Change is Hard

How many people do you know that are miserable in their job, but stick around because of the money/benefits/stability it affords? No one grows up dreaming about working long hours, having no control over their schedule or being under appreciated...so why do so many people put up with it? Because stepping out on a limb to follow your real dream can be scary. In America we derive so much of our identity by what we do to make money. Notice I said money, not a living. There is a difference. Think about it, if someone asks you to describe yourself do you say "I'm a school teacher" or "I'm a reader" or more appropriately... "I'm a pilot" or "I'm an adventurer." What we do has somehow become synonymous with who we are, so striking out on a different path can sometimes feel like losing your sense of identity.

That's why I'm really proud of my friend and fellow climber Kevin. He works as an airline pilot and he does a really good job at a really hard job, but he's ridden that bus to the end of the line and he's ready to make a change. So instead of languishing in a job he is no longer passionate about for another 20 years he's done a lot of hard work to realize a new dream in the outdoor industry. Kevin is taking a chance on the American dream and opening up his own business, Take a Hike GPS.

Kevin is passionate about hiking, climbing and spending time in the great outdoors and he's combining that passion with his expert knowledge of technology to get help people "find your adventure with GPS." His company specializes in all kinds of hand held GPS devices that can help you get from point A to point B whether your in the middle of the woods or downtown in an unfamiliar city. Not just selling them but helping people choose the right model and learn how to use them with an extensive library of tutorial and how to videos. If you're like me and you manage to get lost even in your own backyard you might want to consider investing in one, and if you do I encourage you to get it from Take a Hike. Support a guy who is following his dreams.

Tangana

There are very few things that could get me to step out of the brightly lit miniature America known as the Peace Corps regional house onto the dark sketchy streets of Kaolack at night, but freshly fried eggs and potatoes is one of them. Let me paint for you a picture of how I went about acquiring my dinner last night.

Stepping out of the front door of the regional house feels a bit like stepping onto another planet. Headlights wink through a haze of dust hanging in the air, sillouhetted figures loom suddenly out of the darkness, illuminated by a moto bike whizzing by in a blaze of sound and light, and strange languages echo from shadowed doorways. You clutch your little plastic bowl a bit tighter and click on the small flashlight on the end of your nokia cell phone even as you question your decision to bring it along. Careful to illuminate your every step, you slowly pick your way through the animal poop and trash strewn about the dirt road, moving through the landscape like a pale ghost. Besides a few half-hearted calls of "toubab" from some sleepy talibe children you might as well not even exist.

Out on the road the dust is even thicker and the bright lights of cars impair rather than enhance your vision as they trundle along. As you shuffle through the sand you keep your eyes fixed on the other side of the road, straining to pick out the glow of neon lights behind the nondescript red curtain that to anyone else screams "brothel," but to you indicates a hot tasty meal. You pass a familiar broken down old truck and your heart sinks when you realize that comforting red square of light is absent from the derelict old building across the street. It looks as if no one is home.

But wait! What was that? There are small lights moving behind the curtain in the doorway and you can just barely catch a whiff of grease over the smell of trash and raw sewage. Perhaps someone is there after all? Only one way to find out. You time the rhythm of the passing taxis...one...two...three...then make a dash for safety. Keeping your eyes fixed on those moving lights you wind your way past sleeping dogs and discarded flip flops until you reach "the bridge." Nothing more than a 3 meter concrete slab, it is old and crumbly and the only thing between you and the small swift river of water and human feces that flows from the broken pipe up the street. You cross your fingers, hustle across and stand before that tattered old curtain, the gateway to masticational delight and intestinal distress. You take a deep breath, pull back the curtain and step through the doorway. "Asalaam Malekum"

Tangana is the wolof word for "hot," and its an appropriate name for these type of eating establishments. Three propane burners on full blast ensure that this little three meter square room maintains an average temperature of 100 degrees and the food is guaranteed to scorch your mouth. The man behind the table smiles as you step inside, and the beads of sweat pouring down his face spring up on your forehead as well. As you sit down on the rickety 2x4 supported by cinder blocks that passes for a bench you take in the scene. The space is small, literally no more than a hole in the wall. There are two large curtains blocking off the back left corner of the room, possibly concealing the prostitute the red light outside seems to offer. All of the space that is left is taken up by three propane gas tanks and a low table piled high with flats of eggs and sliver bowls of potatoes, onions, spaghetti, bread and mystery meat. Three 20-something young men sit hunched around the table over plates of fried eggs and meat piled on top of a bed of spaghetti. The normally bright blue florescent light is dark and instead a single tallow candle is burning on a jerry can and everyone is illuminating their meal with their cell phone flashlights. "No electricity" the men say with a shrug.

The menu is a la carte, so in your most basic Wolof you ask for eggs and potatoes and gingerly push your little plastic bowl towards the chef. The pan crackles to life as he pours nearly a quarter of a liter of oil and then cracks in two eggs. The man dips his hands into a bowl of water, and after months in Senegal it is a comforting sign of some attempt at sanitation, before grabbing a couple of potatoes from the bowl and slicing them up in his palm. The whole mixture takes less than two minutes to cook and before you know it your dinner is steaming in front of you. You toss a couple of coins across the table and receive a scrap of newspaper to wrap up your bowl in an attempt to keep out the ever-present dust.

Stepping out of the door the relative coolness of the night is like a breath of fresh air, but as the smell of sewage assaults your nose you decide to save your deep breath for later. The heat and weight of the bowl is comforting as you retrace your steps with a renewed sense of urgency. The thought of the meal to come has your mouth watering and your small intestines cowering in fear. A quick stop for a fanta and you're home free. Stepping back into the light of the house you re-enter the closest thing to America you will see for the next two years. You've survived your journey into the seedy Kaolack night. The next question is will your body survive the new assault of amoebas and microbes you're about to introduce into it?

More Murals!

Friday my neighbor Peter at I biked down to Keur Madialbel to help Jessica paint some murals at the Case de Tout Petits (House of All Smalls) preschool. It was a long day and the director was your typical loud, opinionated Senegalese man, but I think they came out pretty nice in the end.

Promoting girls education

Wash your hands with soap!

Nutrition pyramid, Senegalese style

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.