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