Panoramapalooza!

Ah, spring, that magical time in August when epic rain storms start up and seemingly overnight everything has turned a ridiculously vivid green. Like Crayola green crayons and neon highlighters put together. 

May 2011

August 2011

The field near my house, next to the elementary school. 

My compound is behind the trees on the left.

The cornfield behind my host family's compound. 

Afternoon Coloring Time

So, the kids who live on my compound love to write and color, but there's an almost complete lack of art supplies in Salémata, so they don't get the chance to draw very often. There aren't any art activities for the kids at the primary school, and many kids don't make it to middle school, when art classes start being offered. The Senegalese school system's curriculum is in the process of being reformed and I've been told that the administration is trying to include more opportunities for creativity and critical thinking, but it still tends to be pretty rigid, relying heavily on rote memorization in French, which, since people speak local languages in the home, is everyone's second language.   

In any case, a wonderful friend of mine from Camp Unalayee sent me a fantastic box of art supplies, and so one afternoon my host brother Mamadou (below, on the right) helped me wrangle the rest of my host siblings and some of the neighborhood kids while we made little drawing notebooks and drew and colored.

Kids were really into it, but it took a little while for most of them to think of things to draw. Several kids kept checking to make sure that they were really allowed to draw anything, and everyone thought it was really funny that no matter what they drew I said it was really nice and that they'd done a good job.

Mamadou is a really responsible kid and was doing a good job of helping the littler kids, making sure they didn't eat the crayons or lose the marker caps or draw on each other. After our informal art session I gave him a stack of paper and some of the markers and crayons and made him officially responsible for coloring with the younger kids.

Fatoumata Kindi was in charge of the big kids.

Littler kids drawing under the mango tree.

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. 

Packages!

My birthday was over a month ago, but with all the power outs, flooded roads, and finicky cell phone reseau it's been hard to get online lately, so I haven't had a chance to gush about all the great mail I got last month.

I got an amazing package from Switzerland!

The girls I used to nanny for made me some beautiful drawings and a really wonderful calendar -- it was a lovely gift, and it's going to be great to have all these photos up in my hut:

I got some pretty sweet cards and letters. 

My American family sent me this fantastic package...

... and this lovely new sunhat!

I was particularly excited about the hat, the fruit leathers, and the gel pen that was filled with glue. A glue pen! So good! It works really well, too.

This package from Troll wasn't technically birthday related,
but it was really, really awesome. 

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. 

Back to Village

I'm about to swing by the post office, and then I'm going to do my best to hop on the Niokolo bus (more of a giant van, really) back out to Salémata.

Happy Ramadan! I have a house meeting next weekend, so I'll be back in about a week! 

Ramadan Food

I know that "Ramadan food" might sound like an oxymoron, but there is a lot of eating involved in celebrating Ramadan. First, there are a lot of people who aren't supposed to fast during the day, such as children, the sick, the elderly, women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or menstruating, non-Muslims, people who are traveling long distances or doing serious manual labor, and so on.

People, like my host family, who observe Ramadan will get up before dawn to have breakfast, and then fast until seven in the evening, when they'll break the fast by eating dates and having tea and snacks while they prepare dinner. During the day they're supposed to be doing a total fast, meaning that they'll give up not just eating and drinking, but looking at, thinking about, and doing and saying sinful things. As my host mother during Pre-Service Training noted, Ramadan is much harder than the Catholic tradition of Lent. (I wasn't really sure how to go about explaining that I don't do Lent either, so I just agreed with her.)

Ramadan started while I was in Dakar, but it's a pretty big city and aside from a few things (cab drivers charging more and being less agreeable, witnessing a late afternoon fistfight in a roundabout, lots of Ramadan-related advertisements for dates and coffee and things) it was easy to forget that Ramadan was happening.

There were more people out praying then usual, especially on Friday, which is traditionally the day that everyone wears nicer clothes, and the men and the older women go to the mosque for afternoon prayers. On the first Friday of Ramadan we were walking over to the French Cultural Center at prayer time, and the streets were echoing with the megaphones broadcasting the call to prayer and impressively crowded with people praying or heading to the mosque to pray. I'm not sure why so many people were praying in the streets - maybe there isn't enough space in the mosques? Maybe people run out of time and it's more convenient?

Photo Credit: travelpod.com

In any case, today I'm going to go over to the Kédougou market to buy snacks, a bunch of dates as a seriche gift for my host family, and some gresil. I'm not sure what gresil is but everyone tells me that if you sprinkle it around the outside of your hut it repels snakes. (Side note: Last month I saw a couple snakes in my hut. They didn't hang around and they weren't black mambas or anything, but I'm going to get the gresil anyway.)

Tomorrow (after I go to the post office and hopefully finally finally the guy who has the keys to the cabinet where they keep all the packages will be there and I will be able to pick up my birthday mail) I'll be heading back to Salémata. 

Arrivederci!