Cups and Kettles

Diabou is now the second-youngest kid on my compound. She’s taciturn, obstinate, and small for her age. She doesn't like new people and refused to acknowledged my existence for my first three months at site. She has a big head and little arms and thick, slightly bowed legs, like a tyrannosaurus. She understands things just fine, but frequently pretends to have not heard when people tell her what to do, and she doesn't speak very often. When she does talk, it’s in this raspy, high-pitched little mouse voice, like a gravel-filled squeaky toy come to life.

Obviously, she is my favorite.

After the initial cold shoulder she warmed to me, and now we're friends. She sits on my feet when I'm trying to read, delivers little piles of mango leaves to my doorstep, brings me her peanuts to shell because she knows I don't like raw peanuts and will not keep a portion for myself.

She calls me “Ada” and she's taken to padding into my hut in the early mornings to perch silently on the corner of my bed and watch me boil water, attempt to sent texts, organize the junk on my table, whatever I happen to be doing. Sometimes after lunch I'll let her come in and play around, like this:

She spent about thirty minutes pouring water back and forth, seeing how high she could lift the pouring cup and swishing things around. She spilled a lot, but nothing disappears faster than water off a cement floor in hot season, so I didn't mind. Also, it was kind of mesmerizing, like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Delivery!

The materials for my latrine arrived! Or, most of them did. Everything except the sections of PVC pipe that will be used to provide pit ventilation was delivered, but the hardware store ran out of PVC pipe. It only took two days for them to get it in stick, but then the delivery truck had some mechanical issues and that took a few more days to fix. Things seem to be back on track now and really, it wouldn't be Senegal if there wasn't at least some sort of minor delay and the driver's a nice guy who gave me a good deal on transport so I can't complain (too much).

The truck drove right up on to our compound and they unloaded the cement into my host mom Mariama's old hut, which luckily is still standing. She had a new square hut built about six months ago and has just been using the old hut for storage, which was extremely serendipitous for me and my five metric tons of latrine-bound cement. People have been digging or hiring diggers to get the latrine pits ready, and once the PVC ventilation pipes arrive (which should happen today, if all goes well) the masons will have everything they need to start installing the latrines themselves.

The truck guys unloaded the iron bars (rebar, you would call it?) on to the ground and my host brother Mamadou and his friends hauled them over to the side of the storage hut. Sajou Ba and Diabou tried to "help" for about ten seconds before they (quite rightly) got scolded away. 

I'm happy to see that things are moving along and even happier to see that people are still motivated and interested in the project. Every time I walk over to the market I see more holes being dug and someone calls me over to ask if the materials are ready yet or tell me that they paid their part of the community contribution and are ready to start. There's still a lot of work to be done but we're off to a good start. 

Falling Down huts

There are a lot of huts in various states of disrepair around. In other parts of the country you'll see mostly apartment buildings, or square brick-and-mortar huts, or round mud huts covered in a protective layer of cement. Most of the huts around me are mud, though, just mud, or maybe mud spackled with a village cement made of sand and cow dung. My little hut is just whitewashed mud, with a thin cement floor added on later in order to comply with basic Peace Corps housing requirements. It works, I enjoy it, I feel very at home in my little mud house. But the mud huts aren't permanent, and when they're no longer tenable they crumble in all sorts of interesting ways. 

This hut on the left isn't really falling apart all that much, but it has a lovely squash vine on it and I like it very much. Some of the huts, especially the bigger ones with ample surface area, have stunningly large squash vines. They remind me of frilly old-timey bathing caps or something. The one on the right has slid down quite a bit over the last few weeks, the roof just sinking lower and lower after each rainstorm.

This is my favorite falling-down hut. It was at its best last month, when the tufts of grass around the wall were still short and neon-bright and the inside space was filled with corn stalks. Now the grass on top is grown long and looks slightly dry as it starts to go to seed. The broken-down huts are ruins, but ruins from a very recent past. They're made of dirt, so watching them slowly tumble back down to the ground while the grass and trees rise up around them seems symmetrical. Back from whence they came and all that. A solid hut can last for many years, a decade or mere. It's interesting, living in a structure that isn't intended or expected to last for ages. 

All the over-lush grass spilling out of the ruins of the hut on the left reminds me of a river, crashing through floodgates, and the one on the right makes me think of a game of pick-up-sticks. They're interesting, the falling-down huts, they're quiet and weathered and caught in the midst of a drastic transition; they're a little like clouds or inkblots. They look like sandcastles, or haunted shacks, or Andy Goldsworthy installation pieces. They're neat. 

Lunch in my Hut

A few weeks ago I was working over at the Health Center, things went long, and I came home late for lunch. This happens occasionally, and when it does whoever cooked lunch (my host moms take turns, work-sharing is one of the big perks of the polygamous lifestyle) saves me a bowl of rice with peanut sauce (nine out of ten times lunch is rice with peanut sauce) and I eat it in my hut.

I always eat with a spoon. Most people on my compound eat with their right hands, but my host father, a few of the older girls, a few of the older boys, and I all eat with spoons. They switch back and forth sometimes but I've been told that "Americans eat with spoons, and you're American. Also you don't know how." Which is true, I've tried in other villages; it's a terrible mess, the sauce is too hot on my fingers and it feels awkward. So, my lunch comes in a bowl, with a spoon for me. Inside is more than enough rice and a smaller bowl of sauce.

    

According to good Senegalese mealtime manners, I portion out some of the rice, so as not to "ruin" it by getting sauce all over it, fluff up the remaining rice, swirl the sauce around, and pour it, all with my right hand only. In Senegal, as in many parts of the world, the left hand is the toilet hand  and is therefore considered unclean. (People here use water instead of toilet paper, kind of like a do-it-yourself-bidet, but that's another post for another time.)



In any case, after I pour the sauce I eat the rice, eating from the part of the bowl that's directly in front of me and only mixing one bite at a time. I add rice and sauce if I finish my first portion and am still hungry. Pretty often I've already been fed at the Health Center, but my host moms are good cooks and it's nice of them to save me food, so I eat enough to be polite, even if I'm not very hungry.

    

After I'm done I put the sauce bowl in the bigger bowl and cover it with the lid and the nice sauce-free extra rice and bring it back to one of the two kitchen huts. Sometimes one of the older kids will eat the leftovers as an afternoon snack, and sometimes they'll feed it to one of the little kids as a pre-dinner snack.



And that's lunch in my hut.

Blue Sky Day

On the afternoon of this summer's solstice I kept getting sidetracked by the striking blueness of the sky and how everything just looked so vivid all of a sudden. It took me a little while to realize that lately most days are hazy, making the sky gray, the light pale, and the shadows faint. Everything seems a little flatter without a distinct shadow.

Here are a couple views of the roadside on a normal early-rainy-season day. The laterite dirt looks a little extra red on the left because I used the Beach Scene Setting on my camera. 

My compound on the solstice. 

Also here are some butterflies
on a twig in my yard. 

New Roof!

My host family, the Souarés, are wonderful. At the beginning of each month I give my host father and mothers a modest cash contribution, to cover the cost of feeding me, sheltering me, just generally taking care of me. At the beginning it was awkwardly difficult to get him to take it, there was a lot of "No, you are part of the family now, we can't accept that!" but I would insist. By now we've fallen into a more comfortable oh-you-don't-have-to-but-thank-you-oh-no-thank-you sort of arrangement, and I've never had any problems with my contribution being squandered, (there are PCVs who have had problems) I'm confident that it goes toward food and basic supplies. 

When I gave my monthly contribution right before I left for vacation it got awkward again, with my host father insisting that I shouldn't be giving money for food that I wasn't going to be around to eat, but I said that it Peace Corps gave it to me to give to them (which is pretty much how it works) and so he considered that and then said "Ok, well, we'll repair your hut's roof while you're gone, so it will be very ready for rainy season." I said that sounded just fine, and when I got back to village I had this lovely, still-golden, water-tight, relatively spider-free thatch roof, and I was totally, totally happy about it. 

Fixed up for move-in day  - May 2011

Older, weathered thatch - Feb 2012

FANCY NEW THATCH! - Apr 2012

Mud Wasps

I don't know what these things are called, but I call them mud wasps for obvious reasons, event though I'm pretty sure they're not actually a kind of wasp. They don't bite or sting, but they are always building these many-chambered larvae-caddies on the whitewashed walls of my mud hut. I don't mind them, but this one decided to set up shop right at the head of my bed, and I didn't like the idea of all that buzzing (they're kind of loud) and egg-laying going on just inches from my face while I slept. So, I got out an old spoon and used the end to pry the little structure away from the wall, and to my surprise it popped right off, fully intact.

"Mud Wasp"

Neat. Kind of gross, but neat. 

I felt a little bad about ruining their little home, but they have plenty of other nests set up under my eaves, and I did sleep much better that night.

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.

Baby Fat Cheeks

Fatou, my host sister Mariama Kesso's baby, is adorable. People are always saying that she's "cheeks only" because her chubby little face is basically 80% cheeks. During the elections when things were really slow in village I spent a lot of time playing with Fatou while Kesso braided hair for women in the neighborhood. Last year Kesso went in to Kedougou for a week-long training on fancy braiding techniques and new styles and designs, so her hair-styling skills are very much in demand. 

Here's Fatou and I posing, Mariama Kesso, in a fancy, heavily embroidered pink outfit, trying to get Fatou to pose, me wearing the blue complet that Kesso gave me, Fatou smiling, and Fatou with her brother Mamadou, refusing to smile.