Tamba-ween!

We all went to Tambacounda for Halloween, and the Tamba PCVs did an excellent job of decoarting and cooking for a crowd - there were impressive decorations and lots of treats, from chili, hummus, and cucumber salads to squash bread, cookies, and gissap. And of course, there were costumes:

After Halloween was over it was time to head back, so everyone going to Kédougou all piled clown-car style into a mini-bus and hit the road. In the Niokolo-Koba National Park we stopped for a minute to stretch our legs (one of the biggest mefloquine side effects is that your limbs fall asleep all the time) and were warned by the police to watch our bags because there monkeys that hang out and snatch things that people unattended. 

Ramadan Food

I know that "Ramadan food" might sound like an oxymoron, but there is a lot of eating involved in celebrating Ramadan. First, there are a lot of people who aren't supposed to fast during the day, such as children, the sick, the elderly, women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or menstruating, non-Muslims, people who are traveling long distances or doing serious manual labor, and so on.

People, like my host family, who observe Ramadan will get up before dawn to have breakfast, and then fast until seven in the evening, when they'll break the fast by eating dates and having tea and snacks while they prepare dinner. During the day they're supposed to be doing a total fast, meaning that they'll give up not just eating and drinking, but looking at, thinking about, and doing and saying sinful things. As my host mother during Pre-Service Training noted, Ramadan is much harder than the Catholic tradition of Lent. (I wasn't really sure how to go about explaining that I don't do Lent either, so I just agreed with her.)

Ramadan started while I was in Dakar, but it's a pretty big city and aside from a few things (cab drivers charging more and being less agreeable, witnessing a late afternoon fistfight in a roundabout, lots of Ramadan-related advertisements for dates and coffee and things) it was easy to forget that Ramadan was happening.

There were more people out praying then usual, especially on Friday, which is traditionally the day that everyone wears nicer clothes, and the men and the older women go to the mosque for afternoon prayers. On the first Friday of Ramadan we were walking over to the French Cultural Center at prayer time, and the streets were echoing with the megaphones broadcasting the call to prayer and impressively crowded with people praying or heading to the mosque to pray. I'm not sure why so many people were praying in the streets - maybe there isn't enough space in the mosques? Maybe people run out of time and it's more convenient?

Photo Credit: travelpod.com

In any case, today I'm going to go over to the Kédougou market to buy snacks, a bunch of dates as a seriche gift for my host family, and some gresil. I'm not sure what gresil is but everyone tells me that if you sprinkle it around the outside of your hut it repels snakes. (Side note: Last month I saw a couple snakes in my hut. They didn't hang around and they weren't black mambas or anything, but I'm going to get the gresil anyway.)

Tomorrow (after I go to the post office and hopefully finally finally the guy who has the keys to the cabinet where they keep all the packages will be there and I will be able to pick up my birthday mail) I'll be heading back to Salémata. 

Arrivederci!

Delorian Dreams

Just for the record, the preventative malaria medication that I'm taking does indeed cause surreal dreams. Not nightmares, just weirdly vivid dreams that I would probably confuse with reality except for that they've all been ridiculous.

All my Lariam dreams so far have taken place entirely at night, even the one that I had during my afternoon nap. For instance, last night in my dream I remembered that I forgot my toothbrush and some notebooks, so I ran home to California get them. I tried to hop a flight back, but San Francisco International Airport was being remodeled to look like a Japanese restaurant from the 70s, so it was really hard to find the right elevator... and so on like that.

Lariam Dreams...

I haven't had any Mefloquine-influenced dreams yet, but that was what I wanted to call this blog. I reconsidered after seeing that the domain name was taken, and also figuring that it's better to not tempt fate.

In any case, my life in Senegal (both days of it) have been surprisingly pleasant. There are 48 other trainees in my group, we landed in Dakar yesterday at dawn, wedged ourselves into a couple mini-buses and drove off to start Pre-Service Training. As the sun came up we looked out the windows at the sprawl of Dakar and the multitude of crumbling, half-built apartments on the outskirts of town, and then I half-slept through the rest of the drive. The Peace Corps Training Center in Thiès ("tchess") has everything a trainee could want, except for hot showers, but I'd take semi-reliable wifi over hot showers any day. We dropped our bags, had some food and some rest time, and jumped right into orientation and placement interviews. We also had individual medical sessions, where we were vaccinated for typhoid and meningitis, put on anti-malaria pills (I am now taking Mefloquine, the generic for Lariam), and given first aid kits and a stockpile of handy antibiotics and whatnot. My roommate and I decided to stay up until 21h00 (9:00pm) and we passed the time by writing in our journals and complaining about how exhausted we were and then promptly conked out at 21h03.

Today we had a guided tour of the area immediately surrounding the training compound, listened to another introductory presentation, had our French language assessments, and ate spiced rice, chicken and chopped peppers for lunch, which was delicious. Then we did our prep reading for our culture and etiquette session tomorrow, realized that we'd behaved fairly disgustingly at lunch (drinking with our left hands, sitting like heathens, making inappropriate small talk) and were extra glad that we have this week of heavily supervised compound-based preparation before meeting our first host families next week.

I'm going to try to get a "day-in-the-life" style photo album or video up this weekend, and after next Tuesday I won't have daily internet access for awhile, but I'll update when I can. Jërëjëf, ba beneen!