Oh, the Holidays...

Well, it has been an interesting month or so in my village. Tabaski was pretty fun in a weird sorta way. I just had gotten a new camera so I took a ton of pictures. In the morning I watched sheep and goat butchering, people grilling and cooking and getting things ready for the afternoon. The kids were all super excited and hyper all day and constantly wanted to be in pictures. In the afternoon I had about four lunches of macaroni noodles in an onion and potato sauce with sheep meat eaten with bread.

Most people dressed up for the day starting in the afternoon though some people had nice things on all day. I had an outfit that I had made a while ago but had not really worn it around the village. In the evening, after a dinner of leftovers from lunch (and we continued to have those leftovers for a few days later), and then there was a two day evening dance party out by the kindergarten, a kind with a generator and strings of lights and blaring music, very bizarre for a little village I thought.

Christmas came without too much incident. In the days before and after I was working on organizing a project and village meeting to discuss the project, and I also tried to get work done on Christmas day. Roughly a third or so of my village is catholic and I was told that something would be happening on Noel, I just was very much not sure what was going to happen. Really, I was looking forward to a little chill time, school is out and I have an excuse to splurge on things like alone time, and care-package candy.

In the morning, while walking to the chief’s compound, who is also catholic, others were going in the other direction and invited me to a morning church service. I couldn’t see any reason why not and I have consistently kept putting off going to any other services (mostly because Sunday morning is such a nice time to either sleep in, do backyard work or do laundry), so I agreed to tag along. As people slowly arrived in the church yard, one of the church leaders took me in and showed off a trio of religious type books, one was a Serere bible I think, and the others were like religious lessons and stories, printed neatly in serere, like to be read aloud or sung and discussed. I thought it was really cool just because it contained so much serere that I don’t know, much of it likely because of the slight differences in the dialect of serere spoken in my area, but a good deal of it was simply words I had not come across before (how often do you use ‘begat’ in everyday speech?).

Then there was the service. It was almost entirely standing and singing or chanting in Serere, and most of the older people present got to contribute a little to what was said or sung. This lasted perhaps just over half an hour and that was that. Went out, shook hands greeted people all over again. People seem happy for the harvest, or that it is essentially over, or that they have a lot of money now, or they will soon, or a combination of all of these.

In the afternoon, after lunch with my family - greasy rice and fish, how unique - and after my family stared at me for a while thinking maybe I would do something interesting, like spontaneously explode like a firework and shoot out confetti everywhere for example, I was invited to lunch in the middle of the village. I went over, sat with some of the catholic guys and some of the muslim guys, the usual guys who I sit under the trees with. A few families brought out bowls of the noodle dish, there was also some other bits of meat so maybe a goat was made a meal of that day too.

Then that was pretty much that. I chilled for the rest of the afternoon, talked with the men - they are astounded that it can rain ice for multiple days in some parts of America -, had some time out in the fields to myself - Christmas songs on the harmonica sound kinda sad when played somewhere alone -, and got some reading in -Cold Mountain is a good sad book.

The Sunday after another volunteer invited me to go to Bandia with her. Her family was visiting for a couple weeks and they offered to pay for a trip to the wildlife park. It was cool, even though i had been once before durring IST, and i took many pictures, (that will be up soon). For lunch I had about half of a chicken and fries and some pizza that other people couldnt finish. It was a good day.

The next day I had a big village meeting. It was the first thing that i have actually organized in the village so far and so i was excited and rather nervous. I had announced a village latrine project before and we needed to discuss the details of funding and how it would be carried out. It went pretty well, most people seemed to understand everything i was saying, and with the help of my community counterpart I understood pretty much everything that they said. I was really impressed by their excitement for the project and each of the fifty village families said they would give about sixty dollars in money or labor and supplies. That was way more than I was expecting; though I might need to adjust the project some and so that amount may change.

Anywho, still more i need to write about new years and all in Dakar, later.