But what is there to DO in a village?

Things are going well in Sambande, or as we say in Seereer, a naaya (it is walking). Sorry for the long delay between posts, I've been in and out of Kaolack a couple of times to run errands but I haven't had the time to sit down and blog. Overall village life is pretty uneventful. The kids are out of school for the rainy season, and they're spending their summer "vacation" working in the fields. Since my environmental education work is rather dependent on the school calendar I've got quite a bit of free time on my hands. I mostly spend my days shelling peanuts, working in my garden, planting trees or napping under the big shade tree with my friend Bassirou. That's not to say I never do anything exciting...why just the other day we had a village wide food fight to celebrate the rainy season and ensure a successful harvest. The women cooked an obscene amount of millet and then the men ate it and everyone threw the leftovers at each other until we were all covered in a food with the consistency of wet sand. Quite a party! Here are a few more things that pass for fun in my village and some pictures to go with them:

One day my brothers spent an hour hunting mice in one of the other huts in our compound. Most people would consider bludgeoning a rodent to death with a blunt instrument entertainment enough, but my brothers went the extra mile and decapitated them as well. This is Samba, proudly displaying his two "trophies." I didn't ask what he did with the heads...


Perhaps my favorite thing to do in the village is to climb the mango tree outside of our compound with my brothers. They use one of the lowest branches as a "horse" and take turns bouncing each other up and down on it. I prefer to sit all the way at the top and watch the people coming and going on the bush paths.

Every couple of days the women go out to the forest to collect wood for their cooking fires, and one day they brought back a monkey. I have no idea where they found it or how they caught it, but our village now has a permanent primate display at one of the compounds near the well. They tied a string around its waist and keep it tethered to a tree, but it doesn't seem too interested in escaping. I think it enjoys the diet of peanuts and rice and ants.

Some days my brothers put out some millet and wait behind a tree with a big bucket to catch birds. Issa caught this little guy and pulled out all of his flight feathers before I could rescue it so I spent a couple of hours building it a cage out of bamboo. Unfortunately he managed to wiggle out the top while I was taking a bucket bath and escaped from my hut, and I'm guessing he ended up in the belly of one of our cats.

And of course, there's always the sunsets....natures television!

New Address

Finally made it over to the post office and between my limited French and Wolof I managed to negotiate myself a PO box of my very own. It cost me 10,000cfa for the year so send me lots of letters so it will be worth it! I wouldn't object to a package or two either... Here's the new address and a new wish list to go with it:

Jennifer Wysong
BP 2173 Ndorng
Kaolack, Senegal
West Africa


Reeses, whoppers, M&Ms, any kind of chocolate
Banana chips
American cereal
Cream of wheat / instant oatmeal packets
Chai tea and regular tea
Instant mashed potatoes
Instant soup mix
Instant anything...
Peeps/ marshmellows
The cheese packets from Mac and cheese
Canned tuna/chicken (or the bags)
Muffin mix, brownie mix, any mix...
Maple syrup
Animal crackers
Grahm crackers
Grated parmesan cheese
Piroulines
Those diabetes-inducing frosted sugar cookies from walmart
Any sort of condiment packets you can steal from restaurants
Duct Tape
Garden seeds
Bungee cords
Tupperware (why not save space and put food in it?)
Erasers
Mechanical pencils
Pocket knives (walmart has a decent selection)
Bubble soap
Jump ropes, frisbees, kids toys
Mixed CDs
Stories and pictures from your latest adventure


Magazines:
Climbing
Rock and Ice
Backpacker
Urban Climber
National Geographic
Food magazine (i can dream, right?)
Alpinist

Home Sweet Home

After nearly a month at site my hut is finally starting to look and feel like a home. I had some cabinets made in my road town for about 60,000 cfa ($120) so that I could finally put away my things. I pounded some nails into the cement walls to hang my broom and keep my bags off the floor and even put up a world map so I can dream about traveling to places with mountains and trees and air conditioning. So, without further ado, the grand tour:

Some notes:

* Yes, the curtains are pink...my family painted the walls and hung the curtains as a welcome gift and I had planned to replace them first chance I got, but they've actually grown on me and I'm thinking about keeping them.

* The silver thing in the corner is a water filter. Peace corps says we're supposed to filter our water AND put bleach in it before we drink it, but I bet you could count the number of volunteers who actually do that on one hand. I would rather get giardia than stomach cancer from the bleach, so I always skip that step. Sometimes I filter my water but our well is so deep that our water is relatively safe to drink, so I usually just go for it and hope for the best. So far so good...

*My bed is a cement slab with a 2 inch thick peace of foam and is surprisingly comfortable. My mosquito net is made for a twin bed and my mattress is double sized so I had to cut it up the middle to make it work. It doesn't keep out the creepy crawlies but at least it keeps the pieces of my roof from falling onto my head.

* In the corner next to the back door is my "kitchen." I can actually make a pretty decent soup provided there are veggies available in the market.

* In case you were wondering thats what the inside of a grass roof looks like. Every once in a while grass or bits of bark from the sticks come down and sometimes I get kamakazied by a grub or two that are living in the wood, but for the most part it does its job well. Keeps out the rain anyway.

* Those sacks in the corner of my back yard are the start of my tree nursery. Someday soon I'll have my own miniature forest of Moringa trees. Against the back fence is my garden bed, which took about a week to prepare because I had to cart in manure and soil from the fields since my back yard is primarily clay. One of these days I'll go out to the forest and cut some branches to build a shade structure so I can protect my bike from the sun.

* That cement slab doubles as my shower space and the cover of my latrine pit. You can guess what the hole is for. The plastic kettle full of water is the Senegalese equivalent of toilet paper, I keep it over the hole to try and keep the flies out. I know it must seem pretty primitive but its actually not that bad...you haven't lived until you've taken a bucket bath by the light of the full moon!

Bacon and French Fries and Millet, Oh My!

I spent a good portion of this last week and a half thinking about food. There's nothing worse than having a craving for M&Ms when there is a whole ocean between you and the nearest Wawa. During the hottest part of the day I actually spent a whole hour lying in bed and planning out what I would eat if I was in America. For the record, the perfect menu goes something like this:

Breakfast:
French toast with strawberries, powdered sugar and syrup
Bacon, sausage and hashbrowns
2 blueberry pancakes with butter and syrup
Bowl of frosted flakes, skim milk and sliced bananas
Blueberry muffin
Orange juice

Lunch:
French onion soup with cheese and french bread
Turkey sandwich on an onion roll with thousand island dressing, lettuce, onion, tomato, roasted red pepper, saurkraut, bacon and melted swiss cheese
Sour cream and onion potato chips
Sliced apple with peanut butter
Honey wheat pretzels
Ginger ale

Dinner:
Meatloaf with ketchup
Mashed potatoes with butter and gravy
Broccoli with cheese sauce
Homemade french fries with old bay seasoning
Juicy carrots
Pilsbury crescent rolls
Apple juice

Dessert:
Emery's trifecta pie
2 scoops vanilla ice cream
Piroulines
Skim milk

Sadly imagining a menu like that doesn't make the millet and fish for dinner taste any better. It was after I started daydreaming about super walmart that I realized it was time to come back to Kaolack. At least here I can drink a cold soda and eat a bad hamburger at the french restaurant.

Other than the strange food cravings, things have been going well in Sambande. I collected some fertilizer and got started on a tree pepiniere (nursery) with the help of my two littlest brothers Alaji and Mordu. I put up a tire swing and spent almost a whole day sitting in the shade under the tree and watching the kids try to figure out how many people they could pile on it at one time. I painted a map of Senegal in two of the classrooms at my school and learned that the teachers get VEGETABLES in their rice for lunch, so I conveniently showed up to work around lunchtime three days in a row. I even walked the 2k to my road town with Bassirou for the weekly market last Tuesday and treated myself to some bread and homemade peanut butter.

But by far the biggest news this past week was the RAIN! Rainy season is fast approaching, and we had a little preview Monday night when I woke up to a huge storm complete with thunder, lightning and a torrential downpour. My grass roof kept me fairly dry, just a little dampness here and there, but the deluge turned my favorite shady spot under the big tree into a temporary lake. Along with the rain came an influx of creepy crawlies. I woke in the morning to the company of ants, centipedes, earwigs, spiders and even a little scorpion that had all snuck into my room to escape the wet. The mosquito net the Peace Corps gave me is too small to tuck into my mattress so I found myself sharing my bed with more than one unsavory guest...needless to say I will be buying a bigger mosquito net in the market today. The good news about the rain is I managed to collect enough of it in my buckets to avoid having to pull from the well for two whole days!

One last thing, I think I forgot to mention last time that along with my new family came a new name. I am now officially Mbayang Thiaw (pronounced bay-en chow).