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.