12-26-06
Hey everyone, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I hope the Holidays are treating everyone well. We have been town the last two days and did our best to have an American-ish Christmas. We had rabbit stew and vegetarian chili with salad and mashed potatoes, lots of peanut butter cookies and banana bread and brownies for desert. We did a small gift exchange White Elephant style (where you get to trade for another person’s gift) and drank a lot of cheap wine! It was a bit somber because a lot of the yearling volunteers picked Christmas to go on Vacation so there was a majority of us there going through our first Christmas away from home and a lot of people took it a bit hard.
Personally I hate Christmas, its always awkward, big family parties where you have the same superficial conversations with people you only see at Christmas time each year, trying to have something interesting to say about how you spent your last year (somehow telling the extended family that I spent all year working at the liquor store and drinking with my college buddies just doesn’t stand up to what everyone else has thought of to say) so you hit the highlights and summarize a year in five mins at most and then excuse yourself to “go get another delicious” whatever, and thereby slowly make your way around to as many people as you can manage and then go home.
It is nice to see people, and I understand that the Holidays are a convenient time to get everyone together, and if you try you can have a few really good conversations, but its always been very hard for me during the holidays.
With all that said, it was still hard to be hear with the Senegalese and not at home. Its still around 85F during the day, people here only know of ice from there experiences with frozen drinks, and a few people think of clouds when they think of snow. The mornings are around 60F and everyone here is bundled up around fires to stay warm, so I’ve given up trying to explain that it gets much much colder in Ohio. They just have no frame of reference. So definitely no white Christmas here.
The folks here are getting ready for Tabaski which roughly coincides with the New Year. Its a pretty big deal here, they kill some sheep for dinner get dressed up and pray all day, basically just another rip roaring party in a dry country. It should be interesting for sure, my counterpart went with me yesterday to get me special Tabaski clothes, and hopefully there will be some singing and dancing or something entertaining, but I’m not really sure what to expect.
In other news I am still taking bucket baths, it gets cool in the evening so I’ve been getting my water from the well around noon and leaving the bucket with the lid on it out in the sun so its warm when I bathe in the evening. In my backyard I have a concrete pad with a hole leading down to a pit for the toilet and the whole thing is fenced in with woven split bamboo fencing. There had been a large passion fruit plant growning over the top of the bathroom pad, but when I got there someone had chopped it at the base so it was all dead and hanging too low to stand up. I uncovered it but that left a wide open view into the backyard nextdoor so yesterday I finally got around to moving some extra fencing around to block the view! My ancienne (aka my predecessor) had planted three pineapple plants and one papaya tree there so when I bathe I make sure the bath water runs down to water these plants. It actually kinda nice because aside from the nextdoor building I have a clear view out over the fields to the right and I can watch the sun set while I “shower.”
I have definately lost weight not drinking every night and just eating rice or corn couscous. Its a good thing all in all, but I think I’m gonna start bringing a little red wine back with me and have a glass or two a couple times a week before I go to bed. I’ve been trying to destress naturally by exercising and meditating but a little wine won’t hurt anything and would be a nice little luxury in a country that really doesn’t drink at all ever.
The language is coming slowly but surely. Pulaar is tough because it is a spoken language so there are a lot of different words and an odd grammatical structure. I have been using the grammar book they gave us and I found a Pulaar/English dictionary so I’m slowly starting to expand my vocab. I have a younger brother that has learned a lot of French and some English so I’m gonna have him help me learn. In The Gambia the official national language is English, but I wonder how much that helps the volunteers there who still have to deal with the same ethnic groups and languages we have here in Senegal.
As far as the joking cousin thing goes I don’t really understand it either. There is a lot of inter marrying of the main families and the mothers here keep their own last names so I think its just a matter of different families often coming into contact with eachother and over time establishing these joking relationships. Seydi and Kannde are both Pulaar last names so they would have interacted more than with Wolof speaking families. The closest thing I can think to compare it to in the US would be if I jokingly made fun of someone from the south for being from the south and then that person making fun of me for being a Yankee from the north, if that helps at all.
The tech stuff I reffered to was stuff relating to agroforrestry which is my main sector/area of expertise. So I learned things like soil testing, composting, organic pest control, live fences (using plants to form living barriers around things like gardens) and wind breaks (tall trees that slow the hot dry winds that come from the north and wilt garden plants and field crops). I’ll be learning more about these things during IST (In-Service Training) which is coming up in two months. This is all the stuff that I will be trying to use to help the people in my area of the country.
I am in the middle of nowhere, but luckily I have a bike and I’m really close to the main road. I’m 40K outside of our regional capitol Kolda so that makes for almost a 25mile bike ride into town which only takes me about 2hours if I’m making good time. I usually leave at 7am/first light when its still cool and can be in town by 9-9:30am, so its not too bad. Plus there are weekly markets on Mondays about 2K from my village and they just set up a new telecenter about 1K away so it pretty convenient. Plus I really, REALLY like being out in the country. The cities are crowded and dirty, but my little village is pretty calm and clean (relatively speaking). Way back in the woods there are 15foot termite mounds and groves of bamboo and its quiet and isolated so I love going and walking back there.
Well, as far as all the deaths are concerned the explanation I got was that during the rainy season people start to come down with different sicknesses like Malaria and bad skin infections and they try to wait it out, then the cool season comes and this is their equivelant of the “cold and flu season” in the US so people get worse and a lot die. Even though no one else has died in our village yet, still a couple times a week some comes with news of a death of a relative or family friend, so I guess its just life in a third world country.
Well, Merry Christmas again!
-Zack
02-26-07
Well it has been a while,
The reason is that I’ve been struggling to stay positive and maintain perspective while in the village. Luckily people stopped dying and my language skills are improving nicely but now that I’m not blaming myself for the difficulties I’m experiencing someone needs to be blamed and the only ones left to blame are the Senegalese!
At the moment I’m kidding about that comment but there have definitely been times in the last month or so that I wouldn’t have been kidding. I have wanted to work through this stuff on my own because it seems a little ridiculous to complain that its hard living in a village in Africa because I know I’ll get emails telling me that everyone knew that before I left, but thinking about the difficulties intellectually at home was a lot different for me than actually being here and trying to keep perspective in a tiny village 25 miles from the main town.
The living conditions are fine, I have no problem living in the village. We have reasonable access to good water ( 30ft wells in the dry season, decent pulleys), I like living by campfire and candle light, and while its hot and only going to get hotter, my hut stays pretty cool and is fairly large.
The problem is the people and this is really hard to talk about. I tried not to have too many expectations, certainly not about the living conditions because I knew they would be tough, but the living conditions are fine. My villagers are farmers, as I expected, and I suppose if I had any expectations it was that being poor farmers they would be like farmers at home, at work in the field before sunup and working till after sundown, honest hard working people with an intuitive knowledge of the land and creative solutions to their daily problems out of necessity, but that is not the case.
There is a sense of entitlement everywhere you go. If I learn one thing from Senegal it will be that it doesn’t hurt to ask because they ask for everything all the time. Further, there is a belief that money is the only way to fix their problems and that since I am a foreigner I not only have money but should give my money to them. Also, in my region of Senegal they have access to a lot of resources like water that are very difficult to come by in the north. We have good land, decent roads, and there are opportunities between Peace Corps, World Vision and all the other NGO’s working in the region. The main impediment for people to live better healthier lives here is themselves, a lack of creativity, imagination, and willingness to make things happen for themselves. There are some Senegalese people who know about the things I’m here to teach, the Senegalese have no problem asking for things, but they don’t want to ask for help or for education.
I’ve spent the last couple months trying to readjust my attitudes and expectations. My tentative plan is to focus on basic life skill education for at least the first year, but probably the entire service. Basic health, sanitation, science, reading and writing for whoever wants to get off their ass and do it!
Well, hopefully my writers block is unblocked. I’ll try to write more later in March.
Eat your favorite meal and have a nice tall glass of ice cold water for me!
Zack
o3-17-07
Hello everyone!
Well, I’m trying to get back on track with writing so here it goes. (And Happy St. Patty’s Day! My favorite holiday!)
Quick highlight of events since the New Year: Right around New Years the “controlled” brush fires the Senegalese set to burn the dry grasslands surrounding our rattan fences and mud huts with grass roofs got decidedly out of control due to the heavy seasonal winds out of the north from the Sahara Desert, as a result when I returned to my village one evening and wondered why the sky would be glowing orange off to the north instead of the west where the sun sets I realized it must be a raging bush fire and continued on to my hut content with the answer. When I got there I saw flames leaping out of my backyard and became slightly concerned, (having hoped the fires would be kept away from the village.) I wandered into my backyard to find my elderly host mom and my 5-10yr old host sibs burning the dry grass in my yard and was comforted. When we sat down around the nightly campfire at the end of the evening just before bed Neene (my host mom) told me about the villages that were burning as we spoke, the people losing all there belongings, and the one hut in our village that had burned down, all very encouraging to me. Then my counterpart (main contact person/coworker in the village) came up and asked to borrow my machete so he could go and battle the fire! (also reassuring, how does the saying go “You have to fight fire with Machetes!” something like that…) And finally as I excused myself to go to bed Neene began to say that if she banged on my door in the middle of the night that I should get right up and grab a bucket and then go… somewhere… I really stopped listening at that point, said “sure, I’ll do that…” and went into my hut and packed a small bag and mentally went over the routes leading out of the village! Its funny how much a giant fire sounds (from a distance) like rain… and yet where rain is soothing, the knowledge that that sound represents a huge ass fire is not soothing. Hmm.
Around the same time, a few days after when it was clear the village would not burn down entirely, or at all thankfully, Neene (God Bless her) was going through the medications that were left over from when my host dad was sick and dying. Mostly it was vitamins and antacids but there was a strong antibiotic that she was taking to “help her sleep” and (of all things) a powerful mood enhancer with terrible side effects/withdrawal symptoms that were “notably worse in the elderly” that she knew was bad, asked me if it was bad (to which of course I explained it was bad and should be thrown out in no unquestionable terms) yet she proceeded to take an overdose of the next week. We were sitting around the fire, talking as usual, and suddenly Neene started to slur her words and lose consciousness, (oh shit,) we helped her to her room and laid here down on her bed and before she went out entirely I got her to tell me more or less what all she had taken ( several of everything I told her was bad and none of anything harmless) We got her to drink some water, I took everything I could get a hold of and threw it all down my toilet (hole over a pit) and we sat with her till morning when she started to come out of it. Mood enhancers (basically a terrible version of Prosac) to an African villager regardless of the circumstances ( for example impending death/the death of a spouse) seems a touch irresponsible on the doctor’s part. What villager can conceptualize withdrawal symptoms let alone make a decision about the pro’s and con’s of a mood elevator that has terrible withdrawal symptoms?
We had IST (in service training) in Thies and towards the end we participated in WAIST (West African International Softball Tournament) Which was a blast. Teams from Mali, Mauritania, The Gambia, and various embassy and American Ex patriot teams competed. There was hot dogs and beer, dancing in the evenings, and just a lot of Americans doing American things in an American way (very surreal, especially seeing American children we never see young white people here and the older white people are probably European and not American!) Stayed in one room of The Provencal (a sleezey hotel) right near Le Place D’Indepedence in beautiful (sarcasm) downtown Dakar. Lots of obnoxious street vendors and my friend Adam got jumped on by a monkey that one of the BiFal (religious group kinda like rasta meets Harri Krishna) street walkers had on his shoulder! Crazy…
Starting working my huge backyard because I don’t think anyone really give a flying leap about agroforestry technologies despite the relative ease of implementing may of them. I’ll continue what my ancienne did to make the backyard a demo site for agfo technologies with live fencing and fruit trees and companion planting, and to kill time with my family I’ve been introducing the Alphabet and my work up to reading and writing English french and pulaar (the school systems here send Senegalese teachers who do not speak the local language to teach all classes in French, so the kids learn French as best they can without being able to get the French translated into their local/familiar language and then go on to learn English through this skewed French so English here is: How ah you I em pine an you good morning wass yo nem. all as one long sentence. We’ll see, basic french English, life skills, business skills, whatever i can give them that comes out of my head and not out of my pocket (which is what they really want) will be good.
Well running out of time hope to hear from you soon and I’ll try to keep up more regularly now that I’m getting settled in for the long haul.
Zack