Mural Madness

Probably the most enjoyable projects to engage in here in Senegal is mural painting. Its cheap (around $10), only takes a day or two, and provides you with an immediate tangible result. The best part is it requires absolutely no local language and no interaction with Senegalese people...you can pop in your headphones pick up your brushes and paint all day without ever having to speak a word to anyone.

When I first put up the world map in my room and realized that not a single child could find Senegal on the map or even identify the continent of Africa I decided to do a mural series at the school focusing on geography. I started out with a regional map of Senegal in three of the classrooms and Jen, my new neighbor Peter and I just completed a map of Africa this past Saturday. My plan is to do a map of Africa in every classroom and then do larger murals that are unique to each class. I'm hoping to do a gigantic world map on the back wall of one class, world flags on the back wall of another and the crest of Senegal on the back of another.

My obsession with muraling has recently spread beyond the walls of the school, and I've been painting just about anything that stands still long enough. I've painted two new chalkboards in my hut for writing out my to do lists and important dates, and I even put the Peace Corps logo on the outside of my hut (just in case people forget why I'm here). Jen and I have also looked into painting health related murals at the new health post being built in our road town and the staff seemed really enthusiastic about it. Our goal is to do at least one mural in each village every month for as long as we have things to paint. If you have any ideas for murals I'd love to hear them, but keep it simple...I'm no Picasso!

Universal Nut Sheller

Harvesting peanuts is a lot of work, but even after the fields are empty and the men have gone back to their tea-drinking the women's job is far from done. From November until June they can be found almost every day sitting amidst mountains of peanuts and shelling them, one by one, by hand. I became an expert peanut sheller during my first three months in the village and once i built up the required calluses I found it be be quite therapeutic...sitting in the shade, chatting with my neighbors and smashing each peanut in just the right spot on a rock or piece of wood. Crack. Crack. Crack.

Everyone enjoys a little social nut shelling every now and then, but the women in my village admitted that it is an extremely tedious job. One that takes up every free minute between cooking meals, doing laundry and taking care of children (and husbands). When I asked them what they would do with their time if they didn't have to shell peanuts one woman replied, "Nothing! I would sit around and drink tea like the men, or visit my sister, or take a nap."

There are several different types of mechanized nut shellers available in Senegal, but some require electricity while others have a tendency to break the peanuts (reducing their value) and all of them are extremely expensive, bulky and hard to maintain. However the Universal Nut Sheller, designed by a group called The Full Belly Project, is a promising and affordable alternative to the commercial models. It was first brought to Senegal a few years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kedougou region, and since it can be manufactured locally and is extremely simple to use volunteers in other villages have had a lot of success with it.

The Kaolack region is also known as the "peanut basin" of Senegal, so at a regional meeting in August we discussed the merits of trying to bring the Universal Nut Sheller technology home to our villages. After seeing a video of the machine on my camera and hearing it described by Bassirou who attended a demonstration with me, the women's group in my village decided to pool their resources and purchase a machine for Sambande. I brought the money to Kaolack where several volunteers had trained a local metal worker to produce the machines, and a month later it arrived in our village on the back of a Peace Corps car.

The machine and the volunteers and staff that delivered it were welcomed with enthusiasm and a lot of drumming and dancing. It took a good 15 minutes to get the women to settle down enough to actually teach them how to use the machine, but within 20 minutes they were practicing shelling hand fulls of peanuts by just turning a crank. After the technical training Awa Traore, a local Peace Corps employee, taked to the women about the money-making possibilities of the machine, what it might look like for them to charge people from other villages a nominal fee to shell their peanuts. The women seemed excited to start up their own small-scale enterprise in addition to having loads more free time. I have a feeling the women in my village will be taking a lot more naps this year.

The video that started it all. I took it lengthwise on my camera

but I can't rotate it on my computer so you're going to have to turn your head!

The Harvest Begins...

 Last week the boys brought in the first of the peanuts from the fields, indicating the start of the harvest season, which for me and the women in my family means hours of sitting on our butts on little stools surrounded by mountains of peanut plants, separating the nuts from the roots. Its a monumental task, so each household takes turns harvesting their fields on different days and everyone in the village gathers under the big party tree to help collect them. Its kind of like a big block party, with men popping in and out, women gossiping and kids running around and jumping in the big piles of discarded peanut plants just like American kids jump in piles of leaves.

After the plant is discarded and the buckets are all full the peanuts get sorted one last time to remove the empty shells and any debris before the majority are stuffed into big 4foot tall "bodybags" and shipped off to Kaolack to be sold to a peanut oil company. The leftovers are dried out in the sun and will become the staple of our diets for the next 6-8 months. The peanut butter here is really good, but everyone thinks I'm crazy for eating it raw. Senegalese people only use it to make Maafe, a kind of peanut sauce that could be really good except that they put dried fish into it so it tastes like the Jersey Shore smells and you never know when you'll choke on a hidden bone. The biggest peanuts are soaked in salt water and roasted in hot sand to be sold as a snack and the runts of the litter get pounded up to make Bahal, a very dry dish of rice, peanut crumbs and crumbled up MSG bullion cubes.

The "rough sort" where any empty shells are removed from the pile

The "fine sort" where any remaining debris is picked out
before packing them up

My sister Oumi, less than enthusiastic about the work

Peanut roots with a plethora of peanuts pleading to be picked!

First Funded Projects!

Now that the rainy season is winding down and the school year is about to begin, I'm finally able to get started on some real concrete work. First up is a latrine at the school in conjunction with two new well covers, both of which will help reduce disease in the village. Both of these projects are being funded by Appropriate Projects, an organization that works only with Peace Corps volunteers to fund small scale shovel-ready water and sanitation projects around the world. They rely on donations for each individual project, but they pre-fund everything which means I don't have to sit around waiting for money to come in before I can do my work. I applied last week and the money is being wired to me on the 19th! If you want to know more about the latrine project it's listed on their website HERE. And the link to the well cover project can be found HERE.

Gambian Adventure

You know you're a Peace Corps Volunteer when... you spend the entire night expelling amoebas from your digestive tract in all conceivable ways and instead of cancelling your 60 kilometer bike trip you stick a trowel and a pack of tissues in your saddle bag and hope for the best.

Luckily my gamble paid off. Despite its inauspicious beginning with a sleepless night of intestinal rebellion my trip to The Gambia was really fun. I met my closest neighbor, Jen, in our road town at 6:30am on Saturday to start the first leg of our trip...a 60k bike ride to Elizabeth's site in Nioro. Due to bad roads and a few stops to buy more water the ride took us about 5 hours and we rolled into town just in time for lunch. We stashed our bikes and ate at a restaurant owned by a group of women from a local trade school, topped it off with ice cream then waited out the hottest part of the day at the local Catholic compound. Jen and Elizabeth indulged in a local brew and I sipped on some oral rehydration solution to try and recover from the previous night and our long ride.

At four we took a charette to the garage to catch an alham to Danielle's site in Kaymore to spend the night. I didn't see much of the road on the way there because my amoebas were acting up and I was concentrating on not throwing up on the other passengers, but I felt every bump and bounce on the 45 minute trek out into the bush on dirt paths. We went to bed pretty early since we would have to be up at 5:30 the next morning in order to catch a car headed to Poste, the town bordering The Gambia.

We had expected to take another alham to the border, but we ended up scoring a ride with six other people in the back of a truck for 600cfa (a little over $1). We congratulated ourselves on our good luck since that meant we wouldn't have to wait around for a bigger car to fill up, but it turns out we spoke too soon. About 10 minutes down the road we got a punctured tire that flatted almost immediately, so everyone piled out of the truck to help lift it up and change the tire. Unfortunately the spare they put on wasn't in much better shape, so we had to stop again at the next village to find a pump to fill it up. After our driver spent 20 minutes filling the tire as much as he could with a bicycle pump we were once again on our way. Things were going splendidly until we got to the river. Thanks to the recent rains the road was completely flooded up to a foot deep in some places. The driver went halfway across the road before chickening out and reversing all the way back to dry land.


There were groups of men hiring themselves out to push/guide cars across the road and a lot of other vehicles made it across just fine, but our driver refused to budge. Instead he paid a passing alham to let us squeeze into their already full vehicle and we slowly trundled across an invisible road riddled with 1-2 foot deep potholes. Once across the river it was only another 15 minutes to Poste where we met up with Ari, another volunteer, and headed towards the border crossing. Typically Peace Corps volunteers are supposed to be allowed to cross the border with just their Peace Corps IDs, but we all had our passports just in case. Turns out if you show your passport you are also required to have a visa, so we had a rather long and complicated argument that involved all of our shared languages: Wolof, French, Pulaar, English and Seereer. Once we had the confusion sorted (if you don't show your passport you don't need a visa) we took a charette into Farafenny.

Sunday is luma (market) day we took a quick look at the giant vegetables and bought some fried dough before heading into the town proper. Everyone says the Gambia is the place to buy fabric so we all bought a couple meters before we went to the local dispensary to sample the Gambian brew.

We met up with a Gambian Peace Corps volunteer and some VSO volunteers (England's version of the Peace Corps) and it was nice to see whether the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. The Gambia was settled by England so the national language is English, although people there speak English about as well as people in Senegal speak French. That is to say not very well. Still it was an interesting change of pace. After happy hour we went for some critically acclaimed chicken that was served with mustard, mayo, spaghetti, onion and cucumber. Our meal was accompanied by some ridiculous Nigerian music videos that included women in booty shorts dancing with people wearing masks of former US presidents. I wonder if Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford are aware that they are the stars of a bad Nigerian rap video?

After our late lunch it was time to head back so we jumped on a charette for the bumpy 10 minute ride back across the border. At the garage we squeezed into another alham for the long journey back across the flooded river to Danielle's site. On the way our vehicle was stopped and everyone was ordered out so the police could search the car for contraband...sugar. I'm not sure why, but it is currently illegal to bring Gambian sugar into Senegal, and I think the penalty is pretty steep for anyone caught with it. 

A lot of it makes it through though since the only sugar available in Senegal that isn't from The Gambia is expensive French imported sugar cubes. Every time I put granular sugar into my oatmeal I'm breaking the law! We got back to Danielle's village just as the sun was setting and the mosque was calling out the evening prayer and went to bed right after our dinner of millet and beans.

The next morning we slept in until 7 and then went out to help Danielle trench some mango seedlings to protect them during the dry season and plant some live fencing and wind break trees at the local community space. We did a good 6 hours worth of weeding, digging and transplanting which was more than enough to justify our trip as work related travel. We also went out to look at her Master Farmer's field and check out all of the crop demonstrations. Overall it was a really productive day and its always nice to do work with other volunteers...things get done so much faster when everyone speaks the same language and you don't have to have circular discussions about the best way to do something.

This morning Jen and I got up at 6 to catch a car back to Nioro. The original plan was to pick up our bikes and ride the 60k back to our villages, but by the time we got to Nioro it was already 8am and blazingly hot, so we opted for the back up plan and put our bikes on top of a station wagon going to Kaolack. Since we had to pay the full fare whether we got out at our crossroads or went all the way into the city we opted to come in for the day to check our mail and charge up the electronics. I was originally planning on heading back to site after my last post, but a massive thunderstorm rolled in (cross your fingers that my hut stays standing!) so I'm stuck in Kaolack for the night. I'm really anxious to get back to my site and assess the condition of my hut and just get back into my own routine, but you know what they say...when it rains make lemonade and the world smiles with you...or something like that. Anyway I figured I'd use the extra time for another blog post.

The Downside of the Rainy Season

 So far the rainy season has been pretty good to me...I've only had to pull half the daily amount of water from the well, my garden gets watered for free, The temperature retreats into the 80s...but last week mother nature took it a bit too far. In one night we got enough rain to completely fill up my 16 liter bucket and completely demolish 7 huts in my compound. As a result of bone rattling thunder and large amounts of sand being washed away from beneath it, my hut now has a large crack running from the bottom to the top of the left hand wall and extending horizontally all the way around the back wall to the other door. I also have a big fissure splitting my cement bed in half from floor to wall. Several of our huts collapsed with little or no visible signs of damage, but when I asked my dad if my hut was going to fall down he told me it would be fine. He also told me to sleep on my cot on the other side of the hut just in case.

Until the rains stop in late October/ early November we can't start construction on new huts or work to repair the crack in mine. Since the largest of our collapsed huts is threatening to fall on the two huts closest to it, those are currently out of commission as well. We've got approximately 40 people in my compound crammed into 6 small huts, which is my motivation for staying in my room despite it's current architectural flaws. The village mason assured me that when a hut collapses the walls always fall outward, so as long as I sleep on the side farthest from the damage I should be safe.

Considering my hut is less than 5 months old it should have withstood the rains better than it did. All of the other huts that fell were over 3 years old. Turns out there were a lot of corners cut during my hut construction, using mostly mud bricks and only a paper thin layer of cement on the walls...which explains why my walls kept crumbling away with every little bump. I have a feeling a lot of the money Peace Corps gave my village to build my hut went into someone else's pocket. So now I have to front the money to get my hut repaired out of my own pocket, when a single bag of cement is going to cost me an entire day's salary. Corruption is such a way of life here though that skimming a little bit off the top of any project/community donation is practically expected, and no one even tries that hard to hide it. Take home lesson: I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on the finances for all of my projects.

Collateral Damage

The mud walls cracked right along the seams of the bricks

Horizontal branch of the crack on the left wall

The rest of the crack extending along the back wall

Mangrove Reforestation

This weekend I took a bit of a "working vacation" and went to Toubacouta with 21 other volunteers from the Kaolack region to work with local residents on a mangrove reforestation project. We got to Toubacouta late Saturday afternoon and headed directly for a water front campement for some cold beers and some diving off of the dock. Sunday morning was down to business, up to our knees in muck and mud sticking these oddly shaped seeds "butt down" into the tidal basin.

Mangroves are a type of amphibious tree that is found throughout the Saloum delta in Senegal and helps prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for fish, oysters, herons and (supposedly) otters, flamingos and manatees. A combination of human destruction and climate change have caused a significant decline in Senegal's mangrove forests over the last 50 years, but people here are slowly starting to realize their importance and do something about it. We spent about 3 hours at low tide (and consequently high noon) combating deforestation with over 60 local residents, here are a few of the best pictures:

Sunset over the water and a view of the dock

Ladies sorting out mangrove seeds

Mangrove seeds and muddy feet

Butt down in the ground

Mangrove seedling

PCVs and work and the tide coming in

Mangroves

Par for the course for Senegalese transport