Abe said, "Man you must be puttin' me on"

I wonder what my host family would think about these irreverent lyrics. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son is no joke to devotees of the religions that claim him as a founding prophet. And yet, in Senegal, as in other Muslim countries I'm sure, the solemnity of the sacrifice is far overshadowed by merriment, mirth and feasting. Tabaski is Senegalese Christmas, the most anticipated holiday of the year and certainly the most expensive. Every family must sacrifice at least one ram to prove their faith, the largest and fanciest (the ones with necklaces and decked out horns) costing hundreds even thousands of dollars. In the weeks leading up to the holiday seasonal ram markets pop up around the cities like Christmas tree lots and you can't travel anywhere without sharing your ride with sheep in rice sacks, hog-tied and hanging over the side of the mini-bus. There's nothing quite like livestock on public transportation to remind me that I live in the third world. The key is to get a seat away from the open windows, unless you prefer a shower of sheep pee to your own sweat.

For most families the ram is just a fraction of the holiday expenditures. Most other expenses have to do with looking good: new clothes, new shoes, new hair! I finally relented. Here is what $12, at least 10 hours of braiding and a year and a half of Mandinka pestering get you:

  This is a favored Senegalese photo pose, but also I am not terribly happy about how heavy and hot all this fake hair is. I took it all out the day after the holiday. Looking this fly comes at a high price.

It was a pretty lean Tabaski this year though, my hair being one of the biggest extravagances. A compound my size should have probably slaughtered 3 or 4 rams; we only had one little one, which was great news for me since I generally hate holiday food... so many good ingredients ruined by bad cuts of badly prepared bad meat. My family thinks I'm crazy, but I'll take leaf sauce over sheep intestines any day of the week. Considering the family financial situation everyone looked really good and seemed to have fun. Here is the highlight of the day (ram gore!):

 Happy Holidays! Or as we say in SPB "Allah maa saloo diyala!"


Click here for some new pictures.

Fili

At the end of my most recent post, and probably several other times over the last year, I’ve mentioned Filijée. Recently, as I contemplate how deeply attached she and I have become I realize how strange it is that most of the people I care about in America will never have the chance to meet this wonderful woman and I wanted to introduce her to you.

This is Filijée Cisée, my person. She’s my host brother Mamadou’s second wife so I can’t really call her my host mom, but that’s how my heart knows her. When I came back to Saré Pathé after 4 months away she was the person I was most excited to see, but she had gone to visit relatives in Ziguenchor. I waited weeks. One afternoon Mamadou got a call from her and announced that she would be back the following Sunday, which was exciting enough news, but then he came over to where I was sitting and whispered “A be naala bii! She’s coming today!”  My heart jumped right out of my chest and I tried to keep my cool the rest of the afternoon and evening, going about my routine with an eye on the entrance to our compound. Every time someone walked by I had butterflies in my stomach, but as night fell I began to wonder if I had heard Mamadou right, if Mamadou had heard Fili right, if she had somehow gotten delayed. It’s always hard to know how long you’re going to wait on somebody in this culture so I decided to go to bed. A couple hours later, half asleep in my backyard, I think I hear a familiar voice. Is that Fili? I wait. It is Fili! I scrambled out from under my mosquito net and into a pair of pants and yanked open the door to my hut with my heart pounding. I hadn’t even stepped out into the compound before she leapt up from the shade structure and was running at me with arms spread wide, clearly just as excited to see me as I was to see her (people in this country do NOT normally hug). We sat and went through the usual greetings, holding hands, trembling, holding back tears. I can’t explain why I got so worked up. I suppose partly it was the anticipation, not knowing when exactly she would be back, but it was very much like the feeling I get when I’m getting off a plane in Oakland or SFO, knowing that as soon as I make it through the terminal and get to the baggage claim someone I love will be waiting to put their arms around me. It’s a wonderful feeling and I’m so blessed to have it on two continents.

The next day at the well a neighbor woman, asking after Fili said “Ila moo naata? Your person came back?” I loved that. My person. It was the first time someone else had acknowledged what must be very obvious to most: that Filijée and I have a special kind of bond that I don’t really have with anyone else here. It has been that way since my first months at site and I’m not entirely sure why. Somehow we just understand each other, even with the chasm of a language gap that is between us; she can tell my mood, get my meaning with a look, guess at what I’m trying to say when my Mandinka vocabulary falls short. The other day we were hanging around the cooking area, watching Bouley’s new wife bungle the dinner she was working on (what kind of a Senegalese woman can’t cook rice?!) and I happened to glance up at her with a smirk, knowing she was thinking the same thing. It was all we could do to repress our giggles. Typical. Filijée and I share a similar sense of humor, or at least she thinks I’m funny which is endearing. And I think she’s funny… goofy in a way that is less common here I think. Exhibit A (Fili photobomb):

She also has a temper. Sometimes it’s hard to watch her discipline her children, two of whom are my favorites among Mamadou’s brood, but I try to remember that tough love is part of the culture. She expects a lot from her children, especially now that she is about to have another and needs help and cooperation from the others. I look at her huge belly and marvel at her strength; at a point in her pregnancy when most American women would be taking time away from the office and preparing for birth she is still carrying water on her head, stooping over her garden to pull weeds and washing laundry by hand every other day. I do what I can to give her some relief, but again, its part of the culture and she doesn’t have much choice but to keep up with the never-ending chores. I feel very protective of her and this baby and want to be there when it comes into the world. Sometimes I wish there was more I could do, that I could bring her to America and she’d never have to wash clothes by hand again, but I know I can’t do that.

She asks about my life there a lot and knows the most about Cibyl and my family than anyone else in Saré Pathé does. It’s nice to have someone acknowledge that there’s more to me than Nafi. She wants to know if my mom is coming to visit and the thought warms my heart because I know it would mean so much to her, and to me for that matter. My American mom and my village mom, face to face! I just feel so lucky to have this person around who gets it and who loves me as much as I love her. My village life would be so lonely without my Fili!

House People Where?

When you greet someone in Mandinka one of the first questions you ask is “sumoolee?” The question is actually a contraction of suwo (house), mool (people) and lee (where); in this language, as in most of the native languages of Senegal, when you ask about how someone’s family is (a must!) what you are really asking is “how are the people of your house?” which is a much more nebulous and fitting question in a culture that defines “family” in much looser terms than we do.

Consider the fact that after more than a year of living with my host family I come to find out that Mamadou is not actually the son of my host father Bouley, but his nephew. How did I not know this for so long? Because in this culture your father’s brother is also your father. In the past when a man died it was his brother’s duty to take responsibility for the wives and children he left behind. While this is not usually the case anymore the uncle/dad equation persists, which is why there are men in this village who insist that I am their daughter and why Mamadou is Bouley’s son even though he’s not.

Logic dictates that if your father’s brother is also your father then his children are not just your cousins, but also your siblings. In fact I almost never hear the word for cousin, people just use the same terms they use for brothers and sisters (which translate to “my younger” or “my older” and might be qualified by gender but often are not). This accounts for the boys in my compound who are as much my host brothers as Mamdou’s children, but have different last names and look nothing like the rest of the family. Cousin-brothers. I have a photograph on my wall of myself with my sister, my mom and my cousin Nicole. When people ask me who she is I say “she’s my older sister, our fathers are brothers,” which often prompts a “Nafi speaks Mandinka!” as I’ve proved that I understand how this stuff works; I find that this exclamation often has more to do with demonstrating some understanding of the culture than it does with any actual language skills.

So does all this mean that your mom’s sister is also your mom? Nope. You only have one mom (Naa), but you may have multiple mothers (baa). When I got to site I only had one host mother, Bouley’s first wife, a sweet old lady who ran off to Dakar not long after my arrival and was gone for almost a year. She is back in Saré Pathé now and still the only person I call “Naa.” I also consider two of Mamadou’s three wives my host moms (the third is younger than me and so more like a sister), but I guess technically they would be... sisters-in-law? cousins-in-law?... Do you see why it takes a year to figure out some of this stuff?! Now, at the age of 75 Bouley has taken another wife (no spring chicken, but still much younger than him) who is also now my “baa.” When I first heard about her I resisted allowing her this role. Other family members would sing “Nafi got a mother, Nafi got a mother!” and I would say “She’s not my mother. My mother is in Dakar,” which got a few laughs but didn’t stop them from using the term. Seyni explained that just as she is mother to her own sons, she is also mother to Taani’s and Filijee’s children because all of them are Mamadou’s. Indeed, when her cowives were both gone Seyni did more than her fair share of parenting.

Seyni is the mother of Mamadou’s youngest child, a baby girl also named Seyni, but after my mom, not hers. My family is under the impression that Chaney is the American version of Seyni (itself a derivative of Hussein) and so they’ve honored my American mother with a namesake. Everyone in Senegal is named after someone else, which makes for a lot of repetition (Mamadou has two sons also named Mamadou), but also a lot of interesting nicknames. A lot of times your nickname will come from your parent’s relationship to your namesake which is how you get babies named “Papa”, “old man” or “little dad”. There are women in my village who call me Binki, meaning auntie, because they are the nieces of my namesake. In the case of baby Seyni, I doubt if many people will ever call her that. Not only would it be too confusing with her mother having the same name, but it wouldn’t do justice to her American namesake. So far I’ve heard people call her Seyni Toubabo (Foreigner), Seyni Amerik, and Nafi Baama (Nafi’s mother), but mostly she’s just Mom. Imagine me holding this little baby while Seyni takes a shower and cooing nonsense at her, these private jokes: “Sshhh, Mom don’t cry… Mom! Did you just pee in my lap?!” It’s too funny!

What is this baby to me? My baby mom... that's something special, but even if she wasn't named after my mother I'd still be stoked about this new addition to the household. I may not be able to tell you exactly what her relationship to me is (host cousin once removed?) but that doesn't matter. If family is "the people of the house" then why bother with all these other terms? Cousins, uncles, even this crazy white girl they've adopted, we all live in Mane kounda, we are all family.

News, vacation, pictures, bikes, critters, friends, the 4th

This morning I was sitting in the office at the regional house, realizing I’m not quite ready to go back to site today (the rainy season has a tendency to throw off my plans), and finding as many ways to rationalize another afternoon in Kolda as I can. Luckily I haven’t written a blog post in almost two months and now have plenty of reporting to catch up on.

Since I last wrote we have welcomed a new group of health volunteers along with a few refugees from Peace Corps Mali. I have a new neighbor 7 km up the road from me and another about 14 km in the same direction which means there is now a line of 5 of us running through Mampatim, each about 7 km from the next. This is quite the population explosion considering that Chelsea and I were the first volunteers in the area just a little over a year ago. Now, we are the senior class, answering questions and offering guidance to the new arrivals, which seems funny to me since I’m still figuring it out too. For instance, right now I’m back to wondering how to keep myself busy at site. Unless you’re an agriculture volunteer rainy season can be a difficult time to get work done; most people are busy working in the fields and don’t have much time or energy to humor me by coming to Care Group meetings. The irony is that there is much more to talk about these days with more injuries, infections and malaria cases than during the rest of the year so I’m hoping to focus my energy on what we call “petites causeries” which basically consist of me giving health advice on a person-to-person basis, on the fly, as issues arise – not the most efficient way to disseminate information, but in some cases the most effective.

Construction projects are also ill advised during rainy season, which is why I am so happy to report that my latrine project is done! You can check out my completion report by clicking here. The last few latrines were finished just in time for the big rains to start and the community is looking forward to a much improved level of sanitation now that every compound has a functional pit latrine, including two compounds adjacent to my own which previously did not. I’m thinking of doing another grant like this one in the fall to put a well at the health hut, so I’ll keep you posted as that idea develops. Until then I’m living the life of a villager, hanging out at the health hut with my pal Fodé and learning about medicinal plants.

In host family news, there is a new baby in my compound! Mamadou’s youngest wife gave birth to a baby girl a few weeks ago. It’s her fourth child and Mamadou’s fourteenth. In Senegal babies are not given a name until they are a week old and since I left village only a few days after the birth I don’t know yet who they named her after. There was a lot of talk of calling her Seyni for my American mom, but the baby’s mother is also named Seyni and it’s extremely unusual for a mother and child to have the same name, which means I might have a little namesake waiting for me when I get back to Saré Pathé. I also recently found out that number fifteen is on the way; my favorite host mom, Filijee, is pregnant with her sixth child, which she says she wants to name after me if it’s a girl. So we may have a baby Nafi in the compound in a few months… or we may have one already…

So where have I been for the last couple weeks if not at site? The beautiful region of Kédougou, that’s where! Every year the volunteer community there hosts a huge Fourth of July party and PCVs from all over the country (and a few from the Gambia) show up to have a BBQ and light fireworks and celebrate America’s birthday with far more enthusiasm than any July 4^th party I’ve ever been to or heard of in the states. People have outrageous costumes made and get decked out in body paint and spangles and flags. There is also a tradition of [a few insane] people from other regions biking to the festivities and this year I was one of them. Unlike most of the country, Kédougou actually does have some hills and I remember looking out of the bus as we climbed some of them on our way to the party last year and thinking “Those bikers are going to have some work to do!” I told myself they were crazy and that I would never be so foolhardy as to attempt to bike to the Fourth... there are plenty of other ways to get there. But somewhere along the way I either forgot how far away Kédougou is, or decided I needed to prove something to myself (and this stiff ankle of mine), or resolved that any discomfort and inconvenience would be overshadowed by the adventure of it. I was right. Over 300 km (that’s about 186 miles) in four days and about half of that in a single day biking through the Niokolo Koba National Park was nothing if not a biking adventure. We saw baboons and warthogs and monkeys, stayed with Peace Corps friends and one very nice Senegalese family. We managed to escape the rain, but not the sun. We became very dirty and sweaty, but usually did not have to remain so for long, and we all made it to Kédougou without serious injury to our bodies or bikes. The ankle held up well and while I’ll probably never again bike 125 km in a single day, I think the extra exercise was good for it and overall it was a great trip.

We arrived in Kédougou a few days before the fourth, took a day to recuperate at the regional house and then continued the adventure by taking a trip to the nearby Ségou and Dindefelo waterfalls. We hiked to Ségou the first day through beautiful jungle terrain, so unlike the rest of Senegal. The waterfall itself was fairly small and unfortunately a rock slide had felled a tree right into the pool at it’s base so we couldn’t do much swimming, but the 7 km hike was lovely and well worth the trip. We stayed that night at a local inn and the next morning biked to the village of Dindefelo and then took a short hike to its waterfall, by far the more spectacular of the two we saw (see video below!).

We spent the next couple days in the city of Kédougou, catching up with friends from other regions and partaking in the fun of the Fourth. It was a great little vacation, but by the 5^th I was tired of camping at the regional house (which is actually a compound, not a house) and was ready to get back to Kolda... Home sweet home! Lots of new pictures from the last few months HERE!

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!