Damn bugs

There’s a certain point when you know you’re a real Peace Corps volunteer, and sometimes that comes when a project you put tons of time and care into fails. I came home from the regional house the other day for Christmas, and was extremely happy that I had brought home my guitar and finally had a chance to practice and play for my family here a little bit. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed is that my entire garden was wilted and dead, guava pepiniere included. There were thousands of little insects running around, and then when I showed Arame what had happened, she was super surprised. She is generally responsible for watering my garden while I’m gone, and she doesn’t mind doing it, but she failed to notice that somebody has placed a large pile of peanut fodder next to my millet fencing by the horse stable, and the bugs were emerging from it and eating everything in their path. After hearing tons of stories from other volunteers about trees being demolished by goats and people failing to water their pepinieres, I feel that I can now contribute to the pool of Peace Corps failures and be initiated into our world of disappointment. At least I can be thankful that my diet is not dependent on my garden and I will still have dinner tonight. I can’t imagine what it is like for farmers who have their harvests demolished and nothing to sell or eat. Makes you think.

Another thought-provoking conversation: women in Senegal. Learning about women and gender roles here is an ongoing process, but the last two days were especially weird for me. Yesterday, I was helping Arame cook lunch by cutting onions and garlic for her, and I noticed an empty packet of birth control pills in the binoir next to me. I asked her who owned them, and she hesitantly said that she did, and asked if I knew what they were. I replied that I did and explained, and she was embarrassed, assuming that I wouldn’t be able to answer. After reassuring her that it is more than just ok, I explained that I thought it was fantastic and many women in America use them as well, and if she has any questions she can feel free to ask me. It is extremely liberal and forward-thinking for a Senegalese woman to wait until after 20 to have a child, then go on birth control to prevent from getting pregnant immediately afterwards, and I am very proud of her initiative. On the other hand, Hadi, my younger sister who is 15 or 16, has a child a year old, and I just noticed today that she was pregnant again. This is not particularly unusual, but it is sad that I can actually notice a real difference in both Diama’s and Babacar’s mannerisms and maturity levels both at a year old. Of course every child is different, but Diama is clearly learning more about the world at a faster pace than is Babacar, since Hadi is not nearly as attentive or caring of a mother as is Arame.

The differences in education level show as well; though Arame did not make it much past an elementary school level, she can read a bit and understands a little bit of French. I don’t know any other women at the top of my head that can read anything in Keur Andalla (aside from Oumi, but she is an outsider as well) and this became a topic of conversation today. Seey, my neighbor, looked at my book that I was reading today, and I asked her if she could read. She adamantly replied that she could not, so I asked if she wanted to learn. She basically replied “Sure, if you’ll teach me” so I told her there was a class in Saloum Diane for women to learn to read. She laughed at me and told me there wasn’t any time, she has to cook lunch and go pull water from the well every day, how could she ever think of actually learning something else? Meanwhile, Arame will occasionally pull out her old French books and study with me when I get up the motivation to review my Wolof books, and she keep telling me that she wants to go back to school and continue her studies despite having to raise Diama and cook and pull water just like all the other women in the village. Remember in my last blog post how I wrote about the differences in education level and how people can compare themselves to one another easily here? Case and point.

Anyway, tomorrow is New Years! God knows how I will make it till midnight seeing as I generally pass out before 10 here, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. A group of us are meeting up in Toubakouta, renting out some rooms in a campemont, going out for a nice dinner and potentially jumping in the delta. Should be a good time- much different than the American version of the festivities, but fun nonetheless. Enjoy it everybody, and here’s to a good 2011!

Lessons learned

So I had this great blog entry going about my two weeks in Thies; what I learned, how I plan on applying it, what I did there, etc. But in the in the end, I really just spent two weeks being an American with other Americans. We went to restaurants, went to class every day, learned all sorts of interesting skills, but in the end, it wasn’t a particularly inspirational cultural exchange. I learned all sorts of interesting things in college, too, but you won’t find any blog entries detailing my new fact of the day from the last four years. Onto the village.

I am just about done spending a few days at site before I travel to Kaolack tomorrow for Christmas. Yes, I’m Jewish, but the idea of sitting at site while everyone is out partying just seems too depressing, so I will be sitting in the regional house enjoying ample free internet and kitchen space instead. In the meanwhile, I figured I’d write my blog entry at site, where I am surrounded by my inspirational African coming-of-age stories I know you’re all just dying to hear. So here goes.

At the all-volunteer conference, we got the chance to see the “universal nut sheller” in action. It’s pretty cool. It’s this crank-powered machine that will shell peanuts at the rate that 41 women can in the village by hand, thus saving time and allowing them to make a greater profit each season. Peace Corps was advertising it as revolutionary and able to really improve the lives of rural women who spend much of their free time next to little stools developing calluses. I came back to village with pictures to show Ousman and stories to tell. Then, yesterday, I was walking over to my hut when I saw some kid and an old-rusty looking crank-powered thing turning out a bunch of nicely-shelled peanuts into a sac placed clumsily underneath. It sort of reminds me of a fable I read in a Central American literature class in college- a priest gets lost in the woods and is captured by Mayans who are going to sacrifice him to the gods. Thinking he can outsmart them and trick them into thinking he has magical powers, he tries to tell them he knows the moon will go out at a certain time the next night since he knew about an upcoming solar eclipse. Instead, the Mayans sacrifice him while reading off a list of the previous, well-documented solar eclipses that have occurred over the last few thousand years. I’m glad my stakes for underestimation were not as high as that priest’s, but the lesson is the same. Don’t assume that people are innocent or lack knowledge by their socio-economic status or rural location.

In my case, I shouldn’t overestimate them either. Yesterday morning before going to the fields, my pregnant neighbor came into my hut asking me to read a doctor’s slip for her so she can know when she should go to the local health post for her checkup. The rate of illiteracy here is something crazy around 50% overall, but it is much higher for women and gets progressively higher as villages become more rural and isolated. Keur Andala is a strange place; while my counterpart is practically more educated than I am and can afford such novelties as solar panels and a tin roof, my uncle keeps asking me to buy him a cellphone, something even my pregnant illiterate neighbor owns and asked me to coordinate with my watch on the way out to the field yesterday. Apparently anything the white “toubab” owns is automatically correct.

This also changes my general perception of happiness in developing communities. Thinking I was a smart enlightened person before coming here, I assumed the general level of happiness here would be higher than I was used to; after all, people keep pointing to depression statistics in America. I have seen plenty of publications on how money actually can lead to unhappiness because it leads to a false obsession with material objects and a lower appreciation for the “little things in life.” In contrast, people have this idea that these small villages and tight-knit families are happy because they appreciate everything they have and work for. The large span of knowledge and control of money seems to crush this theory, for all intensive purposes. Now that people here are becoming less isolated and ever so slowly more westernized with their cell phones and Shakira’s “This is Africa” playing on the radio non-stop, people are more aware of what everybody else has and what they don’t have. Not that they are all out to cut themselves the way American media might lead you to believe, but at the end of a Sunday when my brother comes home from the market and I ask how his day was, he always seems to respond, “not so good- there isn’t any money.” So that’s my Peace Corps insightful story for the day.

On a less profound note, my quick life update: I’m slowly but surely starting to get into some real work here. My garden behind my hut is actually growing, I moved and rotated my pepiniere into a sunken ditch to hold in water and put berms around it this morning, and I’ve started visiting my uncle’s garden. He’s got a lot going for him, and it is a mini paradise with water and pepinieres galore- a regular nirvana as rural Senegalese communities go. The second time I went to visit it, though, I had a bit more time while I was helping to harvest rice to really observe some of his techniques, and I realized he could benefit from a lot of little changes- berms and terracing to help with water retention, pruning his mango trees a bit more, making some compost piles… there is work to be done. I’ve also spent a few days back out in the peanut fields, this time sifting through the dead plants and separating them with the wind. I’ll try to get a few pictures of that before the season’s over, but I wasted my camera battery taking pictures of the garden the other day. I’ll post those tomorrow. And PS, I figured out how to do multiple captions on google albums, so if you were curious about the subjects of my photos, now is the time to go back and look.

I’ll leave it at that for now. Hope everyone has (or had) a great holiday!

Much love from the west coast,

~E

An Intellectual Interlude

This past week, all of the volunteers in country and several volunteers from Togo, Niger, The Gambia, Mali and Burkina Faso gathered at the Thies training center to participate in the West-African All-Volunteer Conference and share best management practices from the field. Volunteers had the opportunity to present individual sessions, participate in workshops and round-table discussions, and see a few of the “appropriate technologies” that have been introduced to aid in development efforts. As a new volunteer, it was a fantastic opportunity to hear about many of the current projects, what made them successful or not, and pick people’s brains from around the country. I must say, after weeks of sitting at site, not knowing what to do or how to begin, it was an extremely refreshing and motivating experience. I attended a workshop on grant-writing in the Peace Corps, a discussion on GIS use in the field, various smaller sessions on project sustainability and environmental management, and learned a bit about projects outside my sector such as literacy and sanitation.

Some of the more interesting points I brought away included how to collaborate with NGOs and use multimedia as tools both in and out of the field. I will make sure to write a more in-depth post on development from a PCVs perspective, but I can definitely see an expanded use of technology in the Peace Corps network to start building a base of institutional memory and improve or streamline training sessions. For instance, volunteers have started using video and audio clips to help refresh technical skills of volunteers and train counterparts while carrying out a project or aid in communication when language barriers present a problem. Many volunteers now have radio shows that are pre-recorded and edited in collaborations at regional houses or in local cities, and digital on-line dictionaries help volunteers keep up-to-date on local language terminology. Every year, it becomes easier for more volunteers to have internet at site due to the proliferation of cell keys for laptops, and netbooks increase the portability and ease of that information. Most of the larger, more successful projects are conducted by volunteer cross-sector collaborations, so the benefits of easy communication, documentation and resources are clear. Some volunteers believe that having access to technology at site impedes community integration, but I believe that if utilized with an awareness of the culture and individual community, it will continue to be a beneficial tool to aid in development work.

But enough of that rant. I am currently in IST; our stage in-service technical training. We spend two weeks at the center specifically concentration on technical skills and project development, so when I go back to the village, I will really have more of the knowledge and ability to start small projects and begin to build my credibility as a knowledgeable community member. I am motivated to learn about cross-sector projects and how to integrate knowledge from different areas to really get everything you can out of a project. If I spend a lot of time and effort growing and installing a live fence, for instance, what will the benefits be in terms of vegetables grown in the garden and how will that benefit the village in the long term? A quick training on healthy diets, for instance, would encourage the villagers to consume some of those vegetables rather than selling them all for profit, or a marketing lesson would allow them to sell some vegetables at a higher profit and allow them to buy materials to make an even more successful garden in future years.

While all this is occurring in Senegal, it is the holiday season back in the States. So happy shopping people! I can’t believe that this time last year I was preparing for finals, planning ski trips and bundled up in blankets and jackets. It’s still hot here. That’s what happens when you live in the dessert in Africa. Not that I should have to ask for this, but make sure you all take plenty of snowy pictures for me! I’m pretty sure that a few good magazine spreads of ski pictures will end up in my hut before the end of the winter.

Oh, and PS: Happy Hannukah!

~E

first post from site

Blog Entry:

Hey lookie here! I’m updating my blog from site! My host family compound has solar paneling, and my host dad is patron enough to have a fixed line in the house, and he offered me to use it to get internet access once the AC/DC converter was up and running. Basically, I got sick of waiting and bought it myself as a gift for Tabaski and to provide myself with free electricity for the 2 years that I am here. It turns out the internet I get through the fixed line is quite cheap and faster than the internet in Kaolack since there are normally 10 or 11 computers trying to use internet at once in the regional house, so this is a pretty good option.

At any rate, I will be here for 2 more days, then I travel to Thies for our all-volunteer conference. We get two days of meetings about best-management practices in the field with volunteers from all over the country and a few from surrounding countries. Then, IST starts, and I have two more full weeks of sitting in class learning about agroforestry technologies. Ironically, I am actually super excited. It will be nice to see the rest of the stage again, be out of the village for a bit, eat training center food (it’s amazing the things you appreciate being in the village) and have a bit of fun. I also plan on visiting my homestay family and seeing how they’re doing, considering they’ve been calling me continuously since I left. It’s cute, but the fact that I haven’t really called them back on a regular basis makes me a bit of an asshole by Senegalese standards. There are a few times when I absolutely refuse to be part of Senegalese culture- calling everyone I know on a regular basis just to see if they’re doing ok is something I do not plan on doing.

I came to a realization though- being a PCV is strikingly like being an RA at site. Everyone is watching you all of the time, they see you as some form of authority figure but that does not necessarily mean they respect you, you are living “in a fishbowl,” you have to plan program and projects in your community, and you are responsible for presenting a good image all of the time to represent American culture. It’s also funny; I was remembering the weekly reports we used to have to fill out about our floors, and all of the questions still seem to apply: which new resident (villager) have you interacted with this week? What situations have you encountered and how have you followed up on them? What are you doing to keep yourself healthy and deal with stress? The list goes on. When all else fails and I am going crazy, I usually remember how in some ways, nothing has really changed. The sad part is, I used most of those comparisons during my interview for Peace Corps. I now realize why my recruiter decided I was a good candidate. Apparently, I said the right thing.

In terms of work, yesterday was actually somewhat successful! I sat down with my counterpart and two very motivated local farmers to decide what the overall needs of the community were and what types of projects they were interested in carrying out so that I can do the research for them while I am in Thies. I explained some of our training and offered some ideas, but it seems that people are particularly interested in “diversifying” types of fruit trees being planted, protecting fields, starting a bee-fodder project, fish farming in our little pond, and soil stabilization to prevent continued erosion. We’ll see how many of those projects get started or turn out to be successful, but now I feel like I’ve made connections and have a goal in life. It’s a pretty good feeling.

So I’ll check in again when I’ve made it safely to Thies. Remind me not to overuse my computer at site- I found myself looking through old pictures a lot in my hut halfway through writing this entry; I’m hoping that does not become an addiction. Homesickness is a painful thing sometimes, but I’ll leave it at that.

Love and miss you all!

~E

Tabaski and Thanksgiving. Yummy x 2

Wow, I have failed miserably at this whole blogging deal over Thanksgiving, as normally I would be much better about getting a good entry or two up as soon as I got to Kaolack. But here you go.

I successfully made it through 5 weeks of sitting at site, not doing anything particularly productive with my life, not quite knowing the language or people who live there, and essentially wondering what I got myself into. I made it through Tabaski and endless hours of sitting, peeling and cutting onions to cook the Tabaski meal, and watching them kill sheep. Little background information- Tabaski is the Islamic holiday that celebrates the story of Abraham and his willingness to kill his own son to prove his faithfulness to God. Most of you know the story or some variation thereof: at the last minute, God informs him that he should sacrifice a ram instead. In order to celebrate this, Muslims decided that they should do the same, so everyone kills sheep throughout the country and has large, meat-eating celebrations. However, the process of killing and cooking the sheep is not exactly the clean, well-run operation that you would imagine in the states. People dig a hole in the ground to drain the blood, everyone brings their sheep or goat over to the communal killing location, and they ceremonially saw off the sheeps’ heads with machetes. There are a few pictures of the killing in the Tabaski album if you’re curious to see the gore. I’ve got a video too if anybody is really sick in the head.

The problem with this whole Tabaski process is that it is almost entirely based around the cooking process, and in Senegal, cooking is exclusively the women’s job. This gets really annoying when you consider that my sister Umi went home to her family in Foungioune for Tabaski, my mom Arame got very sick, and I have a small enough family that much of the cooking responsibility fell to me. After spending hours peeling onions and cutting up chunks of meat, we had to wait until 3 in the afternoon to be able to serve the men food. Another hour later, finally, women were able to sit down and actually eat the food they had been cooking all morning. But before they could do so, they decided that the whole community must eat exactly the same meal, so they put all the cooked food from all of the bowls from all of the families into one large bowl, mixed it, then redistributed it back into the bowls brought by all the women. It was a rather odd process. Everyone then dressed up, and many of the younger people went out dancing each night. I did my best to make an appearance, but I have decided that Senegalese dancing is probably better watched than done, especially if I am going to be here for two years.

By the end of the five weeks, I was definitely ready to get out of site. After days of sitting in another culture, isolated from friends and family and not having much to do, I was beginning to lose my patience. A visit to Cassie’s site did the trick. I traveled down to her site just north of Karang to see her lovely agroforestry projects and get inspiration for my own in the future. We wondered around all morning, chatted, saw some lovely live fencing, and decided that it made no sense for us to sit around and do nothing all night when we had a free afternoon to travel into Kaolack, so we came into the house for the night and had a chance to hang out with friends a bit before the madness of Thanksgiving occurred.

Thanksgiving itself was lovely. I was responsible for making pies, because as those of you who know me probably know, I am much more of a baker than a cook. I really miss baking in the states- our ovens have pilot lights, temperature gauges, and are big enough to put more than two tiny pies in them on its single rack at once. However, it was still a good time hanging out in the kitchen, listening to music and baking with friends. After two full days of cooking and baking and 5 mil (about 10 bucks) a person, we put together a true Thanksgiving feast of turkey, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, a few other vegetable dishes, corn bread (we actually had to pound the corn meal from scratch), sangria with orange slices actually floating in it, and pumpkin, squash and apple pies. I am pretty sure I have never been more full in my entire life. Definitely a success. And what do you imagine happens when you have 41 just out of college kids in a house after a good meal hanging out in a house together? You’re probably wrong. We sat around, complained about how full we all were, watched a movie, and went to bed. Thanksgiving, no matter where in the world you are, is not a giant party. That tryptophan gets you every time.

I bought an AC/DC converter for my family so I will be able to charge my computer at site! That means I will have internet access as soon as that gets hooked up and I can secure a wireless key, so I look forward to skyping and emailing all of you on a more regular basis very soon. Also, I found a volunteer who is leaving soon and is actually planning on GIVNG me his guitar, so I will be saner at site in the future, inshallah. At any rate, it seems that the worst of the at-site insanity is over, but I have a long way to go, so we’ll see how this journey plays out. In the meantime, I will be traveling into Thies for our all-volunteer conference on Thursday, so I will soon again have internet and bring you the next episode of these ramblings.

Until next time,

~E

Almost Thanksgiving

Day trip to Sokone! I’m pretty sure that I need to stop showing up at other volunteer’s doors asking to use their computers to type blog entries. If I get into that habit, it may not fly so well when this whole adventure is over and I’m back in the land of the free. Can you imagine- “Hey neighbor, how’s it going? Just gonna sit and watch your TV for a while because I don’t have one yet. I’ll only be a little while, thanks!”Maybe not.

Public transport situation is getting slightly better. One of the advantages to living in a remote village is that there is only one or two cars you can use, so you get to know the drivers pretty well. In fact, I now have the phone numbers of the two bus drivers that go to Saloum Diane or Keur Andalla saved in my phone, which makes it much easier when I go into a crowded garage and the one car that is going to my destination recognizes me and makes sure I am on it. When I got off this morning, the driver left me with strict instructions on where I should sit and wait for him, what time he will be back this afternoon and how much it will cost to get back. This is all well and good, other than the fact that to get here, I woke up at 4:15 am to catch the bus at about 5, then sat as it drove over rough bush roads honking its horn to wake everyone up and alert people of its presence for the 2-hour trip into the city. You give a little, you take a little I guess. Everything in Senegal is a tradeoff.

At any rate, the 5 week challenge is coming into its homestretch! We are more than 3 weeks in now, and within the next week Tabaski will occur, which is sort of equivalent to Easter in the States. It comes about 2 months after Korite, as you may have noticed, and involves many of the same traditions- women braiding their hair and buying new clothes, getting dressed up and cooking fancy meals involving meat and onions. It should be a good time. I am, however, avoiding markets at all costs from here on out until after the holiday is over, because I do not want to deal with frenzied Senegalese trying to buy their goats last minute to kill for the holiday. So maybe it’s not exactly like Easter but you get the idea.

I’ve noticed lately that very little goes to waste around here, though an outsider would never know it by all the trash in the streets. Things get reused all the time for various purposes that Americans would never think to do. This is mostly because we have access to buying products that usually fill that purpose, and the old saying of reduce, reuse recycle is rarely taken to heart when a vendor has a product that fills the exact purpose you were looking for. I have started following along with this trend, and have become increasingly more creative with my use of products I may have previously disposed of. For instance, when the cable to my hut broke and I was solar lamp-less for a few days, I had to find a way to hold a candle.Given that the boutique next to me doesn’t even sell bread never mind candlesticks, I used a small cardboard box that had contained the lighter for my gas stove and filled it with dirt to hold the candle in place. When I painted my room, an old coke bottle with the top cut off proved to be the perfect container to mix paint and paint thinner. When I was breaking up the soil in my garden-to-be, a ripped up plastic sheet that was stuck under the ground seemed to be the perfect cover for my compost pile (banana tree leaves work well too), and the chaco box that my parents sent a care package in work great as a clothespins holder. Senegalese use a cleaned-out tomato can as a cup for water so often that when cooking, the can itself has actually become a unit of measurement. I feel like this is a good trend that I should bring back with me- if anybody is in, we should start a club. The 4 Rs- Reduce, reuse, recycle, for real. Please don’t make fun of my humor, I’m a geek and I’m proud of it.

My village had a big day yesterday! As I was chilling and reading my book in the afternoon, my family told me that there were a few Toubabs walking around. I found that hard to believe, so I got up to investigate, and sure enough a group of three white people and two other Senegalese were wondering around taking pictures of trees. Much as remote peanut-farming villages in Senegal seem like the most desirable place in the world for a nice relaxing vacation and this seemed entirely normal to me, I decided to go introduce myself anyway. It turns out that and NGO collaboration consisting of Plan Vivo, BioClimate and some professors from the University of Dakar were investigating a group of villages in the area and scouting out potential host sites to start some research on agroforestry techniques there. Hah! Now I know that as a PCV I am expected to find out what other organizations are active in the area and try to form connections and collaborate on projects, but I did not expect one to show up knocking on my door. They were unaware that a PCV was present in village, since most of them are based out of Denmark and Scotland, so we talked a bit and tried to figure out what each organization was up to in the village. They proceeded to sit my chief of village and half of the village down and explain the benefits of agroforestry and try to gauge their interest in participating in projects with the NGO. As far as I have gathered, there is no definite that they will return, and they are simply trying to do surveys of potential sites before selecting specific villages to work with. An exciting day for the village for sure, but no guarentees that anything will happen. I still feel as though my work has officially started; I got to act as a delegate for the village, share information, speak in Wolof (they had to bring a translator) and gain some contacts that may be useful in the future.

Chillin in Toubakouta

Yay I have a computer! I apologize in advance- this might be long. I don’t have computer access that much these days, so I take advantage when I can.

Biked into Toubakouta to hang out with Garrison and Amy and see civilization for a few hours. Sometimes I forget what it looks like. Granted, our definition of civilization is a bit different here- if I can get a bean sandwich in a little shack and speak English with another volunteer for a few hours, I’m a pretty happy camper. The ride in is really beautiful- it is about 4 kilometers to Saloum Diane on a sand road, which is a pain, then a little over 20 or so into Toubakouta on a laterite clay road. It’s about a 2 hour ride, so you can imagine I will be in pretty damn good biking shape after 2 years of this. Pan-Mass challenge, anybody? I showed up at another volunteer’s door randomly since the internet café next door was going to charge me a mil an hour to use the internet, which is ridiculous in comparison to the 300 I paid in Sokone. Now I am sitting and typing on his computer while he does laundry, and I will upload this in a little while at a campemont with internet access. Eventually, I will have internet at site, so that should solve that problem.

Last Thursday, I went to a groupemont training down in Karang on the border of the Gambia. To get there, I stayed overnight with a study-abroad student in Saloum Diane and caught a sept-place at 6 am down to the city, and a Peace Corps car brought us over to the garden. Translation, for those of you who are not yet fluent in PC-Senegalese: a groupemont is a small organization of women who share a garden space and help to maintain it, then split the profit of what they make as a result of selling their produce. This is one of the major goals of the agriculture section of PC Senegal- working with women’s groups to enhance gender equality by providing women with the means to create their own income aside from what their husbands allow them and teaching them agriculture and agroforestry techniques to increase yield and sustainability. I watched as women dug zai holes and terraces into the land, and helped a bit despite the heat. Zai holes are small round holes about 20 cm deep that you dig into a slope and plant field crops in such as millet or corn, and you form a berm around the downhill side to catch water when it rains. Most of you are familiar with terraces- flat areas of land built into the side of a hill where you can plant crops. Senegal is not exactly known for its rolling hills and slopesides, but it is a useful technique even in a very minor slope where any water that can be caught should be use effectively. Both the zai holes and the terraces are then amended by digging the crop area and adding composting materials such as green leaves, brown leaves, manure, and charcoal as a carbon source. Sometime in the near future, planting will begin for dry-season gardening. Believe it or not, this concept actually exists- some plants can tolerate a drier climate, and if watered to a certain extent, can be a productive use of time and effort during the dry cool season in December and January into the warmer dry season later in spring. I’ve got some pictures of all of this, but you have to wait until I get back to Kaolack to see. Gotta keep everyone in suspense somehow.

Enough of technical stuff. Want to know how we buy things in Senegal? We go to Loumas! Loumas are open markets that occur weekly in certain villages, and comprise much of the major economic exchange in remote villages where regular markets don’t exist. Aside from a few boutiques scattered throughout larger villages (my village only has 1 because nobody likes us) most people do their shopping and selling on a weekly basis in the market. The major louma near me is in a village called Touba Mouride, and it occurs every Sunday. I have two options for getting there- pay 250 CFA to take an overcrowded car there at 6 am over a horrible road with tons of products to sell strapped to the top and wait at louma until 5 to leave, or bike. The bike ride is about an hour long, but entirely worth the trip, as you can well imagine. The other day, I biked there and met up with my sister Umi and Amy, my neighboring volunteer. Probably spent too much money (because the equivalent of 20 bucks American is a huge deal here) but I came home with some lovely spoils: a giant clay pot to keep water cool at site, materials to build a door for my backyard, extra paint thinner to finish painting my room, margarine, some bananas, and some bread. Yesterday afternoon, Umi and I attempted to finish painting my room- still a little bit short on the paint thinner, so I bought some more today in Toubakouta, but it’s an activity and a welcome break from going to the field. As you can imagine, transporting everything home was an adventure in itself, so the clay pot was strapped to the top of the car that Umi took home, the wood for the door was lashed to the horse charet that my brother took into louma, and I biked home with a backpack full of bread and bananas and not quite enough water. (I learned my lesson, I have more than enough water for today.) Most of my time in market, I found myself missing the malls back home- the food courts there are a far cry from the small tin shack that I got a bowl of rice with a piece of fish in for lunch, and lord knows some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream afterwards from Providence Place would have been lovely, but you learn to live without it.

I know my sister (my real one) has been dying to hear about my “daily routine,” so I will do my best with what semblance of a routine exists in my life. When staying in village, I usually wake up at 7 am- right after the sun comes up, and heat up water to make coffee. I turn on my ipod and sit on my plastic mat in my room and set up everything to make breakfast- usually some bread with some jelly or honey- and chill out while drinking coffee and taking my sweet time to get ready for the day while it is still cool outside. I brush my teeth with a water bottle and put out my solar charger for the day. I will eventually be able to charge everything in the house where there is solar electricity, but I’d prefer not to take advantage all the time. Afterwards, I emerge from my hut around 8 am or so to go greet my family while they are cooking breakfast and sleeping- Umi is still sleeping if she’s not teaching that day, and my mom and taking care of baby Diama. She is my 1-year old younger sister, and I love her probably more than anyone in the village. I then go back to my hut and leave the door open so people can greet me while I do a little bit of work preparing to the plant my garden- I have a small compost pile going and I’ve broken up the soil and constructed some bad-ass handles with eucalyptus branches with a machetti. (Sorry if I’m repeating anything, I don’t have internet right now to check back on my old entries.) When my mom is ready, I go out to the field to help pull up peanuts until noon, then we come back and I take a short bucket bath and rest for a while before lunch. We don’t eat lunch until 3 normally, so I have a small snack and hang out until then. The afternoon really has no rhyme or reason to it. Eventually, I will use it for real work time, but right now I spend a lot of time hanging out with the women, picking peanuts off the plants we brought back to village, having tea, and doing other random tasks (such as painting my room) and needed. We eat dinner around 8 or so- lately we’ve had millet and beans just about every night. It’s not that bad, at least it’s palatable. In some villages, I’m pretty sure it’s difficult to eat whatever was made. On the other hand, some people cook for themselves or are more urban and live with patron families that cook better dinners. I’m in the Peace Corps- I take what I can get.

Speaking of taking what I can get, many of you are wondering what strategies I use to stay sane while living in a remote village with no good electricity, pulling water out of a well, no internet access, difficult transportation and no English. I have a few things that keep me relatively happy. My morning routine is a big part of that- it’s amazing what an hour of having a cup of coffee and listening to familiar American music does for your morale each day. My sister is another big part of that. She gets that it’s difficult to come live away from your home and give up comforts that you are used to, especially when you are educated and can look at the world around you with a more critical eye. I have had many conversations that have ended with “Xamunu dara u aduna…” They don’t know anything about the world. Just hearing that she gets it, even if she doesn’t speak English or has never been out of Senegal, is a huge help. I can tell her whatever, and she doesn’t judge. She knows what skype is and has relatives in the States, France and Italy, so she understands a bit more about where I’m coming from. It’s also nice that I can put on a Goo Goo Dolls song and she will have actually heard it before, which is more than I can say about Senegalese music before I came here. Talking to people in the states (echem thanks Tim) and writing letters home makes a huge difference too. I really do love sharing my experiences with people, hence this blog, and hearing what is going on back home. Just knowing that someone had a difficult day at work or that the Patriots won or lost makes me feel a bit more connected to my life back home. Things like today, biking into Toubakouta for the day, make a big difference as well- like I started this entry with, a bean sandwich and a good English conversation makes a world of difference. Feel free to call me any time you like, you might be lucky and I’ll have reception and we can talk about your life. I don’t judge. And before I ramble for another few pages, I’ll leave it here for today. Probably will update again when I get to Sokone for my mail and language seminar in a week or two. More about that then.

Mucho Senegalese Amour,

~E