where is my husband?

A week into my life here at site, and what I’ve been doing mostly would be considered “getting to know my site.” That means I do a lot of walking around town, greeting people, having short conversations with strangers on the street, and hanging out with my Senegalese host family. I also have been spending some time with my sitemate, talking about culture, logistics of living here, and so on, and trying to get up to speed with the particulars of the current project she and two other PCVs here helped to get going.

I can’t say I’ve done the same thing any day since I’ve been here, which is a relief from training, though I do encounter the same questions from almost anyone who talks to me for more than a few minutes. When they find out I can speak Wolof, a little, nine times out of ten I get some variation on the following:

Q. Where is your husband? (alternatively, Do you have a husband?)
A. Usually I say I don’t have one. Twice so far I’ve made up nonexistent boyfriends, but I’m not very good at lying, especially in Wolof, so I usually just go with the truth.

Q. Why don’t you have a husband?
A. Mostly I say I don’t have time for one. Sometimes I say I just don’t want one. Sometimes I’ll go with a line I learned from another PCV, and say I already have two husbands, in the States, and the guy usually laughs, and says that’s bad, and I say, well men can have two wives here, why can’t women have two husbands?

Q. Can you cook ceebujën? (the traditional Senegalese fish and rice)
A. No, I cannot. And I really have no desire to learn how, but I don’t say that. Fortunately my lovely family here cooks lots of things other than ceebujën. I think this question is just to tease me, to see how Senegalese I am - i.e. if I can already speak Wolof, then maybe I can cook them dinner.

Q. What can you cook?
A. Usually the quick answer I give is eggs, and pasta. But those are easy! people say, and it’s true. But it’s more difficult to get across the fact (in witty repartee) that at home I use cookbooks, and if I can read the instructions, then I can usually cook it. There’s not really any such thing as a cookbook here, so if you can’t cook something from memory, you’re not any kind of cook.

Q. Can you pray?
A. No, not the way Muslims pray here. This is a question less often asked, but I’ve gotten it twice in the last few days, and I think it is also to tease me about being white and Western and living in an African, 90% Muslim culture. There are Christians living here in my town, many fewer than Muslims, but they are accepted and the two groups live together peacefully. If I wanted to go to church, I could, though the service would be Catholic.

The husband question is the most ubiquitous, because a 25-year-old woman without a husband is very rare in Senegal. I always laugh it off, especially when the guy asking the question then offers to be my husband, which just seems ridiculous at first, but then you get used to the fact that it’s all part of how they joke around here. Everyone seems to also love to ask me if I can cook Senegalese dishes, probably also because cooking is solely women’s domain here, and a very large part of their lives. Again, I deflect those questions with humor, because it’s way too early for frustration.

My patience and sense of humor will definitely be tested and tried time and again before I return to the land where it’s perfectly acceptable to be an unmarried woman, where no one but me should care if I can cook, and where my religion is my own business.

by the way, we're real volunteers now!

The other day I experienced for the first time the phenomenon of having a stranger profess his love for me at first sight. I was getting photos developed and waiting to pay when this guy standing next to me in the shop starting talking pretty smooth, asking about my photos, like “who was this, where did I live, where was the picture of my husband, oh didn’t I have a husband? didn’t I want a husband?” and so on and so forth, even after I told him I had a boyfriend in Dakar (as here it’s advisable to fabricate boyfriends). He then proceeded to proclaim that he had fallen in love with me right then and there, to which I laughed, and said, “Oh really? Just like that?” And he said, really, just like that, until I laughed again, for lack of better vocabulary in Wolof to dispute his sudden attraction. Finally the guy behind the counter came up with my change, and I took my photos and left with my friends, to whom I recounted the story minutes later, on the street, as they hadn’t been paying attention. When I told them, amused, how he had “fallen in love” with me, just like that, my one dear friend replied, “Well of course he did.” ☺

Otherwise, much goings-on and upheaval has occurred since last I wrote. Swearing-in in Dakar, at the American ambassador’s house, party in Thiès for our host families, with dinner and dancing and ceremony, moving out of our host families, saying goodbye to our friends who have already left for their distant sites. Friday night was hard, after celebrating the end of training with our families and friends, watching my friends pack and re-pack to be ready to leave early the next day to get out to their sites. Most of us are “installing” on Tuesday or Wednesday, but those further away from Thiès were advised to arrive earlier than those days in order to buy supplies and so on, so some people left Saturday morning, some this morning, and the last two groups, which include myself, will leave Thiès on Tuesday, early.

But if Friday night was hard, saying goodbye to my friends, the Saturday morning trip out to our villages was downright painful. Loading up the car, I didn’t know what to say to express my gratitude to my family for all that they had done for me in these two months. “Dinaa newat, fi ba netti weer, Inch’Allah,” I told them, over and over. “I’ll come back, three months from now, God willing,” and they shook their heads saying three months was a long time. I told them I’d be back for three more weeks then, for more training. “Dinaa dellusi pur netti ayu bes, pur beneen formation,” I said, and then when no one was asking me anything more, we stood for a long time, it seemed, not really looking at each other. None of us said anything, while we waited for our driver to load up all the bags - mine, along with those of the other two new volunteers who had been living in that village. There was so much more I wanted to say then to my sisters and brothers - but the sight of my older sister trying to keep her eyes dry with a handkerchief made it hard to say anything at all. I thanked my mother, and my father, the chief of the village, and as I was getting ready to get into the car, my little two-year-old sister ran up to me and hugged me, one more time. As the Peace Corps car drove us away I felt my heart give out, and as soon as my family was out of sight I could not stop the tears from coming. As we sped down the road back to Thiès, one of the other new volunteers remarked, “If it’s this hard after two months, what’s it going to be like after two years?”

1000 words apiece.

Keep on checking out my photo site, by the way, since I've been uploading photos to it more often than blogging. There's a link to it now on the blog's righthand side: "my PC Senegal photo site".

If you also just want to bookmark it separately, it's http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

Some I just uploaded include a trip to the beach, a tam-tam dance party in the village, and some family photos. Enjoy!

the end of the beginning.

Has two months passed by already? Or am I dreaming that tomorrow morning at 9:30 in Dakar I'll swear in as one of the newest Peace Corps Senegal volunteers?

Nope, it must be real, because I just got a call from my naatango - my counterpart, that is - checking up and letting me know how excited they all are to see me next week. Which means that I do have to pack my stuff up to leave my homestay on Saturday, the morning after swearing-in and the party in Thiès for our homestay families on Friday night. I'll spend the weekend at the center, while I watch my friends depart in scattered groups to various distant parts of the country, while I wait for my turn to come on Tuesday.

I have butterflies in my stomach but I am so proud to have come this far. I don't think I could have done it without the support of so many people, my family and friends back home, and not least of all my fellow trainees, who are now so dear to my heart. Next week will be hard, starting out fresh again. But now I have some language to understand what's going on around me, I have the cultural knowledge to adapt, and I have the know-how to keep myself as safe as possible. All of that makes me feel better about moving on to the next step, because as scary as it is, I know I am ready for it.

I'm gonna miss this one. I think I wrote about how she started to learn to start to speak over the two weeks I was gone for demyst. She can't say my name yet though, so now every night when I come home she greets me with "Tee-ta, Tee-ta!"

end of week 7, one more to go...

One more week. One week from now, next Friday, we'll go to Dakar, where we will officially swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers. Our status will change from PCT to PCV - a slight distinction maybe to those of you at home, but that one letter makes all the difference. To indicate that we've passed muster, we're ready to go out into the field, to take on all the responsibilities that that one letter entails... is huge. It's hard to define "readiness" here - but I think at this point all the necessary elements are in place for our continued success once at site. Yesterday and today we held a "counterpart workshop", where all of the future volunteers' community counterparts came to the center in Thiès to meet us, to learn about our work, exchange expectations of each other, and so on, so that they can go back to our future communities tomorrow and start getting our villages and towns ready for our arrival. Each volunteer has at least one counterpart, a host country national who works in their sector, and who will work closely with the volunteer for their 2 year service, as a partner and colleague. So far I've been getting along fabulously with my two counterparts, which bodes well for my service, and is getting me excited about leaving Thiès to move in to my site. So soon, so soon!