~E
Saturday, June 25, 2011
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.
Monday, June 20, 2011
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
Monday, June 6, 2011
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
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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