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.