Sworn in!!!

Officially a volunteer!  I have my affectation to Botu, I've taken the oath, and I'm heading off to Tamba this coming Saturday! It's all quite a whirlwind, and it's hard to believe that it all happened.  I'll come back to Thiès in February for two more weeks of intense technical training, and then I'll certainly be off, doing sustainable agriculture work in Botu, ni alla sonna!

Jordan, Mallory

Jordan, Falaye (our LCF)

Youssoupha, PTA Sustainable Agriculture, one of my favorite people in Senegal 

Etienne and Mbouille, our Training Supervisor and our Safety and Security Manager

Koomba, my CBT host mom..Matching twins

Officially volunteers!

All the SusAg volunteers

Now I'm off to the beach for Thanksgiving with the other volunteers.  I have more photos, but I'll have to upload them later.  I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Smelling Senegal

A certain father of mine asked me about the smells in Senegal and I thought I would take a stab at that blog post.  The smells are one thing in Senegal that are everywhere and not always good.  The first true smells that I encountered were the burning of garbage and the smell of dried fish, both smells that I could do without.

The smell of garbage burning is pungent and accompanied by smoke as well.  You can catch a whiff as you drive by in a car or it can meander over in village as well.  The most intense component of this smell is that of burning plastic which is unlike anything I've smelled before, worse than burning rubber on the highway.  The other smell that I encountered soon after my arrival in Senegal came while walking through the outdoor market in Thiès.  In the markets here they sell everything, fresh food, canned foods, clothing, tailors set up shop, brooms, knives, mattresses, buckets.  You name it, it's there.  The smell of the foods, fresh from wherever are intense.  The fruits and vegetables are not always in the finest condition so there's that smell.  But the fish have a sharper smell.  Fresh fish is okay.  Flies buzz around their dead bodies but in general they just smell like the ocean, salty.  Dried fish, cured fish, on the other hand are a whole other beast (metaphorically speaking of course).  That odor truly smells like something crawled up somewhere and died, many many years ago.  It's a rotten, salty, fishy smell and the taste is even worse.  Luckily it has only been in the bowl once and it was offered to me, I tried it and immediately told them the truth.  Thank you but no thanks.  Koomba seemed fine with that...no big deal.

The other market smells include the roasting of peanuts on the street.  They roast them here in wide bowls in sand.  The smell is that of burning sand.  Roasted peanuts here aren't what we are used to back home.  Yes they are roasted, but not according to the standards of Planters.  Lightly roasted, would be putting it mildly.  There's also the smell of freshly baked bread, although the bread itself, known as machine bread, isn't good to eat necessarily, the smell of bread baking anywhere is a pleasure for the nose. Beignets cooking is also a good smell but that of oil frying rather than something baking. Again, you can't smell the actual product but the smell of sweet dough frying in oil is not something to be ignored in Senegal.  And if you can get your mitts (the right one in particular) around a millet beignet you are in like flynn.  Those are the whole wheat equivalent of any good, healthy doughnut.

Outside of the market there are the smells from the village.  The most perfumed of those is the soap, Madar, that they use for everything.  They use the same soap for dishes, laundry, and bathing and it has so much perfume and incense that you might think you are in a Bath and Body Works in the States.  A smell I had the good fortune of getting whiff of in village was cooked lizard.  This is not your ordinary lizard, but rather a very large lizard that people in Karamoho So considered a delicacy.  I considered it the opposite and politely declined eating it after they swung it's dead and decapitated body/head at me one night a few weeks ago.  The smell of that beast cooking puts the dried fish to shame.

The smells on the road are what I find the most interesting.  I encountered these recently when I started running (I didn't have the Senegal culturally appropriate clothing at the beginning of my two months so I only recently was able to run in village).  The general air is smoggy with a constant smell of trees burning or exhausting burning.  The trucks that pass by on the main roads are incredibly overloaded with who knows what and they produce an exhaust that could knock a small child on their feet.  There is also the occasionally smell of street pizza.  I've seen more dead dogs and dead cats in Senegal than I've seen in my lifetime.  When they are dead here, on the road, they are really dead.  Intestines, blood, and fur smeared across the side of the road, and if it is fresh, it is rank.  Not something I would want to run by everyday.  But there is a silver lining.  Sometimes, on those early morning runs I've taken, or walking along a road an Al Halm (a large white vehicle that takes can take 15+ people) passes with the best perfumed smell.  Senegalese people often douse themselves in perfume and ironically enough usually men where women's perfume and women men's.  Don't know why and I'm not sure if they realize it, but maybe they are onto something.  That is a smell that I am grateful for whenever I run past a dead dog.

Counterpart Workshop (Bara Nohon) and the end is near!

I am almost done with training and will soon be an official Peace Corps Volunteer, alla sonna (as they say in Bambara, God willing).  Next week this time, if all goes well I will be a PCV and on my way to the beach for Thanksgiving.

We just finished an exhausting few days here in Thiès which included Counterpart Workshop, our final medical exam, our final safety and security exam, and our Readiness to Serve presentations.

Counterpart Workshop was fascinating and exhausting.  My male counterpart, Karim Cisse came from Botu.  He was my ancien's counterpart as well, but for the last CPW Hawa our female counterpart came instead.  He was very enthusiastic and an excited learner.  He participated exuberantly in all of the group discussions and he reminded me a lot of...me as a student so that was reassuring.  The very first day when they first arrived I spent about three hours sitting down with Karim, one of the Jaxanke's counterparts, and some Mandinka speakers as they made tea.  One of the Mandinka speakers starting talking to Karim and I very enthusiastically. He would speak in Mandinka and Karim would translate into Bambara.  I could pick up a bit of Mandinka since it is related to Bambara, but the translation was definitely helpful.  This old man, with few teeth, was speaking in proverbs, which in Bambara we call sendat.  I'll tell you, I can barely grasp the meaning of proverbs in English let alone Bambara, let alone Mandinka, so this was quite the three hour conversation.  I picked up some of the morals that he was trying to tell me. God is within all of us. If you ask God for help, he will only help you if you first help yourself, and one about a a bird that I think was the same as the one about helping yourself.  And then there's the one about something that goes across the ocean and walks up on the other side and still has sand on it...the fruit of a baobab tree...I guess I"ll figure these out when I've been here two years.  Or not... It was thrilling and so much Bambara and Mande all at once. Karim is a great mentor, very patient, speaks French so sometime if I really don't get something he'll translate, but he doesn't use French first which I also really appreciate.

Most of the two day workshop was about sensitizing the counterparts to Peace Corps as an organization and to what Peace Corps does to train us; in language, techniques, and in culture.  For most of the sessions the Mande speakers were together which made the most sense, but was challenging for the two Bambara counterparts, who sometimes had a harder time understanding some of the Jaxanke and Mandinka regional dialects.  I'm still impressed by the languages of these Senegalese people.  Most speak at least three languages, Wolof, French, and one other local language.  But so many speak so many more.  Karim, my counterpart speaks, Bambara, Mandinka, Basari, Wolof, French, Pulafuta, and understands Jaxanke and probably some Soninke as well.  It stuns me, and they are so fluid with their language as well.  Quite impressive if I do say so myself.  There were some really interesting discussions that I could sort of understand in Mande about language acquisition for us as trainees, culture differences, and the general knowledge the counterparts knew about Peace Corps (or didn't as they case mostly was).

While it was great to have all of the counterparts here, it was also exhausting.  Talking Bambara is exhausting all the time when conversation topics are limited by what vocabulary I have in my brain at any given moment.  At the same time that they were here, we also had to study and prepare for our Medical exam and our Readiness to Serve presentations which included a two-minute elevator speech in our local language.  We also had a Safety and Security exam but that one was pretty much common sense.  I spent these past few days getting overloaded with Bambara and putting together a presentation based on our project framework as Sustainable Agriculture volunteers and a two minute diddy in Bambara. I studied a bit for Medical as well although it was all stuff we had been previously tested on.  Everything went swimmingly today and I'm relieved that it is over.

Tomorrow we go to Dakar for the day...still not quite sure what that will entail and I'm still intimidated by Dakar but I'm sure it will be exciting nonetheless.  Next week we have our final LPI and then the official swear in. It's all happening! And so fast! I couldn't tell you this day would come two months ago.

What do we do in training? Technical Training

Many of you, I'm sure, have been wondering what I've exactly been doing during training.  Technical training is a component of Pre-Service Training.  Basically Peace Corps wants all of its volunteers to have the same basic level of understanding of agricultural techniques so that we can all ostensibly extend similar techniques around the country.  We learn these techniques or these methods at the Training Center when we come to Thiès and then we practice them at our CBT sites in the gardens that we have.  Every CBT site has their own garden, but some people have 4-5 working their garden whereas Jordan and I are just two.

We have been double digging beds, amending the soil, building and maintaining composts, hexagonal spacing, seedling nursery, tree nursery, pre-seed treatments, moringa intensive bed, field crops, mulching, microgardening, mosquito bed net repair, pest ID and management, fruit tree identification, tree identification, agro-ecological design, etc.

We learn these techniques in theory, practice them at the center, and then practice them at our sites!  Then the tech team comes to visit us at CBT and checks to make sure that we have done all of these "Training Directed Activities."

Now that I have explained what we do and there are pictures of our garden on my photo site, if you have any questions please comment on this post and I will expand (in the post) what any of these things are!

Days of CBT

So much has happened since I last wrote.  First of all, I got the strep...which is probably one of the worst non-serious illnesses you can get here since it means that swallowing anything (water being the most important) is the most painful thing.  Luckily after two weeks of being sick (but only a few days of the strep) I am now on antibiotics and on the road to recovery!  Alla sonna!

I have just finished the long CBT stay of 15 days and we are back at the center for the next week.  We are having a bit of schedule changes because 50+ francophone presidents are coming to Senegal the day we were supposed to swear-in as volunteers in Dakar.  Things have been switched around and now we will swear in the 26th of November!  It is so soon!  In the next few days we have counterpart workshop where our counterparts from the villages where we will be permanently come to Thiès to learn about Peace Corps.  Then I'll go back to CBT for a few days, say goodbye to my family (Koomba and Jaitu in particular) and then we swear in and it's off to Botu I go!

But, in the meantime, this past two weeks was filled with lots of different things.  A few days after we arrived Jordan and I were about to soak our seeds for our tree nursery in hot water when we were called to the Almami's house (Iman) for some big event!  It would become clearer later that the important person visiting was a Calif of the Khadri (one of the brotherhoods in Senegal).  These brotherhoods are not like the Muslim Brotherhood that we hear about in the States.  These brotherhoods are different groups of Muslims in Senegal who choose to follow certain Khalifs based on miracles they performed.  These Khalifs also act as intermediaries between the people of Senegal and the political power (i.e. Macky Sall) and so in fact these brotherhoods help to keep and maintain the peace throughout Senegal.  We were brought into the almami's compound and were made to sit upfront right next to this very old man.  He blessed us in Bambara or Wolof (not quite sure which language) and we spoke in French and Bambara to his assistant/driver who spoke French and English and Bambara and Wolof.  At one point the call to prayer came and all the women got up and left to go pray in their homes and then some of the men went to the mosque to pray and we left thinking it was over.  But after we went home and pre-treated our seeds, my mom was getting ready to go to the Almami's house and so we went back.  We sat more towards the back this time and slowly women went up to this mori (marabout/Khalif) and brought their kids to receive blessings.  There was some more singing that was in Arabic and then at one point, the dugutigi (village chief) brought in a sheep which I was convinced they would slaughter...After it was all over people got up and linked hands and created a path of Arabic singing to guide the mori out to his car, which by the way, was the newest black SUV that I have seen since here in Senegal.  He got into the car and drove off, and as the car passed in front of me I saw the sheep strapped to the top of the car.  It was apparently a gift from the village to him.  I learned later that he was a regional Khalif and that he was 90 years old!  It was pretty cool and obviously a big deal that he came to Karamoho So.  He was apparently half Bambara so I'm sure that's partly why he came to our village.

Then, last Saturday there was a wedding in our village.  I'm not sure if it was the bride who comes from our village or the groom.  Anyways at the Si compound there was a big dance party (mostly women).  We went after dinner and there were drummers (tam-tam) and the women had made a dance circle.  There was one woman with a stick who was slapping anybody (mainly children) who dared to enter the circle.  When a song started, the women would start dancing together and as the music speeded up, the dancing got faster and faster and eventually it became a competition between the women about who could dance the fastest.  It was amazing to watch their feet move so fast.  Even some of the older women can dance faster than I could ever imagine.  It was so much fun, I joined in for some with my host mom and some of my aunts and even my Maman Musso (grandmother)!  It was lots of fun. I asked my host mom at one point where the bride was and she brought me to the porch area of the house and the bride was there, watching the dancing happening.  Apparently the bride isn't allowed to come out in public for a while.  I don't really understand the weddings here but it was a lot of fun.  Exhausting, and eventually I went to bed and as I was brushing my teeth, sirens, lights and a bunch of motorcycles came into the village, doing papawheelies and it was all of the men who had been elsewhere during the dance party, showing off and tooting their horns.  It was quite the experience!

The other big adventure was on Sunday, Koomba (my host mom), Jordan and I went to Thiès so that I could get some fabric and clothing made for swear in.  My host mom brought us to a Malian fabric store where they spoken a bit of Bambara and some French.  I wanted a dark purple fabric just like my mom had for Tabaski (and luckily she was wearing it when we went to Thiès too!).  I paid a bit more for the fabric but I could tell that some of the fabric was nicer than others and I decided that I would only wear it occasionally and I would be nice to have something fancy.  I also wanted some waxed cotton for some basic wrap skirts because my clothing is falling apart already and it took awhile but I managed to find what I wanted.  Then she brought us to the tailor that she uses and the tailor measured me, I paid him for the work and I'm supposed to pick it up today!  I'll wear it for swear in on the 26th so look for pictures soon after!

I'm going to write a blog post sometime in the next few days about what we have been doing in terms of technical training so that y'all can get a sense of what I've actually been doing!  Pictures to come as well, I'm really getting good at portraits, mainly I think because the kids are stunned by the camera itself!

Baba and Mohammed, u be yelekan ka ca (they laugh a lot)

My host sister in red bissap (hibiscus)

Mamawa

Our Moringa bed