Our Trio's Down To Two

Jen and Peter sorting out the cheese

Last week my closest neighbors and I got together for a little goodbye pizza party in Peter's village. His community counterpart Pap bakes village bread and he agreed to let us use his mud-brick oven for the afternoon. We had to make our own sauce, and use Laughing Cow cheese instead of the real thing, but it was still hands-down the best pizza I've had in a long time. We even made herb and garlic flat bread as an appetizer.

 Since the three of us live within a 10 kilometer radius of each other we've collaborated on a lot of work projects over the past year, working at the master farm, painting murals and planting trees (not to mention cooking some gourmet hut cuisine). Sadly our trio is about to become a duo, as Jen's two years is coming to a close. She is COSing (close of service) this month and Peace Corps has decided not to place another volunteer in her village. Peter and I will both still spend a lot of time over there since we work closely with Abdoul Salaam, the master farmer in her village, but it will be different when there isn't another volunteer to drop in on.

Everyone knows the best pizza comes from a
wood-fired oven

    It's been strange saying goodbye to everyone in the 2009 Ag/AgFo/SED stage as they depart Senegal for bigger and better things. Although a few of them have signed on for third-year extensions, the majority of the stage will be gone by the end of September. I've seen several groups of volunteers come and go, but these are people that have been around for my entire service, and it feels strange to watch them leave without me. Our Health/Environmental Ed stage is now the "senior stage" in country, the "older and wiser" volunteers who are supposed to have all the answers and bestow all of their wisdom on the younger generations, and the next in line to COS. In 8 months our services will be winding down too, and we'll be the ones planning COS trips, saying our goodbyes and passing on all of our old clothes and half-used cooking spices to a new generation of "leaders."

The Finished Products

   I expect these next 8 months to go flying by. It's hard to believe I've already been in Senegal for 18 months. I could have given birth to two babies in that amount of time (and no doubt my village is wondering why I haven't)! There are a lot of things I still want to do before I leave, and a lot of them involve a bit of travel and maybe another vacation, but I've also got a few work projects that I've been keeping on the back-burner that I would like to see finished. It's going to be a busy year, and before I know it it will be time to start thinking about heading home! I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little jealous of the volunteers leaving this month...I envy them their big backpacking trips, welcome home parties, access to supermarkets and ability to drive motorized vehicles again. But I know my turn will come soon enough, and so I'm also grateful for the time I have left to travel around Senegal, play with my little siblings, joke with my friends in village and maybe even do a bit of work now and again.

Our work "pocket" and Pap

I Can Show You The World...

Last week I finally finished the giant world map mural at our school in Sambande. Like the one we painted in Fasstoucouleur it takes up the entire back wall of the classroom and is over 7 feet tall. Each continent is labeled and each country numbered, and there is a corresponding key painted on the side of the cabinet next to the map. Once you've conquered the world there isn't really anywhere else to go, and I feel ready to hang up my paint brushes and put and end to my muraling career. Not that I couldn't be convinced to come out of retirement to help paint at another volunteer's site or do a training session with new volunteers, but I don't want to be buying any more paint or starting any more big projects in Sambande.

Corresponding list of continents and countries

Muraling by the Numbers:Murals painted in Senegal: 26

Mural trainings taught: 2

Villages muraled in: 6

Cans of paint purchased: 56

Days spent muraling: 43

In case you were wondering, this is where I am!

Korite

Aladji in his Korite Best

 Ramadan officially came to an end last Tuesday night with everyone crowded together in our compound staring up at the sky. My dads first wife Ami was the first to spot the thin sliver of moon that marks the end of the month of fasting and suddenly everyone was jumping up and down, pointing to the sky and cheering. For the past week Korite (Eid-al-Fitir), the end of Ramadan feast, was the only thing people could talk about. To celebrate our return to a normal eating schedule everyone puts on their nicest clothes and spends the entire day feasting and drumming and going from house to house to ask forgiveness for any wrongs you may have committed in the past year. The kids get together in little groups to show off their holiday best and ask for money and treats at each house.

Preparing the meat

 I spent the morning helping my mom peel potatoes, onions and garlic for the french-fry/onion/macaroni sauce that goes with the meat. Our meat this year was one kilo of questionable beef parts and two cows feet, so I went ahead and bought a chicken so there would be something worth eating in the bowl. Once All the kids were washed and dressed I took an individual portrait of each one looking as clean as they will probably ever be, and gave each of them a little goodie-bag of toys that I'd saved from care-packages sent over the past few months.

My dad doing what he does best

 Around 2pm all of the men and boys crowded around the bowls for lunch (they must have been hungry after sitting around doing nothing all morning) while the women waited in a different part of the compound. Once the men had eaten their fill me and my moms and sisters got to dine on what was left. Fortunately for me, my mom and I squirreled away the two drumsticks of the chicken which I breaded and fried, so we got a little more than just stomach parts and oily macaroni.

My sisters in their new complets

 After lunch everyone made the rounds to atone for their wrongs in the past year. Someone would pop into the compound with a resounding "Forgive me!" and everyone would answer back "There's nothing to forgive!" and then they would start in on the blessings. "May Allah give you health," "May Allah give you money," "May Allah give you good crops," "May Allah bring the rains," etc. etc. for up to ten minutes. Everyone in the compound just agrees with an "Amin." Most of the blessings I received seemed to be hinting at something. "May Allah give you a husband," "May Allah give you a lot of sons," "May Allah give you a good marriage." My favorite was, "May Allah bless your vagina to bear many children." I think my village wants me to hurry up and get married already. After all, I'm getting old and I'd better start now if I hope to reach the double digits with my offspring. At this point in my service I'm tired of arguing...I just said "Amin."

Babies in their best

As the day wore on and everyone slipped into their own private food comas the activity settled down and I slipped back into my room for a few hours to read and relax. Around dusk the drumming started up from several different parts of the village and everyone in my family made their way out to the dance parties. The women danced until dawn and the men stayed awake until all hours of the morning blasting religious "teachings" on their radios. I must admit, these "teachings" (I prefer to call them screechings) are my absolute least favorite part of life in Senegal. Noise ordinances don't exist in Africa, and so when things get too quiet at say, two or three in the morning, people decide to fill the aural emptiness with various forms of repetitive "prayers on tape." For an ear-splitting example, visit my friend Justin's blog post Here. There is no escaping them...blasting from stalls in the market, blaring from speakers attached to the top of public transport, descending from the minarets of mosques and, especially on holidays, scratching out of the tinny speakers of a thousand made in China radios in my village.

Cows foot, anyone?

Around 3am the festivities finally wound down and people made their way back home. I'm looking forward to going back to the normal routine of lunch at 3pm and dinner at 9 and being allowed to drink water in the heat of the day. 

The Long Ride Home

A few pictures from my last ride to Sambande from Kaolack

Rainy season floods on the side of the road

A bike is preferable to being crammed into one
of those alhams with 40 other people!

The long, straight, empty road to Keur Socce

Cow crossing

Almost home, 3k to go!

Endurance

This is how an expert sufferer looks with
a 102 degree fever on a 110 degree day.

 If there's one thing Peace Corps has taught me these last sixteen months its perseverance. How to put up with inconvenience, deal with difficulty, and keep going despite any amount of pain, discomfort or misery. To accept any circumstance and continue on regardless, because most of the time that's the only option I've got. I never would have made it up Kilimanjaro without these lessons. I don't know what I would have done (sat down and cried?), but I wouldn't have been able to put one foot in front of the other and continued to the summit between bouts vomiting and diarrhea without the endurance I've learned here. I can endure a double-ended intestinal assault on a 60k bike ride, 8 hours in a cramped vehicle suffocating in gasoline fumes and body odor, or an infestation of spiders (or earwigs, or biting ants, or scorpions), with a resilience I never thought I possessed. In short, I am an expert in misery. Acknowledging it, coping with it, moving through it and accepting it as an inevitable part of life in Africa. Thats not to say its always easy, or that all suffering is created equal. For instance, I find it much easier to spend a rainy night squatting over a hole in the ground expelling all the fires of hell than to endure the millionth "xonknop" (red-ears) from a stranger in a country where I'm trying so hard to fit in. Not all trials are handled in equal grace, but none the less they are handled. It is somehow comforting to think, during a bout of illness or a period of abuse, that "this isn't the worst thing that will happen to me in Senegal." I don't know why that helps, but it does. I can't possibly allow myself to go to pieces over something if I know there is worse yet to come. What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger, and Senegal hasn't managed to kill me yet!
 

Shhh, Be Vewy Vewy Quiet, I'm Raising Rabbits

Aput and Xa Ju'ua (lunch and dinner), my breeding pair

How often do you eat meat? Assuming you're not a vegetarian, I'm willing to bet the number is somewhere around 7 times a week...an average of one meal containing animal protein per day. In my village, as in most villages across Senegal, we're lucky to get meat once a month, and that would be one chicken shared between 9 adults and 12 children. A lack of protein in the diet isn't as big of a threat to people's health here as a lack of vegetables since most of our meals contain dried fish (literally just a fish, dried to leather in the sun), but it is certainly a threat to my tastebuds. That's where Bugs Bunny comes in.

The hutch built by my counterpart and I.
I was feeling patriotic on painting day!

I had been toying with the idea of raising chickens, but I couldn't stand the thought of adding more noise to the cacophony that is our compound. My newest rule is "if it crows, it goes," one feathered 4am alarm clock is enough. After rejecting the roosters I turned my mind toward other readily-available sources of protein. Cows are strictly for Pulaars to herd. Goats and sheep require too much space and food, and as I've been waging war against my aunt's goats for almost a year trying to keep them out of my garden I didn't fancy adding to their ranks. Rats and monitor lizards are another option here if you're a good trapper, but although I've got a seemingly endless supply of rats invading my yard and hut I don't fancy trying to cultivate them and monitor lizards, although delicious, don't provide much meat. That leaves just one option: Rabbits. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Rabbits don't moo, crow, bray or baa. They are one of the most efficient animals and produce an astounding amount of meat for every kilogram of fodder. Rabbits aren't picky eaters and its easy to find something for them to eat year round, even in the desert. Best of all they reproduce like, well, like rabbits! Two rabbits today quickly becomes twenty rabbits tomorrow, and so for a small initial investment I have guaranteed myself a steady supply of meat for the rest of my service. If things go really well I might even consider writing a grant to extend rabbit husbandry to other compounds in the village. We'll see how it goes.

 

My brother Samba with Xa ju'ua

Water, Water, Everywhere and Not a Bite to Eat

Now that the rains are is in full swing my family and I are spending a lot of time in the fields plowing, planting, and weeding our crops; millet, peanuts and corn. Rainy season can be a bit misleading, because despite being surrounded by green lush crops, we've been in "starving season" for over a month now. Its the awkward time before the harvest when food from last year is running low and the price of vegetables skyrockets. Fortunately much of starving season overlaps with Ramadan so we're fasting from sunrise to sunset anyway and the lack of food is less noticeable. Our family has been able to supplement our dinners with vegetables from my garden so we're getting a few more vitamins than most, but the extra farm work combined with fasting food and water for 15 hours a day make August a tough month for everyone.

Oumi taking a break from weeding the field

Since the beginning of Ramadan, the farming work falls
heavily on the shoulders of the kids who are too young to be fasting

Modu leads the donkey pulling the plow

Aladji putting the plow away

A monitor lizard caught in my garden.
Lucky for him we're all fasting for Ramadan
or else he would have been eaten

My brothers displaying the first eggplant
harvested from my garden

My rainy season garden in its early stage:
tomatoes, eggplant, basil, beans, corn,
sweet potato, mint, okra, green pepper

My eggplant had twins!

African lightning storm...natures television