Journaling

I like to journal. Or, rather, I like to glue paper-type things into the small stack of booklets that have collectively become my journal. Mostly transport stubs and wrappers and bits of packaging. Sometimes things that people give me - drawings of the world, for example, or photos, or post-it notes. 

My first journal in Senegal was a gift from a good friend. It was a nice size, had lined off-white pages and a very world-traveler-looking leather cover thing, which I like. I labeled it "Senegal"and when I'd filled it up completely with receipts, swatches of snack food packaging and my semi-legible scrawl I cut a little paper-bound Moleskine notebook that my mom gave me down to fit in the cover thing, printed "Senegal con't" on the cover and kept going. I'm working on the last few pages of "Senegal con't con't" now and have another one lined up and ready to go. 

Most of what I write is boring, little more then what I did that day and what I plan to do in the near future. Sometimes there are vicious little diatribes about whatever has recently struck me as awful and there's a fair amount of cataloging of things that remind me of other things, which most things do. Short sentences are favored. Explanations and follow-able segues are not. I don't like to re-read it, unless I'm trying to go back to find the date for a specific event, because it has a tendency to read like the diary of a neurotic middle-schooler.

I wrote a lot more at the beginning of my service than I do now. I think that was mostly because everything was new and remarkable -- all the new places, all the new people, all that Mephaquin. Now, with only a couple of months left, most of the things that were once so novel have become routine. Instead of being shocked by the new I find myself jarred by the impending loss of the familiar - soon I will buy my last transport pass, be handed my last little drawing, make my last cup of tea in my hut, take my last Malarone, apply my last bit of antifungal cream. Funny, how you can be nostalgic for the present.

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.

Les Parfums de Sénégal

Not long after I came to Senegal I was in a car with a few other PCVs, and we got to talking about what scents a Senegal-themed scented candle set would include. (I think it was April's idea.) In any case, I still think about that when I catch whiffs of  Senegal-specific odors. As best I can recall, here are some of the odors we identified as being the iconic smells of PCV life in Senegal: 

• Café Touba: at pretty much every bean sandwich lady's stand in the whole country you can buy hot, sugary little cups of Café Touba to go with your breakfast. (Many PCVs love it; I am not so much a fan.) It smells over-boiled and slightly peppery, like cloves and leaves and instant coffee.
• Fish Market: in most markets there's a section devoted to selling all kinds of fish - big, small, fresh, dried, semi-spoiled - and it always reeks of fish guts turning rancid under the most powerful heat lamp in the world. 
• Trash Fire: one of the least-lovely smells to wake up to. 
• Tea Time: the singed-sugar smell that comes from cooking up the scalding, hyper-sweet ataaya tea that many Senegalese like to drink int eh afternoons (and mornings... and evenings...) 
• Dust: it's subtle, just a light, hot, dry smell, but it's also everywhere, especially on transport. It cakes up on clothes and in sinuses and gets way down into the seams and cracks of everything, from books to keyboards to skin and hair. 
• Mango: fresh, sweet, sun-warmed and lovely, mangoes right from the tree are one of the few silver linings to hot season. 

Other suggestions were Overpowering Body Odor (particularly while crammed in a crowded bus or a station wagon with nine other people), Sewage Puddles (a rainy season fixture in all cities), and Adji (the bullion packets that are the base flavoring for nearly all Senegalese dishes we eat on a regular basis).

Maybe the candle set would look like this. 

Sadly, for me (and the other people in the room with me right now) Trash Fire would have to be the smell that I most strongly associate with living here. While away on vacation I stepped out of the car after being picked up from the airport and the first things I thought was "Oh wow, it smells so nice here." I've heard that repeated - unprompted and almost verbatim - from several other volunteers.

There are many other smells that spring to mind when I think of my life here in Senegal, many of them quite pleasant - babies all freshly washed and lathered in warm, nutty-smelling shea butter; sweet, floral "chourie" incense paste; the fresh-baked bread smell of tapalpa village baguettes. But really, Trash Fire tends to overwhelm them all. 

Birthdayapalooza

On August 1st, 2011 I turned 28, Marielle turned 25, Switzerland turned 720, and a good time was had by all. On July 31st, after the SeneGAD meeting, a bunch of us came in to Dakar and got all cleaned up.

I had a little beer to celebrate...

We all went out for fancy pizza and it was delicious. Ben and I shared one that was half "H&M" (merguez sausage and garlic) and half "Hammam" (caramelized onion and goat cheese, no idea how they chose these names), Nic and Ivy split something similar, Sarah ordered a calzone, and Nathaniel opted to slaughter his own pizza.

Afterwards everyone went out for beers, and Marielle came thisclose to pulling off the opening-a-beer-with-another-beer trick. 

Sharing a birthday (and a delicious birthday cake) with Marielle was great because she is awesome, as you can clearly see. 

On August 1st, our actual birthday, we all went out to Ngor Island. It's a tiny island along the northern part of Dakar, and for about a dollar you can take a 3-minute ride out to it in a pirogue, which is exactly what we all did. 

Even though it was overcast, it was warm and the waves we beautiful. Emma enjoyed the view of the coastline, and Kayla, Ivy and I had a nice time strolling around the cliffs. 

It was a good day for fancy fancy coffees. Ben treated Emma and I to cappuccinos and tiramisu, and then a little while later we treated ourselves to beachside Nescafes.

It rained for a little while, but it was hot, so we swam anyway, doing our best to avoid all the plastic bags and bits if junk floating around in the surf. We looked at a bunch of sea urchins and little fish, and after successfully clambering around on all sorts of slippery rocks, I stubbed my toe walking out of the water and wound up making a little bandage out of a piece of my skirt-towel-fabric. Then it was naptime, and then we hopped in a boat back to the mainland.

After showers at the regional house it was time for N'ice Cream, more espresso, and then out for Thai food at the Jardin Thaïlandais, and it was fantastic. Really just amazing. (When we sat down I was saying they should tell the waiters it's my birthday and maybe they would give us a free dessert, and then was so wrapped up in how lovely the food was that I actually completely forgot about it and so was genuinely surprised when there was a candle and singing with my caramelized bananas.)

AND THEN the next day Marielle and I went into town with Kayla and her visiting friends, to check out a giant fabric market, eat more ice cream (I was not such an ice cream person in the US, but lately my love for cold things knows no bounds), and go on the trampolines. 

Kayla and her friend Sabrina decided to reenact the Scar/Mufasa (Mufasa!!) fight scene from The Lion King. 

Obviously, it was a pretty epic few days, and I'm extremely lucky to have such wonderful, fun, photogenic people in my life. And not just in Senegal - when we stopped for internet and I read all the birthday messages I may or may not have teared up a little bit right there in the CyberCafe. Many, many thanks to everyone for being so great ~ 

All About IST

If you're curious about the Kédougou Region, where I live, or the Pulaar language, which I'm still learning, do check out these links on the Peace Corps/Senegal website, they do a good job of giving you an idea of what I'm doing work-wise. 


As you prob'ly know, I am a Preventative Health Volunteer, and I'm currently at In-Service Training (IST) at the Center in Thiès. The Health Volunteers have training with the Environmental Education Volunteers, so there are about 40 of us total. It's the same group that did Pre-Service Training together, so it's been really fun to see my stage-mates again. 


Fun fact about the Thiès Training Center: our dorm building has two English toilets (meaning American-style, where you sit instead of a squat toilet) stopped flushing last week, so we've been flushing manually, filling up mini trash cans and pouring the water in the bowl.   

On the whole it's been nice to be at the center, though. There's electricity and wifi most of the time, salad with dinner every night, and showers instead of bucket baths. Fancy. 

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.