From Z to A, and A to Z

time to go

2010-05-21T03:51:00.000-07:00

So this is it. The paperwork is done, all medical tests cleared, bags are packed and yes, I'm ready to go. Sunday, Inch'Allah, I will fly away. And I do say "Inch'Allah" not because I think that it won't happen, but because I really hope that it will. That all will go well, that I will leave roughly on time and arrive around time, make all my connections and get where I am going "in peace, all in one piece," as I have taken to praying every time I get into a shaky sept-place or public bus.

But I also believe, somehow, that even if I am late, if I end up paying an arm and a leg (and maybe a spare kidney) for my excess baggage, that I will, eventually, get home. That no matter what happens, from now on, I can deal with it. Because of what I have lived here, because of what I have learned here, I feel up to whatever comes next. So come Sunday I will still cross my fingers and say a little prayer, but I will also remember that whatever happens, it will all work out.

"How will it?" you might say.
I don't know. It's a mystery - but one that doesn't frighten me so much anymore.

NB: To those of you out there who read this, especially to those in particular who know who they are, please deploy your bubbles of security Sunday through Monday for me and my travel partner Diana, as even modern technology can use a little boost. Bu sobee Yalla (God willing) we will arrive, but I will travel a little easier knowing that bubble is out there. Merci mille fois, et en attendant de vous voir je vous embrasse tres fort!

may you go in peace, and arrive in peace...

2010-05-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

But the news is not all bad. So many people have wished me well these last few days, I feel the combined strength of their prayers propelling me on to finish my last tasks, motivating me to pack my bags, clean out my room and say my final goodbyes.

Friday my Senegalese mom Rama threw me a party at our house, and so many people came, I was overwhelmed. I had invited about thirty, people I have worked with mostly, a few friends and relatives of my family, and after I had wondered if anyone would show up at all, most of them came, and then a few more. A goat was killed in honor of the event, and the night before I helped Rama to cut up two big bowls of carrots and turnips to marinate for topping the rice and meat. Somehow as if by magic there was enough food for everyone who kept coming, one single bottle of Coke in the ice bucket at the end of the afternoon, and just enough meat and onions left over for Rama to make a pot of soup for a quiet dinner.

I spent most of the day on my feet, greeting and smiling and taking in the presence of all these people who had come to see me off. The last guest left after 6pm, and after pounding peppercorns for Rama's soup I got a warm bucket bath at 7, tired but happy.

Tonight is my last night in town, in my own bed, until I get back to the States in three weeks, bu sobee Yalla. I need to get back to the house now and sit a spell with my family, because tomorrow is goodbye.

To my family back home, I'm coming soon. Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you and can't wait to see you!

genn rekk (just get out)

2010-05-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

The days are rushing by.
Barely a week left before I have to pack up and leave this town.
My head is spinning, and all of a sudden it's goodbye. I don't want to say it.
Wish I could slip out quietly in the night, grab by bags, slide the keys under the door as I steal away.

Genn rekk. Bagne wakh kenn. Dem.

But I can't do that. (Just get out, not tell anyone, go.)
As hard as it is, I have to say goodbye. I just wonder if I'll have the time to see everyone I want to before I go. More than that, if I'll have the energy to.

Each time I shake another person's hand, each time someone else says "really? you're leaving?" I feel a little part of me tug and wrench. I fear if I keep on saying goodbye all the little tugs will combine to pull me to pieces.

Yes, I waited until the week before leaving to tell most people I know that I'm going. But in this country, it's not like you send out a memo a month before an event. You invite people to meetings the day before, or at most a week in advance. If I had told people a month ago that I was leaving town this coming Monday, most of them would forget way before then, and I'd just have to remind them again, making saying goodbye all the more painful. Now people are accusing me of surprising them, of not caring enough to give them advance notice that I'm leaving. It's not that, I tell them, though they're not really listening because they're too busy scolding me for my indifference.

I know a part of me waited so long to say goodbye because I didn't want people to treat me any differently these last few weeks. I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to bother other people, who hates people fussing over me. Leaving, I have learned, has instigated people here to start telling me how much they will miss me, how great I am, how my Wolof is so great now it's a shame that I'm just going to leave and forget it all, how I shouldn't go, etc. etc., and it just makes me embarrassed and tired all at once. I know I should be flattered, and I am, but I still wish they could just be happy for me that I will soon rejoin my family and friends and country. I know it's hard for them to see it that way, but the few people who can are the easiest ones to say goodbye to.

Part of me feels terrible, being bitter about leaving, but there are so many reasons that make it hard. Take the people, for instance, who ask if here is not good enough for me, who say derisively that I must be in a hurry to go back to America if I'm so happy about leaving Senegal. I'll never be able to make those people understand why I can't stay. I have just another six days here in Joal, but part of me wishes I were leaving tomorrow, that I could just get it over with already.

Once I leave town I'll have a little respite in Dakar, Alhamdulilah. Two weeks to relax a bit, see any sites I haven't yet seen, spend time with some of my best friends. But then soon enough again I'll have to say goodbye to more people I care about.

I've been warned that this is only the beginning of the heartbreak.

someone else's Peace Corps service

2010-04-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Until I post something else real about me, check out this video featuring my friend Jared! We trained together and he has been one of my closest neighbors here.

Jared on YouTube

These are the days

2010-04-23T02:51:00.000-07:00

How do you start to say goodbye?
To people and places, faces and names. To habits and routines. To a job that is not just a line of work, but a lifestyle. To two years of friendships, familiarity, struggles and frustrations. To an identity - me, the Peace Corps volunteer.

I’ve had to say a few goodbyes already, to other volunteers who came into country with me two years ago. I will be one of the last ones to leave from my original training group, flying out on May 23rd to meet up with my sister to spend five days in Iceland, Inch’Allah, as long as the ash cloud clears up over Europe so I can actually get there…
But if all goes as planned I will leave Senegal that Sunday night, and then fly to New York with my sister on Friday the 28th. After so much time, I am actually coming home.

I admit I borrowed the Iceland idea from one of my best friends in country, who’s going there as part of her COS trip (as long as meteorologic conditions permit) after a somewhat whirlwind trip of continental Europe. In fact she’s been gone a week already, having called me last Thursday from the airplane as she was sitting waiting to take off. After being one of my closest American neighbors for two years, now I don’t know when I might see her again, especially since she’s lined up her next job in Alaska.
The permanence of parting is starting to sink in.

With only a month remaining until my own COS date, I am myself preparing to go away. Step by step, each day I move closer to readiness. With every report I write, each belonging I set aside to give away, and every day that passes, my head is lighter. But I know the paperwork and the physical baggage will be the easy part of all this.

I apologize if I haven’t been vigilant about keeping up to date with what I’ve been doing, if these episodes of my life have been sporadically posted and seem to lack rhyme or reason. I could write another post on my recent activities - about traveling to the southeast corner of the country to help translate for a free eye clinic, about celebrating Easter at the mayor of Joal’s house with my Muslim family and their Catholic relatives, or about the week I spent hosting the volunteer-in-training who will replace me at site after I leave next month. But this is my blog, my space for expression. And as another one of my dearest friends who I’ve already had to say goodbye to likes to say, “I do what I want.”

So instead of posting about any of that, when I was thinking about how to how to write about leaving, this song came to mind. Maybe you’ll think it’s cheesy, but I dedicate it to the influence and importance of friends, near and far. Especially friends who love cheese.

"These are the days" (10,000 Maniacs)

"These are the days"

So few of them left to me here. Only 17 more until I leave my site, then another 14 until I leave the country. Thirty-one days. One month - after 25. In my adult life I’ve never lived in one place or worked a job for as long as I have here. It just makes leaving this all the more daunting.

"These are the days we’ll remember"

I am trying to take everything in these last weeks, the sights and sounds and smells of this now familiar place. I’m taking time with my host family and friends, went swimming twice this week after so many days of forgetting I live at the beach, and am reminding myself of the reasons I’ll be sad to leave.

"Never before and never since, I promise / will the whole world be warm as this"

I woke up sweaty from my afternoon nap and had trouble sleeping last night when the power went out. Yesterday the dry harmattan winds were in full force, sweeping the sand up into the air and intensifying the oven grade temperature. But even if I won’t miss the physical heat, I will feel the loss of the kindness of hearts, that warmth of welcome that constitutes the famous “teranga” of the Senegalese.

"And as you feel it / you’ll know it’s true / that you / are blessed and lucky"

I have had the opportunity to experience so much here, and have gotten encouragement along the way from so many sources. Getting to not only see this country, but integrate into this different culture and way of life, has been an adventure for which I will be forever grateful.

"It’s true / that you / are touched by something / that’ll grow and bloom"

I hope that what I have learned here will stick with me, that I will be able to move on from here to take the best and worst of this time to push me to continue to develop and evolve.

"You"

Who I am has been forever affected by this experience. It seems cliché, but it is nevertheless true. As I move on from here, I will take Ngoné Ndiaye with me, even as I return to a place where I am known by another name. It’s not that I feel I spent two years being someone else - but maybe that in being here, I discovered another part of me.

---

After writing this, I stumble up the sandy street under a half-full moon to the fruit stand at the edge of the road, buy bananas for tomorrow’s breakfast and take in the warm evening breeze. Back at my family’s house I take a bucket bath to cool off from the day, put on a light dress and listen to my sisters out in the courtyard playing with the neighbor’s baby, singing and sharing the day’s gossip. I take a chair out to join them, thinking that all too soon, my life will be different from this. So for then, I remember these days.

someone else's success - but we all share it

2010-04-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

In English when someone says "Thank you," you say "You're welcome."
In French, "Merci" is often answered with "De rien," meaning "It's nothing."
In Wolof the response to "Jerejef" (thank you) is "Nio ko bokk", which literally means "we (all) share it."

I understood the real meaning of "nio ko bokk" last weekend when I was in Dakar visiting friends. On Sunday I had the pleasure of being invited to a "Journée d'Amitié" that was held by a youth group in my best Senegalese friend's neighborhood in the northern suburbs of the capital. It's a new community group, non-religiously-affiliated, with the goal of getting together young adults in the neighborhood so they can help each other out, talk about common problems, work together to create jobs and support each other. I think it's very cool that they're doing this, and my friend A. is one of their founding members.

Sunday they held this "Friendship Day" that was about advertising the group, getting people to meet people, and just having fun. They served lunch, talked about what the group is doing and what projects they hope to do, people introduced themselves, and then there was music and dancing. I had a blast, and was so proud of all of them for their initiative and self-motivation. Being the so-called "development agent" that is my role here, I couldn't help thinking that there in front of me I was seeing what I had been saying to other volunteers that Senegal needs - Senegalese who take it upon themselves to help each other, who don't just reach out to outside sources to beg for handouts, who look at their peers as resource people and seek solutions to their problems next door, instead of the next continent over.

In that afternoon I felt the glow of success, and a hopefulness that has often escaped me in my work at site. This was not something that I had worked for, nothing here was the result of my participation, and yet I felt pride that I could simply be there to witness this achievement. True, these people are just beginning, this group is just getting started. Who knows where they will go from here, if their success will continue. But the fact that they are trying, not waiting for anyone to help them but stepping up to help themselves, is, to me, huge. I cannot count the number of times I have talked with other volunteers about the questionable sustainability of our work here, the validity of "development work" and the merit or lack thereof of external agents intervening in countries like Senegal. As strangers from foreign lands dropping in to tell local people how to do something better that they've done a certain way for centuries, I often feel that our presence here hinders more than helps. But at best, I believe that we as volunteers can serve to show the Senegalese that there are different ways of thinking about things. Because who is to say what is better? What is better for an American may not be better for a Senegalese. I believe that what is eventually going to help better Senegal needs to come from within Senegal itself.

So I applaud these brave young adults, who aren't willing to join so many of their peers in resignation like all the young Senegalese I meet who complain to me about their own country, who cross their arms and say over and over, "Senegal neexul, fii amul xaalis." (Senegal is terrible, there's no money here.) Having come to this country with the aim of helping people here to help themselves, I have often been discouraged to see the overwhelming number of people who don't even want to try to help themselves. But here is a group who are walking the walk, stepping up to the plate and doing something. I couldn't think of a better way to start to say goodbye to this place than by seeing at least one small part of it that really doesn't need my help. Because their success is mine as well, and yours, wherever you are.
We all share it.

(The Amicale's president P.B. practicing his speech, with sister looking on)

(P.B. delivering speech, with other board members B. and F. looking on)

clip "mboolo mooy doole" (strength in numbers)

what is reality

2010-04-02T06:12:00.000-07:00

I am not going to apologize for my last entry, as much as it was harsh and written during a long moment of anger. I started this blog to share with people outside of this experience what it is that I am really living in this country. Over the last two years I have lived through many moments that I have chosen not to record here, trying to keep in mind a sense of equilibrium in what I convey. This being said, it seems to me that some readers would still only like to hear about my successes, the bright side of being a Peace Corps volunteer, the days I get to say, “Yes, this is why I came!”

But this experience is not all sunshine, rainbows and happy smiling children. Peace Corps service would not be something so many call “life-changing” if it were not for the low points, the times when nothing seems to go right, when everything you try looks like a failure and your own neighbors are laughing at your face before you even get out of your front door in the morning.

I did not write my last post in a ploy for pity, but simply in an effort to express a reality. My reality. This is, after all, my perception of my own experience.

But if we are talking about impartiality and giving equal weight to both extremes of a sliding scale, I urge you to remember that no two Peace Corps services are alike, even within the same country, even within the same work sector. I have a friend who lives only 45 kilometers away in a 300-person village without electricity. His experience has been vastly different than mine, yet we are both Environmental Education Peace Corps volunteers serving in Senegal. see Chris' blog Most volunteers in Senegal serve in small villages, but another one of my best friends lives in the capital of 3 million, see Jared’s blog and yet another in a city of 120,000. Each one of them has their own experience, their own story to tell, their own perception of what constitutes a success.

Now think about the number of countries in which Peace Corps volunteers are serving around the world, multiplied by the number of volunteers in those countries, and you will come up with the number of different experiences that still all qualify as “the Peace Corps experience”.
Mine is only one small page in the encyclopedia that’s still being written.

Every day I have failures. Some days I have successes too. And I admit that the closer I get to finishing my service the harder it becomes to focus on the successes, as much as I know how important it will be to me to leave here on a positive note.
When I do take a minute to think about where I have succeeded, I can see that most of my successes have been personal ones, not great work achievements. I can’t say for certain that because of my presence here over the last two years I’ve changed anyone’s life in this town. It’s only when I look at myself that I can see real evidence of change.

I feel for you, Angelina

2010-03-04T09:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve had it with this superstardom business.
Being the biggest fish in this cramped pond. Feeling like Miss America on parade on a good day, or on a bad one, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not attraction.
Having everyone know my name, everyone always wanting to talk to me, wanting a piece of me. Having my every move scrutinized, commented upon, and more often than not, laughed at. It is not exaggerating to say that of the Senegalese I interact with here, in general, men are desirous of me, women are critical of me, children laugh at me and most babies cry if I so much as look at them.

Put this way, you can see how it becomes difficult to feel accepted into a community when at any one time I am simultaneously being rejected by three-quarters of the society, and the other one quarter doesn’t actually take me seriously.

You’d think maybe I would feel better about my integration after almost 2 years here, after being in constant contact with locals and even living with a Senegalese family. After learning the local language (and becoming better than conversational), learning local customs and adjusting to the heat, wind, and frequent cuts in power and water. And yet, as I look ahead to returning to the States in a few short months, I have come to realize that as much as I have done to integrate into this country, there is still only so much respect that can be gained here by a single, young, white female.

I knew relatively early on in this venture that my youth would not be something working in my favor in this culture that reveres age as equal to wisdom, but I underestimated how much my femininity would make my time here not only difficult but fraught with daily battles. In this male-dominated country, in my work I have to constantly be on edge. How to work with men without anyone getting the wrong idea? To do my job it is necessary for me to approach men outside of my host family, to talk to them, telephone them, interact with them; all things that would make a young Senegalese woman seem audacious, bold, risqué. Yet the majority of motivated teachers are men, as well as school directors, city hall workers, national park agents… essentially every important post in town is occupied by a man. Add in the unfavorable media portrayal of Western women as sex-crazed and easy... and every single day I work here I get hit on, stared at, ogled, teased, pestered and generally abused, when all I want to do is my job.

The added factor of being white, “Toubab”, has not added to my credibility with most of the population, especially in my own site, since it is a fairly touristy city that sees a good number of white people but who never spend more than a day in town, meaning that tourists (99% white, of Western European origin) have gotten a bad reputation as people who simply use the town, never give back, and never stick around long enough for the locals to get to know them as real people. Anyone else who comes into town and happens to be white gets subjected to the same treatment as a tourist. So considering the size of town, (around 40,000) it is impossible for everyone coming and going to know that I am not, in fact, a tourist. Every day I cross someone new who thinks I am just a money-spending foreigner come on holiday to “see some local flavor”. Oh, and I forgot to mention the small percentage of white female tourists who come to do more than just “see” the local flavor, if you get what I mean. The locals’ common knowledge of that practice also doesn’t help my reputation with the 90% of my city’s population who doesn’t know me.

So, despite all the months I have spent here, I can count on any given day going out into this town where I live and being treated like a foolish youth, a circus clown, a sex object or a whore.

It’s a bit hard to find stability in that.
And yet people here wonder why I am less than enthusiastic when they suggest I stay another two years.

entering the home stretch

2010-02-23T03:46:00.001-08:00

“Ngoné Ndiaye! Gej naa la gis!
Mais yow foo nekkoon? Xanaa nekkofiiwoon? Defee naa ne danga dellu dekk bi té taggatoo ma!”

[Ngoné Ndiaye! It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen you! Where have you been? Were you not here? I thought maybe you went back to your country and didn’t say goodbye!]

I know, it’s been a long time.

That’s what you get when you leave site for over two weeks. It’s the longest I’d been away since last summer, when I went to the States for 3 weeks. Usually I only leave town for a few days at a time, go to the capital, visit friends. But I had good reasons to be away so long this time.

I’d planned to be gone for at least ten days, with my original training group’s 3-day COS conference in Dakar, then 2 days of All-Volunteer conference, 3 days of WAIST, with a day to get in and a day to leisurely come back to site. And then a week and a half before all that started, I ended up falling victim to what was diagnosed as carbon monoxide poisoning, and spent an extra 5 days in Dakar recovering at the PC office Med hut, before all the rest of my planned activities… (I’m pretty much better now)
And once WAIST was over I took two more days to get some things done at our PC office, and finally came back on Thursday to Joal (my site), my dusty room, and my happy host family.

[Sorry for the acronyms: COS = Close of Service
WAIST = West Africa Invitational Softball Tournament
PC = you should know by now = Peace Corps]

[for more details on our COS conference and WAIST,
check out my friend Bethany's blog ]

Two weeks is a long time to be away, and I had let myself get pretty disconnected.
Dakar, the capital, is still Senegal, but parts of it are very Western. Spending almost a week in the Peace Corps office, three days being put up in a posh hotel for COS conference (thank you, US tax dollars) and then another five days at an American-Senegalese couple’s place in US Embassy housing (thanks to the great homestay program instituted by our PC country director)… well, it honestly felt more like America than Senegal.

I suppose I needed that.
Though I have taken mini-breaks every now and then since last summer’s big “vacation”, I was feeling run down, tired, and pretty much just ready to get the heck outta here. I spent most of January feeling like I was just treading water, being physically present but mentally distant, defining in essence the ubiquitous Wolof phrase, “Maangiy fii rekk” - I am here only. I found myself at a loss for work, after the busy-ness of the past few months, yet not so eager to start anything new. Then just after New Year’s I was presented with a proposition by my supervisor to consider extending my service for another year, to be the Environmental Ed program assistant, based in Dakar.
And as run down and fed up as I felt, I almost decided to say yes.
Until I made a spur of the moment visit to a PCV friend in Thiès and realized that staying another year here would be exactly the opposite of what I want.
It’s not that this is such a terrible place - don’t get me wrong. But two years is enough.

My brain was telling me logically that I should do it, that a third year here would indeed be a good job opportunity, a potential for more growth, and so on and so on. I would have gotten a month-long paid leave to go home before starting the third year, and once back in Senegal, a nice set-up with my own apartment in Dakar, more administrative duties, more freedom and a continued PC-paid living allowance and health benefits.

But after all but making the decision to stay, I realized that it was not what I wanted.
And as one of my goals for my Peace Corps service was to stop doing things just because I think I “should”, and only do things that I really “want” to do, once I had let myself be honest and admit that what I really wanted was to go home, I felt a huge burden lifted, and knew I had made the right decision.

January was tough in many ways, but mostly in battling my own thoughts. I got up every day and went to City Hall, met with my counterpart and work partners, listened much, talked a little. But I can’t say I accomplished anything great. I managed to organize one meeting of the CCEE - Comité Communal d’Education Environnementale. But since that meeting we haven’t had another, I’ve been away, more than a month has gone by and we haven’t done anything we talked about doing during that January meeting. And now it’s almost March, and I am looking at the home stretch: finishing my service, figuring out how to give some closure to my time here, passing on projects and allowing myself to accept that it’s OK that there are things I didn’t do.

I sat down in my little corner office at City Hall yesterday (yes, technically I have an office, though it’s not where I spend most of my time) and looked at my calendar. Before we left COS conference we were supposed to choose a COS date, let the administration know when we would be closing up shop. The official COS date for my training group is May 8 - that is the date around which most of us will be leaving country. We swore in officially as volunteers on May 9, 2008, so two years after that we will have completed our allotted time. We are allowed to leave up to 30 days before or 30 days after that date, with a few exceptions, so considering when I want to be here at site for the week or so site visit in April of my incoming replacement, plus time to finish up, say goodbyes, etc, I chose May 20 as my COS date. That doesn’t mean I will be necessarily flying back to the States that day, but unless anything changes in the meantime, it will be my last official day as a PCV.

May 20. I looked at my calendar, then at my packet of COS’ing information, calculating days and timing of closing-out medical appointments, reports that will need to be written, books to be returned, goodbyes to be said. I’ll probably leave Joal a good ten days before my COS date, to get everything done in Dakar that will need to be done before I can leave. I looked back at my calendar, counting the weeks. Counting the days. Eleven weeks at site. Take out Sundays, a Saturday here and there… that leaves about 60 working days. Sixty days.
After so much time, just two more months.

performance review

2010-02-23T03:29:00.001-08:00

In an effort to show that I have actually been doing something here besides whining about the heat and fighting off constant marriage proposals, here is a copy of my supervisor's comments from my latest quarterly report, which I wrote for the months of September, October and November (and submitted in January, just a little late.) It's not exactly current news, but I thought I'd share anyway.

Date: February 3, 2010

TO: Alexis Zackey, PCV Joal

From: Mamadou Diaw, APCD/NRM

Subject: Quarterly report

Dear Alexis,

Thanks for submitting your quarterly report that is very detailed and well written as usual. I Hope that you are continuing to do well both socially and professionally.
Here are my comments on your report.

Activities:
1. Helped write and carry out a short survey to determine the reason for the decline of sales of the compost sold at the solid waste management facility
Problems/ Challenges: Finding honest, unbiased information in a small community was very difficult. She found that local farmers did not understand that buying the compost locally would help their community. Even though the survey was completed, the group in charge of the waste management facility has not yet met to discuss the results of the survey.
2. The Joal EE committee planned a workshop for all 12 primary and middle schools , this was funded by a local Italian NGO, LVIA. Students watched the solid waste management documentary, viewed a sketch by the local theatre troupe and then broke up into “work groups” which presented at the end of the day.
Problems/ Challenges: The regular large meeting stresses, and problems trying to get the teachers to take ownership of the committee that they see as being run by the volunteer. Also, those that were voted as the group coordinators are too busy with other work to devote extra time to the committee.

Secondary Projects:
-helped to host International Volunteer day in Joal. This was a success as it generated revenue for the community and was able to increase awareness of volunteer work and its importance throughout the local Joal community as well as those attending the conference. [blog post about IVD here]
- helped facilitate a French children’s documentary on environmental awareness (can PC get a copy of this?) [read more about Projet Esperanto here]

Future plans:
-drawing a work plan for PCV replacement
-continued work with the CCEE-Comite Communal d’Education Environmentale) to create other activities to be carried out before the end of the school year

Comments: Congratulations on another successful quarter at site. Your time in the Peace Corps has been exemplary in both local, community support and programmatic level. As for your primary activities, I agree that the survey is an excellent idea, but difficult to implement. When you do meet with the waste management committee to talk about the results of the survey, you might want to think of creating a sort of awareness/advertising campaign for the composted fertilizer. This would allow local farmers to take notice of the impact the composted fertilizer will make on their crops and the fact that they are supporting their local community when they buy the product.

The workshop that you facilitated with your CCEE group sounds like an intense undertaking. I was impressed to hear how flexible you were in implementing the program and how it all seemed to work out well. I did notice you added a per diem in the budget for the officials and teachers. This may have a negative effect for future conferences and programs of this nature if they think that they will always receive per diem for their attendance. This should also be addressed in your next CCEE meeting. I understand your concern for sustainability with the CCEE as this is always a difficult concept. Your replacement and your site mate will be able to keep the group accountable to some degree, but I do think it is a good idea to elect an official who’s primary job will be to attend and facilitate every meeting
Your secondary projects are also a testament to your excellent work.

Thank you for your involvement in Volunteer Day, your help was greatly appreciated by all those involved in making a successful and informative celebration. Concerning the French documentary that you helped to facilitate is there a chance we would be able to have a copy of it the finished product for our library in Dakar. This sounds like a great resource for future AV teaching materials in EE. Finally, I would be happy to work with you to create a work plan for your PCV replacement and to gain thoughts for the future of our program in Joal-Fadiouth.

half a million minutes

2010-01-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

It is 2010. Which means that I spent all of last year - minus my 3 weeks vacation to the U.S. - in Africa. Senegal, specifically.
That’s 49 weeks. 343 days. 8232 hours. 493,920 minutes (or so). Not like I’m counting…

So in honor of my last half a million minutes (and lacking anything better to write about) here are a few highlights from my 2009.

2009 In (Approximate) Numbers, In No Particular Chronological or Otherwise Order.

Books read: 9
Books read by Amy Tan: 2
Books started but not finished: 3
Cravings had for tuna fish on white bread: 1
Dreams about iced cream-filled donuts: 1
Packets of orange Foster Clark’s instant drink mix consumed: 83
Bananas eaten: 302
Times called “Toubab”: 3,573
Requests for money or gifts: 1,897
Babies born to neighbors or friends: 11
Babies named after me: 1
Baptisms actually attended: 2
Times I had to type the words “education environnementale” : 157
Letters in “environnementale” : 16
Pounds lost (since January): 15
Pairs of jeans I own that still fit me well: 0
Pairs of cheap flip-flops bought from corner store: 4
Days fasted during Ramadan: 8
Earth Day celebrations organized: 1
Local radio interviews given in Wolof: 4
Neighborhood clean-ups participated in: 3
Community-wide environmental education committees created: 1
Peace Corps Volunteer Advisory Council meetings attended: 2
Presidential Inauguration speeches missed because of traffic jams: 1
U.S. Ambassadors to Senegal met: 1
Amateur championship soccer matches attended: 2
Bucket baths taken: 612
Anti-malarial Doxycycline pills swallowed: 365
Host family members who took pilgrimages to Mecca: 2
Francs CFA spent on phone credit: 250,000
Percent of year’s salary that equals: 10.2
Packages of underwear received in the mail: 1
All-night dance parties attended: 3
New Indian teledramas airing on national TV: 1
From 1-10 how much better this show is than current Brazilian teledrama: 10
To-Do lists written: 289
27th birthdays celebrated: 1
Apple pies baked: 2
Cavities filled: 3
Journals filled: 2
Christmas Eves spent cooking dinner in a pit fire on a beach: 1

“…in the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin you”

2009-12-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

All the familiar signs of the current season are absent here. No festive music playing in stores, no frenzied shoppers racing about, no constant stream of advertising…
Only my wall calendar quietly tells me that a mere ten days are left before the biggest holiday in the Western world. A hint of cold wakes me up in the mornings these days, and I linger in bed to enjoy it, knowing that even as I shiver to take my bucket bath at 9 a.m., the midday sun will still beat down in its dry December warmth. I consider my situation, my distance from where I call home, and think about how much I miss bitter cold, frost on the grass, icicles hanging from heavy tree branches, a cup of hot chocolate in my cold hands. I miss feeling the excitement of an upcoming vacation, as even if I leave my site over the holiday I will still be in Senegal, and still a Peace Corps Volunteer, doing my job 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As I’ve pointed out before, this job is one that has no boundaries, no “quitting time”. Whenever I interact with a Senegalese person I’m doing one part of my job, so that’s pretty much most of my time…

Maybe you’ve noticed my tone is not an eager, enthusiastic one today. I admit it: I am tired. I have been working almost constantly over the last month, with a few short breaks for Thanksgiving and Tabaski, and juggling increasingly frequent thoughts about how to concentrate on my current work while considering wrapping up my time here. People are starting to ask what I will do “after”, and I am hoping in the next few weeks to have some down time to start thinking about that. I got nastily sick two days before our big International Day of the Volunteer event, though fortunately recovering quickly, but I think whatever it was weakened my system because two days after the weekend of the IDV to-do I came down with a cold that came on strong and has hung on for the past week.

Being sick has forced me to take things easier over the last few days, and fortunately the pace of work has also obligingly decelerated, with only one major project now demanding my attention for the next few weeks. Our three days of International Day of the Volunteer “celebrations” (December 4-6) went over remarkably well I’d say, considering my extensive pre-event worries, and the city pulled off hosting several hundred people with only some slight delays in food preparation and last-minute ceremony lineup rearrangements. After much fretting, the part of the ceremony planned for PCVs to “present their experience in community environmental management” ended up getting skipped, so the SED APCD (Small Enterprise Development Assistant Program Country Director) didn’t get to speak about Peace Corps’ role in starting the city’s now-famous pilot waste management project, nor did I have to take a turn at the podium in front of over 300 people to say my rehearsed Wolof proverb (as the APCD had asked me to do, as a concluding remark). Later on that day however the local radio rep cornered me to get my word on the event, so after not-so-eloquently expressing my feelings (in Wolof, of course) about the importance of recognizing volunteer work, I finished with the proverb I’d memorized for the occasion: “Benn lam ci loxo, keleng du am” - meaning “One single bracelet on a hand will not make a sound.”

It’s a truth universally acknowledged - it takes many to really make something happen. One person can set off a course of action, but without the domino effect of others reacting, that single person’s effort will have little meaning. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we are sent out to our villages and towns alone, single bracelets. But as time passes and we integrate into our communities, gain respect and press on in our task to reinforce local capacities, we gather more and more bracelets around us. My time here is waning and I may wonder how much I have actually accomplished, but I am not dreading leaving this work behind, because although I will eventually go back to the States in a few short months, I have hope that the loss of my single bracelet will not mean the silencing of the jangle I have endeavored to set in motion.

holidays coast-to-coast

2009-12-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

Baal ma, baal naa la. Yalla nu Yalla boole baal.
(Forgive me, I forgive you. May God forgive us all.)

These are the traditional words spoken on Tabaski, the Senegalese name for the Muslim celebration of Eid-Al-Adha, which commemorates the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son Ishmael to show his commitment to his faith, and at the last second sparing the boy by replacing him with a ram. It is considered the largest holiday in this mostly Muslim culture, and this year the day fell two days after one of the biggest holidays in American culture, Thanksgiving. Because of the proximity of the two days and my prior plans to participate in the U.S. Ambassador’s Thanksgiving dinner in Dakar, my host mother forgave me for staying in the capital to celebrate Tabaski with good friends instead of with my family at site, agreeing that traffic would probably be terrible if I tried to travel back to site right before Tabaski.

It was a strange inversion of emotion, another year of celebrating an American holiday in the midst of a foreign culture, and then participating as an American in a foreign holiday. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with other American friends, bake a few pies in a borrowed apartment, and sit around a table with others who share my tradition.

I ended up missing my family and friends more on Tabaski, however, than I did on Thanksgiving, a fact that may be hard to comprehend for some of you who will say, “but we don’t celebrate Tabaski.” It’s true that most of us in America don’t celebrate the equivalent of Tabaski, but because it is the biggest holiday here, (and here is where I am now, even though here is not where I’m from) even though I was with friends it felt like I should also have been with my family that day. The feelings of distance and separation from my loves ones that struck me on Thanksgiving were multiplied on Tabaski as I watched my African friends celebrate their blessings, forgive each other for their wrongs, and embrace the importance of being with family.

I’ve posted to my photo site pictures of Thanksgiving preparations and elegant Tabaski outfits, American friends and Senegalese.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

I’ll leave you today with this quote from a book I picked up over the holiday in our Peace Corps regional house library. After I read this I looked back to the first pages to check the publication date and was surprised to find “1958,” because I find these words just as relevant today as when they were first written half a century ago.

“The community today can be no single tradition; it is the planet. Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only bridge on which peace can find its home. But the annihilation of distance has caught us unprepared. Who today stands ready to accept the solemn equality of nations? Who does not have to fight an unconscious tendency to equate foreign with inferior? We live in a great century, but if it is to rise to its full opportunity, the scientific achievements of its first half must be matched by comparable achievements in human relations in its second. Those who listen in the present world work for peace, a peace built not upon ecclesiastical or political empire, but upon understanding and the mutual involvement in the lives of others that this brings. For understanding, at least in realms as inherently noble as the great faiths of mankind, brings respect, and respect prepares the way for a higher power, love - the only power that can quench the flames of fear, suspicion, and prejudice, and provide the means by which the peoples of this great earth can become one to one another.”

- Huston Smith, “The Religions of Man”

they say every day is a learning experience

2009-11-19T01:42:00.000-08:00

After the school-focused trash awareness day I helped to organize last week, these students went home with a (hopefully) better understanding of waste management.
As for me, I went home with a better understanding of event management.
Here are a few things I won’t forget the next time…

1. Start by showing up an hour early for this big event you’ve helped plan, even if you know most of your invitees will be an hour late. You might find that no one has informed the caretaker that there will be 150 people showing up for an event in half an hour.

2. Be on good terms with said caretaker as you might need him to help you set up 100 chairs in the 15 minutes before 100 school kids show up to sit in them.

3. Make sure you have plenty of phone credit minutes on your cell so you can call everyone at the last minute to find out where they are and why they’re not where they’re supposed to be.

4. Remember if you’re screening a film to test run the projector during the day before. It’s easy to forget that at night you will see the movie better because it’s already dark out.

5. Have a backup plan in mind in case your 150-person group gets kicked out of their previously arranged room because the assistant mayor had scheduled a more important (i.e. international donor-led) meeting there already for the same day and the same time but had forgotten to tell you when you asked if you could have that room the week before.

6. Double-check your budget to include contingencies. You never know when your backup plan location’s power box might burst into flames and end up with your group getting blamed for it.

7. Always carry tape and scissors. Extension cords are often flimsy and unreliable.

8. Carry a copy of the event’s agreed-upon budget with you the day of, in case of last minute questions.

9. Wear comfortable clothes so you can move easily as you will likely be constantly sent on errands to keep things running smoothly.

10. Plan to serve your group’s meal in a secluded spot, as opposed to a site where another group is already having a seminar, if you don’t want to have other uninvited people partaking of your carefully budgeted food and beverages.

11. Carry extra cash with you in case you need to go out and buy more beverages for members of your group who were shorted (see number 10).

12. Repeat. Always carry tape and scissors.

13. If during the course of your event you’re giving out t-shirts, pens, notebooks or any other “goodies”, be prepared to fend off constant demands from onlookers for such items.

14. Keep track of all of the event’s attendees, but remember that it is likely many teachers only brought their students because they were promised money for transport and per diem.

15. Remind yourself that at least they came.

16. Be glad you did not have to write up a grant proposal request for this event, and that someone else will be in charge of writing the final report to the donor.

17. Remember to focus on what went right, not just on what went wrong!

stretched a little thin

2009-11-19T01:34:00.000-08:00

There is kind of a ridiculous amount of stuff going on in my life right now, so again please excuse my long absence from this page. You may be wondering what I do with all this time I supposedly don’t have ;) Well. Here’s part of a letter I wrote last week to help explain. (Sorry Dad, hope you don’t mind…)

[dated November 9, 2009]

“Work has been keeping me super busy these last weeks, since October started pretty much, and school picked up. I’m working on three major projects right now. The first and ongoing one is this new committee we’ve started, a city-wide environmental education committee that regroups reps from all the 12 elementary and middle schools in [the city] with the objective to work together to more effectively teach environmental education. With this committee and the committee that manages the city’s pilot waste management project we are organizing a student “trash awareness day” this Wednesday, where we’ve invited 10 kids from each of the 12 schools, along with 2 teachers per school, and we’re going to show them a few short videos on trash and plastics recycling, then lead discussion sessions, give them lunch, and break into workshops to discuss solutions. I hope it goes well, we’ve been planning this for several weeks now and yet some major details (like who would be cooking lunch) were still up in the air as of today, 2 days before the planned event… I have to remember that this is Senegal and that’s the way so many things work here, but it’s still unsettling to me, the structured American…

Besides the committee, I’ve been roped into helping to plan this International Day of the Volunteer celebration, which will (Inch’Allah) take place in [my city] this December 5. It’s a big deal for the community, as this is the first year they’re doing this annual day’s celebration outside of the capital city, and all kinds of bigwigs are invited, ambassadors and other such VIPs. So that’s in the works as a 3-day affair intended to welcome as many as 500 people, and not too many weeks left before that.

My third project on tap is not easily summed up in one succinct sentence, but consists essentially of being a liaison and a facilitator, which is what I, as a Peace Corps volunteer, pride myself in being good at (if I do say so myself). But let me not speak too soon, as the major work of this project is yet to come. The city is expecting the arrival of a French film crew on November 21-ish: a group calling themselves Projet Esperanto, whose vision is to produce a short film, featuring children, focused on the importance of protecting the world’s precious water resources. Their plan is to film one part of their documentary/storytelling movie in 5 different francophone countries, spending a few weeks respectively in France, Morocco, Senegal, Guyana, and Guadeloupe. Through contacts with WWF (World Wildlife Fund) France and WWF Senegal, my site got chosen as their destination in Senegal, and with my position as Environmental Education volunteer here, the adjunct mayor asked me to work on this project with the project team once they come. I’m a little worried that I’m already pretty weighed down with work but I’m very excited to see how I can be of help, as a link between the filming team and the school they want to work with. To read more about their project, you can check out their website - http://www.projet-esperanto.fr/projet.htm - though it is in French ☺

As you can see I’m keeping myself busy. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that I’m being kept busy… At any rate, other than work, and the weather becoming much more agreeable, I am trying to find time to look ahead and start to consider my options for post-Peace Corps. This is not a simple task, as there are many factors involved, obviously, and it is difficult to find time to think about the future when I am so caught up in the present…”

** Now it’s already a week after our trash awareness day, I just typed up a report one of my work partners wrote on it, we are scheduling a follow-up & evaluation meeting with the CCEE (Community Committee for Environmental Education) for next week, and sending in the final details of budget expenses to the Italian NGO that financed all of it. The Projet Esperanto team is on track to moor their catamaran at the peninsula’s cape on Saturday or Sunday (they are traveling the most eco-friendly way, via boat), and I was in Dakar on Monday at the Peace Corps office talking with a 3rd year volunteer about expectations for the International Day of the Volunteer. Now if only I can steal away some time next week to run up to Dakar to celebrate Thanksgiving at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence with some other PCVs and ex-pats… maybe I can make it to Christmas with my head still attached to my body.

(And maybe sometime before New Year’s I’ll find the time to write up the required quarterly report about all of this…)

turando

2009-10-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

It happened. After just over a year of living in a Senegalese community, I was honored in one of the kindest ways a Senegalese person can honor another person - by being chosen as a turando for their child. The word "turando" in Wolof translates literally as "to name with" - a namesake. So someone thought I was cool enough to name a child after. Well, sort of.

At first I thought he was kidding. My favorite teacher at the primary school I was working with all last year was already the proud father of a precocious 2-year-old boy when he told me in the spring that his wife Yacine was expecting. “If it’s a girl we’ll name it after you,” he kept saying. I joked that he shouldn’t really, feeling unworthy of such an honor. I often forgot, as the weeks went by, that Yacine was pregnant at all, as by mid-May she had gone to Kaolack to stay with her mother and I only occasionally got bits of news from Monsieur Ndiaye about how she was doing. Soon I got caught up in the busy-ness of May, and by June was preparing to leave for my 3-week trip home to the States. The week before I was set to leave for Dakar, I went to school one of the last mornings before my trip and heard the good news. Monsieur Ndiaye wasn’t there that day, but the other teachers told me: it was a boy!

The next afternoon I was walking home from the mayor’s office when Monsieur Ndiaye rode up next to me on his best friend Sarr’s bicycle. “The ngenté [baptism party] is next Tuesday!” he told me, excited. “You have to come!”
“Right!” I said. “Congratulations!”
And then I remembered to ask, “What did you name him?” not having gotten that answer out of the teachers at the school.
“We named him after you!” said Monsieur Ndiaye, as he pedaled slowly along with my walking pace.

Named him after me? I wondered how that could be. Which of my names had he chosen? And now I should be at the baptism but it really wasn’t convenient.
“Well,” I hesitated. “But where are you having the ngenté?”
“It’s in Kaolack,” he answered. “Because that’s where her family is.” Kaolack is a big, hot, smelly city in the interior of Senegal, about a 3-hour trip from my site, and not on the way to Dakar, where I had planned to spend the next few days before leaving for the States. I was already going to Thiès for a weekend before going to Dakar, and Kaolack would just be one more leg on a trip where I was already carrying so much baggage.

“I don’t think I’m going to make it,” I told him sadly. “I will come and see him when I get back,” I promised, disappointed that such an important thing had come up at such an inconvenient time. But as Monsieur Ndiaye had always shown himself to be flexible as we’d spent the last year working together on environmental lessons and the school’s student government, he accepted that I had previous plans and told me he and Yacine would wait for my visit. As we said our goodbyes I asked him again what the baby’s name was, and as he pedaled away up the street he called back at me, laughing, “I named him after you!”

Fast forward 2 months. I had been to America and come back, school was out for the summer, and I hadn’t seen Monsieur Ndiaye since the end of June. It was August, a few weeks after I got back to site, and I was walking around town when I saw him hanging out by the market. “Hey! Ngoné Ndiaye!” I walked over and remembered at once that I had, somewhere, a child supposedly named after me. A baby I hadn’t seen. A living growing person. I greeted Monsieur Ndiaye, found out that everyone wass doing well, and that Yacine was still in Kaolack. I got ready to leave and decided to try again. “So… are you going to tell me what the baby’s name is?”
“We named it after you!” he said. “Well, you and Sarr, because he’s my best friend… and Yacine’s dad…” and it turned out that I have the honor of being a 1/3 namesake.

It was several weeks later until I heard that Yacine was back from Kaolack, and a week after that when I finally got around to visiting. I had been putting it off, not knowing what to bring, what to give, not having gone to the baptism. I felt bad, a poor excuse for a namesake. That afternoon I convinced my sitemate to go with me and together we walked up the steps to the Ndiayes’ apartment, meeting Monsieur Ndiaye at the door.

“Hey, Ngoné Ndiaye!” We were led into the living room, his 2-year-old bouncing in from the balcony to greet us. Yacine came in from the kitchen, happy to see me, holding the baby, as I admitted I was ashamed for not having brought anything. “I didn’t know what to bring!” I told them.
And all at once they reassured me.
“No, no!” they said. “You came! That’s all you needed to do.”
Relieved, remembering why we were friends, I sat down on the couch as Yacine handed me the baby.

I bounced him on my knee and looked at his chubby cheeks.
“So, Mamadou Mour Alexis Ndiaye,” I cooed. “How are you doing?”

kaay fecc [come dance]

2009-10-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

[I am now fully two months behind in blogs I’ve been wanting to post, as these last few weeks have suddenly burst into action and I am quickly becoming overwhelmed with work. You will forgive me then if for the moment I get caught up with these next few posts, even if they are dated now.]

So… It has recently come to my attention that not all parts of Senegal are familiar with an event that in my corner of the Petite-Côte region is called a “ngel.” Essentially it seems to be a tradition of the Serere ethnicity and is basically a big community dance party where people get together who are from the same “nawlé” (age group/generation) and often everyone will all buy the same matching fabric and then get different but coordinating outfits made. There’s traditional drumming and Serere singing, and everyone gathers in a big circle around a public place, either standing or sitting at the edges, until the music hits an irresistible pitch and you just have to run into the center of the spotlight, dance with all your might for a few crazy seconds, then run back to your seat. This continues as the music goes on, different people getting up at will, sometimes many at a time, women facing off against each other as they flail their skirts and shake their butts, eyes wild, sand flying, and the drums and electrified guitar play the same notes over and over, urging the dancers on.

As an outsider to this community, I had passed by many a ngel, watched a few from the crowd and admired many a finely-made coordinated outfit. But never had I been a part of one until the weekend of August 15 this year, which marked the annual city-wide party here, based originally on Assumption Day, a Catholic holiday, but over time gradually becoming a shared 3-day-long festival for the whole town, Muslim and Christian alike.

A few weeks beforehand my sisters were talking about the Ndoubab ngel that was planned for the weekend, and my host mom, Rama, said I should be part of it. Even though we live in Santhie II, a neighborhood in the north of town, my family is originally from one of the older quartiers, Ndoubab, a neighborhood where I have actually done most of my work here, as it is home to the school I have had most contact with, and is part of the city’s pilot waste management project.

Really I’m not usually big on the “cultural events” here - baptisms, weddings… they mostly entail getting dressed to the nines, eating lots of greasy rice and then sitting around forever, and, as the outsider, feeling more awkward and self-conscious than I already usually do, because I’m in the middle of a huge group of people who mostly don’t know me. But every now and then I give in to be “part of my family,” and since this seemed like a big deal to Rama, I agreed to go, handing over 2000 Fcfa (about $4.00 US) for the fabric that would match my sisters’.

A week later the fabric showed up, and two weeks later I picked up my dress at the tailor’s, a perfect fit. The next day, however, as I waited while Rama and the girls got ready, I wasn’t feeling in such a party mood. A giant crowd of people? Me the only white woman there? I usually try to keep a low profile as much as possible, and avoid situations where I might be singled out just because of my looks. I worried that I would feel out of place, even though this has so often been the case during my service. I put on my low-heeled fancy sandals and sat down in the hall, wiping the sweat off my melting face and catching my breath in my snugly tailor-fit dress.

My last-minute hesitation soon changed to proud excitement, however, the moment I walked out onto the sandy street behind Rama and my sisters to the oohs and ahhs of astonished neighbors. “Téy damay and ak samay doom yepp,” Rama told them. “Today I’m going out with all my children.”

From my journal 8/20/09

“It was one of those rare moments where I felt like I was really a member of this family. But even saying that sounds empty, doesn’t express the joy that filled me as I sat in that plastic chair next to Rama, part of a long line of Ndoubab women, with familiar faces all around me and the drums pounding along with the Serere songs as dusk fell on us, reunited in that timeless space for no other reason than to rejoice in being alive, being in harmony with each other, looking beautiful because we ARE beautiful, and expressing our love for each other, neighbors and friends.
I watched women rush into the circle, fecc (dance), and run out again, time after time, men who danced in solidarity, lines of people walking in rhythm, aligning and dispersing with the music.
Djibi the [charret driver] was there, part of the organizing group, and soon after the pulse got going he jumped into the sandy circle to dance a turn in the spotlight, moving closer and closer to where I was sitting as he did, until Rama nudged me to get up and I finally slid off my heels and out of my chair to join him out there, and there in front of the crowd I shook my ass as hard as I could, without a clue as to whether it looked like a good fecc, and really without even caring, and then ran back to my seat just as fast as I had left it, my heart racing.
That’s why people do this. Now I know.
It’s exhilarating. I felt so alive.”

backtracking part II.

2009-10-14T08:58:00.001-07:00

The rainy season has all but passed now, the last precipitation here in this town being a week ago, with a dry spell of 2 weeks before that downpour. With the changing seasons comes a little relief from the heat, and the reminder of how nice it is to be able to wash clothes in the morning and hang them out with confidence that they will be dry by evening.

In a low-lying coastal city constant rains become more of a burden than a blessing, invading and inundating sandy soils that become puddles of stagnant mosquito-breeding water. Most of this country isn't built for rain, so when it comes and sticks around it causes issues that come up every year, as the season is only long enough for people to get fed up, complain, and then forget about solving problems once the skies clear up after a few months.

I for one am now happily looking forward to a good 6 months of dryness, after spending the last two weekends cleaning out mold that had built up on every possible surface in my room. And then soon enough I will go back to a country where people know what to do with rain :)

backtracking.

2009-10-14T08:32:00.001-07:00

In all my self-centered musings in my endeavor to relate what life is like here for me, I realize I may have neglected to tell you about this country I am living in. Maybe you've gotten bits and pieces through the months. Maybe you are enjoying the vicarious experience without the aid of background information. So just to satisfy myself (always me, isn't it) I thought I'd backtrack a little to give you an idea of Senegal, the place. What it's like here, as compared to the States. What it looks like and acts like, what it feels like and sounds like and smells like. And since I have also been very bad at keeping up my photo link on Flickr, I think I'm just going to upload a few photos directly here, to save you time and give your reading more meaning, with every one of those 1000 other words.

So...
This is where I live.
Looking down my street.
The view from my roof.
And my always on-the-go dad Ibou in a rare moment of repose.

update.

2009-10-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Lately I've had a tendency to get caught up in my own world here, and in my own head, not getting out to take in what's in my own "backyard," let alone across the ocean from me. I apologize for disappearing off the map. I needed some time to work through the frustration of Ramadan, and the loneliness of losing my sitemate to COS (Close of Service) at the beginning of September. I retreated into myself for a little while, but thankfully I think things are starting to look up, with school beginning here this week and projects popping up left and right to be involved in. The weather also seems to have broken - we just survived an insufferably hot 2 weeks that finally ended with a short rain shower on Wednesday night, and since then the last two days have been much more bearable, with an almost cool breeze in the evenings.

I have a busy schedule the next few weeks, and am glad of it - it took a little while for things to pick back up again after summer school vacation and the end of Ramadan, almost 3 weeks ago, and I had been feeling very low and useless for a while. I am hopeful though that I can move forward now with the new energy of school starting again, and am looking at the next few months as a short amount of time to cover before rounding the bend into 2010. January is not so far away! 3 months, in terms of a 2-year contract, that is. And then it will not be very long at all before I have to wrap up my work here, which is a strange feeling, but a good one. Not that I don't feel my time here has been beneficial - but I have reached a point where I feel that anything more I could do now here would just be solidifying what I have already done, and laying a firm foundation for the volunteer who will come after me.

Maybe I am wishing time away, looking ahead so far, feeling tired, frustrated, and ready to "come home". But what are you going to do. I can only feel what I do. I have about 6 more months of working time here. I am proud of myself for coming this far. I honestly wasn't sure when I started this thing last year if I was going to be able to make it. I remember a certain teary phone call I made to my mother while I was still in Portland, as I'd left my house to walk out my uncertainty on a cold February day. Her support came warm on the other end, reassuring me, as she always has done, that I was "strong enough for this."

Yes, there are many ways I feel that in the last year and a half I could have done better work, more efficiently, more intelligently, differently. But then I've always been a perfectionist. It's not easy to look at my service now from a perspective of "what can I still do?" and "how can I best leave my work behind?" It's surreal to think that so much time has already passed, that I am starting to consider where to go "after".

There are many things I had planned to do that haven't panned out. Some things I could have pushed harder for, some things that were beyond my control. And there is still some time. But at the very least when I look back at what I have done here, I can see that I have gained the respect of my community, and made the importance of environmental education felt even more strongly than it had been before I came.
We'll see what the next 6 months bring. But if that is all I accomplish over 2 years, I think it will still be something to walk away from with pride.

"One man’s trash"

2009-09-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

(7:30 pm, Day 28 of Ramadan 2009)

The sky a streaky slate, I can still make out bats in their nightly flight, winging their way towards dinner across the rooftops. I finish filling a bucket at the faucet out back and bring it inside to fill up my water filter, passing my brother as he wipes the crumbs from his evening breakfast off of the table and onto a metal platter. Every day sunset comes one minute earlier, so the rest of us are done already with our coffee and bread, the time for breaking fast now almost a half an hour ahead of where we started over three weeks ago. Seven-thirty doesn’t seem so late for the sun to be setting, and I am startled to realize we are nearing October, and in other parts of the world that means it’s almost autumn. Here though the only signs of changing seasons are the growing number of sunny days, clouds higher in the sky, fewer power outages, and increasingly frequent talk of going back to school.

It was perfect timing then when Wednesday just before sunset a truck showed up at the community center in town loaded full with boxes of school supplies. Through a work connection with the city’s main women’s group, a Spanish NGO had generously sent the materials by boat from the Canary Islands, and I was called in by the adjunct mayor to help supervise the receipt of the donation, inventory everything, and help decide how it should be divided up between the city’s schools.

When the head of the women’s group said she wanted my help, my first thought was actually, “great, as if I don’t already have enough work…” but once we started inventorying I felt proud to have been called into action as a privileged party, and could not deny the importance of the job I was being asked to do. An elite group we were, just three ladies from the women’s group, my counterpart and the ministry of youth agent, my counterpart’s son and the community center caretaker. The men did most of the lifting and sorting while the women scanned contents and labeled boxes. I kept notes on how many boxes of each kind of material we had, and also served as a kind of cultural anthropologist, as a few items were not so familiar to the Senegalese. I almost laughed out loud when the head of the women’s group triumphantly declared a particular box to be full of cans of disinfectant, when upon closer inspection I found it in fact to be hundreds of bottles of spray-on fake snow. I had a hard time explaining the exact purpose of that one to people who’ve never seen snow except on TV and who don’t even live in houses with glass windows.

Besides the excitement of knowing that so many more kids would be better equipped for learning this school year, I was thoroughly amused at the range of materials that these Europeans had deemed “out-dated” and “give-away”, laughing at how similar all of them were to what I knew growing up. I was transported back to third grade by a box of double-side holed, connected-but-perforated-at-the-top-and-bottom computer paper, as I remembered vividly the printer for our old Mac LCII using it when I was still playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” on a black-and-white screen.

Watching these Senegalese discover their treasure was like seeing a group of scientists uncover a lost civilization, and I was the time-traveler caught in the middle, translating. But even with my intervention, it became evident that not everything would be used here as it had been intended there. A case of miniature magnifying glasses was not set aside for science classes but instead labeled “toys,” and glossy fax paper rolls were proclaimed “wrapping paper.” Poster paper, I was told, was not used for collages or science fairs but generally folded in half to make folders, and rubber bands were set aside to give to hairdressing salons - “for braiding.” Fortunately notebooks and pens are timelessly fashionable, even if everyone in Spain is long done being excited by Bon Jovi three-ring binders and Ricky Martin pencil cases.

After two days of systematic work, I counted a total of 475 boxes, give or take a few, including:

103 boxes of assorted kinds of binders and folders
52 boxes notebooks
26 boxes markers
25 boxes pens
5 cases pencil cases
5 boxes erasers
2 boxes push-pins
1 box kids backpacks
2 boxes mechanical pencil lead
0 boxes mechanical pencils
2 boxes fake snow

The tricky part now will be the dividing of the bounty, for which I’m sure there will be much discussion and hopefully not too much begging. (FYI there are 7 primary schools in my city, 3 middle schools and a high school.) So I’m interested to see how it’s going to go, and whether or not it will all just be given away, or if it will be, as one of the women mentioned, sold at a very minimal price. This was my first hands-on experience with charitable aid, and my only big let-down was my surprise at how little time it took the receivers of that aid to go from being excited over the gift to being critical of its contents. No sooner had we gotten fifty boxes in that they started to complain that there were too many binders, and in the end they were disappointed because there were no shoes. We were standing in a room half full to the ceiling with boxes of things they had just been given, and there they were looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. It made me just a little bit more jaded about development work.

I was also deeply saddened to learn that the Smurf pens didn’t work.
On the upside, a few thoughts:

1. Fasting is much easier when you spend the day doing interesting work.
2. “Boligrafo” is the word for pen in Spanish, and “archivadore” means binder.
3. “Mee-Kay” is a well-known character even in West Africa, as long as you don’t pronounce his name “Mickey”.

09/09/09

2009-09-09T17:09:00.000-07:00

“I always hope that you remember
We'll never really learn the meaning of it all
What we have is strong and tender
So hold on”

“It’s about faith…” - Sade

Believing in something. Your work. Your family. Friends. Love. A greater power.
The promise of tomorrow.

Beliefs shape our world and keep us going, moving forward, looking ahead. Being here I have come to question myself over and over, what it is that I believe, my motives and my motivations, who this person really is who I call “me.” And usually a certain amount of introspection is a good thing, helpful growth. But the solitude and lack of structured work during these last few weeks has affected me negatively, with my perspective leaving me frustrated and angry, feeling that in this context of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, where so many around me are searching for a closer connection to their spirituality, no one seemed to be respecting my right to believe what I believe, or valuing the individualism so sacred in my home country, itself founded under a creed of religious freedom.

The incessant questions of whether I was fasting and why not were wearing on me, and I felt myself under attack every hour of every day. I realized most Senegalese were just making conversation, pointing out one more difference that makes me stand out, not meaning to demean me or throw stones. But despite acknowledging the harmless nature of their questions, it just seemed too much to me, to add this to the already constant daily barrage of questions about where I’m going, what I’m doing, where my husband is, and when I will ever be able to cook fish and rice.

I thought the fact that I was white would be enough to excuse me from fasting, but even when I told people straight out that I was not Muslim, I was still pressured to fast “out of solidarity.” I decided to go ahead and fast for a few days, as I genuinely wanted to join in with my family and please them, but even then on days I was fasting I was ridiculed more often than not, only receiving nods from a few (my family, namely) for my willingness to want to share in one of their most important yearly rituals. Consequently after only a few days of Ramadan I started to become a much uglier person than I usually am, resentful of everyone who crossed my path. I began to wish that I could just spend every remaining day of the month holed up in my room in silence, lying on my bed in the fetal position, not having to go out and talk to anyone. I didn’t feel like writing emails or calling the States or writing on this blog. The effort to connect seemed too difficult.

The realization that I didn’t have the desire to get up and be a real person made me even angrier, angry at myself for my seeming inability to get over my issues and just keep moving. I lived through Ramadan in Senegal last year, after all. Why should this year be any different?

Maybe it's because I have been year a year and a half now, and the novelty has worn off. A year and a half of being under constant scrutiny has not been easy. Also it could be that I’m feeling more vulnerable and alone in my identity as an American, as my sitemate is COS’ing, (Close Of Service), leaving the country next week. The one other PCV living in my city, over the last year she was my closest American friend in country, my constant companion, my ear, my shoulder, my cards partner and go-to person for every small emergency, and now she’s finished her term, going back to the States, and I am left alone to face the last seven or so months of my service. Well technically, I will only be the only volunteer at my site just for the next six weeks, because in October a new SED (Small Enterprise Development) volunteer will be installing. I have no idea what kind of person this will be, or even if it’s a he or a she yet. I only hope we can get along half as well as I did with my COS’ing sitemate. I have to believe that we will. I have to believe that we will make it work.

“Gëm sa bopp.” That’s what my best Senegalese friend told me last night when I asked for advice about how to get out of my slump, how to face the never-ending questions, how to deal with my worry about an uncertain future, how to move forward. We talked for over two hours, as I recounted all my frustrations about dealing with Ramadan from a Western perspective, my unrelenting difficulties as an outsider, my crying need for simple acceptance as who I am. I let it all out, everything that had been weighing on me for weeks. We talked and talked, sharing truths and reasons; I stuttered along in my best Wolof, and the strain gradually lifted. And by the time we said goodnight at one a.m. I felt like I could breathe freely again. Drained but wiped clean, all that stinky funk aired out, I was ready to pick my moping self up and get on with life.

“Gëm sa bopp” means "believe in yourself."
Have faith in you. That’s where it has to start.

slow down, fast

2009-09-04T05:07:00.000-07:00

pre-dawn breakfast
makes for quiet mornings

everyone is sleepy

rainy season clouds hover
muddy water lies idly in the streets

mosquitoes take their tithe
morning fades into afternoon

without fish or rice, we nap

until sunset beckons

dear readers...

2009-08-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my long absence from this site, realizing it is August already and perhaps you’ve given up on me, but I assure you that I am in fact still in Senegal!
Many of you close to me know that the reason I did not write during most of July is not because I was overloaded with work or laid up with dengue fever, but because I spent that time doing something I did not think I would be able to do until next spring.
Yes folks, it’s true…
I went back to the United States of America.

My trip was made possible by the letters A and E and the number 13…
Just kidding :) So many people chipped in to help me come home for three weeks, I cannot thank them all enough. Family and friends, some of whom I was able to see while I was stateside, some not, but all of whom I love dearly and whose kindness I appreciate more than they can know. You know who you are!

I’ve been back in Senegal now for two weeks already, having arrived feeling refreshed and calm, and ready to jump back in. Good thing, because I spent my first week back helping to organize and prepare for a two-day conference of Environmental Education and Health Peace Corps Volunteers which then took place last week at my site, and entailed welcoming fifty PCVs and a handful of PC staff to my town and then ensuring they had everything they needed to successfully house and feed and train them, from Monday night through Thursday morning. I ended up with some overflow, hosting four friends (three EE and one Health PCV) at my house, and only yesterday did the last guest leave for Dakar, leaving me fairly exhausted but glad it had all gone remarkably well.

Now I am at the point where I have time to sit and assess where to go from here. For the first time seemingly since the week before I left for the States, I have time and space to myself to just think. I went back to America for a few reasons, not the least of which was to remember why I’d come to Senegal in the first place. Now that I’m back, and this work summit is over, I am looking at the coming months and formulating plans. Where do I go from here? What is the next step? And I’m just talking for the next few months here. Where I will go next year when my commitment here is fulfilled is still very much up in the air.

While I’m looking forward, I’ll let you look back. Before I even got to the airport, I had left site a week earlier to spend a weekend with my original Thies village host family for a baptism party, and then a few days with a good Senegalese friend’s family in Dakar. Now instead of simply summing up my experience of going back to the U.S. after over a year spent in this developing West African country, the following are some excerpts from my journal, to give you an idea of the range of my reactions, all candid, to the wonderful and surreal fact of my trip.

Saturday June 20, 2009

2009-08-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting in a car waiting for two more seats to fill up before we can leave for Thies. Amazingly I ended up only paying 200 cfa for my huge bag, and though it’s already past 9 and I ideally wanted to leave two hours earlier, I am currently content to arrive in Thies whenever we get there, because I know no matter what my family there will be happy to see me. My beautiful yeere [clothing] is tucked carefully into my small backpack, folded into a plastic bag just for extra safekeeping. I ended up leaving the heeled sandals I’d bought for Tabaski, deciding it wasn’t worth lugging them around and that knowing the village is all suuf [sand] - I just didn’t want to. I’ll wear my gold Reef sandals instead, even though they’re not as fancy.

The reality of going on vacation is finally settling in, as I am actually all packed and here at the garage, having left my family at the side of the road next to Ndeye Siga’s breakfast shack, amidst well wishes and promises to greet all my family for them. I am really going to America. Really really really.

Monday 6/22

2009-08-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

I feel like I need some time bu large to write about everything I felt and saw when I went back to my village, to my family in Keur Sadaro. My mind is full of them, and the trip to Thies and then Dakar, and I feel like the last few days have been moving in slow motion, as I feel acutely aware of every moment, taking everything in, feeling lighter and lighter every day as I shed layers of obligation, leaving work behind and stop trying to think about 10 things at once. I only have a few concrete things I know I’m coming back to, and the rest I’ll figure out when I’m back, next month. But for right now, I am in the moment, I’ve the sensation that time is advancing slowly to give me time to get it all done before I go, and yet… at the same time it’s Monday already, and I feel like it was just Friday.

Monday 6/29 3 am

2009-08-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

There’s so much to say. For starters, I made it back to [my home town]. It’s pretty much the same as the way I left it…
It’s not as strange to be back here as I’d imagined it would be.
But it is weird. America is weird. I don’t know where to start talking about how I feel right now - like I’m back in this comfortable place, but it’s not my home anymore. I mean I kind of knew that that’s how it would be, but it’s weird […] To feel like “where I’m coming from” is literally so different now.

It is so green here. There’s green everywhere.
It’s raining again right now, and it’s perfect.
I love the rain.
This house is so cluttered - there’s so much STUFF everywhere, in every nook and cranny, I feel SURROUNDED.
I had ice cream twice in the last two days and I wasn’t really thrilled by it. I think I’m over ice cream.
I keep thinking about what [my Senegalese friends] would say, do, react to if [they] were seeing all this right now. What would [they] think of the Farmer’s Market. Of my aunt’s house. Of this house, where I grew up. Of this town.

People are fat here.
Everyone’s in their cars, not out on the streets.
It’s big and spread out.

Tuesday June 30

2009-08-02T12:19:00.001-07:00

I’ve been gone from Senegal for 5 days now and I’ll admit I’m already kind of missing it. As sad as that sounds… I thought I’d be thrilled to be back here in America, in my childhood home, with my family and friends. But it’s weird, because I am not the same person I was when I was here the last time. I don’t have a life here now. My life is THERE now.

Tonight on the way home from the movies I made M. stop with me at Hess’s gas station just to go in and see what they had, and discovered that approximately half the shelves in the entire store were stocked with various forms of CANDY. I proceeded to stand in front of the biggest candy aisle for at least 5 minutes, pondering the best sugary snack choice to make, overcome by options, until I finally chose a Reese’s peanut butter bar-type thing to go along with the Sour Patch Kids I’d already chosen. But then I spotted the coffee corner of the store and M and I decided what we really wanted was iced coffee, so after a complicated process… we managed to mix ourselves satisfactory iced coffee drinks, at which point I decided I didn’t really want the candies after all and only paid the Indian guy at the counter for our two drinks.

It is strange to only have to take one shower a day, and to go to bed smelling as good at night as I did in the morning, strange and wonderful. It is strange to look at a 6-foot-wide display of candy and not to have an overwhelming desire to eat any one of the options in particular.

Friday July 3

2009-08-02T12:18:00.001-07:00

This whole being away from Senegal is very weird, and I feel like I’m forgetting my Wolof, and people’s names in [site], and what my purpose is there... I miss feeling like I knew where I stood in life - even if I felt like I didn’t like where that was, at least I knew where I was. Two more weeks of this seems like such a long time. Dinaa fatte sama Wolof yepp! Dama ragal. Bilaahi. Xam naa suma demee foofu, suma gnibbee dina gnewat, InchAllah. [I’m going to forget all of my Wolof! I’m afraid. Swear to God. I know when I go there, when I go back it’ll come back, God willing.] Because it’ll be everywhere. And I know I should be relishing this, and I’m trying to. I’m taking in all the creature comforts, being cold, watching it rain, sleeping on a soft bed without a mosquito net and enjoying the quiet. I’m enjoying my hair not going anywhere throughout the day, and getting to spend time with my sisters. I’m enjoying eating what I want, when I want, and not being given any crap about when I wake up or how much (or how little) I eat.

This house has hardly changed since I was last here over a year ago […]
I don’t know what to say, except right now Senegal seems more real to me than this does.
All of this - there is so much extra.
Extra stuff, superficial stuff, it’s so easy to get caught up in it. In Senegal, there’s hardly any extra stuff. It’s the bare minimum. The essentials rekk [only]. And people have good lives, happy lives.

Was it Emerson or Thoreau who went to the woods to live? I can’t remember, but I know that’s why I went to Senegal. To live. And I feel like that’s where I’m finding life, what it really means to be alive. As much as it sucks sometimes, as I’m sweating through my clothes after just stepping out of the shower, or breathing in exhaust fumes off a Dakar street, being there makes me feel like I’m actually living my life, instead of just watching it pass me by from the comfort of a well-insulated middle-class American view. We are given so much as Americans, I feel like most of us don’t know how to make the best of it, and we’re always wanting more. It’s so true that being happy isn’t having what you want - it’s wanting what you have.

What am I going to do after Peace Corps? Everyone here is asking. I don’t know.

Monday July 13, 2009. 11:30 am

2009-08-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

The good news is that I’m really looking forward to going back to Senegal (and have been for about a week). The bad news is that I’ve been spending a lot of money, and still have to spend more on sarice [presents] for Senegal, which I’m both excited about picking out and dreading giving out upon my return (along with the inevitably numerous questions of “ana sama sarice?” [where is my present?]) Oh well. It comes with the territory.
Good news: I have done almost everything I’d wanted to do while I was here, and I’ve eaten just about everything I really wanted to eat. In the process I’ve discovered that: I can take or leave ice cream, TV, and driving a car, that any of them can be enjoyable but that I don’t really crave them when they’re not around.
I’m really enjoying the all-around quiet, good coffee, and the cool temperatures, and the ability to sleep any time day or night without waking up all sweaty.

Today is our last full day of all 3 of us girls [sisters and me] together […] I did not expect to be able to spend so much time with my girls on this trip - it really has been fabulous.
So has the ability to totally forget about work for these few weeks. For the last year I haven’t been able to do that, even when I traveled I was always still in Senegal, with my work in Senegal never far from my mind. I think that’s what I needed most of everything - a mental break.

You know I think I miss it because that’s where my life is right now. That’s where I belong, where I have a place. I don’t have a place here right now. I got the chance to taste what it’s like, to see what I’d been missing. And it’s all still here. Not much has changed in a year. And by the time next year rolls around I doubt much more will have changed.

I know that before I left I was telling myself that I needed to go back to America so I could remember why I’d come to Senegal. And since I’ve been back in the States I’ve been constantly with D or M and haven’t really had much alone time to reflect on that. But I feel it all kind of coming together, all the reasons why I went. And the reasons why I went in the first place are not necessarily the same as the reasons why I want to go back now. I know that.

I want to go back now and DO a few things before I have to leave next spring. I want to go back now to keep challenging myself, to keep learning. I want to go back to see how those darned Environmental Olympics went, if they went at all. I want to go back to formulate a better plan for an EE club for this coming year […] I’m excited for our EE/Health summit, not just because we get to be hosts, and because all my friends will be there, but also because of what I hope to learn from it. And I am also just a little bit excited to start thinking about what I might be really interested in doing when my 2 years are up. But I need time and space to myself for that, and I know both of those are waiting for me back in Senegal.

wherever you go, here you are

2009-06-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

- Who’s in the bathroom? I asked my mom Rama the other morning, as I prepared to take a bucket bath and found the door locked.
- Benn unka, she said.
- A gecko? I asked, amused that a gecko would be able to lock the door behind itself.
- Waaw, she said.
- A gecko? I repeated.
- Waaw, she said. Unka bi mooy Soukeye.
Yow xam nga unka begg na ndox. Soukeye, douche douche rekk!
““Yeah, Soukeye’s the gecko. You know how geckos like water, Soukeye’s always in the bathroom!”

My sister is 18 years old and stylish, so I’m not really surprised. But sometimes I get so caught up in the way things are different, that I’m caught off guard by the similarities that are universal. Like my father Ibou taking care of getting things fixed around the house. Our 2-year-old neighbor Awa who laughs at my mom Rama when she talks to her in a funny voice. A guy friend getting distracted from our conversation by a fancy car driving by. Kids losing concentration as the end of the school year nears.

It’s true that some things are the same everywhere you go. And I laugh at how people can be so seemingly different on the outside, and yet essentially so much alike.
Thinking of those similarities makes me remember that I am accepted here because I am just another person. I am a human, like everyone else. The people I respect the most here are those who see me just as a woman, and a friend. Those who see through the layers of color, nationality, and respective status, and realize that all of those things are merely illusory.

And the time passes. Each day I still leave the house to choruses of “Toubab, hey!” but I am still here. Those words haven’t killed me yet. Neither have the copious amounts of greasy rice I have consumed over the last 14 + months, the almost daily comments about the size of my derriere, the incessant curiosity about my lack of husband, or the view of my inability to cook fish and rice à la Senegalaise as a terrible failure on my part as a woman. The other day I told someone who was riding me about my inability to cook rice and fish, “Sama liggeey nekkul ci wagne wi.” [My work is not in the kitchen.] And he barely hesitated before saying “Yeah, well, you ought to be able to do everything, work, and cook, and clean,” and so on. And I just laughed, forgetting now what it was I answered to that. I laughed because it’s never enough to them.

Whatever I do here, it’s never enough. I go to school 5 days a week and try and do work there with the teachers. I attend almost every single meeting about this local trash management project. I learn Wolof. Am still learning. I learn enough Serere to be able to greet Sereres, and people tell me I should be able to speak Serere. I tell them all the Sereres speak Wolof, so what’s the point? I try and keep up with my French, which now has developed a West African accent. I come home and sweep my floor. Yes, I can sweep. On weekends I wash my own clothes, YES, by hand. YES, they’re clean. Plus if I do say so myself I am open and optimistic and encouraging and greet everyone I know whenever I see them and go out of my way to be polite most of the time. SO WHAT if I can’t cook ceebujen? Ten years from now, is that what they’re going to remember? I hope not.

The school year is, thankfully, coming to an end, and there is a general feeling of restlessness in the air, as students prepare for end-of-year exams and entrance tests into the next classes. The strikes that started the end of April ended two weeks ago, with a promise from the minister of education to give the primary school teachers a part of their salary bonus request now, and the rest incrementally next year and the year after. I’m looking at what worked this year and more importantly, what didn’t, and looking forward to summer activities. I’m thinking about how to fill the hours in July, August and September. And still wondering how it is June already. At any rate, it’s here. And through all the frustrations I’ve had since the school year started off limping back in October, I can’t say I’m not glad to see it end. Although it’s kind of scary to think that I only have one more school year to spend here - one more run from October ’09 to May-ish 2010, depending on when I decide to leave exactly.

I’m trying to gain some sense of perspective about all of it, these two years, this work, this experience and all it means. It’s certainly not an easy task, trying to remain balanced in this topsy-turvy world. Among the photos of family and calendar pages that I have posted on the walls of my room, there’s this quote I took from a friend (who is much better about writing internet updates than I am), who I know won’t mind if I post it here. It helps me sometimes just to take a deep breath.
It goes like this:

“Fill your bowl to the brim, and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife, and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security, and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval, and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work and then step back - the only path to serenity.”

- Lao-Tzu

more photos

2009-05-12T14:00:00.001-07:00

I uploaded all the pictures I took from our Earth Day events at school. Check them out!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

and I promise a real post soon...

all coming together...

2009-04-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

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.”

3/28/09

2009-03-31T04:15:00.000-07:00

I expected that at this point in my Peace Corps service I would feel more of a sense of accomplishment and pride. I have been here for one full year now, and you’d think that should amount to something. A year, you say. Twelve months spent in a foreign country, learning to adapt and adjust and integrate and respect and speak and work and LIVE.

Instead of rejoicing though, and giving myself some credit for this, lately I’ve been beating myself up and feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt; feeling like I’m not doing all the work I want to be doing, and having a hard time feeling like I’m getting any work done at all. On top of that I feel like I am spending less time being social with my Senegalese friends, and seem to be falling behind in my correspondence to friends and family back in the States. I apologize to those of you whom I haven’t emailed back in many weeks, or perhaps months - but remind myself, and you, that this is one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place ☺. So I hope you’ll forgive me, as communication Stateside sometimes falls last on my priorities list.

As for work, I would have thought by now that I would be full-on gung ho about what I’m doing here, and it’s hard to admit that I’m not exactly. There are some things that I’ve done that have really been exciting, but others I am involved in that I feel like are just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping plodding along. I suppose that’s development work for you, though, it IS hit-or-miss, and sometimes it IS just about simply showing up and keeping encouraging people to do the same. It’s just hard to realize that, though, being so ingrained in my American ways, with our focus on results-driven work. I’ve had to realize that the word “work” is not always defined the same way here, and that “success” has different barometers and criteria.

I was warned before I came about the intangibility of much the work I would be taking on here, how physical, measurable results are not necessarily the usual end product of two years of Peace Corps service. But knowing about something and living it are two very different things. Working in education as my main focus here, I know I am aiming for long-term results, ones that may very well not be seen in the next year I’m here. Despite the warning, it’s a difficult reality to come to terms with.

Last week I was invited to go back to Thies to help with training of the newest group of Peace Corps (soon-to-be) volunteers. It was a peculiar feeling, to be the “experienced” volunteer, and to be asked questions like I was the expert, when I know now how much I still don’t know, and there’s so much I feel I haven’t done. But these trainees had been in country for just three weeks so far, so my scope of knowledge about Senegal and Peace Corps far surpassed theirs, which was again, surreal. This is the second group of new volunteers that have come into country since I did, but the last one six months ago didn’t have as big of an impact on me emotionally. They were exciting and fresh, but after six months me and my stage-mates were still just getting our feet wet.

This year mark is a strange coming-of-age, a time to look back, and ahead, to assess how far I’ve come, where I am now, and where I still want to go. The group of volunteers who were a year ahead of us and helped with our training a year ago are in the process of leaving the country now (COS’ing - Close of Service), and saying goodbye to them makes me think about how fast time has been flying. I just hope that a year from now, when it’s my time to go, I can walk away and say, “Yes, I did something too.”

365 days

2009-03-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

This past Friday marked my 1 year anniversary of being in Senegal.
One year ago I started this adventure, along with the rest of my training group. We came together for staging in Philadelphia, met each other for the first time, with all of our physical and mental baggage, with all of our optimism and dread, anxieties and excitement and eager naiveté.

I can still see the carpeted hallways of that Holiday Inn in the historic district, the pink hue of the conference room, and the flip chart paper we taped to the walls, with our hearts out there in the open, having been asked to draw our hopes and fears. We rode the bus to New York, checked in all our luggage, and boarded the plane. And after over 36 hours of being in transit, we landed in the still warm night of Dakar.

There were so many times in the last year when I thought I was surely not going to make it this far, when I doubted all the reasons I had for coming, and wanted nothing more than to go home. And I don't think that those moments of doubt are completely behind me - but I know now what to expect. I don't expect to encounter too many new challenges and changes over the next year. Just the same challenges, over and over, ad infinitum. That will be the biggest challenge perhaps: knowing what I'm facing, and keeping optimistic in spite of it. In spite of everything.

I still think this is the right decision for me, to be here, now. Yes, I do miss America and my friends and family there sometimes so much that it seems like my heart is just going to burst. But if I think about leaving here right now I am filled with an equally deep sadness, because there is still so much I want to try to do here before I would feel at peace with stepping away and moving on. I feel that here is where my life is now.

So I stay on, and look ahead. To this next year. May it be everything I hope it can be.

dreamstate

2009-03-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

I didn’t sleep well Wednesday night, through a combination of drinking too much water right before bed and it being unseasonably warm all of a sudden. Probably because of these factors, I dreamed, vividly. My dreams here in Africa seem to me to be more often than not transparently symbolic of my anxieties and neuroses of waking life, and this one was no different. The following is the actual, honest-to-goodness, true dream, as well as I can remember it.
…….

The set-up: I was getting ready to go on a trip, with many other people. I was excited of course, and a little nervous, because we were going back to America. The trip was just going to be a visit, a week or so, not permanently leaving Senegal, so I wasn’t sweating it too much, but as we were advancing towards the security gate, I realized I didn’t know where my boarding pass was, or my driver’s license, or passport.

I started ransacking all of my bags looking for these critical papers, not coming up with anything even as the crowd thinned out and fewer and fewer people stayed nearby to help me search. My bags didn’t seem to be proper suitcases, just large plastic bags full of random stuff, but finally I turned up a scrap of paper on which I had scribbled in pen the flight information and my ticket numbers, and hoped that would suffice as a boarding pass. I continued to go through all of my things, which seemed like a ridiculous amount for only a weeklong trip, and as the minutes ticked by I became more and more certain that I was going to miss my flight. Somehow my mother was there too, my real American mother, and she offered to look through her baggage too in hopes of turning up something that could prove my identity. So we delved into her bags, together pulling out what must have been several kilos of large onions, until she had her hands around the biggest onion of all, which she pulled apart to reveal a few small books that she had tucked inside the cleverly-cut vegetable. I saw my monthly planner among her other closely guarded treasures, and reached for it, my hope rising. “I already looked in it,” she said to me. But I smiled, taking it from her and flipping the book open to its back flap, where the inside pocket divulged my coveted driver’s license, as well as the IDs of a few other PCVs, which I had apparently been holding onto for safe-keeping.

I sighed in relief, having feared my precious ID lost. But after a minute of calm, I looked around me, realizing everyone else was gone already. The hour continued to advance, and I still didn’t have my passport. My mother drifted out of the scene, and I drifted closer to waking, seeming once more to be alone, with no one left to help me search for the one last document I knew I needed to board the plane. I started to lose hope that I would be able to make this flight, and soon I woke, before I could find my passport, before I could go anywhere, my feet still on the ground here in Senegal.
…….

I’m not going to list the numerous links I can find here between my imaginative subconscious and its origins in reality (because they seem obvious to me, as I know myself so well) but I would be interested to know what you, dear readers, see, if you feel like commenting. Maybe the next time I will write about something actually related to the “work” I do here, Inch’Allah. Until then…

February 28

2009-03-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

It’s just past 7:30 pm, and as I come up to the roof of my family’s house to catch the last rays of light fading out over the ocean, I hear the dusk call to prayer sounding from the nearby mosque. Palm trees’ dark frames are silhouetted against the darkening sky and the cool evening wind carries the voices of children from up the sandy street as they kick around a ball. Half a block over there is a single lightbulb illuminating a foosball table, surrounded by boys, each eager to have a turn, and as the day turns into night the cloudless sky reveals the first sliver of a new moon. I look out at the sea, the horizon blurred now in darkness, and think about how many miles away is America, and how distant it seems from the reality I’m living.

I can barely make out the palm trees now, but the waves continue to break on the shore and the boys clack and conk their miniature footballers and a baby cries a few houses down. A megaphone mounted on a car passes by and fades into the wind, a sheep bleats, and a car honks from the road, half a kilometer away. And then, quiet. I look up to realize the power is out, only the second time that’s happened in the evening for several months. An almost daily occurrence in the rainy season, since the arrival of cool dry days we have become accustomed to having regular power again. But by the time I stop to think about it, I see the light in our courtyard, the street lamps power on, and the voice from the mosque loudspeaker calls the faithful for one last time today.

The wind is picking up, making me eager to go downstairs and put on a jacket, heat a pot of water to warm up my bucket bath and take a shower. Tomorrow is Sunday, a day I try to set aside to not do work, and I’ve been invited to lunch at my counterpart’s house. In the evening there’s a lutte, a traditional Senegalese wrestling match that I might go to, over at the middle school. I have a few lesson plans to look over that one of the teachers at the elementary school I’m working with prepared yesterday, and I might wash some clothes.

Brr! The breeze makes me shiver in my short sleeves and jeans, and I am enjoying every minute of the cold that I thought so many months ago was not even possible. What wonderful joy it is to step out of the shower these days and not immediately start sweating again! I missed actually wanting to wear layers of clothes. I know the hot season will come again soon, but for the time being I am reveling in my element, and laughing at the Senegalese who look so out of place bundled up like Eskimos in their puffy fleeces and gloves, at 50 degrees F. These hot season people don’t know what to do with the cold. “America is much colder than Senegal!” I tell them. But then it’s their turn to laugh at me, when they see me in my sweatshirt and jacket, hands in my pockets, elbows tucked into my sides. “Leegi miin naa tangaay bi!” I say, in my defense. “I got used to the heat!”

the one-eyed man leading the blind

2009-03-03T03:20:00.000-08:00

Or something like that... So a recent graduate from my university contacted me a few weeks ago to get some advice on Peace Corps, as she is getting ready to join in a few months and naturally wanted to get as much first-hand information as possible. After writing her back, I thought it
might be interesting to share, and she agreed to me posting this here, so here you go.

........................................................................................................................................................

Feb. 18

Hi Alexis,

Thanks for getting back to me! I'm excited to read the blogs--I find it helpful to hear about volunteers' experiences.

I was invited to go on a program in Sub-Saharan Africa this upcoming June, but am only finishing up my health forms now, so it looks like my slot will be filled by the time I'm done with the application process. I am not sure when my next program will start, but I do hope to go to Africa. I will most likely be working in community development/education.

In my months of considering the program, I have created many personal fears and doubts. I feel inexperienced since I have yet to specialize in a specific skill (my major was International Relations). Hence why I considered going back to school first to get an advanced degree. Furthermore, I struggle with the fact that I don't want to go on just a two-year self journey, but rather make a difference and create change. I guess I have felt those feelings from my past volunteer experiences (I did the Bucknell Brigade in Nicaragua and spent last summer filming a documentary in Nicaragua), where there were times I felt inadequate and not helpful at all. Do you feel this way at all? Were you hesitant to join?

Thank you for sharing your experience with me, I appreciate it. What are your biggest challenges? Do you feel like you have changed a lot?

...........................................................................................................................................................

Feb. 26

Hi B,

It sounds like you already have more experience than I did coming into
my Peace Corps service, with the Bucknell Brigade and visiting a
developing country. I had several friends while I was at Bucknell who
helped with the Brigade, though at that time I was not yet seriously
considering Peace Corps. Before I got here I had only been to Europe,
and not even close to any developing countries. My major at Bucknell
was a double, environmental studies and French, but like yours, I
didn’t feel (and still don’t) that that qualified me to do anything
specific at all. I didn’t want to teach French, and only had vague
ideas about working in the vast “environmental” field.

I graduated from Bucknell in 2004 and worked various jobs for a few
years, until the spring of 2007 when I decided to apply to Peace
Corps. I am glad that I had a few years out of college before I came,
but from my experience here, I can tell you that Peace Corps teaches
you just about everything you need to know to do your job. So don’t
worry too much about having specific skills before you come.

One of the things that pushed me to try and join Peace Corps was the
desire to do something useful and helpful to people, to really make a
difference. I think I was most hesitant about whether or not I would
make a good volunteer, whether I could “cut it”, whether or not I was
strong enough to live two years away from my family and friends and
rough it. I think if you didn’t have fears and doubts you wouldn’t be
normal! I didn’t dwell too much on my past experiences and knowledge
while I was in the application process, but when I got here I found a
range of people as my fellow trainees, some less and some more
experienced than me.

Honestly, there are many times here when I have felt inadequate and
not helpful at all. But I don’t think having an advanced degree would
have helped that. There are basic things you have to overcome, that
simply take time, patience, and determination. It is hard being an
outsider trying to make change, and it takes a lot of work to get to a
point where you are accepted and respected by your community, enough
that they will listen to what you have to say. It is a constant
struggle to feel like you are doing something helpful, and one of my
biggest challenges is changing my perception of what is “help”, seeing
that sometimes just being present is what matters. I work every day to
create structure for myself, since there is so much freedom in this
job, it is difficult to find focus. And every day I still meet people
who don’t know why I’m here or what my job is, and they simply dismiss
me, judging me based solely on the color of my skin. But perhaps the
biggest challenge is in fact feeling like what I am doing has some
kind of impact, and that all the months that I have been here are not
for nothing.

As for changes, there is no question that I am not the same person I
was a year ago when I was getting ready to leave for Senegal. The way
I look at the world now is forever different. It’s hard to say exactly
how, but I know that I like who I am now more than who I was when I
got here, and it’s true that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger’. Often I meet new Senegalese people and they ask about what
I’m doing here, and one of the first things they assume is that I am a
student. “Are you learning?” they ask. And although that is not
technically what I am doing here, I usually answer “yes.” Because
every day I’m here I learn something new; about Senegal, about the
Senegalese, and about myself.

At this point, I do not hesitate to say that joining Peace Corps is
one of, if not the, best decision I have ever made. Yes, there were
times (and are still times) when I think, wow, what the hell am I
doing here? and all I can think about is going home. I’m not going to
lie about that. I don’t know a single volunteer who hasn’t at one
point seriously thought about going home. But the wonders, the joys,
the things you get a chance to be a part of here, the opportunities
you have to touch people’s lives, and to have your life changed by
others, I think it makes it all worth it. I feel like I have done more
‘living’ in the last year than in the three before it. I still have a
year left in my service, and there is a lot I hope to get done. It
takes time to get integrated into your community, to learn the
language, to find out where you belong and what you can do. So if I
can give you any advice, it’s that you need to be patient. And
forgiving. Not just of others, but especially of yourself.

I wish you the best of luck, and if you have other questions, feel
free to shoot me a note.
Take care,
Alexis

Six more weeks of WHAT winter?

2009-02-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

After that title, which is a propos of nothing in this post except the date (I don't think there are groundhogs in Senegal) here we go again.

I have been asked to write more about the ways I have changed since coming to Senegal, and since we are fully into a new year now, by American, Muslim and Chinese standards, it seemed like an appropriate time to mark change and look at progress.

I sat down for a minute to think and came up with a list, in no particular order of importance, of ten ways that I have noticed that my priorities, standards, perspectives or habits have changed since I came to this country almost eleven months ago. Next month will mark a year here… Amazing how time seems so fluid. Six months ago I thought the days seemed never-ending, and now the weeks seem to run into each other.
This should be item #1.

Speaking of time, it is perfectly acceptable to take two hours for a nap after lunch, and starting meetings an hour and a half past the time indicated is standard. I also know that even though people often say lunch is at “noon” it is never actually at 12 pm, and could be at any time between 1 and 4 pm, depending on the number of people being served at the particular gathering, the importance of the event, or the weather.

2. What I used to think of as “small” sums of money have taken on greater importance, in the relative scheme of cost of living here.
Take 200 f CFA, for example, (equal to about $0.50).
Doesn’t seem like much, but here it can buy any of the following:
1 Coke from a corner store
1 apple
8 medium onions
8 small packs of peanuts from a street vendor
2 packs of tissues
1 clando taxi ride across town + 3 boxes of matches
200 fCFA phone credit = 10 text messages or 3+ minutes calling time (in Senegal)
What would you use your 200 f CFA on?

3. I look at objects I buy in terms of what will happen to the unused part when I’m finished. I know some of you out there are already quite aware of that, but in the States I felt much more distanced from the actual “cradle to grave” process, if you will. Here I work with city cleanup projects and see where trash goes, and what goes into it. An empty pen prompted me to write this post, as I looked at the beautiful shiny hollow aluminum and plastic housing, thinking about how utterly useless that shell was now that the ink inside of it was gone. How long will that ‘packaging’ take to biodegrade, after it served its use for approximately 3 weeks? How much other packaging is avoidable?

4. Going between three languages while having a single conversation with one person is totally normal. In fact I have a hard time keeping to just one language when conversing with people with whom I only have one language in common. In any given conversation I may use elements of French, Wolof, Arabic-influenced phrases, and even English slang. I also now know a few greetings in Serere and Pulafuta.

5. I find my day somehow lacking if no one asks me about my marital status, nationality, religious affiliation or preference for rice and fish.

6. I regularly start conversations with small children on the street.

7. Half a bucket of water is enough to take a full shower and wash my hair, and I felt disgustingly dirty in the hot season if I didn’t shower 2 times a day.

8. When you wash your own clothes by hand, clothes that look clean and don’t give off obvious odor are in fact clean.

9. Instant coffee is a delicious treat I look forward to every morning when I wake up.

and last but not least...

10. Sixty degrees Fahrenheit is COLD!

2009-01-21T17:02:00.000-08:00

(top) from the months when I first applied to become a Peace Corps Volunteer... spring 2007

(bottom) a month or so ago, one-third of the way into my Peace Corps service, winter 2008

ch-ch-ch-changes

2009-01-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

Christmas. New Year's. Family from the States. Friends from Senegal. Back to work, continuing to figure out what that means, where I belong, and what I can make of it.

Looking back at 2008, the only word I can think to use is "amazing"- to see where I was when it started, and look at where I am now. I have spent the last ten months of my life on a continent that just a year ago I had only seen in my dreams. And who I am has irrevocably changed because of it.

I am witnessing my own transformation as it takes place within me. Slowly yet surely it progresses. I know that as this year begins, the way that I live it will be different than the way I lived last year, and the person I am now is not the same one who left Philadelphia so many months ago.

I know now that I personally will not ever be able to save the world. But I don't think that means it's useless to try. I think what each of us can do to help "save the world" is to do what we each can do best, and in our own ways contribute to the communal bettering of our planet. I think this world needs thinkers, and doers, and planners, and behind-the-scenes'ers. It needs communicators, sharers, artists and idea-men. But most of all it needs to keep thinking that we can. (Obama shout-out!) But seriously, that is the greatest conclusion that I've come to so far here: that people who think there are no options are not going to try and go anywhere. It's those who don't stop at today, who keep looking to tomorrow, who are going to wake up each day more hopeful than the last, with the determination to do something with that day.

I'm not trying to claim any great gained wisdom from a few months of living overseas in a developing country, but I'm just giving you my perspective, because that's why you're reading this in the first place, isn't it? My dad and sister's visit to me here between Christmas and New Year's really showed me just how different my take on things is now than what it was. Some things that would have bothered me a year ago I consider standard now, and my priorities have shifted. Much of who I am is of course fundamentally the same, but there are things about me now that I hope will never change back, even after my service here is over.

After I dropped off my family at the airport late on New Year's Eve, I got back to the regional house and soon tucked myself into bed. When I woke up later that day I sat down to write a letter to the sister I had just sent back to America. Here is part of it.

(written Jan. 1, 2 pm)
…

Maybe I’ll go rejoin my friends now. They’re still watching “The Office.” I know. It's addicting.
And it makes me look at my henna’ed hand, think of [my town, my host mom, my counterpart, my work partners,] the school, the market, the sept-places ... - and thank the heavens that that’s not me there in that office.
For all the times I complain here, for all the comforts I don’t have, for all the people who piss me off - what I’m doing here is actually LIVING.
This is LIFE.
I am ALIVE, and doing what I set out to do here: challenging myself to go further than I ever have before, growing, maturing, changing my perspective and discovering what I’m really made of. I look at this year stretched out ahead of me, and I am hopeful. I think I have what it takes to do this now, and I am excited. I am also becoming more forgiving of myself, and more accepting of small triumphs. Nine months is no small feat. There may be another year and a half before Peace Corps says my time is up here, but there are so many ways I see in which I have already succeeded in what I set out to do.
…

2009, here we come.

new (old) photos

2009-01-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

I realize I'm still behind on posting, since it's been almost a month since Christmas (I know!) but I did just get the chance to upload a bunch of photos that I had taken with my film camera, from April - August 2008, so they're up on my Flickr site now, check them out!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

I will try to get up to speed soon with the blogging, my apologies to family and friends who may be wondering where I've disappeared to. I'm still here, it's just that I'm busy! A good busy. So more soon, Inch'Allah.

on the eve of a Western holiday

2009-01-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

(This is a few weeks old, but my holidays were busy too, so forgive the lag time.)

December 24, 2008. 8:15 am

It’s a strange feeling to wake up this morning and not to smell pies baking, not to feel overwhelmed with excitement for the holiday season, and especially to know that there is not a chance in hell of seeing snow on the ground or of sitting down to breakfast with my mother and grandma, to watch them pick at pieces of Italian sweet bread and gently bicker about whether Mom’s silver is polished enough.

Instead I woke up to hear sheep “mehh”ing and birds twittering, the 70-degree air just cool enough to remind me of the States, but still about 40 degrees warmer than what I expect it’s like at home today. A rooster is crowing, and when I get up to go outside, the ground will still be covered in sand, sand, sand, as far as the eye can see.

It’s more than strange to be displaced in a foreign culture during a holiday such as this. The only other time I’ve been out of America for Christmas was the winter of ’02, when I went to Greece [during my study abroad year in France]. It was chilly and raining, but there were still signs of the season around - blinking lights strung up in restaurants, ferries not running on the 25th. I remember that cold auberge in Corinth, and looking down at the lights on the peninsula with Jake and Andrew. And the welcoming warmth of the hostel in Athens, where I called home to talk to Mom and everyone, as they told me it had snowed so much already that morning that Uncle Dave had to come over and get them in his truck. It would just happen that way, that the first time I’m away from home on Christmas we get a real snow for the holiday.

But here, there are no twinkling lights. There are no malls to go to, playing Christmas music on repeat. It is not even cold. There are no evergreens growing in this climate, and 95% of the population doesn’t even have an oven, in which to bake cookies. How very very different.

my heart in my mouth

2009-01-06T10:57:00.000-08:00

From Sunday December 14th through Thursday the 18th, I was away from site to help at the Hopital Regional in Thies with the week-long Operation Smile mission to identify and offer free reparatory surgeries to people with cleft lips or cleft palates. If you haven’t heard about Operation Smile, check it out: http://www.operationsmile.org/

This was their first trip to Senegal, and they had sent out a message a few weeks prior to their arrival, via our Peace Corps Country Director, asking for PCV help in translating, since most of the doctors and Operation Smile team didn’t speak French, let alone any local languages. I went through the whole gamut of emotions that week, but my experience was overall a very positive one, and I was proud of the collaborative efforts that not only Peace Corps Volunteers put into working with the international Operation Smile team, but also TOSTAN and its American and Senegalese volunteers, as they also did a tremendous job coordinating. http://www.tostan.org/

journal excerpt from Sunday December 14

I think I’m still coming down from the high that today was for me. Today - was - amazing. From before 8 a.m. until past 10 pm today I was speaking in different languages from my own, and for about 8 hours of that time, what I said was actually important. I felt needed, and useful, and respected, and you know what? I don’t think that one person at the hospital today called me “Toubab.”

Today was hard. I felt my ego checked several times, my self-esteem crushed and kicked to the curb when people I was trying to translate for didn’t understand, and told me my Wolof was “leerul” (not clear) and I had to call in a more advanced (or native) Wolof speaker to help. I was humbled and given a different sense of perspective, and heartbroken to have to tell Soxna Mbaye’s mom that her daughter wouldn’t be able to get surgery because her deformity was so severe, and that there was a chance that a larger NGO, WorldCare, would be able to see her case and do something, but that chance was so small that I almost didn’t want to mention it. I came across differences in opinion when it came to translating - one photographer with Operation Smile was upset when I told her that I had told some patients that the constant pictures she was taking were for the doctors only, that they wouldn’t show them to anyone else. She told me the photos weren’t for the doctors, but for Operation Smile, to show potential sponsors to get more funding for projects. When I didn’t relay that to the patients and said to her that it was just as easy to tell them the pics were for the doctors, she said she thought I should “tell them the truth.” I just nodded “hmm” and went on to something else. I don’t think I did wrong by the patients by not telling them exactly what the pictures were for, and in my semi-educated-by-nine-months-of-living-in-Senegal opinion, Toubab truths are not always completely understood or appreciated by the Senegalese either, no matter what our intentions.

Tomorrow we’ll see. Surgeries tomorrow. 18 scheduled. I think we might have more PCVs than they need. Anyway I’m going. Despite how badly my phrases might come out, I’m hooked and I want another fix.

from Friday December 19

I haven’t written since Sunday because every day since then has been so full of living that I was too busy to do any recording. I just got back from Thies last night, just after 8, exhausted and feeling totally emotionally spent. On the Alham (rickety mini-bus) ride from Thies to Mbour the driver turned his radio onto ingratiatingly loud Baay Fall religious songs (if you can call them that), and it just broke the last fiber of patience I had left. Sitting there wedged between a ‘mama’ and three other people in my row, my heavy backpack on my lap and my satchel at my feet, I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down my face. I had spent the week with my heart in my mouth, and though I know I did good, that last day really got to me, with the constant demands for food, water and especially toys, other non-related hospital patients asking me about their other random ailments, the (Senegalese) nurses’ demands for toys for their children, nieces, nephews, whatevers, and some patients’ families wanting still more drugs than the ones they were already given, and everyone just seeming to grab at me from every direction yelling “Ngone! Ngone, Ngone, may ma li! May ma li!!” (Ngone, give me this! Give me that!)
And when I got to the Thies garage all the hustlers were in my face, treating me like a tourist… and there I was again, back at square one.

I just felt like I gave so much of myself this week, and here were all these people still wanting more. Still not satisfied. Still ungrateful. It just made me so terribly sad. Mad, and then so deeply sad.

As the Alham rolled by the dry countryside, I tried to recall the faces I had helped to change. And slowly I was able to dry my tears, as I saw in my mind’s eye Fatiou Diop, and Mahawa Malick, Abdourakhmane and Cheikh, Majigeen and Fatou Diongue, Sidi Sow, and Soda Lo. Their lives will be forever different, and I was able to help make that change a little bit easier.

One of the best parts of the week was being able to tell mothers that their children were out of surgery, to see the relief on their faces and hear their thankful words in Post-Op. “May God reward you for your work,” said one, after I helped translate discharge instructions to a group of cleft lip repair patients.

But I think the best best part for me was making new friends. And seeing them through the whole process, from screening to Pre-Op to OR to Post-Op to discharge. And being told that a patient in Post-Op was asking for me by name -- there was my heart in my mouth again. Malick still needs another operation to complete his new partial nostril (his was a different kind of facial repair) but he seemed to be doing well just out a few hours post-op, and his handshake was balm for my open wounded heart, out in the open as it was for those who needed it, but easy prey for those who only wanted more. His sister seemed like an amazing person as well, and just about made me cry in front of the other patients and nurses as she was thanking me for being there. I told her across Malick’s cot that I wanted to “taq” her as a “xarit” - that is, to make her my friend - and she replied that she was my friend already, “parce que tu es gentille,” she said. Because you are kind.

Right there. Right after we found Malick’s clothes (they had been placed in a different recovery room) with my hand in Malick’s left, because his right was still weak from the IV. Right there, I felt alive, and hopeful. I felt like someone.

Tabaski

2008-12-22T09:05:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from my journal, Tuesday Dec. 9)

This morning I watched our neighbor Biram Ndiaye kill our sheep by slitting its throat with a machete, practically beheading it, while my brother held it down with the help of another neighborhood boy. They had dug a small hole in the sand to let the blood pool down into the earth, and after Biram had finished, he wiped the blade on the sheep’s cheek as it was still convulsing in its last breaths.

I watched as the animal pulsed and spurted blood, helpless and all but dead, my brother Pape calmly pressing it firmly to the ground, his knees on its stomach, his hands on its neck and rump. And then it was still, lifeless. No longer a creature with needs but a piece of meat ready to be butchered. I stood there one more long moment in morbid fascination, then turned away.

Today is a holiday to celebrate man’s devotion and absolute obedience to God. Understandably, it is one of (if not the) most important holidays for these Muslim Senegalese. Tabaski means "sacrifice" in Wolof, as the story goes, God asked Abraham to kill his only son, Ismael, and Abraham was ready to do it, when at the very last instant God replaced the baby with a ram - hence the reason for the killing of the sheep. I believe the holiday is called Eid al-Adha in other Islamic countries, and it takes place approximately two months after the end of Ramadan. In many ways it was very similar to Korité, the end-of-Ramadan fête: the preparation of the meal, the greetings of family and friends, the ritual sayings of forgiveness and blessing, the wearing of one’s best and finest to visit loved ones, and the giving away of what one has enough of to spare.

Today somehow, though, I am missing my American family more than I did on Thanksgiving. Perhaps because then I was surrounded by my peers and we all felt the same way. Here I am among family too, but as the “adopted” child I feel the odd one out especially on holidays like this one. I’ll put on my fancy clothes later and go out, but where I want to be today is thousands of miles away and an ocean apart.

1:30 pm. Haven’t eaten lunch yet, though it’s just about ready. I’m not really hungry, especially after watching my sister Deanor slice apart the sheep’s heart, and Rama and our friend Sophia saw through the tendons of its knees. All I could think about was how it would feel to have someone slice up my knees, and as they grappled to separate the tightly stretched muscles, I decided to leave the kitchen.
I think I will eat mostly fries for lunch, as potatoes are a tuber with no possible human resemblance.

I’d like to stay in my room for the rest of the day today but as I’m not actually sick, I know that’s not an option, and even if I were throwing up they’d probably try and make me come out anyway. Maybe I’ll feel better once I take a shower.
The house still smells like charred flesh. Lunch is over now, and I could hardly eat any meat. I had fries and four pieces of bread, and they just kept telling me to eat, eat! as they sat there gnawing on fatty bones. “Thanks,” I said. “My stomach was kind of unwell this morning.”

I finally got a hold of my village sister from Thiès on the phone, and she was happy to hear from me. “Naka Tabaski bi?” (How is Tabaski?) “How is the family? Are they all in peace?”

And now I can hear my family here shouting at each other - now it feels like a real holiday. It’s not a holiday without family stress and drama… Some things are universal.

1 a.m. Ended up putting on my new Senegalese clothes and going out around 7:15, stopping first at my counterpart’s house, then meeting up with my sitemate at her friend’s house so we could go around town together. After greeting everyone in that house, we went on to pass her house (no one was home but the kids), stopped by our ancien volunteer’s host family, but they had gone to Fatick to spend the holiday, so then I suggested we go visit Kinne Ndiaye, who is the president of the PTA for the school where I spend most of my time. She was home, wearing a beautiful bazin fabric boubou, and was delighted to see us. I accidentally almost sat on a darling tiny sleeping baby on the bed, but otherwise it was an excellent visit.

After Kinne’s we walked to my sitemate’s counterpart’s house, then another work friend’s place, and finally ended up at my namesake (Mame Ngoné)’s compound around 11 pm, an obligatory stop but nevertheless a pleasant one.

Everyone was glad to see me, and admired the red choup fabric of my embroidered long-sleeved top and pants. It felt good to know that I know people here now, that I have family and friends, and people know me. When I finally got home just before midnight, I was happy and tired, and content that despite all my annoyance at the earlier part of the day, it had turned better than just fine after all.

catching up

2008-12-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

I realize I haven’t posted anything in several weeks, and December is flying by! So here are some entries from my journal to fill in a bit what I’ve been up to lately.

(Excerpt from Wednesday Dec. 3)

Last night a family three houses down from ours had their house burn down.
And I slept through the whole thing.
I woke up this morning at 6:30, peed, went back to sleep, and at 7:30 got up again, greeting my host mother Rama after I’d brushed my teeth. “Did you sleep well?” she asked, the usual morning question. I had in fact slept soundly. “Yes,” I replied, “very well. And you?” To which she replied, essentially, “Not a wink! I was up all night.” I asked why, and she proceeded to recount to me the story of the nosie, the flames, the whole family rushing out with water, buckets… how my sister had been so frightened by the blaring light at her window that she had practically fainted. And I just stood there astonished, and guilty that I had not heard anything, that I could have peacefully slumbered while an entire family not half a block away scrambled to save their few belongings from an accidental near-deadly blaze.

“Nothing made it out,” Rama continued. “Everyone is fine, Alhamdulilah, but nothing, NOTHING is left.” I just kept on standing there in her doorway, numb to the strangeness of such a close encounter. I had only ever known one family personally back home who had had their house burn down. But now here I was, putting on my sweatshirt to venture out into the still cool morning to follow my mother around the block. To see for myself the awful damage. It was a family compound made up of wooden poles supporting corrugated aluminum roofs, some in straw even, the perfect starter for a low-burning candle flame. As I stood there, watching the family pick through pieces of rubble and ash, I didn’t have anything to say. Other neighbors were standing close by, and a door-to-door clothes salesman I know came over to greet me, telling me how he had brought water from his family’s house two blocks away but it hadn’t been enough. There just hadn’t been enough water, he said. And then he told me how the family’s cooking gas had exploded from the heat and almost reached a nearby parked car with the flames.
And I slept through all of it.

I watched as Rama stepped through the scene, talking to the family, staying where I was, a short distance away. Feeling like a voyeur, like one of those people who stops traffic when they slow down their car to gape at the wreck. Only I felt especially wrong being there, being white, not being from here, not knowing this family well, hardly at all. A young man in his 20’s or so asked me how I was (usual greeting - “Nanga def?”) then continued with another normal phrase: “Yaangiy noos?” (This literally translates to “Are you having fun? / Are you having a good time?”) I surveyed the damage, the family standing around, still cold from the night, with nothing left but the clothes on their backs, and I looked at the man. “Noosuma dara,” I replied. (No, I’m not having fun at all.) He seemed surprised by this response, telling me I should be “noos”ing more (always the response to someone saying they’re not having fun) and I just looked at him again, and back at the trash heap that had just yesterday been a home. “Yow, mën nga noos, yow?” I shot back at him. (Are you able to enjoy yourself, you?) “Sure, yeah,” he replied. “Why aren’t you?” he continued. “Ana xaalis bi?”

And this (after the fact that I had slept through the blazing fire and all accompanying noise and neighbors roused to aid) was perhaps the most frustrating part of the morning for me. Because I understand that “Yaangiy noos?” is one of the many standard greetings, and you are never supposed to say “Waaw, maangiy noos” (Yes, I’m having a good time) because in this society it is assumed/culturally ingrained that you are only capable of really having a good time if you have money. (And the general populace never does seem to have any.) So in asking me “Ana xaalis bi?” (Where is the money? / Where’s your money? / How’s your pocket looking? or whatever you want to translate it as…) he seemed to be saying to me, “You, you have no excuse not to be enjoying yourself, because obviously you have money. (You’re white.) So don’t go pretending that you can’t have yourself a good time whenever you want.”

I was struck by the coldness of his blunt question, and all I could think to say was a simple “Xaalis amul.” (There’s no money.) Turning away from him, I thought that standing there, I felt more out of place than ever, and even less understanding of a culture that can stand in front of a burned down house and ask another onlooker lightly if she’s having a good time.

Maybe it’s part of an unspoken understanding, an implicit set of rules that everyone follows, to keep emotions in check, never to show your vulnerability. It’s like what a good friend of mine was talking about in a recent email to me, about the people she met in the Czech Republic. I suppose it makes sense - life is hard, people die quickly, houses burn down easily. And if every time you let it get to you? and ask why? That’s a short path to depression. And who wants to live that way? No, much better to move on, say “Yalla moo ko def,” and just keep going. “It was God’s doing,” they say, throwing up their hands.

But to ask me then, at that moment, how/where my money was, though part of the normal greetings repertoire, seemed particularly cruel. I’d barely gotten up, hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, and yet here there was already someone ready to jab me in the stomach when I wasn’t looking. As if my relative affluence could shield me from having feelings. As if somehow I had a say in the choice of the color of my skin, the country in which I had been born, and the fact that our two situations were so vastly different. As if somehow, somewhere along the line of my creation, my parents had traded in my heart to replace it with cold hard cash.

Some people resent me just for being here, and I resent that. They don’t know me, don’t know who I am or what I’m doing here. They assume, and they judge, basing their quick conclusions solely on the color of my skin. It seems like a reverse racism (or is it just plain old racism?), this one bred from a history of colonialism and imperial sovereignty. It’s a strange feeling to be the minority. And to know that as much as I can dress like them, eat like them, and speak like them, I will never be one of them.

màngi sant.

2008-12-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

Wrapping up a quiet weekend, it was good to relax and have downtime after getting back from four days away from site. This week I go back to work refreshed, ready to tackle a busy schedule and start work in earnest (Inch’Allah!) It was wonderful to get away for a bit though, as Tuesday I left my coastal town south of Dakar to travel about nine hours north (on good road, so you estimate the mileage) to a town near the border of Mauritania, where about a third of all the Peace Corps Volunteers in Senegal were gathering to celebrate that quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving.

The volunteers who live in that region did a stellar job of organizing the preparation of food and drink for almost fifty people, especially considering they basically only had one oven, one stovetop, and one fridge to work with. As much as possible was prepared ahead of time, and the lineup of pies on game day was a sight to see. The boys were in charge of buying turkeys, and on the morning of the feast they killed and plucked them, later grilling two and deep-frying one. We had chickens as well, and as it’s still watermelon season here, there was a fruit salad served in a watermelon cut like a basket, and other treats such as a delicious assortment of cookies, homemade stuffing (and Stovetop that someone had thoughtfully sent from America), mashed sweet potatoes, squash, carrots, care package canned cranberry sauce, green beans “White House” and a cheesy corn casserole. Dinner was served around 3 pm, and sitting down on mats outside the house, surrounded by many friends (and a warm 95 degrees), I tucked into my plate. Thousands of miles away from my family who would be preparing their own meal in the house where I grew up, I thought about where I was and where I had come from, this year thankful for so many things.

First, for the courage that got me here.
For my family and friends who encouraged me to pursue this experience, and whose words, priceless and necessary, continue to keep up my spirits.
For the new family that I now belong to, my Peace Corps fellows. As immutable as blood, we share this experience, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
For the hospitality and forgivingness of my Senegalese host families, both here at site, and in Thiès; that they now call me sister, daughter, friend.
To everyone who sent me birthday wishes over the last few weeks, especially my dearest who actually sent packages - you know who you are ;) and how much I love you.
For my relative health, and that the “cold season” has finally arrived!
(Friday morning at 7:30 it was 66 degrees in Ndioum.)
For cell phones, computers, and postage stamps; that they keep us connected and bridge the gap that can seem so wide at times.
For John F. Kennedy, whose vision is still alive today, and for Barack Obama; may he live up to what we hope for him.
And for patience, perseverance, perspective, and a sense of humor.

This year I have gone so far, and grown so much. For everything and everyone that has made (and continues to make) that possible, thanks. merci. jërëjef.

p.s. I wish I could post a few photos, but unfortunately both my digital and film cameras are currently "en panne" - that is, not working. So you'll have to trust my words for now, and when some of my friends upload some photos, I'll link them here. Until then...

a harsh reality.

2008-11-12T03:03:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I will have been in this country eight months, and yet I still feel so far away from achieving any kind of sustainable “progress”. The longer I’m here, the more I realize that two years is a drop in the bucket in terms of making lasting change, and the only thing certain to benefit from my two years here is me.

I should preface this by saying that my role here is not supposed to be a teacher. I am supposed to be helping teachers, and working with students in an environmental club, but right now I am still observing classes, so I can see how the teachers work and how I can start to help. Therefore, as you will see, this morning I was faced with a harsh reality as I stood in front of a CP (Classe Préparatoire) class of 80 kindergarten-aged kids. That’s right, eighty. In one class. After 45 minutes of not teaching them, as the teacher seemed to be more importantly occupied filling out paperwork reporting for the Department of Education, I asked the teacher if the kids didn’t have anything they were supposed to be doing. “No,” he replied, “And when they get out their slates it just makes so much noise.”

“They don’t have anything to work on?” I asked again. “Nothing to practice?” To which the teacher replied by going up to the big board, drawing two long horizontal lines across one section of it, and filled those in with short vertical lines all the way across, like train tracks. He then told the kids to copy that onto their chalkboards, after which time Ngoné (me), he said, would come check on their work.

After several minutes had gone by, and I could see about two-thirds of them had at least tried to draw something, I started walking around and looking, speaking to them in Wolof mostly because although they’re supposed to be learning French in school, at this age most of them don’t understand it yet. The only thing in French most of them seemed to understand well were “oui,” “non,” “bonjour,” “je me leve,” and “je m’assois.” I channeled my best teacher self and patrolled the room, trying to explain in a mixture of Wolof and French why one child’s drawing was lovely but that it didn’t match what the teacher had drawn on the board, because the teacher’s was straight across and the child’s went diagonally across her chalkboard. How do you say “diagonal” in French even?

Other students had drawn their train tracks across the top of their slates, whereas the teacher had drawn his in the middle of the board. I tried to explain how to leave space on top and underneath the tracks to some, while for others the issue was that they had drawn the slats of the tracks jutting out of either side of the rails. Really not as easy as I had first thought, as I walked around the room realizing that though I was able to translate for some kids into Wolof, there were also Sereres and Pulaars in the class, and they would just have to make do with my hand gestures, as I was having enough trouble not knowing the word in Wolof for “straight”. After I managed to get the kids to erase their boards and put them away, it became apparent to me that that this was not only a lesson in drawing, it was simultaneously a lesson in hand-eye coordination, listening comprehension, and French vocabulary. That’s a lot to handle at once for 5-year-olds.

Only shortly before this semi-forced temporary (I hope) substitute teacher role was given to me, I had been minding my own business, taking notes on the class and sitting quietly watching the students and teacher, recollecting what I remembered learning in kindergarten. I calculated that it was twenty years ago exactly when I myself was learning the colors, how to tie my shoes, counting using small plastic dinosaurs (color blue), and reading aloud “The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck” to my class. I feel like my own kindergarten class was much better behaved than this one that I found myself in front of today, and certainly achieved more progress on a daily basis, but then again, my class was taught in our native language, we got nap time, and cinnamon toast on special occasions, and although we did have three Ashleys, our classroom didn’t have to contain more than 30 children.

A little bit of perspective there, then, as I walked out of the classroom at break time thinking about how in America there would be four teachers to handle the number of kids I had just left.

so this is what it feels like to be busy...

2008-11-09T02:54:00.000-08:00

These days I don't know where time is going. It seems to be over 2 weeks since I posted last, and there is more to report than would conveniently fit into one post. I'll do a little catching up, then hope to be more frequent in the months to come.

The good news is that the reason I haven't posted recently is because work is really picking up, Alhamdulilah! School has begun officially for everyone here, meaning that my job as an environmental education volunteer has finally started in earnest. These days I’m going to the elementary school I’ve been assigned to work with almost every day, Monday to Friday, observing classes, getting a feel for teaching methods and styles, and talking with the teachers during class breaks about their expectations and frustrations. After a few weeks of observation, I want to start talking with the teachers about how to incorporate more environmentally related topics into their lessons, and in the meantime I’m also working with the teacher advisor to the student government to use the structure already in place as a launching pad for a separate environmental club.

The past three days I was invited to attend a seminar on waste management in Senegal, and yesterday I made it to my second meeting of a young journalists group, composed of middle and high school students, to whom I hope to serve as a kind of counselor/advisor. Their meeting was held at the CLAC, which stands for “Centre de Lecture et d’Animation Culturelle”, and which is, by all accounts, a library. Needless to say, if you know me, you know that I was thrilled to find that such an institution already exists here, and I have great hopes to work with the folks there as well, as time goes on.

And after over a month of feeling unfocused and somewhat directionless, my motivation got a much needed boost last week when my program supervisor came to visit me here at site. We talked about how things are going and what is expected of me, workwise. He expounded upon several projects that I could get involved in or start up myself, and reassured me that feeling like I had accomplished nothing thus far was absolutely normal. That afternoon we went to the school and he spoke to the director and teachers about my role at the school, what my job actually is, and what Peace Corps means by “environmental education.” The visit was affirming, as after I had spent the last few months only feeling like there is so much I cannot do, I was happily reminded of all there is that I can, in fact, do.

That's the basic gist of what has been happening here with me. On a side note, I have been constantly congratulated since Wednesday on Obama's win, as if it was personally due to my influence that all of America is celebrating. All of Senegal seemed to have been praying for it, and it has been very interesting to be here to see, as my friend Jen said, "the African reaction" to the election results. As for my personal reaction, this is my blog so I can say that since Wednesday morning, I have up to this point in my life never been prouder to call myself an American.

Best wishes to all in the States and beyond, and more posts to come soon, I hope, as I establish a semi-regular schedule for myself and try to make time for everything I want to be doing!

may the force of Africa be with you

2008-10-20T15:26:00.000-07:00

We are all excited here, even so far away, for the showdown on election day. Volunteers and Senegalese alike, that is. Believe it or not, even somewhere so far away-seeming as West Africa, people are excited for American change.

Even my host father, Ibou, a normally very serious and sometimes severe man, has been making jokes recently, like when I got back to the house one evening last week, after being out all day.

(note: Ndiaye is my last name, taken from my host father's. 2. one way to honor someone when you are greeting them is to repeat their last name, as they repeat yours. 3: obviously this is translated from the original Wolof)

Ibou: (as he sees me) Oh, who is this? (pretending to be surprised to see me, like I've been gone so long) Ndiaye, Ndiaye, Ndiaye. (extending his hand)
Me: (taking his hand, shaking it) Ndiaye, Ndiaye, Ndiaye.
Ibou: Well, Ngoné Ndiaye, how are you?
Me: I am here, Ibou Ndiaye, how are you? Did you pass the day in peace?
Ibou: I am here, peace only. And you? How are you? I hope you are well?
Me: Peace only, thanks be to God. I am very well. I hope everyone here is well?
Ibou: Yes, indeed, praise the Lord, we are all in peace.
But where did you go today?
Me: Well, I went to the school, talked with Monsieur Loum, went to the mayor's office, to the market... and then stopped by Gnilan's... and after that... (thinking in an English/Wolof blur) After that, now I'm here.
Ibou: Did you see the mayor?
Me: No, we didn't see the mayor. You know, he's never there. But I saw Mamadou Sarr, and we talked about the trash project.
Ibou: Oh, good. (seeming to be actually interested in the events of my day.) Ok.
Because you missed Barack Obama. He came to visit you, but you were out.
Me: What? Wait, who came?
Ibou: Obama, Obama, Barack Obama.
Me: Oh really, he came here, to the house?
Ibou: Yes, here! He greeted your mother, and your sisters Soukeye and Deanor, and your brother, Pape Sambou... but I said you were out, and I didn't know when you'd be back.
Me: Really? (laughing a little)
(then more seriously) That's too bad. Maybe he'll stop by again soon.
Ibou: (straight-faced) I don't know, he said he had to go to France tomorrow.
(and then a minute later, he laughs)

just some new photos.

2008-10-17T19:16:00.001-07:00

I just uploaded a bunch of photos from Korite, so check them out. Pretty outfits, people I know, and so on. Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

me and my sister Deanor, in our Korite best.

7 months in.

2008-10-14T10:06:00.002-07:00

This post is overdue, but I wanted to note that ... Ramadan is finally over! Hooray!

At the end of the month, we did not eat our sheep after all. Because the day after the feast to celebrate the end of the fast, our sheep gave birth. In our backyard. I am not used to seeing animals actually bring offspring into the world, so it was a bit of a new thing to me. That whole day was a lesson in patience and cultural adaptation, really. The day after Korite, I hoped to be able to do some laundry in the morning, all quiet-like. But first my brother had untied the sheep in the backyard, where the faucet is to get water, and I was slightly distracted from filling my bucket by the head and foot of a miniature sheep stickily protruding from the once singular sheep's back end.

Almost as soon as the entire small creature was exposed to air, storm clouds started to rapidly gather overhead, dashing my hopes of line-drying my wet clothes, and starting my whole family to worrying about whether this newborn should be left out in the downpour. Meanwhile, there had been a funeral for an elderly woman who had lived next door, and the mourners who had filled the street were starting to pile into our house at the first sight of gray sky. After some minutes of rapid discussion, the back door was opened and mother and baby were herded into our small kitchen just as the first drops were starting to fall. Closing the door behind them, I tried to make my way back through the corridor to my room, almost tripping over people filling up the hallway, looking at me oddly, not knowing that I actually live there, and had much more right to be in the hallway than they did, even if I am a white person in a black world.

Needless to say... I only managed to get 2 shirts and 2 pants washed and suffered much indignation at feeling unwanted in my own house (after carefully fostering a sense of belonging over the last several months). By late afternoon I finally got out into town and away from the bedlam, had a successful trip to the market and visited with my sitemate who was sympathetic to my cause. All in all, at least it was a story to tell! Days like these make me rethink how "adjusted" I really am so far here. The next time a farm animal gives birth in my kitchen maybe I'll be a little less surprised!

Baax na, wante lan ngay DEF?

2008-09-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

starting out small.

2008-08-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

week three of IST we got out of the training center and got our hands dirty planting some trees. the soil was harder than ideal, lacking rain for several days past, but we put a few plants into the ground, and with a little luck, some of us will go on to do likewise in our own corners of Senegal.

all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

2008-08-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

the second weekend of IST we organized a talent show, and acts ranged from card tricks and magic cookies to song and dance numbers based on classic Disney movie tunes with revised Peace Corps-parodied lyrics. we finished off the night with a dance party, of course.

a break from training, with sand and sweets.

2008-08-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

the first weekend of IST I took a short trip to the beach with two friends. you wouldn't believe how much a simple thing like baking cookies is transformed into a luxurious pleasure when you live in a country where ovens are a rarity!

back to site update.

2008-08-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Our second, shorter, follow-up training is over, another time marker past. After almost four weeks away, I am back at my site, in a room I can call mine, and a city that knows my name. It feels good to be back, and also, selfishly, to know that people noticed that I had been away.

My transition back to free-flowing, unstructured time at site from the rigid, hourly-planned schedule of IST was eased by the visit of one of my best friends from our training stage, and the opportunity to show her around town also led to the realization about how much I already know about this place I now call home, and how many things here I hold dear. Though it was not always fun, being away for IST was useful in many ways, not the least of which was to get perspective away from site and come back with refined ideas and motivation to really begin working. A few more days of adjustment back to site, then hopefully I’ll be ready to start making plans. Thank you also to everyone who sent me letters while I was out of site - it made coming back that much sweeter. A full mailbox is cause for several days of joy, don’t underestimate it. And keep it up!

So, for a quick recap of time in country to date:

- 8 weeks PST (Pre-Service-Training), Thiès Training Center. (Getting ready to go out into the country on our own. Language, cross-culture, safety, health and technical training.)
- Swearing-In. (We became “real” volunteers!)
- Installation at site. (A few days of not knowing anyone’s name, and mild to severe panic.)
- 12 weeks at site (Figuring out town, meeting people, settling in. Technically not allowed to start any projects during this time.)
- 3 weeks IST (In-Service-Training), back in Thiès. (More technical training, plus a little language, and a safety, culture, and health session or two.)
- And now… back at site to stay and work, until spring COS (Close of Service) 2010, Inch’Allah.

Next Saturday will mark my first 6 months in country, and two days before that the newest group of trainees should be touching down in Dakar to start their Peace Corps experience. It’s strange and awesome to think that I will no longer be one of the greenest volunteers in Senegal - and that 6 months have already gone by so fast.

from Beijing to Dakar to the U.S.A.

2008-08-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Three months at site, getting adjusted, starting a new life, feeling comfortable - and now we’re back in Thiès again, with training classes at the center and beds for the night back in our original homestay villages. I feel like the city mouse is a country mouse again, switching back to rural living, and it is a strange feeling to have this transient stay, 3 weeks only, back in a place I felt I left forever when the Land Rover drove us away back in May.

The best part of IST (In-Service-Training) so far, however, has been the comfortable time we get to spend with each other, fellow volunteers, all 34 of us who trained together now back here to continue to learn, and laugh, together. Three months away from each other has only brought us back with even more cohesion, and Friday’s opening Olympics ceremony was a moment to enjoy, as most of us crowded around the training center’s one TV after lunch, jointly commentating on the French-dubbed broadcast. We may not be this quick at our repartee in local languages yet, but it felt like home again to be around people who get the kind of humor that I so often miss at site.

- These are awful costumes.
- Yeah, Hungary, come on.
- I guess somebody got a discount…

- Yay, Togo.
- That was half-hearted.
- Yay, TOGO!!

- Sweet, it’s Iceland!
- He’s got a nice mustache.
- Like a used-car salesman.
- Nice coordinated dancing. Good job, Iceland.

- What do you call people from Guam?
- Guamese? Guamish? Guamians? Guamrats?

- Jordan should field a team with one guy, named Jordan.
- (Voice of sports announcer…) “Chad plays Jordan today.”
- Yes, but where are they from??

A few more countries parade through, including Finland and the United Arab Republic… and then:
- Who really cares?? I just want to see America!!

- Cook Islands! They’re the only country that’s a sentence!

- United Arab Emirates.
- They have more money than the rest of them.

Three guys jumping up and down wearing obviously homemade hats the color of their flag sparked a “Nicely done, Argentina!”

- Palau. Where’s that?
- Another Pacific island country, right?
- It’s one of those dots.
- That guy’s like, “This flag is bigger than my country!”

- Somalia! How does Somalia get in without an organized government?!

And as we were waiting, and waiting, and waiting to see Senegal march in, our next class had started and we were still watching:
- Let’s go, Senegal!
- Yeah, come on, we’re on a time schedule.

Then someone cynically (but not without reason) remarked,
- Eh, they’ll probably show up tomorrow.

07/30/08

2008-08-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

After half a year in one of the wettest cities on the West Coast, then coming here to four months of incessant heat and dryness, I am rejoicing in the fact that the rainy season is now in full force. Just this past week it rained for the first time during the day, and my younger sister and I took advantage of our newly cemented drainage spout to shower under the gutter in front of the house. The day-time rains have become more frequent, which unfortunately means that the accompanying flooding in the lowest lying, poorly drained areas of town has also become obvious, and not everyone is as delighted to see the rain as I am. Many of the newer parts of the city are hard to get around in, and with the standing water, mosquitoes are rampant.

Just the other day (well, about a month ago now really) I went to a part of the city I hadn’t seen before, but had heard much about - the area of town where women smoke and dry thousands of fish every day to later sell them to be trucked east further into country, or exported to Mali, Guinea, and Burkino Faso.

The area of town is called “Xelkom,” (pronounced ‘Helcom’), and in fact the adjective ‘hellish’ would not be far wrong. My counterpart walked me around, and with my little notebook and pen in hand, I felt like a scientist making observations, seeing from the outside, looking but not touching, thinking and not knowing what to feel. It’s the equivalent of a factory, only outdoors and totally unregulated. No health sanctions, no supervisors, no cleanup at the end of the day, no coffee breaks. All the detritus from the smoking fish falling to the ground, caked into the earth, rotting and mixing with horse manure from the constant tread of charettes hauling fish from the port.
And now that it’s the rainy season…imagine what happens to that wretched mixture of decaying fish guts and fecal matter.
Take a minute...
That’s right.

It’s interesting to me, introspectively, how terrible this situation seems to me, and yet how it is still possible that I continue on with my own life, wanting to stay as oblivious as possible. Those women are out there every day, dawn to dusk probably, some with babies on their backs, in the smoking inferno, breaking their backs to scrape by a living in near squalor. And yet I can sit on my mostly comfortable and relatively very clean bed, under a mosquito net, in a room all to myself that would likely sleep as many as five children over by Xelkom. How can my conscience rest easy knowing that so close by there are people who have it much worse off than I do? I don’t know. Somehow it does.

I guess if I had to be upset about everyone in the world who has it much worse than I do, I’d never get any sleep at all. My stomach would always be uneasy, and I think I’d always feel off-balance. Somehow now I’m reminded of Ralph Nader and the speech he gave during my college graduation. He urged us to find one thing to be passionate about, and to pursue that cause to the best of our ability. I think he’s onto something there. You can’t be passionate about every cause - at least I know I’d wear out that way. You can be compassionate about many, true. But I think the way you can live with yourself is to commit yourself to something you believe in, that you love doing, do that thing to the best of your ability, and know that in doing that thing, you’re doing your part to help the world in the best way you can. I think that’s what “saving the world” comes down to, in a nutshell. Each person does what he can, where he can, all the while trying to keep in mind that he is a member of this 'global humanity'.

a small circle of life.

2008-07-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-07-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

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.)

2008-06-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

part of a big neighborhood cleanup... hopefully I'll get more pictures up soon.

flashback to 6 weeks in country... now 6 weeks at site.

2008-06-28T05:33:00.000-07:00

2008-06-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finally broke down and bought myself insecticide spray. This isn't the stuff you spray on yourself to gently ward off insects. No. This is the stuff you spray around when you have the intention of actually causing their untimely death.

My room had become a breeding ground for flies, and I couldn't even sit for one minute inside without feeling like I was being molested every five seconds by a hairy, brainless, six-legged creature. So I went to our closest corner store right before lunch, and just before sitting down to the bowl with my family, I sprayed it in my room: all around the window, the edges of my bed, and around the door, closing it behind me. Half an hour later, full of delicious rice and fish, I opened up the door to my room to count twenty - that's right, twenty - dead flies on my floor. I had to go get a broom to sweep them all out, a few of them still twitching. Ooh. I know some people believe all life is sacred, but I just don't know what purpose in life flies serve, except to annoy human beings and other animals. And perhaps I'm killing some of my own brain cells with this anti-fly toxin, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to be able to have some peace of mine, which is so precious to me here.

So you may rightfully now ask, what have I been doing the last six weeks here at site that I need peace of mind?
Just the usual stuff: getting out into the community seven days a week, trying to get a feel for what my job is, getting to know my city and the people in it.
Things are getting easier, bit by bit, and more and more people are starting to know me. The routes I traverse every day are becoming friendlier. But every day that I walk down a new street, I still feel as if I were a dancing bear who escaped from the circus. Some kids run towards the bear with gleeful smiles and yells, because they think that it's neat that the bear can dance. Many people expect the bear to do other tricks, but the bear doesn't know any of the ones they like. Some little children are afraid of the bear and run away, because they've never seen one in real life. Other older people look at the bear with scorn, as if it were in bad taste for the bear to go out in public, especially unaccompanied by its trainers. So it happens that by the end of many days, the bear just wishes it could go back to the circus, because at least there it felt accepted and praised for what it was.

But since the circus is far away and the bear knows that being here now is more important, it tries to find ways to blend in, to walk on all fours, to change its ways to make itself more acceptable and not so bizarre. Maybe one day, if the bear works hard enough, people will stop pointing it out as odd, and maybe the bear will even earn a few real friends before it goes back to the circus. But for now, at the end of the day, no matter what it does, few people can get past the fact that the bear is still a bear.

3 buckets, 1 bar of soap, and a load of vindication

2008-06-21T05:30:00.000-07:00

To start, it needs to be mentioned that my Senegalese family is very well off by this country’s standards, and coming here from my village outside of Thiès it felt a little like I transitioned from country mouse to city mouse. Here I live in a small family (6 people), with one daughter going to school full-time and another part-time, and a well-to-do father who can afford to pay for a housegirl to come to clean, wash, and cook every morning to afternoon, except Sundays. So when I approached the topic of washing my clothes about a month ago, my host mother asked me if I could wash clothes, and I said, “well, yes,” but she didn’t really believe me. So she told me I could give my clothes to A., our housegirl, and she would wash them once a week or once every other week, for 1500 cfa each time (about 4 dollars US). I agreed to this, because 1. I had seen how much work it seemed to be to wash clothes here by hand, 2. I had heard of other volunteers who also paid someone in their family to do their wash, and 3. I was also sure that A. could do a quicker and more efficient job than I.

Since this agreement, I have given my clothes to A. twice, both times getting them back pressed and dirt-free, but smelling like what we had for dinner the night before. The other day I figured out that the reason the clothes smell like cooking is because the charcoal A. uses to heat the iron she uses for pressing is the same charcoal she uses to grill fish for our lunch. But besides the smell (I’m used to washed clothes smelling like soap, not fish), it was really starting to wear on me that no one around here thinks I can do anything a woman should be able to do, by Senegalese standards. And they not only think that, they constantly point it out. Again, and again. And again.

So the other day after lunch, I bought some bar soap at the boutique and set myself up around the back of the house, with my two buckets and my clothes, ready to prove that I really am useful and can do something for myself. I filled up the one bucket with water from the faucet at the back of the house, and had barely started to scrub the first piece of clothing when my very critical father poked his head out of the kitchen door, saying just “Men nga foot?”
(meaning “Can you wash?”)
To which I replied, already tired of this line of questioning, “Waaw, men naa.”
(Yes, I can.)

He said something to the effect of “hmm,” left, and I started to scrub the wet clothes with the soap when the younger of my two sisters, S., came around back. Looking at my work with a discerning but kind eye, she took the soap from me and rubbed it across a wet skirt, squinching and squelching the cloth with the necessary sound that seems to be an essential criteria for cleanliness in this country.
“Defal kom bi,” she said, (Do it like this), and then went about her business.
Ok, ok, I thought, but really I can do this myself.

I kept at it, but soon after, A. came back behind the house to feed our local inmates on Death Row - four chickens and a very noisy sheep. Since it looked to me like she was confused about what I appeared to be doing, I said that I was washing my clothes, that I thought she had enough work to do, and that I had time - have time - to do it myself. After this short speech, she told me I should “bay ko” (leave it) until the next day, and she would do it. But I said “no, no,” and insisted that I wanted to do it, that I had the time to do it, and that I would do it. At that point she decided that if I was going to do it, I should do it right, so she also proceeded to take the soap from me, unsatisfied with my scrubbed and squelching, showing me, just as S. had, how to soap and squish and wring out my clothes.
“Defal kom bi,” she said, looking at me and laughing a little, like she does when I’m sure she thinks I’m a little crazy, or stupid, or both.

So I kept going, and going, as A. went back and forth in her chores, periodically checking on my progress, and later showing me the “best” way to then hang my clothes on the line. “Do you want them to dry?” she asked me, and I said “Waaw,” (Yes), wishing there was a Wolof equivalent for “duh.” She replied to this by silently pointing me to the clothespins, and rearranging all the clothes I had already put on the line.

At one point my brother even came around back and gave my work an approving smile, and it seemed everyone had checked in on me when finally I was putting the last of the clothes on the line. A. came back just then to put the chickens away and sweep the yard before going home for the day. After she shooed the chickens back into their pen, she took a look at the line, inspecting my work. I followed her eyes as they looked critically at the clothes I had worked so hard on to prove that I can, at least, do one thing that as a woman I am supposed to be able to do. After a moment of decision, she said simply, in a tone of voice that could have been either a question or a statement of surprise,
“Men nga foot?”
(which depending on context can mean either “Can you wash?” or “You can wash”)
And since I wasn’t sure which it was, I said to her, “Men naa foot?”
(Can I wash?)
To which she replied, turning to me with words that never sounded so sweet,
“Waaw. Set na.”
(Yes. It’s clean.)

june 18.

2008-06-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in Senegal for three months now, and I’m starting to feel like I actually live here: like this is normal, and this is familiar. I’m not saying that all the novelty has worn off, but I think at this point the initial period of shock and rapid adjustment is over. The beginning is the hardest, many volunteers say - I guess I can’t know yet, but the way it’s going now I would tend to agree. I’m starting to feel like I’m actually part of this community - a newcomer for sure, but in many ways I’m an active citizen, and people are starting not only to recognize me, but to respect me, and to know why I’m here.

This past weekend I left my site to go to a regional welcome party/meeting, and then spent two days in Dakar, visiting with other volunteers. It was great to spend time with my friends in country, share our trials and tribulations since we’d last seen each other, and just relax, but when Tuesday morning came and I had to go back to site, I felt hesitation. By the time I had made it to the garage, though, and was seated in a sept-place, all I wanted to do was get back. The traffic leaving Dakar took us an hour to get through (which I hear is about average), but an hour and a half later we pulled into town, and when I walked into my house and my host mother was there to greet me, it felt like home.

More to come in a bit. Just wanted to put this out there.

2008-06-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

the right words to communicate

2008-06-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

Technically I’m supposed to be at another meeting right now, but as no one would give me a straight answer as to why I was supposed to be there, I took that as a sign that that it was not actually mandatory for me. That, and the fact that when I called my counterpart, his wife answered the phone, saying that he had gone to a different meeting. But lest you think that I take every opportunity to slack off from work, I did spend the last two full days at a seminar on the problems of youth in the city, and participated in brainstorming sessions about what we, as various representatives of the services offered to young people, can do about those problems. I got the chance to meet many important and relevant people to my job as an environmental education volunteer, and got a brainful of Wolof and a lot of very rapid French. Then this morning I showed up for a meeting at the mayor’s office, but unbeknownst to me, the hour had been pushed back so far that 10 minutes after I arrived, the meeting was over. I was able to profit from my presence anyway by using the wireless internet there at City Hall - that is, until the power went out again an hour later.

My last post took 3 days to put up on the blog because we’ve been having long periods of electricity outages here in town, which are apparently region-wide, not just across the city. It’s something else to live in a village, where you’re used to not having electricity, but when you’ve come to take it for granted, and then it’s not there, well…
I do apologize and tip my hat to my friends and all Senegalese who live every day without power.

Unfortunately for us here, the plumbing system that runs the faucets is linked to the power generator, so when there’s no power, there’s also no water. We have a little well in our backyard area, for backup, but our neighbors on the island don’t have wells, so they have to come over the bridge to the mainland when the power cuts out, to fetch water to take back to the island to wash, cook, clean and flush. Makes “island life” sound a little less romantic, doesn’t it.

Speaking of romance, I continue to be grilled about my lack of husband, and more recently, lack of children. Yesterday, I was talking to a colleague of my counterpart, an older man who I had up until yesterday seen a few times but never spoken to, as he didn’t seem to be interested in talking to me. I was waiting outside my counterpart’s office at the elementary school when one little child who had been playing in the schoolyard came up to me with a dear look on his face, not saying a word, but just staring. I started to talk to him in Wolof, asking him his name, if he was having fun, and so on, and this colleague of my counterpart’s asked me (in Wolof as well) if I wanted to keep him - the boy. I laughed, saying no, of course. He asked me then if I had any children, and I said no, again with a smile, because children are one of the furthest things from my mind while I myself feel like a child much of the time in this foreign country.

“Don’t you want children?” he then continued, and I said, “Maybe, one day.” And then he asked if I would carry my children on my back, like women do here, and I said “yes, or maybe in front,” but he thought that was a bad idea, and insisted that in back was better. Then - and this is where I was almost laughing out loud, because 1. The question would be considered very personal in the U.S. and 2. I understood it quite plainly in Wolof - he asked if I would breast-feed my children, when I have them. And I told him, with a smile on my face because I could hardly believe that I was having this conversation in Wolof with a near stranger, that if I have children I will certainly breast-feed them, because it’s good for the health of the child. He approved of that, saying that mother’s milk is better than cow’s or even goat’s milk. I learned later from my counterpart that this particular guy is a “griot,” a member of Senegal’s traditional caste of storytellers and singers, and he is invited to events because he (and I quote my counterpart) “knows exactly what words to use to communicate.”

So I apologize to anyone out there who may have just been given too much information, but I wanted to share some insight into the forward-ness, as well as the priorities of some people here, and my personal triumph that I was able to communicate so much. There is still so much I don’t understand, but I’m feeling a little bit more involved in what’s going on around me, and as noted, increasingly holding my own against the constant barrage of gender-based questions. Wish me luck on keeping it up.

2008-06-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

the electricity is out again…

2008-06-06T03:20:00.000-07:00

Every day I’m here I feel like I’m being tested in different ways, and I’ve slowly come to realize that I need to develop coping strategies now, early on, before the incessant pressure builds to a breaking point. Patience and flexibility are two of my biggest challenges here, and I can feel that I am changing, gradually, but noticeably, because of my constant efforts towards a greater capacity for both.

I don’t think I’ve written about the “toubab” issue yet, but it is probably the toughest obstacle I feel like I’m facing in the process of integration into my community. A “toubab”, as I may have mentioned in previous posts, is the Senegalese word for foreigner, but more specifically it refers to “white person”. My site is a small city, and as such it unfortunately makes it impossible for me to stop and greet every small child who yells “Toubab!” at me as I pass. This wasn’t an issue in the village I lived in during training, because it was small enough that everyone very soon knew my name. Here though, the situation is different. I often walk to get where I’m going, but I also ride my Peace Corps-issue bike, including regulation helmet, and that provokes just as much public attention, though I can get out of earshot faster on bike than on foot.

I have come to terms with the fact that although the children on my street now know my name, most of the city children will continue to call “Toubab, toubab, toubab, toubab, toubab!” whenever I pass, on foot or on bike, every day of every month for the rest of the two years that I am here. I am therefore determined not to hear each mocking, accusatory call of “Toubab!” but will pretend instead to hear “Lexie!” as if each child were greeting me by my most real name. Hopefully this will ease my frustration at the accumulation of deriding exclamations. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As for flexibility, I’m learning that here more than anywhere else I’ve been it pays to go with the flow, and have a plan B. Perhaps you were planning on going to the internet café and just as you were ready to leave the electricity cut out again all over town. Or maybe you thought your whole day was going to be devoted to working on a school project but all the schools are on strike and no one is around to participate. Yesterday I had no plans for the afternoon at all, and when I asked my sister in the morning why she wasn’t at school and she answered that there was a “physical education day,” I decided to go see what that was about, feeling sorry that I had missed the previous week’s race at her middle school.

So after lunch we walked over to the fields (a.k.a. big sandy expanses) behind the lycée (the high school), and there I discovered all of the girls in troisième (9th grade) from all three of the local middle schools gathered to do their end-of-year P.E. tests. These consisted of shot put, 100-meter dash, high jump, and something they termed “roulade” - which was kind of a short gymnastic/balance routine, including tumbling and cartwheels. From 3:30 until after 7pm I watched, cheered, and laughed along with the girls, as each took her turn, and all encouraged the rest.

I could have left at any time, but I stayed along with my sister until the last jump had been attempted, and all the scores reported. It took me back to my days of middle school gym class, running “in-and-out” laps, and made me laugh to remember who I was over 10 years ago. So I may not have started out my day planning to stand in the sun for four hours watching teenage strangers try to jump a 4-foot-high rope… but it was honestly one of the best afternoons I’ve spent here so far.

where is my husband?

2008-05-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

by the way, we're real volunteers now!

2008-05-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-08T11:26:00.001-07:00

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...

2008-05-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

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!

new photo site!

2008-04-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

So I've created a Flickr site to post my PC photos to, in bulk, when I can, which seems to take less time to upload and has more space than this blog. I'll still probably post photos here from time to time, but the photo site will be more like an ongoing album, so you can check that out too. Here's the web address:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/offtoseetheworld/

So far actually these photos are mostly from Tracy's camera, but soon I'll have some up from mine as well.

Enjoy!

at the office in Linguère

2008-04-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

10 days wiser...

2008-04-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Whew. "Demystification."
What a word for what we just experienced. The new PC term for it is CBT - Community-Based Training, but I guess you could say that I have been demystified in many ways, after spending the last week plus with a current volunteer, shadowing her work and meeting her community. With everything we did and the time we spent there, it's hard to express how the days seemed to stretch on and on, slowly melting into each other with a timelessness that was intensified by the heat and the constant concentration required to interact in a different community in a new language. Monday felt like Saturday, Thursday could have been Sunday, and each day there seemed to be so set apart from what we were used to, the community in itself seeming isolated from the rest of the world, existing alone in the desert heat. After a few days the whole town knew our names, our new names that is, the second round of names we've been given here in country, and I admit now that as difficult as it was to feel like we were thrown into a new situation just as we were getting comfortable in our first one, I feel more ready now to go to my site and start feeling comfortable there.

This week I bought my first few meters of Senegalese fabric, danced at a tam-tam while wearing a borrowed Wolof outfit, complete with headwrap, tried to bargain for produce at a weekly market, and helped facilitate a session on mosquito net dipping for the town (with some small success). Most of the week it was between 98 and 100 degrees F, only cooling down slightly each night, and most of my pocket money went towards buying boissons fraiches at the town butiks. On the day where there was nothing cold in the fridge because the electricity was down, I came back to the house with two cans of pineapple chunks to share between us after our hot lunch of fish and rice, and we laughed as the five of us passed around the cans and savored the semi-cool juice.

Now that we're back in Thiès, I realize I did a lot of complaining, but overall those days were positive ones, and helped to reassure me that I will indeed be able to handle myself when I get to site. This last week also is making me appreciate all the more the luxury of sitting here to write this with air conditioning blowing cool around me. Until the next time!

2008-04-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

sun and sand.

2008-04-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

Week 5 of 8, and training is getting more important every day. It's also getting to be more fun, for me at least, since I feel like my language skills are starting to be acceptably passable, Sant Yalla. I've been joking around with our trainers, having funny conversations with my friends who are learning Wolof, and laughing at phrases other friends are learning in Serere and Pulaar (in Serere, to say "really?" you say "ndigol-ndigol?") Buying sodas from the guards at the gate in between classes, while they ask me in Wolof if I have any cute sisters, also keeps me smiling. Last week I was talking with my Senegalese sisters, in between studying for two tests, and after two of them asked me if I didn't have a "far" back in America ("far" is a Wolof word that means "boyfriend", but really in Senegalese culture you don't have a boyfriend unless you're basically engaged, so. anyway...) and when I said no, they didn't believe me, so to deflect attention I turned to my (very pretty) younger sister and told her I knew she had a "far", and she giggled, and said no, no, while my older sister laughed and said, "Yeah, she does! She's got 10, 11, 12..." and counted all the way up to 25! So when I told the guards who were asking about my eligible sisters that ND had 25 boyfriends, they got a big kick out of that, and said, no, no, 25 boyfriends, "baaxul!" ("no good!") :p

Things have been going really well for me, I helped organize a trip to the beach this past weekend, and I'm excited to keep going with training, though a little overwhelmed about going out to site in just under a month - gasp! We found out our site placements on Friday, and it's hard to believe that in less than four weeks we'll all be somewhere different. I feel very lucky to have the people I have here with me in this stage (our training group), and will definitely miss them when we're all spread out around Senegal. But the country is not sooo big... though one of my best friends has been posted in a village that will take about 14 hours by car to get to =( I found out I'm going to be on the coast, about 110 km south of Dakar, around the city of Joal, which has about 35,000 people. So probably no mud hut for me, actually. I have mixed feelings about this, as I really do love living in my village right now, as everyone knows me, and I feel very comfortable and safe there. But everyone has been very supportive here, and I have faith that the trainers know what they think is best for me, and things will work out okay whether I'm in a city or a village. I'm trying not to build up any expectations around proximity to amenities like electricity or running water, as I've mostly gone without both for the last month anyway (though we have them at the training center, of course), but it's hard not to be excited about the fact that my site will be, by all accounts, very close to the beach =)

Tomorrow all of us PCTs are leaving, in ten different groups, to go out into country for 10 days for what's called in PC jargon "demystification". We'll be visiting current PCVs to see what their lives are like and what their work is like, to get a little practice in our technical areas, and to continue learning our respective languages, since our language teachers are going along. I'm going to miss my family here, but getting to see what PCVs really do should be interesting, and fun, and informative, for sure. I'll let you know how it goes.

a little banner-waving.

2008-04-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Background info: yesterday was Senegal’s Independence Day, April 4th.

Because of the holiday, we trainees had the day off to use as we liked here around Thiès. Being as how we have been working and learning for the last three weeks to cram information into our brains to the tipping point, we were all very excited to get a chance to spend a night and a day just relaxing. To facilitate this kind gift, the staff at the training center allowed us to stay overnight there Independence Day Eve, meaning we had to inform our homestay families that we would be spending the night away. So on Tuesday evening, while my older sister and younger sister were in my room helping me go over my Wolof notes, I brought up the subject of Independence Day.

This is about how the conversation went, with me speaking some French, and trying hard to use Wolof more, and my sisters, N and ND, speaking a mixture as well, but with a larger ratio of Wolof to French :

ME: So. Vendredi. Naka lanuy waxe “vendredi” ci Wolof?
(How do you say “Friday” in Wolof again?)
N: Aljuma.
ME: Waaw, waaw-waaw, Aljuma. (Yes, of course. Friday.)
ND: C’est la fête de l’indépendance. (It’s the Independence Day celebration.)
ME: Waaw. Degg la. (Yes. It’s true.)
ND: Est-ce que vous fêtez le 4 avril en Amerique aussi?
(Do you celebrate April 4th in America too?)
ME: Déedéet. Wante… on célèbre le 4 juillet, c’est notre fête d’indépendance.
(No. But… we celebrate July 4th, that’s our Independence Day.)
ME: Kon, aljuma, amul klaas ndaxte c’est le 4 avril.
(So Friday there’s no class, because it’s the fourth of April.)
ND: Ah, baax na, baax na. (That’s great, great.)

[break in conversation while I try to formulate the words in Wolof to say I’ll be sleeping at the center Thursday night --- ND takes this opportunity to continue the topic of the 4th]

ND: Xam nga l’hymne nationale? (Do you know the national anthem?)
ME: Déedéet, wante xalaat naa ne … c’est dans mon cahier de langue, look, voila --
(No, but I think that… it’s in my language notebook, here, tada!)
[as I pull out my notebook, pointing to the page with the Senegalese national anthem]
N: Hahaha, [Then N, who has been very helpful and hands on in my language learning, takes my notebook into her lap and then proceeds to sing, along with ND, the entire national anthem. And maybe now you can see where this is going… Clap, clap, clap, so beautiful, etc. etc., and then…
ND: Xam nga sa hymne nationale? (Do you know your national anthem?)
ME: Waaw, waaw-waaw, The Star-Spangled Banner. (Yes, of course, “The SSB”.)
ND and N: Chante-la! Woyal, woyal!! (Sing it, sing it!)
ME: Mmm, well…

So that’s how I sang the entire American national anthem for my two Senegalese sisters, sitting in my room in our village on the outskirts of the city. Talk about cultural integration... ;)

2008-04-03T14:32:00.001-07:00

Jared is creatively demonstrating the effectiveness of the teaching system here at the training center. This is from the first week... and we were all très fatigué, c'est sûr.

let's give this photo thing a try...

2008-04-03T14:25:00.001-07:00

First night in Africa, baby. Look how we are tiiired. This is the foyer of the training center, with its great maps painted on the wall of Africa and Senegal.

More PCT friends! read up.

2008-04-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

To help round out your vicarious experience of Peace Corps training in Senegal, here are more of my friends here. Bethany in particular has posted some great photos already, so check them out!

Brittany: http://bsquaredinsenegal.blogspot.com
Annicka: http://annickawebster.blogspot.com
Bethany: http://pcbeth.blogspot.com
Marisa: http://senegalfastfood519.blogspot.com

Ba beneen yoon (til next time)!

Other PC Senegal friends' blogs

2008-03-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

Check out a few other blogs that my friends in our stage have going on:

Jared: http://nod83.blogspot.com/

Cruger: http://crugerdunnflanagan.blogspot.com/

Rithvik: http://rithvikinsenegal.blogspot.com/

I'll add more when I get more info from others. Happy reading!

15 days in!

2008-03-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

All right! Two weeks in Africa, and all continues to go well. We've been taking classes 6 days a week at the training center, living with Senegalese homestay families in and around the city of Thiès, and I'm starting to feel like I'm not quite so helpless as when we first arrived. I can hold my own for most of the greetings in Wolof, and have even started to be able to ask simple questions of my host family, who are a tremendous resource, even though it can be hard sometimes to feel like I have privacy, with 18 or so extended family members all living within the same compound. But they all know who I am now, even if I'm still learning all their names, and when the Peace Corps Land Rover drops me off every evening at my village, 9 km from Thiès, I hear my name from every direction:

"Bineta! Bineta! Asalaam malekum! Nanga def? Naka wa Thiès? Naka wa ekool?"

"Peace be with you! How's it going? How's Thiès? How was school?"

Bineta is my name here, now, after the first night with my homestay family in my village. My older sister named me, and it's how I introduce myself to people. I hear I'll probably get another name when I go out to site, after swear-in May 9th, Inch'Allah (God willing), but I like Bineta - it's easy to remember :)

It's been a tiring few weeks, but it's a good tired - the kind you feel when you've been working hard, challenging yourself, and constantly moving forward. Hopefully I'll get to put up some photos soon, though it seems to take quite a while to get anything up on this site. Send your best wishes and good vibes, and I'll write more later. Until then, ba beneen yoon (until next time), Inch'Allah!

2008-03-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Waiting in JFK...

The plane was delayed a few hours, but we had plenty of extra time in Brussels, so no sweat.

First, from 2 weeks ago.

2008-03-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

After two days of orientation in Philadelphia, and over 36 hours of travel, we have arrived at the training center in Thiès, Senegal. You don't need the hairy details of flight delays or landing specifics, but let's just say no one lost their luggage, and the Peace Corps knows what they're doing giving us pleeenty of time between flights. Night had already fallen when we arrived, and as we stepped off the plane at the airport in Dakar to the smell and moisture of the salty Atlantic, it was something to realize how far we'd come to smell the same ocean, from another shore.

The bus ride from the airport to the training center was where it hit me that this was really Africa - a place I had only read about in books, seen on TV, and imagined from the pages of my parents' monthly National Geographics. Looking out the windows of the bus onto the highways, lit at night only by the occasional roadside fire and the headlights of the other vehicles, I took in the sky, the earth, the trees, and the bright produce stands that seemed to still be open for business, even though it was already 11 pm.

The last two days here at the training center have been a little surreal, to say the least, feeling that we are in Africa, but not quite. Crash courses in Wolof are going pretty well, and so far I can greet someone, ask their name, where they are from, and if they slept well (only to be used, of course, if you really know them. If you don't then you don't have any business asking how they slept.) We are supposed to go out to the market this afternoon, so we'll see if we can get along there without any major mishaps. I'll have to remember what we were taught to say for "I don't have any money." :)

so it begins.

2008-03-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

these Chacos will never be this clean again.

2008-03-05T21:36:00.001-08:00

After much searching and frustration, yesterday I finally found a store who had these in stock. They're leftovers from last year, but I certainly don't mind. I feel much closer to being ready now that I have the proper footwear. All the rest is details, right? ;)

Peace Corps called me at home today to tell me that I won't have to wake up at the crack of dawn on Monday to have my mom drive me to the airport in Philly to fly to staging in Atlanta, because the staging event has been changed to Philadelphia. That's pretty sweet for me - one less flight, one less step between here and Senegal. I also think my mom will be happy to be able to drive me right to the hotel and drop me off in the lobby, rather than leaving me at the security checkpoint at the Philly airport. Security is where we said "au revoir" at JFK when I left for my year in France, but this time is going to be different. Two days between the tears and the takeoff.

one week left until the big show.

2008-03-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

Here it is, one week left. Next Monday morning, bright and early, I'll be driving away from the house I grew up in, with my mom at the wheel, and heading to the airport to meet the group of people I'll spend the next two months with, in a totally foreign country. And between now and then, it seems I still need to do so many things. Ok, so it's probably not thaat many things. But it seems like for every one thing I accomplish, three more pop up that need my attention. And come tomorrow, all of those things will be staring me in the face when I return to my mom's after four days of blissful irresponsibility spent with my little sister. Maybe irresponsibility isn't the right word - more like lack of any responsibilities. I got to follow her around at work for a day, sleep in late the next, get late-night Chinese takeout from the Wonderful Dragon around the corner... and just put on the back burner for a few days the fact that I am embarking in a week on the scariest and most exciting adventure of my life.

What's killing me the most right now is the waiting, and the not knowing. I think (I tell myself) that when I'm actually there, the anxiety will ease, or at least alter, once I can see what my surroundings really will be, once I see with my own eyes what life will be like there. But for now, all of the unknown is weighing on me, coupled with the cumulative effect of the waiting after waiting after more waiting that started when I filled in the first blank of the 18-page online application last April, ten months ago. I may not be packed yet, but I'm ready to stop waiting, and start doing.

back in suburbia.

2008-02-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

Leave it to me to walk into an outdoors equipment store two weeks before I fly to Africa and expect to find sandals, here in Pennsylvania, in February. I guess I just forgot that it's 30 degrees outside here, has been for months, and will be for another month at least. It's 70-something in Dakar right now, and that's where my head is. Well, that's one of the places it is. It's also still in Portland, with friends I left last week; in Boston, with my sister I saw a few days ago; and in Philadelphia, with my other sister I'll see this weekend. I don't know that I've ever felt pulled in so many directions before. I must say it's easy to get distracted. But even if I still have to go to the eye doctor to get new glasses tomorrow, file my taxes, visit possibly both my grandmothers - who live on opposite sides of the state - and go to the AT&T store to talk to an actual live person to get them to stop my cell phone service (because I can't for the life of me find an actual number to call listed on their website), my major remaining concern is packing.

I went to the mall today to do some scouting: checking out things I might want to get to take with me, do some price comparisons, see what's out there. The whole idea of packing for two years is hard to wrap my head around. I think it will help if I can just grasp the fact that it can't be done. I mean, I won't for the entire two years only use what I take. I will inevitably add to it while I'm there, it's not like I'll be camping in the wilderness. So my paralyzing fear that I won't be able to find and take everything I need is one that can be gotten over. I will take many good and useful things. I won't be able to take everything I want to take. I can buy things there. It will be ok. Breathe.

The whole trip to the mall today, however, didn't help soothe my anxiety any. I stumbled around for a few hours, consulted the store directory several times, and narrowly avoided being trampled by oblivious teenagers only to return to my car feeling bewildered and slightly annoyed. I understand the mentality behind grouping many shops together for the easy consumption of shoppers, but standing in the center of that giant circus and watching the crowds hustle past, I realized that I feel less stressed about getting on a plane to go to a completely foreign country for two years than I do about trying to buy clothes at the mall. Ok, maybe not "less" stressed... but it's a different stress. A less artificially-created, evil-genius-masterminded, dehumanized one. But what can I say? Right now, oh Suburban American Shopping Mall, I need you. So soon I will return.

structural weaknesses.

2008-02-14T12:12:00.001-08:00

I have a strange feeling that last night I dreamt I was filing my Oregon tax return. It is one of the things I still need to do before I leave the country, but I wish my subconscious would choose other aspects of my life to filter through my REM sleep. My brain has been in overdrive these past few weeks, and even at night I haven't been resting well.

There is something oddly comforting in the structure of taxes, though - rules to follow, steps to take, forms to fill out, a specific deadline. Maybe I'm just weird, or it could be a deeper desire for something certain and tangible in a time when for me, everything seems uncertain, and abstract. I can do a few additions and subtractions, fill in this line, ignore that one, and figure out how much money I made last year, and how much I owe. Nothing seems quite so straightforward, however, about what I'm about to do.

I'm down to two days left at work, and it's been tough containing my almost giddy level of excitement today. This morning before breakfast I called to make my flight reservation to get to staging, which I found out on Monday will be in Atlanta, March 10 - 12 (we fly to Dakar the night of the 12th). I spoke with a jovial fellow who asked me if I was with the group going to El Salvador or Senegal, and by the time I got off the phone, having confirmed my reservation for 7:30 am that Monday morning, window seat and all, I was practically bouncing up and down.
Airlines. Flight numbers. Seat assignments. Every detail brings me closer to the reality of going.

Rimsky-Korsakov did not live in Africa

2008-02-13T00:31:00.000-08:00

As I stood at the bus stop tonight, hoping the #75 would come sooner, rather than later, since I hadn’t thought to bring gloves when I left the house this morning, I glanced at my hands, and the familiar calluses on my left fingertips. I had just left the last orchestra rehearsal I would participate in before leaving the country for two years, as I don’t expect to be playing much classical music in the desert - I don’t trust my viola to take kindly to the expected 110 degree heat. During the last half hour of practice, in between pages of achingly adagio eighth notes, it struck me how little I was dreading leaving, and how eager I was to move on. I felt I should be sadder to leave this company of friends, but my east coast family is calling my name, and impending visits are filling me with more elation than the prospect of Christmas vacation. That’s not to say that I won’t miss Tuesday nights, or the camaraderie that makes me feel at home since I’ve been playing in orchestras since the third grade. I remember that first elementary school orchestra - there were so few of us we all fit into a tiny classroom, short legs dangling off cold metal folding chairs. I don’t remember what we played, or who else was there with me in the room, besides our big teddy bear of a conductor with his fuzzy caterpillar moustache. But I remember how it felt to be there - special. I was proud to be there, proud to be chosen, and in love with the music. That thrill is something I’ve never gotten over - it’s what keeps me coming back. There is just something undeniable about bringing people together who are all so different, and making something beautiful out of those disparate voices.

Some people have sports teams or church groups, places where they feel truly accepted, welcome, and free to be who they are. For me, that place has always been orchestra.