Off to Darou Khoudoss

I'm off to my village for language training, so I won't be posting (or e-mailing or Facebooking) for a couple weeks, but when I get back I'll post photos of my training village and host family. (Just to give you a sense of where I am, Thiès is about an hour and a half east of Dakar, and Darou is about 30 minutes northeast of Thiès.)

Take care 'til then! 

Dinner in Darou

Thiéboudienne, the national dish of Senegal, is basically fish, vegetables and tomato sauce cooked with spices and served over rice. We had this for dinner on my first night with my host family, it was made with carrots, cabbage, eggplant, okra, bitter tomatoes, spicy peppers and sweet potatoes, and it was really, really good.

At meal times we all sit on a mat around one bowl, and everyone has their own little section. Like most of my host family, I sit on a little bench and eat with a spoon, but some people sit on the floor and eat with their hand - either with a spoon or with fingers everyone always eats and drinks with their right hand, since the left hand is traditionally the "bathroom hand."

For lunch and dinner on most days we have some sort of fish and vegetables over rice, along with with some sort of sauce and millet porridge for dessert. There's onion sauce, cassava leaf sauce, peanut sauce, bissap leaf sauce, and stuff-I-don't-know-what-it-is sauce, and they're all pretty tasty.

This is not my photo, it's from a German blog that I think is all about fish, but you get the idea. 

Delorian Dreams

Just for the record, the preventative malaria medication that I'm taking does indeed cause surreal dreams. Not nightmares, just weirdly vivid dreams that I would probably confuse with reality except for that they've all been ridiculous.

All my Lariam dreams so far have taken place entirely at night, even the one that I had during my afternoon nap. For instance, last night in my dream I remembered that I forgot my toothbrush and some notebooks, so I ran home to California get them. I tried to hop a flight back, but San Francisco International Airport was being remodeled to look like a Japanese restaurant from the 70s, so it was really hard to find the right elevator... and so on like that.

Hot Emergen-C

For breakfast on my first morning in the village my host mother served me half of a heavily buttered baguette and a mug of hot, milky, vaguely coffee-flavored sugar. I generally prefer my coffee without powdered milk and twelve teaspoons of sugar, but unnecessary politeness compelled me to drink it anyway. I'd brought a zillion little packets of Starbucks Via (the Cadillac of single-serving instant coffee powders) so the next morning all I really needed was a some hot water, but I didn't really know how to go about saying I wanted to make my own breakfast without offending anyone. I really could have just said that I wanted to boil water and they would have showed me how to use the stove, but instead I explained that "I am not habituated to drinking some milk and so that it does me some pain of the stomach so could I just have some hot water, please?" My host mom said "Oh, for tea?" and I said "Sure!" and then realized that I'd left my tea at the Training Center, along with my belt, phone book, and cell phone charger.

I felt weird bringing out my instant coffee when she'd just gone out of her way to make me tea water, so I poured a Raspberry Emergen-C into my cup and pretended it was Wildberry Zinger.

A Toubab in Darou Khoudoss

"Toubab" means foreigner; everywhere I go a dozen little voices call out "Bonjour toubab! Toubab! Toubab!" and the brave ones dash up to shake my hand, shriek gleefully, and run away.

I spent the last week living with a host family in my training village, Darou Khoudoss, a little town of 4,000 built entirely on sand about a half hour north of Thiès. I live in a four-bedroom house with my host family; we have a nice little courtyard with a couple mango trees, a few banana trees, an orange tree and a lime tree. There's a faucet, so I don't have to pull water from a well, a squat toilet, a little room for bucket baths, and electricity most of the time. I have my own room with a bed, a white plastic lawn chair, a plastic floor mat, and the obligatory mosquito bed net. All things (including cockroaches) considered it's a pretty nice place, and everyone's been fantastically welcoming, supportive, and encouraging, so I've had a pretty good week.

My neene (host mother) Maladho and her husband Ibrahima have a 10-year-old daughter named Bineta, who adores me, constantly shows me off to her friends, and is trying to teach me to dance. My uncle Lamine (Maladho's younger brother) and his wife Amina have an 18-month-old, also named Amina. Petite Amina was very wary of me for the first couple days, but now follows me around, chattering away, trying to feed me little biscuits, and generally "helping" me with whatever I'm trying to do. My twenty-something cousin (Maladho's sister's son) Alfaa also lives with us - he was particularly excited when he found out I was from California, just like Tupac.

I am called Adama Diallo, after my host mother's mother, and I spend most of my time in Pullo Fuuta language class or sitting in the courtyard, pointing to things and asking what they are called, counting to ten, or playing games with my host sisters, who unfortunately only speak French and Wolof. There are two other Peace Corps Trainees in my town, and for our first Training Directed Activity we started a garden at the local elementary school, digging out and enriching a few beds for vegetables and setting up a little tree pepinière. The kids are really enthusiastic, which is great, because clearing four inches of sand off the entire garden surface area would have been miserable without fifteen eager helpers.

This afternoon I got my second rabies vaccination shot, so my left arm feels like an achy and leaden and I'm going to go hang out in the Disco Hut until dinnertime. Tomorrow I'll post the story of how I awkwarded my way into drinking hot Emergen-C with breakfast all week.

En bimmbi!

"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!

Pula Fuuta! Pullo Fuuta?

Today we got our language group assignments (which will pretty much determine the region where we'll be placed, and I will be learning a type of Pulaar called Pullo Fuuta (or Pula Fuuta, depending on which handbook you're reading). This means I'll most likely be placed in an Southeast-ish part of Sénégal (I am re-learning how to use all the accent shortcuts, have you noticed?) where there will be lots of wonderful fruit and veggies to eat with my rice and sauce. So far Pullo Fuuta seems pretty cool for a language, nouns aren't gendered and there are only seven characters that completely don't exist in the English alphabet...  Tomorrow, in groups of three, we'll be going out to our homestay families in villages around Thiès for a week of intensive language training. We'll have language and culture classes with our Language and Culture Facilitators (LCFs) during the day and will be eating meals and socializing with our host families in the evening. My LCF is a great Senegalese woman named Houssey, and she'll be coming along with us and staying in the village during the homestay. We each have our own host families (and our own rooms and all that) but since they're trying to ease us into Senegalese culture we'll all be quite literally next door to one another. We'll spend most of our Pre-Service Training in the villages, but will come back to the Thiès Center every week or so for technical trainings and whatnot.

Today we went to the market, where I bought a brightly-colored thin cotton dress, and to the Catholic compound, which is where people congregate to hang out and drink beer. We've all been told several times that it's not acceptable to walk around town taking photos of people and places, so I won't be posting many photos of Thiès outside of the Training Center, but I'll see if I can find some pictures around and post those instead.

In any case, I'm off to pack for the homestay! I'll be back at the Training Center on Sunday evening, but I won't have any internet access until then. Have a lovely week!

Training Center Video Tour!

This is a short, two-part walk-through video tour of the Peace Corps Training Center in Thiès. It turns out that one two-minute clip takes about 137 minutes to upload (no joke) so I'm not sure when I'll get the whole thing posted.

Training Center Video (Part 1)

UPDATE:

Training Center Video (Part 2)

Photos of the Thiès Training Center

Asalaam malekum! 
Hello, and welcome to the Peace Corps Training Center in Thiès (which I am now pronouncing "tchess").

Training Center Photos!

(Soon I'll figure out how to post them directly)

Under African Skies...

Last night walking back to my room I looked up at the stars and saw Orion. It's always the first constellation I see, and it made me think of home and camping and Lake Tahoe. And Fievel going West.

Maybe I should have called this thing A Senegalese Tale: LaRocha Goes to West Africa... 

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!