3 marabouts and a skeptic.

As many of you know I am not a religious person.  I have little spiritual faith, I don't believe in god, and I can be quite the cynic.  These things all still hold true.  I was raised Jew-ish which coming from a small, rural, white farmstead town in Vermont meant the world to me. As I grew older what it meant to me to be Jewish changed as did my perspective on judaism.  As of this post I'm still trying to figure out what I am and how I want to identify myself.  I'm an atheist and I identify as culturally Jewish, beyond that it is a huge abyss.  But this post isn't really about religiosity in Vermont, but rather my experiences in Senegal. I have been in Senegal for 18 months.  Upon arriving we were taught a bit about the Muslim culture that encompasses life in Senegal.  I began to truly understand a bit of the Muslim religion, daily prayers, giving alms, etc. I lived it. I didn't participate directly, not being a Muslim myself, but I did observe, watch, and admire the devotion my family and friends give in the name of their religion. Islam is one of the most generous, beautiful, and conscientious religions I have encountered.  The more interesting encounters I have had with Islam involve marabouts.  Marabout (or mori-ce as we say in Bambara) is a religious leader and teacher in West Africa. They often wander throughout the lands, surviving on alms and helping people with sicknesses, creating amulets, and telling the future. They are often also scholars of the Quran. I have had three separate and distinct encounters with marabouts.  They all occurred in my village, one I sought out, the others came to me.

The first time I saw a marabout I was sick.  I had a some gastrointestinal issues, not uncommon in Peace Corps, but I wasn't getting better and instead worse.  I had tried pepto bismal and had called my Peace Corps doctors but had not heard back.  I thought, why not just go and see the marabout. Everyone else in my villages does, maybe his stuff actually does work. The marabout in my village is one of the wealthier men in my village. I know this because he doesn't farm, he travels to Tamba almost every day on a motorcycle, and his compound does not have any huts, only large buildings with zinc (metal) roofs.  I told him I was sick and he brought me into a room, filled with old soda bottles filled with random liquids. On the floor lay piles of papers, all written in arabic, a wooden tablet, and some random shells and prayer beads. I described to him my symptoms and he searched for a specific prayer in his pile of papers until he found the one he was looking for that would take care of my problem. Once he found the prayer he took some black water/ink and a wooden pen and copied the prayer onto the wooden tablet.  He then said a prayer in arabic with his prayer beads and then washed the prayer off into a bowl so that the black ink filled the bowl.  He then took a sip of the black water and passed the bowl to me.  I took the tiniest sip ever, skeptical about the whole situation and set the bowl down.  He filled the empty water bottle I brought with the black water and told me to rub it on my stomach and drink some every day.  He also said to make meat soup and eat that and that would cure my stomach issues.

The second time I visited a marabout, it was more a situation of, the marabout visited me.  There was a visiting marabout from the Gambia who came to my village during the day. He spoke some english, pretty good actually.  Every day my dad would go pick him up from Tamba on his moto and bring him back to Botou.  One day we were sitting together and he asked me if I had ever had my future told my numbers.  Of course I said no and he brought out these wooden pieces that looked much like scrabble pieces and laid them out.  He put them in two columns and told me to pick a number and remember the number but not tell him. He then moved the wooden pieces between the two columns and kept asking me which column my number was in  Eventually he asked me to pick a second number, which I did and he did the same thing with the two numbers.  Then he asked me if my grandmothers name was Anna.  Stunned I said indeed it was, my maternal grandmother.  I was impressed.  He then went on to tell me to buy a string of beads to string around my waist, three kola nuts for old women, 6 oranges for young women, and some bananas for the young kids.  The impression he had made of getting my grandmother's name shortly wore off, but nonetheless, and experience worth having.

The last marabout I saw was a visiting marabout from Mali, staying across the road from my compound.  He called me into to his room one afternoon and told my fortune with cowry shells.  He told me I would have many projects and other accolades that I take down to the simple generalities you can make about that one white person living in a small village in Senegal.

The three visits to the marabouts were intriguing to say the least, but what they provided me with most was an inside look into traditional medicine, belief, and faith characteristics that I have very little experience with.

Peace Corps Service: Sine or Cosine?

When your life is a sine curve. Or is it cosine? They showed us this graphic during our training for Peace Corps that lays out our 27 months of service on the y-axis and our emotions going above and below the x axis. It was entertaining to imagine how I would be feeling at X-month mark but I never thought about how I would feel if the graph was shrunk to fit within a 24 hour period.




Monday morning around noon there was a major car accident by the Botou school. One of the mini cars (buses, almost) had a loose tire.  The apprentices who hang off the back, alerted the driver who refused to stop and fix it until they reached Tamba. The tire fell off and rolled into my village (50m). The car stop, flipped over and killed one woman immediately when she fell out the window and was squashed by the car. My village came running out. The men rushed to the scene helping anyone they could and directing traffic around the accident. Some people thought there was a fire so buckets of water were brought. When they realized there was no fire, but that people were injured and some even dead, the women began wailing. This is the wailing that begins deep in the lungs and comes out almost like a screech. It's terrifying and brings sadness immediately. I stood with the women who kept a 20 feet distance or so from the accident. The voyeur aspect of the accident was incredible. The women watched for hours as we waited for the ambulance and gendarme to come and then waited for the ambulance to come back to remove the deceased. The woman who died on the scene was left in the road, under the sun, for at least an hour and a half. People were sitting alongside the road, bleeding and in shock. I watched as every other mini car full of passengers stopped, got out and walked to the accident to see what happened, if they knew anyone and then pile back into the car to continue on their journey. Six cars of people, maybe a hundred total, plus the hundred or so from my village were watching everything unfold. It took half an hour for the ambulance to arrive. Then the gendarme arrived with our village chief. They put the driver of the car in the gendarme car and the proceeded to get the injured in cars to be taken to the hospital. Luckily no one from Botou was in the car, but some people from my village did apparently know the one woman who died. It wasn't until the next morning that we learned that three more people died in the hospital. It was terrible and terrifying.

Tuesday morning after spending some time at my uncle's place he came back from Tamba with pieces to fix water spigots in other villages and said he was going to go into some bush villages to fix things. I asked to join him. I've wanted to visit all the villages in the bush but I have been reluctant to go alone. So together we headed out on our bikes. The first village we went to is called Koro Maji, another Bambara village about 4km up the road. From there we went to Ira Koto, a Mandinka village, which is another 4km and across the train tracks. There we met with a guy who is a member of the water association that manages the water tower. He was at the school which has recently been built, complete with a beautiful cement wall surrounding the grounds. From there we crossed the highway and road to Diayabugu, a Soninke and Bambara village. It sits up on a hill and apparently during the rainy season there are times when nobody can leave because erosion has created a moat around the village. Biking into this village you can see the minarets of the mosque. Upon seeing the mosque in person I was completely awestruck by its beauty. It was pristine, turquoise blue, and magnificent, soaring above the village. We rode through, greeting the elderly men who had just exited the mosque. From there we biked to Kouthia, another Soninke and Bambara village. There we fixed the robinet at the village chief's house. The man we found there had worked in Boulogne, France for 40+ years and was now back in Senegal for his retirement.  A sweet man who offered us lunch and even paid my uncle for his time (which doesn't usually happen). Upon leaving Kouthia I was stopped by a Pulaar woman who turned out to be one of the host moms of a volunteer friend of mine. She is pretty deaf and doesn't speak Bambara (and I don't speak Pulaar) but we were both thrilled to see each other (and that we recognized one another). We had a brief conversation in two languages and then parted ways. The last village we biked through was Nema, which is the tiniest village I've seen so far. Three compounds. Some of my Fofanas live there and I've been wanting to see them for awhile now. We sat and greeted them and then took our leave and biked back through our fields to Botou. It was great fun to bike with Mahdu and see the bush and the villages that I've been hearing about for a year now. Mahdu is so patient with me and all my questions and even indulges me when I tell people that I am his plumbing apprentice. Quite the contrast from the day before, but I guess that's life. Unexpected tragedies and treasured travels in the bush.

Garden of Botou

It's been awhile since I last posted and for that I apologize. For anyone worried that I was lost in Europe, working too hard, or coming home, you are sadly wrong on all accounts. I am grateful to have gone on vacation (it was much overdue) but I couldn't wait to come home. I am not working too hard but rather just enough as you shall see. And I am not coming home. About ten more months are left in this tour of service and I couldn't be more rejuvenated.

Vacation was great! I didn't speak a word of any language except English and the basic Spanish I had to pick up like "dos cervezas por favor." I wandered around the Portuguese coastline taking in warm winds and cool waters. I ate good pork and drank delicious beer and wanted most of the time to be back in Botou.

Before I left, I had given vegetable seeds to my school director who has been taking charge of the garden. I told them to seed them in lines in a nursery and that I would be back in January around the time that we should transplant. None of the making of the beds had been done and I wasn't convinced they would be nor would the seeds be in the ground when I got back.

I was wary to visit the garden when I got back. In fact I waited a day and a half. But low and behold there was greenery inside! The nursery was beautiful; full of lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, onions, and eggplant, and the beds to transplant had been traced out. Apparently the director had told Bouna to have all the dads of the school kids come out that Saturday to dig the beds. And so they did. Saturday I spent the morning watching men whack some of the most difficult ground I've seen. I had done my share of pick-axing this space earlier so it was their turn. We have 10 rows and 20 beds and slowly slowly they were dug, amended and dug again by some of the teachers. One in particular has been a garden superstar and his level, symmetrical beds make for quite a nice space to look at. Slowly slowly the kids and teachers began transplanting the vegetables and things were looking terrific. Then I had a visit from one of my bosses, he visited the garden and gave the teachers a pep talk about the uses of the garden, the benefits of Moringa, etc. they were jazzed and in fact, that afternoon the women of Botou decided to come to the garden and see for themselves what all the hubbub was about. Turns out they had some (correct) opinions on the spacing of tomatoes and eggplant. They also had ways to improve the garden beds which I welcomed and watched from the periphery thinking "this is what sustainable development is supposed to look like." Then these women, who I have worked with on a few other things decided that all the women would come out Sunday afternoon to help transplant. And so they did. It has been amazing to see the community effort in this space. It isn't perfect. But I have heard so many stories of other PCVs with school gardens where the PCV does most of the work and once they leave, it no longer is a working garden because no one takes the initiative to keep the work up. I decided to approach the Botou school garden differently. I trained the director and the teachers a bit adding on to what they already knew on spacing, amendments, etc. and then I backed off. So far off that I left the continent. I figured if they were determined to actually have a garden they would seed and water. If they weren't, I would have just installed an expensive fence for no particular reason. Luckily the former occurred, and full speed ahead the garden is thriving all thanks to the hard work of Botou and not as a result of all the work I did. This is what sustainable development is. This is what it can be. Yes I bought the fencing, but the teachers are keen on planting thorny species to build a live fence to live on after the chain link disintegrates. The community is motivated and helping to pay the robinet water bill. And soon the vegetables will be in the kids lunches helping to increase nutrition in their diets. It's great to be a volunteer in Botou these days.

In this world

For those of you interested, I have not posted anything previously regarding the attacks in Beirut, Paris, Kenya, or Mali. I don't usually use social media to try and work out what's going on in the wider world. That's just too hard. But with the Mali attacks, I have had a few people write to me and others post statuses angry that more people aren't posting more about it. This one hit close to home, literally. I live about 890 kilometers from Bamako. We were a bit worried, mainly for our Malian PCV friends but also for the future of Mali. I was worried because of the proximity to Senegal but was reminded by myself, my friends and Raki and Bouna that it is extremely unlikely that kind of attack would happen here. Nonetheless I am still worried and I'm still sadden by the death of the American who had once been a Peace Corps Senegal volunteer and I'm worried about the state of our world. That being said, I have always felt safe, at home, loved and supported living with my Bambara Muslim family. What I heard  of the attacks in Bamako was that the terrorists ran into the Radisson screaming Allah Akbar, which means God is great in Arabic, a phrase that I hear probably 40 times throughout the day for prayer calls. And while I personally don't believe in God, here in Botou I do believe that God is great. I believe that prayer brings peace to many people and that religion can be used to help unite and welcome people into this world just as much as it can destroy and take people out of this world. The world is messy. It seems to be getting messier; in America with oil pipelines, xenophobia, racial violence, sexual violence, and ignorance; in Europe with xenophobia; Asia with natural disasters; and Africa with war, militant extremists, poverty, and environmental degradation. It isn't a world I am proud to live in at this moment, but I am proud to live in Botou.  I cannot live in fear but I am fearful. I have no hate in my heart for those that committed crimes because that won't do anyone any good but I'm confused at how religion is affecting my life so positively in Senegal and so negatively around the world. I believe the world is scared, unsure of what to do, and vulnerable. There seem to be so many tipping points, so many bridges broken and lives lost that I am not sure how we will recover. But all of this, what's going on in the world, is not new to humanity, despicable, but not uncommon. For such a supposedly intelligent species, we are not doing very well for ourselves and things need to change. I want to be proud to live in this world, much like I am proud to live in Botou but for now, being here is all I can manage.

Letting myself fall in love

Falling in love is one of the greatest and most intimate gifts we are given.  Humans claim to fall in love and I would argue that other creatures do as well.  To do so is to give a piece of yourself, a big piece, to someone else.  Doing so puts you at risk, makes you vulnerable, and to a certain extent makes the intimate and private rather public, or at least shared.  For many people, particularly those in my generation falling in love is a difficult decision, we keep ourselves guarded waiting for that someone special to come along, or we give in, fall in love, and then wait and see if that love holds or not.  While I don't usually share my most intimate thoughts and feeling this post seems to need them.

In my few years on this earth I have only fallen in love a few times.  I actually have yet to experience falling out of love, I believe that love stays with you and shifts its form as you grow, meet new people and experience new things.  Most of us grow up loving our families (biological or not) but after that, we choose who we love. I have been reluctant, at best, to put myself in situations where my heart is at stake.  Finding the "worth" of love has been difficult for me and so I have kept myself quite reserved. Those times that I did take the leap, stay with me as the best moments of my life and the deepest attachments I have with other people.  The most recent has been a young girl, age 2 1/2 and she has taken my heart in more ways than one.  Tene is my youngest host sister in Botou.  She is learning to speak and her vocabulary is expanding by leaps and bounds every day.  She is my favorite Senegalese dancer and she runs like the wind.  She and I spend lots of quality time together. Unlike other people in our family I do not reprimand her physically.  She is young and in my mind still needs the comfort and security of people that love her and lots of verbal attention. She is a fast learner and eager to become a Senegalese woman, but also still a toddler.  She comes to me for safety, sleep, and siips (cheese puffs).  Recently a few of my volunteer friends made the trip to Botou for a visit.  One of them commented on how well Tene and I get along and said that she was happy to see that I've let myself get attached.  Often volunteers choose to keep a certain distance from the people they are close to because they know that they are not permanent and that as transient beings, leaving is the hardest part.  I disagree, I understand the sentiment, but for me there has been something powerful for me to become attached.  The power of letting myself love and my ability to watch as Tene reciprocates has been one of the biggest blessings of my service so far.  It took me awhile to come to this state. I was reluctant at first when she only referred to me as -Tar, referring to the volunteer before me.  Then I was on the fence because, yes she is adorable, but was that all she was to me?  When she began to communicate and I saw a light in her eyes when she spoke, when she used her hands to talk to our deaf aunt, and her reaction to me upon my return from other cities or the bush I realized that I had to let myself fall.  And so here we are.  She is quite the talker and recently I was trying to ask her if she had any other young friends that she could play with, while I or her siblings were at work or at school.  She thought about it for a moment and then looked up at me and said, but you are my friend.  I tried to explain that I would be leaving in a year and that she would need to find some other people to play with.  She wouldn't have any of that talk so I left it alone.

It will be one of the hardest things I have ever done to leave Tene and Botou next year.  But falling in love with Tene is one of my most treasured accomplishments.  She has been added to my list of few that have made their way into my heart.

The Fifth Sense: Touch, Feels, etc.

For those of you that have been following my blog you know that I agreed to do posts on the five senses.  I have not forgotten that I still have one left.  The most difficult to accumulate details worthy of the written word but I figure a year in and I've touched a lot. Time to give you a sense.

The feel of new born babies (literally a few days old).  The feel of a recently shaved head (baby or otherwise).  Shucking peanuts on a hard service, enough to give you blisters.  Shucking corn, also gives you blisters.  Mixing cucumbers together for salad, with your bare hands.  Wiping your tush.  Pouring water over your head as a shower.  Baby peeing/pooping on your lap.  Holding up a bleating baby goat upside down.  Rubbing dirt encrusted on your face in sweat off your face.  Shucking beans (if that is the correct verbiage for that). Working in the gardens/fields with hand tools all day and also receiving blisters.

This is a short post. I'm sure can get the picture but I cannot think of much more now.

Some recent updates

For those of you that read my last two blog posts, I have updates for both.

Apparently there is a fourth option for my sister Sorkna.  She can do the last year of primary school again in Botou and try again for the middle school in Tamba next year.  One of our teachers came to our compound yesterday and talked to Raki about it. Let's hope she makes it!

The second point, as I was delivering photos to Tacko yesterday she mentioned that I should have told her I don't like to take photos at night (because of the shitty flash I have) because they would have moved the dance party to the afternoon when there is daylight.  Next time, I told her, next time.