Sights in Senegal

Introduction to the Five Senses of Senegal:

Since I did a post awhile back on the smells of Senegal I thought, (along with some discussion with that certain father and a certain mother as well) that I would go through all of the senses and try and give you, as a reader, a better sense of what life is like in Senegal.  These sights, smells, touches, tastes, and sounds are a part of my life in Senegal.  They are not unique really to one day or one celebration, most often they are things that I experience frequently.

Termite mounds are abundant throughout Senegal.  When I first saw them I thought they were ancient ruins, much like the Mayan pyramids that you can see still hidden in the "bush" of Mexico but before I actual spoke about those thoughts to anyone I asked.  Turns out they are termite mounds, disgusting, bad for the trees, mounds of termites.  Kids.  Kids are everywhere in Senegal.  But the most interesting difference about the kids here is that they go to the bathroom wherever they please.  Most often in my compound it is on the ground and one of the mothers or an older sibling scoops up some sand and cleans it all away.  There was the one time this week when my little sister, Tene, decided to go on my front porch, but just like everywhere else it is now spotless!  Whenever I bike to Tamba I always love seeing the mile-markers.  It isn't that far, 10km, but knowing which dilapidated mile marker is about to show up on my bike trip is a terrific motivator when the wind is blowing in my face and my backpack is loaded down with vegetables.  Coming to Tamba is the time when we get to see BACON!  And by this I mean the wild pigs that roam around, particularly in the trash river.  Biking into Tamba provides me with lots of sights (and smells and tastes for that matter but that comes later).  I always bike into Tamba in the morning, leaving Botou at 7am and as I arrive in Tamba I see many women walking with baskets and buckets to the daily fish market that is just on the outskirts of Tamba.  Men shave their heads at what seem to be random periods of the year.  One moment my uncles or host dad will have a modest head of hair, the next moment, bald!  Babies are also bald.  At birth, most babies come with some hair but a week after they are born before the naming ceremony they shave off all their hairs, even the baby girls!  It is quite distressing actually to see them take a razor to a tiny baby's head.  They also cut dogs ears and donkeys tails.  I'm not really sure why they do either.  I've heard that it is to keep the bugs/flies away, but it seems counterproductive to me when there are gobs of blood coming out of their ears and rear ends, a perfect habitat for blood thirsty insects.  Dust is everywhere in my hut!  I can't get rid of it.  Things are no longer clean or sponged off, they are dusty.  It's just a fact and I've gotten over my OCD about cleaning it 24/7.  Now I just clean everything only once a day.  Whenever cars come into the village it is a sight for the whole village.  A car, in our village?  Whatever are they doing here?  Nobody owns a car in Botou so seeing one is a pretty big deal.  Again when I bike into Tamba I see lots of truck drivers, many from Mali with their trucks parked on the side of the road.  Most of them have pulled out mats and blankets and are sleeping or praying underneath or beside their trucks.  UN trucks.  On December 29, 2014 there was an attack on a UN refugee camp in northern Mali and because of the presence of the camp and the attack in particular there are always (and sometimes more frequently) trucks with UN posted on the side going past Botou on their way to Mali.  Baobab trees, a tree many think of as a "typical African tree" are de-leafed in my village.  All their leaves stripped and eventually they will grow back during the hot/rainy season.  And finally, the sight of my host siblings watering the garden as I come back from Tamba is a true delight!

Babies and New Year's Eve

It isn’t every day that you come back from a skype session with your parents and its announced that there will be a brand new baby in your compound the next day.  Last weekened, after my rough week in general, my uncle, Daouda, announced that his wife had another baby and that the next day she would be at our compound for the baby naming ceremony.  I was thrilled!  As many of you know I love babies.  I had heard so much about naming ceremonies that I was excited to witness one.  I asked Bouna if it was all right if I took pictures, he said yes of course.  A bunch of women were cooking in the morning, some sort of corn mash with sugar that they made into balls.  When I got up, my host sisters ushered me into Daouda’s hut, where his wife was there with a teeny little baby.  They were about to shave his head.  I would learn later that this is what happens to every baby, boy or girl before they get their names.  The naming happens a week after they are born.   At around 10am, all the village elders, meaning old men, came into our compound and sat down on mats.  The iman, almami, was there front and center.  Then a younger man came out and seemed to be speaking with the Iman, I think it was more that the iman was speaking to him, telling him the name of the new baby, Djibie.  They passed around the corn balls with kola nuts inside (a very caffeinated nut that I think tastes very strong and bitter) and gave it to everyone that was there.  They sat and prayed, holding their hands in front of them and then praying, in Arabic.  It was quite charming and calming to watch.  After a certain short time, less than half an hour they all left, filing out slowly.  The older women were at my compound the whole day, cooking, and many family members from Tamba and neighboring villages came to see the new baby and to see the family.  Then later in the evening I walked out of my hut and my uncle was slaughtering a sheep, I thought it was in celebration for the baby but then it turned out that he was selling most of the meat, maybe the money goes to the baby, as I’ve said before, I think, I still don’t quite understand the money matters here in Senegal.  

Holding a tiny baby was pretty much a terrific treat.  The next day I went around the village and ended up finding two more small babies, both under two weeks old.  One that had been named, and the other that was supposed to be named the next day.  Everyone seemed to want to name it after me, Halima, which was I was at first okay with.  I told them I would go back and take pictures the next day.  I went back and spent a couple hours or so.  I watched the iman bless her, whisper prayers and I guess get or give her her name.  I asked her mother if her name was in fact Halima and she replied in the affirmative.  It wasn’t until later that I learned from my host sister Setou that in fact her name was Maimouna, not Halima.  Kind of a relief, just because it seems like a lot of pressure to have a kid named after you and on top of that the family isn’t related to my family, I’m not sure what the practices are.  But I got to spend a few hours with a number of babies and that was pretty cool. 

On New Years Eve my host sisters came back from picking cotton and told me that they were going to get together with some other kids from the village and cook spaghetti and eggs. I decided to help them out so I have them 300cfa and decided to go along with whatever they were doing.  After we watered the garden we went over to another compound and started peeling onions and potatoes and cooking beef.  My uncle earlier had slaughtered a cow, it was pretty amazing to watch them kill something that big with a dull knife.  All of my uncle and neighbors were holding the cows legs, tied with ropes and they had the dull blade of a knife that they sharpened by scraping it on the well.  Then they called Kooli (my other uncle) over and he took a pole of wood and laid it across the belly of the cow to hold it down so that the cow couldn’t move.  It’s amazing to watch them kill animals with the slip of a knife, they drain the blood and then begin the the butchering.  But back to the cooking.  I was with a bunch of 14 year old girls who were all chattering away cooking up a storm; beignets, beef with onions and mustard and spaghetti.  The irony of the whole thing was that the dish we were cooking was supposedly called couscous marocain (Moroccan CousCous).  I just think that is pretty crazy.  I helped out with the peeling and cutting of potatoes and onions.  At one point, about three hours later I was getting tired and bored, and they began to notice.  So they took a bowl as they were beginning to get ready to eat and my Tupperware container that they had collected peanuts in and they packed up my part of the dinner that I thought we were going to eat together and walked me back to my compound.  I thought we were going to eat all together but I guess that wasn’t the case.  I sat down with my own bowl of “marrocain couscous” and invited my host siblings and my aunt to join me.  They of course did and then we sat down and had our New Year’s Eve meal.  Pasta with onions, mustard and beef.  

Guilt and Peace Corps

Peace Corps isn't easy.  No one ever said it was nor did I have the illusion that it would be.  But what I didn't expect was this.  Aside from feeling unproductive 80% of the time I also get waves of guilt (not the Jewish kind), boredom, frustration, unhappiness and general dissatisfaction.  The good news is that I know that this all will pass.  Things will get better, everyone says so, and I believe them, if I didn't, I wouldn't be here anymore.  Things don't just get better with the snap of my fingers though, it takes time, dedication, and perseverance.  Staying in village for me has been key.  Getting through the hard days is always rewarded with good days and great moments.

Christmas was hard, and not because I wanted to celebrate Christmas, nor was I upset that family and friends back home were, but it was that I knew that all my family and friends were getting together; something that I always enjoyed during college was getting together and seeing people who often I would see only once or twice a year.  It wasn't even that I necessarily wanted to be there instead of here, but the simple fact that it was happening, even when I was here, in Botou, was difficult to say the least.  But I did come out on the other side, and as I said there are always great moments.  Christmas afternoon my host siblings said that we were going to go and do something.  It came across to me as some sort of adventure and of course I said yes.  It turned out that we went to pick little shriveled fruits off my least favorite tree in Senegal.  A tree that during CBT would constantly attack Jordan and me at our garden, a tree that has the most painful spines, but a tree nonetheless that provides a strange, and occasionally satisfying taste of sweet and sour.  Spending time with my host siblings, whether it be pulling water from the well like a donkey and watering the garden, or picking these bizarre fruits are the great moments that I rely on to keep me sane and happy at site.  My siblings, the three girls in particular, are sometimes the siblings that I never had growing up as a kid.  I give them a hard time when they do silly or stupid things, I roll my eyes with them behind the back of their mother and watch them giggle, and I help them with their French homework.

The other frustration of being at site is feeling guilty.  I feel guilty when I read, I feel guilty when I cook food in my hut to supplement my diet of rice, I feel guilty when I use a pen that works much better than the pens my host siblings use for school, and generally there isn't much I can do about any of these guilt ridden daily happenings.  I still read in my hut because it gives me a piece of mind.  Reading is now, and always has been my sanctuary, my escape from reality, even if for a little bit.  While I could (and sometimes do) read outside my hut, I am then surrounded by a group of kids from the village who can't read or participate in what I'm doing, so begin to chatter in Bambara. I also feel guilty about cooking beans in my hut.  While the food at site is particularly good for Senegalese food, it isn't varied.  Most lunches are either peanut sauce or fish and rice and dinners are corn couscous with a bean sauce, often with moringa, but usually with few actual beans themselves.  Protein is obviously lacking in their diets so I have taken to cooking myself a cup of beans every few days to supplement.  Sometimes to the point that I'm not as hungry for lunch, and this my host mother, in particular, notices.  It's frustrating because I don't love the food in Senegal, but I do eat it and sometimes I genuinely like the food, but I do feel the need to eat some beans now and again.  Maybe it's the language barrier right now that doesn't quite allow me to express what I'm feeling or thinking, but I try the best I can to explain and hope that either the message gets across and they get used to it, or we can laugh and joke about it whenever it becomes an issue.

The point of frustration about the lack of productivity is the one thing I know will get better in the months to come, guaranteed.  Right now I have my garden seeded, I started a nursery with my host mom and dad under the water chateau in my uncle's garden, and now that the harvesting of peanuts is basically finished, people should be around more so that I can spend time in other compounds.  But sometimes I think about whether my presence in village really means something to the villagers other than the fact that they have an American living in their village.  I know that at times it truly does, that they enjoy talking to me and learning about American culture and ideas, but at times I feel like I'm enduring many more daily struggles and personally getting a lot more out of my time at site then they are.  Part of that may be because I can't see, and may not see, the effects of my work at site.

Halima Fofana

Life has changed once again in Peace Corps Senegal.  This time, for Halima Fofana! I am now living at my permanent site, Botou, Tambacounda, Senegal.  It's a village of 900 people according to the village chief and 2500 according to another source.  It lies just 10km outside of Tamba, the capitol of the region.  I installed on Tuesday December 2, 2014.  That morning a group of us as new volunteers visited the prefect (like the governor) of Tamba, the head of the gendarmerie, the head of the police, the head of agriculture for Tamba and the head of Eaux et Forests, the body that governs the national forests in Senegal.  While we were at the Eaux et Forets office, Djitte, one of my supervisors got a call from my host dad Bouna, because everyone in Botou was ready, waiting to dance me into the village.

We went and picked up all of my stuff and drove to Botou.  Upon arriving, the women were gathered in a circle dancing and singing my name.  They had cleverly made a drum out of a gourd bowl placed upside down in a bucket of water.  I danced with them and clapped as they danced.  Before I knew it, I was whisked away, covered in a white shroud and walked to my hut with a group of 15 or so women.  It was simply amazing.  I got to my hut and when I turned back into the hut from the back yard all of my belongings were in my hut!  My hut is made of cement/mud and wood for the structure itself and the roof is made out of grasses from the fields placed on top of a conical beam structure.  This kind of hut is ideal because the straw roof keeps things relatively cool.  I have a shade structure/porch that faces the other huts in the compound.  Then there is a window facing the garden and a door to my backyard and to my bathroom.  I sleep on a stick bed frame made by a man who lives in Jam Jam, a bush village not far from Botou, that was commissioned by my ancien.  I also have a great work table- made by my ancien and our uncle Mahdu.  I have made a few additions to my perfect new abode.  I painted two rectangles inside with chalkboard paint to keep lists, etc.  I painted an image of Vermont on the outside of my hut.  Seeing as both Connor and I are from the wonderful and beautiful 802 it seemed only fitting.  Now I am hoping to secure the next volunteer's home state.  I finally feel settled into the hut.  Just a week in and I built a stand for the clay pot I bought that will keep my water nice and cool during the hot season.  I've planted some vegetables in my nurseries and made a compost as well as started experimenting with some basil and nasturtium container gardens.  I also planted some sunflower seeds from High Mowing Seeds on the edge of a berm, but I have no idea if they are going to grow- stay tuned.

My host family consists of two families.  My host dad Bouna is the de facto village chief as his elder brother lives in Tamba now.  He is married to Raki and they have nine kids, six who live in Botou, two who go to high school in Tamba and one who lives in another village.  The kids range from Sorkhna who is about 15-16 to Tene who is a year and a half.  There there is Bouna's younger brother Cooli who's wife is Seynabu and their child Fili who is a bit older than Tene.  Another brother of Bouna's also lives in the compound but is in and out.  Then next door is Mahdu and his wife Muya  Mahdu is another brother of Bouna's.  Their sister Masirrah also lives with them.  She is deaf and watching people speak to her with their hands has been one of the most interesting parts of my short time here so far.  Mahdu has 5 kids and works at the water tower that the town recently got.  He's also a woodworker and farms.  All of the men in the family farm, peanuts and corn are their main sources of income. The women sort of garden and do all of the cooking, cleaning and child rearing.  The one thing about the men in the Fofana family is that they are among the most kind, patient, and interested/interesting men I've met so far during my time in Senegal.  They will sit with me as I ask them questions, they won't yell at me to speak as Raki has done, and they are very sweet to their young children.

It has been exhausting getting used to this new pace of life.  I got strep throat again...But otherwise I'm learning to become a more patient, more relaxed person.  So much work happens, but slowly, day by day.  They say that here in the Peace Corps, days go by slowly and months rush by.  I've felt that, but I also love spending the day with the kids in my family, wandering around my village, or helping in the peanut fields.  The manual labor is exhausting in itself in Senegal.  Everyday I pull water from a bidon from the well in our compound, 30 meters down, which is pretty deep for a water table here.  Harvesting peanuts, and the work they put into their fields is amazing but sometimes I wonder if their physical exertion is worth the amount of money they get for all of their hard labor.  I guess at this point it is their only option.  Let's just hope that the rains will fall harder and more frequently in the years to come!

Always a Vermonter

work table

Bed, with my mosquito net cocoon, front door

My roof

Bathroom; I hope to plant a banana tree there in that hole

backdoor; outside yard; I do my laundry here

bathroom: we call it douche here

My garden

Moving to Botu

Today is the day!  It feels a lot like the Dr. Seuss book,  Oh, the places you'll go right now.  Today after visits to government officials in Tamba, I will be driven in my last official Peace Corps approved ride to my village of 2500 people and install into Botu.  I will also be accompanied by a current Agfo volunteer, a Mandinka speaker (in the Mande family) for support and company, a nice tradition.  As I install we will walk around and greet the village leaders, Almami, village chief (my host father), among others. Then they will move all of my stuff into my hut...if they can fit everything, and set off!  It's exciting, scary, and freeing all at the same time.

After install I'll spend 5 concentrated weeks at my site, learning as much Bambara as I can, soaking up the daily life, and settling into my new home.  I've bought chalkboard paint to paint the inside walls of my hut, pictures to hang, maps to stretch out, and a beautiful garden to start planting in.  The 5 week challenge is a Peace Corps tradition where volunteers try and spend 5 consecutive weeks (35 nights) in your village.  This does not preclude a trip or two to skype with my family, but it is a concerted effort to show your village that you are there for them, to live with them, and to immerse yourself in what will become your life.  I'm ready.

I want to thank you all for reading and commenting about my training with Peace Corps Senegal, the struggles and the successes, but do stay tuned.  This is only the beginning.  Now is when the real work begins, the real work partners forged, and the relationships formed across cultures.

This is where my two years in Peace Corps will be:

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.