Wait... It's March already?

Trying to think back on the last week and what I’ve been working on in order to update my lovely readers, and I’m finding that my brain is going into overdrive. Whew. I need another vacation.

This past weekend, my lovely friend Aviva came to visit me for a few days and help me work on the school mural that I am painting at the primary school here in Keur Andallah. It’s ALMOST done, but apparently the ocean is larger than I originally anticipated. Who knew? The funny part is, I bought some paint brushes, but most of the map has been painted with dry grass and sticks because there are too many fine borders that the paintbrushes cannot handle. Thus, we have determined that that is how PCVs paint in Africa- with sticks. Sigh.

In the meanwhile, I’m also trying to get my pepinieres going for the year so that everything can be outplanted early enough this year that it actually survives the hot season. While all this is happening, the latrine project is progressing bit by bit, the school gardens and rolling along, the women’s garden people continue to annoy me about getting barbed wire, and my own garden refuses to outplant itself. I even asked it nicely. So yes, it’s hard to keep track of things, but Mangiiy goorgoorlu, I’m doing the best I can.

I also tried to upload pictures to my picassa account- the one on the right of the screen, and for some reason my pictures refuse to upload into the program, so until I figure that out I’m posting pictures on facebook for those of you who know me personally. Best I can do until I figure out the problem.

I’m very excited for my parents to get here next week and show them around my life here. I will make sure they post an entry so you will all know what it is like for a non-PCV American to show up in Senegal and start touring around. At this point, all I can remember is this vague shock and exhaustion from the journey and the prospect of spending the next two years of my life here, so I’m really no help on that matter anymore.

Stay tuned,

~E

Running for the Girls

Guess what guess what guess what??? My appropriate projects grant is fully funded! Thank you to everyone who contributed, you are all wonderful and are making a huge difference. As I am sitting here in the regional house catching up on some emails and whatever else is on my to-do list, my lovely work partner Assane is heading up the project back in the village, hopefully breaking ground on the first 12 latrines. It turns out that I overbudgeted a little bit, and I will be able to install a few more than originally anticipated in the compounds that complete their latrines in the timeliest manner.

I am also out of site because I am returning from the Tambacounda “marathon” during which I ran a 10k to encourage girl’s education throughout the country. Thanks to those of you who contributed to that as well! The event went relatively smoothly, considering we were running long distances in the hottest region of the country at the beginning of the hot season. One of Senegal’s best marathoners traveled out to participate and run the half marathon, the longest event of the day, and finished WAY ahead of everyone else in a blistering 1:14 without breaking a sweat. This is one of the guys that gets of out Africa every once in a while to go see the sights and, you know, run the New York Marathon every so often. As you can imagine, it was great to have his support.

I did pretty well for myself, considering I’ve been training by myself in the village early in the mornings on the sand bush paths, so I was happy with my 4-minute-and-change 10k. I actually passed and beat a couple of the Senegalese Army men participating, who were joking to each other that they were beaten by a girl (Senegalese women rarely compete in sports competitively, especially in distance running, so there wasn’t much in the way of local competition). A few of them approached me after the race and started joking that I must have cheated because I have two hearts, and he was going to take me to the hospital to get it checked out. At any rate, it was a great day of hanging out with people and cross country nostalgia.

So now it’s back to village, getting some photo documentation of those latrines for your benefit and beginning the daunting task of making my farmers fill something like 3000 tree sacks over the next few weeks. I also have yet to finish painting my world map mural, and I should have some lovely volunteers come to visit me and paint all day! Finally, my parents are coming to visit me in a few weeks! I’m sure they will love giving input into what it is like to come to my village directly from America, because at this point it seems strangely normal to me to pull water from a well and take showers from buckets, and I’m probably not as interesting as I used to be. So stay tuned, there will be fun updates ahead!

~E

Elections and such

In light of the fact that it is Sunday and I vaguely remember deciding to try to write blog entries on Sundays for the rest of my service, I figured I’d let you all know how the Senegalese presidential election is going. Not in political sense- I’m not legally even allowed to have an opinion on that given my status as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but you can read all you want about that on the associated press. Google it.

Let me paint the scene- I’m sitting in Arame’s room at site, where some of the men have turned on a generator so they can watch TV during the election. I figured that if they were to bother buying the gas to turn on the generator, they’d at least watch the progress of the election on the news. Instead, they’re watching bad-quality “theater,” which is basically a series loosely written skits performed in Wolof. Most of them consist of women talking to each other and wearing skimpy Western clothes. But if you were wondering what a group of men who just voted decide to do the day of a controversial national election- that’s it. Watch women yelling at men on bad Wolof soap operas.

If any of you have been concerned for my safety while you’re all hearing about the riots in Dakar, don’t be. We get more text messages asking for status updates from our security director than I can count, and as work zone coordinator, I also have to be in touch with the rest of the volunteers in my subregion and know where they’re at too. My phone battery seems to be dying faster than usual these days. Thank goodness for solar chargers. There have been a few protests in Kaolack and other major cities over the last week or so, and we are all restricted from traveling there and to all major regional capitols. Hopefully that will be lifted soon, as most of us are running low on cash and the only ATMs we can go to are in Kaolack. I realize I talk about living without electricity and running water all the time on this blog, but ironically enough we are still dependent on modern conveniences such as ATMs to retrieve our money for every-day expenditures.

Today, while everyone is nervous about the election outcome, I’m just bored. I can’t do any significant work all day because everyone is going to vote and, apparently, watching skimpily-dressed women yell at their boyfriends on TV. I can go to the garden, water my plants, read my book, play a little guitar, but eventually I got bored enough that I’m bringing out the computer and writing this blog entry with a bunch of people surrounding me. Most of them are used to the computer at this point anyway- I’ve had enough conversations with people that are along the lines of “calling America is really expensive, that’s why I have a computer” that people get it. It’s also amazing how computer are starting to make their way into villages via community politicians, NGOs and teachers that it doesn’t really change anyone’s perspective of me. This is one of those things you learn after being here for over a year. The women in skimpy shirts are more interesting than the electronics that portray them.

On that note, I will leave you. A quick reminder, if you are so inclined, you can donate to any of the lovely projects that I am working on and describe in my previous blog entry. The Senegalese people and I sincerely appreciate any help you can give.

~E

Give me Money!

Ok, This just went out as an email to my friends and family, but anybody else who reads this blog should help out! Sorry if this is the second time you are seeing this for those who got the email and also read the blog.

Hello all!

It's that time- the time when I ask you all to give me all your money. I've finally figured out financing for the projects I'm working on for the rest of my service, and your help on all of them (there's only 3) would be greatly appreciated. I'll give you an overview of the point of each project and its importance-

Tamba Marathon for Girls- March 4th, I am running a race to raise money for projects concerning gender awareness and development throughout the country. Despite the name, I'm actually not running the full marathon- they decided to cut that, and now the options are the 5k, 10k or half marathon. Despite my general love of running, the Senegalese environment, training conditions and diet really aren't conducive to long distance running, so I'm going to do the 10k with a bunch of my friends. This is not the highest priority, but if you feel very generous and want to throw in a couple of dollars towards me pounding the pavement (sand?) and helping women's advancement, here's the link: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-CFD

More importantly, we are trying to raise money for the Girl's Camp that will be happening in June, and I will be much more directly involved in planning and carrying out this project. This is a week in which we invite a couple of girls of a middle-school age to a camp outside of Sokone and teach them skills for the future, have talks about careers and the environment, and we have a bunch of games and sports for the girls to play that they would never normally have the opportunity to play in the village. I'm going to be leading a bunch of sports (naturally) and we'll have cross cultural games and snacks (s'mores included). Anyway, here's the link if you're interested: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-198

Finally, I just got funding through the wonderful organization appropriate projects to construct 12 new cement-lined latrines in my village. This is actually a huge deal, because most people in the village don't even have a sanitary place to do their business in the morning, and I often see kids hanging out with their pants down in village trash piles during my morning runs. When the rainy season comes around, there are lots of problems with bacterial diseases as you may imagine, so this project will be accompanied by a health sensitization meeting informing the villagers of the importance of building and USING these new latrines. This project will be partially funded by the organization that works with appropriate projects, but they ask for donations if you are able to do so, as this ensures that the organization can continue to fund other projects around the world in a timely manner. Anyway, here's the link- http://appropriateprojects.com/taxonomy/term/3 You can even see some of my lovely village pictures on the site!

Ok thanks for bearing with me. I'll post more about this on my blog over time so you can track how the projects go and see pictures, not to mention hear about my other lovely projects that I am continuing to work on as my service winds down. I'll be home this fall, can you believe it? Here's my blog if you lost the link:

http://www.emilypcsenegal.blogspot.com/. Honestly, if you don't have the money or just don't feel like donating, I will not be offended. I know that many of you asked if any of my projects required monetary contributions, so here's the information you were asking for. If you want to help but can only contribute to one project, the girl's camp would really benefit most from your help because donations are the only source of funding available. Also, please forward this email to anybody and everybody that might be interested in helping out, because I don't have everybody's email addresses. (That means please forward this to my extended family, etc.) This will be the only time I ask you guys to help out with my Peace Corps service, and I thank you all in advance for any help at all. Even just a couple of dollars here and there add up.

Thanks one more time, and greet America for me!

Jamm Rekk (Peace Only)

Emily

aka Fatou Sy

Go Patriots!

I am mildly tired of writing about my projects, so I will instead give you a little anecdote for today. A few days ago, I was biking back from Toubacouta where I had been using the internet in one of the hotels there to write one of my grants. I biked through one random village, and a group of kids started yelling “Toubab!”and running after my bike. This is an entirely normal occurrence, but one kid specifically actually reached my bike and started grabbing the back of it and running with it, which really annoyed me. This again wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, but on this particular day it just irked me, and I turned around and screamed that he was a “bleepity bleep” that I will not repeat here because unlike that little kid, you will all understand what I am saying. The weird part was, the kid looked at me and shouted what I had just called him right back at me, not knowing what he was saying. Hearing that little kid say it was a little jarring and sort of brought me back, but I still needed to get him off my bike, so I sped up as much as I could and eventually he let go, but it still just reminded me how difficult of a situation you can be put in when you’re a complete outsider. Things like that never occur in my village because everyone there is used to me and knows my name, but the problem with being here is that you don’t just sit in your village forever; you have to travel on occasion and go to places where people don’t know your name. Everyone has a way of dealing with it, but some days you just lose it.

In other news, in case you are as disconnected from the world as I sometimes find myself, today is the superbowl. I will not be watching it in real-time, but being a Patriots fan I cannot reasonably let it go without doing anything, so a group of us are getting together at a hotel and watching a recorded version of it tomorrow night. If I were to watch it when its happening, that would mean kickoff would be about 3 am, and for someone who’s been passed out at 9 pm every night, that’s a little past my bedtime. Therefore, I will not be in contact with anybody back home tomorrow until I actually watch the game. The funny part is that it’s really not that hard to disconnect from the world and not spoil it when you’re in a village in Africa. I can guarantee you that nobody in my village will come up to me at any point and say “can you believe he made that field goal?” It just won’t happen.

So on that note, I am signing off until after I am back up to date with you all and we can chat about it.

Go Patriots!

~E

AHHHH PROJECTS!

In an effort to keep relatively up to date with my blog, here is the next entry in my somewhat weekly escapade to document my life. Granted, lots has been happening that may very well define my work for the next few months of my existence here.

Recently, I was approached by Aissatu, one of the four leaders of the women’s group. (Ironically, 3 of the 4 women are named Aissatu. This was the one I am closest with, Aissatu Diop.) She requested that I help the group by finding financing and enclosing the garden with barbed wire. This is not the easiest of tasks, as the area to be fenced in is a 2-hectare plot of land (for those of us stuck in the western world, that’s about 5 acres, or 4.94 according to the handy-dandy converter on my phone. I guess little old-school Nokias are good for something. But I digress.) The project would require at least 100 thousand CFA of financing, which converts to roughly 200 dollars, not an easy sum to come by in the village. The project is very much possible, and similar projects are carried out all the time, but I had to air two main concerns, namely 1: they still need to come up with a 25% community contribution, which might be a challenge due to the fact that they can barely come up with their contributions towards seeds for this year and 2: I am sick of going out to work in the women’s garden and having most of these women peace out early to go cook lunch/lay down/take care of someone’s kid/whatever their excuse may be. Why should I work my butt off for a group of people who don’t quite seem to understand the importance of what they are doing? So despite all roadblocks, I started talking with my chief of village and my APCD in Dakar to see what we can do, and whether this will turn into a giant headache remains to be seen.

Another grant-funded project seemed to just appear at roughly the same time, this time to do with douches, or compound latrines. These would be similar to mine, if you’ve seen pictures of it that are buried somewhere in those album off to your right on the screen, but the village would complete one for every compound. This is also a significantly costly project and we are still working out the logistics of it, but if my original plan to hit up a lovely little organization called appropriate projects (google it- www.appropriateprojects.org) falls through, I may be hitting you all up for money in the near future. Unlike my reservations about the women’s garden, I actually am pretty determined to see this through, because you have no idea what its like to walk out to the field every day and pass by a group of children out on a compost pile behind their compounds with their pants down and pooping their little hearts out in public. The kicker is when they get all excited to see me and try to scream and wave and greet me in the middle of this rather awkward occurrence.

All while this is happening, I finally decided that I must paint a world map in my school before my close of service, and what better time to do it than when I am starting two other major projects? Makes perfect sense, right? After my exasperation with the school garden grant, the two new ones I plan to write and never wanting to write a project abstract again, I have decided to suck it up and just pay it. It’s not really all that expensive, and it’s a damn good way to get me out of my hut and away from screaming children for a few afternoons while I go grid out and outline a world map in pencil in my ecole primaire and listen to some good music. Sometime in the next month, I’ll invite a group of other volunteers over to my site, buy some paint and paintbrushes, cook up a good bowl of yassa ginard which for you non-wolof speakers is rice with chicken and onion sauce, and we’ll bring this thing to life. At least then finally most people in the village will be able to point to their own country on a map, especially after I reward them with candy for doing so.

In the meanwhile I’m still working in my garden every morning, watering my beautiful little guava and orange saplings, and damnit if I don’t get some good looking carrots and tomatoes by the end of this gardening season. It’s also pretty good therapy sitting in a garden each morning and writing in your journal. I suggest you try it sometime. And on that note, I leave you until next Sunday. Inchallah.

~E

About this whole blog thing

So it’s been a while, as you can see. I owe an apology to anyone who still reads this blog at all, but in my defense, I did go on vacation for a while. Since my last entry, I have come back to site, left site, gone to America over the holidays, come back to country, attended our all-volunteer conference in Thies, gone to the West African Invitational Softball Tournament in Dakar, and returned to site. So, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind, as you can imagine. I actually find myself enjoying the quiet downtime to get my life back in order that I have here at site. As it stands, I have 8 months or so left in my service, and I intend to make the best of it, whatever that may mean. But first, let’s back up a bit.

Back in December, I had a couple week period at site right before I went on vacation during which I was (I think understandably) rather annoyed and irritable at the world. I was, after all, about to return to my home, friends, family, boyfriend, etc. A couple of things occurred that are rather normal in Senegalese culture, but at the time irked me very much.

For instance, as I was working to get the school garden pepinieres in the ground before I left, I was struggling to get in touch with the teachers and outline the terms of the grant: I bought the tools, and they have to choose and buy the seeds. I like to be present when we actually seed the pepineres so I have an idea of what is going on, and for my school garden in Saloum Diane I set the date well ahead of time so that my counterparts would be ready. On the day we were supposed to seed, I got there and found that nobody really had any idea that the seedbeds were supposed to be made on that day and my main work partner had traveled to Sokone and was unreachable by cellphone. I was pretty flustered by the whole situation, not only because I just wanted to get it done and leave to go on vacation, but also because these sorts of things happen all the time in this culture.

A similar situation occurred right around that time in which a work partner of mine from Dakar showed up in the village to check out the project he has going on here. I can’t remember if I wrote about this a year ago, but there had been this big NGO collaboration that wanted to put in a massive tree nursery in my village, and it included partners in both Scotland and the US which I would liked very much to have talked to. After all, I will be back in that glorious country in less than a year, and it can’t hurt to have some high-up contacts there that have actually seen me at work in the village doing many of the same tasks and monitoring in the same way that they do. I called more than once to confirm the time and date that they were planning on coming, and my Senegalese work partner told me a certain day in the afternoon. That morning, I went to the garden to water my nurseries there, and just as I was returning to the village I saw the cars of all the American and Scottish partners driving away to another village. That was the only opportunity I had to meet with those people, and I got very upset with the Senegalese work partner who had told me the wrong information. I asked why he hadn’t called me to let me know he was coming earlier than expected, and he basically just told me that he forgot.

It’s really upsetting when you miss out on a such a large opportunity because of a small cultural flaw- timing in this country means nothing. Scheduling and appointments hold no real value whatsoever, and in both of these cases just a phone call to inform that a time or date had been changed would be sufficient. I left to go on vacation with a bad feeling about this culture- why should I bother to help them out and stress myself out over being on time for anything here if they never bother to show the same respect? It’s hard to get across the point that most developed country value schedules, but even if I do manage to explain that to a couple of people, a single American Peace Corps Volunteer really doesn’t have the power to invoke a major cultural behavioral change. Such is life, I guess.

Anyway, enough of that rant. AMERICA! Because that’s what you’re all wondering about, right? It’s a beautiful country, especially after having been in Senegal for 16 months. I went skiing and snowshoeing with the family, went on many walks and ate lots of delicious American cuisine, and apart from a few hiccups involving illness (I actually spent most of New Years in the ER) I’d say I had a very successful trip home. Being there was like walking through this weird dream-world where everything is like you remember it except the way you relate to almost every other person in your life. Also, everything looks amazingly clean, like someone just came down with a giant duster and made everything spic and span.
I spent the last week or so there buying supplies for the village and for myself; much of the weight I carried back to Senegal consisted of granola bars and dried fruit from Costco, which is a little like Peace Corps heaven in bulk. I also lugged about 80 dollars worth of cheap school supplies to be distributed between the 3 schools I work closely with, which was slightly ironic when I got back and found out that all the teachers in the country are on strike. It will all be used eventually though.

Immediately after touching down, my friend Clint and I had to find our way back to the training center in Thies and get our two very jet-lagged selves ready for the all-volunteer conference, and I immediately had to present to a group of Assistant Peace Corps Directors and the Country Director what is going on in my work zone, for which I am responsible. Somehow I made it through, and spent the next couple of days trying not to doze off in sessions and grabbing 10-minute naps on random benches wherever I could.
Finally, we all went to Dakar for WAIST, which I wrote about last year, and I don’t have much more to say other than it was a couple of days of reconnecting with friends, spending too much money on food, readjusting to this country and destroying my liver. But you know, that’s what growing up is for I guess.

At any rate, I’m back in village now, enjoying the cool breezes of January that you get for a couple of weeks before the hot season sets in. I’m actually pretty well bundled up at night because it gets colder than you’d expect for the desert. Pape keeps complaining about the cold and the wind, but I just respond how much I like it and making fun of him for complaining. At least let me have my fun for a few weeks, and the hot season will be here before we all know it.

I’ll do my best to update more regularly, because I know how fast these next 8 months will go by. It’s not exactly the light at the end of the tunnel yet, but the train is definitely on that track. Email me with any questions you’ve got, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Until next time

~E