Hot

The hot season has arrived. It's miserable in the afternoons, when even the wind is hot, like a blow-drier. Last wednesday I got caught in a dust genii while on my bike, a mini-tornado of hot, dusty wind. Fun! Not much village news to report. I seeded my pepiniere, but it has not yet sprouted. Just today, after a series of delays, I finally got to start contacting principals for this year's Michelle Sylvester Scholarship, for middle school girls. It went really well last year, and was both fun and rewarding, so I'm looking forward to meeting 2009's candidates. Yesterday I finally brought out some coloring book pages I've had stashed in my hut for months, dug out my bag of crayons, and hosted a mildly chaotic colorng session on my mat beneath the shade of a couple of neem trees. The kids were all screaming and coloring, having a general good time. And today I saw one drawing taped onto the wall of one little boy's mom's bedroom, which was cute. Finally, too, I brought my tape over to the school so that I myself could tape up the world maps which have been sitting there since Mom's visit. Now, at last, kids can study geography properly! Otherwise, not much to report. It's just HOT.

Bookmobilerific!!!

Me standing in front of a FINALLY FINISHED Bookmobile.


It's happened at last! After over a year of hounding the mechanic and scrounging for funds, the Bookmobile has been completed! Shelves are installed along both walls, and everything is painted bright red. Today I worked with a volunteer from Buttercup Farms (the group in the US who sells 10,000 Girls products stateside) to label the shelves and start sorting books. We have at least these groupings: Very easy English picture books, Easy English picture books, Medium English picture and story books, Advanced English books, Teacher's materials, Easy French books, French novels, French comic books, French textbooks, French grammar books, and a few books in other International languages. This coming week, hopefully, girls can get to work sorting and loading the books into the truck. How exciting! It's finally happening!
Meanwhile, I need to start planning fund raising and attention-getting activities in Dakar, so we can collect enough money to run the program for a year. Now that we have books, a painted, revamped truck, and volunteers ready to work, all we need is cash and we're on the road!

Two more weeks

After being very sneaky, I managed to catch this photo of mother and daughter at a wedding, watching the bride being blessed by the village elders.


My as-yet-unplanted pepiniere. I'll seed it with mostly nebedaye when I return to site, along with a little jitropha, and some flamboyant trees.

School is still out, so it's been awhile since Internet classes, but they're sue to start up again next week, once I'm back from our annual Agriculture Conference in Dakar. Which will also be good and an opportunity to eat tasty food. I realized, once again, how desperate my body is for nutrients, when I put away two brochette sandwiches last night. A single sandwich is half a baguette, roasted meat, french fried, tomato, lettuce, onion, and spiced mayonnaise; I ate TWO of those without pause. Wow. But, as I think on it, my caloric intake is so little, as every day I eat maybe a cup of rice, and another cup of millet, along with scraps of fish or vegetable or a little peanut sauce, and that's pretty much it. With the exception of the bad cookies I buy to stave off munchies on occasion. But soon it's mango season, which is a healthier way to indulge my sweet cravings. And now that school is back, I can get started on the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship, which will keep me busy. And better yet, in just a couple months the rain will come, and there is nonstop activity in the rainy season. My focus this year, I hope, will be on upland rice and beans, plus finishing the vetiver grass demonstration fields.
This week I finished preparing my pepiniere, which is a small tree nursery. Hopefully I can convince people to make ones of their own, too, as I have more sacks, but in my personal backyard I have 150 sacks stuffed with half-and-half sand and sifted manure. Next week I'll seed them and water them all, so hopefully every family can have at least one more nebedaye tree, which provides extremely nutritious leaves for "mboom" sauce. That will go well with everybody's new latrines!

Lucy Lays an Egg

Perhaps the highlight of my week is that Lucy the red hen is finally laying! No eggs from Gertrude yet, but two days in a row now Lucy has hidden a tiny, pointy-topped cream-colored egg somewhere in my backyard. If only it were pink I could pretend I was hunting for Easter eggs. But as it is, I cooked both those up and they were delicious! This was after showing them to the family, who refused to believe me when I claimed that female chickens will lay just fine without a rooster. I said in the USA there are whole yards full of only hens, which lay just fine, but they shook their heads and said, "Oh no, Senegalese hens are different! They need a rooster!" In fact, as we confirmed this week, they do not need a rooster. But baby chicks are so cute I might buy one anyway.
In other news, the REALLY hot season has set in. Everyone is miserable in the afternoons, and I copy everyone's example by spending all day sprawled out to try and escape the heat.

Little Things

The date carved into the lid of a completed latrine in my counterpart's compound.


Solar cooking last week; there was an impromptu dance party inspired by this fish sauce.


My host sister coaxing a kite up into the air.


There are some weeks that pass so quickly, and others that merely drag. It's the slow season here now for me. Not much is happening that I can properly consider "work". So what am I up to? Every week or two, I'll buy ingredients for solar cooking, though I can't do that too often so as not to make people jealous. It's the windy season, so the kites left here by visiting students last year have made a popular appearance. When they get up to the end of their string, the entire village can see the kite way up in the air, high above the thatched roofs and mud-brick walls. It's a swooping, bright spot of rainbow color in an otherwise featureless blue sky. And I can't help humming the song from Mary Poppins, under my breath, when I wind the string and get ready to send it up. Once a week, I do the mini-library thing with the school, lending books to kids from a trunk of Viola Vaughn's Bookmobile books. Twice a week, the computer class with the Nioro students. We're learning to do Google searches now. Next month, hopefully, I can start my pepiniere, and the plan is to organize the women's group (or some other organization in the village) to dissipate that knowledge. Maybe even be a little money-maker for someone. But progress, as usual, is ndank ndank. And, I am annoyed because I want to start work on this year's Michelle Sylvester Scholarship, the one for middle-school girls, but because of this ridiculously long spring break, it will have to wait until mid-April. Baaxul!!!
Probably the biggest news in the village is the latrines, which are being completed super-quickly. Since taking the money out of the bank to buy the materials, I haven't done anything at all, which is precisely the idea of a Peace Corps Partnership. My counterpart has supervised all the cement and iron distribution, keeping careful track of it in a notebook, and people have dug their holes, molded their bricks, paid the masons to line the pits and put the lids on. Really, it's all happened incredibly fast, and people still rave about how pleased they are to finally have enough latrines for a healthy village. All thanks to you wonderful donors! The thirty-seven latrines will be completed by the rainy season, which is awesome, awesome news.
The other day there were two weddings in neighboring compounds, so I (along with everybody else) was running back and forth between them all day, escorting the brides with the parade of women (the brides with their faces and heads completely covered by an opaque white shawl), sitting while the wedding was blessed by the men elders, and enjoying the greasy rice lunch, the boombox music (Akon, of course) brought in from town, and admiring the brides, their faces lavishly made-up, their hairdos towering, with 1,000cfa bills pinned into their thick curls. I briefly considered taking photos, but considering the mayhem that's caused (especially among the children) when I bring out my camera, I chose to try and describe it with words instead.
And my chickens have become more friendly, too. Gertrude and Lucy now run to me when I stand on my back step and cluck, because they know I have handfuls of grain for them. Luckiest chickens in the whole of Senegal, maybe.

Election Week

This week (the last two weeks, actually) have been full of election events, as local politicians advertise their platforms in preperation for tomorrow's election. It's the mayors, I think, and the Presidents of the Communaute Rurale who will be elected, which means it's a big deal for villages. So most people's focus has been on that. I've been shelling peanuts, because 'tis the season. But on Wednesday, and this afternoon again, was the kids' computer class and they're doing fantastically well. Plus they're having fun, which is important too. If they continue to improve their typing today, I might let them get online. It's fun teaching an Internet class! Yesterday was a fun day, too. The family I gave my solar cookre to has been gradually perfecting its use, but it doesn't cook things in time for lunch. So I bought a kilo of fish, some tomato paste, bouillon, pepper, kani (which is piment), a few little onions, and oil, and we put it all together in a pot to make fish sauce for "cere ak jen". The solar cooker had it ready by the afternoon, and it was delicious! I ate almost half the bowl of "cere" (that's the millet dish) that night, it was so tasty. But even better was the fact that the family did the whole thing themselves. They're now the village solar cooking experts! And, in other fantastic news, the mining company donated some wood for the Bookmobile, so shelves are being installed now. Hopefully soon we'll be able to shelve the books in the truck and really get started.

Douches, Porridge, and Computer skills

These are what I call the "Halfway Trees". If you pass these, you're halfway to Keur Ali Gueye from Nioro du Rip! Still got about four kilometers to go, though.


At the louma last week I succumbed to an impulse buy: two chickens, one red, one gray. I named them Lucy and Gertrude, tied them onto long strings, and set them loose in my backyard. To go along with them, I mixed up some grain of millet, sorghum, corn, and peanuts, to supplement the bugs and whatever else are out behind my hut. Like many impulse buys, I find myself wondering now what ever inspired me to buy such a thing, but here in Senegal you don't purchase a new coat or a pair of boots, you buy hens. So now they're mine. The consolation is, I got a good deal - only 1,500cfa each (the kid after me bought his chicken for 2,000! HA! I got a better price!!!), and hopefully in a little while they'll start laying eggs and I can have omelettes in my hut. If not I suppose we can eat them. I would worry about getting attached, because after all, they are my animals, but chickens make very unsympathetic pets. Too much loud squawking and terrified running around to really make you feel warm and fuzzy. But Gertrude and Lucy are now my very own, irregardless.
Otherwise, my week has been occupied with time-filling activities. The latrines are coming along splendidly. Everyone is doing the work at their own pace, but quickly. Pretty soon everything will be finished! It's really fantastic and people are as enthusiastic as ever about having family latrines. It will make the rainy season, especially, more tolerable. I, meanwhile, inspired by the seminar in Dakar, went into two classes to talk to kids a little about basic nutrition, and later on, the women from three different neighborhoods organized themselves to learn how to cook a rich porridge that's good for growing children. I brought the ingrediants, and gave insructions while they prepared the meal. It is so easy and accessible, too! Just a half kilo of millet flour, a kilo of peanut butter, some kind of fruit (I used baobab fruit once, bananas another time, and suggested squash, mango, or papaya as other choices or, if nothing else, at least nebedaye leaves! They're amazingly high in vitamins), as well as 100cfa each of sugar and oil. While the water boils, mash up the fruit, add the peanut butter, oil, and sugar to the fruit mash; when the water is boiling you mix in the flour until smooth, then add in the peanut butter-fruit mash, stir it all together, and voila! A delicious, nutritious, simple breakfast for young kids. The important part, of course, is that it combines all the necessary food groups, so carbohydrates, protein, fat, and vitamins are all together in good proportion. That's a hard concept to teach. But we've had fun making porridge and the children find it delicious, and all the ingredients can be found in the village, so hopefully some women will prepare it on their own.
The last thing is a project I just started, inspired by the fact that this year ten teenagers from Keur Ali Gueye passed the test into middle school, and are now studying in Nioro. Which is fantastic news, especially as four of them are girls - the first time that has ever happened. But in this day and age, education only get you so far if you don't have basic computer skills. So I decided that I would teach them how to type and use the Internet, by biking down to town twice a week and holding little classes at computers rented from the local cybercafe. The first class took place this Saturday. The kids were late, which made me angry, as I was offering to pay out of my own pocket (well, it's Uncle Sam's money, really) to teach them these important skills, and they were lounging at home! But the one girl who made it there first, and the other two students who finally showed up in time for a taste, really enjoyed it. They won't be late next time. My plan is to work on typing and using the keyboard until everyone can write paragraphs with proper capitals, punctuation, and indentation. Then, we'll go online! Inch'allah. But I'm excited because it's fun to teach something that I truly know, and even after a single lesson they're already catching on so fast. I have a feeling it could be a very rewarding little project.