Hut Sweet Hut

Buckets are such a big part of my life here. I've really come to appreciate a good, sturdy bucket, especially one with a nice lid. Here's my bath bucket (with fancy sieve/soap caddy), my food storage bucket, and my gaz tank. 

My nice burner broke the other day and this little one (the only kind available in village) that doesn't have the nice pot-guard that my other had. I use my gaz to heat up water for coffee and instant oatmeal most mornings, and during cold season I'll heat up a little pot of water to add to my bathing bucket to take the edge off the chill of cold water. Some volunteers just leave their bucket out in the sun all afternoon, but because of the shady mango tree (which is great and I love) next to my hut I've had very limited success with that during the cold season. Right now it's quite hot, and I'll just leave my water buckets (which are exactly the same as my food storage and dish storage buckets) in the coolest corner of my hut and hope they don't get too warm.

This is my wooden table. It pretty much looks like this on any given morning, with my silver water filter, various mugs and water bottles, sunblock and toothpaste, and random this and that. It's a really nice table, I like it a lot. The metal water filter is nice, too, it keeps water much cooler than the dark plastic filters that some of the volunteers have.

The table has handy shelf for stacking all sorts of things, and there's a bamboo (or whatever it is, everyone in village calls it bamboo) rod for hanging clothes to dry or keeping stuff away from the rats and bugs on the ground level.

I store clothes and things in my trunks, and then I store important things in my little suitcase because it zips up, which keeps dust and critters out. The oatmeal cans also help with the bug situation, it's easy to sweep under the trunks when they're propped up, and that keeps ants from building trails along the fine cracks in the cement, and keeps the spider population in check, too.

Water!

For drinking, cooking, and bathing I use about one and a half 15-liter buckets of water a day. There are wells just next to my compound, but they're open and not very deep, so stuff can fall in and they could be easily contaminated by runoff or seepage, so I go a little further, to the forage hand-pump at the elementary school across the way. I have buckets with lids, so I can strap them on the back of my bike, but sometimes I just carry them on my head like most of the other women. It's about a three minute bike ride or a five-to-ten minute walk, and I only do it once or twice a day, which really isn't so bad. On days when I do laundry in village I just bring my clothes over and wash them in tubs under the mango tree where pretty much everyone else in my neighborhood does their washing; carrying the clothes over to the water is a lot easier than carrying all that water back to my hut would be. 

This blue baignoire tub holds about 20 liters, and most women carry them on their heads. They wrap up a scarf or small towel or something to make a little trivet-looking round of fabric to provide some padding, and people help each other lift the heavier tubs up onto their heads. Men don't fetch water as often as women do, and they're more likely to use bikes when they do. Most people don't use lidded buckets, but I see a lot of men and boys using empty 20 liter fuel or oil containers, like the yellow one in the background here. 

The "forage" hand-pump at Salemata's Elementary School

Return of The John Boehner Laterite Road Tan

Salémata is about 80 kilometers down a red dirt road from Kédougou; in a Peace Corps Land Rover it takes about two hours, but in a mini-bus or a truck it can take a lot longer than that. Ever since rainy season started up in earnest it's been even more of a trek than usual, and on bad days it's completely flooded in several places. My neighbor Sully and I waited until it had been sunny long enough for things to dry out a bit, and decided to head in to town.   As you can see, even with the recent rains tamping things down it's a pretty dusty ride... 

The best part (other than the icy icy cold Coke that I bought as soon as we arrived) was that when we got back to the Kédougou Regional House the water was on (it's not on a lot of the time) so that I got to take a shower not out of a bucket, which was lovely. 

The John Boehner Laterite Road Tan

There are many laterite roads in my region, and when you ride in a Niokolo safari car (or truck or bike or cart) you get coated in a thick layer of fine orange dust, which PCV Eric likes to call a John Boehner Laterite Road Tan. 

If it's really hot out (and it usually is) the best way to wash off a serious road tan is by taking a baignoire ("ban-wahr"), filling it with cold water (ice cubes optional) and sitting in it. 

Some of the Kédougou Volunteers did this while my neighbor Ian H. and I were hanging out at the Regional House, listening to ourselves talk about malaria on the Peace Corps Kédougou local radio show.

I ♥ Eric.

Baignoire Party with New Ian H., Ben G., and Eric

Me and Old Ian H. enjoying the sound of our own voices.

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!