The daily grind

It's now been over two months since I left my little hut away from home and the more time that goes by the more displaced I feel. It's not as if I'm unhappy at home (hot showers, ice cream and good beer? Don't mind if I do) but I feel so restless! Partly this is because I require assistance just to leave the house, but I think mostly it has to do with the fact that I don't have a life here right now. My life is in Kolda, going on without me. I'm trying really hard to stay present and enjoy my time in California, reminding myself that there were days when I wished for this and there are bound to be more of them once I've been back for a while. But I often find myself stalking my Peace Corps friends on facebook, reading their blogs, watching old videos of my own and fantasizing about all the things I want to do upon my return.

My hope is that soon after my arrival I'll be able to start work on the latrine project I've requested funding for. The planning stage of this project has been so drawn out by this interruption in my service that it's hard to imagine the reality of actually getting it done. And there are other work goals - getting back to my Care Group and maybe helping to develop a training manual for medicinal plants - but I find myself thinking a lot about the little day to day activities that await me. I've gotten a lot of questions about this since being home and since it's never going to be big news (this is the wild card blog post to write when I have nothing else to write about) I've decided now is the time to fill you in on what a day in village consists of.

7 am : Wake up and greet the day. No alarm, no heavy eyelids. I stretch and wash up and put some water on to boil. Breakfast time is one of my precious alone times of the day and my only American meal in village. I have a little single burner gas stove in my hut which has never done anything but boil water because village breakfast is almost always tea and oatmeal. I take a lot of pride in my village breakfasts actually because I miss cooking for myself and let's face it, tea and oatmeal can get boring pretty quick. That's what care packages are good for. Cinnamon walnut raisin oatmeal and a Bengal spice chai latte (I've developed a love for powdered milk) is Peace Corps gourmet and a whole lot tastier than the moono (millet porridge) my host family eats. Before I emerge from my hut I feed Tanko and get dressed so that by

7:30 am : I am out the door with my bucket to say good morning to my compound and head to the well. Getting my water is always the first chore and I never know how long it will take. Sometimes I get to the well and am able to fill my bucket right away, sometimes I get there and am one of several women sitting on a bucket waiting for water to filter into the well, and other times I just don't feel like waiting and end up leaving my bucket at the well. Someone else fills it up for me at some point during the day and I pick it up later, or more likely I forget about it until my host mom is standing outside my hut with it on her head.

8-12 : These are my most productive hours on any given day. On "busy" village days I might be working on a mural, helping in the fields or doing work in my hut. I get sort of hung up on trying to do work that looks like work, which isn't always easy in village. Whenever I'm sitting on the floor of my hut with notebooks and paperwork sprawled around me people ask if I'm reading or studying. "No, I'm working," doesn't seem to make sense. "Work" involves sweat and you don't sweat while writing a lesson plan (in Mandinka no less!) or budgeting a construction project. I probably look busier on what I consider slow village days. On these days I pull extra water and do my laundry in my backyard (to avoid being ridiculed by the women in my village who have been washing clothes by hand since adolescence) or visit other compounds or give Tanko a bath or work on my garden. On one slow day after the plague of frogs was over for good I decided to really thoroughly sweep out my room. I sweep my room at least once a day, usually after my trip to the well, and sometimes again in the afternoon. But rarely do I get behind the buckets and under the trunks and bed. There was A LOT of dust and two frog mummies.

12-4 : By noon it's usually too hot to do much but wait for lunch to be ready and since we usually don't eat until 1 at the earliest I read. When lunch is over I usually sit with the women in the shade. They chat and nap and braid each others hair while I read or sketch or write in my journal. Kids run around and bring me whatever fruit is in season.

4:30 : Time to resume activity. When I have meetings with villagers this is usually when they happen because the women haven't started cooking dinner yet, but have presumably recovered from lunch and the heat of the day. It's really not often that I have meetings though, so instead this is usually when I wrap up anything else I might be doing in preparation for my favorite part of the day.

5 pm : Nafi alone time round two starts with a run or long walk in the woods; I have a favorite path out of the village that I take almost every time. Tanko comes with me and I talk to him in English and enjoy the exercise. When I get back to my compound it's time for my daily bucket bath. I listen to the BBC world service while I get clean and am probably more aware of what's going on in the world than when I am in America.

6:30-7 : Reemerge and read until the sun goes down.

7:30-8: Wait for dinner. Khady usually keeps me company during this time with hand games and various charming performances. Sometimes my community counterpart, Laye comes over for a visit. He's 20 and sort of a goof and I'm teaching him a little bit of English and telling him about America.

8-10 : Dinner is late. Sometimes as late as 9. When it's over I sometimes sit with my host brother Mamadou while he makes tea and listens to the radio, but usually I sit and talk with the women.

10 pm : Absolutely the latest I would ever get to bed on the average village day. Before I left in December 9:30 was starting to become the norm for closing my door and getting in bed. I read for a little while by headlamp and then go right to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

*Note - Because I'm living by the season more than I ever have in my life, these times are approximate and subject to change depending on the length of the day, what food is in season, what farming activities people are doing, etc.

Tanko eating corn on the cob last September

2012 - Already So Weird

Okay, it’s time. Time to get caught up and answer some questions.

You didn’t hear from me during the month of December because I was in village for the first part of it, in anticipation of being gone for over a month. Up to that point my longest stint out of village was just over two weeks and while I was looking forward to my trip to America I was sad to say farewell to my host family and my baby Tanko. I spent my last few days in SPB working on murals at my village health hut, which attracted a lot of attention from the local kids!

I considered writing a blog post from home (Oh the miracle of fast, reliable internet access!), but come on. Did I actually think I was going to waste any of those precious three weeks writing blog posts?! Not a chance. I was too busy meeting my new beautiful niece, having a New Years reunion with my Barnard girls, going for walks with the dogs and attempting to gain back some of the weight I’ve lost since March by eating as much delicious American food as I could stuff down my throat (apparently putting on five pounds a week is not as easy as some of my colleagues had led me to believe).

I had been prepared for some severe reverse culture shock and was pleasantly surprised to find that I slipped back into my American routine almost as if I had never left. I remember feeling so out of sorts when I came home from Senegal in 2007, but the effect was much more subtle this time (aside from a minor and very brief panic attack in the Macy’s shoe department the day after Christmas). Mostly I just felt slightly out of sync with all but my closest friends and family, sort of disoriented in the same way as when you are suddenly awoken from a very vivid dream. And the more days I spent away from SPB, the more my life there really did seem like a dream. I was starting to disbelieve that my routine for the last nine months had actually involved waking up in a hut, getting my water from a well, and eating lots and lots of millet. By the end of the three weeks I was just about ready to get back. I at least was missing my host family and my dog, and definitely by the time I was on that plane I was wishing that it could just drop me off in Saré Pathé.

Instead I arrived in Dakar and almost immediately got on a bus to go to Thiès for the All Volunteer Conference, two days of volunteer presentations on projects and best practices. It was fun to see everyone and sort of strange to come back to Senegal in much the same way as I arrived in March – straight to the training center and the bubble of American culture that dwells there. After AllVol most everyone headed to Dakar for the West African Invitational Softball Tournament, more often referred to as WAIST (a handy acronym considering the general state of inebriation preferred by most involved). It’s a chance for volunteers and other Americans living in Senegal and neighboring countries to come together for a weekend’s worth of America’s favorite pastime. And, as some of us discovered, it’s also a chance to incur some fairly serious injuries.

Now, unlike some of my fellow WAIST weekend casualties, I can honestly say that my injury had nothing to do with either softball or being drunk, at least on my part. The cab driver that we hired to take us from the Peace Corps talent show to a nightclub on the other hand… totally wasted. My big mistake was not getting out of the cab before we got into unknown territory and then Dakar’s notoriously mugger friendly expressway. I knew he was drunk. I should have insisted that he let us out right away, but I don’t think any of us realized how much danger we were in and I think we assumed that he would heed our pleas for him to slow down and watch out. Sure enough, by the time we were on the expressway he did seem to listen and slow down. We were almost there, on a straight, well-paved street, divided from the cross traffic and not a pedestrian or small animal in sight (we had had several near misses already) and then suddenly he just lost control. He over-corrected, swerved several times in the most cartoonish way possible and plowed us right into a cement wall. I was sitting in the passenger seat and saw that wall coming towards me and thought that was the end of me. So when the dust settled and I realized that I was alive I threw open the door and practically leapt out of that car. My ankle started swelling right away. After some yelling and phone calls and a near brawl (the cab driver still wanted his money!) we were rescued by a good Samaritan who happened to speak perfect English and very generously offered to drive us to the Peace Corps office, which luckily wasn’t too far away. As I’m writing this, I still can’t believe that all this actually happened to me and that my busted ankle was the only injury. I feel very fortunate.

As it turned out, I sustained two broken bones, one serious enough to warrant surgery. After a week of sitting in the Medical office in Dakar, Peace Corps decided to fly me to DC to have two screws put in. I’ve been here for almost two weeks now, staying in a hotel in Georgetown on Peace Corps’ dime and am finally getting ready to go home to California. The doctor says I’m not to put any weight on my foot for the next 6 weeks, so I’ll be laid up at home for a while and then have a couple weeks of physical therapy before I can go back to Senegal. At first, I had a really hard time with this news since I was already so excited to get back to site. I hate having my service interrupted in this way because I feel like I was just starting to get my hands dirty. Now I just have to sit at home and try not to forget all the Mandinka I know or let that dream of Saré Pathé fade any further. I’m trying to make the best of it though and come up with ways to keep myself busy while I’m home – doing research on medicinal plants in West Africa, writing a grant for my latrine project, maybe making some visits to local classrooms to talk about Senegal or Peace Corps, realizing some of the art projects that have been stuck in my head while I’ve been in Africa and away from the supplies they require. At least I have an interesting story to tell and some bad-ass x-rays to show off. Things could be so much worse.