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
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