Ups and Downs

I should start by apologizing for the dismal tone of my last blog entry. But that’s life in Senegal for you- first you are at the top of the world, wondering at how you managed to come to a new culture, integrate yourself into a third-world village and learn a new language, and the next moment you turn around a realize that you did in fact just leave everything you ever knew behind and it will be a long time until you can come back. That is what is known by PCVs, lovingly, as a mid-service crisis. But it’s not one major event that happens and passes, as I originally thought. I’m coming to realize that it comes and goes, just as everything in life. Even if I was in the States right now, I’m sure I would have bad times as well as good. The difference is that in the States, you usually have more of an open line of communication to vent and an ability to walk around the corner at all times, buy yourself some ice cream and move on with your life. Here, that angst manifests itself as angry blog entries.

In reality, I’m doing alright overall. I’ve been back in village for about a week, getting over a cold that I had, and getting my hands dirty outplanting all of those pepinieres I wrote about a while back. It’s a lot of work, but it is somewhat calming to work quietly in a field outside for a couple of hours and just let your mind wander. I’ve also taken the time to write in my personal journal every day, a practice I started years ago as a little kid, and I have taken up again while here as a way to process, record, and vent about my experiences. At some point I’ll be able to go home, re-read about all of these difficult times that I’ve made it through, and write new blog entries about how much I’ve learned.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to rant about my life and try to document all my experiences here to my loving readers. May you all keep enjoying TV, ice cream and internet every day. And may you all send me care packages on a regular basis.

Much love,

~E

Complaining. Feel free to disregard.

In Kaolack today, but going back to site in a little bit. It always is difficult mobilizing enough energy and effort to actually make the trip back down there- have to get a taxi to the market, walk to the garage while ignoring all the obnoxious moto drivers hissing at me to get my attention, find the car, wait forever for the thing to leave, endure the bumpy, 4-5 hour ride back and end up in my village where work and Wolof people await me. As you can imagine, it's always tempting to spend an extra day here, drinking cold water, eating real food, watching movies on my computer when I don't have to worry about the battery dying, speaking in English. Sigh. But that's what America is for, right?

Disclaimer: I'm going to complain a little. There's no reason one can't vent in public on their blog to the world, right?

Senegal gets really tiring sometimes. You're exhausted by the heat, the culture, the lack of communication because of language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, the work, the food... the list goes on. Not that I don't think this is a rewarding experience and I'm going to toughen up and push through, but sometimes you've just got to give up for a day or two and stop trying to be the perfect volunteer. Even if you are the perfect volunteer, you will probably leave this country having made an impact on a few people's lives, maybe taught some new skills or started some good projects, but that doesn't mean that what you do will be continued or remembered forever. Volunteers are not gods to Senegalese people, they are foreigners with money that occasionally you can interact with. Ok that's a mild generalization, but it's hard to really have a full life conversation about what my job is as a volunteer and the purpose of Peace Corps with every single person I meet on the street. Sometimes you have to just look down at the ground and keep on walking.

I do have good days here. I have a fantastic relationship with my family, great work partners, a beautiful site, and some very good friends (though most of them are currently home on vacation). There are times though when that's not enough- being here is a constant reminder of who you are because you are very aware that you don't fit in. It's a study in human psychology- group mentality always singles out the person with different color skin, who doesn't speak the language or do things the same way as everyone else. I don't always want to drink attaya, I don't want to wear a complet everyday and yes, I do like to read for fun. What gives. My host uncle, who is home in Keur Andallah for school vacation but normally teaches in Sokone, had a conversation with me the other day. He asked why I always just like to sit and read in the evening. What is my job here in Senegal? He is a teacher after all, and he knows that it is difficult to always have conversations about things like early marriage and having many children without the ability to support them, but he still said I could try using my time by having conversations with villagers about problems in Senegal and how they can take small steps to fix them. I do that, I really do. I've sat in the field and talked about culture and families and environmental issues and education.

But I'm only human. Humans have limits. We need friends, a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort. That's hard to come by in this country for a volunteer. We do our best, but we get sick and tired just like everyone else. Sometimes you just have to face that and make it through another day. So I'm still going back to site today. I'll continue to deal with the frustrations of being a volunteers and handle them in whatever way I can. I'm blessed to have this opportunity, but I've gotta say- sometimes it's just easier pretending I'm not here for a little while.

Rainy season and the 4th of July

First of all, I apologize for that very rushed and very nonsensical previous entry about the rain. That is apparently what happens when you see a weather event that you have not experienced in the last 9 months of your life and decide to blog about it on limited battery life. The AC converter is currently not functioning in Ousman's house because they are too lazy to maintain the batteries that the solar panels charge, so I am currently without an ability to charge at site. Kaolack house it is.

Happy belated 4th of July everyone! If you are a facebook stalker of mine, you already know that we ate BBQ chicken, a lovely menu of various side dishes and desserts, chocolate rice-crispy treats notwithstanding. So now you understand what makes a PCV happy. I have to admit though, after eating small amounts of rice and millet and secretly snacking on a granola bar occasionally in my room for the last 2 weeks, it's a bit difficult to stomach an entire Thanksgiving-style feast, and needless to say it was an early night for me.

In other news, the rainy season has really commenced, emphasized now by the return of the giant lake in the middle of Pape's field and the muddy disgusting streets that Kaolack is famous for. Gratefully, they are paving the road in front of the regional house which will help prevent the giant puddle that prevents all ease of movement to or from the house we lovingly dubbed "Lake Kaolack."

The arrival of the rains signals a change in my general schedule, since now my goal for the next couple of months focuses almost entirely around outplanting all those pepinieres I so lovingly nurtured since April. This is the part of my job that feels like you are actually helping the earth, since now I am actually taking baby trees and putting them into the ground. It was especially rewarding the other day planting a grafted ziziphus tree that I bought up in Thies a few weeks ago during the agfo summit. Assuming this tree takes off well, it will provide me with copious amounts of scions to graft onto other baby ziziphus trees and ultimately allow the village to make a profit off of selling little jujubee fruits. Now if I can just figure out how to go about actually grafting them successfully, that would be useful.

The other piece of exciting news is that Garrison will be helping to install a rope pump onto one of our village wells within the next couple of weeks, and it will likely improve the quality of life of many women in the village by speeding up the time it takes to pull water. It's not exactly the same as having running water in your compound, but it's a change nonetheless, and it's something that the village can get excited about. Stay tuned for updates on that!

One other quick thing- if people have questions about any aspect of my life that you think I should post about, feel free to shoot me a note or a comment. I realize my blogs are getting less frequent since nothing seems quite as new and amazing to me anymore, but my life is probably still pretty foreign to many of you states-bound readers, so ask away. It's good to hear feedback.

Until next time,

~E

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.

~E

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

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

Senegalese out of Senegal

One of my favorite conversations to have with Senegalese people is about my life in America; what my English name is, what the climate and food is like, what our favorite sports are, etc. It gives me a chance to reminisce while holding a captive audience, and every Senegalese person I've ever met wants to go to America. I always end the conversation with something along the lines of "but if you went there, you'd hate it. There's no attaya (Senegalese tea they drink out of shot glasses with tons of sugar), it's really cold, and you wouldn't get to eat rice out of a single bowl with your hand ever single day. Also, Americans are addicted to work, much as we don't think we are. Most of us can't sit still for long periods of time without any real goal. Instead, we're always working at some sort of chore or following some sort of plan, even if that plan involves things like going to the gym or going out to meet someone for coffee- there's still a plan. Many people I talk to agree with me; they think they're better off here and might as well stay. Many people don't care and decide that all American have tons of money and live happy careless lives. Some really just want to go to see it for themselves as a vacation then come back to tell about it, which is okay with me.

Lately, though, I've really started wondering what Senegalese who do make it to America actually think of it once they see it for what it is rather than just through a TV screen translated into French. I've now been here long enough to have made enough contacts that I've gathered various opinions on the matter. Surprisingly, these opinions really run the gamut from hating it to illegally staying there because they can't stand to come back to their own country. For instance, the other day I was visiting my host dad Ousman in Saloum Diane for a meeting, and met one of his collegues who had gone to America and lived in New York for a couple of years a while back. I asked him if he hated it because of the cold, and he said no, that wasn't really an issue. The problem is that there's no real rest. If you're accustomed to spending every afternoon resting and drinking attaya, then you go drive a taxi through Manhattan for two years where you don't quite speak the language, I can understand that. When I was talking to my host mother Arame last week, I wondered out loud what Seneglase think of America, and she said that whenever she's had friends that went there they always return saying "Senegal am na jamm. Men nga toog fi." (Senegal is in peace, you can stay here.) Another person I met yesterday who I am collaborating with had a younger sister who managed to go through an exchange program for the better part of a year, and she came back to Senegal saying "Amerik nexul," or rather, America isn't very nice. Her experience there was focused more around the American education system, which varies drastically to the Senegalized-version of the French system here. I'm guessing it was more rigorous and she was held to higher expectations than she was used to, but I can't say for sure.

Some people think that they will love America and are not disappointed when they get there. Pape told me the other day that he knew a man when he was a kid in our neighboring village of Keur Theirno, and he left two wives and all of his kids to go to America and work at a hotel there. He's been there now for 30 years and as far as anyone knows, he has no plans to ever come back. One of the boutique owners in Kaolack across the street from a restaurant we like used to work in a boutique in New York for a few years also, and he enjoyed his time there greatly. He makes a special effort to import some of the same boutique-type products we value there such as orbitz gum and other brand names I can't quite remember.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to write in this blog entry as a conclusion, until I realized that just as people from America differ drastically, so do Seneglaese. Every experience is an individual one. Some PCVs come to Senegal and fall in love with the culture here, and others simply can never get the taste for it, and it is really no different the other way around. Another way of explaining my point: when I was talking to my work partner yesterday about his little sister, I later thought to ask what state she had lived in. He responded that she had lived in Kansas. Being my loyal Bostonian self, I joked, "Well that's why she didn't like it." If I went to Kansas, the culture there alone differs so drastically from my own American experience that I probably would have been saying the same thing. (Sorry to anyone from Kansas reading this, I promise it's not personal.)

All in all, this just motivates me to find a bunch of Wolof-speaking Senegalese whenever I go back to America and throw out a couple of "Asalam alekum"s. Could make for an interesting international social study.

~E