Abaraka, y'am'!

For those of you keeping track, this will be the fifth time I’ve missed Thanksgiving at home, and as fate would have it, the second time I’m celebrating it in Senegal of all places. It would be easy enough to let this get me down, but in the spirit of the holiday I am finding things for which to be thankful. It’s really not very hard to do when you’ve been living in the third world for nine months; I feel grateful for who I am and where I come from literally every day.

But the last thing I want to do with this post is give you a list of things that make me thankful. You can probably imagine or infer a good many of them from other posts I’ve written or from what you know about me personally, and the rest would just be boring or misrepresentative of my Thanksgiving thanks givings.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this holiday here. The two choices I have right now are regional house or village. You’d think it would be an easy choice, and for most volunteers it is – American holiday, American people. The trouble for me is that I have a complicated relationship with the Kolda house and the volunteer community that uses it (the subject of a separate blog post that I’m no where near ready to write) and I’m slowly learning how to deal with it. In some ways I feel more comfortable and free at the Kolda house than in SPB. It is after all an American haven where I can run around in shorts, with a cup full of frozen peanut butter m&ms, speaking English, watching movies, cooking American comfort food and being Cibyl instead of Nafi. But other times the house is so crowded and messy and debaucherous that it takes the wind out of these sails. And Thanksgiving at the house is sure to be crowded and messy and debaucherous.

So then there’s village Thanksgiving… insert superficial analogy about the foreigner coming to learn the ways of the natives, living off the land, depending on the people who know it, harvest season, blah blah blah. Not good enough.

Here’s what sealed the deal:

A few weeks ago in village I was thinking about the upcoming holidays and my Christmas homecoming (now less than a month away!) and the warm-fuzzy-happy-anticipation-relief-to-be-home-with-people-who-love-you feelings. I realized that I don’t get those feelings when my taxi starts climbing the little hill towards the Kolda house. I suppose I feel relief to unload my bags and drink something cold, but I never know who will be on the other side of that door, which makes it not home. On the other hand, when I get to that last stretch of my dirt road where I can start to see the tops of the huts and I turn off into the center of Saré Pathé my heart begins to swell. I can’t help but have a huge silly grin on my face when I roll into my compound amid the kids swarming and yelling “Nafi naata! Nafi naata!” They don’t always understand me, or I them, but I always feel like I’m coming home to people who love me. The more I thought about it the more I realized that if I can’t spend this holiday with my American family, I want to spend it with my Senegalese family. It may not mean anything to them, and we’ll probably just eat millet and leaf sauce like we always do, but it means something to me. Thanksgiving is family and love and home, because aren’t those always the things we’re most thankful for?

So tomorrow I’m going home to Saré Pathé Bouya to a family that loves me while I’m far away from my own. If that’s not something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.

Africa, Africa

A couple of weeks ago, while in Dakar, I had a chance to visit my former host family for the second time since being back in Senegal. The first time was during training when I was still living in what you would call a city with a family that was pretty well off by Senegalese standards. The house in Mbour was small, with no indoor plumbing and there were farm animals in the front yard, so by comparison my Dakar family’s house was a mansion. But now that I’ve been living the village life for six months, walking into the Diop house is like walking into another world. The fact that these two families live in the same tiny country blows my mind and tempts me into thinking of my two Senegalese experiences as being less and more “African” respectively. I hate thinking this, because it feeds into the stereotypes of Africa and the third world that offer such a narrow view of what life is actually like here and implies that my Diop family is somehow less African than my Mané family.

The fact is that Dakar is still Africa. It’s full of Western amenities (as well as Westerners), is multi-lingual, cosmopolitan and home to the wealthiest of the Senegalese, but the street vendors and car-rapides and balmy evenings give it away. Since being back I sometimes think that the “Africanness” I saw and felt during the four months I lived in Dakar was a function of the city being in a state of flux and chaos; there were numerous large-scale construction projects going on that are mostly all finished now and much of the hectic grunginess I remember is gone. My old neighborhood is full of new apartment buildings and restaurants and even the house I lived in is bigger and fancier than when I left. So, some of the shock of going back has to do with changes to the city itself.

However, I know that a lot of my reaction to visiting my Dakar host family has to do with the huge disparity between life with the Diops and life with the Manés that forces me to address the stereotypes of “the real Africa” that persist somewhere in my mind despite my knowing better. After living in a village with no cars, no plumbing and no electricity and where dirt floors and thatched roofs are standard, things like playstations and couches cease to exist for me. And yet, there they are, chez Diop. The kids speak perfect French and the tile floors are spotless. Even my former host family comments on how brave they think I am to be living in a tiny rural village (the exact same thing I hear from Americans) and tell me that I speak French with a Mandinka accent now. Both times I’ve visited somebody has made some comment about me living like a real African, which makes me wonder what I was doing in Dakar… living like a fake African? What happens when fewer and fewer people live in thatched roof huts and get their water from community wells? Does the “real Africa” disappear?

I could ask these kinds of questions all day, but really that’s just semantics. The truth is, I know what they mean when they say I live in the “real Africa" and I know that there is some amount of admiration and even a little nostalgia in the way they say it. The Diops have traded certain aspects of Senegalese cultural for a comfortable life in the big city. They are still African – one large extended family under one roof, eating on the floor out of communal bowls, and most importantly, living in Africa – but they recognize that for most of the people in their country life hasn’t changed very much from what it was a hundred years ago. In that sense, they give me permission to go ahead and think what I don’t think I should think: that the Manés are more African than the Diops. At the very least their Western ways remind me that I can justify saying that Saré Pathé is more African than Dakar because Dakar is connected to the rest of the world and Saré Pathé is not. Saré Pathé is pure Africa.

I realized upon my return to the African village how much my life there suits me, how much Saré Pathé has become my home in the last six months. I take for granted all of the little daily sites and sounds and routines that are now so normal, and yet are so far removed from my American life or my Dakarois life. Sweeping out my hut every morning, knowing exactly how much water I need for a bucket shower, grimy babies, topless ladies, raw sweet potatoes, moon-shadows. Each day goes by slowly, but the months are flying.

Skyscapes

Thunderheads and lightening flashes and a rainbow (click).

The frogs have gone biblical.

Since I’ve started sleeping inside my hut every night I’ve had several waves of houseguests: crickets, bats, frogs. The bats have been the most polite – neither as noisy as the crickets or as messy as the frogs… plus they eat mosquitoes. There is something comedic about the frogs though. There have been days when I’ve thrown at least 15 frogs out of my hut (Holy Moses! When can I expect the locusts and rivers of blood?!). And yes, I literally throw them. I pick them up and throw them like baseballs. Have you ever had a handful of frogs? I have. There are just so many of them and it doesn’t seem to really hurt them (I’ve seen them hit the back fence when my pitching arm got tired and hop off like nothing happened) and its sort of funny to watch them go flying through the air with their little legs sprawled out in every direction. Also, Senegalese people are terrified of frogs and I get a huge kick out of their reaction to the Toubab chucking them over her fence. In truth, I wouldn’t really mind the frogs hanging out in my room, especially because they’ve done an excellent job of reducing the rather disruptive cricket population, except that they leave these horrible smelly slimy messes all over. Sorry frogs, you are not welcome chez Nafi. Tanko is the only hut-mate I need.

Aning dookuwo dun?

This is one of my favorite Mandinka greetings, meaning “And what about the work?”

The answer depends on whether you are asking Cibyl or Nafi. The latter might tell you about her accidental tomato crop or her new banana plant [This might be the only time in my life I’ll have a chance to grow bananas in my backyard! I’ve named her Bernice.] or her experiences harvesting rice, which, by the way is insanely labor intensive – they cut it all by hand, blade by blade, stooped over for hours. Cibyl on the other hand has been at site now for five months and has a much harder time pointing to the things she’s done in that time. The work is slow to take shape- partly this is Senegal, partly this is Peace Corps, partly this is me. But finally things are moving.

One of SPB’s biggest problems at the moment is the “non-functional” status of our health hut. In Senegal the health structures at the village level are very basic – small two to three room buildings that carry some basic first aid supplies, administered by volunteer health workers. When the health hut and its supplies are available to the population depends largely on how dedicated the health worker is, how busy he is in the fields and the availability of supplies at the nearest health post. And because these workers aren’t paid for their time, even technically “functional” health huts may be otherwise in practice. Now take Saré Pathé, where we have a beautiful new health hut, where my counterpart, a trained birth attendant is very motivated and hardworking and where we can’t get any supplies because the guy the community has chosen as the local health worker has yet to be trained. Who’s going to pay for it? After some frustrating conversations with the president of the village health committee and the doctor at the nearest health post (7 km away) I finally feel like I have an ally and a sponsor in this effort. An NGO that is run by one of our own, a sort of Saré Pathé hometown hero, has offered to put up the money for the training, which will start in December and last three months. By March our health hut should be up and running - what that will mean in practical terms has yet to be seen.

While I feel a sense of victory at having this plan in place and the money to carry it out, it doesn’t feel like my victory. The community picked the health worker and HOPE 87 is paying for the training. It all could have been done without me, which is great, but the fact of this NGO and its multi-faceted role in the community has challenged me to think really hard about what I want my impact here to be. Most of the more visible projects (think wells, garden fences, latrines) I could work on would normally require writing grants, which doesn’t interest me in the least. And besides, what does SPB need a grant for when they have HOPE 87 to pay for all that kind of stuff? The tricky thing is that a lot of people in my village have come to expect these kinds of bigger projects from development organizations, especially since they have this close relationship to one in particular; people assume that the American volunteer has come to build them something and I sometimes get the sense that they are waiting for me to roll into SPB with bags of cement and a construction crew. I don’t want my villagers to be disappointed in the Peace Corps or think that they got a slacker volunteer. I want to serve the needs of the community, which means trying to give them some of the things they ask for, but I also have my own ideas of what I want my service to be. I didn’t sign up to be the foreman of a construction project or even an NGO liaison. I signed up for the grass-roots community development and the cultural exchange… which is why I’m excited about my Care Group.

Within the last month I’ve recruited five women from different corners of Saré Pathé to be my Care Group. The idea is that each of the women is responsible for five or six compounds, including her own, and every few weeks we’ll meet to go over a health intervention, then they go out into the community and teach other women what they’ve learned. The hope is that it will be a more sustainable way to disseminate this information than if I were to always be the one hosting demonstrations. These five women will become the local experts and hopefully continue to be role models of healthy practices in the community after my two years is up. People here have a complicated relationship to the “miracles” of Western medicine; they don’t know what is in the pills they take but they want them for everything and that’s frustrating because they often can’t afford them (or think they can’t). I want to remind people that there is a lot they can do to take care of themselves and their families and that they can reduce their reliance on medicine from the health post if they learn how to prevent some common health problems. I want these women to feel empowered. We had our first meeting last week and made mosquito repellent from locally available ingredients. It’s been a great success so far – the women are enthusiastic about being part of this group and are already sharing their newfound expertise with their neighbors. There’s even talk within the community of expanding the group to other nearby villages, something I was planning to suggest at a later date if the group proved successful. I’m thrilled and encouraged and optimistic. This is a project I can take ownership of. This is a direction in which to run.

Click here for new pictures: rainy season landscapes and vegetable harvest!

All Safe in the Hut - Journal Selections From a Rainy Ramadan

{For new visuals click here}

2 August

The best kind of day in village – chores, cleaning, organizing, fixing, a million little things that keep me busy for hours. Cut my first crop of moringa leaves and laid them out to dry on my cot. It’s so nice to feel productive after several days of feeling down. IST was fun and in some ways inspiring, but it left me feeling sort of listless and eager to get back to SPB.

Yesterday spent the morning running around Kolda by myself – something I should do more often. Took a mini-bus back to Mampatim. It was cramped and hot and slow and when I got to Chelsea’s I had trouble pumping up my tire and even more trouble locking her hut. But by the time I was on the road to SPB, with a full tire and Tanko on my back I was so happy I almost cried. It was a beautiful sunset, everything on the ground was lush and green and springing to life. Met Ansou Kanté on the road and had a bit of a race on the last stretch as it grew darker. It was getting hard to see the road in front of me, but the tiniest sliver of moon was lowering itself on the horizon… Ramadan! Sunkaro = fasting month. Today is the first day of the fast.

3 August

All safe in the hut! There’s something so wonderful about the feeling I get when I’m safe and dry inside my hut watching violent downpours turn my compound into a lake. I think I like these storms more during the day than at night. But today it is particularly delicious because it is so well timed. Another morning of chores and now there’s nothing to do but wait for the storm to pass so I can return my damp laundry to the line. It’s these quite moments that make life here so sweet and worth coming home to, an anecdote to that worst kind of homesickness that I felt after IST. Its not going to be hard to leave Senegal, it’s going to be hard to leave Saré Pathé.

The problem with IST (and congregations of volunteers in general): talking about development = talking about problems. It becomes so negative.

Storm is passing, slowly. Outside is getting clean. Everything is cool and fresh, but a little bit in shambles.

Sounds: long rolls of thunder, rain hitting the enormous puddles made by the rain that came before it, the low clucking of a chicken (sounds like she is considering something), trees soughing.

Watching the eucalyptus sway in the distance reminds me of home in the same sweet way as the smell of it – it doesn’t make me homesick, just nostalgic, knowing I will go back there someday, that I have my whole life to live in California. What a glorious future, what a wonderful present.

A cool breath of wind and a warm puppy in my lap.

9 August

Woke up early on Saturday and rode my bike to Kolda with Tanko in a bucket on the back. 75 km, over 4 hours, 2 attempted escapes. Painted the house - taking ownership, making improvements.

13 August

FAR too much down time during Ramadan. Its not so much not having work to do that gets to me, because I’m perfectly content reading for hours on end; it's the restlessness of being cooped up in my hut. Where would I go? It’s too hot to venture out and what would I do anyway? Yesterday went to Mampatim as much to interrupt the tedium as to try and get a look at the health records. The doctor wasn’t in so Chelsea and I spent the whole day lounging around her hut talking.

I can’t get over the drama of these storms

Over my shoulder the full moon shining clear and bright

Washing the compound in a dim silver glow

In front of me huge clouds rolling over us

Billowy and white up front

Black and thick with rain in the middle

21 August

Yesterday spent all day in the fields with the women, pulling weeds in the rice paddy, bent or crouched the better part of the day. These women work so hard and on no food or water right now. I sunburned a stripe across my lower back.

22 August

Woke up sometime around 2 a.m. aware that it had been pouring heavily for a while. I had been hearing it through half sleep and thinking I’d never heard it rain so hard for so long in my life. A bump in the night. I reach for my headlamp and peer through my mosquito net. There is a muddy river flowing through my room – pouring over the back doorjamb like a miniature Niagara and emptying into the ocean that was once my family’s compound. This is not a mefloquin dream. Tanko and I are floating in adjacent islands, safe from the muck and protected from the leaks through the thatch by a tarp I had tented above my bed in drier times.

I keep thinking I’ve seen the rainy season and then Africa ups the ante.

I felt like all the rain that falls on Santa Rosa in a year was falling on Saré Pathé all at once (my 30 liter beignoir set out in the open yard filled and overflowed who knows how many times over). How can that much water come out of the sky in one night? What is a monsoon? I misheard something that was said and the phrase “black rain” came to me. A perfect way to describe it. Water falling from the blackest possible sky in an endless violent downpour, flooding the village and wreaking havoc. Black rain – rain so thick you can’t see through it. African rain. Must we always come back to the Heart of Darkness?

I hear voices outside. The black rain has subsided to a normal downpour (still heavier than what we’re used to in sweet gentle America). I open the door to see Moustapha trudging through the flood, carrying something from the boys’ room to Mamadou’s. “Nafi! Big rain is happening!” I hear Maimouna, from Mamadou’s hut as well, tell me that the women’s hut is a goner. She actually uses the phrase for when you’re so full you can’t eat any more.

I went back to bed wondering what things would look like in the morning. When I got up the boys were chasing an injured bird around the compound (one of those pretty little bright yellow ones). I thought it was a game and left them to it while Filijee showed me the damage to the big room. The wall was cracked in 2 places where the flood had washed out the ground beneath it. Crack isn’t even the right word since it’s several inches wide. As we’re walking out we hear a commotion outside and the kids are yelling and huddled around Tanko who appears to be eating the wounded bird. Part of me feels bad for the poor thing, but part of me is proud of his hunter instinct since one of the reasons I got him in the first place was to keep mice and spiders out of my room. Filijee, in a rush to see the action, slips in the mud, cracking herself up and startling Bakary, who she is carrying, into tears. They manage to get the bird away from Tanko and the chase continues.

I soon find out that their panic at seeing Tanko go for the bird has nothing to do with warm fuzzy feelings for it – they don’t plan to adopt this bird, nurse it back to health and set it free or keep it as a pet like American children would want to do (like I would have wanted to do). No. They plan on eating it for breakfast. It’s such a small bird – hardly any meat on it at all. They’d get more out of one of the bull frogs I heard croaking all night. But the bird is here and has become a pretty little sacrifice to protein deficiency. Yum.

Did my laundry in clean cold rainwater.

24 August

Woke up to howling. Dogs? No, wailing. Someone in the village has died. As I wake up and get out of bed I start to think maybe I was wrong and it is just animals being noisy. The sound seems to have morphed into rooster crows as I hear it from my backyard. But when I open my front door to greet the family Maimouna tells me there has been a death after all – a two year old child who had been sick for the last couple days.

I went to sit in the women’s hut at the Sané compound across the way. The wailing had subsided into sniffles. I glanced at Filijee across from me who seemed to be lost in thought. As she stared deep into the space in front of her I wondered if she was thinking about her own child who died a few years ago. I thought about the time, already a couple months ago, when she came to me and asked if I could do anything for Bakary’s diarrhea. She seemed so panicked and then was so grateful when he got better (gosh, all I did was give him sugar and salt in water). Its just too common for children to die here of things they would never even get in America. Could I have done something if I knew this child was sick?

The first storms came from the southeast. This one came from the northwest. There’s not much of a pattern anymore.

Found a baby bat clinging to the bamboo pile under the mango tree. Its wings were so fragile and translucent, tiny pink spidery digits spread across them. The fur on its back like the softest gray velvet and little alert ears like cups of tissue paper. I moved it on a stick into the tree in an attempt to keep it form the kids. Its not there anymore.

Big rain again. I stepped out for mere seconds to put my buckets out to catch it and the back of my shirt was completely soaked. Just hoping my room doesn’t flood again. The water flows into the compound from at least five places. We seem to be at one of the lowest spots in the village. Lake Mané!

25 August

The rain started in the late afternoon and continued on through the evening. I sat in my doorway through a lot of it, watching the compound fill with water, drawing, sitting on a bucket with Tanko in my lap. Had a fun conversation with Fili about how there are men in America who carry babies on their backs and cook and clean, how men and women share work and that’s why I don’t want an African husband. I think she thought the idea of a man with a baby on his back was the funniest thing she’d heard all day. When it got dark, and after candlelit cuuro (rice porridge), sat in the new “big room,” formerly Mamadou’s room, looking at the pictures in a reader by firelight, Khady pointing out the different animals and people. Warm and cozy and exactly what I wanted to be doing.

Yesterday a baby goat hung around the compound all day. Tanko had a great time chasing it down all morning. Then it hung around until night crying and just being lost in the rain.

26 August

I think Tanko just ate the baby bat.

28 August

Yesterday was Kirimoo or Kidimoo or something like that, a holiday whose only significance that I could gather was its proximity to the end of Ramadan. They celebrate with a chicken dinner and singing into the night. Mamadou asked me for more money to get rice for dinner. We ended up killing two of the young chickens in the compound because Mamadou didn’t budget the money I advanced him the other day and couldn’t afford to buy a nice fat chicken for dinner. Why would you spend 12,000 CFA on a bag of corn if you know two days later you’re going to need rice and chicken? I don’t get it.

Filijee and Maimouna tell me that Sana ran off in the middle of the night with 10,000 CFA of Mamadou’s money and that when he found out he cried. As if he isn’t having a hard enough time scraping by. I want to do something for the family for Korité before he asks me for any favors.

2 Lists

Back in Thies for more training, the intrepid volunteer reflects on the events of this last month and comes up with two lists:

Things that have made me unhappy (from least to most severe):

1. Very long rides in very uncomfortable cars
2. Mosquitoes at the training center
3. Dermatological maladies (some resulting from the above)
4. General homesickness
5. The prevalence of domestic abuse in my village

This last item has caused me considerable distress on more than one occasion now, partly because it is just pure awful, disgusting, horrible and partly because it throws a wrench into my efforts to be culturally sensitive. My general philosophy when confronting situations that tend to make Westerners cringe (corporal punishment, polygamy, devaluation of girls' education to name a few) is to remind myself that these things have deep roots in a culture that also produces strong moral convictions, close-knit families, and a universal cult of hospitality. I may not like every aspect of this culture, but I can accept most of it by trying to be open-minded and remembering that there are plenty of things I do or value that a Senegalese person would disapprove of. This is the crux of the Cibyl/Nafi divide. As my Senegalese identity (and they are distinct and different already), Nafi deals with everything that is "okay here, not okay back home," most of this stuff being fairly harmless (i.e. living with big bugs, plucking chickens, eating pasta for breakfast). But, Cibyl cannot let Nafi have this one. She just cannot accept that beating one's wife is "okay here, not okay back home" (even though that's what her villagers keep telling her). She believes with every fiber of her being that it is not okay anywhere under any circumstances, it's just Wrong, capital W, period. I know that speaking in absolutes can land you in hot water; with as many moral codes, religions, social norms as exist in this world is there such a thing as right and wrong or is it all subjective? But that's a question for the brain. If you watch a man beat his wife with a bamboo cane while she holds their baby in her arms I bet your heart's reaction will trump anything your brain might have to say on the matter. Sometimes wrong is wrong.

Perhaps the hardest part for me in all of this has been the feeling of helplessness. I don't know yet what I can do and yet I feel like I have to do something. Something, something, something....This job is hard.

And still there is that second list (alxamdulilah) because life here is so sweet so often and really the severity of the bad is outweighed by the abundance of the good, evidenced by the length of list #2.

Things that have made me very happy (in no particular order):

1. Roasted peanuts, fresh off the coals
2. BIG dramatic African thunderstorms
3. Mamadou's wives
4. Unripe mango pounded with salt and pepper and spices
5. Fourth of July in Kedougou (fireworks, pulled pork, American music, pool party)
6. My pink tie-dye dress
7. Cleopatra soap
8. My puppy Tankoo!! (rhymes with Bronco)
9. Tankoo playing with Boubacar the donkey
10. Sweet peaunut rice porridge for dinner
11. Watching my garden grow
12. Being able to make jokes in Mandinka
13. Receiving packages from America
14. Chinese food in Dakar
15. Mandinka family reunions (Nicky, Will, Aziz)

Visuals

New pictures on facebook! Click here.

Cat Lady in Africa

Chapter 1 – Circle of Life

My second day in Sare Pathe my namesake’s husband died. The women wailed and the men laughed about how old he was (100 according to most people in my village, although I doubt very many of them could tell me their own ages so I take this estimate with an enormous grain of salt). I went to the funeral and watched the prayers, the wailing, the men carrying the body out, wrapped in a sheet. No sooner had this procession passed than my host brother’s first wife (he has 3) grabbed me and dragged me off to the health hut. We barge in just in time to be a baby boy’s first vision of the world. It was the most intense illustration of the circle of life that I’ve ever had the honor to witness; as one person was going into the ground, another was emerging from the womb. The baby was named for the man who died. And since our namesake’s were married I get to joke about him being my baby husband!

Chapter 2 – The Mango Game

There are lots of mangoes in Kolda. Every compound in my village has at least one tree if not several, and at the rate that people eat them they really should be planting more. While its still mango season in the sense that you can still get them at the markets, the supply in SPB has been dwindling steadily since I installed almost 6 weeks ago (I may have eaten them all). But as long as there are a few precious mangoes clinging to the top branches I get to enjoy watching the Mango Game. Here’s how you play: sit around your compound after dinner, chatting and going about your usual business. When you hear the thud of a mango falling to the ground in the corner of the compound stop whatever you are doing and be one of the first to jump up, extra points if you’re already holding a flashlight. Try to find the mango before a cow, sheep, or donkey gets to it first. I thought this was a funny game when my younger host siblings played it, tripping over each other in a mad scramble to find the mango in the dark. I thought it was even funnier the first time it happened after all the kids were asleep and the person to leap out of his chair first was my 45 year-old brother-dad (brother-dad because he is technically my host brother, but behaves more like a dad to me). He came back grinning and holding out his prize, just like the kids do.

Chapter 3 – Cat Lady in Sare Pathe

I’ve been making the rounds in my village, having lunch with every compound as my first “project.” I usually leave my compound in the late morning so that I can help the women cook lunch wherever I’m going. I make a map of the compound, write down the names of the people who live there, eat, drink tea, practice Mandinka. It’s been a really great way to get to know people and to eat some good food and to win some serious brownie points. Word spread really quickly that Nafi was making the rounds and “cooking lunch”. I love how tickled people are when I do “African” things. Nafi can cook! Nafi can clean rice! Nafi drinks tea! Nafi can stir! Nafi can pound stuff! Nafi can crack peaunuts! Nafi can carry water on her head! And the best one: Nafi can speak Mandinka! Maybe the best part of this lunch project is hanging out with people who wouldn’t normally talk with me everyday. They get all my best Mandinka.

Inevitably some compounds are more fun than others. Some days this project is a chore, other days it’s the best thing for me. I had one of those days a few weeks ago when I helped Ami Diatta make lunch. It was a very small compound, which sometimes makes for a boring lunch date, but Ami kept it lively. From the first minute there we were making each other laugh, sometimes for reasons I didn’t fully understand, but its not like that doesn’t happen almost every day anyways. She was just goofy in a way that most people are not here and I thought “This lady gets it! She’s funny, she thinks I’m funny, she gets why this toubab speaking Mandinka is funny!” We giggled all through lunch at who knows what and then she made me a bracelet. I was so taken with her that I pulled out my journal and took a moment to write about her then and there, something I wouldn’t normally do. When I got back to my compound that afternoon my host family, as always, wanted a report on where I went, what I cooked, and with whom.

Mamadou: That woman you cooked with, Ami Diatta, what did you think of her?

Me: What do you mean?

Mamadou: Do you think she is maybe… a little… (taps his temple)… do you think she is a little bit not “correct”?

Perfect. Of course my new best friend in village would be the local crazy. It really made me wonder what it is about her that makes her “not correct” according to Mamadou (brother-dad). Is it just the things that endear her to me like this goofy sense of humor (in which case I’m no more “correct” than she is) or is there something more to it that I just don’t get because I don’t have the same linguistic and cultural background? In any case, she is completely harmless and functional and no more eccentric than your average American cat lady, which is why I love her.

Chapter 4 – Donkey Lady in Africa

There is a baby donkey that lives in my compound. When I’m done with my shower in the evening and am combing my hair in front of my hut he comes and finds me. He knows my voice now and comes over to have his ears scratched and his nose rubbed. I named him Boubacar, which my family thinks is hilarious. They think I’m crazy for making friends with a donkey.

Chapter 5 – Donkey Lady Needs a Cat (or a dog?)

There are big spiders in SPB. They like to run around after dark, sometimes over people’s feet (yay! Come visit me!). Cut to me pointing at one on the wall and saying to Mamadou, “Wo le yatina nsoolata ñankumoo!” THAT is why I need a cat! After two unsuccessful trips to the next village over in search of kittens, we found out there were puppies to be had. All the better because as most of you know I much prefer dogs to cats and since a now have a larger-than-a-kitten sized rat trying to live in my grass roofed hut, I thought a dog might be able to scare more things away. I was a little hesitant about getting a dog at first for several reasons, the main one being that my compound doesn’t currently have any dogs and I didn’t want to burden them with a pet (a concept that doesn’t really exist in the first place in this culture) on the occasions I’m out of village for long stretches. What convinced me to get one is that Mamadou wants one as well, which means I can feel better about leaving mine in village, knowing he’ll get fed. It also means I’ll be able to train them together, show Mamdou that dogs can be smart and obedient and fun to have around. I don’t have one yet, and part of me knows it would be smarter to wait until after my in-service training. But the part of me that craves contact with other warm-blooded creatures wants a puppy now now.

Chapter 6 – 11 p.m. May 30^th

Just witnessed one of the most wildly beautiful spectacles I’ve ever seen in my life – The overture to an African rainy season. Everything up to now was just the sky tuning up.

Sat in the yard after my shower watching the storm roll in from the Southeast. All I could see were red and yellow flashes in the distance as dusk shifted into twilight, lightening unlike any I know: neither a flash of the whole sky nor zigzags striking the ground. It looked more like cloud-covered fireworks or a distant view of a civil war battle. For a while I wondered if it would even hit SPB or if it would just roll on by. Mamadou and I ate dinner while the flashes got closer. Then I heard a rumbling rush of tree branches blowing from the South side of the village and Filijee yelling at me to get up “The wind has come! The wind has come!” As the wind arrived and roared through the compound I understood her urgency and shut my room up to keep it from being torn apart and covered in dust. A moment later I decided I had better move my bed inside because wind like that can only bring crazy rain. It started pouring just as I shoved my mattress through the door. I took shelter in my hut, hoping the grass thatch would be enough of a barrier against the storm. When all of my things were covered, put away, protected from leaks, I lay in my bed thinking about the great storms I’ve seen and how quiet they’ve been in comparison with this one.

When the raging center of the storm had passed I turned on my headlamp to assess how my roof fared in keeping water out of my hut (not perfectly, but everything survived). Seeing my light flashing around, Mamadou called me out into the compound. After checking the leaks in my roof we sat in the yard enjoying the cool air, the last of the light drizzle, watching the lightening ride past. Great big streaks of horizontal light branching across the sky like veins, or fissures in the surface of our world letting in light from another. Is this egg cracking? Every time a flash lit up the sky I wondered what the tiny synapses in my brain must look like as they processed such a spectacle – a lightening storm in miniature?

A comfort: rain smells more or less the same everywhere you go.

And your hut becomes fragrant with it when your roof is made of grass.

Chapter 7 – I’m a witch!

On June 15^th there was a full lunar eclipse on this side of the world. I had been very excited about it because cloud cover prevented me from seeing the one that happened in North America on the winter solstice last December. I hadn’t told many people in my village about it ahead of time, since an eclipse is not the easiest thing to explain in Mandinka. As the sun set, I positioned my chair in the yard so that I could watch the moon rise, worrying that cloud cover might again thwart my eclipse viewing plans. My family was probably pretty confused about why I was so intent about watching the moon. I just kept saying, “I’m waiting for the moon. You’ll see, you’ll see, just wait.” When the moon rose above the clouds it was almost fully eclipsed. A tiny sliver was just starting to emerge from our shadow. As people in my village took note of what was happening they began singing religious songs “to make the moon come back.” It sparked some interesting conversations with people in which I explained (to French speakers) what an eclipse is, the movement of the earth and the moon, gravity, space exploration. Some favorite quotes:

Mamadou: Nafi…?

Me: Yes?

Mamdou: How did you know that was going to happen?!

Kouta: Our shadow goes all the way to the moon?!!

Bouley (my host dad): You have the moon in America?! It goes all the way over there?

Me: Did you know that people have been on the moon?

Kouta: What?!

Me: People have walked on the moon.

Kouta: And they didn’t fall off!?!

Me: No, you can’t fall off the moon.

Kouta: Is it like here (pointing to the ground)? I’ve heard the Earth is round. Is the moon round like the Earth?

Waking up in the Gambia

Yesterday morning I woke up at the crack of dawn to leave Thies in a 7-place (read, "junky Peugot station wagon") and get to Kolda before the regional curfew. We got about a half hour down the road when one of our rear wheels started coming loose and we ended up stopped for four hours waiting for it to get fixed. Through some misunderstandings and a stroke of luck our driver decided to take us through the Gambia, the sliver of a country that cuts through the middle of Senegal - a much faster route, but also not officially Peace Corps sanctioned. When we arrived at the border and realized where we were it was too late to turn back and we got the official go-ahead to pass through - which was a beautiful and fun little adventure. We saw monkeys, met some really nice people and got a Gambian stamp in our passports. Not a bad travel day in the end. I posted picture of it here. I promise to try to upload more photos the next time at the Kolda house, but right now things are pretty hectic since many of us move to our huts tomorrow! Last day of living out of a suitcase... alhamdulilah!

A fo kotenke

(Say it again)

I just finished writing a guest post for Amanda's blog that you can read by clicking here. I took it as an opportunity to expand on what I already wrote about my volunteer visit.

This week was counterpart workshop which means my two counterparts came to the training center all the way from Kolda to attend sessions on everything from Peace Corps philosophy to logistics of my installation. It was also a chance for us to start getting to know each other (not so easy when all I can say are things like "It is cold here," "Did you eat dinner?" "Mandinka is difficult," "This is an eggplant."). Still, I managed to communicate enough of my personality to make them laugh, which as far as I'm concerned is a huge success, especially because my 19 year-old smurf of a counterpart has one of the goofiest laughs I've ever heard and I'm making it my personal mission to get it out of him as often as possible in the next two years.

I'm in for some good times and a lot of misunderstandings and confusion and hard work and a tired body and lots of time to read and think. I'm in for a great service I think. More than ever I can't wait for training to be over and to get to my village... 18 days!

De-miss - Quick! Draw a line in the sand!

Yesterday evening I got back to Thiès – tired, slightly under the weather, and in theory, demystified. Volunteer visit, which used to be called demystification and is still popularly referred to as “de-miss” by volunteers, is the part of training where we finally get to see where and how we will be living for the next two years. Why the official name is no longer demystification became apparent after the first day.

To be fair, I did leave Kolda with a MUCH clearer idea of what my future looks like. Saré Pathé Bouya is beautiful, with a huge “tree of life” at the center. I will be living in the chief’s compound, which is surprisingly one of the smaller, quieter compounds I saw. My hut is not quite finished, but is well on the way to being a lovely little home. It’s a concrete square with a thatched roof and I will have a backyard with my own pit latrine, shower area and shade structure under a mango tree. In the two days that I was able to visit my village I got to meet my host parents, my counterparts and my namesake – Naafi Mane - all of whom seem wonderful. Demystification accomplished.

Sort of. As much as I learned about my future life as Naafi Mane, demiss really highlighted how little I know about the work I’ll be doing, about the language I’ll be speaking, and about the people I’ll be living with. In fact I’d say I that I was pretty thoroughly mystified watching my host, Amanda chat away in Mandinka and carry herself with all the confidence of a successfully integrated volunteer while I sat quietly and smiled.

At the end of my second visit to Saré Pathé my host dad presented Amanda and me with a rooster to take home to her village. As he flapped around on the ground with legs tied Amanda took the opportunity to explain to all present that a chicken in this state is quite easily hypnotized by simply drawing a line in front of its field of vision. My host family was as impressed with the demonstration as I was and the trick was put to good use on our bike ride back to her village. During a quick water break Boubacar the Rooster decided to flap off of Amanda’s handlebars and take off rather clumsily into the bush. I held the bikes as Amanda went after the flailing Boubacar (who seemed all too aware of his pending fate). “Quick! Draw a line in the sand!” I yelled. And sure enough, his panic subsided long enough for her to grab him by the legs and get him back on her handlebars, where he continued to periodically fuss and flap until we got back to her compound and ate him.

This incident, in addition to being hilarious, has also come to represent the de-miss experience for me. Like the rooster, I had my moments of panic – when my language skills fell flat, when the reality of being the only American set in, when I had glimpses of the trials of village life, loneliness, boredom and the daunting task of implementing lasting change. Flap flap flapppp flap flapflapflap!

And then someone would draw a line in the sand - hiking into the bush to collect wild honey comb in the moonlight (probably the richest, most delicious honey I’ve ever tasted), eating cashew apples fresh off the trees, getting into the rhythm of village greetings, watching Amanda joke with her siblings, the exuberance of my namesake. Everyday there was something that got me flapping a little bit, something else that calmed me down completely, and the rest of the time I was just taking in the sights, bouncing along quietly on Amanda’s handlebars. So to speak.

Saré Paté BOUYA!

This afternoon I found out that starting in May I'll be spending the next two years living in the region of Kolda and I couldn't be happier! Kolda is part of the Casamance region of southern Senegal, one of the greener, wetter regions of the country... and hot. Mangoes. 'nuff said.

Saré Paté Bouya is a village of around 500 people, 7 km from the road town of Mampatim and my closest volunteer neighbor. There are quite a few volunteers within good biking distance, and while it might be tough sometimes to be a little island of Mandinka, I'm really excited about all my Pulaar neighbors.

Oddly enough (or simply indicative of my amazing psychic abilities), the girl I'll be replacing as the area's Mandinka health volunteer is the same girl whose blog I read just before coming to Senegal, with the thought that it seemed representative of my imagined Peace Corps experience. I won't be living in her village, but will be nearby and I'll be staying with her for my volunteer visit next week. I can't wait! Kolda or bust.

Aissatou Konta

I'm back in Thies after my first week at my home-stay in Mbour. It was a tough week in a lot of ways, mostly because we went directly from this sheltered island of American culture at the training center, to living with Senegalese families and trying out our very limited language skills. My host family is very patient and welcoming. As soon as I set foot in the gate they dubbed me Aissatou Konta, which has caught on rather quickly with the people in my neighborhood. There are about 15 people in my house, most of them kids. My host dad is a Marabout and has two wives that both live in the house. Most of my host "siblings" are actually my nieces, nephews and cousins, although I'm still a little unclear about how exactly everyone is related. I spend the most time with 16 year old twins Awa and Adama who speak French and are helping me communicate when my limited Mandinka and hand gestures fail me. Its frustrating that I can't speak more of their language and I sometimes feel like I'm not learning fast enough, but then I remember that I've only been learning this language for a week (it feels so much longer). The fact that I can understand and respond when my host dad asks when I'm going back to Thies and when I'll come home to Mbour is really impressive for only a week.

I have my own room in the house, very simply furnished with a bed, a floor mat and a bench on which to lay out my clothes. I have a good sized window that faces the courtyard and which I keep open most of the day as Mbour is extremely hot in the middle of the day despite being a coastal city. The courtyard is home to a mango tree, an orange tree, a sheep that will continue to fatten until Tabaski in November, and a chicken family that will also be dinner at some point.

On the average day I wake up at 7:30 and enjoy my breakfast of bread and butter and tea in the patio/foyer/hallway/living room/dining room looking out at the courtyard while my host family goes about the morning chores. I have Mandinka class at nine at my teacher's apartment, a short walk from my house. We study for as long as we can, usually about three hours and then go home for lunch. After lunch I usually rest because its too hot to do much else; sometimes I sleep, sometimes I read or write in my journal. Then in the early evening, when it has cooled off a bit, I meet up with my fellow trainees at a school garden where we are practicing the technical skills we learn at the training center. This last week we prepared beds for planting and this week will take seeds back to Mbour to plant. After that I head home for a nice cool bucket bath. My host family eats dinner around 8 or 9 and I usually end up going to bed around 10, totally wiped from the heat and the effort of walking through piles of sand all day.

So far I've been to the beach twice, but have yet to swim. Mbour is pretty sprawling and the neighborhood where I live is a cab ride or hour long walk from the beach. So far we've all been so busy settling that we haven't gotten much time to explore Mbour, although I did see the market and the port where the fishermen bring in their daily catches. I'm definitely planning more beach time for when I go back this week.

Tomorrow afternoon we leave the training center and head back to our host families. The last couple of days have been a welcome respite from the trials of linguistic and cultural immersion, but I'm ready to go back to Mbour and keep working. This next stint will be close to two weeks and then I'll come back to Thies to find out what my permanent site will be and then I leave to visit it for a few days. We found out today that the three Mandinka speakers will be pretty spread out - one of us in Kolda, one in Tambacounda, one in Fatick. I was a little bummed about this, as I feel like Will, Nicky and I have already gotten fairly close, but we'll still see each other and keep in touch pretty well if we want. I have a hunch I'll be the one in Kolda, but we'll see; I'd be happy in any of those regions. So, the next time I'm able to post something I'll actually know where I'm going to be spending the next two years!

Wishing you all peace, health and happiness.

Fo saayin-saayin!

-Cibyl, called Aissatou

I'm at summer camp.

The similarities between life at the training center and life at summer camp are remarkable. We wake up early, have scheduled activities after breakfast, then lunch and some free time to rest (or update blogs), then more activities and then more free time around dinner. The other day some of us went with a few language trainers to a nearby soccer field and got a game going. I organized a game of sardines on the compound that same night and then a huge group of us fell into a sing-along led by the more musical trainees. Soccer, sardines and sing-alongs. It's summer camp. Not to mention the fact that we sleep in dorms, the meals are provided and the weather is sunny and beautiful... it's hard not to feel a bit pampered in this "virtual Senegal". I'm enjoying this for as long as it lasts because by tomorrow evening we will be at our CBT (community based training) sites in the surrounding regions, living with host families and speaking local languages, and our lives will be much harder.

I'm also looking forward to this though. We got our language and CBT assignments this morning and I hit the jackpot! I, along with two other trainees, will be learning Mandinka, which means that ultimately I will be living in the southern part of the country (yay!). During training the Mandinka group will work a lot with those learning Jaxanke and Malinke as they are all members of the same language family (Bambara is also part of this group) and are all spoken primarily in the south. There are 7 of us in this Mande language group and during training we will be living with families in Mbour, which is on the coast (yay again!). Basically I lucked out on two fronts - I'm getting the training site and permanent site that I wanted!

During training we will still have "center days" when we come back here for technical training. So for those of you who have written letters, don't worry, I'll still get them at the Thies address.

Off to more cultural training.
Heera dorong!

7 months, 6 airports, 4 time zones

This is what it took to get here. After months of planning and preparation I have officially started my Peace Corps training here in Thiès Senegal. Alxamdulilah! My journey began last Sunday with a series of airline snafus; my first flight was cancelled, the next one delayed, and I ended up at two different airports before even leaving the bay area. After a layover in Dallas I finally made it to Washington D.C. late on Sunday night with sore arms and quite an appetite. Luckily, my roommate arrived just minutes behind me and the two of us were able to split a midnight pizza and start getting to know each other.

The next day was full of many more introductions as our class of 48 new health and environmental education volunteers (a huge number for a single training class) met for an orientation to the Peace Corps. We have people from every corner of the United States, ranging in age from 21 to 31 and it seems to be a really great group. Seeing all these young, enthusiastic and like-minded people definitely renews my faith in my generation and reminds me that while I might not agree with aspects of our government or foreign policy, Americans on an individual basis can be extremely generous, open, and compassionate.

Our orientation lasted most of the day and afterward we dispersed for dinner around Georgetown. It was fun to see a part of D.C. I hadn’t before and I ended up having a very nice Thai dinner and then a few birthday beers at a nearby tavern. The next day we got yellow fever shots and headed to the airport (not my favorite way to celebrate my birthday, but the tradeoff was a trip to Africa, so I’m not complaining). We arrived in Dakar very early on the 9th and immediately got on a bus to Thiès.

The training center is beautiful with lots of big trees and flowering vines. I’m in a room with 3 other girls and our accommodations are pretty comfortable, although its going to take a few days before I get used to taking cold showers again. The food is good, the weather is perfect and I am having so much fun already. Overall, I’m just so happy to be here at last!