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