chez Dakar

The Close of Service Conference in Dakar concluded this afternoon, and it went really well. We discussed all the things I had been wondering about, like the work environment at home, how to use Peace Corps in our resumes, what needs to be done administratively to finish our service, and how to communicate about Senegal to everyone in the USA. Our conference leader was really great. She kept us involved and interested in the sessions, and I for one learned a lot of important things in a short space of time. Meanwhile, it really IS good to be back in Senegal! My visit home went so smoothly, with no real culture shock at all, and the re-entry here went just as easily. Right off the plane, into a taxi I go (after bargaining in Wolof, as usual, to a reasonable price) and into the market downtown. And it felt GOOD to be here again. Truly! I admit that was a bit of a surprise, but it does, and I am so lucky that I am honestly delighted to be here still for a few more months. Now I know that home is still there, and Senegal and I still have things to teach each other before I go.
My wonderful counterpart - who I appreciate immensely because he is such a motivated worker and generally awesome guy - has called me twice glowing because such good things are happening in the village in my absence. They're working on constructing a health hut near the school, which will get stocked with basic medications and staffed by a trained "matrone". What little cement was leftover from the latrine project is going to that, and the work is happening! A nearby doctor promised to train the matrone (like a nurse-midwife) for free if the village did their own construction work, so hopefully he'll keep his word and Keur Ali Gueye will have a little health post of their own right in town. Also, the USAID project to spray rooms with pesticide has happened again, along with distribution of free mosquito nets for kids. Your tax dollars at work! He was really excited to tell me about how smoothly that went as well.

Who says you can't go home?

I'm home for ten days, for my brother's university graduation. And it is AMAZING! How even to describe it? There wasn't the culture shock I was expecting. Some things have changed, but not enough to make me feel disoriented. Seattle seems even more beautiful than ever, a veritable paved paradise, liberally splashed with thick groves of evergreens. There are flowers blooming and robins nesting. It is so lovely! When I see the familiar curve of the Space Needle, or the emerald patches of growing things dotted throughout the city, it feels so natural, as though I never left. That's how I feel I can describe it. Not surreal, not even startling in contrast to life in Senegal. Because when I am here, my I am ONLY here. When in Seattle, eating the food I love and being with my friends and family in this comfortable environment, it is the only kind of life I can concretely imagine. All other ways and places of living are like a fantasy, only half-real. And the same goes for Senegal. When I'm there, pulling water at the well, eating millet from a communal bowl, speaking Wolof, THAT is the only kind of existence that I can viscerally imagine. Both times, in my head I know that this isn't so. When in Senegal I know that in the USA there are people commuting to work on smooth roads, buying $100 sundresses and eating burritos, but these are like imaginary things, too unfathomable to be true. Likewise, while here in Seattle, I know that not so very far away there are people bathing in murky well water, who are excited about finally having a latrine for their family, who are eating (really pretty unappetizing) rice with peanut sauce... but it seems so impossible that such things could be real, when my experience is so completely unlike it. So that's how it is. Like two different worlds sharing the same small Earth. But in any case, it is wonderful to be home.

A taste of success

A girl hoping to check out a book from the Bookmobile.

The kitchen smells amazing at this moment, because my friend Kyle and I are making dinner. There are green beans with ham simmering, garlic mashed potatoes, and two kinds of guinea fowl: fried (by Kyle) in cornflake breading, and roasted (by me) with carrots and potatoes in a marinade of tamarind and Worcester sauce. I wanted to try guinea fowl, which are so funny looking with their bald heads and droopy-looking bodies. But they can dart away as quick as a flash, and are much less common than chickens. Anyway, I have never eaten one, nor have I ever killed an animal by myself. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone...well, one bird with one knife, actually. Which I did. Killed it, bled it, de-feathered it, cleaned out the insides, cut it up, and now I'm roasting it. If the smells are any clue, it's bound to be tasty! And though I didn't ENJOY killing the bird (or doing the messy work of preparing it, either), I feel a kind of satisfaction having done it, the way I'd planned to.

The big news today though is that the BOOKMOBILE went on it's first test run! To my village and my friend's village. All things considered, the event went pretty well. The kids loved that big red truck, all full of books. In each village, we were able to check out about 150 books, but had to stop there so as not to overwhelm the Peace Corps Volunteer who has to keep track of them all. The titles and name of who checked it out are written in a notebook, which we left in the village where the book is in order to know who has each book at any given time. We read aloud some children's stories, and taught some interactive songs, which were a big hit. There is still some work left to do on the truck (the shelving had been badly installed, so we'll have to have it fixed) but we are slowly checking those things off the list. What fun! The Bookmobile is finally on its way, and it looks like the program will be wonderful for these village kids.

But now the water is out in Kaolack again, which is a bummer. Our bean seeds finally came in, though, so when I get back to the village tomorrow I can start telling farmers how many kilos of seed they'll get, and hopefully even see some fields now before the rains come.

Thanks to Florence, Colorado!

Michelle Sylvester Scholarship is finished for the year, Alhamdullilah! All the paperwork is in and now all we have to do is wait for the committee to pick the winners. Finally, some seeds have arrived - no rice seed yet, but beans, corn, and sorghum, so I can start telling farmers what they will have from me for this rainy season. Last week the annual Gamou was held in Keur Ali Gueye; apparently it happens every year around late May, but last year I missed it. They set up a huge tent next to the half-finished big mosque, and hung it will all sorts of portraits and posters of Baye Niasse. The young girls all bought white pants suits, which they asked me to paint with Baye Niasse's classic three-quarter pose. I see this depiction of the marabout everywhere, on car stickers, on tee-shirts, on keychains, painted on the walls of telecentres and boutiques. He is a very famous religious leader; my whole village is Niassene - followers of Baye Niasse. So I did my best to sketch his face on an ever-increasing pile of snowy boubous. In the end I got pretty good, and could do it in under a minute. Then I made the girls (they asked me, but I refused, so they could take some credit for the work!) paint over the lines in black oil paint, so the image stood out. In the end they looked awesome! The Gamou itself was quite an event. People from several surrounding villages came to listen to the recitations and speeches, and the entire town put on their best clothes. The older folks sat under the tent with their prayer beads. The leader of the village's Koranic school was the host; he killed tree cows for the two meals that day! So we ate delicious greasy rice and rich meat-flavored cere. There was melodic chanting all through the night, though I ended up going to sleep after dinner. It was a nice village experience.

And coming into Kaolack has been great this time around! We're putting the Bookmobile together for the test run this weekend. Hopefully it will go well, unlike the Dakar fiasco. So far everything seems to be good. This time Kaolack had wonderful surprises waiting for me. FOUR packages: two gifts from home (full of delicious food! Now I can pig out!) and two HUGE packages of children's books from my friend in Florence, CO. How wonderful! We put them in the Bookmobile today and they really enrich the collection. I chose three of those for reading aloud to kids this weekend, and I think they'll enjoy the stories. So THANK YOU Florence Public Libraries (and Robin, you especially)! You've definitely made a great contribution to the Bookmobile! Wish us luck on this test drive.
Next, we need to get our hands on an old card-catalog. Anybody got one lying around? :)

Time, fast and slow all at once

Thank goodness I've made peace with my bike seat since last year. I've had to bike somewhere almost every day this past week, bumping along the sandy bush paths, past the occasional nomadic Pulaar camp (they are so cool! With vast herds of cattle, sheep, and goats, they set up tents in the empty fields so their animals can graze on last year's crop residue. The women sometimes walk through the villages, selling curdled milk. And I love the way they drive their donkey charettes - no reins at all, three donkeys hitched abreast, and they steer by wacing a stick on one side or the other to indicate which way the donkeys should go. It's impressive!), and swatches of black ash, occasionally still smoking, from where farmers gathered stalks and weeds to burn. I've been biking so much because of the Michelle Sylvester Sholarship, which is done every year throughout Senegal. (You can go to the SENEGAD website to learn about it: http://senegad.org/ ) For me it means going to two neighboring towns and working with the middle schools there. Six girls are chosen from each school, and they all need to write an essay, have a teacher recommendation, and a personal interview. That gives me a chance to see what their home is like, too, because the scholarship is supposed to go to girls with excellent grades AND a striking financial need. Of course, this year I am reminded that good grades are often the result of a comfortable family situation. I visited quite a few beautiful compounds for the interviews this year. But in each town, there are always a couple girls who stand out, with their excellence in school in the face of financial difficulties. This year the process was easier, because I knew what I was doing, but also more difficult, since now I have been working in these towns and so gotten to know some of the families, and had to remind them that in this case I must be entirely impartial when choosing finalists for the scholarship. Luckily there is a committee in Dakar who will choose the eventual winners - a 30,000cfa scholarship, plus a certificate of achievement - to spare us Volunteers drama from the families of those who didn't win. Anyway, there are only a few more things to do for the scholarship on my end, which means another two or three bike trips to and from the towns. I can do it!
One might think that with actual activities going on, it would be a busy week, but time has a way of dragging here even when there is lots going on. I also finished two books, including "The Omnivores Dilemma", which was very good, thoug not quite applicable to my lifestyle here. It shows that Americans, assuling we "are what we eat", are primarily corn; whereas I feel mostly comprised of rice and millet nowadays. I am currently working on a novel called "Iceland's Bell", which is also extremely well-written and interesting. Thank God for the Kaolack library. I've read books I never might have heard of otherwise.
In less fortunate news, a cat killed my gray chicken, so now there are only two: Lucy and Studly Dudley the rooster. No chicks yet. But I can report that chickens are not at all traumatized by the death of a compatriot. On the contrary, they had no problem pecking at the bits of feather and gristle that the cat eshewed. Chickens, I believe, have absolutely no sense of their own mortality. Which is a good reason to eat them.
More cyber lessons this week! I asked the kids if I could distribute their e-mail addresses to perspective pen-pals, and they said yes. No guarantees of when or if you'll get a reponse, but they would love to hear from the "waa Amerique". Here are the e-mails I have:

Omar - diopomar14@yahoo.fr
Penda - avenir.gueye@gmail.com
Pape Souleymane - papesouleymanediop@yahoo.fr
El Hadji -elhadjisamba18@hotmail.fr
Masse - fansgambie99@live.fr
Malick - batman22@live.fr
Aissatou - fanselhadjidiop@gmail.com

There they are! More kids come to the lessons sometimes, but these are the ones whose e-mails I have at hand. Tomorrow we'll practice attaching a webpage link in an e-mail. Wish us bonne chance!

You win some....

The Bookmobile being worked on by Fatik mechanics. Photo courtesy of Lauren from Buttercup Farms.

Well, Saturday was a series of unfortunate events, one after another, all day long. When one thing goes wrong, it can be very upsetting, but when tons of things go wrong, at a certain point you just have to throw up your hands and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Here is the abbreviated story:
After two days of rushing around town, making sure everything was ready - paperwork, checks in the hands of the right people, new battery, spare tire, and lights for the truck, driver and sept-place hired, books secured with rope and nails, posters made, donation cards and box prepared - everyone went to bed as early as they could. We woke at five the next morning to start off. The truck, with its two drivers, had gone off before us, because the sept-place drives much faster. At first it all went fine. We had music playing to keep us awake as we drove into the murky dawn. But then, just inside the town of Fatik, we spotted the Bookmobile on the side of the road with it's hood open. Stopping to see what was up, the drivers told us it was dangerously overheating, and they didn't want to risk continuing on in that situation. There was mild mayhem for awhile as people cursed the mechanic who hadn't fixed the truck the way he'd said, and we debated what to do, waking poor Mm. Viola up at seven to tell her what had happened. Eventually Kate asked if a mechanic in Fatik could be found to take a look at it, and a motorcycle was sent to bring one. He ended up being a very nice guy, but we waited for nearly three hours there while he removed the radiator, had it cleaned at the gas station, and put the whole thing back together. Meanwhile, it was nearly ten, and the event was due to start at eleven. We'd left so early to avoid Dakar's heinous traffic. But it was not looking good. Still, around ten we had the mechanic paid and crossed our fingers that the Bookmobile would be okay. On the road again!
But the moment we started back on the main road there was a clunk, a dragging sound, and our sept-place driver exclaimed that HIS car had just broken down too! Our bad luck was starting to seem comical at this point. Meanwhile, the truck was not 100%, but we decided to keep trying. So the others stood there waiting for a new sept-place, which had been called in from Kaolack, and I got into the cab of the truck, hoping to get to Dakar before they did. It was just not meant to be. The truck overheated every two kilometers, and finally the drivers said there was nothing else to do besides go back. The new sept-place still hadn't reached Fatik, so we waited for awhile, and when it finally came I hopped in. By this time it was nearly noon; we were an hour late, still hours from Dakar, and with no Bookmobile either. Since we'd lost so much time, we pulled into Dakar in the middle of lunchtime traffic, which is practically stand-still. This gave us the opportunity to buy some cashews for breakfast from vendors who stroll up and down the lanes between the vehicles, but in the end it caused us to roll into the event at nearly 3pm. Most people had already gone home, and though the ladies who had organized the Bookmobile station with us were sympathetic, there was not much anyone could do. We set up our story-reading corner, which had been our planned kids' activity. But since most of the kids had gone home, and there was no beautiful big red truck to intrigue them, we had few customers. The donations table was vacant; only a few people were left to come listen to us talk about the program. In the end we got a little money that had been collected on behalf of the Bookmobile some time ago by a member of the Dakar Womens' Group, and a couple handfuls of spare change from people on their way home.
In short, the event was a total failure. But, I suppose we learned some useful things. For one, the Bookmobile is NOT ready to go around to rural villages until its engine is properly fixed up. This was our test drive.

Ndank Ndank.....ndank.....

The backyard chicken project: Lucy the red hen, Gertrude the gray hen, and Studly Dudley the rooster.


I bought a rooster at the louma. Having proven that chickens WILL lay without one, I decided that little baby chicks are just too adorable to resist, and I want some in my backyard. Plus, the roosters in my compound are ugly so I wanted to purchase a handsome one who can hopefully breed better chickens in the whole quartier. The result: Studly Dudley. Four dollars worth of strutting, crowing male chicken. And he is a good-looking rooster, isn't he? No eggs yet, but when they happen again I'll have adorable chicks to look forward to!
My pepiniere finally sprouted, only to be attacked by the aforementioned poultry. But I found a way to fence it in using old broom-like dry stalks of weeds, which makes a thick barrier around the pepiniere. Then I laid a piece of old mosquito net on top, and so far that seems to be working well. This year I want nebadaye for the whole town!
The kids at Internet class are progressing quickly. They all have e-mail addresses now, either Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo (since there's a silly daily limit on all of those) and they are practicing sending messages back and forth to one another. The next thing they all want to do is search for "correspondants" from other countries. Anybody want a Senegalese penpal?
Days in the village are slow this time of year. There is really nothing going on. Though in the evenings I've taken to helping some of the neighborhood kids study, by asking them questions about their lessons, to test how well they retained the information. It's all in French, which I'm the only one who speaks French in the village, so I try to help them out. But it is frustrating because some can recite the information, but have no idea what any of it means. So I try to have them explain it in Wolof afterward (rather, I explain it in Wolof) and ask the questions a couple of different ways, to try and help them learn what information goes together. There are a few star pupils, which is always encouraging. But one student makes me sad. I know he's very bright, he can speak French fairly well and is extra-quick with numbers. But he simply cannot read. I think he's probably dyslexic, but of course they don't have any resources to work with those kinds of children here. So what can he do? Struggle in class and, despite his smarts, probably not get into middle or high school.
Now I'm in Kaolack, where I have to work like mad to put the finishing touches on a Bookmobile fund raising event that will be held in Dakar this weekend. It's exciting that the Bookmobile is finally getting near completion, and I think it'll be a fun day in Dakar talking about books. But I need to get to work and make this all happen before Saturday! Luckily the fantastic people at 10,000 Girls have done most of the tough stuff already. I just have to confirm the details.