Demystification & Installation

During Pre-Service Training (PST) the Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) get to go on a Volunteer Visit (VV) to see the villages where they'll be living and serving for two years. Every region (and even every site) is very different, and it's really good to get a basic idea of what it's like there. Is there a water spigot or will you be hauling water from a well across town? Are there mango trees or just thorn bushes? Does the village have a baker and boutiques or nothing at all in the way of places to buy snacks? The PCT gets to sort of shadow a current Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) for a few days, and hopefully that helps demystify the whole life-in-village thing a little bit.

I took PCT Katie O. out to her village, and it went really, really well. She'll be the first volunteer ever to serve in her village, and people seemed genuinely excited and really, really, really nice. They fed us wonderful food, (fonio! chicken and sauce!) showed us around town, and were just generally really hospitable. There's a baker, some boutiques, a bean sandwich lady, lovely community gardens, a couple good hand-pump forages for water, and her hut and latrine were mostly finished.

Katie (the PCT) and myself

Getting ready to bike the rest of the way in 

Yesterday, accompanied by Mamadou Diaw (basically the boss for Health PCVs in Senegal), we went back to install Katie in her village. The traditional village chief gave a welcome speech; the head nurse from the Health Post gave a welcome speech; Mamadou gave a speech about Peace Corps, likening a PCV to a knife, which cannot cut by itself, urging the community to be patient with language, and thanking them for their overwhelming hospitality. Her hut and latrine were all ready to go, her family had built her a little fenced in garden, and the entire community had prepared a huge arrival party in her honor. Dioula ("joo-la"), her sister and village namesake, had had matching complet outfits made, they gave her earrings and a necklace, the school children had prepared a song-and-dance in her honor, and the griot musicians and the older women all sang and danced -- it was an amazing party, above and beyond what most villages put together, and it was completely heartwarming. 

Katie (the PCV!) and her tokora

I tried to stay in the background, taking photos and greeting as many people as possible, playing the photographer and mostly taking pictures with her camera. After the first round of singing and dancing there was a parade through the village, which was funny because there was next to no one to to see the parade, since everyone was in the parade, but it was fun. 

Parade through the village of Dakateli

After all that the party continued, but they pulled us aside to feed us lunch. We were presented with the biggest bowl of rice I've ever seen, and a small vat of rich, wonderful sauce with two entire chickens chopped up in it. It was all very reassuring -- when a community invests this much time, effort, energy in making the PCV feel welcome, included, and well cared for it bodes well for everyone. Not that it isn't exhausting and overwhelming or that village life won't be incredibly challenging in many ways, but it's a very good start.

Dancing and singing for the new arrival

Salémata/Ethiolo Bike Ride

Ethiolo, where my wonderful neighbor Tatiana lives, is about 5 or 7 kilometers away from Salémata. 

I don’t know how far it is exactly, but it doesn’t take very long to bike, even including the two hills that are too steep to bike up.

The Well Near My Hut: A Series

November 2011

August 2011

May 2011

Trees and Plants and Whatnot

There's a pomme cannelle tree growing just behind my hut. I had no idea what it was when I moved in, it just looked like a sun-bleached twig stuck in the ground. When it started sprouting glossy dark green leaves in rainy season I was pleased, and then confused when it started growing weird dragon-egg looking pine cone things. My host family said that is was a fruit, and that it's delicious. I learned that it's called sweetsop or sugar-apple in English, and am looking forward to trying it when it gets ripe enough to eat.

Pomme cannelle/sweetsop

I also have a papaya tree just behind my hut, and am looking forward to all these big green unripe papayas turning sweet and yellow and edible.

Baobabs are also fruiting again. Before the green fuzzy fruit pods appear there are huge white hibiscus-ish flowers dangling down on those long stems, and it's beautiful like Christmastime. One of my host moms collects the fruit once it's dried out, breaks the pods open, and grinds and sifts the fruit part into a sweet powder that can be mixed with water to make a delicious, nectar-y drink.

And here's a cornfield near my compound, the harvest season is underway, but I accidentally left my hard  drive with corn harvesting and shucking photos in Kédougou, so those won't be up for another week or so.

Back to Salémata

Tomorrow morning I'll be headed back to village to help wrap up cervical cancer screening training stuff and to finish final drafts of my Action Plan and Baseline Report.

I'll be back in a few weeks, inchallah!

Pens & Paper

(I love pens almost as much as I love crayons.)

I got some really lovely paper for my birthday and was able to send out some nice thank-yous. I really like that the red-orange paper is exactly the color of the laterite roads we have out here.

Fun Fact: Rainy season humidity will seal all of your
lick-and-seal style envelopes.

Drawing notebooks from an afternoon
 of neighborhood Arts & Crafts. (I am Adama.)

Language Seminar

I just got back into Kédougou from a language seminar in Bandafassi, a village about 60 km from where I live in Salémata. Houssey, my Peace Corps Pulaar teacher, came down from Thiès, the other people from my training group came in from their villages, and we all had three days of semi-formal language class. PCV Patrick hosted us, (and he really was a very, very gracious host) we went on a nice hike up to a Bedik village in the hills above Bandafassi and his host sister cooked some fantastic lunches.

Just to give you an idea of where all things are happening, Salémata is the "A" on this map, and Bandafassi is the "B," the city of Kédougou is "C," and Dakar (where all the political protests and everything were happening last week) is "D."

In case you were wondering, it takes about two days to get from Salémata to Dakar, so I'm a long ways off from any of the protests, and even when things get hectic in Dakar nothing really happens in the village, which is nice.

PHOTOS: Bandafassi Language Seminar 

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.