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.

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.