Glimpses of the Future

      We woke up at 5 am one the morning of the 25th of October and loaded a ~20 person Peace Corps bus with bicycles and bags necessary for the 4 day trip to visit our future site or something similar. We dropped people off along the road where they met up with a current volunteer to guide them around the region and show them what the next two years might be like. It was late afternoon when I exited the bus to find a tall guy with tape on either side of his thick glasses, who would be showing me where he had lived for the past two years and where I would live for the next two. We borrowed a bike from Tasha, the health volunteer stationed in Mampateen(the nearest town with a paved road to my site) and took off on a small dirt road, at times simply a path, through the African brush.

The gentleman who I am replacing, Tucker so called, and myself, pedaled through tall grasses and trees occasionally passing people and fields of cotton, peanut, sorghum, and corn. We stopped and took a short walk through some shorter grass and looked at a rather disorganized garden of banana trees a few tall palms and some other small trees. Tucker had selected the owner of this farm as a promising work partner for me and we had been hoping to meet him at his garden. When we failed to locate him we returned to the bikes and finished the 7km ride to the village passing more concentrated fields of the above mentioned crops as the village came into view.

Tucker had passed his two years living with the family of Dembo Balde, son of the chief of the village. We entered and began the very long process of greeting every person over the age of 16ish who we met. Each greeting consists of about 6 back and forth wordings of “how are you”- “peace only the (time of day) is without evil”. Also the day is split into six or so parts and each part has it’s own special greetings. We greeted and unloaded the bikes behind Tucker’s hut. The hut was about 2.5m diameter with a cement wall going up about 5.5 feet, the roof is thatched on top of bamboo sticks that come to a point making the building about 12 feet tall.  A bamboo bed and chair as well as a wooden desk chair combo furnish the small space. Two traveling trunks also provide storage area with a bit of protection from bugs, humidity, and likely children who may wander in.

The sun set soon after our arrival delaying the much anticipated introductions. I was informed that the village was excited to meet me. We were seated and provided with kosam(a sour milk with sugar added, hopefully,) and lecceri (pronounced lechery) which is a pounded sorghum that is cooked and often served with a watery leaf sauce. The food was good and apparently far more nutritious than the rice I had become accustomed to eating for almost every meal prior to arriving in village. Tucker and I ate by flashlight while Dembo sat with us and they made light conversation in Fulakunda. After I took a pretty sweet bucket shower in the backyard of Tucker’s hut beneath the stars and thought to myself “I could get used to this”. The remainder of the night was spent lying on a supported bamboo mat talking with Tucker about the village, it’s people, and his projects that he worked on over the past few years.  Then bed.

Woke up at 6:45 just as the sky began to grow light. Started the long process of greeting the rest of the village. Considering I couldn’t even remember the people I had met the night before I had already resigned to the fact that remembering more than two or three names would be useless. We took a break after an hour or so and walked 100m outside of the village to the East to admire the baobab grove consisting of 7 or so of the massive trees. The rest of the morning was spent greeting and talking to the important people in each of the family compounds and getting to know some of the important points such as the blacksmith’s workshop.

After a late lunch, everyone eats lunch at around 2pm, of sorghum pounded into a slightly finer consistency we took the bikes to see the farmer whose garden we had stopped at the night before. He was present this time and we chatted for a bit and he showed us the part of his garden where he wanted my help establishing a live fence to keep out animals. The three of us walked back to his village, which is between my village of Pidirou and the road town of Mampateen, where we looked at his peanut and millet crop.

Next we returned to Pidirou to check in on a project Tucker was rather displeased with involving a mildly incompetent mason and a basin and some piping. Once the sun went down we visited a man on the other side of the village, who Tucker had also selected as a very promising work partner, and we discussed his garden and made arrangements to look at it the next morning. We ate a little bit of supper with Walli’s family and then returned to our family compound… for a second supper. This was followed by some more stargazing an excellent night shower and bed.

The second morning we visited Walli’s garden and apparently made arrangements for him to extend his garden and buy and plant some vegetables so that I could take over when I returned a month later. I felt really productive that I’d have a project already half started when I arrived and some volunteers hadn’t even seen their villages yet. Once this meeting was over Tucker and I took a long walk that must have been 4 miles and began by going south into a large cow pasture that was bordered on the south by the small seasonal river that swells intensely during the rainy season. We walked along this river as it ran northeast along the village and then looped back around ending in some rice fields and meeting some men as they harvested sorghum. As we passed some other individuals harvesting sorghum a woman picked several peanut plants and gave them to me as a gift.  

I spent the afternoon writing about the recent events, taking a small nap, and doing a bit of homework that had been assigned to me. Ah yes before I forget this was also the morning that while on our way to visit Walli’s garden I thought it would be very entertaining to ride a donkey. Turns out it is very entertaining, although the word to stop the donkey only seems to slow it down in small increments and just as I repeated it enough to get the donkey to slow down the same kid who had suggested the ride whipped the donkey and effectively doubled the length of my mini morning adventure. After dinner I engaged in an excellent philosophy based discussion with Tucker (who had a bachelors and masters in the subject) while laying on one of the bamboo mats staring at the sky.

The final morning in the area was spent in mampateen visiting some people who Tucker knew and seeing another farmer who desired my assistance implementing a live fence around his mango orchard. Then we jumped on a 20 person bus that didn’t belong to the Peace Corps and began the 90km journey into the regional capital of Kolda city for the welcoming party that the volunteers who’d been in country already were throwing for us. Regrettably non PC buses stop to pick up anyone who wants to be picked up wherever they are along the road until it is full, and is much more sketchy and uncomfortable and took 4 hours to make the journey that I could probably bike in 2 hours.

We spent the afternoon hanging out in a very nice hotel’s pool for free with access to a full service poolside bar. The evening was full of a pig roast at the regional house where volunteers from the region can go to get internet access or can go to stay a night and chill while watching movies and just unwind. After the food everybody dressed in their toga, as a toga party is obviously needed, and we had a killer party. The day after we loaded the bus before sunup and were traveling until 45 min past sundown.

As an afterword what I’ll be doing in my site is to help farmers and interested individuals implement newer agricultural practices to increase crop yields in a sustainable manner. Which can be anything from grafting mango and citrus trees, planting live fences which do not need to be replaced every few years like traditional fences, and helping diversify gardens with new crops, help keep them healthy with natural pesticides, and try to educate the village about nutrition. I’m really excited to start my work and have the free time to do random village stuff, ie ride a donkey, and read my books and practice martial arts. At this point I am very hopeful that the choice to come here will be extraordinarily well reasoned, rewarding, and provide me with mountains of personal growth. 

First Perceptions

                Fist perceptions of Africa… it’s hot. We exited the plane and headed to the terminal to pass through a security and fingerprinting station.  After collecting bags and shaking hands with the PC country director we packed onto buses for the two hour ride from Dakar to Thies. The ride was odd for several reasons, we had little sleep on the eight hour plane ride and arrived late because Air Force One had been at our departing airport, freezing all take offs for about an hour and a half. So, sleep deprived, we took in our first sights of Senegal, our home for the next two years.  The streets are lined with trash and random piles of it dot the sidewalks because there is no organized sanitation department.  The houses are constructed of cinderblocks and mortar; most look so similar it is difficult to orient oneself. There are beat up cars doing as they please in a country with no road rules. Any road straight enough and empty enough where one might build up speed has a giant speed bump every km or so to keep people from driving too fast. Thin sheep and horses drawing carts dot the city streets while cows and other animals appear sporadically throughout the suburbs and rural areas. I was surprised to find that the general odor of the air wasn’t unpleasant. The allure to this part of the country for me has been the countryside. Huge half a century old Boab trees dot the landscape otherwise dominated by short bushes. There is a fairly clear distinction between vast open areas and small cities.

                We arrived at the Theis (pronounced chi-es) training center and began lessons on culture and an array of safety concerns and other such things. During the following days we had 1 on 1 meeting to discuss language and technical skills as well as placement preference. I communicated a desire to be somewhere small and rural. The area which everyone worried about most extensively was the area we all needed to work on the most, language. So obviously they needed to digest the interview information and figure out where we should be put… meaning we didn’t find out which language we should even start to learn until we’d been here a week already. Also for reference the country is loosely split into the arid hot dry north and the jungle humid south. They also don’t tell us where we’ll be spending our two years until we’ve been in country for several months so they can observe our strengths and weaknesses.

                Well after the first 4 days or so we were informed of what language we would be learning. This was interesting because from the language you can somewhat identify what region of the country you will be placed in for two years. I am learning Fulakunnda… a dialect of Pulaar, and that means I will most likely be in the Kolda region in the center of the country below The Gambia, a jungle region with many interesting plants and animals, I am quite excited about this for your information. Well anyway we are told our language and have about 2.5 hours of language training… then they take us 20km away and drop us off with a host country family for 5 days so we can learn everything first hand. That… was an intense experience. You arrive and they take your bags and show you a room, then you sit around smiling while people talk at you and you haven’t the slightest idea what is going on. I wasn’t actually even nervous, I thought the whole thing was somewhat comical really. Well my host family is my Baaba(father) and his three wives and their kids and I think some of their kids… numbering around 25 in total… all living in a walled compound 12m squared. It’s a bit hectic but I like the kids so far and the older adults are nice to me. In Senegal eating is done from a communal bowl. As many as 10 people sit around a bowl of rice and fish or meat and eat with their right hand or occasionally a spoon. Right hand is for eating and left hand is for toilet paper so…. Yeah.  It’s also impolite to hand or take anything with the left hand. Morning prayer is at 6 and there are loudspeaker calls at 5am or so. It’s a different environment all around.  Although it can be very similar at times too.

                I found humor to be a wonderful ally. I informed my host mother that I was 25 and she thought that was funny, then I told her I wasn’t married and she thought that was hilarious. Also foreigners are called Tubob and we hear it frequently from children. I have taken to pointing at myself and asking confusedly “me tubob? No no no, you’re a tubob, I’m Senegalese”(as best I can in my local language) and people seem to think that is hilarious. There’s tons more information but this room, despite it being like 9pm, is exceedingly hot.  So I’ll throw in a some more cool stuff and hopefully pictures eventually. Sorry for lack of communication the internet when available is quite spotty.