, go back to your hut, shut your door and have a snack that you enjoy. This is the main reason you require so many granola bars in care packages- since apples and other fruit don’t last for weeks in the heat, you can only stock up on fruit for a couple of days at a time.

2) Coffee and occasional baked goods that you cooked in the Kaolack regional house and brought to site in Tupperware can be added to point number 1.

3) In the case of the aforementioned coffee in point number 2, you may occasionally indulge in Starbucks “VIA” coffee packets from the States, shipped over in care packages. [Thanks mom and dad.]

4) Listen to music you like, and lots of it. I, for instance, have playlists put on shuffle for running in the morning, relaxing with breakfast, cleaning around the hut, etc. Exchange music with other volunteers to mix it up a bit and keep things fresh.

5) Make your own music. It’s amazing what a half hour playing guitar and living in your own little world can do for your overall well-being. Singing counts too. Natives find it hilarious, and the advantage is that you can sing whatever you want to in order to get out your frustrations. Curse if you need to, and nobody will understand it. Then you have the satisfaction of bad-mouthing that idiot for proposing to you for the 15^th time and the knowledge that you never actually offended anyone.

6) Make friends with teachers. I’ll leave out a long and drawn-out explanation here since my previous entry should explain this, but if you do use this method, be wary of point number 5. Some teachers understand English.

7) Decorate your room with all things that remind you of home, and if you are from the North, cold places. I now have magazine cut-outs of snowy skiing vistas plastered to my wall (thanks to my parents), along with some cut-out snowflakes (thanks to Tim’s last care package) and a string of pictures of my family and friends between them. Check out my pictures if you’re curious.

8) Sleep. Go to bed early, and take naps if necessary. It can often do a world of good.

9) After that 900^th conversation about whether or not you have a husband and if so, why do you not have kids, it may be rather rewarding to read something intellectual. It will remind you that you are, in fact, a thinking and educated human being and life is not simply about getting married and having babies. Malcolm Gladwell books (author of works such as The Tipping Point and Blink) are extremely popular here- I highly recommend them. Peace Corps is also a great time to catch up on all those books you always told yourself you would read and never actually did.

10) Sometimes, you need to counteract point number 9 with point number 10- reading something trashy. After a long day in the field, at meetings and struggling with grammatical points in Wolof or teaching your counterpart how to amend the soil and why nitrogen is important, curling up with a Cosmo magazine and oogling at pretty dresses and cute shoes can be real therapy.

11) Stay busy. The first few weeks at site are shockingly difficult to a self-defined overachiever who always had a full schedule until now. Get involved, make your own schedule and stick to it. If that means you are forcing yourself to sit and scarify seeds from exactly 3 to 5 PM, so be it.

12) Text people in the outside world. If someone texts you on gmail, you can respond to them cheaply rather than having to write a text to an American phone line and use up all your phone credit.

13) Get exercise, especially if you were one of those athletic-types in the States. It’s hard in the heat, but if you force yourself to wake up before dawn every morning and get out for a short run before it gets hot or do some yoga ever day in your backyard around sunset, your body and mind will appreciate it.

14) If necessary, spend money on phone cards for your internet key and spend an hour online browsing facebook and chatting on skype. If you are so inclined, you may also update your blog and blab about how you stay sane at site to your captive audience.

As a quick, somewhat-related addendum to this list, I will include another how-to: how to keep cool while writing a blog entry.

1) Soak a bandana and wring it out. Wrap it around your head, including your forehead. Fan yourself for a minute with a little plastic Senegalese fan. Continue typing.

Now, if you ever find yourself out in the middle of nowhere with the job of planting a bunch of trees in the African Sahel, I hope that you can do it with ease and grace. Thank you.

~E

In appreciation of teachers

My ability to read many books in short spans of time at site is dwindling, seeing as I am actually doing worthwhile things with my time now, but I did find the time to start reading Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. I haven’t finished it yet, but a book discussion is not the point of this entry. Instead, it just brings to light the fact that seldom do we take the time to thank those who spent countless hours marking up our poorly-written commentaries with red pen and, as one of my college mentors might say “making it bleed.” It’s amazing how so much constructive criticism can keep you in your place.

I could go on about the merits of teachers, how they helped me get where I am here and how they are entirely underappreciated the majority of the time, but that would simply be inflating their egos and is beside the point. Instead, there actually is a point to my discussion of teachers in relation to my life in Senegal. The past week I have been busy setting up my projects for the upcoming planting season, and it occurred to me that thus far, all of my best friends and work partners in this country have been teachers. Most of the reason for this is that teachers are by far the most educated people in the village. When you are normally lucky to talk to someone who has been to a couple years of grade school and can read a word or two, it is a breath of fresh air to talk to someone who has been to college and can have an intelligent discussion on the differences between the democratic and republican Senegalese parties, or who at least has heard of people like Michael Jackson or Bill Gates. It is not fair of me to expect educated people here to know American music when educated people in America rarely could name the most popular singer in Senegal, so I don’t take it for granted when I can play a Panic at the Disco song on my iPod and have a Senegalese friend recognize it. Oumi and I have had a couple of nights when we rocked out to “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Promiscuous” while the villagers watched on us amusedly. Of course, it is nothing out of the normal for us to act completely over-the-top and theatrical, so nobody asked any questions.

Teachers also have turned out to be fantastic work partners for agroforestry work. Back when I first installed (almost 5 months ago now!), Oumi and I walked over to Saloum Diane for a day to meet her coworkers over there, and I met one guy who wanted me to take a picture of him in the classroom. I did, and spent the next several months making excuses that I could not print it for him since I had not been to a location that prints photos. Then, a few days ago, I took a trip over to our neighboring village Keur Serigne Bamba to check out some Jatropha live fences and Ziziphus trees there, and found myself greeting him there. Apparently he lives in Serigne Bamba and just stays in a room in Saloum Diane on weekdays to teach, but he took me over to his field of 40 hectares to check out some agroforestry species. Let me assure you, nobody I have ever met in Fatick region has had a field of 40 hectares- that is simply incomprehensible when you consider that there are no machines doing any of the work in the fields and very little agricultural education. He demonstrated some of the unique trees he was propagating for live fencing, most of which Peace Corps is trying to promote itself, and referred to them by their scientific rather than their local names. He also had examples of grafted Ziziphus and mango trees, which is extremely rare in a village since it requires technical skill other than what you learn through trial-and-error.

Projects with schools themselves are also much more rewarding when you see eye-to-eye with your work partners. The school garden I am working on in Babou Njiti is probably the most fun I’ve had at site, since each time I go there we get to work in the garden, I spend a bit of time in the classroom teaching about American culture or English, then we go back to my friend’s hut where we have real conversations and joke about music or American food. Thus far, I’ve begun teaching the male teachers over there yoga and salsa. Apparently, they’ve been practicing. (As a side note, for anyone who ever plans on joining Peace Corps, learn some yoga. It’s probably the best exercise you can get given that you live in a hut and everyone laughs at everything you do outside of it.)

Within my home village, I had a meeting with the teachers yesterday planning what types of projects they want to accomplish while I’m here. We sat together in the small office and discussed logistics in a very organized and pointed way, which as an American used to meetings about projects rather than short discussions involving tea, I appreciated greatly. As of now, we are planning a small windbreak, live fence, shade trees and a few fruit trees, in addition to supplemental environmental education classes explaining what we are doing and small side projects like murals and book donations. Speaking of which, if you keep up with this blog and have actually read this far, that probably means you either need to give me money or send me a care package. Money is in the form of a donation to our book project in which we will be contributing kids books in French to form a small library and provide teaching resources for a school that has none. Here’s the link: Books! ­­­­­­­Care packages must include small scientific demonstrations: a small set of magnets, a compass, plastic thermometer, books with pictures of the human body or small models of it, or whatever you have lying around the house that takes up very little space in a package but would be of great interest to a village-bound 7-year old are all appreciated. American snacks for me are also a must.

So in conclusion, don’t forget to thank teachers for the differences they’ve made in your life, whether or not you were actually in their class. Alternatively, you can simply thank a Peace Corps volunteer for being awesome. You know it’s true.

~E

Life and Times in Dakar, and other stories

Well, the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. Since I left you, I went up to Thies for the Agroforestry summit, then spent an extra day there for our Gender Awareness and Development program summit, traveled to Dakar where we spent a day presenting our projects to NGOs in Senegal and hearing about their programs, and finally got to see the infamous West African Invitational Softball Tournament. (In case you haven’t figured it out, the abbreviation for that would be WAIST. I’ll let your imagination wander.)

The agroforestry summit was informative, and it was great to have a chance to get to know all the other agfo volunteers in country that I would not otherwise have much time to see or interact with. We went on field trips with guest speakers to learn about some projects outside our normal realm of work such as poultry farms and fish farms, conducted a seed exchange that allowed us access to many seeds for our upcoming projects, and we pooled our energy to complete a small project trenching mango saplings in the agfo teaching area at the training center. That afternoon, my friend and old homestay village-mate Peter and I traveled back down to good ol’ Keur Madaro to catch up with the homestay families and go on a seed hunt for Acacia melifera, a thorny live fencing species. It was great seeing my homestay family again; I’ve visited them twice now, and it’s a good benchmark for how far I’ve come since leaving training. Each time I visit them my language skills are a bit better and I feel more confident in my work and daily life here. It’s a pretty rewarding feeling.

Our 1-day GAD conference was also interesting; it gave us the opportunity to see what other volunteers in country are doing in relation to helping women and girls become educated and be more independent in society. We also had a chance to discuss GAD work in relation to our sector- in my case agriculture. GAD work is built into every sector to some degree- I have to work with women’s groups for gardening and teaching them improved farming techniques and hopefully marketing techniques for their vegetables and seeds. I would also love to get involved with girls and exercise. Since the village finds it hilarious that I like to run and play soccer with the boys, maybe it would be fun to start a running club. Amazingly, and it’s hard to believe I’m already saying this, it might be hard to find time now that I’m starting to get really busy.

The all-volunteer NGO conference was a good experience to present our projects and see what other NGOs are up to, but it was rather overshadowed by the fact that volunteers were reuniting, tired from traveling, and starting to get pumped up for the upcoming madness that is WAIST. Just being in Dakar is an experience in itself. We went out to fancy restaurants and real diners. One night I had Thai food, another I had sausage pizza, and the last night we had a barbeque at the American club and ate grilled chicken with garlic mayonnaise and pasta salad. It was a beautiful thing. There’s a mall along the shoreline that as my friend Teresa puts it, “looks more like America than America.” We ate ice cream and went to an American-style diner called Times café where we had (ready for this?) mozzarella sticks, garlic cheesy bread, and fancy coffees- I ordered an mint mocha latte. Ahhhh heaven does exist after all.

WAIST is a whole other ball game (haha get it?) As a representative of the Kaolack region, I donned a tutu with the rest of the team and pitched softball for a couple of innings against the Gambia, an NGO team and the northern region. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, because only a few things can happen when you get all of the PCVs in West Africa together, give them a softball field on the ocean in Dakar, and then put them all in a club with a pool and a bar. Needless to say, pictures are posted.

Originally, I thought coming back to the village and going back to daily life after that would be rather difficult, and much as it hurts to write about all the good food I had when it is now far, far away, it’s actually rather refreshing. I don’t feel healthy gorging myself on calories and just having fun all day after a while. You just need to get it out of your system and then go back to work. Therefore, I’m surprisingly motivated, even in the face of the oncoming hot season, to get myself back on a routine. This applies in all aspects: exercise, diet, work schedule, sleep schedule, etc. For example, for the past couple of days I’ve been waking up early to run before it gets hot out, then I’m off to the field to water my garden, and I’ve been talking to farmers and planning projects for the planting season. Tomorrow, I’m going back to Babou Njiti to begin outplanting the school pepinieres with the students there, and by next weekend, I have to go back to Kaolack for a meeting about the Moringa tourney we are planning. So as you can see, after a brief yet lovely diversion hanging out in mini-America, I’m hitting the ground running. What do you know? I’m actually starting to feel like a real Peace Corps volunteer.

Still, that doesn’t stop me from missing snow. I’m writing this with a piece of damp cloth wrapped around my neck to keep cool. Gotta keep everything in perspective.

Love from the desert,

~E

Thoughts from the field on education and development

Over the last few weeks, it has started to occur to me just how much I take basic information that we learn in elementary school for granted. I never realized before I came here how when you talk to somebody in America, you automatically assume they have an education level of a certain degree, which is an easy assumption since it is illegal to drop out before you have at least reached high school. Here though, I often find myself trying to have certain conversations before stopping myself and realizing that I need to back up- a lot. This morning, I was out in the field chatting with Pape about time zone differences- that if I call my family when it is 11 am here, I will certainly be waking them up since it is 6 am over on the American eastern seaboard. Somehow he ended up asking a question of direction- so if Banjul is in this direction (points south) and if Dakar is in this direction (points northwest) then where is America? I have been continuously trying to explain that America is a very large country in comparison to Senegal and hoping that it will click and they were remember at some point seeing it on a map and remember that-oh yeah- it actually is rather big. It never occurred to me that maybe they have not even seen a map of the world before. I asked Pape if he had, and he replied that no, in fact he had never seen a map of the world before. This man is about 35 years old. In all my attempts to explain that America is a very large country and you can’t simply describe what the weather is like over there in a short statement, it somehow slipped my mind that I took for granted the fact that as you go north in the world it gets colder because of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun, or the fact that there is more than just water that separates Africa from America- there is an ocean there. Also, airplanes move quite fast. If I am in an airplane for 8 hours versus a bush taxi for 8 hours, I will get much farther in an airplane. Telling them how long the flight is will not exactly convey the distance of the trip.

There is a whole slew of other things I often take for granted about talking to people with a certain level of education that I have only just started to think about after half a year in this country. Literacy, which I’ve mentioned before, is a big one. It doesn’t quite occur to you just what the implications are of not being able to read until you try to work with these people on a daily basis. People keep asking me to teach them English, assuming they know what that entails. I now respond by asking if they can read. Often, they say they can’t, and now I have to try to explain to them the importance of writing down words and reading them over in order to memorize them or understand the necessity of a pronoun and an article. When they go to the doctor, they receive a small slip of paper similar to the ones we get on appointment cards saying when to return- those are rather futile if they can’t be read. Lately, we’ve been watching TV in Arame’s room since the AC/DC converter has been working at night, but I wonder how it interests them so much if they can’t understand the majority of what is going on when the news is all in French. The other night, an American action movie came on (I don’t know what it was but it took place on a cruise ship which is hard enough to explain as it is) and it was dubbed over in French. At one point, a woman in the movie went to a stage and started singing and the dubbing went away, so that she was speaking in French but singing in English, and I laughed at the irony of it. Almost all 20 people in the room with me turned around and wondered why I was laughing- many of the children don’t know that white people speak more than one language, too. The other problem was that this movie came on right after a news reel about a demonstration parade in Dakar involving thousands of people walking down the street holding signs and marching bands playing. For someone who has never been out of the village life, how to you distinguish between the reality of this gigantic mass of people on paved streets surrounding by tall buildings in this country and the American action film that followed it?

I’ll leave my education rant there to comment on the consequences; in short, development cannot progress without education. You don’t really notice it until you’ve been living here a while- as you try to talk about abstract concepts, technology, or the outside world, things simply go over many peoples’ heads and they lose interest or assume you are trying to speak Wolof and don’t know what you are saying. On the bright side, education is actually a large part of Senegal’s overall development strategy. The other day, Ousman told me that when he was a kid here in Keur Andalla, there was no school, and he had to travel to go to elementary school all the way up through university. Now, almost every village in the general vicinity has a French elementary school in it or within walking distance. Ousman and I both agreed that over time, the general level of literacy and education in the villages will start to increase as the current generation begins to mature. The school here, after all, was built less than 10 years ago, so the current adult generation is mainly uneducated. Even if they never progress to middle school and high school, the ability to read and write a little bit and perform basic arithmetic will make a world of difference within the next generation or two. Especially with the extension of infrastructure such a electricity and water availability that permit more widespread use of technology such as cellphones, television and internet, people will begin to see the necessity of education and understand the concept of globalization. Inshallah.

I am, after all, posting this thought to the internet for the world to see from my cozy little hut in Africa. That has not yet ceased to amaze me.

Love from the Sahel,

~E

Bananas!

After a relaxing couple of days in the house, I am back to the grinding stone- planting bananas. I helped Abdou Aziz plant a small plantation of around 10-14 banana plants in a swampy part of his field last week before I went into Kaolack, and now I’m at it again. Though the water requirements for banana plants is very high (around 20 L/day/plant) they are also very prone to rotting, so I am a tad bit worried that they might rot too much before the hot season really starts. I suppose we learn by trial and error, and I tried to make that clear to my work partners- if this doesn’t work, please don’t hate me forever. Yesterday, Pape and I went over to Keur Chorno about 2 km away with the donkey charette to visit his friend’s field and cut a bunch more banana suckers (the small offshoots from the trunk that you plant to propagate bananas) and ended up with around 33 plants. We brought them back to my hut and put them in my backyard for the afternoon, and this morning we lashed small piles of bananas onto the back of our bikes and brought them out to the field. We spent a lovely morning digging holes, amending them with a manure mixture and filling them in, and planting small banana plants. After all this work, here’s to hoping they grow (raise imaginary Nalgene bottle with me.)

I’m also working on my demonstration plot. Many of the seeds that Peace Corps gave us during install are not growing, and I have had to go to the market and just start buying some seeds of my own. God knows how long they were lying around in the training center before they decided to get rid of old seeds by handing them out to unsuspecting newbies. At any rate, I finally have something green that is sticking out of the brown stuff underneath it, and one would only hope that it is actually a plant. I have now seeded and reseeded my damn pepinieres around 5 times since install and have nothing to show for it.

Moringa beds are a similar story. I originally seeded the bed, and it didn’t grow. I thought birds ate the seeds, so I reseeded it and put branches over it to protect it from birds landing there. Once again, it did not grow. Pape then told me the other night that a small animal- a gecko as far as I can get from the rough translation, has been walking in a line after I plant them and eating each seed in the bed in succession. Today I seeded it and put dead grass over the whole thing to prevent it. Here’s hoping, again. (Cue to raise Nalgene bottle a second time.)

To wrap up, here’s a funny cultural anecdote to hold you all over until my next entry. Yesterday, on the way to Keur Chorno, Pape pointed out this little footbridge in the middle of a field that spanned a small eroded area. He told me that when black people build a bridge, that is how it turns out, insinuating that blacks are less skilled than white people. I then asked who built the bridge we have in Keur Andalla (there’s pictures of it in the album if you want to see- it’s pretty nice). He responded that they were black too, but they were outsiders. I laughed and said, “so they were black toubabs” and he laughed an agreed. The moral of the story, in case you missed it, is that Toubab is supposed to define the color of your skin here, but it really has less to do with that than Senegalese people think. It’s really about societal status and where your family comes from. If you live in upscale Dakar but you’re still Senegalese, you may very well be a toubab, but it really depends on who you ask.

At any rate, to drive the point home that the black people who built the bridge were toubabs and I was not, I drove the donkey cart home. What stupid creatures.

Until next time…

~E.

Oh and PS after I wrote this Oumi and I cooked French Fries to portray American food to villagers who don’t know what ketchup is. You might call it a cultural exchange. I thought it was the best excuse ever to eat American food at site. Yum.

Moving right along

It’s been a little while since I’ve written in this, and that is possibly due to the fact that I left myself internet-less for a while, not realizing that the fixed line I have been using is not set up to work with Windows 7 that I have on the new netbook. That will be fixed by buying an internet key which works in a similar way but doesn’t need to be charged the way a regular fixed line does, and it is a bit more expensive. At any rate, I’m typing this offline to be uploaded in Toubacouta tomorrow when I go help out some friends with terracing a garden. It’ll be a long day.

On the homefront, things have started to happen at site! After starting my demonstration plot and planting my moringa intensive bed, my friend Byron came to visit me for a day and helped me get all my project ideas into a real schedule. It is amazing how much better it can make you feel when you actually have a purpose in life. During his visit, we went to the fields to look at some of the work I’ve done already and determine logistics on things such as how many seeds I will need for live fences, where I can obtain them and when I should be starting them. By this point, I have a pretty good idea of what my life is going to be like up until the next rainy season when the pepiniering season comes to a close and outplanting begins. If that is jibberish to you, that means that we have to first seed the trees, let them grow a little bit in tree sacks where there is greater soil retention and less risk of insect attack, then we take the seedlings and plant them in the ground to their final site right after the rains begin and they will be watered around June or July.

The other great thing about visitors is the food. Senegalese love to impress their visitors, so the quality of the food is substantially greater if somebody comes to say hi. Unfortunately for me, I live out in the middle of nowhere and it is difficult for most volunteers to stop by, but when they do it is a good day for me and my stomach. For dinner, they cooked chicken with a macaroni sauce- a huge treat, and for the following lunch we had a rice dish with onions, carrots and fish called yassa. Yummy.

Since Byron’s visit, I have started to have more of a direction to my daily schedule, which is reinforced by my farmer counterparts in the village. We talked to a farmer named Abdou Aziz about planting bananas, for instance, since he has abundant water sources in his field and plenty of overgrown space that can be cleared and used. We also talked briefly about the uses of Neeme, a common tree in Senegal that has insect-repellant properties and can be used both in the field as a preventative pesticide and on the body as a regular bug spray. Today, when I got back to his field, he had already gone to a neighboring village to obtain some banana plants that we can plant, and he had attempted to make a neeme solution for his garden. Unless you are a volunteer, it is hard to describe just how amazing it is that a farmer simply took you at your word without seeing it in practice and went ahead and tried it. The small victories can really make your day.

Now all of a sudden, January is almost over, and soon I will be traveling to Thies for the agroforestry summit and Gender Awareness and Development seminar. Afterwards, we get to go to Dakar for WAIST, the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It will be a welcome break from the village for a week or so, and hopefully I will come back rejuvenated and ready to get some of these pepinieres up and running. One can always hope.

Missing home lots.

~E.