South by Southeast by Southwest

From St Louis I headed down to the Peer Support Network (PSN) meeting in Thiès, at the Training Center. Peace Corps/Senegal’s PSN is still relatively new, so we went over by-laws, brushed up on listening skills with  mock phone calls, and discussed issues that have come up over the last few months. We also spent sessions discussing how to best handle PCVs who are dealing with domestic violence problems in their communities and host families and how to talking with Volunteers considering early termination (ET). It was a good meeting (even though my stomach was completely off the whole time) and I liked learning more about Peace Corps resources and hearing ideas from other PCVs on how to talk about and cope with stressors and difficult situations that crop up throughout a Volunteer’s service.

Senegal's PSN 2012

After the PSN meeting it was back to Dakar to catch transport back to Kédougou. I stopped by the office, where Hadiel helped me set up Twitter via SMS (it’s more complicated in Senegal than in America), and I visited Rachel, Emily and their adorable new son Xavier.

I ate my fill of buttery pastries from the decadent Grain d’Or bakery, packed up my backpack, and headed back down to Kédougou, where I am now. I’m just sitting around, typing and waiting for the rain to let up so that I can go run errands, get packed up, and turn the internet back on so that I can post this. When it starts raining we run around the house unplugging everything important because when lightning strikes on or near our Regional House compound everything plugged in just gets completely fried. We lost several routers that way last rainy season (I hear that’s down from six the year before) when no one was around to unplug things in time.

24°C = 72.2°F and 40°C = 104°F

In any case, soon I’ll bike over to the market to pick up a seriche gift for my family (a couple kilos of carrots and dry beans), buy my transport ticket to get back to Salémata tomorrow, gaze wistfully at the closed post office (I have a package waiting but the Poste has very limited hours and I won’t be able to get it before I go back to village) and stop by the office supply boutique to buy a notebook.

I’ll be back in Kédougou in a couple weeks, but now that I’ve figured out the whole SMS-tweeting thing you can look forward to those, for as long as my phone credit lasts, anyway. 

Thiès!

Last week there was a Health/EE Summit at the Thiès Training Center, which meant that all the Health and Environmental Education volunteers in Senegal came in to talk about projects, do presentations on Best Practices for things that went well (which is helpful) and Lessons Learned for things that were fiascoes  (which is far more entertaining) and grant-writing and whatnot. 

Also, there are some very savvy artisan ladies who came and set up shop in the Training Center courtyard, so Emma and Ivy and I did a little necklace-and bracelet shopping during breaktime.

Jewelry shopping with Emma at the Training center 

Then we went for a walk downtown and saw this huge, green, spiky, neat-looking caterpillar. Good times.

Ivy and the caterpillar 

The Blue Dress Party Continues

At the end of IST (In-Service Training) there was a meeting for SeneGAD (the Senegal Gender And Development group) and that involved the SeneGAD Fukkijai. A fukkijai is basically just an informal thrift store (most of the stuff was obviously donated form America and actually still has tags on it from places like Savers and Value Village) and so SeneGAD sets up a Fukkijai and the proceeds go to funding scholarships for Senegalese girls in middle school. 

There was even a Patagonia factory reject table, which is where Sarah L. got this lovely pale blue dress.

Fukkijai Fashion Show

These dresses are totally sy-sy (scandalous and/or trouble-making) because you can see our knees. Our knees!!! We'll have to wear leggings if we wear these out in public.

Emma, Ivy, LaRocha, Sarah, Mac

Emma, Ivy, LaRocha, Sarah, Mac (again)

Remix! Ivy, LaRocha, Nic, Sarah, Mac

Logger Time with Mac

All About IST

If you're curious about the Kédougou Region, where I live, or the Pulaar language, which I'm still learning, do check out these links on the Peace Corps/Senegal website, they do a good job of giving you an idea of what I'm doing work-wise. 


As you prob'ly know, I am a Preventative Health Volunteer, and I'm currently at In-Service Training (IST) at the Center in Thiès. The Health Volunteers have training with the Environmental Education Volunteers, so there are about 40 of us total. It's the same group that did Pre-Service Training together, so it's been really fun to see my stage-mates again. 


Fun fact about the Thiès Training Center: our dorm building has two English toilets (meaning American-style, where you sit instead of a squat toilet) stopped flushing last week, so we've been flushing manually, filling up mini trash cans and pouring the water in the bowl.   

On the whole it's been nice to be at the center, though. There's electricity and wifi most of the time, salad with dinner every night, and showers instead of bucket baths. Fancy. 

Five-Week Challenge and In-Service Training

Right now I'm in Thiès, starting my In-Service Training (IST) on technical aspects of the projects I'll be working on as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). It will involve sessions on how to make nutritious weaning foods, ideas on leading community meetings, gardening with natural pesticides, baseline survey information, and lots of acronyms. It's great to see all the people from my training stage again, and last night we got to go up to Dakar for a dinner at the Country Director's house.  


The dinner party was for everyone who completed the Five Week Challenge by not spending the night at a regional house for the first five weeks of service. It wasn't exactly a fancy dinner party, but after two months out at site we were pretty thrilled with the menu, which included American breakfast cereal and cold (not powdered) milk, scrambled eggs with moringa, corn chips and guacamole, chicken wings, crispy shrimp, watermelon, salad with vinaigrette, mashed potatoes, garlic potatoes, chicken quesadillas, ratatouille, and green beans. Also, yellow cake with chocolate frosting, brownies, and ice cream cones. And Cornonas. With lime wedges. 


It was kind of amazing.   

Flashback: Site Assignments

I just came across these photos from our site assignments, during Pre-Service Training. They gave us blindfolds and had us line up...

... and then, while blindfolded, lead us out onto a giant map of Senegal, stood us each on our respective villages, and then told us all to take off our blindfolds at the same time, so we could see who our neighbors would be.

It was a fun, very summer-camp-ish way of going about the whole site announcement thing.

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.

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 ~ 

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 ~

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 ~

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)

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!