Endless Trash

Waste disposal is a huge problem here; trash cans are often non-existent and littering is completely normal. Sewage, garbage, recyclables, food scraps - too often they wind up strewn about on the ground, waiting to be swept up and burned or washed away by rain or just left there forever.

Trash on a beach in St Louis

A typical debris-filled drainage ditch in Dakar

In the U.S. people produce a truly astounding amount of garbage on any given day, but for the most part it's quickly whisked off, to landfills or barges or processing centers or treatment plants, and we don't have to look at it. In Senegal everyone has to look at it. Pretty much all the time.

When I first arrived here the sheer volume of trash was one of the most striking things about the city-scape. When I travel around the country I still get hung up on how much garbage I see by the roadside, on the outskirts of towns, and just generally strewn around on the ground.

One of Dakar's many refuse-strewn lots

Batteries, old clothes, corn cobs, broken shoes, cardboard boxes, empty bottles, old notebooks, used-up pens, animal bones, mango peels, burnt-out light bulbs, candy wrappers, an ocean of plastic bags; anything you could use or grow or buy and then throw away is piled in the great swaths of refuse fanning out around the cities, towns and villages.

A village garbage pile in a field

Litter in a village creek bed

Rubble in a village ravine

People nonchalantly toss wrappers out car windows and drop soda cans right in the gutter without a second glance. For someone coming from a part of the world where littering is not only illegal but considered morally reprehensible, this is profoundly unsettling. It's awkward to watch. When there isn't a wastebasket handy (which is almost always) and no one to come by and empty a wastebasket anyway it's hard to argue with. It's a complicated problem and is difficult to change, but there are many people, PCVs and Senegalese, trying to do just that, with Sanitation Committees and public awareness campaigns and designated trash collection and burning areas.

Trash on a village path

At the end of the day all of this really, really makes a person appreciate the often unrecognized value of well-enforced anti-dumping laws, all that chiding about putting things in the proper bin, and access to an efficient garbage collection service.

No Reseau

I've been having cell phone network connection problems (or no reseau, as they say here) off and on for a few weeks. It's been better the last few days, and now that I'm back in the city of Kédougou my cell phone's working just fine. 

The internet, however, is another story. I'm using a little USB key to connect. I buy credit and log on; today I opted to spend 1000 CFA (about $2 USD) on three hours of internet access, which I can use all at once or in bits over the next three days.  It's really not a bad deal, it's not too slow and I get to use my own computer, which is great. 

Yesterday I biked in from Salémata yesterday -- the rains starting meant that everything was starting to turn green and lovely, but also that the road was muddy, so it was slow and messy going for a few big stretches. It was a good ride, though, my neighbor Jackie took my backpack in on a car and gave me a mocha-flavored Clif Shot packet, which was fantastic. After I got in, washed up, and got over the disappointment of no wifi at the Regional House Tatiana and I made home fries and a big pan of sautéed eggplant for dinner, which was amazing and delicious after all the rice I've been eating in village lately. 

Tomorrow we have a big Malaria Fair and then a big 4th of July celebration, so we're very busy with all the preparations today. I have a bunch of photos I'm really excited about uploading and posting, but that won't happen until things settle down and the real internet comes back, hopefully early next week. 

PeaceCare: Part I

So, the PeaceCare team arrived in Kédougou about a week and a half ago and was made up of doctors, residents, a med student, and a couple communications people. (One of the doctors is from Callahan, CA, near where I went to summer camp, it's where we pick up camp mail and stuff, but it's a town so small that GoogleMaps doesn't quite know where it is.) We started out in Kédougou, where we did a lot of meeting-and-greeting and then the American doctors lead a refresher course for the Senegalese trainers.

The next day the trainers lead a refresher course for health workers. 

Training tools:
Speculums, models, and dictionaries. 

Of course, this is Senegal, so there was a nation-wide gas strike, transport issues, long power outages, equipment problems, disruptions in Dakar related to the upcoming elections, and so on. After much rescheduling, re-rescheduling, and re-re-rescheduling the team made it to Saraya.

Saraya is about as far from Kédougou as Salémata, where I live, but Saraya is a magical Malinke wonderland of paved roads, sidewalks, post offices, pharmacies, fancy boutiques, and vegetable ladies. (There's also a water shortage and since it's becoming a trucking route to/from Bamako there are also more semi trucks and HIV.)

The Saraya Health Center is the regional hub for the Saraya Health District, and we went out in teams to facilitate cervical cancer screening days in villages around Saraya. I went out to Bambadji, and it was really interesting trying to get around a village where pretty much no one speaks Pulaar, just Malinke. A lot of women came to get screened, which was great, and I bought a little bag of Youpis (like Chupa Chups) to give to their little kids while they waited. (It's hard for a kid to wail and eat candy at the same time.) Everyone was really nice (I'm assuming, if they were insulting me they were smiling while they did it) and I had some fun pantomimed conversations about lollipops. 

Back in Saraya, the hospital staff kept us very well fed, and also had an entire big freezer just for juice - red bissap, white baobab, green ditakh, yellow ginger, orange Foster Clark's... I really can't overemphasize how pleased I was with the rainbow of juices. 

Back to Kédougou

Peace Corps Cars

So, I had step throat, which was unpleasant but at least it didn't last very long. It started when my throat was all scratchy on lumo (market) day, but I just walked around the ladies selling bananas and pretty fabric and cheap jewelry and fried bon bon donut-type things, sucking on frozen sachets of bissap (kind of like hibiscus) juice and blaming the dust. By the next morning it was clear that I had strep so I called Peace Corps's Med Office and after a little back and forth and a lot of box-reading (Salémata has no actual pharmacy and apparently I am not allowed to take the AMOX 500 amoxicillin from the Health Center because it's made by some company in India with suspect dosage reliability) I took some of the antibiotics that I had in my med kit and went back to bed. It was weird and sad to realize that the health services that I'm always encouraging people to use are considered unusable by our medical office. It's also reassuring that I have my own med kit and that there's an office full of people in Dakar worried about my antibiotics. 

The AMOX 500 that I wasn't allowed
to take looked like this.

The next day I'd been planning on meeting up with Jubal and Jackie, a couple of my PC neighbors, and biking in to Kédougou (biking is fun, and also there was a nation-wide transport strike) but I really just didn't feel up to it. Luckily Pape (one of the Peace Corps support staff guys) was coming out to my area to do some site set-up prep work in a village called Dakately, and he was nice enough to drive over and pick me and Jubal up. Getting a ride in a Peace Corps car is wonderful, so much smoother and faster and less dusty than public transport or biking, I was really happy about it. 

We rode along to check out Dakately (lovely village, worst road ever) and were impressed by their lovely community gardens, enthusiastic people, fancy new health post buildings, and spectacular cell phone reseau (reception). Really, though, there are sections of the road that seem more like a boulder field crossed with a ravine and one part is very obviously going to just be a river during wet season. But aside from that it's delightful. 

Excuses, Excuses

I haven't posted in awhile -- it's been a busy month, internet's been bad,the power went out, we have out of town guests, there was a transport strike, I've been in village, I got strep throat...

streptococcus bacterium

In any case, I'll be in and out of the Kedougou house all week while helping with the cervical cancer screening training project and (hopefully) will catch up with blogging... and e-mailing... and podcasts... and paperwork... and Skype... and laundry... and everything.

Writing with Adama

I’ve been working in my hut the last few afternoons, doing prep work for a latrine project and typing stuff up. I don’t usually let little kids into my hut, especially if there are a bunch of them, but if they ask nicely and aren’t being too rowdy I’ll let them in, give them a stack of scratch paper and some pens, and watch them “write” up a storm. 

Here are Mankaba, Ablaye, Diame, and Diabou (above) and Diouma, Mankaba, and Daouda "Petit" Ba (below). They’re usually pretty well behaved, and they do a good job of keeping an eye on each other, calling out things like “Hey! Mankaba! Don’t touch Adama’s pillow! She washed it!” and “You can’t have all the paper! Give her one!”

Yesterday Diabou, the youngest of my host sisters, came into my hut for the first time. The mere sight of me made her cry for the first few weeks after I arrived, but I gave her plenty of space and she progressed to just glaring at me, then sitting near –but not next to - me, and then a few months in she started greeting me with little waves. Now she has a lot of affection for me, and expresses it by doing her best to feed me mushy crackers, lightly chewed-on bits of baobab, and handfuls of rice with sauce. Anyway, yesterday she came in and sat down and scribbled, and I was pleased that she was there and it was all very cute.

 And then she peed on my floor.

Joseph the Cat

This is Joseph, the Kédougou Regional House cat. 

He used to be Kate’s cat in village, but he made the move to the big city and (after an epic Dino Party) since then Kate has COSed¹ and gone back America. He’s chatty and slightly nuts and likes to sit at the table like a human person and sometimes comes and sleeps on my feet, which is adorable. 

He is INSANE about hard-boiled eggs. 

I really can’t exaggerate his egg-mania. (I feel like there should be a word for that.) He yowls if he sees them, comes running if he hears shells cracking, and rears up dancing on his hind legs if you’re dawdling while peeling one. Once you drop it (you have to drop it, he will tear into your fingers if they’re between him and an egg) he’ll latch on, growling like a ferocious little wildcat, and wolf it down as fast as his little jaws can demolish it.

¹Close-of-Service, when you do a mid-sized mountain of paperwork and they send you home.

NEVERMIND...

...about heading back to village today. This morning, a little after 8:00 am, I biked over to the Kédougou garage (a big dirt parking lot hemmed by tin-roofed boutique warehouses and lunch shacks) and bought a ticket for the next car to Salémata. I settled in with my books for what would turn out to be a futile eight-ish hour wait.

During those hours I ate the Spiced Pumpkin Pie Clif Bar that Santa left in my stocking (which was delicious), rode my bike back to the regional house for snacks and to use the latrine, and made a big impression on a gaggle of older Pular men who grew increasingly impressed as they watched me read three books, one after another.  Those books were Daughter of Fortune, which I really liked, Take the Cannoli [Stories from the New World], which was great even though I'd already heard almost all the stories on This American Life, and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, which turned out to be pretty much the perfect thing to read after sitting on a narrow bench in a crowded dusty lot all day long.

Around lunchtime I got up and very sweetly told the guy who's in charge of selling tickets that if the car didn't fill up by 4:00 pm I'd need to leave, because after that it would be possible that I'd be arriving in Salémata after dark and my boss at Corps de la Paix forbids me from travelling at night. (That's a real rule, though Safety & Security does make occasional exceptions) As it turns out, I'm really glad I had that little chat, and that I was very polite.  

Eventually 4:00 pm rolled around, and much to the ornery driver's irritation (other passengers were grumbling about refunds and so far had been refused) I quietly got my money back from the ticket guy and rode off to buy a ticket from the Niokolo Transport office, which has a truck that reliably goes out to Salémata on Monday and Friday mornings at 8:00 am. So, sometimes being a toubab means I have to put up with extra hassles, but sometimes being foreign (and invoking Peace Corps rules) seems to make it easier to duck out of unpleasant situations.  Sticking out like a bespectacled DayGlo thumb is a mixed bag.  

Anyway. The water's on for the moment so I think I'll take an outdoor shower, download some podcasts, heat up some soup, make the most of an extra night at the Regional House. And then tomorrow morning I'll actually head back to village. Inchallah.

Revenge of the John Boehner Laterite Road Tan

So, last week when we got on the Niokolo bus from Kédougou to Dakar, a very nice man sitting in the row behind us handed over these disposable surgical masks and told us to put them on. We weren't totally sure we would need them (the bus had windows and everything) but dutifully put them on anyway. (Left to right: me, Leah, Marielle, and New Ian.)

Four hours later when we stopped in Tamba we were very glad we'd done so.

Eight hours after that we were in Dakar, enjoying croissants and fancy coffees and attracting all sorts of sidelong looks from the well-kempt people on their way to work. (Once the Peace Corps office was open for business we went and took showers and felt much more presentable.)