NEVERMIND...

...about heading back to village today. This morning, a little after 8:00 am, I biked over to the Kédougou garage (a big dirt parking lot hemmed by tin-roofed boutique warehouses and lunch shacks) and bought a ticket for the next car to Salémata. I settled in with my books for what would turn out to be a futile eight-ish hour wait.

During those hours I ate the Spiced Pumpkin Pie Clif Bar that Santa left in my stocking (which was delicious), rode my bike back to the regional house for snacks and to use the latrine, and made a big impression on a gaggle of older Pular men who grew increasingly impressed as they watched me read three books, one after another.  Those books were Daughter of Fortune, which I really liked, Take the Cannoli [Stories from the New World], which was great even though I'd already heard almost all the stories on This American Life, and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, which turned out to be pretty much the perfect thing to read after sitting on a narrow bench in a crowded dusty lot all day long.

Around lunchtime I got up and very sweetly told the guy who's in charge of selling tickets that if the car didn't fill up by 4:00 pm I'd need to leave, because after that it would be possible that I'd be arriving in Salémata after dark and my boss at Corps de la Paix forbids me from travelling at night. (That's a real rule, though Safety & Security does make occasional exceptions) As it turns out, I'm really glad I had that little chat, and that I was very polite.  

Eventually 4:00 pm rolled around, and much to the ornery driver's irritation (other passengers were grumbling about refunds and so far had been refused) I quietly got my money back from the ticket guy and rode off to buy a ticket from the Niokolo Transport office, which has a truck that reliably goes out to Salémata on Monday and Friday mornings at 8:00 am. So, sometimes being a toubab means I have to put up with extra hassles, but sometimes being foreign (and invoking Peace Corps rules) seems to make it easier to duck out of unpleasant situations.  Sticking out like a bespectacled DayGlo thumb is a mixed bag.  

Anyway. The water's on for the moment so I think I'll take an outdoor shower, download some podcasts, heat up some soup, make the most of an extra night at the Regional House. And then tomorrow morning I'll actually head back to village. Inchallah.

Back to Salémata

I'm off to village and am planning to spend New Year's Eve in Ethiolo with my friend and her Bassari host family. The Bassari around here are mostly Catholicized animists, so they care a little more about the Gregorian calendar's new year than most people in our area. 

Also, thanks to GoogleMaps I can show you around Popenguine, Salémata and our little corner of Kédougou. 

Happy New Year! 

Fête Noël

I spent Christmas in Popenguine, a little beach town just south of Dakar, it was wonderful, and here are a few of the highlights. 

MERRY HAPPY!

Chrishaunakwanstice, Fancy Baking Day, Christmas Adam, White Elephant Night...  I love the holidays. And Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwaanza, and Tamharit, New Years' Eve, those are nice, too. 

This year I'll be spending Christmas in  Popenguine with some Peace Corps friends (including Emma and her family visiting from Amerik) and I'm sure that Christmas on the beach will be fantastic, but I know that part of me will be thinking of another West Coast. 

Family time, gingerbread houses and a Cheeseboard cheese platters... winter in California is generally pretty lovely, and last year was no exception. And now I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Merry Happy, Everyone! 

Business Lunch

These photos are from awhile ago, but better late than never. The youth camp in Dindéfélo  that I helped out with in September was partially sponsored by several mining companies, including a Canadian company called Teranga Gold, and one of their representatives came to Kédougou and took some of the PCVs, a couple local officials, and a few interpreters out for a fancy lunch at the Bedik hotel. 

They wanted to hear bout what we do out in our villages, and it was interesting to hear about the (vastly different) lifestyles of other foreigners living and working in Senegal. Also, lunch was really delicious. 

Work Etc

When I moved into a little mud hut fifty miles down a dirt road in the middle of Nowhere, West Africa,  I was expecting many things. Pulling water from wells. Keeping my knees covered. Extreme heat. I wasn't really expecting that there would be so many Excel charts involved. Volunteer Reporting Forms, surveys, spreadsheets, reports, project planning, funding paperwork... sometimes living en brousse is a lot like living in D.C., just without roll-y chairs or electricity during the day.

This is my hut. And also my office. 

This is my floor. And also my desk. 

If you're interested in what I do at the office, you're welcome to take a look at the Action Plan (English), the Plan d'Action (français), and the Salémata Baseline Assessment that I submitted after my observation period and baseline survey and all that.  Between other project opportunities coming up and all the interruptions that we're expecting around election time, it's hard to figure out what will actually happen when,  but it's nice to start with a plan. 

Peanut Butter

People in my region eat a lot of peanut sauce (my family has some sort of peanut sauce with rice for lunch every day) and that means that people make a lot of peanut butter (called tiga diga) which is a key ingredient. To make peanut butter they dry, shell, and roast the peanuts over the fire, and then pound and roll them into a paste. 

My family has a grinder (it looks like something you'd use to make sausage) but it's been broken for awhile now. 

The days of grinding peanuts into butter

Since the grinder's out of commission they take the roasted peanuts, pound them with a pestle in a big wooden mortar, and then they get glass bottle and a very flat rock or a thin slab of smooth tile and roll the pounded nuts into a very smooth butter. 

Mariama Gaulo making tiga diga

It's good, if you like unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter, which I do. My family only uses peanut butter to make sauce, and so when they found out that I like to put it on bread for breakfast (which is fantastic with bananas when I can find them) they balked a little. I figure they feel about my peanut butter sandwiches the same way that I feel about their straight-up mayonnaise sandwiches -- bismillah, to each their own, but I will stick with what I've got, thanks. 

Peanuts

Honestly, before coming to Senegal I had only a vague idea of what peanuts looked like before they were roasted and salted or ground up for sandwiches. This is what peanut plants look like. They're all over the place here, and they tend to be about knee-high, but can get bigger. 

(Thanks, Wikipedia.)

This is a little bunch of raw, just-dug peanuts that one of my host brothers handed me a few weeks ago, like a little bouquet. 

The peanuts are roasted by a few of the small boys, who make a bed of coals from smoldering corn husks and cobs that they've scavenged and then push the raw peanuts into the embers, charring the shells, singeing their fingers, making me nervous. 

To me raw peanuts taste unripe, almost sour, like something you'd feed a hamster, but these peanuts were fresh, a wonderful new kind of taste I had trouble describing -- like, what airplane peanuts are to these peanuts what sushi is to canned tuna. (I like canned tuna, but it's a whole different deal.) 

They tasted warm and fresh and clean, they had a green bright flavor and a rich meaty crunch that made me think of standing in the sunshine, eating a BLT. I was hungry, and they were delicious. 

Chickens

I really like the chickens on my compound. There's one mange-y looking hen who I call The Ugly Chicken but who is the favorite because she lays more eggs than any of the other hens. Some of her little chicks have the same odd bald spots that she does, they're funny-looking. 

These little chickens like to hang out by my hut chirping and scuttling around next to my front step. They're adorable, but surprisingly difficult to catch at just the right moment in a photograph. I spent maybe 15 minutes taking chicken photos, which the neighbors thought was totally amusing and kinda stupid. 

It was worth it, though. Just look at these chickens. Fantastic. 

Sunrise

Last Saturday I got up at dawn to bike from Salémata  into Kédougou, and this was the sunrise that morning. It was cold. I wore my fleece for the first hour, and my ears ached from the chill, but it was still a pretty lovely ride. 

On Beauty

I'm very clean and dress appropriately in village and all that, but I haven't really made many concessions to the Pular ideals of feminine beauty. I don't wear earrings often, and I never wear giant shiny dangling earrings. I don't braid my hair into interesting designs, I don't wear lots of bracelets or colorful skirts or have my gums tattooed black. My host family is really nice about this, and even though they're obviously thrilled when I dress up Senewgalese-style for holidays they've never pushed me to wear dresses or anything like that. 

So, partly because I knew they'd be super into it and partly because I'm totally curious about how it works, I said I wanted to do the henna-type thing that my host sisters like so much. They call it foudin or poudin, depending on who's doing it, and it turns out that the leaves it's made from grow all around my compound. 

First, we picked leaves and spread them out to dry int the sun for an afternoon. 

Once they were dry we pounded them in a big wooden mortal and pestle and then sifted the powder, re-pounding the bigger bits until we had a smooth, green, talcum-like dust.

Then we cut up some limes, which also grow nearby, and mixed in lime juice and water until we had a nice paste.

Then we got out the tape. I did my own taping and my host sisters were very impressed, so then I had to do their taping, too. The little baggies on the left are filled with mangiac, which looks like dirty rock salt and can be used to turn the orange of the foudin into a dark inky black.

After my designs were all taped in place Mariama Kesso helped my smear the paste on.

Then, once I was all covered in leaf paste they put plastic bags over my feet and told me not to walk around for a few hours.

Once the color had set I peeled and scraped the goo and tape off and let my prune-y orange feet dry out before rinsing them off with cool water. 

Everyone was happy. My host sisters were super pleased that I'd let them help me with something, we were all fascinated with how ridiculously orange the foudin looks on my pale, pale skin, and people liked that I was looking a (very) little bit more Senegalese.

Every single time I have gone outside someone stops me to tell me how pretty my feet look. people have been way nicer than usual (they're nice usually, but even nicer now) and a fruit seller lady in the market gave me a lime for free.

On the other hand, I can't shake the constant feeling that I'm wearing little nylon socklets, which is weird.