Another Map Mural

Ever since I painted a couple map murals at the primary school near my host family's compound the director of the local Cas de Tout-Petits (pre-school) has made a point of coming over whenever he spots me in the market and telling me how nice one of those murals would look at his school. For months I've been telling him that one of these days I'd come paint a map there, and last week I finally made good on that promise.

Scary and confusingly-out-of-context fairytale figures aside, Cas de Tout-Petits (which translates literally to "the case of the all-smalls") is a pretty decent place. There's a big yard with some trees, a classroom with some little desks, and various charities and NGOs have donated chalk and little black boards and a few books and things like that.

I think the wolf on the upper left is from some sort of folktale but I really have no idea what is with the earless, smiling elephant-man. I decided to put the map where the elephant-man used to be. I really do wonder if any of the kids will miss him or if they found him to be as off-putting as I did.

I painted most of the map myself, which was pleasant. My little host brother Mamadou stopped by to take some photos and ask various questions about maps and America and whatnot, and while we chatted I painted a blue background for the map. And then started to fill in the regions with different sherbet-y shades of yellow, green, pink, and orange. And then realized that on my map Senegal looked like an island nation, which is not exactly accurate.

The inadvertent island of Senegal. 

Then Jubal, one of my PCV neighbors, biked over to hang out and help me finish up the painting. It's more fun to paint with someone, and Jubal knows his way around a paintbrush, too. It didn't take long to wrap things up, and by the end of the day Senegal was no longer an island, I was having sherbet cravings, and the director was super pleased with us.

World Map Project

My neighbors in Salémata and I have been working on painting World Map Murals in each of our villages and last month it was Salémata's turn. After chatting with the Primary School Director and choosing a place to put the mural I spent an entire day setting things up and gridding the map outline. (Gridding is where you have an image drawn on a small grid and then you draw a big grid and copy the image over square by square.) I had a very handy grid plan printed out but it still took hours and hours to lay out all the lines and copy everything over.

The next day Jubal and Jackie came to help with the painting part, which was great. I took pictures every few minutes to show how the mural progressed from start to finish. Here's a link to the album; if you play it as a slideshow on the fastest setting it has a nice flipbook-ish feel to it, I'm really happy about that.

Salemata World Map Montage 2012

Thanks to the wonderful people who send us care packages we had some decent paintbrushes, but prying the paint cans open took quite a bit of effort (no screwdrivers on hand, unfortunately) and the mixing of some of the colors was challenging. The blues and reds came out bright and vivid, but the oranges and purples came out a little flat and drab. (Sorry, Canada.)

The painting was definitely more fun than the gridding, both because it was colorful and also because I had good company all day long. We even had music (faintly) playing in the background, thanks to my ipod touch.

  

We also had an audience, which got to be somewhat annoying at times. I made a rule that only a few kids could come in at a time and they had to leave if they touched wet paint, were rude to each other, or made too much noise. For the most part the kids were endearingly enthusiastic and pretty respectful about the precarious jars of paint, smelly old wine bottles filled with paint thinner, and the grid papers and country name lists scattered about. The teachers and Director were very impressed (it was funny how surprised they were with how well it turned out) and pleased with the mural; they've already asked if we can come back and paint a map of Senegal in one of the other classrooms.

It was great to work on a team project, and also really nice to do something tangible, straightforward and finite. This month I'm planning on going back in to draw outlines around countries, double-check the border we made between Sudan and South Sudan, and write "La Carte du Monde" along the bottom with our fancy golden paint pen, and then it will really be finished.

(I'm just awkwardly pretending to have a chair here.)

St Louis

After my Mid-Service stuff I had a couple free days so I headed up to St Louis for JazzFest, an annual music festival of jazz musicians from around the world. Some of the other Kédougou Volunteers and I got a room at a hostel on the island, right next to the Mairie on this map. (The mainland is on the right and that strip of land on the left is actually a peninsula that goes up and connects to Mauritania.) As an added bonus, Youssou N'Dour (the incredibly, unbelievable popular Senegalese musician-turned-Minister-of-Culture) paid for everyone’s entry into all of the shows, so it wound up being a bit like an African version of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

(Map courtesy of anonali.com)

As the name suggests, St Louis was a major hub of activity during French colonial times. It’s much more developed than Kédougou, and for those of us coming up from the South, everything felt very fancy and tourist-y. The city has a bustling, run-down but somehow distinctly European air about it, maybe kind of like a seldom-used guesthouse in a forgotten corner of Sicily.

In any case, we spent a couple days listening to a lot of really good (and some mediocre/really not very good at all) music, eating real cheese and other delicious foods, and relishing the fact that our hostel was right on the island, so we never had to walk more than a few blocks to get anywhere except the beach (which was littered with dead fish, a dead porpoise, two dolphin carcasses, and the bodies of several enormous rams, so no big loss there). There was a big Peace Corps turnout, so everywhere we went we ran into friends from other regions and stages (training groups), and it was really nice to see people and catch up.In the evenings there were band playing on a large boat parked (docked? moored?) just down the way, so we got to go listen to music and sip cool drinks on the upper decks while the sun went down. It was not a bad deal. 

So, there was all these lovely sunsets and scenery and music and whatnot and the only pictures I took were of us eating big wedges of brie, the wall of a broken-down building, and a few of my stage-mates and I in front of said wall, inexplicably and unintentionally dressed like two very match-y middle-aged couples on vacation. Good times!