road-weary but happy for now.

This past week has found me in a much better state of mind, first due to the long-overdue purchase of a small gas burner, whose presence in my life here cannot be understated (cooking for myself makes me feel like a grownup again), and second thanks to the fact that this week we non-Senegalese here got together to celebrate the most American of American holidays, the 4th of July.

Every year the PCVs in the Kedougou region of Senegal throw a party for the 4th, inviting all the volunteers in country. That means this year about 155 PCVs were invited, and about half of those actually came. I had been debated whether or not I would go - my site being about as far away from Kedougou as you can go and still be in Senegal. Finally, one of my good friends from training who I hadn’t seen since then convinced me to go. So after a little bit of planning and my trip to the bank for the month accomplished, I told my family and my counterparts, packed up a bag, swept and mopped and bugsprayed my room, and I was on my way.

Public transportation here is not that bad, and relatively speaking I’ve heard it beats the heck out of a lot of other African countries. Still, “not that bad” is also a relative term, and when you get car sick like I do, 8 hours in the back seat of a not-very-well-padded sept-place over 200 km of pothole-ridden road is not exactly a pleasure cruise. All told, from my site to Kedougou means about 16 hours of road, which we split up into two days going, and two coming back. About 8 hours of that is bad road, 2 hours’ worth is decent, and the rest is good, even, hole-free/American standard pavement.

Despite the route, the trip was worth it to me to see all the people I hadn’t seen since PST, and even to meet a few new ones. The event was held at the Kedougou Regional House, also known as the CTC, because it has formerly been a Training Center for various Peace Corps activities. This place is a little hard to believe - let’s say for brevity’s sake that it looks like someone took apart the treehouse from Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson and put about five of those round thatch-roofed huts down on a good stretch of green leafy land, threw some mountains in the background, painted it all brightly, threw in a bunch of hammocks and set a bunch of gangly bike-happy Peace Corps volunteers loose in it.

The outdoor shower alone sets it apart from the other regional houses I’ve seen so far in country, and I was in awe of the kitchen, which is about four times the size of the kitchen at the Dakar regional house. This was helpful when it came time to prepare food for the 70-some hungry volunteers who showed up. The Kedougou guys had planned well in advance, and when we arrived Thursday afternoon they were already butchering the pig they had bought for the fête, and baking bread to eat with the bucket bath-sized tub of hummus they had prepared. Giant bowls of mangoes had been cut up to make a cobbler, and another baignoir was already full of macaroni salad. Many people had already arrived by then, most in small groups from the different regions of the country, though a few close by came in Friday. I had traveled with four other volunteers, which made the trip somewhat easier, because we had each other to complain to. Once we got there, though, there wasn’t too much complaining going around.

Thursday night we were on our own for dinner so we went to one of the nice places in town where we had heard you could get warthog sandwiches. Because who can resist a warthog sandwich? The sandwich was very delicious indeed, even more so because most of us don’t get that much meat on a regular basis. At any rate, it tasted like pulled pork, good and tender, and a good twenty of us or so were there, reveling in each other’s company and catching up on the last few months.

The next day was the 4th, and throughout the day people came and stayed, eating, drinking, and listening to a great soundtrack of American music pumped through Senegalese-rented speakers. There were horseshoes around back, a foosball table someone had acquired, and sometime mid-afternoon there was a water balloon fight, followed shortly by a grand piñata spectacle. When it got dark, the music changed to dancing tempo, and around 9:30 a few fireworks even made an appearance, somehow having been obtained in or around Kaolack, I believe. A few times during the day I actually forgot I wasn’t in America.

Saturday we stayed until the afternoon, then started our trip back. From Kedougou back to Tambacounda, the road passes through a national reserve, which is actually a World Heritage Site, and this time we saw warthogs and baboons, crossing the road. We stayed the night at the Tamba regional house - on the roof, because all the beds were taken with everyone traveling back to their sites. Sunday we left the Tamba garage at 7:30 am, and I got back home 12 hours later, tired, and very dirty from all the dust on the Tamba - Kaolack road. The dirt made it seem like I had gained an extra layer of tan when I stepped out of the sept-place, but when I took my blessed bucket bath that night it all washed off, and it felt so good to be clean, after so much time on the road.

So now I’m back at site, digging in to get some assessments done in these few weeks left in July, because come August I go back to Thiès for another three weeks of training - IST - in-service-training. It feels good to be back, and I’m certainly glad to be sleeping in my own bed in my own room after five nights away. One more week from today and I’ll have been at site two months, and in Senegal for four. Mungiy dox, ndank ndank.
(It’s working, little by little.)