Beach Weekend!

The Counterpart Workshop went really well, and now we are all going to Popenguine to stay at a beachhouse for the weekend. On Monday we'll go out to the training villages for our last week of homestay with our host families, and then training will be almost over. If all goes well there will big a big televised to-do and we'll officially swear in on Friday, May 13th. (Inchallah.)

Bon weekend! En ontuma!

The Cat in the Glasses

There is a very small, very thin, very pregnant orange tabby cat that lives around the Training Center. She's always coming in to loll around on the couches in the foyer and clamber around the buckets where we scrape the leftovers off our plates, teetering precariously while she reaches in after little bits of stewed meat and whatnot. She's a nice cat, and people like her.

Also, a whole lot of the people in my group of trainees (or stage, "stah-je") wear glasses, which is supposedly why our nickname among the current volunteers is the "Library Stage." (It also might be because a certain number of us are somewhat stodgy and bookish by Peace Corps standards, but officially it's the glasses thing.)
 
Anyway, earlier today someone said that they wanted to have stage t-shirts made, and that people should come up with ideas, and that is how I came to have the following conversation:


Cady, coming in & not seeing me at first: "Oh! Hey, whatcha up to?"

Me: " Oh! Hi! Just.... mmm... photoshopping glasses... on this cat picture... that I have."

Cady: "Oh. Wait, what?"

Me: "I'm, uh, photoshopping glasses. On this cat."

Please note the teeny tiny colored pencil set. It is my favorite thing. 

I explained about t-shirt thing and finished my photoshopping and then turned out the lights, put some paper over my screen, and used my laptop like a light table to trace the cat picture. I was in the middle of doing this when someone came in looking for something they'd left by my roommate's desk, and I got to have a whole other mildly awkward conversation about cats, glasses and Photoshop.

Little Misc Senegal

 Here are a few photos from the last few weeks, in no particular order:

Emily M.'s birthday dinner at Massa Massa, the fanciest restaurant in Thiès. (Emily M. is on the far right, them my roomie Emma, me, Rachel L., Hailey, Meredith, and Claire) 

Marie (Salimatu), Hilary (Mama Awa), and LaRocha (Adama) cooking dinner for my host family in Darou

Marie and Hilary in our school garden in Darou; I'm behind the camera

Beach Day in Mboro, near Darou. This was just before we noticed how many fish heads and chunks of offal were swirling around in the surf...

A photo of a street in my friend Marielle's training village. Many, many streets look just like this.

(Many thanks to Marie, Chelsea and Marielle for remembering their cameras.)

My Life in Acronyms

Tomorrow our Community Counterparts (CCs) and arrive at the Thiès Training Center for a three-day Counterpart Workshop (CPW) where we'll do official introductions, have some halting and awkward getting-to-know-you conversations, and talk about the work we'll be doing as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) over the next couple years.

So, what are Community Counterparts? Well. As far as I can tell, when a village or town has decided that they want a PCV and Peace Corps (PC) has decided that it's an appropriate location for a PCV, the community gets together and chooses a couple people to be our work partners. The idea is that they can show us around, explain village norms to us and our bizarreness to the village, and just generally facilitate our integration into the community. They'll also help us communicate, especially at the beginning when our language skills are still basically "Thanks to you! You have peace! Peace only! I am called Adama in Senegal! I come from America! Senegal is pretty! It is hot today! Hot, hot hot!"

My counterparts are two Senegalese men, I met them during my Volunteer Visit (VV) to Kédougou and they were really nice. One is Gilbert, a very kind and slightly spazzy guy w,ho manages a campement, a little group of rustic guesthouses for tourists, and the other is Jean-Jacques, the Infirmière Chef de Post, (ICP, the head nurse at the local health post) who I only got to meet for a few minutes on account of his busy schedule.

I have some paperwork to do to get ready for CPW, so I should go do that now.

I'm feeling much better!

But I'm going to post some photos of my missing toenail anyway.

Tokora An

In Senegal I am named after my host mother's mother, Adama Diallo. In Pulaar the word for someone with the same name is "tokora," so she is tokora an, my name-twin. She doesn't live in Darou, but this past week she came to visit, and my host aunt took a photo of the two of us together.

 

Adama Diallo I and most of Adama Diallo II

It turns out that it's easier to make myself shorter than it is to explain zooming, so this is the best photo we got:

Bineta, Adama Diallo, and Adama Diallo

 

This is me drinking sugary, sugary tea with Houssey, my LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator) She is fantastic; she's very, very patient with us, even when we're being ridiculous. (On a side note, most days it is really, really hot and I stay out of the sun as much as possible. Which may be why I have been living in Africa for almost six weeks now and only seem to be getting paler.)

Houssey and Adama (aka me)

And this is little Aminata, "studying" under the mango tree in the side yard where we have language and culture class most afternoons. She is adorable.

 

Aminata, my 18-month-old host cousin.

I'm sick.

I was just thinking "Oh, I've been here a month and a half and I haven't gotten sick yet! Awesome!"

And then my nose stuffed up, my left pinkie toenail fell off, and I started throwing up.

Luckily, if I were going to pick a day to get sick this probably would have been it. We have the weekend off from language classes, and a Peace Corps Land Cruiser was coming through Darou to bring my LCF (Language & Culture Facilitator, my tutor) back to the Training Center. I would have chosen to postpone getting sick until after my language assessment interview was completely over, but I suppose it could have been worse.

In any case, now I'm lying around in sick bay, sipping ORS and Emergen-C, and catching up on This American Life podcasts. I still have a "running stomach" (as they say in Pullo Fuuta) but I'm feeling better than I was this morning, and might even try to catch up on e-mails in a little bit.

My toe is pretty much fine, too, I stubbed it last week, and it looks weird but doesn't hurt.

UPDATE: ORS is so much less unpleasant with a Raspberry Propel-style drink packet mixed in. Emergen-C is great for normal water, but ORS is kinda gross. Many thanks to Chelsea (one of the other sick PCTs hanging out at the Center) for coming by and giving me some drink mix powder.

Off to the Village (again)

I'm about to head back out to Darou, my training village, for another week of Pullo Fuuta language classes.

I think I'm getting a cold (which seems ridiculous because it's so hot out) but other than that things are going pretty well.


I'll be going back and forth between the Thiès Training Center and Darou until May 13th, when we'll go to Dakar to officially swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers. (Inchallah.) Then I'll go down to Kédougou and they'll help me install in Salémata, my village, where I'll spend a couple months doing observation, language practice, and starting a baseline health survey of my village. After that I'll come back to Thiès for In-Service Training (IST) on technical stuff and grantwriting and whatnot, and then after that I'll be able to really start working on my service projects.

So, that's the plan! Have a lovely week ~ 

The American Club

Rachel and LaRocha in Dakar

I know that this photo could have been taken at any playground in the American suburbs, but it's of my friend Rachel and I at the Atlantic Club (formerly known as the American Club, I hear that the name was changed after 9/11; it's a private swim & tennis club) in Dakar. We went to the Univ. of Puget Sound together, and it was nice to catch up. There are actually four Loggers (that's the UPS mascot) currently in Senegal with the Peace Corps. Small world... 

Our Peace Corps IDs give us complimentary access to the Atlantic Club, so while we were in Dakar visiting the Peace Corps main office, getting our service visas, and all that we stopped in for lunch and hang out time.

The Village Castle

I spent this past week in the Kédougou reion, visiting the village of Salémata (where I'll be living during my two years of service) shadowing current volunteers to get an idea of what life will be like as a PCV, and checking out the village castle. Mmmhmm. The castle.

 

For some reason it looks mini in this photo, but it is a couple stories high, and as far as anyone seems to know it was built about 10 years ago by a crazy French guy who thought that a cinder-block Medieval-Times-looking chateau was exactly what this little rural village needed...

Anyway. Back to Volunteer Visits.  So, we all climbed into a Peace Corps Land Cruiser and drove down to the Kédougou Regional House, which took about 10 hours. The Regional House is a kinda communal house in the city of Kédougou, and it has a kitchen and wifi and plenty of beds. It's where I'll stay every few weeks when I come into town to pick up mail and buy stuff at the market, and it's a pretty nice place with a very beach-town-commune feel to it. 

After spending the night in Kédougou the other volunteers who live around Salémata hired a van to take us out to village, which took a couple hours. It's about 80 kilometers (50 miles) out to Salémata, and the dirt road is pretty good but it still tends to be slow going. I have a bike (and a helmet!) and there's a cheap, reliable bus that goes into town several times a week, so transportation shouldn't be too much of an issue for me. I'll also have a very nice little hut with my own little fenced-in backyard and latrine/bathing area, as well as electricity for several hours during the evening on most days, which is fancy if you ask me. I'll be living with the village chief, his three wives, and their zillion children, and according to the volunteer who lived with them before they're pretty great. I met the wives and a half a zillion kids, but the chief was out of town during my visit, so I didn't get to meet him and I also didn't get a name. My name in my training village has been Adama Diallo, so people in Salémata have taken to calling me Adama Tawo, which means Adama-For-Now, and I feel like there's a decent chance that that will stick.

So! I also did actually visit Volunteers! And they were great! My closest neighbor and visit host was an Agriculture Volunteer named Sully. He extended for a third year, his language skills are really fantastic, and it was really nice to go around town with someone who knows everything really well. We met the people I'll be working with, worked on some HIV/AIDS awareness billboards he's been painting, spent a morning leading a tree-seeding activity at the local school, and just generally hung out being very Peace-Corps-ish and talking about how hot it was all day. (It was so hot!) 

My other neighbors, Tatiana (Eco-Tourism) and Ian (Agro-Forestry) were also really fun, really funny, and are working on really great projects, like facilitating well construction and helping get schools involved with scholarship programs for girls. 

More on Salémata soon, right now I'm going to go work on getting some photos uploaded ~ 

UPDATE: Volunteer Visit Photos

ADDRESS UPDATE and Volunteer Visits!

Tomorrow morning I will be waking up extremely early to pile into a Peace Corps Land Cruiser for the long drive down to Kédougou for Volunteer Visits, where we shadow current volunteers for five days. I'm excited about seeing Salémata (my village) and getting a better idea of where I'll be living and working for the next couple years, even though it'll be really, really, unreasonably hot.

ALSO! Because it takes so long for things to arrive, starting now it'll be best to use my Kédougou address rather than my Thiès address, even though I won't actually be moving to Kédougou until next month. (Things will still make it to me eventually, there'll just be a delay if it goes to the Training Center after I've already installed.) This will be my address at site:

PCV LaRocha LaRiviere
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 37    Kédougou
Senegal - West Africa 

Mislearnings Etc

For most of last week a trainee up north thought she was constantly telling her homestay family how much she liked things, but she was actually just saying "peanut butter" a lot.

Similarly, it's been really hot this week, and a trainee in my language group kept saying "teranga," which means "hospitality," until we realized that she thought it meant "it's hot!"

Overall, we had a pretty good couple days back in the village, and I'm back at the Training Center in Thiès now. It's still pretty hot, so I'm going to go sit somewhere and read and sweat until I'm ready to take a shower.

Ça va la tête?

I've been very into hat-wearing lately (since my part burns horribly if I don't) and it's been working out really well except for the how the brim sometimes interferes with my peripheral vision. Last week, on my way to the village health post with Hilary (my fellow Health stagière) I walked under a sign. Or, I would have, but I couldn't see that I was slightly taller than the bottom of the sign, and I smacked my head on it. Pretty hard. And once Hilary had verified that I hadn't given myself a concussion she laughed and laughed and laughed, and I though that was the end of it. 

Then, yesterday afternoon, in a different part of town, we were walking back from class and a guy I don't know called out hello and then asked "Ça va la tête?" which means "How's your head?" and also "What is wrong with you?!" I must have looked confused, because he continued in French, said "Don't you remember when you hit your head? You hit it really hard, did you forget?"

I had not forgotten (apparently no one else has either) and Hilary got to have another good laugh. 

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 ~

SALEMATA, KEDOUGOU! Alhamdelilaay...

We got our site announcements, and so after we swear in on May 13th I now know that I'll be headed to Salemata, in the southeastern region of Kédougou, where it is hot and green and pretty much everyone gets schistosomiasis at some point. (kidding! sortof...) My village, Salemata, is about 80 kilometers west of the main city of Kédougou, and I'm actually really happy about my posting; I've heard from very reliable sources that it's a beautiful site (the "prettiest site in Senegal," actually) and that the three nearby current volunteers are both good people and extremely funny, so that's good, too.

They let you know where you've been assigned by rounding up the entire stage (the word used for my training group, pronounced "stah-je," from the French) on the basketball court at the training center, where they've painted a giant map of Senegal. We're all blindfolded, spun around, and then walked over to where our sites will be. When everyone's in place, they tell everyone to take off their blindfolds and everyone looks around and either balks or gets all excited about their posting. Most people were pretty pleased, including me (I wound up pretty much exactly where I thought I'd be working, which was nice) and the whole thing was indeed filmed for Senegalese TV. I was interviewed (in French) about where I come from and the work I'll be doing, and if I can find a clip of that at some point I will post it for sure.

Next week we'll be doing Volunteer Visits in Kédougou, where we stay with current volunteers for a week, shadowing them and getting an idea of what our lives at site will be like.

Other People's Photos

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of other people's photos. My friend Hilary, one of the other trainees from the Pullo Fuuta language training group, was kind enough to share her pictures, so if you're interested check them out!

Hilary's Picasa Gallery 

(Thanks Hilary!)

Greetings to Senegal!

So, this afternoon we find out where our site assignments will be, and the site announcement is going to be on Senegalese TV. (Apparently the son of a Senegalese pop star has his own channel? And wants to make a reality show about Peace Corps Volunteers? More about that later, hopefully.)

We won't install in out sites until mid-May, but it will be nice to know who we'll be near (even though the whole country is about the size of South Dakota, so no one will be that far apart) and just the general direction we'll be headed.
 
I'm super stoked about having a hut all to myself (I'm already dreaming about tables...) and am excited about decorating my walls with the lovely postcards, greeting cards, and photos that people have sent me... aaaand speaking of sending me cards, in case you're interested, my address for the next month or so will be:

PCT LaRocha LaRiviere

Corps de la Paix Training Center

B.P. 299 Thiès

SENEGAL - WEST AFRICA 

 

Many thanks to Lauren, Janet, Katie Murphy, and my mom for the lovely cards ~ 

Rabies and Rainbows

The day we left for our most recent trip to the villages was hot and fairly miserable. I'd gotten my obligatory rabies and hepatitis vaccinations, which left my arm feeling like hot lead and my stomach gurgling. Between trying to do laundry in buckets, adjusting to the malaria medication, sitting through technical trainings (on gardening, security, and common illnesses, etc) and the heat and the dust and the nausea, I was not exactly in a fantastic mood.

And then a package arrived from Switzerland, and it was filled with rainbows and flowers and adorableness (aka beautiful hand-painted stationary from the girls I used to nanny for in Lausanne) and suddenly everything seemed a lot less unpleasant.

It's always lovely to get mail, but this was definitely the sweetest thing I've received so far. 

Highlights

A few of the more memorable things from the last couple weeks of training:

• Fielding questions about American culture as my mildly conservative Muslim host family watched a French-Canadian show called "Reportings" do an exposé on American co-eds on Spring Break in Cancun. Luckily they find it hilarious when drunk people fall over, and they also understand that every culture has its share of ridiculous people.
• Indian Soap Operas. They're 20 minutes of non-stop intense-gaze-filled melodrama backed by a soundtrack that's mostly thunderclaps and they're incredibly popular in small-town Senegal. 
• In Pulla Fuuta, my local language, the verbs for 'to vomit,' 'to plant,' and 'to spit' are tuutugol, tutugol, and tuttugol. I'm pretty sure that I've been showing up to dinner and then cheerfully announcing that I went to the school garden, where I spent the afternoon vomiting carrots, okra, and eggplant.
• Trash. In some areas there is so much trash. Clumps and piles and fields and acres of plastic bags, kitchen garbage, soda bottles, worn out shoes, anything and everything.
• Baobabs. There aren't any in my village, which is entirely built on sand, but there are zillions of them along the road to Thiès. The ones here aren't tall and column-looking, like the ones that come up when you google 'baobabs,' but wider and stumpier, extremely impressive in a gigantic, gnarled, squat sort of way.

Back in Thiès!

I'm back at the Training Center after a couple weeks in Darou, and things are still going well. We'll spend the next day or so doing technical trainings (how to do baseline surveys, common illnesses and how to avoid them, more garden training, and so on) and then tomorrow night we'll go back to the villages for a few more days.

I've posted a few photos of my host family and my trip to the beach with the other trainees in my area, and will link to more photos as they get uploaded ~