Fancy Ladies

There have been several very fancy things in my life this past week. The first one was Tambaween, which is like Halloween but is hosted by the gracious PCVs in the region of Tamba. Being so busy with work stuff lately I wasn't sure that I was going to go to Tambaween this year, but a group of Kédougou volunteers arranged for transport and decided to dress up like princesses, so I got a tailor to help me throw together a last-minute Snow White outfit and packed an overnight bag. 

Our Private Car and Chauffeur. And a street cow.

The drive from Kédougou up to Tamba is usually about four hours, barring flat tires, break-downs, and inclement weather. It can be a grueling ride on public transport if you happen to get squeezed into a sheep-laden mini-bus or have to perch awkwardly on a seat made mostly of metal bars and sharp edges, but we were in luck. PCV Ashleigh made some phone calls and hired us a driver and a mini-van, for the same price as a seat in a seven-seat station wagon at the public garage, and so we all got to travel in style and relative comfort.  

The Region that makes team
costumes together stays together.

The Ladies of Kedougou

As you can see, our costumes were pretty great individually and even better collectively. We had a great time the whole time -- getting ready, going to the party, hanging out, and going back down to Kédougou the next day. 

And, when we got back to the Regional House there was internet. Wireless internet. It's been weeks and weeks and weeks since a particularly fierce lightning storm took out our house router, so we're all pretty thrilled to have wifi again. Fancy!

South by Southeast by Southwest

From St Louis I headed down to the Peer Support Network (PSN) meeting in Thiès, at the Training Center. Peace Corps/Senegal’s PSN is still relatively new, so we went over by-laws, brushed up on listening skills with  mock phone calls, and discussed issues that have come up over the last few months. We also spent sessions discussing how to best handle PCVs who are dealing with domestic violence problems in their communities and host families and how to talking with Volunteers considering early termination (ET). It was a good meeting (even though my stomach was completely off the whole time) and I liked learning more about Peace Corps resources and hearing ideas from other PCVs on how to talk about and cope with stressors and difficult situations that crop up throughout a Volunteer’s service.

Senegal's PSN 2012

After the PSN meeting it was back to Dakar to catch transport back to Kédougou. I stopped by the office, where Hadiel helped me set up Twitter via SMS (it’s more complicated in Senegal than in America), and I visited Rachel, Emily and their adorable new son Xavier.

I ate my fill of buttery pastries from the decadent Grain d’Or bakery, packed up my backpack, and headed back down to Kédougou, where I am now. I’m just sitting around, typing and waiting for the rain to let up so that I can go run errands, get packed up, and turn the internet back on so that I can post this. When it starts raining we run around the house unplugging everything important because when lightning strikes on or near our Regional House compound everything plugged in just gets completely fried. We lost several routers that way last rainy season (I hear that’s down from six the year before) when no one was around to unplug things in time.

24°C = 72.2°F and 40°C = 104°F

In any case, soon I’ll bike over to the market to pick up a seriche gift for my family (a couple kilos of carrots and dry beans), buy my transport ticket to get back to Salémata tomorrow, gaze wistfully at the closed post office (I have a package waiting but the Poste has very limited hours and I won’t be able to get it before I go back to village) and stop by the office supply boutique to buy a notebook.

I’ll be back in Kédougou in a couple weeks, but now that I’ve figured out the whole SMS-tweeting thing you can look forward to those, for as long as my phone credit lasts, anyway. 

On the Laterite Road

So, my toe scrape hewaled up quickly and nicely and this morning Little Jess, Tatiana, Jubal and I all biked in from Salémata and now I'm running around, getting my stuff together to head up North to celebrate Thanksgiving (and a couple birthdays) with some other PCVs.

I hope everyone has a very Happy Thanksgiving! 

Les Dakarois

After the  Health/EE Summit my friend Leah and I went up to Dakar and had a wonderful time visiting Rachel & Emily at their completely lovely home, which, coming from village, pretty much seemed like Hearst Castle to us.

(Rachel is going to make the best baby blankets.)

I took some photos out the window of our sept-place (the hearse-looking station wagons that have seven seats) to capture the stunning scenic beauty of the Dakar freeways. 

It was mostly partly finished houses and rubble piles and the occasional baobab, but also a surprising number of these bizarre billboards encouraging everyone to "Be clever like Leuk!" and get bank loans to buy Christmas/a fridge. Leuk is apparently the father of a family of rabbits with human bodies? 

Cervical Cancer Screening Training continues…

…and it’s going well. More on that later. Right now I’m signing in to Skype so that I can chat with my Gramma.

This Week in Kédougou

I've been in village for the last week or so, and things went well, as usual. My host family, the Souarés, are doing pretty well -- there is quite a bit of conjunctivitis (a.k.a pinkeye) going around, which is gross but under control, and other than that everyone's fine.

Some host family cousins were visiting from Guinea last week, so there were even more people at the house than usual, and the corp harvest is almost ready, most afternoons there were a lot of people just hanging out under the mango tree, making tea and cooking ears of fresh corn on little Hibachi-ish grills.

I helped do paper work at the monthly vaccination and baby-weighing day at the Salémata Health Center, worked on my Pulaar a bit, and worked on formatting my baseline data and planning my Action Plan.

Today I'm going to swing by the post office, try to catch up on e-mail at the cyber cafe, download and start filling out my Volunteer Reporting Form (VRF) and just generally take care of work-type stuff, and then a few of us are going to make lentil soup for dinner at the Regional House. Exciting times here in Kédougou...

Water.

At this very moment PCV Eric and I are stuck at the Bedik Hotel in Kedougou, eating caramel pops and waiting until it lets up enough for us to ride back to the Regional House. We were using the wifi here (I'm uploading photos of camp right now) because our wifi is still down and right when we were about to leave it started pouring. 

There are definitely worse places to wait out a rainstorm. 

Incommunicado!

So, everything's been pretty good lately, except for the recent lack of internet access and our road being flooded on and off for most of the last week or so.

I'm back in town for a few days and am using a little USB InternetEverywhere key to connect to the cell phone network and get online. 

I'm going to slog through my Gmail for awhile and then will get to uploading some photos and posting some updates. 

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. 

Five-Week Challenge and In-Service Training

Right now I'm in Thiès, starting my In-Service Training (IST) on technical aspects of the projects I'll be working on as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). It will involve sessions on how to make nutritious weaning foods, ideas on leading community meetings, gardening with natural pesticides, baseline survey information, and lots of acronyms. It's great to see all the people from my training stage again, and last night we got to go up to Dakar for a dinner at the Country Director's house.  


The dinner party was for everyone who completed the Five Week Challenge by not spending the night at a regional house for the first five weeks of service. It wasn't exactly a fancy dinner party, but after two months out at site we were pretty thrilled with the menu, which included American breakfast cereal and cold (not powdered) milk, scrambled eggs with moringa, corn chips and guacamole, chicken wings, crispy shrimp, watermelon, salad with vinaigrette, mashed potatoes, garlic potatoes, chicken quesadillas, ratatouille, and green beans. Also, yellow cake with chocolate frosting, brownies, and ice cream cones. And Cornonas. With lime wedges. 


It was kind of amazing.   

My First 100 Days

A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast about a lady who wrote a book about Obama's mom, and it occurred to me that I was about to complete my first one hundred days in Senegal. Here are a few of the my early in-country achievements:

My language has advanced to the point where I can say "Hello Mother! I am going to with lunch Taki's friend here. There. There. I am going to lunch. Is not here, me, lunching. Lunch? To eat. With Taki from Etiolo. Friend of Taki house here. Ok? Thank you! Thank you much much much! At afternoon ok!"

All of the little kids in my neighborhood have stopped calling me "Toubab!" and started calling me "Adama!"

I built a little barrier at the base of my hut's back door so that the rat who has been digging a hole in my wall can't scamper in while I'm trying to enjoy my morning coffee.

I have established myself as the Resident Facepainter at the Regional House.

Diabou, the ten-month-old who was initially extremely suspicious about me as a person, has finally warmed up to me and now calls me "Ada!" and waves and gives me brisk little handshakes.

I new have a faint Chacos foot-tan and approximately two dozen new freckles, most of them on my ankles. 

Sick Day.

I was sick yesterday. Also the internet went down, then the power went out, and I spent the entire day at the Regional House, looking green and lying on a mat while my fellow Volunteers brought me juice and ORS and checked on my (mild) fever.

I'm feeling much better today, and will most likely go back to village tomorrow. 

Trouble with the Interwebs

Bad news.

This isn't actually my laptop, but you get the idea. Thanks to Senegal's wildly unreliable power grid and all the recent lightning storms something went horribly wrong while I was charging my computer and now it doesn't so much turn on anymore. *sigh*

Luckily there is a somewhat-clunky-but-totally-functional house computer at the regional house, and other volunteers (especially Sully) have been unnecessarily gracious about letting me monopolize their laptops to upload photos and e-mail and everything.

This trip into town has had pretty sparse internet access for everyone, though. The wifi at the house has been sluggish and choppy (slower then cold molasses, one might say...) and frequently unplugged, due to the thunderstorms and lightning strikes that come with the onset of the rainy season.

So, until I can get a replacement laptop or netbook sent over (in a Diplomatic Pouch, doesn't that sound fancy and important?) I will not be able to Skype/e-mail/etc as much as I would like. O well, I suppose.

Off to Install! Back in Five Weeks.

Tomorrow morning I install at site. I am the only one left from the Kédougou, so in the morning I will get up, load the mid-sized mountain of stuff I've accumulated into a Peace Corps car, and drive out to Salémata to be shown around, introduced to the local authorities, and to officially meet my host family. I'll move in, start unpacking, and get back to working on my Pullo Fuuta language, which feels like it's been getting rusty over the last week or so.

I'm planning on being out at site for about five weeks, but since Salémata is more of a small town than a village in many ways I'll have electricity for a couple hours in the evening on most days, good cell phone coverage and possibly some e-mail access.  I'll also be doing my best to check (and send!) mail. My address again:                      PCV LaRocha LaRiviere
                       Corps de la Paix
                       B.P. 37    Kédougou
                       Senegal - West Africa 
and I'm still looking for postcards and pictures for hut decorating!

I'll be back in Kédougou in July, and will make sure to have some photo albums ready to post as soon as I get back to reliable wifi.

Also! I talked with Emma, my roommate at the Training center during PST, and was happy to hear that she had a good install and has great cell phone coverage, or reseau ("network" in French) as they say here.

Village Weekend

I'm headed out to Darou in a few minutes, and I'll be back to the center (and internet access) on Sunday evening. 

Hope you all have a lovely weekend ~

"No marsude buy."

"It is going well."

I had a pretty good week in Darou, my training village, and am back at the Thiès Training Center for the next couple days. I'll post highlights sometime tomorrow, hope everyone is well!

Lariam Dreams...

I haven't had any Mefloquine-influenced dreams yet, but that was what I wanted to call this blog. I reconsidered after seeing that the domain name was taken, and also figuring that it's better to not tempt fate.

In any case, my life in Senegal (both days of it) have been surprisingly pleasant. There are 48 other trainees in my group, we landed in Dakar yesterday at dawn, wedged ourselves into a couple mini-buses and drove off to start Pre-Service Training. As the sun came up we looked out the windows at the sprawl of Dakar and the multitude of crumbling, half-built apartments on the outskirts of town, and then I half-slept through the rest of the drive. The Peace Corps Training Center in Thiès ("tchess") has everything a trainee could want, except for hot showers, but I'd take semi-reliable wifi over hot showers any day. We dropped our bags, had some food and some rest time, and jumped right into orientation and placement interviews. We also had individual medical sessions, where we were vaccinated for typhoid and meningitis, put on anti-malaria pills (I am now taking Mefloquine, the generic for Lariam), and given first aid kits and a stockpile of handy antibiotics and whatnot. My roommate and I decided to stay up until 21h00 (9:00pm) and we passed the time by writing in our journals and complaining about how exhausted we were and then promptly conked out at 21h03.

Today we had a guided tour of the area immediately surrounding the training compound, listened to another introductory presentation, had our French language assessments, and ate spiced rice, chicken and chopped peppers for lunch, which was delicious. Then we did our prep reading for our culture and etiquette session tomorrow, realized that we'd behaved fairly disgustingly at lunch (drinking with our left hands, sitting like heathens, making inappropriate small talk) and were extra glad that we have this week of heavily supervised compound-based preparation before meeting our first host families next week.

I'm going to try to get a "day-in-the-life" style photo album or video up this weekend, and after next Tuesday I won't have daily internet access for awhile, but I'll update when I can. Jërëjëf, ba beneen!