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. 

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.

The Home Stretch

During my Pre-Service Training (PST) time crawled by so slowly, each day seeming longer and more sweltering than the one before. Twenty-seven months seemed to stretch off into infinity, a boggling amount of time. Now, a year and a half later, my Close-of-Service (COS) conference is coming up on the horizon and it feels like the earth has sped up; the weeks are just flying by. It isn't really a surprise (pretty much everyone I talked to about Peace Corps mentioned this phenomenon) but it's still somehow slightly shocking, like when a good friend's baby is suddenly starting kindergarten.

It make sense that this happens; at first everything, even the most innocuous small-talk, was a struggle and daily life was both exhausting and filled with huge blocks of unoccupied hours. I'm busy now, with work projects and to-do lists and mundane chores and Peace Corps responsibilities and social calls and vacation ideas, and even though I have so many more things I want to do while I'm here it's starting to feel like COS-ing is just around the corner. It's not bad, it's mostly pleasant to be busy, it's just a little strange to be most of the way through a thing that once seemed like it was going to last such a long time. Now that I really feel at home here it's time to start thinking about going home there. Funny how that works. 

Korité

I spent Korité, the feast day celebrating the end of Ramadan, in Salémata with my host family. I woke up, puttered around, got my complet outfit out, and waited for my host brothers to pound the big drum, signaling tat it's time for everyone who's going to the mosque to get a move on.

The drum, warming in the sun

 After mosque I walked around the compound, greeting people, being greeted, and taking photos of everyone's new clothes. My host cousin, Bineta wanted photos of both her new outfits, and we all took turns posing with my host sister's baby, little Fatou.

 Fatou's mother, Mariama Kesso, was busy all morning with food prep and cooking. We had steamed fonio (grown, processed and sold by host moms' women's group), meat, and an amazing vegetable-heavy onion sauce made with the onions, cabbage, carrots, and bitter eggplant that I brought in from town as my contribution to the family celebration.

Dinner prep under the mango tree

 After lunch, dinner prep started and the greeting continued. My host mothers Saliou Njan and Mariama wanted photos of their new outfits, and my neighbors Tatiana and Jess came by to visit and greet everyone, hold the babies and admire all the new outfits.

 

Adama and Fatou

 I also took a few pictures with Diabou, the stubborn, clever girl who was extremely slow to warm to me after I moved in, but who is now a great little friend. She refuses to accept having her hair braided (I can't blame her, it looks like it hurts, especially at first) so they're still shaving her head.

 After all that it was time to go greet people all around the village. I went greeting in a little group with Mariama Kesso, Fatou, and Diouma, the little girl in the blue and gold. Since the bridge to the far side of town was thoroughly washed out we picked out way along the creek bed, looking for a suitably shallow and solid place to cross.

Crossing the gulan (taro root?) field

 After a wonderful dinner of warm bread, spicy beans, flavorful yellow potatoes, and onion-y meat sauce I went to turn in at a reasonable hour and greatly relieved that the Ramadan schedule of dinner at 10:30 or 11 o'clock at night. Before I got to sleep, though, my host sister Kindi and her friend popped in to pose (sprawled out on my bed) for one last round of photos.

All in all it was a lovely holiday and it left me looking forward to the Tabaski celebration we'll have in October. 

The Joys of Transport: Rainy Season

As I may have mentioned before, traveling is by far my least favorite part of living in Senegal. Most of the time Peace Corps Volunteers (like most other people here) get around on what the French would call transport public, which here means transportation that is open to the public (as opposed to private cars and buses) and not "public transport" in the usual sense. The vehicles tend to be dirty, slow, unreliable and rickety, and (with a few exceptional stretches) the roads are often crater-filled, crumbling, or very washboard-esque.

Last month, on our way from my village to Kédougou, the car that my Peace Corps neighbors and I were riding in broke down. It wasn't a total surprise when the clutch fell out of the car floor (the engine sounded like a dying foghorn filled with wrenches) but, as we were nowhere near anywhere, it was pretty inconvenient. Luckily, a guy we know from my village drive by in his truck and wound up taking us (and, somewhat grudgingly, the rest of the passengers) the rest of the way in to town.

Salémata to Kédougou, July 2012 

Several days later, on the way back, we jinxed ourselves by marveling aloud at the lovely weather, the total absence of flooding, the cleanliness of the vehicle, and the competence of the driver. We were thinking that we would get back earlier than expected, have the afternoon to hang out, pull water, sweep out our huts. And then we came upon a big truck, hopelessly mired in a deep and slippery mud puddle, completely blocking the road. Some people opted to wait in the car, some tried to help push and dig and pile rocks under the truck's wheels, and my two PCV neighbors and I decided to walk. We didn't have much baggage and we didn't think that we were too far from Diara Pont, one of their villages. It turned out to be farther than we thought, but again, thanks to a kind man in a sturdy truck, we got a ride in most of the way.

 Kédougou to Salémata,
 July 2012 

And then there's the turnoff in Salémata to continue to the village out toward Oubadji and Kékéressi. There's a small cement bridge there where the road crosses a seasonal stream, or there was until last month. To be fair, the cement part is still there, it's just the road part that's gone missing. 

Kékéressi turnoff on the Salémata Road, July 2012

July 2012 

August 2012

Bigger trucks and less-rugged cars won't be able to go out past Salémata until it's repaired. In the meantime, the mayor and some of the men from around the village stacked rocks and sacks of clay dirt over a shallow area just upstream, so motorbikes and 4-by-4s the ambulance and people on foot can cross without too much difficulty. It's not ideal, but it will have to do for now. 

Of course, despite the terrible roads, the erratic departure times, and the falling-apart cars, I do travel. I go because it's necessary for work, because it's fun and interesting to see new places, and because it's wonderful to visit friends in other cities and villages. I make the most of obligatory trips; while in Dakar, taking care of office-type things, I stayed with my friends Rachel & Emily and their adorable baby boy, and now that I'm in Tamba for a USAID meeting I get to catch up with Emma and Marie, a couple of my favorite PCVs from my training group. After the meeting's over I'll continue to make my way south, on down to Kédougou, eyes on the road and fingers crossed, hoping for the best.  

The Office Moat

This past week I spent a few days at the Thiès Training Center, helping with a few sessions during the latest training groups' In-Service Training (IST).

 

From there I headed over to Dakar, where I'm getting a few things done at the office (meetings, printing, reimbursements for rash-cream, etc) while I'm up here. While it's been lovely to have electricity pretty much all the time, warm showers at the transit house, and plentiful fruit vendors (Plums! Pears! Tangerines! Amazing!) I've also been reminded of why I'd much rather sit out rainy season in a little village than spend it Senegal's capital. 

The Moat: receding, but still very much present.

Dakar doesn't exactly have well-functioning sewers or an effective urban drainage system, so when there are heavy rains gutters overflow, raw sewage burbles up through access holes, and many streets are thoroughly awash with filthy, murky runoff water. Yesterday, after a heavy morning downpour, the water was so deep in parts of the Almadies neighborhood that taxis and other normal-type cars couldn't make it through the reach the main office and the main street by the transit house, where I was, briefly became a frothy river with a surprisingly swift current. Today the water has drained off, for the most part, leaving only the muddled pond that fills the road in front of the office for most of every rainy season here. We were able to get from place to place pretty well, carefully making our way around and over the filthy runoff puddles and streams in an impromptu little game of high-stakes hopscotch. 

Name That Rash!!

As many people know, Peace Corps Volunteers love to describe in unsolicited detail all the positively revolting things that have gone into (and come out of) their stomachs, burrowed into their feet, or raised nasty welts across their torsos. I, alas, am no exception. 

So, a couple months ago I started getting this rash on my right knee. It wasn't particularly terrible-looking, but it was unbearably itchy, oddly hard, and started to flare up angrily in bright red swaths around both knees and across my lower back. I talked to Med, sent in some photos, applied hydrocortizone cream, and things improved. This was right when the nail of my big toe was threatening to become painfully ingrown, but after a few weeks of no closed-toed shoes (which I only wear for jogging) and soaking my foot every day my toe was fine and I went back to my normal routine, toes intact and rash-free. For a few days, anyway. 

To: Med Re: Recurrent Mild Knee-Rash

And then the rash came back with an irritating vengeance. I happened to be on my way up to the Thiès Training Center where two Peace Corps Medical Officers were kind enough to spend twenty minutes looking at my knees, running their fingers over the rashy parts, and deducing the cause of my discomfort. They immediately decided it was contact allergy, and guessed that it was caused by some sort of fabric that, combined with rainy season, my skin finds intolerable. We talked about my clothes, they asked about this and that and if I have any knee-length synthetic pants, maybe ones with seams around my knee and across my back. 

And then I realized - my running pants. My stretchy, frayed-at-the-synthetic-seams, capri-style running pants. The rash went away when I stopped jogging because of my toe. I am allergic to my pants. Problem solved. They gave me some strong anti-itch cream and, only a few days later, the rash has almost entirely disappeared. 

On a related note, while looking through my photos to find this picture I realized that I have an entire album's-worth of photos of rashes, stings, blisters, infections, and swollen lumps, taken by myself and  my fellow Kédougou PCVs and e-mailed to Med in the hopes that they can diagnose us from afar and spare us the long slog up to the Med Office in Dakar. Of course, I thought "Wouldn't it be funny if we all sent these photos in to the PC/Senegal Volunteer Newsletter? They could have a little matching-game-thing in the next issue, where people guess who was afflicted by what. Name That Rash!! Hilarious!" 

My suggestion went over pretty well with the Newsletter editorial staff; it might actually happen.