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.

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!