A Little Success

            I’ve been stuck in the city for a week due to illness and now that I feel better it seemed a good time to do some writing. Alluding to an illness without explaining would be poor decorum though. So, last week I awoke with a light fever and a sore throat and headache. I stayed in bed until about 10 a.m. before deciding that I’d be better off recovering in the city rather than my hut. Firstly because of all the good food and electricity driven fans and ice water available. Secondly because Fula culture dictates that if someone is ill everyone should go into that persons room and ask them if they are sick and then wait a few hours before repeating. During the time when you would least like to talk almost every single person in your village in your second language because all you want to do is rest… you have to talk to everyone in your village in your second language. So I packed up and headed into the city.
            The travel in turned out to be a fun(haha sarcasm to the extreme) adventure as well. The hour I waited at the road brought me no success of a random car heading in the direction I wanted. So I had to pay 1,000cfa (2 dollars) to travel 20km in the wrong direction to get to the nearest garage. At the garage I paid an additional 2,500cfa(5 dollars) to travel 80km back the way I’d come. Although this car wasn’t full and I had to wait for two hours, while still being fevery and generally unwell. Although I did meet a nice family who let me use their outdoor duce while I waited. Our 3 hour trip into the city was held up on two occasions. Once because a truck driver decided the middle of a one lane road with zero place to driver around him was the best place to stop. A second time because someone needed to borrow a tire iron. I’m not entirely sure because I was focusing on not overheating and dying in the back of the car when it stopped and consequently stopped the airflow. Made it into the city at 5:30 p.m., a nice six and a half our endeavor which should have taken under 4.
            Anyway I arrived in the city to a fun power outage and found my fever to be on the rise. By the time I called our medical team I was near 103 degrees Fahrenheit. I took also the malaria rapid test to ensure that a fun bout of malaria wasn’t the cause of my discomfort. Negative. So med suspected strep throat and prescribed an antibiotic and pain killers to reduce fever. I’ve since spent some unpleasant days coughing and being out of energy. Although honestly I would easily have gone twice as long with all that if I could have given up an insufferable canker-sore at the end of my right canine tooth. I couldn’t move or eat or drink without the tooth digging into the sore and just driving me mad. Six days of both of these things and I’m feeling energetic again.     

            Now for the reason I wanted to write, some successful projects I’ve done. The first project I did about four months ago. Went around my village helping people plant Moringa seeds in 2 ft. spaced patterns. Moringa is a rapidly growing tree when given enough water. It contains excellent quantities of protein, calcium, vitamin c, and other hard to come-by nutritious goodies. The leaves are a valued cooking additive and the tree itself is difficult to kill. Also you can cut the tree and it will regrow. Even better you can use the cut portions and plant them in the ground and those will grow. So if I can get just a few started and teach people how to care for it then in a few years we can just make its numbers around the village blow up. 

 As you can see a few short months and these trees are about 2m tall.

 Kumba holding her little one. Kumba had also been growing corn here, so some of the nutrients and water that would have gone to the moringa were siphoned off. Yet the moringa will outlive the corn by a great many years we hope!

 Two little jokesters that I pulled into my camera work with a few of the trees splattered about.

 Another fantastic looking bed of moringa, sorry I didn't pull somebody in for scale.

Here are some younger girls at my work partners compound among the few moringa that lived thus far.

            Another fun project I’ve been working on is the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship. This project involved going to a neighboring village’s school(the one in my village is the equivalent to an elementary school) and helping teenage girls pay for inscription fees and school supplies. First the school supplied us(a nearby volunteer helped me a little) with a list of the top ten preforming girls, several from each grade(they would be early high school equivalents I think). Each of the girls wrote a short essay on a question of their choice, referencing the advancement of women in society or the importance of education. Next I went to their compounds and(with the help of a French/English/Pulaar speaking teacher) asked them questions about their home life. Questions like; if they planned to continue schooling in the event of marriage, or if their family had difficulty paying for schooling, or what they aimed to be after school. Next all the paperwork was gathered up and sent out. A few weeks back I received the twenty dollars for each girl. Ten went to inscription fees and ten I was instructed to use on purchasing school supplies; backpacks, pens, pencils, notebooks, and a math kit for each of the scholarship recipients. Here is a fuzzy picture of us (Sorry mom but my camera has a grain of sand in the focus and is hard to work, meaning that I’m the only one who can work it, which is why there are no GOOD pictures of me.)

            This project revealed some of the sadder elements to the culture here as well. When asking the girls what they wanted to be when they finished school the answer was almost always doctor, police officer, or teacher. This might not be a bad thing to aim for, but they are practically the only professions available. When you talk to young women the answers given are obviously(most of the time) only what they believe you want to hear. In multiple young people empowerment gatherings I've been to a strong willed successful woman will ask the younger girls what occupation they desire. Many of these are answered with silence until a frew options are given as a prompt, and then the one heard most recently is spouted off as the asnwer because it is perceived as the correct answer. Now this saddens me on two fronts. Firstly because the way educatoin is handled here(and to some extent Stateside) is to elicite fact regurgitation and ignore critical thinking. Classes here consist mostly of the teacher saying something and then every child in the class yelling it out loud repeatedly.(to be covered in next post hopefully). Secondly I'm upset by this because not everyone needs to be a doctor or teacher. Nothing at all wrong with an ambition to be a parent or farmer. If everybody is a teacher or a doctor then where will all the shop keepers, mechanics, and farmers be? The point of the question is what do you want to do to make you happy, but the true meaning is sidelined not only in Senegal but often in the U.S. as well.
            I’ve also been working on getting people started on seedlings of a couple types of fruit trees. To occupy my dry season time and before the big workhorse seeds of mango and cashew are ripe, I’ve been working guava, citrus, and papaya. I walk around telling people that these seeds will be ripe very shortly and if anyone wants one or two or twenty of these trees let me know and I’ll help them start and care for everything until they are adults. So people ask for one or two guava trees or papaya trees and then I give them tree sacks to fill and get ready and then I’ll return to their compound with seeds when the seeds are ready later on. One of my practice runs of this project has already yielded… this tiny guava tree pepineer(French for tree nursery I think?) Also I do not own this or take care of it, purely Senegalese gorwing and learning happening right there.

           Now  how about some other little pictures of stuff and then goodnight.

            This youngster was out collecting bissap flowers. They are heated in a little water and a good deal of sugar and the red and flavor leak out making a colorful and tasty beverage. Also corn season being in the swing you'll notice a few discarded husks and cobs.

            The youngster on the left is one of my work partners kids and his wife Mariama is in the background picking bitter tomato(look it up). The bitter tomato leaves have wood ash on them to keep away insects and I don't know if my village was doing this prior to my arrival or not. I had showed one of the prominent male gardeners and women from all over the village love to go to his well and get water because the longer walk gives them a little break but also becuase it's shallow and they have a chance socialize. While being next to the garden they may have asked him about his use of wood ash to protect plants. I don't know if what I did there spread or if people already knew this though?

Lastly I love clouds and boabobs. Scenes like this will be one of the things I'll miss the most when I'm flying back home for good just under ONE YEAR FROM NOW! Have a good day everybody.

Photo Feast

          I regret to inform readers that while I am not much interested in writing a traditional styled entry today. Therefore I shall be using this decent internet I purchased for 2 dollars to upload a great many photos and write little stories or things about them. I'll even try to categorize for yah!

My hang out.

 This is my backyard very early on during my service. It was dry season so lugging water back there to keep the plants alive isn't really all that fun. Plus I'd been working elsewhere.

The nice thing though, is that during rainy season you can plant all kinds of stuff and have it grow like crazy. Here I have beans, okra, bissap, mango and cashew seedlings, the trees are moringa, some squash and cucumbers are visible. Don't know if my watermelons are visible but everything is much bigger as I write than it was a few months back when I took this photo. The tree in the back right is related to beans and puts out a neat bean pod looking thing which can be cooked and eaten just the same as beans. Also there's my Karate striking post which I use daily. If you start off slowly it kills/dulls the nerves in your knuckles. Then you can hit it a little harder and it creates microfractures in your bones which scar over and bone scars are quite dense and hard.
My environment.

In contrast to the back of my hut this is a photo from Thies, the larger city where I did most of my training early on in service. Obviously this is a little negative on account of all the trash, but it was what I wanted to get across. Without a waste management system, much of the cityscape is varying degrees of this sort. The railroad is more of a dumping area than markets or homes but walking around anything but very rural villages and you'll see something similar.

 A favorite part about rainy season is the seasonal riverbed less than 1km from my village. It's beautiful for several months.

 The same.

 Within the river bed are some fishing nets. One day for dinner my family cut up an catfish looking thing and I was a little reluctant to consume it knowing it originated from this close to village(being that field pesticides and herbicides travel downhill same as rain). While the fishballs that are made do not typically appeal to me, I sampled these and swear to you that, even without seasoning, they tasted like sausage. Sad I only got to try it once.

 I love this picture because while standing here I felt all mystical and magical. As though I were in some Lord of the Rings adventure or looking at a swamp/forrest mana card from Magic the Gathering.

 Rainy season also means RICE! and lots of it. The reason for taking this photo was also to show the ingredients to my favorite dish. Rice and foleree with palm oil.

 Sorry I couldn't figure out how to turn this, but it's Okra. You can see a little one growing about center frame.

 This here is bissap. To make my favorite dish the rice is cooked and then ground up okra and bissap leaves are made into a mildly slimy and salty leaf sauce. Next palm oil is put around the edge of the dish. One could make palm oil from(I believe) crushing the nuts the tree produces.

 One afternoon as another volunteer and I were headed to my roadtown I commented that it looked like rain. As rainy season is on it's way out the other volunteer dismissed my conjecture. After loading a bus and heading back to their village I restated my hypothesis to myself and bike the 7km/4mile back to village as fast as I could so that this scene could great me. As beautiful as it is, I still caught several raindrops as I took the corner into my compound. Also it's harvest season and you will notice that the sorghum has been bent over and harvested in half of this field.

Biking back to village from another volunteers site about a week back brought me to this excellent sunrise. Then of course I had to turn and try to get to site about 3km away before it became dark and stranded me in the woods.
Critters and crawlers.

 This was the first scorpion I had seen in real life. I was walking and noticed it about two yards away and just froze. After a few seconds of it not moving and looking all dead I figured it was dead, turned out it was. So I took the opportunity to study it like any good science oriented person. Fascinating. Wish I could have examined it when it was alive. I've seen about 5 total. Most dead. The one that was alive was being flung at children, by other children. Ho ho ho, kids these days.

 This is a spider I found(almost with my face) while out wandering in the woods. It interested me because of its spiny body. The hand is present merely for contrast.

 This giant cricket cousin was behind my hut making the loudest cricket noise ever. It literally hurt my ears it was so loud up close. Though very cool.

 I noticed within a bush there was a little beetle and wanted to examine him closer. Here he is! I like his horn.

Although after looking at the beetle for several seconds I noticed that the bottom of the plant he was on looked like this and that it's head was about 5 inches from my foot. So I moved back a little even though he was only about 17 inches long. Lil cutie.

People!

 Sorry Ruble for the less than flattering picture. But here are some photos of the village wedding held by Jenny Cobb and her fiance Jake Castillo.

 Here we have Jenny(Hoolay as her village calls her) pre makeup and dress. The hand art? is a local leaf that when dried, ground up, and soaked in water stains skin. Women primarily use it on hands and feet to make designs like temporary henna tattoos in the states.

 J squared coming out for the big reveal.

 You know, it's a wedding sorta. I don't understand them nomatter what continent they're on.

So the Senegalese favorite dish is ceeb(pronounced cheb) and usually fish but also meat sometimes. Hoolay found a nice goat willing to be eaten and here is some of the early prep work of pouring the oil into the rice cooking bowl. Obviously most meals are not cooked on such large pots, but this was a party and people like to eat!

 You can see some of the rice mid cooking and a bowl of chopped onions. The two women are getting ready to pound something. The straight face is a popular expression among younger Senegalese. I asked my host brother why kids didn't smile when he was photographing them for his work and he said because they didn't want to. The morter pestle combo is called the unugol and korngol in pulaar. The stick being the unugol and the bowl the korngol.

 Matching outfits!

Sometimes I like to just come into the regional house and make up my own breakfast. Here we've got some nice sweet potato hash with very fluffy scrambled eggs and tomatoes basil and onions with a little cheese covering, not forgetting the essential glass of chocolate milk. Peace out!

Yes, but what do you actually do?

          I was informed that while I have given great detail over many aspects of my adventure in Senegal one topic that has been neglected is what I do on a daily basis. You can see how this would slip my mind because what I wake up and do daily is rather uninteresting to me and seems mundane, but since you aren’t me, you may be far more interested in such things. So, for today the treat has arrived of what work I am filling my time with while here in AFRICA!

           My job title is Agroforestry volunteer. Agroforestry is defined as a land use system that incorporates trees, planting and care techniques, and even animals, to increase yields. Some of the primary technologies of Agroforestry include; ally cropping, live fencing, wood lots, fruit tree propagation and grafting, and increasing availability of food. Ally cropping involves planting beneficial trees within a field crop(corn, beans, rice, peanuts, sorghum, cotton) area which fix nitrogen or provide shade and generally increase soil health and benefit the shorter field crops around the planted trees. Live fencing is the use of thorny, dense, or non-edible plants to surround a field and keep out animals, pests and even people. Live fencing has many great uses in Senegal and I’m trying to focus on increasing usage in my area during service. The Senegalese like to build fences out of dead wood around property they want to protect. The problem with this is the huge population of termites attack fences causing them to need to be rebuilt yearly and it isn’t easy work. Also during the dry season when there are no fresh plants animals will ruin weak old fencing in desperation for whatever plants remain inside. If one were to have a living fence though, termites would leave it alone and it can do cool things like produce flowers which attracts pollinators. The collection of wood for cooking and charcoal production has been hitting the forests of Senegal fairly hard in the past fifty years, so another technology we try to introduce is wood lots, the production of large amounts of wood via planting large amounts of trees in one place. Senegal also has a unique climate for mangoes and during one part of the year is the only place to buy large quantities of fresh mangoes. As a cash crop and food source we assist farmers in the planning and implementation of orchards. The local variety is fairly small and the improved varieties have poor root systems for this environment so what we do is plant a local seed, and then graft an improved variety to the roots of the local. This way the root system is of the local variety and is adapted to the soil, and the top of the tree provides larger and tastier mangoes! Some other work within Agroforestry is to plant trees in a manner that reduces the crazy winds that blow through during rainy season or trees that greatly hinder the movement of the many bush fires during the dry season.

           The first step of my job is to travel around looking at fields and talking to farmers to determine if one or more of these technologies could help them and weather or not they have any desire to put in the work to implement them. Which basically is reduced to biking around the African bush looking at fields and jungles and trying to talk to farmers in Pulaar. Fun times really. Luckily for me the volunteer living in my village prior to me pointed out some good farmers to work with and what they wanted very early in my service. So from here the farmer and I decide on a course of action, what they desire and how we should go about making it happen. I’ve received many requests for live fencing and fruit tree assistance with mangoes, cashews, and citrus.

           

            Now we have to talk about how this is all going to begin. The best method usually is to plant the trees into tree sacks(pictures below) during the dry season, care for them until the rains come, and then outplant them to the fields and let the rain continue to care for them. The benefits of planting all your trees in tree sacks are that it is far easier to care for them as a group. Watering and monitoring for pests and the like is easier when you can stand in one spot than if you had to walk around your field and look at over one hundred different plants every few days, or daily, when it comes to watering. Protecting the young plants from hungry cows and goats is much easier when they are all in one spot as well. So teaching farmers how to use the sacks correctly is another part of my job. They tend to want to put dirt in the sack and call it good, but since the plant will be living off the nutrients in this sack for upwards of a whole year they need to mix in manure or compost to increase the nutrient content. Small things like periodically picking up the sacks and moving them so roots do not break through the bottom and start growing into the ground are also important tips that need to be taught.

            Teaching is a large part of the job. Many farmers are aware of the benefits of techniques such as grafting, but don’t know how to do it. I’ve seen branches from one tree cut off and stuck onto other trees and tied all up with cloth, which might work but seems to only have about an 8% success rate. So if I see improper grafting or a farmer asks me to help them, I teach them to take a six to eight inch segment of the tree you want the fruit from and graft it into the tree and then wrap it with plastic so it doesn’t dry out. Grafting is a quite difficult procedure but I’ve recently had some successes that started producing leaves and am very happy because I had doubted myself a little. There’s a mango tree in my neighbor’s backyard and several of the branches hang behind my hut. So I grafted one of the branches and cut away the others so the graft can grow outward into the new space and give me exclusive good mangoes next year, haha.

Some smaller scale projects take up spots of my time as well. Several weeks ago I went around my village asking if anyone wanted moringa trees. Moringa is a great tree with tons of uses and very difficult to kill and the people here love the leaves to cook with, which are very healthy and in my opinion very delicious. So I planted forty or thereabout two meter beds of moringa and will continue to go around talking to people about how to care for their trees and how to use the leaves for maximum benefits, such as drying them out of the sun. Senegalese like to dry everything in direct sunlight, obviously faster, but tends to reduce the healthy vitamins and proteins.

Monitoring of projects is also a large part of my job. Several of the live fences I am working on involved filling tree sacks and then caring for the trees until the rains arrived. Although laziness, forgetfulness, or other work such as preparing their fields for corn and other crops and general repair of houses and fences and things, tends to make caring for the tree sacks less of a priority for the farmers than it is for me. I’ll visit and see weeds and drooping trees from lack of watering and need to remind them to spend a few minutes with their plants every few days at the least. Making sure projects are coming along and that grafts are alive and that animals aren’t killing everything are all part of the job as well.

One of the best parts about the work is having a work and cultural advisor within the village assigned to each volunteer. Mine is Mama Saillou Balde and he’s excellent. If I need help explaining projects to farmers or if there is a holiday or funeral Mama Saillou is my go to for what’s happening. He is also the sweetest older guy, always checking in to make sure I understand while discussing something and he doesn’t talk really fast to me, just a jolly fellow really.

I also work outside of Agroforestry. The nearest volunteers to me are all health volunteers so I have helped them work on malaria education. We went to the weekly market in my road town(closest town with an actual road and cars) and set up a booth, signs and visual aids about malaria. I also wanted to paint a world map in my village because I’m asked geographical questions frequently but didn’t have anything to help explain, and giving such descriptions purely in a new second language isn’t easy. Now I can show the kids where they are and point out where I’m from and most importantly of all… show people where the countries participating in the world cup are. I’m also involved in another malaria project that studies mosquitoes. I take a sheet and spread it out inside a room/hut and then spray a poison around the room to kill the mosquitoes. Send the mosquitoes to the capital city of Dakar where they study how many and of what type and when and if they’ve eaten, all to advance knowledge of malaria transmission. I do ten huts/rooms per month and it only takes me a few mornings then on to other adventures.

Then there are the activities I have to do that aren’t really work but need to be done to further my work, i.e. trainings, meetings, travel to and from such things. I’m in my regional city today because the past two days were an Agfo summit training. We learned about pineapple propagation and care, banana propagation and care, and some other neat things that I can take back to site and teach farmers. Meetings and trainings might be as far away as 900km and with terrible transportation I spend some time sitting in busses and cars just riding all day. Although the riverboat crossing in Gambia is fairly fun, and they have great chicken sandwiches for 700cfa/$1.50 while you wait!

I also like to care for my own garden. Behind my hut I’ve planted several trees for the production of an edible bean and one for shade eventually. Planted squash, cucumbers, okra, eggplant, peppers (hot and green), some local plants that give good fruits or tubers, and my own fruit trees and live fencing trees to show farmers as an example. I must admit to a great fondness of caring for these plants. Every morning and evening I walk around my backyard and look for sprouts, seeds coming up, or insect damage then try to find and remove the insects. Making sure trees are growing straight and removing unwanted branches, keeping an eye on my compost pile, weeding, seeding, watering, it’s all very Zen and peaceful, one of my favorite things about living here in fact.

Also there are the activities I do that aren’t even work at all. Reading has become a great new friend. A kindle and one of my solar lights make each night before falling asleep entertaining and fulfilling use of my time. The Senegalese also love their tea as I’m sure I’ve mentioned. Sitting around at night with either my counterpart Mama Saillou or my host brother and his family drinking tea and teaching about constellations or chatting about the news which is in French and they understand so I’m usually being taught about what is big in the world in Pulaar. A few nights ago I found some people preparing bread so I went over to watch that procedure. They have a big brick furnace and light a fire inside, let it burn to mostly ash and a little coal, then pull out most of the coal leaving only a small amount of it. Then the bread goes in, upwards of fifty loaves. Each loaf about 16 inches long with a razor blade slice down the middle and painted with a water/sugar/flour mixture just before entering the oven. Cooks for about twenty-five minutes and then you can buy em hot or not for 100cfa/25cents. I sat around asking questions about their procedure then bought two and ate one hot before bed and one for breakfast, was a good night.

This would be an average day for me, I typically like to do two work things per day. Wake up and do maybe run or practice karate before it gets too hot, wash up and find some break-fast(typically leftover dinner of rice or maybe rice porridge). Bike to one of the neighboring villages either 1km or 7km away and check in on a project and discuss outplanting when the rains arrive, look at their work and remind them to weed and water, see if they have any problems and offer solutions. Return home for lunch around 1 or so and then a little rest until 3 or 3:30 when it isn’t so hot. Head back out to monitor my own projects or care for my demonstration live fence behind the school(has to be weeded and pruned) or measure a farmers field to see how many trees he can fit in it or go around talking to people about their new moringa trees and how to care for them or seeing if anyone has problems with any of the above and trying to solve those. Usually make it back home around six thirty or seven. I like to take my bucket shower around dusk or after the stars have come out and then water my plants. Grab my spoon and go sit with my host brother Demba, his wife Safi, their 4 yr old Allu, the six month old Seynee, the village chief/my host dad (although I’ve never called him that, I call him my host), a few random kids that live with us and have family elsewhere, and if they are in village(rarely) one or both of my host moms, Wude and Paite, and wait for dinner to be ready. Hang out sometimes after dinner or go chill with my work partner or simply return to my hut and read until about nine thirty or ten when I fall asleep and start the whole thing over again. Yep, it’s rather nice without TV and such making me feel like I wasted part of my day, part of the reason I came here actually, wanted to sample that freedom.
And now for your dosage of pictures.
Here we've got from right to left Jess Moore, Jenny Cobb, Scott Le, and Allia Crouse. With Rob Leventhal in the background there. Each holding a pommelo during our first Agfo summit on a visit to a huge orchard of citrus, mango, and other neat stuff near Theis.

 This is another shot of the orchard. I believe the approximate size was given as 100 hectars.
 So this is an example of my work on a small scale. You can see some nice cow poo on the left and I've tried to reduce its size by stepping on it, being the pile in the bottom center.
 Mix with sand sitting to the right of the bucket, at a little water from the bucket. Then fill up your tree sack! Only if I'm working with a farmer it is usually several hundred of the smaller sacks seen closer or about fifty of the larger sacks in the back for mangoes and so forth.
 I took this at Jenny Cobb's village wedding (was ceremonial and not legally binding, although she received an engagement ring during the event and will be married in the future to her non volunteer fiance who was visiting at the time). Not sure why the woman pounding thought the serious face was the best option but she used it for each of the eight pictures I took of the women cooking. These wooden morter and pestle sets are everywhere. People pound rice, millet, sorghum, and just about everything in them. Most of the cereal grains are pounded to remove the little husks around the actual grain.
 The starting of the world map in my village outside the entrance to the elementary school, as well as the ever present donkey. 
 Some kids watching us, because they have nothing better to do than watch foreigners and talk about them, usually forgetting that we can somewhat understand them. Here we have from right to left Tasha Torchon, Jess Chow, and Lexi Merrik come to help me with the work and I will go to their villages and help them in the future.  


 The work done(minus the names) we get a nice photo with two kids I like and three kids that bothered us the whole time. Yay kids....(he said with sarcasm)(not that kids are bad but when nobody raises them it's rough.)(Seriously they give the infants to like six year olds to wear on their backs and take care of, not constantly but usually it's the kids taking care of the other kids, not adults) 
Panorama of the finished product with some women returning from planting the rice field caught in the side.
 
 Several of the little monsters from village. I know Bacary in pink, Mamadou the tiny kid in blue, and Bota who is front green. Bota is a strange child always doing odd dances and weird things in general, although comical to say the least. The rest I don't know names of, and they simply wanted to be in something because they saw my camera. The reason of the fist is that they know I know Karate and want to be cool or something, not sure. Although I'm liking this kid in the front right for actually being photogenic.


 Some of the woods/jungle less than a km from my village. The grass will become much taller this is simply the beginning of rainy season and everything short burns during the dry season. 
 One of the paths to and around my village. How's that for scenery on your trip to work every morning? Admittedly for 1/3 of the year it is burnt and all ash, making it look like a post apocalyptic wasteland. They balance one another out overall.  
 And finally some of that reading thing I was talking about. Turns out people used to do this back in the time of radio and monocles. This is Meditations written by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Tough start and its merely a bunch of numbered suggestions and observations, but many are quite good.
On a final note to everybody noticing that Senegal is next to some of the countries where the ultimate doom of the universe (Ebola)... don't worry about it. It won't get you, and my superiors are making sure that it won't get me. If you combat this argument with 'but the news says', I'd like to remind you that the news covers the same story for months at a time because its full of horseshit and can't actually talk about things deserving of your attention due to how it is designed. My suggestion is to stop watching it entirely and either watch The Daily Show, or just breeze through the headlines online each day.
Next time we'll be covering people of the village! Ok toodles!

The Settings

As fireworks barbeques and cakes resembling American flags sit fresh in everyone’s minds I thought a relevant topic might be the Senegalese forms of nationalism that I observe as an expat. The interesting twist on nationalism in Senegal is that the borders of this country were sketched out by the European powers arbitrarily with respect to the different ethnic groups living within the area. Senegal is about 40% Wolof who inhabit the capital and coastal interior of the country. The next largest ethnic group is the Fula, approximately 30% of the population. After this we have many smaller groups; Seerer, Mandinka, Diola(pronounced Jola), Lebou, Soninke, Bassari, and many others. Each group has it’s own language and cultural norms and tend to be familiar with some of the basics to whatever other groups tend to live nearby. One of the most observable cultural influences in Senegal is Islam. Approximately 90% of the population identifies as Muslim with a small amount of Catholicism and small pockets of Animism(what you would think of as mysticism, spirits and smoke and odd medicinal techniques).
            I remember arriving in Senegal and being given lessons on Islam and frankly being surprised at how little I’d known prior. In order to identify oneself as Muslim one must follow the 5 pillars of Islam. The first pillar is that there is only one God and Muhammad is His messenger. The second is prayer, not necessarily mandatory but one is expected to pray five times a day. Once at approximately 5am, once at sunrise around 7am, again after lunch around 2 to 4pm, a sundown prayer around 7pm, and the final prayer of the day around 8pm. Not everyone prays every day at every time and strict adherence seems mostly an individual choice of devotion and time availability. Anyone staying in a part of the world with a large Muslim population becomes rapidly familiar with the 5am call to prayer over loudspeakers in most cities and towns(I feel a little lucky that my tiny village doesn’t have electricity and am not exposed to this daily.) Prayer is emphasized on Fridays, people gather at mosques for the afternoon prayer. The Friday afternoon prayer would be the equivalent of heading to church on Sunday for a Catholic or Christian. I see people praying occasionally in my village but not all that frequently. The next pillar of Islam is almsgiving. Alms can be given in the form of money or food. I remember that while training in a bigger city we would see young boys outside the family compound to ask for food at meal times. The young boys are training with a religious leader and living away from home, learning humility through begging. The interesting part about this is Islamic societies do not stigmatize begging like in the U.S. The fourth pillar is fasting during the month long observation of Ramadan. It would be most comparable to the concept of Lent for Christianity. During Ramadan one awakes at 5am and eats and drinks prior to the first prayer then refrains from drinking water or eating until the last prayer of the day at about 8pm. Children and pregnant or nursing women are excused from the fast. Ramadan started about one week ago and I have been fasting in solidarity with my host family, waking at 5am and eating and drinking then breaking the fast with them at sunset with coffee and bread. Fasting is not entirely food though, from first to final prayer each day one is supposed to refrain from impure thoughts and actions such as anything sexual or immoral. Interestingly Islam uses a lunar calendar so Ramadan occurs every nine months and not on a 12 month interval. It’s rainy season this year and I’m worried about what will happen when it falls on the hot dry season next time around. The final pillar of Islam is a pilgrimage to Mecca. Anyone with the time and the means is expected to make a trip to Mecca, a city overlooking the Red Sea from the country of Saudi Arabia. Anyone lacking the means to make the pilgrimage is expected to contribute to the trip of another person.
            Traveling around Senegal will yield one with many sights of mosques and people praying while waiting for a bus at the garage, and the sound of calls to prayer over the loudspeakers daily. When in training my supervisor was on his trip to Mecca and my training family has made the pilgrimage as well. The pilgrimage is referred to as the hajj and anyone completing the journey can add el hajj to their name for easy identification. Muslims in general never drink or smoke either, though I’ve seen many smoking here. As many people know the pig is thought to be very unclean and is never eaten or kept as livestock either. When exploring Senegal and presented with the sight of a pig ask yourself “which of these houses is Catholic?” The village next to mine is of the ethnic group Balante and they are primarily non-Muslim and I always see pigs there.
            I was going to continue talking about tea and the concept of being on time but I’m quite certain I’ve covered both in previous posts… neither was even a means of expressing nationalism, but simply nationwide actions.
            So maybe we can discuss some of the fun illnesses I’ve been collecting? Few months back I vomited for the first time in five years. Followed by a night of the same and all around having an emergency evacuation of all my internal organs. Laid me out for a day and kept me weak for a full week before I came searching for a medication. Apparently a little parasite called giardia had decided to try and inhabit me. Side effects of which are vomiting, diarrhea, and a sulfurous gaseousness. Not entirely sure if I’m rid of it, I haven’t felt like I’ve been at 100% since then, although eating rice every day for every meal with leaf sauce and fish once a week for protein could also be the cause of this. Several days ago also I had something get on my chin, which itched, and then raised out, became white and started leaking, and the leaking caused more boils and stuff. This led me to believe I’d been hit by the unique chemical produced by a blister beetle, although people in my village told me it was some sort of caterpillar. It’s cleared up and pealed out in the past few days although the skin is still raised, red and a bit crackly. I’ll put up some fun pics of that next time I get the opportunity. I had to shave a weird part of my beard to allow for tape to be stuck to my face while I slept, because as one boil spills open it causes more. So for a few days I had a chunk missing from my beard and eventually just shaved it off.
            So thinking about stuff to write about has been a little bit of a challenge and I haven’t written in a while because I feel on some hard times. I’m getting back into it now though and have had a request for an outline of the Senegalese family and schooling and so forth. So look forward to that and please request something if you’d like to help me come up with a topic. Thanks for reading!

The Subtle Stressors

       I feel that one of the hardest things to communicate for anyone is their struggles. People refrain from sharing their concerns because they don't want to waste other people's time, or look weak, or burden those around them, or they simply believe that their own story is uninteresting. I wouldn't be sharing my stories online if it weren't both an excellent means of sharing with family and remembering my time here in Africa. I often find what I do to be uninteresting and just between you and I, being perceived as incapable of dealing with life in general by others is often the cause of me being quiet or deliberately derailing conversions with a non-sequitur. Then every time you do start to feel stressed that damnable intellect has to cut in and tell you "but there are others who have it worse than you." This is very true for my current circumstances, living in a third world country makes emotional discontent seem like a huge luxury. How does one justify 'feeling lonely'  or some such grievance when people around you are hungry and losing family members and children to malaria and malnutrition. I can intellectually process my situation, though contemplating weather or not I have the right to 'feel bad' only really adds to the pile of worries I drag around anyway.

       I think my problems continue to burden me with respect to the new challenges seen around me because of the cultural lens I see them through. In the culture which nurtured me to my current age I rarely experienced these situations. My mind organized the totality of my experiences into good and bad and the extremes of either side. We organize our experiences into a linear scale as we cognize them. Each new experience is placed along the scale as good, bad, or neutral and then we compare any new experiences against all the previous ones we have collected giving us our own cultural context. A child who is the product of a first world country would organize the experience of consuming a pizza differently than a child in a third world country. The first world child would likely have many positive experiences rated above that of the meal and this would make the pizza look mediocre, or uninteresting. A third world child sees the experience as novel and, if taste-buds agree, delicious. The rating of the same experience is rated much higher for the second child due to the comparison of all prior experiences.
       Living in a dramatically different culture than the one you grew up in is like a plunge into ice-water for your experience gauge. Tons of new experiences come flooding in and dramatically shift how you perceive the world. Suddenly it becomes difficult to justify concerns for paying off student loans over the next fifteen years when the people around you are worrying about weather or not their children will live through the month. (Side note; during the four months I have been in my village only about five people have died out of the three hundred person population, with four or five births as well. We in America have diseases and so forth as well but the reality of our situation is that the premature death of a loved one feels like a failure on the part of society and not a common and acceptable occurrence.) Perception of the same experiences changes with the different cultural backgrounds. An excellent reason to travel, if one has the means, is the broadening of experiences which permit a more accurate system of experience classification in the future. If you've seen much of the world and the challenges of others you find much of your own concerns to be quite insignificant in a different cultural context. (Note; if you still intend to live in your own culture, the cultural contexts you already know are going to work best for you. Refrain from throwing them out entirely.)
       The real question here is "How should I, as a visitor to this region/reality, incorporate what I experience here into all that I have experienced prior? How do I choose to act in light of all the things which I know now and did not know earlier?" The question is hypothetical because I won't waste my time endlessly reviewing potential future experiences in light of recently added experiences. Rather the information gained will be used to deal with new experiences as they arise. Which is life isn't it? Learning and doing so as to have the ability to handle new experiences efficiently and rationally.
       New experiences in this context function as a tool. The interesting paradigm of any tool is that once obtained, the owner has the capacity of choice. Being the owner of a bicycle does not imply the necessity to use it. I studied martial arts to give myself a tool in the knowledge of defense. In truth I have no desire to hurt a person and may refrain from using the tool, my knowledge, to defend myself. I would prefer to use it to keep other people from being injured. What I have gained with all forms of knowledge, training, or experience is choice. If I lack the bicycle then I do not have the option to use it when I want to. The same is true of experiences. After acquiring all these new experiences I have the choice of perceiving things through my own cultural context or through the new expanded cultural context of multiple cultures. If I wish to sympathize with one of my friends or have a problem while I'm in the United States I need to use the cultural context of my youth to relate and process information. Having experiences outside of my original cultural context gives me the option to sympathize and problem solve in new ways and effectively operate in different and varying environments. Though in the end these are MY experiences and making another person understand what I have been through is difficult.
       I recently read the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse which is a fictional tale of a young man in India searching for enlightenment. As a youth he meets, but refrains from studying under, 'a Buddha' or 'enlightened one' and chooses to go off and live his own life because it is his believe that he needs to experience life. Great truths cannot be taught they must be earned. After living as an educated young man, then a homeless beggar, then a hedonistic merchant Siddhartha settles as a ferryman living peacefully next to a river. When a son is reunited with Siddhartha in his later years he yearns to keep the young man at his side while knowing that he cannot verbally teach him all the wisdom he has gained by experiencing life, and thus needs to let the boy leave and discover. If, upon my return home people ask me to impart them with my wisdom I do not think I will have the ability. I can attempt to recreate my experiences with fantastic stories, yet to fully comprehend any of them one would need to experience something for themselves. I don't wish to return and constantly be saying "This is just like that time in the Peace Corps...", because I'm not truly sharing, I'm simply trying to make others think more highly of myself by reminding them of 'all my selflessness'. The reality is that as an individual I will gain far more from the experiences here than I will be able to impart assistance on the local communities. This is information I KNEW when I agreed to leave. I wanted the experiences and the ability to function in new environments and deal with varying problems. I do also enjoy helping people but that is less than 50% of the reason I am here. It certainly isn't so I can return home and have everybody think I'm awesome, because frankly I don't give a shit what people think about me, and my friends know it. Heh heh.
       The overall point to this is that many people think that I'm over here going through all these 'hardships' of no running water, electricity, and I get sick sometimes, but honestly the difficulties are intellectual. Incorporating my new experiences into my old worldview undermines the importance of some of the things I valued. Now I must realign my perceptions of hardship with my new experiences. A flat tire is no longer a huge grievance it is simply a trifle of an inconvenience.  Life here isn't so different from life back home. People work and prepare food and hang out with their family and friends. Adjusting to the routine is easy because you either incorporate the lifestyle here into your own or you leave this place. It's far more difficult to fit your experiences into a broadening worldview than it is to draw water from a well.

       Sorry if this is over the top. I can answer questions and so forth if you have any. Some pics too.

Little boy from my village standing next to a large gourd. The gourds are cut in half and used as bowls or a hole is put in the top for carrying grains or water.

This is my homestay(the house we stay at during training to learn cultural norms and language) mom Kumba Seydi, and an excellent meal prepared for the family. The six or so little children eat at one bowl, the young adults at another, and the parents and miscellaneous others eat from the last bowl. All with your hands!

This is a cool field near the seasonal river bed near my village. The little mounds are termite hills which the water erodes around the bases, making them look like giant mushrooms.

Each is about two feet tall or less and all of them together is a cool, if odd, sight.

While it is still dry season and often too sunny and most of the green has been burned or died there are still a few places of refuge that are beautiful. Sorry to all the people serving as volunteers in the north who have no trees. But here we've got the snakes and scorpions and evil baboons too.
       Thanks for reading.