Photos: Last Days in Darou

A photo album of my last couple days in Darou -- with captions, even!

Last Days in Darou

Camera Obscura

The afternoon before I left my homestay in Darou I was lying on my bed, avoiding the heat of the day and gazing up at the wall. The window next to my bed looks out on a narrow little walkway between the house and the kitchen hut, and the light shines in on the wall over my bed. Anyway, I was lying there and saw the bright pink silhouette of an upside-down person go by -- when my room is dark and I leave my little window open I guess the light reflects down the corridor and it turns my room into a sort of camera obscura, so I could see my host grandmother walking back and forth in her fuchsia complet outfit. So that was what I did for pretty much the rest of the afternoon.

Last stay in the training village!

The beach was amazing, and we're here at the center to pick up our bags and go out to the villages. I'll be back in a week, talk to you then!

Little Misc Senegal

 Here are a few photos from the last few weeks, in no particular order:

Emily M.'s birthday dinner at Massa Massa, the fanciest restaurant in Thiès. (Emily M. is on the far right, them my roomie Emma, me, Rachel L., Hailey, Meredith, and Claire) 

Marie (Salimatu), Hilary (Mama Awa), and LaRocha (Adama) cooking dinner for my host family in Darou

Marie and Hilary in our school garden in Darou; I'm behind the camera

Beach Day in Mboro, near Darou. This was just before we noticed how many fish heads and chunks of offal were swirling around in the surf...

A photo of a street in my friend Marielle's training village. Many, many streets look just like this.

(Many thanks to Marie, Chelsea and Marielle for remembering their cameras.)

Tokora An

In Senegal I am named after my host mother's mother, Adama Diallo. In Pulaar the word for someone with the same name is "tokora," so she is tokora an, my name-twin. She doesn't live in Darou, but this past week she came to visit, and my host aunt took a photo of the two of us together.

 

Adama Diallo I and most of Adama Diallo II

It turns out that it's easier to make myself shorter than it is to explain zooming, so this is the best photo we got:

Bineta, Adama Diallo, and Adama Diallo

 

This is me drinking sugary, sugary tea with Houssey, my LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator) She is fantastic; she's very, very patient with us, even when we're being ridiculous. (On a side note, most days it is really, really hot and I stay out of the sun as much as possible. Which may be why I have been living in Africa for almost six weeks now and only seem to be getting paler.)

Houssey and Adama (aka me)

And this is little Aminata, "studying" under the mango tree in the side yard where we have language and culture class most afternoons. She is adorable.

 

Aminata, my 18-month-old host cousin.

I'm sick.

I was just thinking "Oh, I've been here a month and a half and I haven't gotten sick yet! Awesome!"

And then my nose stuffed up, my left pinkie toenail fell off, and I started throwing up.

Luckily, if I were going to pick a day to get sick this probably would have been it. We have the weekend off from language classes, and a Peace Corps Land Cruiser was coming through Darou to bring my LCF (Language & Culture Facilitator, my tutor) back to the Training Center. I would have chosen to postpone getting sick until after my language assessment interview was completely over, but I suppose it could have been worse.

In any case, now I'm lying around in sick bay, sipping ORS and Emergen-C, and catching up on This American Life podcasts. I still have a "running stomach" (as they say in Pullo Fuuta) but I'm feeling better than I was this morning, and might even try to catch up on e-mails in a little bit.

My toe is pretty much fine, too, I stubbed it last week, and it looks weird but doesn't hurt.

UPDATE: ORS is so much less unpleasant with a Raspberry Propel-style drink packet mixed in. Emergen-C is great for normal water, but ORS is kinda gross. Many thanks to Chelsea (one of the other sick PCTs hanging out at the Center) for coming by and giving me some drink mix powder.

Off to the Village (again)

I'm about to head back out to Darou, my training village, for another week of Pullo Fuuta language classes.

I think I'm getting a cold (which seems ridiculous because it's so hot out) but other than that things are going pretty well.


I'll be going back and forth between the Thiès Training Center and Darou until May 13th, when we'll go to Dakar to officially swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers. (Inchallah.) Then I'll go down to Kédougou and they'll help me install in Salémata, my village, where I'll spend a couple months doing observation, language practice, and starting a baseline health survey of my village. After that I'll come back to Thiès for In-Service Training (IST) on technical stuff and grantwriting and whatnot, and then after that I'll be able to really start working on my service projects.

So, that's the plan! Have a lovely week ~ 

Ça va la tête?

I've been very into hat-wearing lately (since my part burns horribly if I don't) and it's been working out really well except for the how the brim sometimes interferes with my peripheral vision. Last week, on my way to the village health post with Hilary (my fellow Health stagière) I walked under a sign. Or, I would have, but I couldn't see that I was slightly taller than the bottom of the sign, and I smacked my head on it. Pretty hard. And once Hilary had verified that I hadn't given myself a concussion she laughed and laughed and laughed, and I though that was the end of it. 

Then, yesterday afternoon, in a different part of town, we were walking back from class and a guy I don't know called out hello and then asked "Ça va la tête?" which means "How's your head?" and also "What is wrong with you?!" I must have looked confused, because he continued in French, said "Don't you remember when you hit your head? You hit it really hard, did you forget?"

I had not forgotten (apparently no one else has either) and Hilary got to have another good laugh. 

Village Weekend

I'm headed out to Darou in a few minutes, and I'll be back to the center (and internet access) on Sunday evening. 

Hope you all have a lovely weekend ~

Highlights

A few of the more memorable things from the last couple weeks of training:

• Fielding questions about American culture as my mildly conservative Muslim host family watched a French-Canadian show called "Reportings" do an exposé on American co-eds on Spring Break in Cancun. Luckily they find it hilarious when drunk people fall over, and they also understand that every culture has its share of ridiculous people.
• Indian Soap Operas. They're 20 minutes of non-stop intense-gaze-filled melodrama backed by a soundtrack that's mostly thunderclaps and they're incredibly popular in small-town Senegal. 
• In Pulla Fuuta, my local language, the verbs for 'to vomit,' 'to plant,' and 'to spit' are tuutugol, tutugol, and tuttugol. I'm pretty sure that I've been showing up to dinner and then cheerfully announcing that I went to the school garden, where I spent the afternoon vomiting carrots, okra, and eggplant.
• Trash. In some areas there is so much trash. Clumps and piles and fields and acres of plastic bags, kitchen garbage, soda bottles, worn out shoes, anything and everything.
• Baobabs. There aren't any in my village, which is entirely built on sand, but there are zillions of them along the road to Thiès. The ones here aren't tall and column-looking, like the ones that come up when you google 'baobabs,' but wider and stumpier, extremely impressive in a gigantic, gnarled, squat sort of way.

Back in Thiès!

I'm back at the Training Center after a couple weeks in Darou, and things are still going well. We'll spend the next day or so doing technical trainings (how to do baseline surveys, common illnesses and how to avoid them, more garden training, and so on) and then tomorrow night we'll go back to the villages for a few more days.

I've posted a few photos of my host family and my trip to the beach with the other trainees in my area, and will link to more photos as they get uploaded ~

Dinner in Darou

Thiéboudienne, the national dish of Senegal, is basically fish, vegetables and tomato sauce cooked with spices and served over rice. We had this for dinner on my first night with my host family, it was made with carrots, cabbage, eggplant, okra, bitter tomatoes, spicy peppers and sweet potatoes, and it was really, really good.

At meal times we all sit on a mat around one bowl, and everyone has their own little section. Like most of my host family, I sit on a little bench and eat with a spoon, but some people sit on the floor and eat with their hand - either with a spoon or with fingers everyone always eats and drinks with their right hand, since the left hand is traditionally the "bathroom hand."

For lunch and dinner on most days we have some sort of fish and vegetables over rice, along with with some sort of sauce and millet porridge for dessert. There's onion sauce, cassava leaf sauce, peanut sauce, bissap leaf sauce, and stuff-I-don't-know-what-it-is sauce, and they're all pretty tasty.

This is not my photo, it's from a German blog that I think is all about fish, but you get the idea. 

A Toubab in Darou Khoudoss

"Toubab" means foreigner; everywhere I go a dozen little voices call out "Bonjour toubab! Toubab! Toubab!" and the brave ones dash up to shake my hand, shriek gleefully, and run away.

I spent the last week living with a host family in my training village, Darou Khoudoss, a little town of 4,000 built entirely on sand about a half hour north of Thiès. I live in a four-bedroom house with my host family; we have a nice little courtyard with a couple mango trees, a few banana trees, an orange tree and a lime tree. There's a faucet, so I don't have to pull water from a well, a squat toilet, a little room for bucket baths, and electricity most of the time. I have my own room with a bed, a white plastic lawn chair, a plastic floor mat, and the obligatory mosquito bed net. All things (including cockroaches) considered it's a pretty nice place, and everyone's been fantastically welcoming, supportive, and encouraging, so I've had a pretty good week.

My neene (host mother) Maladho and her husband Ibrahima have a 10-year-old daughter named Bineta, who adores me, constantly shows me off to her friends, and is trying to teach me to dance. My uncle Lamine (Maladho's younger brother) and his wife Amina have an 18-month-old, also named Amina. Petite Amina was very wary of me for the first couple days, but now follows me around, chattering away, trying to feed me little biscuits, and generally "helping" me with whatever I'm trying to do. My twenty-something cousin (Maladho's sister's son) Alfaa also lives with us - he was particularly excited when he found out I was from California, just like Tupac.

I am called Adama Diallo, after my host mother's mother, and I spend most of my time in Pullo Fuuta language class or sitting in the courtyard, pointing to things and asking what they are called, counting to ten, or playing games with my host sisters, who unfortunately only speak French and Wolof. There are two other Peace Corps Trainees in my town, and for our first Training Directed Activity we started a garden at the local elementary school, digging out and enriching a few beds for vegetables and setting up a little tree pepinière. The kids are really enthusiastic, which is great, because clearing four inches of sand off the entire garden surface area would have been miserable without fifteen eager helpers.

This afternoon I got my second rabies vaccination shot, so my left arm feels like an achy and leaden and I'm going to go hang out in the Disco Hut until dinnertime. Tomorrow I'll post the story of how I awkwarded my way into drinking hot Emergen-C with breakfast all week.

En bimmbi!

"No marsude buy."

"It is going well."

I had a pretty good week in Darou, my training village, and am back at the Thiès Training Center for the next couple days. I'll post highlights sometime tomorrow, hope everyone is well!