all coming together...

Whew! Tomorrow is May already, hard to believe. I am still here in Senegal, and this month I actually did a few things, if I do say so myself. So to fill you in, here are some highlights of the last few weeks.

On April 12 we did celebrate Easter here (if some of you were wondering), since my community is split Christian/Muslim, and I got to enjoy the visible harmony between the ethnicities that live here. Christians invited Muslim family and friends to spend the day at their houses, both religions went out on Saturday to take advantage of the holiday by dancing the night away at the local club, and many Muslims prepared a traditional sweet peanut butter/millet/baobab juice soup to be doled out to all of their Christian kin. I ended up spending the day at the nicest place in town, in fact, as my host mom happens to be the younger sister of the wife of the mayor. Lucky me! So I got dolled up along with my sisters and we enjoyed a delicious lunch and dinner there, just hanging out with family, despite my host family being Muslim and the mayor’s Christian. Here’s me and my sisters just before we went out for the day:


The day after Easter was the last of school break, which had been going on for 2 weeks (Senegal observes Christian holidays in the school calendar because their first president was Christian). And then the very next day I hopped a car to Thies, as I had been asked to help out again with the newest group of Peace Corps trainees, this time for the few days of Counterpart Workshop.

from my journal, Tuesday 4/14:
“Back in Thies to help with counterpart workshop, and I’m happy to feel valued here, for my year of experience, though I feel I left site today with hopes that a lot of good things will get started by the time I come back Saturday, and seriously doubt that most of it will in fact happen. If only it weren’t Earth Day next week, and if it hadn’t just been Easter break for the last two weeks…it’s just poor timing…”

But being in Thies was a good break, and I felt useful at counterpart workshop, being a go-between for the training staff, visiting work partners and the soon-to-be-volunteers.

And somehow I came back to site Saturday to find my teachers assembling a group of CM2 (like U.S. 6th grade) kids to start rehearsing a skit. Monday I easily convinced two other teachers to go with me to visit the chairman of the big market to ask permission to bring kids over to do a cleanup. We got him to agree to give us soap and bleach for hand-washing afterwards, and pay for gasoline to burn the piles of trash that the kids would rake together. By Tuesday the theater group was finding themselves costumes and a group of girls had a dance number ready. A list was compiled of one boy from each class who was going to fight in the wrestling match (lutte). And then Wednesday came, a day I’d been fretting about for at least a month, feeling like if I didn’t do something with my school for this one day that’s all about the environment, then I’d be a BAD environmental education volunteer.
And surprise: it wasn’t a disaster.


from my journal Thursday 4/23
“So. Yesterday was Earth Day. And a success!
The set-setal [cleanup] was fairly organized, kids brought brooms and rakes and the teachers supervised, we got eau de javel [bleach] and soap from Cheikh Diop at the marché and the kids washed their hands, the dance troupe performed (rather racily and scantily clad for some), the skit went on, and though getting cut off prematurely, was still mostly appreciated, and of course the lutte was the highlight. Director Diedhiou said a few closing words, and I financed the purchase of 150 0.5 liter sachets of water for the two CM2 classes who had cleaned up behind the marché. All in all, I’d call it a success. And I was the instigator! It all came together at the last minute, and though certainly there were things that could have been improved upon, I am happy with the way it all turned out. This was a major effort, and everyone at school really put their all into it, without asking for anything in return. I feel like I earned my pay this week! I did something visible, tangible, and I feel good about it. Now to settle down and work on lessons in the classroom…”

It turned out the timing was good after all, as Tuesday this week all the primary school teachers in the community started to strike.

That’s news from this side of the ocean. Here are a few pictures of Earth Day ’09, and I’ll post the whole lot on my Flickr photo page, so don’t forget to check it out!

taking time

There is an old man who sits across the street from the local hospital in the mornings, who I once stopped and talked with, and who now greets me every time I see him with a cordial, "Obama!"
I can't help but smile, as any greeting that doesn't start with "Toubab!" is greatly appreciated, but one that recognizes me by association with my native land is even sweeter.

He reminded me yesterday of how important it is to simply get out of the house and walk around town, taking the time to stop and greet people, even if I don't remember everyone’s name, and to respond to greetings from others with a smile and a wave, even if I continue on my path without stopping. I had been getting wrapped up in my own world lately, and lost perspective about why it is that I am here. These people are why I am here, what my work is for, who I should be caring about.

Sometimes it’s getting away that makes you realize why you want to be here. I got back yesterday from almost four days away from site, making the trip out for the weekend to Dakar for a regional volunteer meeting on Saturday, and staying on for just a few days of feeling like an independent American. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to refuel my batteries, to spend some precious quality time away from site, to just stay at the regional house and run on my own schedule, doing whatever I wanted, eating whatever and whenever I wanted, sleeping whenever I wanted, and just being me. I was staying at site feeling like I needed to get things done, but I had no motivation to do them. Being back now I feel more at peace with being here, less stressed, and just motivated enough to keep me going for a while.

Sunday I spent the whole afternoon doing nothing but reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which I picked up from the regional house library. After finishing the book, I was struck by how unsettled it made me, as reminiscent as it was of certain aspects of my Peace Corps experience. The “civilized world” versus the “savage reservation,” the triumph of the mechanical over the emotional, the power of conditioning trumping instinct… all of it echoed with a strange parallel to the reality I am now living. Huxley’s description of the “savage reservation” in comparison to his futuristic “civilized England” made me think about the typical, fresh-out-of-college American PCV when he first sets foot in a remote African village, how like the Alpha Bernard Marx when he first sees the pueblo on the reservation, how like Beta Lenina Crowne when she witnesses their rain dance.

And how strange it is that I should still feel this way in 2009, that we should have such disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds. Huxley wrote in the 1930’s that he had projected this distopia for 600 years in the future. It’s more than scary then that not even a century has passed since his vision, and the world is already in such a divided state of advancement.

But progress is a relative term. Huxley’s words narrated by the Savage resonated with me, as he spoke of “really living” and of claiming the right to experience joy and sorrow, passion and pain, even though in the “civilized” world those emotions would be a recipe for disastrous “instability.” In this fictional far future, everyone is conditioned (from the earliest stages of fetal life) not to have strong feelings about anything or anyone, keeping everything in a “perfect” state of balance and stability. But I agree with what Huxley was saying - that you can only feel true joy if you’ve been to the depths of sorrow, can only experience real passion after temptation and self-denial.
So as tragic as it was, I understood how the Savage could not continue to live in the “civilized world” - because being a feeling person in an unfeeling world is living torture.

If progress means losing all sense of what it is to be alive, then I too would rather be “savage” than “civilized.”