If you could eat sunshine it would taste like a mango.

As a kid I don’t think I liked mangoes all that much. They are slimy and unfamiliar and kind of hard to eat (I will qualify this last point later).  Eventually I came to realize how delicious they are, although as a rare treat, a produce aisle impulse buy, not as something that made it on to my shopping list very often. I probably eat more mangoes per day in Senegal than I eat in an average year in America. Which leads me to wonder…

If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, what do three(+) mangoes a day get you? Something good I bet.

1.     Duh. Fresh fruit. Vitamin C.

2.     Digestive antidote to loads and loads of white rice

3.     An incentive to floss regularly

4.     Pure simple joy

Mangoes are a surprising fruit… so many possible favors! The other day I ate one that was so soft it seemed like it should have been bad, too bruised and battered from its fall off the tree to be worth much. I cut into it anyway. It was as good if not better than any mango I have ever eaten. So fragrant and golden and sweet. Like eating late afternoon sunshine. The accumulation of all the day’s warmth and goodness, melting in my mouth. What a wonderful food!

Most mangoes you buy in America are roughly the same size. Here I’ve eaten ones the size of kiwis and some the size of cantaloupes. The first type to ripen are the small yellow ones that tend to be softer and sweeter. My host family will demolish a bucket of these for breakfast every morning. Then there are the much larger ones that come in various shades of green to yellow to orange (and sometimes red and purple!) and resemble what you’d usually buy in America. Most people seem to consider these the superior variety, although I think all mangoes have their virtues. A third variety is by far my personal favorite though. Outwardly they look like the other large grafted variety, but on the inside they are heaven in fruit form (see previous paragraph). Both the large grafted varieties in their unripe state lend themselves well to a tasty snack that Mandinkas appropriately call “pounded mangoes”. The fruit is cut up and pounded with salt, pepper and sometimes red onion and other spices and its DELICIOUS... and also a little dangerous.

As I wander around village in the mornings I tend to collect mangoes. People are always offering some of their golden bounty to me and I’m happy to take what’s offered, although I admit I often end up with more than I can eat by myself. They see how much I love them and ask, “Do you have these where you come from?” (This is a popular question and since I arrived in village has been applied to everything from black people to the moon). I tell them we buy them from Mexico and this means they are expensive and I don’t eat them often. And besides, they aren’t as tasty because they don’t ripen on the tree! People love to hear that some things are just better in Africa.

I've come to believe that there’s just no way to fully appreciate the range of possible flavors offered by a mango unless you eat it fresh off the tree. For the most part, I’ve gotten pretty good at selecting them, but there is still so much variety, so many factors that keep me from ever knowing exactly what I’m about to cut into. I was so mango-ignorant for so many years! For example: did you know that you can eat the skin? Some people are actually quite allergic and it makes their lips swell up, but if you don’t have that problem or a knife you actually can just bite right into a mango. I’ve added this to my repertoire of mango-eating techniques. I have at least five now and will chose the best one based on the type of mango, size, ripeness, availability of a knife, and how messy I am willing to get. THERE IS NO WAY TO EAT A MANGO WITHOUT GETTING AT LEAST A LITTLE MESSY unless the mango is less than fully ripe and you are peeling it over a bucket of water, washing as you go and who has time for that?! I prefer to act like the greedy primate that I am and tear into my mangoes with savage ferocity and wild appetite. It’s really the only way.

Clearly the work of a mango fairy.

What's new?

As anticipated, getting back to my life in SPB was a fairly easy process, not too much has changed. The hardest part was the logistics of getting there, but even that managed to work out great – three long flights + two long layovers + an all day bus ride = Santa Rosa to Saré Pathé, door to door in approximately 78 hours… not too shabby. Tanko was the first to greet me as I rolled into my compound, but news of my return spread quickly and I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks answering the same series of questions: How are the people of America? How is your mother? And your father? And your siblings? How is your leg? Are you better? May God heal you quickly. Amen!

I'm back to sleeping under the stars, saying “heera” fifty times a day and eating lots of leaf sauce! I’ve returned to SPB as I first saw it – hot, dry, full of cows and mangoes and bamboo home improvement projects. This part of the year there is not much fieldwork to be done so everyone is getting ready for the rains. In my compound this means new fences, new roofs and even new huts! My bush path is back to what it looked like the first time I hiked down it and my backyard is as void of plant life as it was when I first installed (RIP Banana). But despite these superficial reminders of what life was like for me a year ago, I am feeling a distinctive, fresh village vibe these days. A new chapter begins!

Mamadou and Moustapha building a new hut out of bamboo. It will later get a layer of mud (from the dirt displaced by our new latrine!).

My latrine project is well underway (click here for more details!). I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm and urgency with which people are approaching this project and how quickly the work is progressing already. My Care Group is also up and running again, with a couple of solid alternates joining the rotation. This week they have been teaching the village how to make Oral Rehydration Solution and are so wonderfully engaged in the task! I’m hoping to expand these lessons to surrounding villages in the coming months. All in all, I’m unusually busy at site and I love it. I no longer get nervous about calling meetings, I know how to get the help I want when I want it, I know how to ask more of the right questions and I definitely know more of the right answers. My work counterpart had a baby while I was away (I didn’t even know she was pregnant when I left!) and my community counterpart left town, which means I’m a little more on my own these days, which is not a bad thing. When I spoke to Laye on the phone the other day I tried to explain that he doesn’t need to come back to Saré Pathé on my account. As far as I’m concerned he has done his job as my community counterpart – he gave me my introduction – and while I consider him a pal and would enjoy seeing him again soon I’m now at a point where I feel able to find my own work partners and friends in village. It took leaving and coming back to realize just how comfortable I have gotten at site.

Mamadou digging a new latrine in our compound

The other day, while making the greeting rounds I was in a compound that I don’t often visit and asked the name of a baby squirming in the lap of the woman I was greeting. “This is Lamine! You don’t recognize him?!” It was the baby who was born on my first day in village and named for my namesake’s husband who died the same day. He’ll be a year old in a couple weeks. My Peace Corps service measured in terms of human life. Two years is really not so long at all.   

Renewing my commitment

It's been a while since I last posted something; writing too many blog posts for cibylinsenegal from America seems like false advertising, and anyway I haven't had much to say. I imagine most of my readers have had some improved form of contact with me since my injury and fewer are resorting to this venue for news of my life. That being said, I thought it would be appropriate as I near the eve of my return to Africa (and in this moment between two spring holidays about remembrance and new beginnings) to offer some thoughts on my time at home and what has been going on in my absence.

Since being back in California the anniversary of my arrival in Senegal has come and gone. I've now spent more of my service in America than I did in training leading up to it. Sometimes it still feels like I've only been gone a few weeks, but then I remember that a new group of health volunteers have arrived and finished half of their training already. Or I think about something that happened while I was still in DC recovering from surgery and it seems like so long ago. I think about all the that's happened since January - the reunions, the revelations, the renewals, learning to get around on crutches, how to get in and out of the shower, how to carry things while my arms are trying to be legs. Not to mention teaching my bones and muscles and ligaments how to walk and bear weight again. A lot has happened in the last few months. It makes me wonder what would have been had I not gotten in that cab...

I can't imagine too much has changed in SPB since I left almost four months ago (hell, not much has changed there in the last hundred years!); the kids will be a bit bigger and Tanko will be a bit skinnier, but I'll fall back into the swing of things without having to catch up on the new gadgets and movies and viral youtube videos. That's all for my temporary American life... and believe me, the life of an invalid lends itself very well to being caught up on internetting. Not surprisingly my eye has been on West Africa in the news and the status updates of my fellow volunteers. There has been a lot to report. As some of you may know Senegal recently elected a new president, only their fourth since becoming independent in 1960. Despite the anticipation that was built up since my arrival last spring and a few tumultuous moments in between, the election season passed with relative peace and zero upset to the volunteer community. I know for most volunteers the elections were pretty uneventful (maybe disappointingly so), but it would have been interesting to watch the last chapter of that contest play out and hear what people in my village had to say about it. In any case, I watched from afar and privately celebrated the change of regime. I could not be more happy for the people of Senegal or for myself. I think the only thing that could have made my medical evacuation more unpleasant (although I can't say it was all bad) was if I had been told I couldn't come back due to political unrest. I feel for our volunteer neighbors to the east. Because of the recent coup Peace Corps Mali is evacuating volunteers for the first time since the program opened 41 years ago. Knowing first hand how hard it is to abandon your site and your host family I know that what they are going through is incredibly sad and painful. I'm lucky. I get to go back.

Through all of this I've been reminding myself to count my blessings:

1. I am lucky to be alive.
2. I am lucky to have a network of support and love that spans these two continents. Whether at home in Santa Rosa or at home in Sare Pathe, I have family and friends to look out for me and care for me and bring me things to eat.
3. I am lucky to be independent and mobile. It takes great strength of character to stay upbeat while having to depend on others to do for you what you've been able to do for yourself most of your life.
4. I am lucky to work for an organization (however frustratingly bureaucratic) that takes care of its employees - flying me home first class, taking care of my medical needs, insurance...
5. I am lucky to have insurance.
6. I am lucky to come home to a comfortable house in a spectacularly beautiful part of the world.
7. I am lucky to be so eager to go back. I love what I'm doing there. I love my village and my host family so much. I continue to be thrilled with this decision and am grateful not to suffer from the kinds of doubts that have plagued me at other points in my life. It feels so wonderful to know that my heart is in this experience, really and truly.

To humanity,
to the earth,
to our betterment, each of us,
our greatest work.
To renewal!

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.

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.