Reasons I Tolerate A Cat

I'm by no means a cat person...in fact I'm highly allergic and I find them to be rather stuck up and snobbish. But there are two reasons why I gave in and adopted my cat Bin Bin:

Reason # 1: as a kitten he was irresistibly adorable

Reason # 2: despite his adorableness I refuse to feed him more than the occasional scrap so he's become a master hunter...lizards, mice, camel spiders, giant rats...you name it Bin Bin kills it.

Mary Gets Married

 

  Peace Corps is all about promoting cross-cultural understanding, getting to really know your village and letting the people in your village really get to know you. Sometimes you get to know someone so well you realize you want to spend the rest of your lives sharing your cultures. Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the wedding of Mary and Malik in Jilor. Since they will be having an American wedding when they travel back to the States at the end of Mary's service in a few weeks this was a primarily Senegalese affair, although with a few American touches.

  

Kaolack sub-region volunteers

At 11am about 30 of us dressed up in our Senegalese best and piled into an alham (made to seat 20) for the hour long drive out to Mary's village. Weddings in Senegal are an all day affair, and throughout the day the bride and groom are each occupied with their own wedding obligations. The men get to chew cola nuts and go to the mosque for the "official" marriage ceremony (no women allowed, not even the bride!) and the bride spends the day being primped, prepped and presented to the whole village. After greeting her family the Kaolack crew wiled away the hours in the shade of a large tent chatting and dancing to some good old fashioned Senegalese drumming until it was time for Mary to greet the whole village in her wedding day best. She was gorgeous in her white complete (the color being one of the few American traditions that were blended into the wedding), and I was glad to see that she chose to skip the dreadful drag queen-esque makeup that Senegalese brides wear in favor of a more natural look. A whole procession of people including her American, Senegalese and volunteer families marched here around to all of the compounds in the village in the heat of the day then retired to the shade while the men went to the mosque to pray.

Eat your heart out Michael Jackson

Lunch was served around 8pm (not a typo, meals at weddings and baptisms are always served really late) and then the real dancing began. There was a group of drummers and a guitarist that played traditional Seereer music, but there was also a DJ with a generator and huge speakers to blast the latest hits. Around 10pm the bride and groom shared their first dance, which I think was another custom borrowed from the states since I haven't seen it at any other Senegalese marriages. After that was the presentation of the gifts, at which point us volunteers gave our gift to the happy couple and then performed the Macarena for the crowd. After that it was dancing until dawn, although we stuffed ourselves into an (even smaller) alham for the journey back to Kaolack a little after midnight.

It was a beautiful day and I'm so glad Mary invited us to share it with her and Malik, and I wish them the best of luck in their new life together.

W.A.I.S.T.

I spent this past weekend in Dakar with almost every other Peace Corps Senegal volunteer and a considerable number from The Gambia, Niger and Mali, for the West African International Softball Tournament. Three full days of softball and three full nights of dancing (until dawn) later and most of us are ready to head back to the village and get back to work. The tournament is divided into a competitive league with teams of high schoolers, embassy officials, and ex-pats, and a social league which is mostly made up of teams from various peace corps regions and countries.

It can be debated that the team "uniforms" in the social league are taken even more seriously than the game itself. This years Kaolack's theme was ballerinas, and although everyone put their own spin on their costume we were all united under one common banner: tutus. The vast array of outfits was a real tribute to both the creativity of Peace Corps volunteers and the ingenuity of Senegalese tailors. Other regions were Cops & Robbers, The Jersey Shore, and Lederhosen. Despite a pretty respectable showing (can YOU field a pop fly wearing nothing but a tutu and boxers with a beer in one hand?) we didn't win any games, but Kaolack was definitely first place for continuity and team spirit. I think our pirouettes could give the Russian ballet a run for its money!

The part of WAIST that Peace Corps volunteers look forward to the most isn't the softball, but the chance to eat something other than rice and millet, and dance to music that doesn't involve drumming on buckets or old ladies wailing. Dakar has a great selection of insanely expensive (on a village salary) but insanely delicious restaurants, and parties are hosted by the Marines, Peace Corps, and the American Club. Since my bedtime in village is no later than 8pm I was worried I wouldn't get to enjoy much of the Dakar nightlife, but I rallied and managed to keep dancing until last call at 5am! I think I was more sore from the dancing than from the softball. It was great to spend a weekend forgetting that I still live in a mud hut and eat birdseed for two meals a day, but I am starting to miss my family and its time for me to get started on the school garden, so its back to the village in a few hours!

Dakars finest: Police officer, banana, Hamburgler

Master Farmer Madness

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This past week has flown by in a blur of manual labor. I made several trips to the master farmer field in Fasstoucouleur to prepare for a "Permagarden Party" that Jen and Peter hosted this past Friday and Saturday. Permagardening is a method of cultivating that involves double digging garden beds and creating berms (mounds of dirt) and swales (trenches) to maximize water retention and provide plants with an optimal growing environment. All week we saturated the area to try and soften the cement-like soil and took a pick to the ground to loosen up the first layer so that when Carla, Cora, Toby, Andrew and Mollie arrived they would already have a bit of a head start.

The first order of business when everyone arrived Thursday night was to have a little cocktail ($2 bottle of warm wine and fosters clark) and catch up. I had to bike home before it got dark so I missed dinner but I heard it was a colossal mountain of beans on top of millet (my favorite!). The next morning I had to travel to 15k down the road to check out another possible site for the incoming stage so I missed the first few hours of work, but by the time I biked back to Fass the group had made amazing progress. All of the beds had been double dug to 20cm and I arrived just in time to help amend the beds by adding manure, ash and leaves to the soil like a layer cake. By the time we broke for lunch (rice and fish and veggies!) we had three 1x4 meter garden beds surrounded by a 1m x 7m square raised berm and two holes on the downhill side for collecting runoff water.

After lunch and a couple rounds of dice most of the volunteers headed back to Kaolack and Mollie, Jen, Peter and I went back out to the field. Abdoul Salaam and his friends had already watered and manicured the new beds so they were ready for planting by the time we arrived. While the men watered the 24 regular garden beds, various trees and starter plants we transplanted tomatoes, eggplant, and hot peppers into the three separate beds and intercropped them with lettuce. By the end of the day we had transformed a bare patch of earth into a textbook worthy permagarden, and we even had time to play with our new mascot, a puppy that Abdoul Salaam has adopted to guard the field.

The regular garden beds are already bursting with tomatoes

Celebrity Guest Bloggers

Greetings from New Jersey...we are back from Africa.  Jennie has invited us to write a guest blog about our of visit to see her in Senegal.

I must say that we came back from the trip very proud of what Jennie has accomplished since March, 2010.  We were able to see the projects (well covers and latrines for the school) that she was instrumental in completing.  We met her family and were introduced to many others from the village who tell us that she is a very hard worker.  Jennie is a master at speaking Seereer, her village language, and has learned enough Wolof (another of the local dialects), and remembered enough from her French classes to get us safely through our trip. 

We were also able to meet about a dozen of her fellow Peace Corps volunteers from the Kaolak region and enjoyed hearing them discuss their grant applications and plans for projects in their respective villages.  She and her PCV friends have a really good networking and support system going. 

We experienced what it's like to live without electricity or running water. We helped Jennie pull water from the well to water her garden,  took a bucket bath in the evening and made visits to the pit latrine at night using battery operated headlamps. And imagine waking to the sounds of a rooster crowing, donkey braying and the sights of donkeys and goats wandering outside Jennie's hut.  Really a huge step back in time!

Jennie's village mother, Funjai, made us some traditional meals over an open fire and we shared the food with Jennie from a common bowl in her hut.  But we cheated and used "sporks" instead of eating with our hands.  Although the food was different than we are used to, it was quite good.

As we loaded our things onto the charette (donkey-pulled cart)  for the ride to Keur Socce for the beginning of the journey back to Dakar and our flight home, many of Jennie's family were on hand to say good bye.  It was a cheerful end to a good visit.   We really enjoyed the African experience and wish Jennie nothing but the best in completing her upcoming projects. 

May God bless you, Jennie,  for all that you are accomplishing in Senegal!

Mike and Patty Wysong

 Dad and Ba

 Mom and Ya

New Year, New Life

In Senegal pregnancy isn't something you talk about. In a country where people can greet complete strangers by asking "How is your father's penis?" (Still haven't figured out how to answer that), it is considered extremely rude to discuss someone, even a close family member, being pregnant. I know, I don't really get it either. Maybe a lot of it has to do with not wanting to get too attached to a baby...there is still a pretty high infant mortality rate here, and people wait a week before they'll even call a baby by its name.

So even though my sister Somong has been big as a barge for a while now I was a bit surprised to come home on January 1st to find out that she had given birth at 5am that morning our villages first baby of the New Year! I'm not the most perceptive of individuals (and I don't make it a habit of studying other women's bodies) so I'm sure I was one of the last people to notice that she was pregnant in the first place...but I was totally unprepared for the baby to arrive this soon! Also, if you do the math you'll realize that the baby must have been conceived around the same time I moved into my village...kind of weird to realize I've been here long enough for someone to completely grow another human.

    I arrived at the health post about 5 hours after the baby was born, and since for everyone else newborn babies have long since lost their charm I got to monopolize the baby for a couple of hours while his mom rested. There was another mother at the health post, a girl of about 15, who had given birth the day before to her second child. Since hers was a girl they joked that when the two babies were old enough they would marry them to each other. 5 hours out of the womb and my nephew already has a wife lined up for him.

Since this was the couples first baby and its a boy, the baptism/naming ceremony, held exactly 7 days after the baby is born (both to give the mom time to recover and to make sure the baby is going to live), was a HUGE affair. Relatives from as far off as the Gambia started converging on our house at 6am Saturday morning, and all of the women in the village were recruited to help cook massive amounts of food while the men sat around in the shade and talked. Like any other Senegalese party, it wasn't complete without some constant source of noise, so my brother hired a DJ who brought a generator and speakers and played every Akon song known to man remixed a thousand ways until 3 in the morning. As far as baptisms go it was shaping up to the biggest event of the year. I didn't actually see the baby all day, even the naming and ceremonial shaving of the head was done without announcement or fanfare. Mostly the day was about everyone in the village celebrating life in general. For the record though, the baby's name is Abib.

Cooking breakfast for over 100 people

Breakfast is served...sac fo kosam (sour milk and millet)

The women eating their "breakfast" around 11am,
AFTER the men had been served and dishes washed

You know its a big event when someone goes to the trouble of renting chairs!

Witches cauldron? No, lunch pot.

Photo Frenzy

I recently had the pleasure of hosting Lora and Evgeni, two Couch Surfers from Bulgaria who are working on hitch-hiking their way around the world. They stayed in my village for two nights and while they were here Lora took some absolutely amazing photos of my world. Seeing these really makes me wish I had decided to bring a nicer camera with me...her fancy pants camera with all of its lenses and buttons really puts my little Fuji to shame. They also make me wish I had taken a photography class in college just so I could capture my experiences as brilliantly as Lora can. Hopefully she won't mind that I borrowed a few of these to share with you. To see some more amazing pictures (of my village and other places they have been) and read more about their epic journey around the world you can check out their blog Here (or the slightly less frequently updated english version Here).

The outskirts of Kaolack, known to volunteers as the city of trash.
All garbage is dumped on side of the road and is periodically burned, filling the air with a suffocating acrid smoke. As bad as it looks, this is also a sign of city-dwellers relative wealth. Most of these things would never be thrown away in my village...clothes, containers, old tires...all are used and reused until they just simply cease to exist. I have been known to occasionally salvage a treasure or two from this pile when biking by.

A great shot of a typical day in my compound:
My sisters braiding hair and shelling peanuts, my dad lounging on his cot, kids hanging out, someone nursing a baby and people just sitting around relaxing

One of the boys returning from the forest with a pile of wood. The bark will be stripped to be used as rope and the sticks will be burned in cooking fires. 

My little sister Oumi...its tough to get a shot of her smiling, she usually clams up in front of the camera 

Sine and her baby Omar...possibly the most unhappy child I've ever met. He cries 23 hours a day.

A little girl in desperate need of a bath 

Fatou and I pulling water from the well. Every evening I pull four of those big buckets you see in the foreground and carry them home on my head for drinking, cooking and watering the garden. Women with families carry many more.

My little brother Modou, age 4 

A typical ladies table on market day. 

Bags of peanut butter, packets of spices, bouillon cubes, some ragged looking vegetables, dried fish, and a big knife to divide up the vegetables and fish into even smaller parts to be sold. Can you imagine trying to buy 1/8 of a cabbage in America?

My dad Mamadou Diouf and his newest grandson. This baby has the most comical bulging eyeballs, its like he's staring at everything with such intensity it makes his eyes pop.

Ida, a little girl in Keur Socce who always charms me into giving her a bit of whatever treat I happen to be eating.

 A clothes seller at our weekly market. He just lays on his wares while the megaphone in front of him screeches the prices over and over again. Most of the clothes are cast-offs that didn't make it past quality control in Chinese factories and weren't fit for our dollar store shelves. Some of the "English" phrases on these clothes are downright hilarious. 

My favorite little brother Aladji eating a big slice of watermelon on my doorstep. 

Two of my friend Bassirou's daughters, Rokhya and Koumba.
Koumba cried every time she saw me for my first two months in village. She's no longer afraid of me but was still wary of the white person with the camera.