Step Back a Little,

I Think I Skipped a Step...

Ok, so I have recently been made aware that I never really put any kind of good description of where in the world i am or what the culture is like around me. Wow, I suck. I have also been made aware how bad my typing is. This I fully blame on this stupid French keyboard. It may take me twice as long, but I will try to make this one a bit more... aesthetically pleasing? My other motive is that I have a project that should be up to be funded any day now, and I really want you all to care about my community as much as I do. No, more than I do, cause you dont have to hear the roosters at 530 in the morning.

So here is (maybe the first installment of) a quality description of some background on where I am at.

Ok so my village is one of several Louly's. 'Louly' is the way the french spell it though on a map I am convinced was made by pirates, I saw it written as 'Luli'. Anyway, I have counted seven thus far though they seem to have nothing else in common except proximity. They are not even all Seereer, and some are so spread out, like mine, that they have different 'quartiers', or seperate sections with their own name. My Louly is Ngogom, meaning roughly, the house of Ngom, though there is only one Ngom family in the village and they dont really seem paticularly special. Nice guy though. The village is spread over about two kilometers east to zest (gaa! zhy is the w down there!), and a little over a kilometer north to south. Most of the village is ethnically Seereer and speak a dialect of the Seereer dialect Sin called Seereer Jegeem. The Seereers themselves have undoubtably an interesting history, though I have only gathered little bits and pieces of it. 'Seereer' supposedly means 'keepers of the temples' in antient Egyptian, and the people themselves are nomads that left to seek more exciting shores. They settled in the Sin-Saloum delta (just south of where I am) many hundreds of years ago, and established a kingdom. They had a line of rulers in a place right next door to where I spent a week of training. I even visited the kings' burial ground where they were suposedly under these mounds, buried standing, with all their possesions and perhaps also wives and husbands (at least the first king was actually a queen). It was a pretty spooky place. Then, some few hundred years ago, there was an invasion from the north as the area was converted to Islam. The Seereers were rather stubornly against the whole deal and were driven out and scattered. Later, when the heat died down and the Animist jokes started to get old (if the sky wills it), they returned and set up more humble towns and villages. Some converted to Christianity when the toubabs, err, French came and colonized the area. The Seereers in my area were not paticularly into the whole colonialization thing and thought it a rather bad deal. As I am told they formed a resistance tribe and fought and hid from the foreigners, calling themselves 'Jegeeram', meaning 'they dont own me'. This is shortened to the 'Seereer Jegeem' that they now still call themselves, err, well, call their dialect.

Other interesting facts- Seereers and Puulars generally have a joking relationship of mutual distate for one another. I have never really gotten a clear explaination of their combined history, certainly the languages are similar but the people even look different. Puulars, as I call them, are various different groups of people not just around Senegal (mostly in the far north, east and south), but are also in many other west african countries as well. The Seereers call them 'slaves' and the Puulars call Seereers 'cats', which i imagine give some clues to thier past relationships, but then, I cant be sure.

My village has three Puular families. One lives in the central area of town near me. The father insists on calling me 'Mousa' everytime, even when the rest of the village corrects him. The other two families live up in the northern section on their own. As one expects from Puulars, they have a large herd of cows (the largest around), and many goats and sheep. In my opinion they are the nicest people in the whole village to me and insist that I learn Puular. I think I get this impression for two reasons, one is that they are super isolated group in a sea of Seereers and so they are extra nice to me when i come visit. Secondly, I think that with some of them, their Seereer is about on par with my level of Seereer and so we can have easy, slow and nice conversations. I like them.

The other forty-seven families are Seereer. Most in the village and in the area are Muslim, but about a third of my village is Catholic. Instead of the usual Arabic-cally derived name like Mamadou, Seikh or Abibou, the Catholics tend to have two first names, one French, like Piere or Francois, and the other a traditionally Seereer name like Diogoye (lion) or Ndigue (rainy season).

Agriculture is really the main activity and work in the village. We are surrounded by fields. Much of time, in the dry season, these stand dry, sandy and empty, but when the rains come (as some of my pictures showed last year) it really greens up. Around me is a fair amount of Baobab, but also a good many different variaties of Acacia trees, those classic african savanna thin trees with tiny leaves and thin canopy. It is very flat where I am, and generally rather sandy, but the water table is near the surface so water is not too much of a problem.

Millet is the big main crop in my area. It grows looking kinda like corn (alas corn needs more water or better soil than we have), and developes candle like tops an inch or more in diameter and a foot or two long with hundreds of little beads, kernels if you will, of millet. They tend not to sell much of this as it is a crop they can store all year, eat all year and plant the leftovers with some to spare in the next season. Peanuts are also a big crop around me as well as beans (like black-eyed peas) and sorghum (grows like corn again but has a more grain-looking top part that then grow kernels similar to millet (i am sure you can google it (i will take pictures next time))). My village has a ton of gardens too, thirty seven by my count, and nearly, if not every, family has one to work on or help with. Bissap is a big crop around me, both green and red varieties, and it is used for a cranberry like drink and for a sauce from the leaves. To some extent people also manage fruit trees like mango and lemon, and grow eggplant, cassava, peppers and okra. The local cows generally roam about eating weeds and cleaning up stalks from the fields durring the dry season and then are relocated to areas to roam a ways to the east of us, near Kaolack, durring the rainy season. There are also sheep and goats in small herds in my village and chickens galore. These animals are not tipically eaten unless there is some special holiday, but are kept for a kind of solid financial asset. Most families keep a horse and/or a donkey for field work and for transport and such.

The village has five main wells people use to get water from for everyday needs like drinking, washing and bathing. There is a four room primary school and a kindergarten. The kindergarten sits in a field next to the one room church and recently both have been encircled by a brick and chain-link fence. I guess you gotta pen those little tikes in... that or protect the church from witches... There is also a small Koranic (so sure that is spelled wrong) school that teaches the young children their Arabic prayers and such. There is a tire-repair shop (a guy with an air pump some rubber tubing and a hammer) and a boutique. The boutique sells many wonderful things such as rice, oil, tea and sugar, matches and powdered milk, soap and an assortment of small terrible biscuits.

My family is perhaps one of the more well off in the village. My father is currently the vice-president of the Rural Comunity (kinda like the county, I guess). He is a really nice guy with two wives and more children than I have been able to determine. The oldest being perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties and the youngest was born just before I came to country last year. My younger mom has only had two children and I doubt she is anywhere near done. My dads younger brother lives in Spain and a bunch of his children and his second wife live with us too. Both my dads mom and his younger mom live in our compound as well along with at least one adopted child, my dads younger sister and her one child. It took me a while to get all of the names right. We have a horse and a recently purchased (or maybe borrowed) donkey. When I first came my dad proudly showed me a room where he was raising a good little bunch of chickens but since selling them all, that room has been empty and we simply have a little brick coop and wandering fowl that drive me nuts.

Folks around me generally eat a lot of millet. They pound it in a long and tiresome process that turns it into a grainy powder that is mixed with another powder (ours is pounded baobab leaves) and cooked into a kind of couscous. It has the consistency of warm wet sand when it is eaten, and at first i thought the texture awful, but i guess it grows on you, eh? They eat this for breakfast, sometimes with milk. Where I am it is usually the powdered variety, but since the Puulars have cows and do sell a kind of yogurt at the market every once in a while, I imagine they may also get fresh milk. For lunch, it is mostly the same all over the country. I understand that some time around colonialization or a little before or after, local lunch foods, whatever they were, based on local grains or other veggies, were overwhelmingly thrown out in favor of the rice that was imported as a time saving foodstuff. Thusly, I, with many other volunteers, 'enjoy' rice and fish for lunch every single day. Sometimes this is suplemented by small amounts of vegetables, but oily rice and fish is pretty standard. For dinner we have the couscous again but with a sauce, usually made from peanut or, if I am having a good day, beans.

Oh gosh, this post is getting way long and I should go ahead and end it. Well, I will totally have more of these 'steps back', if anyone wants to know anything in paticular, let me know.

Oh, and Jared posted pictures of me at Goree island (they are really really silly, but go see (I forgot my own camera, sorry))!!

The Year Mark

Such a long time since a good entry, eh?

I have been here in Senegal for over a year now. It doesnt really feel like it has been that long, but then again, it feels like I have been here ages and have learned way more than I had thought possible.

It really has been a good, interesting, stressful and life changing year. I have taken a long, long weekend in Dakar, seeing friends and relaxing in a place with hot showers before I head back to my little hut. The latrine project that I am sponsoring in the village is now in the phase where we all wait expectantly and hope magic happens. The proposal was completed and sent off to Washington last friday and now PC is chewing on it before it can appear up on their website. Once it is up there I will, definetly, let everyone know it. I am really excited, it is an expensive project and the world economy is what it is, but i think if only some of the people I know give jsut a little, it can really add up. Not to mention, that it can change the lives of some 600+ people, making their days healthier, easier, and I think, just a little happier.

That being said, I feel like this project may be the most I do durring my service. The most of anything that can last at least. My environmental club has met a few times now. We have played a couple games, talked about what the environment is and how we can affect it, looked at national geographic pictures of other ecosystems and the like. But then still, I am not sure that they really follow me that much. Slowly slowly I guess. i also know that this year I am going to try and do a really big tree nursury and do a big outplanting at the start of the rainy season (with the help of the club). I have been colecting seeds from many different local species that people use for mostly for feul-wood, fence making and feeding animals, and also other varieties that have medicinal value, fruit or other edibles, and some that are just good shade trees. People generally like to have trees in their gardens and even in their fields and some varieties can be very benificial to the surrounding soil. The village seems very excited about it and have given me suggestions and seeds for planting and right now I am preparing a large area of sacks in my back yard and will, if i can get it protection, do another large area behind the school. I know that many of these probably wont survive a year, some will be eaten by goats or cows or get trampled or simply dry up and die, but i feel like it is one of those great classic PC type ways to make a modest lasting impact. I could maybe come back years from now, sit under a tree and eat a mango from a tree i helped plant. That would be way cool.

I really am very excited for this coming year. I really cant believe I only will have another year of this. Lots of volunteers have had different feelings about their service and PC life and all. Lots of volunteers come with different expectations and perspectives and with different goals and understandings of our purpose and take different ideas from similar situations. I could not be more thoroughly satisfied with my decision to come here and have the greatest job on the planet. I get to live in a totally new environment, learn a new language and do things that I could only dream of back at home.

The work here is hard, to be sure, but i dont think i would rather be doing anything else. The Peace Corps is not perfect and sometimes i do feel sometimes as if nothing i do could ever come to any good. I feel like i do so much time learning language and integrating that when it comes down to getting things done, half my service has flown by. Being a volunteer also means, usually, well for me at least, being rather independent. I have a 'boss' but i dont really have anyone telling me what i should work on or what i should be experimenting with or what would be most fulfilling. I have general guidelines for the type of volunteer that I am (Environmental education), but i am free to delve into most anything i can imagine, including work that other sectors do (latrines are health, and tree plantings are agro-forestry). I often have to be a little creative for getting certain things done or deciding what i could best spend my time on (working with another volunteer on an excellent Seereer dictionary). As short of a time that I have here I do hope that I am making it worth it for my village and myself.

Before I came here I had never really given sufficient thought to any philosophies of development work. I had just thought, there are good things you can do for people in need, these things can be done, people will be helped. period. Now i am begining to see the bigger, much more complex and often frustrating problems. I think the PC program has a great approach to developement, not that it can do everything, or hit every area of the problem. But it is unique, and connects cultures and people in amazing ways. Important PC goals in fact, involve, and I think properly, the cross-cultural exchange. There is so much I could say about all of this, but i will save it for a speech later.

As independent as we volunteers are, I also feel that I big part of getting me through this year has been our support system. Care-packages are amazing, the food and the magazines are like nothing else. Hearing from people back home lets me know the rest of the world really is still out there and that there are people who have not forgotten me to the other side of the globe. But also there is nothing that can substitute the friends I have made over here, both close neighbors and volunteers from around the country. That we can get together and actually breathe for a little while every now and then has probably played a good role in keeping me level, motivated and positive over an oftentimes very stressful job.

I really do love it here. It has taken its time to grow on me, but i really love my village. And, if I havent emphasized this already, I have the best language too (as long as you dont count most useful or prettiest sounding under 'best'). I am so excited for this next year. I am excited for this next month and for all of the potential that I see in my village and in the people there. I only hope that at the very least I can continue to entertain those in my village, yoona fo mi?

I leave this with a good quote that I was sent just the other day:

-You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future. - Thomas Sankara

Nana?

Oh these past couple weeks had amazing ups and downs, but i will write on that later. Now i feel like i must brag a little, if only to keep from being completely depressed by lack of progress.

Generally now my Seereer is pretty good. Not great, there are still a ton of things that i dont get, but its good and i can get points across, talk to children, talk to older people, make small talk, speak at meetings, summarize what others have talked about, and sit and just listen to others talk idly or argue and generally get what people are talking about. When i notice this, it makes me rather proud of my progress.

Now when a stranger comes by and greets me and does the surprised 'Nana seereer?!', 'you understand seereer?', and I give my usual grin and answer 'nanaam ondik', 'i understand a little', then anyone around me, family or otherwise, is in a rush to say 'no, no! he understands everything! he understands very well!'. Grin, shrug, move on.

Now, there are times still when i am utterly at a loss. There was a big arguement in my village yesterday, a very unusual event, and that looked like it might come to blows. I had and still have no idea were all yelling about but it seemed like everyone was mad at everyone else. Also, i am slow to pick up on the ,ore colorful expressions and the metaphores and certain connotations are lost on me.

Yesterday though (before the fight), I was sitting with a bunch of the old men in the village and they were talking to another man who was passing through. 'Does he understand seereer better than the former volunteer,' he asked. Then they all thought and after a bit one said 'the other volunteer played and talked with children, he knew seereer, but not deep seereer and he did not learn all seereer by talking to adults and old people. Ndiouma, (me), talks to children too, but to adults more. He wants to learn all of seereer very well. He is learning but soon he will know all of Seereer very well!' maybe thats a bit much, but it made me feel warm and fuzzy. Its coments like this that help me get through the day!

A New Year and New Starts

So I have a blog to post about December, only it is saved on my thumb drive thingy which this computer does not like and i dont feel like writing it again, so that will come later.

I do have a mess of new pictures up, stil more to go, but theres a bunch up there from october and on. I am in Dakar now but going back to Louly on tomorrow. I had come not really for the new year bu that was fun too. Every kid in the city seemed to have bought noise makers and fireworks and spent all day and night setting them off, i think they are still going off actually, fun. I went with a couple other volunteers who had their families in town and we ate at an Ethiopian place that was really nice and really different from what I usually eat, on either continent, but good. After that we just watched episodes of the Office at our regional house, someone looked up and anounced it was after midnight, we didnt even gt up, and yet i still stayed up nearly all night.

My real reason though for coming to the city was to speak to my boss, who i found out is on vacation, and to work on a grant proposal for a latrine project i am having no luck getting started. It does no help that the community has requested really fancy latrines -you know, with walls and a zinc roof that is a latrine/bathing room combo- and so each one is kinda expensive, relaively, but then when they want fifty of them, one per household, that skyrockets the price beyond all my hopes.

Unfortunately I think i will go back, probably have another village meeting with fun speech giving, and do my best to explain why and how this project needs to be scaled down, maybe by number of latrines, more likely just by reducing each one to the bare nesesity of concrete slab with hole in it over a two meter pit. I doubt anyone will be thrilled by this, but it will at least be something better than nothing which is he current norm. People just go to the 'woods' which does not really exist so they go behind trees or in brush for bathing and bathroom, even, and especially dangerously and hazardously, at night.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. When i first got to my village I did not want to do any such project where money is just given to the village for some construction or other with no rel sustainability or passed skills to anyone. Other NGOs may do this but Peace Corps is not of that kind to throw money at problems. At the same ime this was a project idea totally pushed by the village and could really incorporate heath semenars on the importance of hand washing and be a resonably sustainable betterment of peoples health.

Anyway, its still much work left to do with whatever happens.

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.

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...