Nice while it lasted.

So I’m headed home in about 50 days now. While I’m looking forward to see family and friends and play video games until my eyes dry into little eye raisins, I will miss some aspects of life here. Might even decide to stay another whole year! (but probably not)

I think the thing that will be missed most is my garden. Behind my hut I am currently growing; pineapple, tomatoes of the small and large variety, guava, eggplant, basil, watermelon, okra, taro root, young mango and cashew trees, and several local varieties of trees. It has been one of my greatest pleasures to awaken each morning and peruse my plants to look for bugs and remove branch starts so the plant grows how I want it too. Pruning and weeding and building little water catchers in the soil and simply watching everything grow has been so satisfying to me my whole service.

On a similar note I’ve greatly enjoyed the part of my work that focused on trees and their growth and care. Biking around through the woods and talking to farmers and teaching them about the best way to care for plants. It’s fun to talk to and teach people about something which you are passionate about.

I’ll miss the freedom I have here greatly. On any given day I can decide to stay in my room and read all morning, or go out to the woods and wander around climbing termite mounds and observing the plants and animals. I can go visit with people and chat about what they’re doing and answer questions about my own culture. Since cultural exchange is the primary purpose of Peace Corps all of these things are my work. I’ve always loved the feeling of having a plethora of options. I feel that upon returning and beginning work I’ll no longer be able to wake each morning and have the choice to read a book until lunch.

Novelty is much more abundant for anyone far from home and doubly so if outside of their original culture. My days have the potential to go very interesting directions here. On one travel trip I ended up sleeping in a car with tons of mosquitoes and it was very weird and uncomfortable. But I also had not the slightest inclination that my day was going to go in that direction. Sometimes going to the market I’ll suddenly be in a new situation that dumps a cacophony of new experiences on me. Any walk in the woods can easily turn into a “What the hell is that?!” It’s great fun to not know what to expect each day.

Everybody here is AT LEAST bi-lingual. Growing up in a community that seemed about 1 in 60 or so people knew more than one language made those people geniuses. Here I can find difficulty getting around a city without knowing a little bit of at least two languages. It’s fun to make jokes in one language that don't make sense in the other, or translate things directly and realize they don’t work. For instance the greeting in Pulaar of “How is the body” sounds very odd in English. It’s fun to say stuff to someone in a language you’re pretty certain the people around you don’t understand, or yell it to someone on the other end of a bus. “I freakin hate this bus!” I’ve always had a soft spot for etymology(study of words and their history.) I like looking at how words are used and comparing a new language with the one I am familiar with. Being bi-lingual opens up so many doors. Language provides an excellent insight into culture. English only has one word for love and then we have to specify the type, many other languages have a slew of words all describing different kinds of love. Pulaar has a word for ‘to have something in the eye’. It’s just really neat being in a bilingual environment.

The food here can be rough sometimes, but it can be fantastic at others. A really good plate of rice and oily onion sauce with chicken meat is one of my favorite local dishes. You won’t hear any complaints if a plate of oily rice, fish, tamarind sauce and vegetables with a slice of lime falls in front of me either. Steamed corn meal with watery peanut sauce, leaves, and beans has been known to disappear in vast quantities when I’m around. Taste is the third best part about the food, second best is the freshness. Most times all the ingredients were growing or moving within the last 24 hours, and have no preservatives or false colorings or flavorings. The best thing about the food though is the cost. A Peace Corps volunteer learns early to become frugal, then more frugal, and when I get a nice steamy plate set in front of me for 1 U.S. dollar… I’m very happy.

Some unique potential exists here for human interactions. An interesting aspect of this culture is that it’s respect based, while in the U.S. we base much of our interactions on usefulness. If I go to a vendor of goods or services and fail to say at least several of the formal greetings, then I’m being rude. People here don’t like being treated like a means to an end. Say hello and ask about the afternoon and the work and their family, then move onto business. Not so in the U.S. where I may say hello but then move directly into “and I’d like a small root beer.” Without electricity in much of my area people spend most of their free time sitting around chatting. I felt that back home you don’t simply sit and talk with people for very long before their staring at their phone not paying attention. It’s difficult to really feel like you’re with another person and just spending time talking and joking and getting to know them.

Some specific humans I’m very fond of. Peace Corps attracts a certain type of person and the other volunteers that I’ve had the privilege of sharing time with are so fun. Diverse and with loads of stories and experiences talking with any individual for hours can feel like minutes. They all care about something enough to have come here in the first place, and being around people that have similar interests is amazing. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made over these two years greatly when I have to return home to my deadbeat friends.

It will be less fun to have the factor of unknown reduced upon returning home. Like the day I awoke to a large scorpion right next to my bed, and then a second came in my room that night. There are so many things that could randomly happen here that home will probably be boring if there isn’t a cow trying to break into my yard at 3 am, or I randomly end up chasing a 60 strong troop of baboons with a young kid. Never knowing where the day might end up is quite a treat.

I’ll miss the challenge of not being in my own culture. When my phone rings I get a mini panic attack because I’ll need to problem solve or at least comprehend potentially important details… in another language. If I go to the market I run into problems there and they need to be thought through and overcome. I need to plan ahead to avoid dying from dehydration or sun stroke. I have to make sure I can fix my bike if it breaks when I’m on a stretch of road that has nothing for six miles in either direction. Overcoming challenges isn’t only a way to make oneself feel competent it is the best way to grow as person. I have grown quite a bit since starting here two years ago. Hopefully this will actually be posted on Sept 23 2015 which is two years to the day that I left home and started all this.

The final thing I’ll miss, at least some of the time, is a lack of electronics. Sometimes you do want to read a book or work out or do something productive or to better yourself, but then you simply watch netflix and play candy crush. One of the reasons I joined Peace Corps was so that I could remove these options and only have self improvement things to choose from. I’ll miss the times when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work out or read a nonfiction book, but then realized they were my only options.

I’m in the mindset right now that I want to be home and playing computer games and eating cheese and meats and ice cream which I’ve been without for much of the past two years. But I’ll also be home missing the times when kids saw me and got way too excited, or when I greeted old people in their own language and they thought it terribly funny or fascinating that I knew it. Early into service another volunteer came to my road town and got off the bus, then we started greeting one another back and forth in the local language. The old man sitting down was so confused and entertained by two obvious foreigners knowing his minority language. Greeting people on a bike path from behind is always fun because they respond and then when you pass them they realize that you are NOT what they were expecting. I suppose I’ll miss being able to wear the same clothes for every day of the year and not get too cold. It’s been an adventure and I’ll be sad to have it end for these reasons, but that doesn’t mean the next thing I do won’t be an adventure.

To exemplify much of what I’ll miss I want to write a little story of one of the days I’ll have difficulty forgetting. My work partner and I had biked to a neighboring village. The bike ride was about 3km on a cool morning, it had rained recently and was still fairly cloudy. Just prior to the arrival at the village we needed to move through a flooded lowland filled with rice fields. It was very charming with the frogs croaking. After whatever it was we did at the first village we headed to a second village only a half km away and it began to rain slightly. We passed tranquil peanut and corn field with big baobab trees in them. One of the baobab trees had a big opening about 4 meters from the ground and I thought about hiding in it. We arrived at a friend of my work partners and greeted everyone in the drizzle. Then it began to rain harder and we were ushered into a metal roofed building. Some younger boys returned from the fields and unloaded ears of corn they had picked. They began grilling them on hot coals. In the meantime the matron of the house brought us a rice porridge with a soured milk/ yogurt on top. We ate breakfast while observing and listening to the rain. Chatted a little when the rain softened on the metal roof. After the shower the boys gave us an ear of corn each and we biked back to our village while nibbling fresh cooked corn. I think that was really a morning that exemplified what I came here to do as the experiences of the morning were so varied but so enticing and quaintly real. It has been a fulfilling time.

You won't be missed.

This is a compilation and explanation of things I will not miss after returning from Peace Corps service. Expect gross negativity and downright rude observations, but remember that after this is the piece about all the good things. After writing some of this I realized that some of the points I intended to write about were aspects of life here that are caused by the specific environment. As such I’ll attempt to avoid those to keep from sounding like a privileged yuppy.

I suppose the most noticeable component of being here was that I wasn’t born here. Which kids that don’t know you (almost all of them) are wont to remind you. For the most part being a foreigner is simply a novelty that children do not often have the chance to interact with, so they say ‘foreigner, hey foreigner’ in the hopes of some sort of interaction. This is annoying for a whole slew of reasons. Primarily because it is very rude to try and speak to someone without greeting them. I can’t help but perceive that they are being rude because I don’t think ‘Hey foreigner’ is a greeting. A rare specimen of child will say ‘foreigner hello’ in french, but I still wish they’d just say hello. The underlying implication here is that foreigners are treated differently. Children aren’t the only ones doing this either. Frequently adults will begin speaking to me with ‘foreigner, blah blah blah’. It is difficult to make locals understand that being treated differently isn’t what anyone wants, and often they don’t know they’re doing it. Another volunteer was having a long conversation with Senegalese and laid down the scenario that they were visiting a village to which they had never been. You see someone you’ve never met, what do you do? The reply, ‘you greet them and then ask their name’. After a moment of sinking in the local person made the connection. We simply want to be treated the same way anyone would be treated. Greet us and then ask our name if you want to interact, ‘Hey foreigner’ is rude because it isn’t how you would treat any other person.

Further under the list of being a foreigner is the perceived connections and ties we have. Most of this problem lies in foreigners coming abroad to vacation. Nine out of ten white people are wealthy and here on vacation. Those vacationers like to give money and treats to kids because they can afford it and it makes them feel good. I however am poor as hell and do not have the resources for that kind of stuff. Complimenting this is the fact that one of the basic tenets of Islam is giving alms, so there is no reservation about asking for handouts or anything. People think, ‘if I ask maybe I’ll get something, but if I don’t then I certainly won’t get something’. So they ask… constantly. With less access to social media and in a culture where ideas don’t travel as quickly, I can explain all of the reasons why I don’t have anything to give, but then there are still 40 more people that I haven’t explained this to and will keep on asking. Being American doesn’t help because everyone thinks of the U.S. as the land of money and simply because I originate there I have access to it. I can explain that I personally don’t have money but then people think surely my parents have money. Here almost everything one earns is put into a family pool, children aren’t really expected to function independently. More often as soon as adolescence can work they’re paying whatever they can into their parents livelihoods. I’ve been asked to purchase people iphones and give them all my possessions upon leaving, a handful of people have asked for assistance in paperwork to get to the U.S. The thing is, as a citizen, I never needed to do that and therefore haven’t the slightest idea how. Only after most of my two years have I thought to ask the askers if they can help me with getting paperwork for Senegal, wait for the inevitable ‘no’ and then have them explain why and turn the same logic back on their initial question.
The final part of being a foreigner is simply dealing with the less noble elements of society. Adolescent boys and girls trying to look cool in front of their friends have a very offensive term for foreigners, and I hear it much more than I’d like. I mean I gave up two years of my life, family and friends, other potential jobs and all that to come here and help and this is how I’m treated. Anyone selling anything with a flexible price has in their mind 2 prices, one for locals and one for anyone obviously not born here. I want my replacement to know never to ask a vendor how much something costs, always ask a person NOT selling it to you first. Many vendors simply believe that a foreigner can afford it and wouldn’t know the difference so why not double or triple the price.

On food there is light in the tunnel, but it’s still a tunnel. My host brother dislikes the steamed ground corn so he never buys it. While in village I have literally eaten rice two times a day almost every single day of service. The rice is topped with a watery peanut butter sauce, a slimy sauce of ground baobab tree leaves, or another leaf mixed with okra. Occasionally the rice is cooked in oil and maybe once or twice every two weeks some fish or vegetable. This is every day for most of a two year service. I can’t wait for my family to decide to eat breakfast anywhere between 7am and 11am because then I can’t go out and work early and miss most of the morning. So I eat a small handful of roasted peanuts for breakfast. Food in village can be good quality, they make good food for festivities and also if I buy all the ingredients. It has been one of the bigger mysteries that people don’t just keep small gardens to supplement their diets with vegetables. I also question utter lack of creativity among food. There exist about 8 set dishes that are made in rotation depending on availability of ingredients for every meal. Never does anyone just take the ingredients and do something new with them.

I was going to write about transit, but it’s less a choice and more a result of using what you have.

The weather. I arrived at village at the very beginning of a seven month dry season. Dry means dusty with no rain to clean anything. Then when the rains do return it rains so frequently, every two or three days in the middle of the rains, that washing clothes is dooming them to be damp and likely mold because they’ll never get a chance to dry. My bedsheet had to be washed twice to keep a fine white mold from overtaking it when I left village for days at a time. At times during the hot seasons we can see temperatures of 115 degrees fahrenheit.

The entire concept of borrowing. Senegalese have the very interesting perception that anything borrowed is to be kept until specifically asked for it to be returned. Mixed with the complete disregard for object value makes lending anything a terrible experience. In concession since almost everything here is very easy to break and then replace cheaply, people don’t really learn to care for their belongings. Regrettably when they don’t care for my expensive belongings… I get rather frustrated. My family borrowed the nice knife I was given by Peace Corps to do my tree grafting. Then they lost it. They also borrowed my rake, then someone borrowed it from them, and they don’t know who, but coming back to the policy of objects are only returned when requested, and one cannot make a request to an unknown individual… my rake is gone forever.  

I’d written kids but I think I’ll extend it to animals as well. They’re noisy and ignorant. Animals will get into everything(my garden) during the dry season looking for food because everything else is dead. Last year a cow plunged its horns into my bamboo fence and started trashing it so it could have access to a small bush I had on my side. I did not appreciate waking at 3 am to tell a cow to leave my stuff alone, also had to fix the fence. Kids don’t respect anything at all ever. Any person entering my room, but primarily kids, treat it like a candy store and just ignore me and stare at my seemingly mundane stuff that they’ve seen before and constantly ask for it. ‘Hey, give me this, give me this then, well give me this.’ THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT SOME STUFF IS, but still want it. Animals also feel the need to wake up 1 hour prior to sunrise and yell at one another to make sure everyone is awake for morning prayer. For most of my service I have awoken before dawn to every rooster and donkey in village making their respective noises as frequently as possible. Then tried to fall asleep for another two hours. Both of the antagonists to this paragraph also love to relieve themselves all over everything everywhere. Kids don’t have pants and I watched a little kid peeing next to the food prep and then as he was finishing up he just sorta swung into the wooden mortar bowl. No doubt that a few drops went directly into lunch.  

Hygiene is also less than a priority here, as the previous sentence demonstrates. To some extent one cannot blame the people for lack of access to needed supplies. But for washing hands, in a region of the world where the left hand is toilet paper… I think some exceptions need to be made. For instance, people rarely wash hands. I’d be more accepting of this if it were possible to ensure separation of things touched with one hand from things touched with the other. But there isn’t. Women cooking unavoidably switch something from one hand to the other to free up their dominant hand, that means cross contamination right there. Now the reason people don’t wash hands is because… Soap costs money. Not a lot of money, but people don’t have a lot of money so they skimp when they can. I’d be far more accepting of this situation if they never bought soap at all, but they do, they buy soap all the time, but only use it on their CLOTHES! People here value immaculate clothing over clean hands. Plus kids get worms and a symptom of that is itchy anus! Which means they scratch and then MAYBE, and I do mean MAYBE, rinse their hands before coming to the communal food bowl… with worm eggs and jazz all over their hands. I simply think that if you gotta have grungy clothes for a little while in order to wash your hands a little more that such is a wise trade.

I’d written a few other things but I realized they mostly constituted things that were a product of the environment of a poor community. So I’ll leave them be. Thanks for Reading. And I’ll put up the positives in a few weeks hopefully. Should be more of them as I eliminated half of the negative list.

Ah yes. My host Dad here also passed away on Sept 17th. He’d been ill for several months and was having trouble sleeping and eating as of late. I remember once he tried to teach me numbers in Pulaar after I’d already been in village for several months and had a good handle on numbers. He could be a little abrasive but loved his grandkids as one could tell by his interactions with them. I’m glad that the last thing I said to him was “Alah okku maa cellel”(God give you health). He was also the chief of the village and there was a big turnout for his funeral which actually lasted a day and a half longer than most. You’ll be missed Bacari.

Like the sun though, I'll be leaving and headed to America soon.