Only a Quarter as Rediculous as I Look

... but then I do look pretty darn rediculous.

Some fun and interesting events of the past couple weeks to give an idea of whats been going on:

I have been observing classes at my primary school, often roped into helping out in unexpected ways. Besides the general sitting and doing nothing, I have been asked to draw things on the board for the students to copy down. These include, a prehistoric man's axe, an airplane, a drum and a banana. Also I have helped teach one little french song which now some of the children sing whenever they see me.

i have done a big village survey, household by household trying to start up a latrine project. So far it is still just getting off the ground, hoping to find some super funding source, or to scale back the project in a way that does not upset people.

Have been helping to peel bissap 'fruit' for drying with my moms and aunts most nights after dinner. Has made for some good bonding time, some interesting disagreements, and my sore caloused fingers. Nearly all that bissap then has been deposited into my back yard to sit in the sun, then taken to town to sell.

Have been helping out in my dads garden. Mostly I have just been the official water puller, filling up my younger brothers watering cans. I did do some weeding and they planted a bunch of eggplant where i had cleared a space. I talked to them about how good it is to water these plants regularly, and cause there are so many of them, trees and okra and eggplant and mango and guava trees, they have certain days where they water certain things, and drag me along when there is a lot of water to be pulled. Usually we all end up tired, wet and caked in silty mud, fun fun.

Walked to a far part of the village to see the chief among other people, a couple little boys, probably 6ish, ran out to walk with me. One had on shorts that were generally clean and only had one hole, only that hole was really big and right at the crotch of his pants. Pantless children are not unusual in my village, it genuinely seems to be more fun to run around, do cartwheels and generally be a kid when such stuffy adult worries are not on them. He didnt seem concerened and I didnt say anything about it. As we walked, we picked up more and more kids into our group, for no real reason, and they all followed me around, facinated whenever I would say something in Serere. Eventually they all wandered off and I brought the two kids back home. When his mom saw him, she started yelling at him for walking around with those shorts on. Other women standing around tried not to chuckle. She asked him where he had walked and when he told her, she yelled 'what?! you went to Ngodagen and back dressed in THAT?' then he ran away and everyone started laughing. Not sure if i was about to get blame passed to me i slowly backed away and went home.

One afternoon a man asked me about Canada, he wants to move there. It is cold, I tell him. Yes, he says, isnt that great! He also asks about Boston and says he has a relative working there, and asks where I am from and how far all of these places are from one another. Do I live near Celine Dion or Michael Jackson? That is too bad, they are great singers. Is it also cold in the US or is it just cold in Canada? Do I own a car? How much was my plane ticket? Lots of lots of questions. It was cool though cause he spoke in a way that made it pretty easy to understand and explained several words and expressions. Cool, just.. odd.

My dad asks me if I am buying a sheep for Tabaski. No, yeah, they are expensive. Getting a new outfit? No, yeah, that is expensive too. Are you going to the little building to pray? No? What, you are not Muslim? I think we have been over this before, like a million times, but it always seems to strike them as new information when i tell them i am not, in fact, Muslim.

And finally, there was one rediculous day where we ate lunch at like 4:40. That did not make any sence to me and since I do not know any serere word for 'late' i was left confused. 'why are we eating now?' - 'it is lunch, we are hungry' duh, of course, oh well.

There should be a Tabaski post at some point, what a crazy holiday that was...

How to Kill a Mouse

Ndiouma Diom's first in a series of how-tos for living in Senegal
-be sure to take notes, this will be on the final
-appologies to animal lovers, Ndiouma is usually not this crazy, and this is the longest post ever
-also, sorry, I really am ok, I just wrote this all out in the middle of the night one night and needed to make a post out of it
-also, i really am only half as crazy as I sound


+Step one- live in a hut with one or more mice. You dont need to go out and find them, they will find you.

+Next, allow yourself to be slowly and helplessly deprived of sleep for several months...

+Despite the small size of the intruders, they will delight in the great amounts of noise they can make frolicking about your room, mere feet from your annoyed head. They will cleverly gather up debris from outside and all your untidy bits you leave carelessly about inside: bottle caps, loose change, bits of metal, glass or shell, scraps of paper, clothespins, keys, thumbtacks and even nail clippers. Once collected, they will wait until you are at the very threshold of sleep, where sounds become nearly surreal and lost in your own head, when even the crickets (who have also moved in,) have almost been turned into the white-noise of night. When you are discovered in this state, they will chew on and bang these items together in one of the corners of the thatch where they nest. There favorite used to be right over your head, but graciously they have moved much of their oporation to the corner at your feet. Still, this does not amuse you.

+A few, seemingly inconsequential details: As it happens, you filled up the little plastic trash bag outside and have not had time to find another to stuff your sticky jolly rancher wrappers into and instead you choose to stuff them in a tin can. It is a chilly evening and likely to be a cold night so you get your sweater out of your clothes trunk. It is the bottom one of your two trunks, the clothes one is a lighter, tin box with thin wooden slats on the bottom. Your food trunk is heavier, sitting on top of the other one, made of thick cast metal with a good seal as to keep out bugs. After two recent care-packages and a trip to the grocery, it is briming with deliciousness.

+The mouse chews a chunk out of the eye-dropper you use to bleach your drinking water. Luckily you happen to have a spare and the bottle is relocated inside your dresser. The dresser has a single-piece plywood back and should rest flush with the walls in the corner it is in. Heat, humidity, age or maybe just poor craftmanship have made the back warped such that there is a permenent space between it and the wall. A perfect hideout for all sorts of hut critters. Push on the top front of the dresser and it will rock back and forth again, annoying, but not squashing, what hides behind. The little can of candy trash is put on the floor next to the trunks.

+You are generally a lover of all things nature. In fact, you cannot think of a time when you directly caused the death of anything above the arthropod kingdom. Maybe a few fish on various summer trips with grandpa camping. Keep you awake countless times for countless nights, leave poop on everything left in the open, chew your stuff, hide your stuff and screw with your ability to purify water, then soon someone will indeed find themselves in a world of pain.

+Nearly a month ago, your host dad bought you some poison for the mouse problem. You had entertained guests for nearly a week and the mice had not entertained them in the slightest. You were all kept awake by frequent and noisy late-night shenanigans. The poison came in the form of a few small white capsuels. Your dad put them in a little cup of water, broke each one open, stirred it and put it on the floor in the corner by the dresser. 'Soon it will die,' he said confidently. That was nearly a month ago. While it may have killed some deserving roaches the size of band-aids, there has been no evidence that it made any impact on the local rodentia.

+You wake up numerous times a night, every night, to the mouse doing his best impression of a marching band around the top of the walls of your hut below the thatch. Shine your flashlight, make noise, slap the walls in the hopes of scaring it away so you can get a little more sleep without having to get up and untuck your mosquito net. The mouse seems to know your threats are empty when made from under the net and you are lucky if it even gives the mouse pause. Inevitably, you wind up draging yourself up and out of the net, reaching for the blunted stick you keep over the door for mouse pumeling, stomping angerly to the area of noise and beating, scrapeing and stabing at the gap over the wall. The mouse scampers away, presumably unharmed, its nest disturbed, You find your keys and go back to bed. The room is quiet untill the mouse calls your blugg, finds a plastic bottle cap and goes back to his fun. Rince and repeat.

+Mice have other enemies here besides you. The former volunteer had a few cats. At the mention or sight of the cats, your family will lament 'he should have taken them to America.' Your family, in fact, seems to generally despise them. They do have some advocates. When she was cleaning up leftovers from a lunch bowl, you asked your aunt what she would do with the remaining fish bones and scraps of vegetables (who eats eggplant anyway?). She said she was throwing them to the cats and they sat nearby, eagerly awaiting their turn. Other than leftovers, it is unclear what they eat on a daily basis. They are all quite thin yet have defined taught muscles and seem constantly on the prowl. You once saw one pounce on something near your hut one day. Trying to stay casual, you snuck a look at what the cat was playing with between its paws, letting go briefly and pouncing again. You hoped so much it was a mouse, your mouse, give the other mice something to think about. It was a lizard. A stupid, bug eating, sleeps all night quietly lizard. Stupid cat. There are also snakes out and about. From your amateur estimation, most are the non-threatening kind in and around the compound. While other types have been seen in the fields, nearby you have only seen thin brown and yellow ones, usually two or three feet long. The perfect size for eating a mouse. One even probed through your thatch one day but only found you eating lunch. Confused or bored it went back from wherever it came. Of the dozen or so that you have seen, they seem to generally only be interested in frogs. Perhaps now that the rains have been long over and 'frog season' is closing, their appitites will adjust.

+On this night the mouse is doing his darndest to keep you up. Your hand is sore from beating the stick against cement, your knuckles are red and irritated from repeatedly tucking and retucking the mosquito net. Around 4am you hear a leap to the floor. Note: his first mistake. The plastic floor covering on cement makes a sound one would expect from, say, a stampeding racoon or perhaps a very excited and rather confused baby sealion that found its way into your room and is desperately looking for a glass of water or a sardine. This is not the most amusing sound.

+When down from the roof, under my bed is an obvious hudung place: away from my flashlight, it is close but then out of your easy reach. Not much down there, but some cardboard and paper are always fun to play with. Behind the dresser is always a good base, with a few crawls and leaps one can scale to the top and be out over the thatch in no time. You have been keeping your trunks pushed up against the wall and the side of the dresser to discourage further hiding places and avenues of escape. This night though, when you got your sweater out, you left the trunks about an inch from the wall. You concider pushing them back on one of your trips in the night to the bathroom or to play tag with the mouse, but part of a plan forms in your head instead.

+The water in the cup of poison had evaporated, actually it had nearly evaporated twice. You figure the potent chemical part probably should still be in there so you refilled it again with water, twice. You place it in various high traffic areas, on the corner of the dresser and above the doors. You have seen no sign that it has ever done anything, hopefully it did not aerate and imbed in your lungs.

+At 5am, the judgement hour. The mouse is playing with the edge of the tin can with the candy wrappers. You slowly sit up, not sure between him and the malaria meds if you had closed your eyes for more than ten seconds that night. You flip on the flashlight and in the time it takes for your eyes to adjust, he scurries a little and is out of sight. You sit and wait, the wind-up flashlight getting dimmer by the second, your eye lids heavy and you are fed up. You stare out, still and quiet. Then, the mouse makes his second mistake. His nose pops out from behind the trunk, then his whole head as he peaks at you, then back to his nose again. Your cue.

+You had texted your friend, another volunteer in Mbour, about taking care of such things in the week before your dad bought the poison. She listed many avaliable options: poisons, glues, traps for both live capture or the traditional kind, all avaliable in various styles, colors and (for the posisons) various killing intensities. As you prefer not to deal with bodies, live or dead... or stuck, you thought poison would be best. While you do swing the stick with intention of bodily harm in the dark of night, in the light of day you like to think of yourself as not one who would smash the life out of something in cold blood. After innumerable sleepless nights, you think you are allowed a little licence.

+With all the stealth that you can muster at 5am, you pull up the net and step out onto the floor in one motion. In one stride you are out across the room and in a crouch before the trunks. You left the flashlight on lying on the bed. Light through the net gives you an odd large shadow against the wall. All that is left is mistake number three.

+Rodents you have had in my hut come in a variety of fun flavors. The legendary Scampers came into your room at least once, through the back door you had left open because of the heat that suffocated even at night. He is likely too big to come in otherwise. Scampers, in fact, has his own exciting and dramatic story you meant to have posted here months ago. To give an idea of his size, when you first caught a glipse of him, your mind jumped to opposomn or maybe a fat housecat. You have also had a bats in your hut on a few occasions, the small, bug catching kind, probably mid-size when it comes to the bat population on the whole. Most of the time though, your hut is occupied with mice of the tiny kind, fieldmice, like brown furry ping-pong balls. How it is possible for things so small to make so much noise, you will never understand.

+At this point, all the mouse has to do is move. It can either dart to the trash, not a great move, but it could hide temporarily behind the other empty cans there or the bricks holding up my water filter; Or, its safest bet, it can run the few feet across the back of the trunk and behind the dresser. You hope it is too smug to do either and place your hands low on either side of the front of the clothes trunk. And shove, hard. Remember to breath.

+Stand up, verify that it is flush with the wall on both sides with a few prods and a kick. Lay back down in bed, fairly sure you have accomplished nothing.

+Did I mention the mephloquine? For nearly nine months now you have been on a once a week malaria prophylaxis. The most noteworthy complaint is that it causes some insomnia, just what you need, and also vivid dreams, that while often facinating, lead to rather unrestful sleep. It is often worse on the night after taking the pill, which, as it happens, is tonight, and now thirteen or fourteen hours later you know further sleep is out of the question. While you think you are spared any other symptoms, for the record, they include mild hallucinations, anxiety and feeling generally like you are flipping out.

+When you lie down you dont even bother with the mosquito net, you know you are getting back up, you just want a little air. Seconds go by and you begin to hear irregular scratches against the floor and side of the tin box. It is possible, you think, if this mouse is small enough, it could be squeezing into the centemeter of space under the trunk. You stand again, slowly winding your flashlight, crossing the room. You click it on, quickly drag one corner of the trunk a few inches from the wall. Mouse. Slam it back again against the wall. You stand for a moment, then examine the trunk, both back corners are indeed nearly flush with the wall. You straighten up again awkwardly in the middle of the room. You concider attempting to capture it somehow, in a can or under a bucket to deal with it in the morning, but you realize it is probably fairly stuck where it is. Together the trunks surely weigh mroe than 30kg. Then you notice that he frantic scratching has stopped. For a moment your feet forget which way they should go, the bed is so close but now you are curious. You slide the trunk forward again a few inches. The mouse is slightly longer than your palm, not including the tail, larger than the usual mice. It is flat up against the wall, sideways, legs stretched out. Gravity slowly peals its back off the wall. You think, something better saved for the morning.

+The room is unusually quiet as you lie down again. Even the crickets seem to be taking a refrain. Quiet, but then, of course, you still cant sleep. You try reading but come to realize that the paragraph you are reading over and over is the same paragraph you read over and over last night. The wind is stirring up a surprising number of large dead leaves outside and the horse has an itch or else is repeatedly dozing off and sliping against the stick fence outside your back door.

+Morning does come and you do feel as rested as you ever are here. You show off the dead mouse to your younger brother who says yes, it is very nice, now kindly throw it away. You should have taken a picture, but thinking clearly is not one of your finest morning qualities.

+The next night is beautifully silent, as is the night after that. The third night, some other mice in the neighborhood noticed the vacancy and couldnt stand that such good real estate go to waste. Perhaps you can refine and build off this method... or just get yourself a real mousetrap from Mbour. You hope your friends can forgive you for haveing gone completely crazy...

Toubabs Everywhere You Look

Gosh, a bunch has hapened the past three weeks, maybe I can skim the highlights:

School finally began at my village primary school around the end of October with several spurts and stutters. Now they are actually, kinda, holding classes. However, there were so many strikes and lost days last year, they have to do 2 months of review and finish up last years classes. So three of the classes are being held back this way, the oldest class left to middle school, and now my principle has a class of equivelent 1st graders.

I went up to St. Louis for halloween. It is a costal city up north, past Dakar. A small gathering of other volunteers was also there and in general I had a good time. The beach was beautiful and windy, the city was nice and had good restaurants, and best of all, it was COLD!

Back at site, the first full week of November I was fortunate to host two american exchange students who were studying in Dakar for the semester, and had week long rural visits. The two girls I hosted were cool and I felt actually sorta competent in Serere translating for them and showing them around the various exciting areas of the village.

On that tuesday we went and helped out in the local health hut with the nun that comes weekly to give out medicine. I hadent really been in the hut before to help out cause i figured the little french woman would want privacy, but it was pretty interesting. Most of the cases were apparently malaria.

Also on tuesday, that evening the neiboring families all through togther a dance circle with druming, some singing and lots of confusion, very fun. After, we crashed in my hut and tuned in for hourly election results on my shortwave on the bbc. They were pretty tired but I caught some early state predictions through 200+ electoral votes, to the consession speech and then most of the acceptance speech. Needless to say, I didnt actually sleep much that night. The mice also decided to have parties everynight, keeping us all up, but with the help of my dad, their fun may be over soon. The rest of the week we were all very excited about the Obama win and many of the villagers congradulated us too.

Also, through this week and all of this past one, there have been french people in my village every morning. I think it is some kind of french aid-service thingy, but about a dozen, mostly young, very pale, french men were in the village helping to build a wall around the kindergarden's yard, also encompasing the church and the health hut and the big gnarly shade tree. I tried to stay out of their hair for thier african-experience, and really i guess they did a pretty good job of it.

On Saturday, the students wanted to go and see joal before going back to dakar and i went too as I hadnt really had the oportunity to spend time down there yet. Joal is about 40km south of me on the coast and we toured the island of Fadiouth, which is made out of shells and is home to many serere speakers. That day we also saw the french group again also on tour of the island.

This week I have spent more time observing and helping classes in the school. I took a 2 day trip to Mbour though to help work in the garden of the urban-ag volunteer who is based here. Another PCV came down from dakar and the three of us got Jen's garden looking not too bad for two days of work.

Now, this weekend is mbour time again, a couple of birthdays is a good ocasion to get volunteers together and perhaps there will be pizza and cake somwhere in these two days.

My next big trip is to go up north for thanksgiving, they say the desert is cooling dow up there so maybe it will not feel like a summer feast.

Boo o pam!

Befores and Afters

Ok, not really a legitimate post but that can come at a later date. in the meantime some village before and after images:

May 13, 2008 : day after install

August 1, 2008 : before leaving for IST

August 28, 2008 : upon returning from IST

September 24, 2008 : regained some control over my yard

May 30, 2008 : Big ole tree up north of the village

September 5, 2008 : Fields of millet, beans and peanut

May 30, 2008 : unplanted church fields next to the kindergarden

September 22, 2008 : church group planted beans

May 30, 2008 : Looking west next to primary school

September 22, 2008 : watermelons and weeds

A Week, Mostly the Same, Mostly Different

First off, i wanna say howdy to those who actually are reading this blog, i feel like i have been useing it too much to keep myself sane and not really thinking about those on the outside who are just getting their picture of me, senegal and my service from this little, quickly and rarely written in and poorly thought through journal of my life in the past few months. I really just noticed that there have been comments on my entries and i have failed to reply to them or anything so in the future i will try to be more observant. Feel free to send me any questions or comments or anything about anything. i swear, i get to a cyber and my mind goes blank for anything actually reasonable to put down, that and the power is always going out. anyway, on with the entry:





I thought i would give, as best i could, an account of the events of this past week. It has not been a typical week for me, though at the same time, there has not really been any 'typical week', since i have been here, constant adventures and all, so i thought it would be entertaining at least to write it all down. I think i may end up writing an awful lot, but this is certainly not even close to all the entertaining, frustrating, boring, busy, ordinary and rediculous things that i did ove the course of those days.





Sunday- after taking my time to get up, i had breakfast in my hut, cereal and a two month old newsweek magazine, i made my way out to the spot that i have found my self going to again and again in the village. It is a few ancient logs and a big concrete stone arranged under a relatively small neem tree out in the middle of the village central, what could be called 'the village square' if i were in a silly mood, an area of cleared sandy flat ground in amonst two of our big baobab trees. It being sunday is of no consequence to anyone but the catholics of course so most people were already out in the fields harvesting millet, or else at the church. This left a group of late teen to early twentys-ish boys, sitting under the trees with me. As i could have expected with the group the conversation went from the names of objects that they happened to be holding, to teaching me the names for all the body parts they could think of, and urged me to give them the english versions. not my favorite game in the world, but i dutifully wrote everything down on my serere writing pad i keep with me, much to their delight. In the afternoon i was sent out to go harvest with some of my brothers who had left earlier. It is amazing how lost one can get in a millet field, and how evidently allergic i am to everything in said millet field.





Monday- The 'first day of school'. I got to the my primary school just about 8 when it was supposed to begin, some students were sitting out front and a door to one class was open. Inside i found the school principal busy in a notebook with something. He pulled out a chair and suggested i sit outside, sure. At this point i dont yet have any 'work' to do but i am supposed to be building a rapport with the teachers, seeing how they do things, help with what i can and observe and understand whata good place for myself and the projects i hope to do. Eventually some of the kids went in too, helped him straighten out the classroom, swept the floor and whatnot, and then he joined me outside. Another teacher came at about this time and he had gone into his classroom, organized some things and left again. Clearly, no class would be held today, the children had all gone off elsewhere as well. A couple village fathers came up and talked with the principal for a while and i listened in, mostly just talking about who will be in what class, how old kids are, why certain ones were held back, and eventually they left. The principal left by 11 and I decided to walk a small loop around the village to see what other folks were up to. I found a group of mostly the church group older guys sitting around the big tree in a recently cleared and burned and raked field by the church. Horse carts, or sarets, were bringing up loads of sand and dumping them next to the cleared space. Whats going on, i ask. A chicken coup, they say. Right. Sitting with them for a few minutes and we go from words for how to say things carried by cart, to things carried by head - 'rohandoox', to things carried by hand - 'seetoox', to things carried on ones shoulder - 'gondoox', to then unexpctedly and without provication into names for certain body parts again, for the second time in as many days, whatever. I go along and write them all down again, the old men think it is possibly the funniest thing ever, and well, maybe it is. A little after noon, as i am getting ready to head back for my mid-day bath, a series of police motorcycles roll by, slowly, along the big road bordering the village. Then two bicycles with racers, and about a minute later, a whole pack of bicycle racers followed by their whole motocade of support vehicles and film crews. Then all the traffic that was backed up from the race, and then, a few minutes later, a lone cyclist trying to catch up, clearly not having a good day. I dont know the serere word for 'that was odd' but i sure wanted to say it about then, wierd. I am sure those with news and internet time could probably have told me what was going on.



Tuesday- Back to school in the morning, to find the principal and one other teacher, a different one than from monday. They busied them selves with some organizing, cleaning type stuff, i offered to help but ended up just sitting outside again playing with the kids. I tried to make small talk with the principal, something i still have not mastered in serere. at one point i tried to ask how ramadan went and i got a mini rant on teachers strikes, right. They left again by 10 and I was back to the village center to chat with the old guys, as is my usual. After lunch they asked me for two things, I bought tea and sugar for the men who help me everyday with serere and we had three rounds while i took out my national geographic world map that i found in my hut when i moved in. People ask me all the time, which way is america (they often point east when the refer to it), whether america is next to the ocean, how far i grew up from new york and where is the capitol of america, and what exactly a north and south and latin america are and if they are all one country. One of the first and loudest comments by many of the men was 'geke a ref senegal? ahh, kaa neew!' -that is senegal, it is so small! I said it is only a little small and it is really nice. then they had me name surrounding countries and continents and point out any places that they had heard of, pretty much new york, the u.s., france, spain, russia and japan. They were impressed that america has TWO oceans, neat, you must eat lots of fish, eh? After this, the men dispersed and I went over to a group of compounds that is always a source of entertainment. After a little while, i pulled out my frisbee and had a quick impromptu three way throwing game with a kid who is a bit goofy and always laughing, and a kid who is deaf but always very intent on communicating with me. The deaf kid ended up being better at the game then either of us, and i dont think he had ever thrown a frisbee before.



Wednesday- I was told at some point earlier that week that on wednesday the first lady, President Wade's wife, would be comming to sandiara, the town 5km east of me. That morning it had drizzled and everything was dewy and i got up early in hopes to leave with my dad, but he left before i could finish my breakfast, and my younger mom and aunt asked me to wait for them so we could all go together. Before we left i went and greeted the principal who was sitting outside the school by himself. Supposedly, the school should start up next week, he says. In sandiara, i quickly find out that there is a new middle school opening, and it is a dedication ceremony, beyond that, i am still not sure what was going on. Some speeches, some music, some dancing, some award or prize giving to students with paticular achievements that i did not quite catch, and a variety of other... stuff... that day could be its own long entry and this one is already pretty long. Needless to say, i was not aware before going that the first lady of senegal was a little old white french lady, but the senegalese seem to love her. In the evening big dark clouds rolled in from the east threatening rain that we havent had for over two weeks, but like the village has some kind of repulsion field the clouds split above us and in the evening the stars come out over head while lighning flashes both to the north and to the south. I go to bed fearing that the rainy season is really over for good, just when i was getting used to it, but then is promptly pours for a couple hours that night.

Thursday- I wait for a while for anyone to come, and i think maybe no one will. The principal in out buying class materials for the kids that i think maybe he recieves somehow or maybe it is jst the village that gives him the money. Eventually a teacher comes opens his class and kids go in, i follow and sit in the back. My french really sucks at this point and my wolof is not much better, but essentially he had the older kids and was going over who was in what class and why and how old everyone was and what materials they needed and what the school schedule was going to be. It wasnt really a class, just an info session, and i spent much of the time smashing these infuriating stinging insects that dont really have any equivilent that i know of in the states. The session lasts just over an hour and afterward i headed to sit with the men again who tell me that i missed out on a big group harvesting thing that morning where a bunch of people all got together and helped clear a large area of millet field. I guess i am sad i missed that though the school thing was important too and i probably wouldnt have been that much help in the harvesting, i understand the technique, i am just several times slower than everyone else at it.

Friday- Get up to the village super foggy, like visibility of 100 meters foggy, very cool. almost think to put on a long sleve shirt for the day if it will be even a little chilly for a while. with no sence of humor, the sun burns its way through in a hurry and the day was blazingly hot and not a llittle humid, gross. Wait at the school for a long time and almost decide that no one is coming before the principal shows up with a group of kids in toe helfting the notebookds and things he had bought in a rice sack. I sit with him for a while again, get the word for foggy in serere- 'kaa lima', and he gives out some pieces of chalk to a group of excited giggling girls, probably 7-8ish who precede to mark up any surface they can find with designs. save it for class, he says, but we both know that they probably wont. Classes start on monday, he assures me. After a leasurly lunch-time break, i go back out to the 'square' armed with my frisbee, hoping to stir up some trouble. Not many people out but a few very young kids. try to teach them to throw and catch which is very entertaining. the disc poseses some kind of magical properties that make them scream whenever it is in the air or on the ground or flying at them or after they have thrown it. it is like i have taught them to hurl lightning bolts, only they dont see it as the least bit dangerous, and before i repeatedly demonstrated the flying ability, they insisted on standing perhaps two or three feet from me, often smacking me or one of the other kids in the face while trying to throw it and everyone erupts into laughter as they chase it and try again. Pretty hysterical. Soon, some older kids come along to monoploize the game and it ends up with me running around barefoot throwing back and forth to two or three other kids who are pretty quick learners. How to teach them a game like ultimate though, well that may be beyond my abilities, maybe in a year.

Saturday- and that bring us to today. lets see, slept-in, well, got up at 740, basically sleeping in but the frog army that storms my room each morning makes it hard to actually sleep past 7. leasurly breakfast of cereal and a month and a half old newsweek magazine. then hopped an alham, big scarry mercedes busses several decades old, and got to mbour this morning and have been interneting my time away right here. oh and had lunch, yassa poulet- chicken in an onion sauce over rice and a couple sprites, refreshing.

Gosh, that really isnt even the half of what all happend this week, but i guess those are the highlights, the rest will find its way into other journals or letters or things here and there. I think i may add a list of things or two to the sidebar of this blog, so look out!

Njookanyong!

October, ...already?

I dont think i have ever sat down and written everything that I have wanted to in an email or blog entry since comming to this country. Oh well, such is senegal, with a little luck i can get through this one here today.

Ramadan went, and it was ok. It is nice now that things are reutrning to thier 'usual' rhythm, not that there was ever really a pattern to the days. Like i had said before, I fasted for three days, not really anything crazy, the people in the village either thought it was good or they just didnt understand why I was doing it in the first place, or they often thought both at the same time. Otherwise, I had lunch on my own mostly, or with the kids and folks not fasting and didnt really do much.

The millet harvest has begun gradually. I went out with my brothers one day and it was really cool out in the fields with them and cutting millet candles from the stalks until my body gradually informed me that I was, in fact, allergic to something, no, everything that was in that field. I went out in the morning and the afternoon, had nice cool baths after each, sneezed my head off all day, my arms and hands were red and itchy. After dinner I had a benadryll and passed out.

I also have gone out to pick beans with my mom and aunt. That was pretty fun too and a good bonding moment with them. I am, as a matter of fact, not allergic to much in the bean fields, but my nose likes to run for fun anyway. While out there a couple peanut plants had been uprooted so we helped ourselves to the raw, fresh, moist peanuts. They taste and have a texture kinda like water chestnuts at that point, but they were a cute treat. The official peanut harvest doesnt begin for a little while yet and i am just trying to help with what i can, trying to learn as much as i can about the daily life month by month of the people of Louly.

Then Korite was last week, after the fast had ended. My family wanted me to dress up nicely so I ended up wearing my sabador (big fancy green outfit hangning next to my door in picture in my hut), but then once i was out and about, not really anyone else was wearing anything nearly as special. I guess the sereres are just too chill. I mean, dont get me wrong, they were not in just any old dirtly clothes, ;ostly clean t shirts and pants with only a few holes, i just kinda felt even more awkward than usual. The food was good though, the first time i have had chicken in the village, and it was a pretty fun day.

The next day was a funeral though in Mbour and so, dressed again in my fancy outfit i went out to sit awkwardly again, but at least with people just as dressed up as me. The guy who had died was a great-uncle of mine and they say he was around 100 years old. Also, his father's name was the same as my senegalese name, Ndiouma, so the constant joke around me was that my son had died and i should be more upset and go see the burial at the cemetery. I thought that was a bit much, but i offered my concolences and made small talk as best i could and made it back home in one piece.

Since then, only mild craziness in the village this weekend. I introduced the children to my frisbee, which has gotten the name 'ndig kaga', simply meaning 'that thing'. The older kids mostly think it is silly and takes away from valuable football time, the younger kids think it is hilarious and love to imitate the silly things that i do. I cant really kick a soccerball straight to save my life so i feel it could be a worthwile alternative. Then, at the summit of the random mountain, a group of students doing an exchange program in dakar came to stay in my village, at my house even, for the weekend. Most were senegalese students but two who came were americans. While they were supposed to be in a 'french emmersion' i was able to steal time with them to speak in english. They were really cool and it was an interesting diversion in the village and to some extent i got to help show them around and talk to them about life in rural senegal. We also had really good food in the village, and even a drum-dance thingy on saturday night that was really fun.

Gosh, well now, school is about to start next monday and i am getting started on some potential community projects - latrines may be a highlight in my future- and i am also starting in on a serere dictionary -so far over 200 verbs and the nouns are presenting many a challenge. It is still hot here, but the evenings have been noticably cool as made evidence by the lack of sweat-soaked sheets. Rains and winds and weeds and bugs glalore. I remain generally healthy and serere is gradually getting easier. French and wolof are whole other stories though. No dice.

well, i made it a whole two hours and no power outage, yay!
Peace.

Well, lets see, whats been going on in Louly...



Well Ramadan is still in full swing. I hadent planned on it but I decided that I would go ahead with what my family and my village asked repeatedly, following the example of the all powerful Latyr and see how fasting goes for a few days. I started thinking it would just be for the day but then ended up making an over the weekend three day thing. I made up my mind that I was not doing it because latyr did it, and according to my village, so did his visiting grandparents. I was not doing it even just because they kept asking me why i wasnt everyday. i was doing it for myself. and because it is what is on peoples minds right now and having a better understanding of one small aspect of the crazy things that seem to happen in my village might make other things easier. also it is a good conversation point and i am trying to develope my serere conversation skills. but mostly i was doing it for my own self and as a test of my own will.



Not that three days is really any big thing, and i just sat around each day under the baobabs with the other fasting older men and catholics too.

POWER OUTAGE! Auto-saving and backdating to the rescue!

Inwe Maufka Soom?

Well its the rainy season here in Louly all right. That means all kinds of fun things.

The rain only cools things off a little for the period immediately following the storm and then it is just as hot and now super humid. There seem to be weeds growing out of anything that they can find to grow on. All the standing water makes it a great time for the mosquitos. Clothes, fabric and my whole hut seem to be molding into a gross smelling mush. The winds that come with the hardest rains knocked down my fences and pushed over some of my trees, twice. My village seems to have all manner of reptile and amphibial life that seems to simply spring out of the ground when it rains (as the villagers verify). Also this is the month of Ramadan and that means about half of my village is fasting durring the day, making them cranky, tired and appear to be going through caffeen withdrawl from lack of tea. I am not really sure what if anything that i can do useful this month.

That being said, it is good to be back in the village. While school starts next month, I dont really feel I have much super productive to do till then. I have helped people farm a few times now and after that and the weeds in my backyard, I am fairly tanned and my hands are fairly rough and blistered. As my village is about a third Catholic, I have been trying to hang out with them lately, qs they drink tea durring the day, promise to make me lunch one of these days, and dont continually ask me why i am not fasting.

I have concidered it, and i may try to fast for a day or more at some point this month. It just doesnt feel like it would be something that would do anything positive or form better relations with people in my village. They know i am not muslim, as others in the village are as well and as i dont pray or do anything else like they do i dont see what the point would be. other volunteers do it and they say that they bond better with thier families... i guess i will see and weigh it out. i just also feel like it would be a bad move to not drink water for an entire day and still do stuff. or i should just do nothing all day, and feel unproductive and even worse. i guess its just one of the many things i gotta get a better handle on.

geez, never enough time to do anything at these cybers.

The Return of Souleye

Back at my site again, well i will be when i am done in this cyber cafe. IST was roughly what i expected it to be i guess though with many surprises.

Finishing assesments right before i left back to thies was a bit stressful and hectic, though i think what i managed to understand about my site will be immensly helpful to me in my next two years. Going back to training was kinda weird and it was an odd transition for many people after being on our own schedules and into our own routienes to be put back into the madness that is the training schedule in thies. I suppose i can do some highlights from those three weeks. Seeing all of our training stage again was really cool and it was amazing how much some people had changed and our language ability had grown and all the stories that people had already. Then it was really cool getting to go back to my old homestay family again in Mbambara, the village 19km outside thies where i stayed durring PST. They were so happy to see me and it was an amazing self esteem boost going back there, able to have somewhat actual conversations, and them being so amazed by my serere. they would tell me i can speak serere like a professor. i am not that good but it felt really nice to hear it from them. I also went back to being Souleye again after being Ndiouma for three months at my site. Souleye Gningue is a much more cheerful optomistic person than Ndiouma Diome was in those months in Louly.

In our tech classes that were supposed to be the emphasis of our In-Service Training, i do feel i learned a marginal amount, and with a ton of books and binders i should be able to figure out how to actually get something done in my village. We did go to the Bandia wildlife preserve which is really not too far from Louly (possibly a field trip site with my school). the park had ostrich, many species of antelope, warthog, girrafe and rhino, amoung other animals. while i previously never really liked the idea of a safari (it just feels like it is trivializing the environment), it zas actually really cool and would be a good place for kids to learn about ecosystems and the environment. We also went and out planted trees out in a large field between mbour and joal. that was really nice to get some reall hands on field experience demonstrating many problems that exist in trying to transplant trees.

I got some language training in wolof too. kinda a quick survey of the grammar and the verb structures, but it is enough to really understand most short conversations and it is easier by far to pick up than serere was.

After training was over we had a celbration in Mbour, which was not too bad, and then there was an Environmental Education summit in Dakar. I had signed up for a homestay there with a cool american family but then ended up getting a couple rooms in a fairly nice reasonable hotel (by my standards) with five other volunteers. I felt the summit was very helpful to me and others in our stage though perhaps the older volunteers did not find it quite as useful.

Back to Louly Ngogom then. A good friend and health volunteer of the north, Marisa, came and visited my site for a few days. My village is really pretty with the rains. the fields are all green, the trees look happy, the skys are clearer of dust, the clouds and sunsets are amazing. Also my backyard was full of weeds up to my chest. Just three weeks and it is amazing how nature emerges from the sand. also my bed sheets were covered in mold from the humidity, super gross. It was a nice few days and we only got rained on a few times. i need to finish weeding my yard and patch my roof a little. Marisa left for the Fouta this morning and now i am back to site freal. Still not sure what i am even doing yet, at least till school starts.

Oh right, also have pictures up in a link to the right!

Kaam Jalaa Ndank oo Ndank

IST now looms barely more than a week away. That means retrning to Thies for three weeks of additional language and technical training. I hope to get a small handle on some wolof vocabulary and, importantly, figure out just what it is that i can technically do. Inshallah.

This past couple weeks has seen me somewhat productive. I had made a very small pepineer (tree nursury) behind my hut with thirty-five bags to plant in. As of this morning, I have all seven nebedaye (nutriious plant of a billion uses) about a foot and a half high, thirteen of my twenty mangos are up and growing strong (thank you david!), (though my backyard friend 'scampers' or possibly a giant angry rat bit off the top of one of the mango sprouts and it hasnt recovered), four of my six lemons have come up, and my two maad (sour-patch-kids tasty fruit with ugly exterior) are starting to emerge from the soil. (I would have had one more mango but my backyard friend 'scampers' or possibly a giant angry rat bit off the top of one of the sprouts and the stem hasnt recovered, I put a couple of lemon seeds in next to it in case the mango is done for.) I know that a bunch of people in the village already have some of these trees or they have pepineers of thier own in their gardens or resting above their chicken coups. However, some people have expressed varying interest in some of them though it is clear they figured I would have had many more than I do. Well, next year, when i have an actual good head start on the rainey season I plan on haveing a nice big ole nursury, filling a corner of my yard space, next year. This year though, as the trees get big enough, i guess i will start gifting them out to folks, hopefully in some kinda orderly fashion. It sucks that I am going to be away from my village for three weeks cause i wont get to take care of them though with the rains they should, i hope, could possibly survive anyhow...

My community assesments have been coming along in spurts and stalls, but gradually I am conecting dots and figuing things out. There seem to be like a million NGOs working in and around my village. One that gives out money for the villagers to buy peanuts, one that owns annd helps maintain a huge garden in the center of the village, one that gives mosquito nets to school children, at least one that pays for additions on the schools, latrines and gives out money and medicine, two more own a garden and a tree nursury to the south west of the village (the tree nursury place has a billion trees and, no joke, at least 2000 seedlings in bags), and there is another group that is doing health education in the village that I have been helping out with. I am sure there are more that I havent yet discovered the funcion of yet but that will reveal themselves. There also are a variety of groups within the village doing farming and agricultural activities.

While of course I feel all of this is amazing, fantastic for the people in my community and for the health of the environment, I do have this nagging feeling that I am just a redundant actor, repeating the same lines that have already been said, are already being said, and that will continue with or without any of my imput. I guess on the optomistic side that leaves me to branch into neglected areas and expand on awareness and do more to actually correct problems people are already thinking about. Not that that makes any of this any easier though.

Ooh, on a different note, I have to talk a little about how cool yesterday was. So yesterday I came into Mbour also, actually yesterday was my second day in a row here making this the third, but that is because I dont plan ahead well and the first trip was more of just a waste of a morning. Anyway, so i walk out to the street from my village and it usually takes me a little while to get a bus into town but like in two seconds an alham pulls up and it is almost empty, which i would say is rather unusual from the ones i have seen. Getting in i ask how much it is and the driver says 200cfa. 200! that is about fifty cents and i usually pay twice that amount or more. so cool. Then, as we come to the cross street where i would like to get out, the bus stalls out and rolls to a stop. the driver hops out and opens the hood and i hop out, happy to be right where i want to be. I had some fabric that I wanted to have made into an outfit so after wandering the market for a while trying to figure out how i will find a serere speaking tailor who will not try and rob me, a guy approaches me, picks me out for a PCV and asks about other volunteers, in serere! He tells me his friend is a tailor and pretty soon we are agreeing on what i think is a very resonable price (though i guess i will see today when it is done if it is quality work). Then after lunch where the guy forgot to charge me for half of what i had and he looks confused when i hand him more money, i went back to the market to buy some shoes. Practically the first ones i try one are good and, again, at a good price. ...weird good day at the market... Then after meeting up briefly with my good PCV friend Jen, i walked up to the tourist grocery store to buy cereal. As i was early there and crossing the road, my old pair of flipflops broke. one of the little posts snapped off right in the middle of the street. after hobbling to the side of the road and trying in vain to put the shoe back together, (i was not really worried cause i had just bought another pair!), a guy in military uniform beckoned me to a small room where he offered to fix my shoe. He was even another serere guy! he took a bit of twine from his mosquito net (i am not sure how i feel about taking that), and made a neat little fix on my sandal. I got home to a beautiful sunset and my neighbor had made me this sweet desert thing from millet (not my favorite thing in the world but a nice change and a really nice gesture). All in all it was a really... fortuitous (is that a word?) day. really nice and convenient things just kept happening. A nice little breather from my normal struggles.

Well, gotta go now, started drizzling here just now, awsome, good thing i remembered my rain jacket!

Owe Ñaayaa

I feel like such a remarkably lage amount of stuff happens in between each post i make that i really want to spend ages going over all the million crazy things i have seen, amazing things i have learned, and substatually little that I have actually done. Alas, there is not enough time in the day or at least in this internet cafe.

I have also been trying like mad to get either my camera or my flash drive to be recognized by even one computer here. so far they are all alligned against me ever posting any recent photos and i may have to just wait till IST and try and get a whole mess of em done.

So rereading that last post i guess i had meant it to be less dire sounding and more, well strange, as it was at the time. Recently in my village I have had many up and down moments but overall things have been coming along.

At the beginning of the month I had a grand time out in Kedougou, in the south-eastern part of senegal, where a bunch of volunteers gathered for the 4th of July. It was really cool getting to travel from my familiar -flat, desert, mildly treed- environment down to a different part of the country. There are mountains there with actual forests and the gambia river, we saw tons of monkeys and baboons and even a few warthogs doing their thing. while i could have planned ahead with my money much better, i was able to stay in a super sweet hotel (with AC and a pool!), the food there was pretty awesome (even had half of a warthog sandwitch, tasty), and it was really nice seeing so many other volunteers and friends who i wont often get to see.

Then this past week and a half has been as exciting as always. Early last week I met a guy who works at a case de sante, or little clinic thing, in the village next to mine. He is really excited to work with me, and that is super nice cause I have really been struggling to figure out ways of actually being productive to making some kind of a difference in my village recently. He is working on a 'programe sante comunitare' which is teamed up with the Presidents Malaria Initiative and a bunch of other NGOs with his group focusing on the department of Mbour (the area all around me and the coast near me). In the past week I have sat in on three mini community womens meetings, two were in serere (which i understood most of), one was in wolof (but i could mostly figure out what they were talking about), and all were about family planning and enfant maladies, pretty cool. I have also been to two rehersals for a malaria play a kindergarden group is putting on next week in wolof. While i havent nessesarily been super 'useful' at any of these, everyone seems to really appreciate my presence. (I did give some advice to the child preformers on the importance of speaking loudly, and i did do a little dance entertainment in the other meetings that seemed like it drew in more people to listen to the discussion, so maybe that is helping). Yesterday, I came into town to see the other people that he works with and he wanted me to see what is is that they do. I thought that that would be like an hour or two meet and greet in the morning but it ended up being a six-hour board meeting. I cant really complain too much though, it was in an air conditioned building, with a generator when the power cut out, and the gave me lunch with a million vegitables and a huge meaty fish, and they gave me a cold fanta.

But then just to bring me back down to earth, after lunch they passed around what i thought was tea -as it was in tea glasses with the tea foam and it is what most people drink. As soon as I took the glass, by the smell I knew i had made a mistake. I had had a glass of this only once before, but that was one time too many. They drink a kind of coffee here that is best described as gasoline. well maybe like if you scraped the dregs off the bottom of a really dirty coroded gas tank, then heated that to the point that the fumes burn the inside of you nose and lungs, and it smells about what you would expect of that. It takes my taste buds about 24hours to recover. The people here all seem to like it though, or else they are all into some kinda group denial. Anyway, I think i will have a more productive PC service if i avoid that 'coffee' as much as i am able. That makes up part of one of my two most important rules i have for myself so far. 1 - be careful about everything that i put into my mouth. food and drink and crazy straws. 2 - take care of my feet. something i learned from scouts. i can manage almost any problem, bandages or medicine or switch hands for tasks if i need to, but if i cant get around, well, then i am useless. with a cut on the bottom of my foot and the taste from coffee from yesterday still overpowering my sences, i am rather failing my two most important rules right now. some RnR this afternoon will do me good.

Tomorrow there is another meeting in the moring in the next village and there is more play rehersal in the afternoon so I think it will be a good day. Then saturday i am getting a fancy outfit made for the big presentation on monday where the play is performed and a large meeting is held. I feel like i am scrambling here at the last minute to get my village assesments done before IST which is coming way faster than i would have liked. we go back to thies on Aug 4 and have 3 weeks of further language and technical training where hopefully i will actually know what the heck i am doing.

Anywho, i need to go but some more mangos and head back to the ole village,
Boo ndiki!

We Ask That You Please Not Feed the Toubab

Well, thats not exactly right, but yesterday was a wierd day. It had a great deal of emotional ups and downs, lots of misunderstandings, confused serere, and I didnt really get anything done. So really just an average day in my village.

It started normal enough. I had breakfast on the floor of my hut. I got this musli cereal stuff with rasins and corn flakes and it is amazing. I had planned on going and sitting in on a class while they still have class at the school next door to me. Really all I wanted to do was talk to the school director about some of my assesments and determine where the kids that go to that school live (I have gotten several different answers on that), and talk about the schools calendar. I last saw him leaving on Thursday and as he left he said 'boo tening', essentially meaning see you monday. Of course when I got to the school, only two out of the four teachers were there, and only a handful of kids were there doing what i guess was retaking exams that they were absent for. I didnt really want to disturb them so I went back to my hut to replan my morning. The previous day I had gone to a section of the village they call Pintoke, where I had sat for a while and the people at one of the compounds there were very nice and helpful and I thought I could go back there to get some of my assesment questions answered.

Just as I was gathering myself to head out, my younger mom came to my door and stood there staring at me (as she usually does. I had tried to ask her once what she wanted before I had opened the door and she gave me a long lecture on how terrible a person I was and that I should always open the door for her and never ask her what she wants first...yeah, freal). So anyway, she had my screaming brother, I will call him Biff, with her. He had been crying all morning, as he usually does on every morning and afternoon and anytime he is awake. He loves to cry. Any way, all she said when i opened the door was 'jegaa mayo, ciam', or pretty much 'you have milk, give it to me.' I think politeness might actually kill some people in my family. So I let her spoon out nearly all the rest of my powdered milk as she said Biff 'buga o yer', he wants to drink. Well, stop the presses, he is in no ways an enfant, and while i dont oppose giving him some calcium, I dont know why they have to just take it from me like that unannounced. Whatever, I really dont mind that much and when I go back I will try and bring a kilo of powdered milk just for her.

Anywho, so then I went out to Pintoke (after giving 100 cfa to some guys fixing a building for no apparent reason) and sat with the same family again, learned all their names as best I could (or at least the adults, which are more important anyhow) and we talked about what villages around have boutiques and which they go to and which villages have schools and where kids go from where to where and why. It was mildly productive at the least I suppose. They also taught me some words for making pottery and showed me bowls they made to sell near mbour (cue ominous music), and how the pottery was really good and they also had some for making couscous with and they taught me some words having to do with druming and dancing (more ominous music).

Around noon, my usual time to be getting back to my hut, they urged me to stay and have lunch with them. Most families do this when I sit with them for a while and I always turn them down saying that I would like to have a bath before lunch or study or have a nap. But this time, they insisted that everyday they have lunch at 1, which they admitted was early, and then I could go back home. They were very nice and it looked very much like lunch preperations were in full swing so I said sure, I will stay (did i mention that there were dark clouds all day, and it would have been awsome if right then there was a thunderclap).

I thought I could have lunch here, then go back home and be back before 2, in good time to have another lunch with my dad, a lunch that rarely fills me up and is almost always just greesy rice and a fish. I figured I could actually eat a fill this day and my family woudnt be insulted cause I could be back in time. So I waited for my first lunch. And waited. Lunch was finally ready at 1:30, I tried to eat quickly, but they brought out four different bowls, all of really good food with vegetables and spices and good fish... it was too much to pass up. At 1:45, i tried not to be too rude but I said 'i should go home' in kinda a question like way, and they said 'you should go home' in kinda like an answering way. Then I walked quickly back home, it is not terribly far, and I turned the corner into the compound at 1:50.

All the kids and my moms were sitting around the tree, and as I approached they all stoped talking and stared at me. Kinda a death stare, if you can imagine it. Like I had just punched the Pope, hard in the gut, and they wernt sure if they should run up and smack me or if I would probably just get struck down where I stood by a lightning bolt or something. They had obviously just uncovered the lunch bowl, but they hadnt yet started eating. I greeted them, to no responce, and said 'oh, you are having lunch' trying to smile and hoping to get something warmer from them. One of my neighbors who was also seated by the tree pointed to my dads room and said 'go'.

Now, understand that never in all my month and a half in my village, never have we had lunch in my family before 2pm. The average is probably around 2:15. So I think I made it home in good time and I really hadnt thought that I would really be late like this. But timing rarely if ever works in my favor.

So in my dads room, my dad and our farm boy, The Joker, were sitting and had just begun on a big bowl of rice mixed with small chunks of fish. I appologize as best as i can. My dad says he tried calling me, where was I and where was my phone. Pintoke is too far away and I need to get back before lunch. Ok, ok. After we eat he says that I need to be back here before lunch everyday and that I shouldnt be gone like that. Right, right, i understand now, i said, and i thought that would be the final lecture on that.

I went back to my room, had a nice bath, decompressed, got ready to head out again for the afternoon - somewhere to chill a bit. Walking out of my room i was stoped almost immediately by my younger mom. This was unusual for her to stop me like this and talk to me so directly. she asks where i had gone that morning, Pintoke. She then gives me a long lecture on 'the kind of people that are in pintoke and the kind of people that are here' she is kinda smiling as she says it, but she is always kinda smiling and my mom is laughing in the back, so i am not sure if she is really serious or not. I listen dutifully and ask what things mean. She tells me that the people there are not good people. All they do is play music and dance and ask me for money (I had to try very hard to restrain my self in pointing out that that is, fact what this family does), and she says that if she is walking by she will not sit with them and if they ask her to eat with them she says that she is full. Suddenly the caste system lectures rush back to me and i realize that my family, along with much of the village, are nobility, while those in pintoke are the artisans, storytelling and music playing caste and we are not to intermingle. Great, I think, well at least I know now.

So then I walk about two steps, and my mom reiterates the same lecture. Making sure i understand what music playing is and dancing, and how (when they do it) it is apparently bad. And how they will ask me for money (which when they do it), I should turn them down. Then I walk another few steps and my grandmother, who overheard most of what was said, ask me for what I know about the people in Pintoke and she then gives me the lecture to. Then my nextdoor neighbor walks up, ask where I went in the morning and procedes to give me the same lecture again. Almost out of my compound, two more women ask me where I had gone and feel urged to explain, several more times, that I am not to go there, not to eat there, not to talk to them or sit with them. They are not good people. Right. Heavy stuff.

So I head in the opposite direction, towards some compounds with some similarly nice people. I learn some new words and sit for a while as women in the village begin to arrive there apparently for a womens group lottery. There was music and dancing (both my younger mom and neighbors were there, dancing and druming, freal). I sit out with some of the kids and play a board game. A kid walks by and hands me a lemon. Just like that, out of the blue. My younger mom happens to be walking by a second later, sees me holding it and looks at me as if I am mr selfish. I think of giving it to her (maybe she could give taste to a meal with it), but i put it im my bag instead. 'To plant', i tell her.

Before i can leave, one of the women, my aunt evidently (or so i am told), gives me two fish that she has fried in a way that I think is the best ever. I take them back home and give them to my mom, for her to put them into dinner, i guess. At dinner though, somehow no one in our compound knows where any flashlights are and the solar powered light is out, as usual. so we eat in near utter darkness, only starlight, no moon up yet. I cant see my fish, meaning i dont eat my fish, the joker and my dad down the one in our bowl before i can get more than one piece. I finish the bowl, and go to bed dreaming of desert.

So, yeah, the moral to this long long post, i have no idea, dont let me eat food i guess is a good village action plan. Oh and today i planted the lemon seeds and lunch was at 2:15.

Pictures... I Hope...

So, I will give this a try. These pictures are all kinda random. And I dont have many anyhow.















First here is one of my stuff at home in Atlanta before it got all packed up. It was very early in the morning.

Yeah, I have way too much stuff... yeah.
















This is some of us before training enjoying our last night out in the states. Wonderfully chilly America and all its wonderful food...















Traveling can be very exhausiting. Yep.

We drove from Phili to New York, then flew to Brussels and from there to Banjul and THEN finally to Dakar where we were then bused to Thies.















This last one here is of us finally making it to the Thies training center. It was after midnight and it was kinda like most of s wernt sure whether to be giddy and excited or completely and utterly exhausted at the thirty something hour journey we had just finished.

Well, thats it for now. More pictures to come including my home near Thies and my hut and village here. For some reason many of my pictures appear to be very dark and so I didnt put up a bunch, or maybe this monitor just sucks bad, I'll have to figure that one out i guess.


Oh right, so maybe a post.

So this week was... interesting. As all weeks tend to be. I went to Dakar last weekend with Mbour neighbor, Jen, and we had a quick little tour of cool places by Jared. It was a cool weekend, spent quite a bit of money, but I figured I would and I think my budgeting is going rather well. I only really prchased two things besides meals and transport and all. I got a big jar of apple sauce from this rediculously large grocery store that is in the downtown area of Dakar, I think. And I got a jug of bissap syrup that you add water to to drink. It is very tasty and very very strong. I did the recomended 4 parts water to 1 part syrup and it was unbelievably sweet. I had to keep adding water as I drank it and hoped my teeth wouldnt fall out.

Getting back home Sunday night was also... interesting. I dont think I will put all of the reasons for that here in type, but I will say that I was rather disgrunteled and didnt even really know who to be pissed off at. Also, steps 34 through 78 appear to involve 'fence repair'.

Tuesday brought me back up again when my birthday package from my older brother, David, finally arived and I took the morning to go to Mbour and get it. It is undescribably excellent and has tons of great sugary things to get me through a day! Jen also came and visited me for that afternoon. I was excited to finally have a visitor for once, it was the first time anyone has visited me with either of my serere families or villages. It was the first time that I saw the language thing from the other side and for once I knew more of what was being said than another volunteer. That being said, I wasnt really sure what to do once she was here, I mean my village is not Dakar or even Mbour, only one boutique and some gardens and goats and thats about it for excitement. Well, after lunch with my family (though my moms were up at some wedding in a neighboring village), we walked around a bit and made our way to the village chief who live a fairly good ways away from my compound. It was really crazy how windy it was that day, there was dust and sand everywhere and the wind, which blows fairly constantly anyhow, was rather fierce.

So, lets see, yesterday it was overcast all day and fairly cool, and this morning it really looked like it wanted to rain in the morning. It might, for all I know, rain while I am gone this weekend.

Oh, right, this weekend. So I am off to Popinguine to flit away more money and see some folks from around my region, including some that I havent seen since training ended a month ago. Err, thats it i guess. Eventually I will really pretty this blog up too. It is just kinda hard from a cyber cafe to get a whole lot done at one time and with out many programs, and in French...

Boo jaf lakas!

Day to Day Me

Well, that last post was very rudely interupted by the power going out. I ended up paying for the half hour and trying to bike back when, after a few blocks, my pump made this awsome little 'pop!' and it decided to stop pumping. And then my fron tire was very flat. Some kids were walking by right when I was about to throw my bike into traffic and they said in wolof what i imagine was, 'there is a guy who can fix your bike around the corner'. I was in no mood to probe for more information so i just followed, dragging my bike along.



magically, there was indeed a tire repair place right around the corner and even more magically, working there were two serere speaking men! pure awsome. so after a tense half hour of inflating the tire, finding the hole, lighting the tire on fire, inflating the tire again, fixing my pump somehow... everything seemed to work out. I made it home in record time and before the sun set.



But anyway, so what do I do everyday, thats what I wanted to write about before, I am not even really sure what I do, well let us see:


I generally seem to be waking up between six and seven in the morning. At five fourty-five-ish the roosters would rather I wake up but I am trying to confound them and maybe eventually they will ease up. Whether or not it is a good idea, and I have heard varrying exclaimations, I have tried to run about every other day, which seems to be turning into Mon, Wedn and Fri. I dont really run that far or that fast but it feels good to do something like that, though the sand likes to get the better of me, and it feels like I am running through thousands of grains of very small rocks... weird.


Anyway, so my run usually lasys till seven or I may finally get up at seven, either way I am up and then going to pull water. For many male volunteers this apparently is a tricky situation and I have heard that they end up getting water from their families or something like that. For me, my first day, within my first two hours at my site, i had asked my counterpart where to get water. He grabbed me and my bucket and we walked to the closest well, he dumped water into it and then put it on my head. 'like that' he said, evidently it was what the former volunteer had done everyday so it was not a big deal for me to do it as well. So now I pull water every morning and every afternoon, about five or six buckets a day (it is not an enourmous bucket) depending on what I want to do that day: watering stuff, baths, drinking water, laundry, all that good stuff.



After the water thing is done, i sweep out my room, straighten things up and have breakfast on my own. This generally consists of some combination of cereal with powdered milk, chocoalte milk i make with hot chocolate mix, and half a loaf of french bread with either chocolate spread or honey. It is very small, but it generally holds me until lunch.

Then I try to be 'productive' until noon. This generally involves me walking around the village, finding various groups of people doing stuff - pounding millet, building a house, gathering leaves or firewood, often people just sitting around - and I sit with them and talk, or try to, find out thier names sometimes, where they live, what it is that they are doing and how to say it all and I try and write down as much as I can.

At about noon, I head back home for a bath, they feel really good in the heat of the day, and it gives me some time to decompress from the morning. Then I go and sit with my family and the neighbors out by the tree between our compounds until the food bowls start ariving and eventually I go and get a meal with my dad as well. Lunch, almost without fail, is greesy rice, a mouthful of carrot, and a greesy fish - fun stuff.

Then, my afternoons vary, I usually walk around more and talk to people, but only after it has cooled down a little. I often sit under the tree more till then and drink tea with the neighbors and try to understand their conversations. Sometimes I just walk around and try to explore the neighboring villages and areas around my village, I feel like the more people I know, or rather the more people that know me, even outside of my village, the more work I will be able to inspire. I hope.

Then around six or six thirty I get back home and pull more water, perhaps have myself another bath, try to recover from the inevitable afternoon misunderstanding (they seem to happen at least once, sometimes five or six times, every afternoon), and maybe i sit and read for an hour.

My family always eats when nearly all the stars have come out, around eight thirty-ish, which is earlier than I ate with my family in Thies, and it is much earlier than many other volunteers eat dinner too. Dinner is the meal that varries the most, though not really that much. It is always saac, or couscous senegalese with some kind of sause. most often it is hot salty brown water with a fish, this is my least favorite as fish + night = fish bones stuck in mouth/throat. we also have various leafy sauses, usually they are alright, and usually they are about the temperature of liquid lead. and my favorite sause that we have is the spicey bean sauce, where if i close my eyes it is like chili, well chilli that is missing many of its main ingredients, but thats why i close my eyes.

And thats about it. I turn in pretty early, nine thirty or so, and usually read for another hour maybe, or until i get tired of winding up my flashlight, or until the cricket who lives under my bed gets tired and decides to call it a night, but he is usually on his own time and pays me no mind.

So yeah, there is that. I know many of yall were wondering what it is i do and i hope that kinda makes that, well, spelled out.

Errrm...

Travel seems to be a big part of many of these days. I would rather it not be as I am starting to become rather fed up with my bike. Or rather, I am becoming frustrated with the tires as they seem to prefer to be flat, and are flat, each and everytime that I look at them. The rest of the bike is working splendidly besides getting me covered in greese. This morning, after bikeing almost to Mbour in record time, i was sourly interupted suddenly when the back tire decided that it would only hold air for a hundred meters at a time. I spent a good little bit of time then this morning after walking the rest of the way taking apart the bits and gibbles, even puting the tire under water and only finding one very unimpressive hole that I patched (perhaps badly, but it was my first patch and no one to tell me how). That fun little episode certainly has not stopped the tires, both of them, even now, from going flat each and every chance that they get. I will leave for home a little early and assume that I will stop every twenty feet to fill them up again. Tomorrow, among other things, will be fix my bike day. Hopefully freal this time.

[as is the way of things, this is when the power decided to cut out]

The Beginnings of More Substance

Ok, so here it goes, I can do this...

Right, so I have been at my site now for nearly three weeks, the language is comming along and everything is so far going fairly well all things concidered. Hmm, i really need to recap a great deal of information, this may take many posts.

How bout starting with now and we will go from there.

So I had my birthday on Friday, it was a good day, very chill, just the way i like it. There was a funeral in my village in the afternoon and all day people were a bit aloof and acting funky, not in a bad way, just distracted and then all of the sudden all these tiedye clothes in the evening with the only explaination of- they are for sleeping in. but i am rushing myself. so anyway, mostly a good relaxing day, i got to read, write some, i didnt tell anyone in my village that it was my birthday mostly cause i wasnt sure what theyd do and they probably just would not care. all the same i walked around some, took some pictures that will eventually make it into this blog theoretically, and talked to the kids who were equally not invited to the funeral i guess.

well, at first i was invited. some people said i should definetly come and i should even take pictures. then my family asked if i was going and then when i said i was thinking about it they said no, i should not go. and then all day folks walked by me chillin in the shade and they would ask if i am going and then say i really should not go.... yeah, i was confused as well.

then yesterday, saturday, i left as early as i could, though dramatically later than i wanted, and biked to mbour for internet stuff like this and meeting up with some other volunteers for just some lunch and then i would ride back in the afternoon. well that didnt really turn out quite like that, after lunch we had a grand ole time on the beach where i decided that i could just stay here in mbour and go back today. this gave me much more time to lounge around and eat chicken and vegitables that i am severely lacking in my village.

So today, i get to use a pretty good cyber that i found and it even has english style keyboard settings and everything, YAY!

My serere is comming along, i can understand folks when they talk slowly and speak clearly at least (though they never do), but i feel like there are lots of words i am still missing in every conversation and i can never really get them to repeat them or define them, though, such is life.

Well, ok really more updates to come and i can recap all the goings ons and whatnots...

Installed

Ok, for serious, I am really going to do this blog thing. Though it kinda sucks right now cause I only have ten minutes left. Ok next time It will be even better. Oh how I hqte this keyboard.

So, right, training is done. It seemed to both take forever and go by really too quickly. I am installed at my site and hqve been there now for exactly a week. Well a week except that I came to Mbour on Friday for Post office fun that i can discuss later, and I was here yesterdqy again for shopping fun and birthday pizza, and now i am obviously in the city again today. for the next week and a half at least though i will stay stay in my village.

so far everything is going really well. my village is fairly small, less than 600 people supposedly, and eventually i hope to know them all.

grrr, the time runs out too fast and i type too slowly. there is much more to tell, and pictures too.

Training

Ok, so bear with me on this french keyboard.



soo much has happened since i last wrote. so much wqs happening when i last wrote.

now i am in thies. at the training center, figuring out wolof, mostly figuring out serere, it is pretty intense.

While it feels like a whole lot is going on at once things qre really going well,

Guff, not really enough time to write a decent entry...

Totally Slacking Off

Wow, ok so i really should have been posting about all the fun and excitement and trauma that has led up to today but i just somehow lost the time and right now there is no time either.

its 5am, i leave for the airport in an hour, i am totally running off of pure excitement, and no sleep.

i guess i am packed almost completely. the last few things still need good places to fit i guess, overall, it didnt really turn out to be as much stuff as i was fearing that i would bring. it is really amazing how much stuff, even just clothes, that i am leaving here.

well, i still gotta get all my bits and gibbles together... much more later!

Shortly

Getting closer and closer to that time... gotta get everything squared away.

Tomorrow i am cutting my hair short. right now it is probably longer than it has ever been. much longer than i like it though still no one has really said that it looks as bad as i think it does. ah well, i will just feel better and more confident when it is shorter.

and i have started saying my goodbyes. well, really that started when i left tucson, but that was also a bye from college thing too. i really hate those whole farewell things. its just what do you say to someone that you know but not that well and you probably wont see them again and all of the sudden both of you realize that and then you are both kinda awkward and errrr.....
yeah, well i guess it is not something that anyone is really good at.

in any event, i gotta get my current immunization record, and figure out what i am taking and what i am not. I work at the office for only one more week, then i can give my uncle back his jeep. the play i am doing tech for is done by march 1st and i think that that is the last of my preplanned obligations. then i have a solid week for not a whole lot but getting ready to leave.

errrr, yeah, still not the most interesting stuff...

Staging Kit

My staging information arrived in the mail yesterday! More forms to fill out booklets to read and further encouragement to study French much more than I have.

Yesterday was my big spending spree. Well, I guess I only bought two things, but it seemed like much more. After shopping around I found a reasonably priced good sized backpack thats about right for what I want. I didnt really want to buy a new bag but I only have one good easy to carry duffel that I could take but I think I really should have two bags.

Anyway, and I got a new pair of shoes. I am way overdue for a new pair, and the ones that I got were not expensive and are good for everyday wear and I could run in them and whatnot, so all around good.

Hrrrm, well, these will be a lot more interesting once I am in-country.

Ready to Begin

Well, here it goes. A whole shiny new blog... cool.

Ok, so a little what's what first:

Right now I have a bit less than a month before I leave for West Africa, Senegal, to work in Environmental Education with the Peace Corps. Whenever I think about it, I feel a rush of emotions that float between a jumpy excitement, nervousness, eagerness, and a feeling that I am way way over my head.

I have only really been far out of the country once before, almost ten years ago, I dont think my french is really up to par, and, oh right, I have never taught anyone about the environment before. maybe all that is minor, but i still feel particularly out of my league.

I had originally planned on English Ed in the Pacific islands leaving back in September, but... well... that fell through.

I just found out today that my Orientation will be taking place in the great city of, *drumroll*, Atlanta! Well that would be terribly exciting if not for the fact that I already live here and have lived here all my life. Well, its only a couple of days of leaving home but not leaving home, and then I fly off to another continent. I was kinda hoping the orientation would be in D.C. or Philadelphia or I dont know, not down the street...

So, oh right, I am going to try and update this as much as possible while I am in Senegal. That really means as often as I can find myself in a large city with an internet cafe and time to use one i suppose. That may not really be that often but I guess we shall all see.

Err, thats good for now i guess, i gotta figure out how to work all this blog stuff now...