a small circle of life.

My schedule has been, believe it or not, rather full recently. The volunteer who was here at my site for a full tour and some (2+ years) before me just left last week, so helping her get ready to go over the last few weeks was no small task, nor was the passing on of necessary information, pertinent to continuing the excellent and by no means easy work here that she began. That being said, this post is over a week old. But no matter. It's not like I live somewhere where I could have Internet at my fingertips every single day. I mean, this is Peace Corps after all.

Wednesday for lunch we ate another one of our chickens. When I went around back of the house after lunch to draw water, the other two (of the original four we’ve been raising in our little backyard for the past month or so) were huddled together next to our sheep, as if worried they’d be next. I didn’t witness the transformation of live animal to delicious meal, but after lunch there were a few stray gray feathers still laying on the sandy ground next to the back door, and even if I hadn’t asked my sister if it was one of ours, I would have been able to count that now only two of the original four were left strutting around behind the house. Anyway, it’s a novelty to me, being a born-and-raised suburbanite. Raising animals for food is something I grew up thinking other people did, but now that I’m in the midst of it, it seems perfectly natural. Here it’s nothing like the factory-farming culture in most of the States, where we’re generally so removed from our food sources and usually have only half an idea of what goes on between the birth of an animal and its arrival on our dinner plate.

On a less serious note, after lunch I was helping take our little wooden stools that we sit on around the bowl back to the kitchen. Coming back to the front room, I stopped for a moment to find the source of something sticky between my foot and my sandal. My sister saw me and asked, "Li lan la?" (What’s that?)
"Ceeb," I answered, having found a grain of rice stuck to the sole of my foot.
She laughed and said, "Sa tank bi da’y lekk." (Your foot, it’s eating.)

I’m so glad my family has a sense of humor. She’s the one I joke around with about the cockroaches in the bathroom, when the electricity goes out at night and there’s no light to chase them back into their corners. One night a few weeks ago she was making dinner, and after having come back from the bathroom I heard her say to our other sister that there were cockroaches in the bathroom. "Really???" I said, laughing, surprised that she had seemingly never noticed this very obvious fact before. So a bit later on I went to the bathroom and after coming out told her, "The cockroaches said hi." (Or literally in Wolof, "The cockroaches greeted you.") She laughed and said, "Oh really? What did they say? Nanga def? (How’s it going?)"
"Yep, they said, nanga def?" I replied, in a small cockroachy voice. I guess I don’t know what cockroaches would sound like if they could talk, I haven’t watched any of those Pixar bug movies. I don’t exactly like them now, sure, but I guess I don’t despise them anymore. They’ve just become part of my everyday life. As long as they don’t run into my feet…
And as long as the geckos stay out of my bath bucket, I’m ok with them too.

Chickens and cockroaches and geckos and sheep... No lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) but an assorted menagerie nonetheless. More news soon!

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.)