She has a place in Africa

She has a place in Africa. My daughter. She has a place in Africa where everyone knows her name. The minute she opens her outside aluminum door the day begins with all its greetings - the coming and going of the children, the head of household, the neighbors. She then walks to greet the important people in the village - the Imam, the Chief, the oldest grandmother, the chief's 3 wives. Finally she can begin her day. No matter where she goes she is called to, "Abby-Gway!" "Abby-Gway!" As we walk down nearby roads, as we walk past huts, the well, as we walk through neighboring villages, they know her name. Abigail is frustrated by the relentless greetings, the time it takes to honor each household or individual with a greeting, sometimes even sit to repeat the salutatory exchange. A repartee of the same greetings/blessings and then the same questions about your health, family, did you sleep well, the weather - with a rote answer for each before gently moving on. A time honored way to show respect and community. She lives in a 10x10' hut, no electricity, no running water. It is the ultimate camping experience. Except that it is her place for 2 years. She has a comfortable bed, though, with the mandatory mosquito netting all-round, made from foam rubber. At the end of the day we are exhausted although it doesn't always seem like we've done too much. But the days are just packed! With greetings, drawing water from the well, maybe 2 hours in the fields schucking maize or cracking peanuts, then there might be wash to do, or a discussion with the older women about their soap business, the girls giggling about some teenage thing, a discussion about the midday meal - or you may begin helping with that: plucking a chicken, peeling the vegetables, washing the rice. Then the heat sets in; it's 2pm now. And November. And November is nothing compared to May. But you will see people lying down on mats now. Waiting for the meal to be ready. The sounds of schucking peanuts, or pestle hitting mortar, children laughing, children crying, children singing. There is always sound. She has this place in Africa.

A busy week

First of all, whoever gave that first 100 dollars towards constructing the latrines, thank you very, very much! You're awsome.

It has been a very busy week for me. Which feels good, but is also stressful! I've been running back and forth to Kaolack working on things for the Bookmobile. Our truck looks fantastic, but we are still trying to find financing and materials to install the shelving. I set a date to pick up some more books in Dakar in a couple days. I just bought ten big metal trunks to store books in, which the paticipating Peace Corps Volunteers will distribute in their villages. Now that we have those, the books can get out there even though the truck is not complete. Mme. Viola Vaughn was honored with a ceremony last week, celebrating her nomination as a 2008 CNN Hero. Kind of a big deal! The US Ambassador was there, as well as the Peace Corps Country Director, and many other important people - local and regional officials, work partners, media, etc. Two of my good friends brought their girls' groups, who are working in conjunction with 10,000 Girls. It was completely amazing to watch them speak in front of everyone, many as confident as any American kid used to public speaking, some shy but trying so hard and doing a fantastic job. This program really helps girls blossom. They have so much confidence and spunk! It's really quite wonderful. Yesterday I gave out the other Michelle Sylvester scholarship to the middle school girls who won in a nearby town. Everyone is so grateful for that, even though it is such a little thing; but it could make a big difference in a girl's success in school this year, now that she doesn't have to worry about finding money for supplies and inscription fees. I'm also working iwth a fledgling young women's group in the village, who is buying soap for 125cga in Kaolack, to resell for 150cfa, to get a small profit. Its good practice, but I found a lady who can train them to make the soap themselves from scratch, so I hope to hook them up sometime next month. Now I'm in Kaolack again, having to run around like crazy to get a few more things done before my Mom comes to visit. The entire village is ecstatic that she's going to spend several days there. It should be an adventure!

Latrines

There comes a time in many development workers' carreers when they start to ask for money. That time, for me, has come! After a series of meetings, talking with my counterpart, hashing out plans, writing a proposal, getting it signed and sent to Dakar for approval, at last my Peace Corps Partnership application is online. Here's the address:
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-108
Basically, a Peace Corps Partnership is a way for folks at home to donate money directly to a specific project. My proposal is for latrines. Here's how it happened: my counterpart came to me asking whether I may have an idea how to get funding for building latrines in the village. At the moment, very few families have a latrine in their compound. They simply go into the bush, usually at night. Just before the rainy season, my counterpart built a latrine behind his house. It's a very simple design: a hole in the ground, a hard-packed seat set over wooden poles, the top reinforced with the little cement leftover from patching my cracked hut walls. He's hoping it will last a couple seasons before collapsing under the rains. Meanwhile, the neighbors come over to our compound all the time to use it! They'd love to have latrines in their compounds, too. Behind every home is an open area where they tether the animals, maybe have a hutch for chickens or ducks - the perfect place to install a latrine. My counterpart was very excited when he heard about the possibility of a Peace Corps Partnership. If we collect the money, he will be in charge of organizing thirty families throughout the village to build their own latrines. Ideally this will happen right before the rainy season, when people have plenty of time to collect the sand, gravel, and water they need for construction, and to do the labor. My counterpart has the technical skills and the community connections to get it done; what the village needs is the money to buy enough cement and iron bars for thirty latrines to be built. With these materials, the latrines can be built well enough to last. One of the few families who has one built it this way, and they say their latrine has lasted over ten years! It's an instant imrovement to village health, especially for the children. And, as I've said before, there are a LOT of kids!
Any amount you can give would be a huge help. Whatever small things I manage to accomplish are tiny drops in the bucket of this village's development. Building latrines would be a splash!

Peanuts, encore

The goat kids have taken to sleeping in the shade of my doorway. They don't move even when you step right over them!

Life has come more or less full circle for me. When I arrived we were deep into peanut season; now, again, life is full of peanuts! There are seriously mountains of peanut plants piled in peoples' compounds, or in the fields. Most of the day can be occupied sitting in front of one of these green hills, pulling out the plants one by one to strip them of their nuts. The other day I spent a total of six hours "xontent gerte" - that's pulling peanuts. It's calm, repetitive, brainless work that I find strangely soothing. For the most part, the millet harvest is done now. Charettes loaded with millet stalks now traipse into town; the stalks will become new fences before long. Behind my family's compound is an enormous stack of millet, as tall as I am! My host father says we'll eat it all, but it sure looks like a lot of millet to me. Still, I guess it does feed about twelve people, twice a day. The girls and young women get a workout pounding the grains into flour, sifting it, and going through all the other steps of preparing "cere", the grainy cereal we eat for dinner and breakfast. At first I hated the taste of millet cere, but it's growing on me. And I'm getting pretty tired of rice.
So, this past week I've been pulling peanuts mostly. But I took a day to harvest my sesame, which is ripe now. I had to cut it and stack it upright on a piece of cloth, because the little seed pods will burst open and spill sesame seeds everywhere. So, now they're mostly contained in a bucket and hopefully I won't lose too many. Yesterday, I biked to Taiba Niassene to give out the scholarship to the winning student from last year. The principal of the middle school was delighted that I came with prize money for a promising young girl, and she seemed equally pleased (though shy) to accept the 30,000cfa and her winner's certificate. To the three other finalists I gave a letter of recognition, that hopefully they can present later on to show that they were indeed one of the top four female students in their school (at least, according to me, who read their essays, teacher recommendations, and did an interview with each of them). I didn't know what else to say besides congratulations, and tried to emphasize that this scholarship is designed to reward girls who are serious in their studies, and to help those with limited means to continue their education; hopefully I managed to get some of that across in my mangled French/Wolof.

Photos

Some photos for your enjoyment! Comments below each one.

Sometimes, you have to bail the boat so you don't sink in the mangroves.


Baby goats are the devil's children - they get through any fence and eat all your crops! If only they weren't so adorable.


This stuff is known to you as birdseed; to me it is dinner.


My host sister cutting millet in the field.


I snapped this picture of my neighbor as we went to the fields.


This is a whole lot of sweet potato, and some bissap, and a cashew tree and basil in a neighbor's garden.

CNN Heroes

Here's a bit of exciting news! Viola Vaughn, the lady who runs the NGO "10,000 Girls" has been nominated as one of the top 10 Heroes by CNN. This is a HUGE deal, because now there will be a bigger feature on her and the program. If you forgot, 10,000 Girls is the program that hosted the girls' English/democracy camp. They're the organization I'm helping to start the Bookmobile. In my friend Kate's village, her girls' group started a huge bissap and cashew cultivation project, that will be linked to 10,000 Filles product transformation project in Kaolack, which will produce teas and other goods for export. Also, Mme. Viola runs an excellent program in the city of Kaolack that caters solely to girls who have been struggling in school, as well as a successful entrepeneurship program. In short, she's an amazing lady who has done an enormous amount of good throughout this region of Senegal. And now, there is a chance to help her out for free! You can vote for her on CNN.com. Thanksgiving, I believe, is the final announcement of the winning Hero for 2008. So if you think she deserves it (and I sure do!) check out her work and VOTE for Viola Vaughn!

Here's the address:

www.cnn.com/heroes

A village Korite, and the Harvest

Korite in Keur ALi Gueye was very different from the one I experienced in Thies. In the village, everything is so communal; there's not a party if tons of people don't show up. In Thies, I remember, my host family killed probably half a dozen chickens and cooked up huge plates of yassa - onion sauce - over rice, served with chicken meat, for the family and a few guests. For Korite in the village, they killed a cow and the various families all went to buy a couple kilos of beef. Then, we all cooked the same thing, like we did for Tabaski: a meat sauce, heavy with oil, made with onions, fried potato slices, macaroni, and seasoned with plenty of mustardand vinegar. The men went off, as they tend to do, to eat the meal together, and afterwards the women of the neighborhood gathered in a courtyard to share bowls of the sauce, to be sopped up with bread. Everything shared, everyone participating. For them, Koritewas also a day off, and the very next morning people were back to work, because now the harvest is really beginning.
Every day now there is some kind of work to do harvesting the crops. The past few mornings, after breakfast, I've headed out to my host family's enormous millet field to pick my way through the flattened stalks, searching out the candles and slicing them off with my new "goban" - my knife for cutting throughmillet stalks. It's quick work, once you get the hand of it, and we've managed to hack our way through maybe a quarter of the field in two days. The result is two huge stacks of millet, laid out on beds of dried leaves in the midst of the field, which will be gathered up later and stored in my backyard. It's really a lot of millet. Known to youas birdseed; known to me as dinner. Meanwhile, the peanuts are ripening quickly as well. I've made several trips back and forth to a couple peanut fields, to do my part in collecting them. The nuts are sold in big sacs, and the leaves are kept, too, to be dried into hay for horses during the coming dry season. When I filled my water bucket full of peanuts and had them counted out (measured by the comato can), I found I'd gathered 10 cans-full, which, being given 25cfa a can, came out to 250cfa. That's about 50cents! The next day I only filled seven cans, and made 125cfa. The peanut owners are insisting on paying me, just like everybody else, but while it's nice to be treated the same as everyone, I'd rather not take their money. Luckily they don't usually have it right away, as it comes in only after they've sold the crop, so maybe if I don't ever mention it again they'll forget the 250cfa... if not I'll have to spend it on tea and sugar to give right back to them.