Village Placement...Medina dar Salam

Yesterday I found out where I am spending the next two years of my life. We were all shepherded out to a basketball court with a painting of Senegal and then blind folded and taken to our village sites. We were told to remove our blindfolds and excitedly looked around to see where we were placed and who would be our closest neighbors.

The name of my village is Medina Dar Salam in the Region of Tambacounda (Southeast). It is just outside of Niokola Koba National Park and near a river but I am not sure which river as of yet. Approximately half of my village speaks Pula Futa (the language that I am learning) and half speaks Mandinka. Most people are Muslim but many also have animist beliefs. Peanuts and cotton are the cash crops of my village.
Peace Corps has been in my village since 2000, but the village is still facing three main threats. Good medical care is hard to come by which is currently being addressed. Employment and other ways of producing income are scare. Village cohesion is a problem because eight villages are in the same area with different chiefs and cultures.

I will be living in a compound with a large family. My hut is one room with a thatched roof and cement floor. The village has eight wells but only two are cement lined. Biking will be my main transportation and will be easy with the roads being mostly clay and gravel. I will know more about the village next week after I go visit it so be sure to check back for more information!

Easter in Senegal!

The Easter holiday weekend was nothing like home but relaxing all the same. I went to a Catholic church here in Thies for Mass in French in Wolof. I can't say that I understood much that went on but it felt nice to have some structured time in a holy environment. The rest of the day friends and I ate good food and delicious beverages taking full advantage of our first free day in country.

The next day a group of us had our first experience at the Thies garage. The “garage” is indescribably chaotic. It is simply an open area crammed with cars heading different directions. There are a plethora of drivers, vendors, talibe (basically street kids that study the Quran under a marabou), and travelers. There doesn’t seem to any method to the madness, though I might understand it more in a few months. After plenty of drivers tried to take advantage of our group of toubabs we finally struck a deal and we were on our way to the beach in Saly!

The car ride was about an hour and a half and not bad besides the back seat being almost completely laid down. We were dropped off at a hotel call Blue Africa that had an amazing view of the beach. We bought drinks and were able to use their private beach for the day…what an arrangement! The weather was beautiful and the beach was clean. I couldn’t ask for much more. We spent the day basking in the sun, swimming, taking walks and trying to fend off vendors convinced that we needed what they were selling. It was refreshing and incredibly relaxing.

The hotels along the beach have guard dogs that chase off problematic people. The dogs are actually racist because European travelers spoil them while the Senegalese are not as kind to them. They dig holes near the surf and sit in them to stay cool and chase off anyone causing trouble while trying to snuggle up with visitors.
In the evening we headed back to Thies before dark. We spent another night eating good food and wrote reports for technical training the next day. Easter weekend was a success and unwinding with church and beach time was the perfect way to enjoy my time off!

Laughter is the best medicine

Bucket Bath Gone Wrong

The first home visit I had to begin taking bucket baths. I didn’t think it was that big of deal to splash water from a bucket onto my body, suds up and splash rinse. Apparently I was uninformed that I was supposed to have a tiny bucket to do the rinsing (although in hindsight it seems pretty self explanatory.) This for the first couple of days did not pose much of a problem. However, it was always inconvenient when trying to wash my hair. I had to bend over, dip hair in the bucket, shampoo and then dip and rinse.
Inconvenience turned to disappointment the last day of my first home stay when rinsing my hair bent completely over, ended in me getting my hair stuck in the bucket handle. There I was in Senegal, standing completely naked, in a small dark concrete room (lit only by my headlamp hanging in the corner), bent over with my head stuck in a bucket. It must have been a full minute before I freed myself from confines of the evil bucket that had captured me. As a friend of mine and fellow trainee said. “shit just got real.” Needless to say, I have now mastered the task of bucket bathing.

Radi/Ice Cream Truck

Throughout each day we take several breaks to trek to radi/crème glass vendors in our village. Radi or crème glass is the best idea Senegal ever had. This scrumptious delight is frozen juice in little plastic bags. The juice is usually bissap or from baobab fruit. One is never quite sure what all has touched the outside of these radi bags but when you bite into the corner and frozen heaven enters your mouth it is the least of your worries. One day while attempting to obtain radi our group was told it was gone for the day. Disappointed we walked away and when doing so heard a honking sound. We turned in the direction that the sound originated only to find a man pushing a cart with a picture of an ice cream cone on it. He was honking a horn like the type you see on little girl’s bicycles. There in Sangalkam we purchased what was almost ice cream…mmm.

Pet Chicken..Pot pie

There was a chicken hanging out at our compound for a couple days and I asked my family if they had bought it. They said that it had wandered in and would wander away soon. It was sleeping in the kitchen, which I found ironic. At night it was falling asleep like a human nodding off. I used him in sentences while studying Pula Futa. Himo tampibue. He is very tired. After our bonding study session I headed to school. When I came back I saw my sister plucking my friend for dinner that night. Guess he should have wandered away when he had the chance.

Power Outage

At my home-stay I am lucky enough to have electricity and running water most of the time. This is something that I treasure dearly because I know I will not have it for the next two years. The other night the electricity went out in my village for a full day and night. For dinner my host family always crowds around the food bowl under our outdoor light. Without it we had one candle stuck in the ground and couldn't actually see each other, let along our surroundings or what we were attempting to eat. I saved the day by coming to the bowl with my headlamp on so I could shine it into our shared meal. It was so Africa meets America. I had to giggle thinking about how my friends in the states would react to seeing me eat around a bowl with 12 other people wearing a headlamp.

PS: People in Senegal think that Peace Corps Volunteers are in the CIA. My language instructor says that they are convinced because we write notes every night (i.e. journal). She has tried to explain that it is simply for our own record keeping but some people insist on believing that we are spies.

Sangalkam Home Visit 2

My last two weeks in Senegal have been jam packed full of learning and community activities. Every morning in Sangalkam my language group has class. After class we all return to our host families and eat either fish and rice or some variation of sauce and rice on the ground around a bowl of food shared between the whole family (or part of the family depending on family size). After lunch we spend time with our host families trying to further our vocabulary/communication skills and build relationships. Almost every afternoon this past visit we had an activity going on in the community either to give us better insight into Senegalese cultures and customs or to practice the skills we are forming for our permanent sites.
Some of our afternoon projects have included, fencing in our garden, building a mud stove, painting a mural to increase AIDS awareness, mapping our community etc. Building the mud stove felt like an accomplishment because I know that the woman that we built it for will benefit greatly from it. Before, she cooked every meal in a small hut over an open fire. It was ridiculously hot and she was consistently breathing in smoke fumes. The mud stove uses much less fire wood and contains most of the heat and smoke so it will help her to cook faster and be much healthier for her and the environment. Mud stoves are made with a mixture of manure, sand, clay and can be completed in just an afternoon in most situations. It was exciting to feel like we had made a sustainable change for a family in our community.

At night we always water our garden/tree nursery, which surprisingly and excitingly has started to sprout. Considering it was planted in only sand and manure (without anything near what we would consider soil in the U.S.) it was somewhat unexpected that we would see results. I try to squeeze in a run before dusk and take my daily bucket bath around eight pm. My host family eats dinner (usually the same thing we ate for lunch) around nine and then sits around and watches ridiculous Senegalese television. If you know me at all, you know I didn’t particularly enjoy t.v. in the states so watching Senegalese soap operas and wrestling are not high on my list of things to do. We all have electricity now but probably won’t at site so I may not have to endure much more of men covering each other with milk and slapping each other (wrestling traditions here…who knows why). I try to hang out with my host family a bit, do some language practicing, study some and then get a good nights sleep. Some nights I play Uno or look at pictures of home with my family or pictures of their weddings/baptisms and such. They always point out that I look “different” (I.e. presentable) in America and love seeing pictures of my life at home.
One day I had the opportunity to do observations in classes at a local school. The first class that I observed had 66 adolescents learning French, math, geography, history, etc. Considering the lack of one on one attention (with only one teacher) the class seemed to run reasonable well. The best description would be controlled chaos. Kids stood up and snapped yelling out Monsieur, when they wanted to answer questions. Everyone seemed to be very eager to learn and be in the spotlight. The next class I observed had 82 seven and eight year old students to one teacher. Nothing seemed to get done and the children didn’t really know what they were supposed to be doing most of the time.
In every age group the children who are not innately quick to catch on get left behind because there is very little room for one on one attention. In Senegal, at the end of every year the students take a test and if they pass they move on and if they don’t they are usually done with school for life unless their families can afford private schooling. Corporal punishment is legal and used in the Senegalese education system. Having a dedicated and loving teacher is important no matter what country you are in, but here it could make or break the success of a student.
I also had the chance to observe the Sangalkam health post. I sat in on consultations for general health and women’s health (specifically pre and post-natal). I saw how the offices functioned and an example of a large village pharmacy. It was vaccination day so I also observed baby weighing and vaccinations.
My experience in the general consultation room was disconcerting. Three women, worked together to see patients one at a time. They had all received three years of training at a university in Dakar. I witnessed four patient consultations, none of them lasting over five minutes. They never spent more than two minutes asking questions or getting information from the patient. It seemed like they were writing prescriptions before the patient opened there mouth to speak. The only vital consistently taken was blood pressure and only one out of the four had their temperature taken. In the record keeping books the women rarely filled out the diagnosis section, but the treatment section was full of 3-5 prescriptions each. The only way records were kept were by date of visit.
The pharmacy sold tickets to those needing a consultations and obviously sold prescriptions. It consisted of a woman behind a desk with a bunch of drugs behind her. A doctors visit was 200 CFA for children, 300 CFA for adults, and 500 CFA for pre/post-natal. ($1~460 CFA currently) Prescriptions were government subsidized and available at very low cost.
The women’s health consultations were far more impressive. The Sage Femme (head midwife with medical training) had been educated in Dakar and then trained other women to work under her as matrons (traditional birth attendant). Together they handled all matters of women’s reproductive health and babies’ health. I asked if women came for general checkups and they responded that only the well educated come to get annual gynecological examinations without a problem prompting their visit.
Surprisingly, women in Sangalkam have access to family planning and are using it. They can get the pill or the Depo shot without informing their husbands. The sage femme said that many women, singled and married were taking advantage of it, which is very suprising in this culture. If men had to know the chances of women being on birth control would be close to non-existent, like in most small villages. Thus, people have a billion and one kids. I was very impressed with the information and resources given in women’s consultations regarding health issues, family planning, pre/post natal care, follow up, etc.
Last week I was lucky enough to bamboozle my language instructor to accompanying my group to Lac Rose. I had read about Lac Rose before coming to Senegal and was pumped to have the opportunity to see this pink salt lake. The transportation to get to Lac Rose was the first terrifying African transport I have taken. Alhum vehicles (short for Aluhumdulalait, meaning we will get there thanks be to God) are essentially buses made in the 60’s packed tight full of people. Upon arriving at Lac Rose we were asked if we wanted to see the Lake or Ocean…what a pleasant surprise! We had no idea Lac Rose was on the coast. The lake wasn’t very pink this particular day, but there are certain times of day and year when it is most likely to be pink. The reason it is pink is because it is right next to the ocean and contains large amounts of salt and in turn creates a bacteria that resists the salt, thus making it pink (sometimes). It was neat to see mounds of lake salt all along the shore.
After having our fill of Lac Rose we headed to the beach. It was absolutely amazing. On the way we saw camels in the sand dunes and it looked like a scene straight out of the bible. The beach was a long walk in the sand with a forest on one side and palms on the other. I got super giddy when seeing the ocean and did a mandatory cartwheel into the water. The beach was untainted and so clean. A clean beach is always amazing, but in Senegal it’s even more spectacular! The day was rejuvenating for the spirit. There I was on the Ivory Coast splashing in the surf and collecting seashells I got super giddy when seeing the ocean and did a mandatory cartwheel into the water. The beach was untainted and so clean. A clean beach is always amazing, but in Senegal it’s even more spectacular! The day was rejuvenating for the spirit. Every day in this Muslim culture one is pressured to be ultra conservative in dress and action but here I was free to swim in underoos and have no concerns about being judged. There I was on the West African coast splashing in the surf and collecting seashells thinking about my family doing the same exact thing on the Gulf Coast. The public transport home was terrifying but so worth the amazing day.

Shenanigans in Senegal

I've been in Senegal for 12 days now and what a whirlwind it has been. Time is elastic here. I feel like it's been a month at the very least. I flew into Washington DC March 8th for Peace Corps Senegal staging and met 40+ new amazing friends! We talked about our fears, anxieties, excitement and realized we are all in the same boat, which was a lovely feeling! After orientation some of us went out for a delicious last dinner of SUSHI in America and to a piano bar to get our fill of Miley Cyrus and such before leaving the states.

March 9th we got immunizations and hopped a plane to AFRICA! The plane was pretty pimped out with all kinds of tv shows, movies, games and even a video of take off. We flew over night and arrived in SENEGAL March 10th and promptly took a van to our training center in Thies (pronounced Chez).

Since then we have had a slew of trainings ranging from professional development to "how to poop in Senegal." We have planted gardens, learned about culture, religion, language, etc. We have also had a good amount of fun. I have the most diverse group of Americans possible. We enjoy random dance parties, volleyball games, yoga, and other fun activities. Every day of the first week was packed full of learning and fun.

March 15th we all left the training center for home stays. Everyone is placed in a different family that speaks the local language that they are learning. I am learning Puula Fuuta but others in my group are learning Seerer, Mandinka, Wolof, Puular du Norde, and Fuuta Kuunda. We are all placed in small language groups that meet in our village daily with a Senegalese language instructor. My family is small in Senegalese standards. I have a dad, two brothers, two sisters, an aunt and uncle, a niece and nephew and cousin living in my compound. They gave me the name Kanni, last name BA. We went to our homestays with only one language session under our belt which was akward and intimidating when placed with a family that speaks no English, but like children we are slowly improving.

In addition to daily language training I have been attempting to keep my sanity while eating around a bowl with 10-12 other people (many non-handwashers and snotty children included). Other new adventures are using a latrine, aka hole in the ground, for a potty, running in sand, and bucket bathing...oh the joy of it all! I have however picked up a radi addiction. Radi is frozen fruit juice bought in a ziplock back and it is delightful and unsanitary at the same time...I make a habit of eating several a day.

Yesterday, March 21, we returned to the training center for a few days of technical training and leave for our homestays again on Wednesday. We will be spending the majority of training at our homestays. This is a curse and a blessing at the same time because I love our group and it is sad for us to be seperated, but it will force us to learn the language and culture much faster. I am elated to be back at the training center eating good food and taking actual showers. I suddenly feel like I'm staying at the Hyatt, when day one I thought it might pass for nasty camp dorm. My feet are hardly even dirty in this heavenly cloud called the peace corps training center.


I will try to update my blog more often, but our access to internet is limited and time to ourselves barely exsists. I love and miss you all so much! Thanks for all love, thoughts and prayers from home!

Two years, two bags...let's do this!

This may be an optimistic view for what can fit inside two backpacks and weigh approximately 80lbs, but here is to hoping I can make it happen! I used previous Peace Corps Volunteers' packing lists and information on what is available locally to compile this list.

LUGGAGE
• Large (5400 cu. in.) Eagle Creek backpack
• Medium (3000 cu. in.) backpack
• Small Eagle Creek travel bag (purse size)

CLOTHING
• 7 pair ExOfficio undies (check them out online ladies!) several bras and sports bras
• 6 pair of socks
• Shirts; 5 T-shirts; 5 Tank tops; 2 long-sleeved lightweight shirts; 1 fleece
• 4 long skirts
• Pants; 2 pair linen pants; 1 pair workout capris; 1 pair jeans; 1 pair PJ pants
• Rain jacket
• Sun hat
• Shoes: Chaco sandals and running shoes
• A few headwraps/bandanas/clips…anything to help de-fro
• Bathing Suit
• 2 pair Underarmor shorts (to avoid chaffing while wearing skirts)
• Minimal not valuable jewelry

GEAR
• Cheap sports watch
• Sunglasses
• Crank flashlight
• Camel pack
• Solio Solar charger with 75 watt power inverter
• Battery powered alarm clock
• Rechargeable batteries (both AA and AAA, as well as, a charger)
• LED headlamp/Mini LED lantern
• Shortwave radio
• Large dry sac, small water proof pouches, small waterproof case
• 1 pr good scissors, 1 roll duct tape, 1 roll scotch tape
• Multi-tool
• 2 good kitchen knives and a nice pocket knife with sharpener
• Measuring cups
• Small non-stick skillet
• 2 combination locks
• 2 Nalgene bottles
• Lots of Ziploc bags and a few Tupperware containers
• Binoculars
• 2 compression sacks
• Bungee cords
• French plug adaptor

ENTERTAINMENT
• Acer Netbook (people also suggest getting a keyboard protector and laptop fan which I may do)
• 2 journals
• Digital camera; extra battery; SD cards
• Numerous flash drives
• Games I love, as well as, kid friendly games (Uno, Parcheesi, 5 crowns, Phase 10, Set, Old Maid, Crazy Eights, Go Fish…)
• IPod, waterproof case
• Tiny speakers
• African Wildlife Field guide
• Knitting needles
• Yoga Book
• Jump Rope

TOILETRIES
• 2 toothbrushes, 1 toothpaste, floss
• 2 deodorants
• Shampoo and conditioner
• Hand soap and hand santizer
• Face wash
• 2 bars of soap/soap container
• The Keeper (The Moon Cup), pantiliners
• Razor/blades
• fingernail clippers, fingernail brush
• Hair ties, bobby pins, clips
• Small mirror
• Packtowel
• Lotion and face lotion
• Sunscreen, face sunscreen, Chapstick with SPF
• Bug Spray, 100% deet, after bite
• Gold bond
• Ear plugs
• 3 month prescription
• Nasal Spray
• Waterproof Band Aids

MISC.
• Wolof Dictionary
• French Dictionary
• Small Bible
• 2010 planner
• Photos, important notes from home, favorite quotes
• Pencil bag; pens, pencils, sharpies, krazy glue, rubberbands, mini stapler and staples
• Index cards for language learning
• Important documents and anything necessary for Peace Corps
• Mini-sewing kit
• Address book, stamps, envelopes
• Small pillow
• Set of Sheets
• A couple of my favorite spices
• Gum
• Children’s vitamin gummies
• Coffee singles, Drink mixes, Protein powder

GIFTS
• Kaleidoscope
• Paddle ball game
• Whoopie cushion
• Blow up globe
• Candies
• Book about snow

FOOD (if I have room)
• Peanut butter
• Am I allowed to say Rum as food?
• Tuna

Time's a tickin

Time is flying!  Less than two months to go and I’ve started the overwhelming process of getting all of my “stuff” in order.  Acquiring all of the gear I need and deciding what is essential to my existence in Senegal and what is unnecessary and can be lived without for a couple years. I have started two buckets (which ironically are an important commodity in Senegal): one of “must-haves” and one of things I would really like to bring but may not have room for...this will definitely break a person of consumerism.  While this is a lot to think about it is far more appealing to me than dealing with the icky stuff like my financial obligations while I am gone and insurance/legal paperwork, etc.  Regardless of all of the responsibilities that I have yet to take care of or am currently caught in the middle of, I am so ready to begin my adventure.

My anticipation is unparalleled to any other time in my life.  I can’t wait to: meet my fellow Peace Corps trainees, find out what language I will be learning and start working towards my aspired fluency, SEE Senegal instead of reading about it, learn a whole new culture I have had no experience with, mango season, and so many other things.

Other things I am a little more apprehensive about, such as, mosquitoes, Senegalese bathroom habits, constant carbs, actual language acquisition, leaving my friends and family and essentially everything with familiarity, etc.

Oh the roller coaster of pre-departure emotions is an exciting one.  Here’s to making my last couple months in country meaningful!