Baax na, wante lan ngay DEF?

In recent letters from home, I have been asked what it is that I actually DO on a daily basis. This is a difficult question to answer, for several reasons, but I shall give as accurate an account as I possible can, at this point.

First, it should be noted that I don’t really have a “normal schedule” as it were, nothing like a 9-5 job - but then you probably already assumed as much, seeing as I am a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Second, I should note that I also have been here just over 6 months now - the first 2 months were training only, the second 2 ½ were an adjustment phase, the month following I was back in training, and this past month has been Ramadan. All of which is to say that my work here has not actually, technically begun yet. My technical work, that is.

Remember way back in February or March, when I posted the 3 goals of Peace Corps? The first goal involves providing countries in need with trained workers, and so on.
The second goal involves giving host country nationals a more educated idea of America and Americans, and the third goal involves giving Americans a better idea of what the host country and its people are like.

Since the night I stepped off the plane in Dakar, I have been accomplishing the second and third goals of Peace Corps, through interacting with Senegalese people and through my communications with my American friends and family back home. I concede that my “first goal” accomplishments are much fewer, but as an environmental education volunteer, that work is soon to start in earnest, once the school year opens in two weeks.

Once we get there, I’ll keep you updated on what my day-to-day work is like. As for now, I can give you not so much an average daily schedule, but a list of things that I have done (and continue to do) since being here in my site. My role here is to help the elementary level school teachers to implement more environmental education curriculum into their classes, and I am also helping with the implementation of a current pilot project to separate, collect and properly dispose of the city’s household trash. This project is currently being implemented in 4 of this city of 40,000’s 27 neighborhoods. So yes, there is work to be done.

Technical work-related things I may do on a daily basis therefore include:

Attend meetings with the pilot project management committee
Go to women’s group meetings to observe the explanation of trash separation
Talk with my school counterpart, the director of one of the elementary schools
- about how the project can be relayed into school curriculum
- about community sensibilization
- about Wolof vocabulary, grammar and usage
Study my Wolof notes
Participate in community clean-ups
Talk with school teachers on an informal, social basis
Attend meetings at the Mayor’s office to talk about funding for the project
Visit the local Marine Preserve office, talk with guys there about what they’re doing about resource conservation, and so on…

Up until now you could say I have been listening, watching, observing, absorbing, learning, asking questions, and processing information. So soon I hope to actually start “doing”.

if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Ramadan, Part III

Disclaimer: the following is not meant to disrespect any religious beliefs. I am only posting this to try and give an idea about what my personal experience is like living where I do know, having coming from where I do. That being said…

Imagine a scenario such as this. You are a new teaching assistant at a rural college, where you have been happily working for a few months. Just as you are starting to feel like you know your way around campus and are comfortable with the professors, one of the deans passing in the hallway tells you, “Oh by the way, starting Tuesday we will celebrate our annual chalkless month. One month without using chalk from your first 8 am class all through the end of your evening seminars. It’s great, you’ll like it. It’s not easy to give up chalk, but we do it to honor the Earth from which chalk originates. Then at the end of the month we throw a big party where we chalk up the whole campus. Can’t you just see it now?”

“Thanks, Dean,” you say, all the while thinking that the whole thing sounds pretty silly. “Give up chalk,” you think to yourself. “Why, I use chalk so much I don’t know what I’d do without it. And besides, no one gives up chalk for a whole month where I come from. I don’t know anyone who has. I’ll just keep using chalk, thank you very much.”

So the chalkless month begins, and each day your students and fellow teachers greet you, asking about the weather and how the chalklessness is going. “It goes,” you say, slightly uncomfortable, knowing their chalk is stashed away, while your hands are still caked in powdery white. “So, you’re not using it, right?” they say, happy that you are still new to town and yet eager to fit in. “Well…” you mumble, and then admit that you have yet to be able to give it up, that you’re just not used to it, and that it’s not a tradition you are familiar with. “But you can try it,” they respond, “help us out, support us. Try it for a day, at least,” they urge, seeming to take so much joy in their temporary boycott.

Each day the conversation is the same, morning and afternoon and evening, for two weeks running. You start to wonder if it is really worth the grief you’re getting, being the only one who’s still using chalk. It’s starting to wear on you. Maybe there’s something in this whole giving-up-chalk thing, you start to think. The other professors seem to still be able to hold classes, you see, the students aren’t rioting, and in fact everyone all around seems to pay a little bit more attention to their studies. One morning you happen to wake up earlier than usual, and think that if you just went ahead and prepared your lesson with markers on flip chart paper, you could leave the chalk alone for the day.

So you do. Your students come into the classroom for the first class of the day and greet you heartily when they see your clean, chalk-free hands, and your conscience feels clearer, knowing you are not still doing something that everyone else around you has, for the time being, given up. By the end of the day you are laughing with your adjunct professor, who invites you to sit in on his evening seminar. “Just wait til the end of class,” he says. “At 9 o’clock on the dot I give every student a piece of chalk and let them go at it on the board. After all day without chalk, they love it.”

You see that this is true. At the end of the day, having been deprived of your usual, everyday chalk, you realize how much you take chalk for granted. When the professor hands you a piece so you can join in with the students up at the board, you take it in your hand with a newfound respect, and are almost giddy at the aspect of actually using it. “So this is why they do it,” you think to yourself. Your head is swimming a bit from the sudden flurry of chalk dust, but you see the point as you wipe your hands on your pants and head home to prepare the next day’s lesson.

but what IS Ramadan really about?

Here are a few links with information about the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, for those interested:

http://http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2005/09/27/idiots_guide_to_ramadhan_faith_feature.shtml (this article is a few years old but funny and informative - note, this year Ramadan falls in September, not October)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan

Ramadan

22 more days
how many hours can I sleep
not as many as they can
every conversation now a religious debate
as if daily marriage proposals weren't enough

22 more days
each another reminder of how much I stand out
next month will they forget that I ate

22 more days
no one is working like they used to
children are still not back in school
hours at the cybercafé
in the street with games
pushing shoving hungry/stop staring over my shoulder

22 more days
until life goes back to what is normal anyway
religious beliefs can take a backseat
i can stop hiding my water bottle from the sun/
and feeling bad that I am not hungry

22 more days