Costa Rica comes to Senegal

Nisha finished Peace Corps in Costa Rica and then came to visit her sister/my friend Emily in Dakar for a few weeks. While she was in country she caught a ride down to Kédougou and I had the pleasure of showing her around Salémata. The ride out was dusty and slow, but we made it, and after a crash course in Pulaar greetings I put her to work painting names on bowls for my host moms. 

We spent a lot of time comparing Peace Corps service in Costa Rica and Senegal, and there were a striking number of similarities. For instance, the roads are terrible, public transport is difficult, host families can be wonderful, acronyms abound, and you eat the same thing every day.

Candid under the mango tree

We spent some quality time with my host family, took the obligatory snapshot in front of the absurd castle that a creepy French man built, had much with my friend Maimouna, and threw rocks at trees in a middling attempt to knock down a few mangoes. 

Having just done her own Close-of-Service, she was really understanding of the miscellaneous loose ends I had to wrap up and gamely hung around during my last work-related meeting. I'd asked my host father to call the meeting so that I could thank everyone who'd participated in the latrine project, solicit feedback and suggestions, and distribute the bars of soap and plastic screening that I'd purchased with the last bit of the project money. (The plastic screening was to replace the metal screening on the ventilation pipes, which already seemed to be rusting on some of the latrines; the soap was a last plug for hand-washing and a token of thanks for all their hard work.) It also gave me a chance to start my good-byes, explain how I would be replaced by another volunteer, and talk about what an honor it's been to spend these last two years with the people of Salémata.

The next morning we day-hiked out to Ethiolo, a nearby Bassari village, and walked around, greeting people, stopping in at the Health Post, and hanging out with RPCV Tatiana's former host family. They invited us to stay for lunch, and then we stayed for tea, and then we stayed to sample some of the local palm wine. Nisha scored big points by offering a giant cup of palm wine to two older ladies on the compound, and then we headed back to Salémata to check out the market.

It was a Tuesday, and Tuesday is Salémata's market day. Everyone comes out for the market, and we ran into all of my host moms, including Mariama, who was selling vegetables and palm oil. 

I feel like Nisha got a really good sampler of all of the things that I do while in village. It was really fun to have her around, she was up for eating out of a communal bowl and carrying water on her head, and really nice to have PCV there for all the acronym talk about COS forms and DOS reports and SPA grants and getting NCI and being an RPCV. There was downtime, day-hikes, work stuff, market day, lunches with friends, and little kids piling in to my hut to ask for photos and band-aids.  

Sajou Ba gets a band-aid for a small scrape on his head. 

Afterwards, I realized that taking her on a tour of all my favorite parts of my life in Salémata was also a really wonderful way for me to revisit the things and people that defined and enriched my Peace Corps service. It was lovely to take some time to really just enjoy being in Salémata before beginning the bittersweet process of saying my final good-byes and I'm so glad that her visit gave me an occasion to do so.

The Castle Gets Weirder

The castle of Salémata is owned by a very creepy old French man who I suspect can't go back to Europe because of his InterPol rap sheet. Here are some updates of the slow, bizarre progression of the construction of what I hear is supposed to be a "tourism restaurant and safari bar." (Keep in mind that donkeys are the most terrifying big game animal in village.) 

Spring 2011

Summer 2011

Fall 2011

The Castle, Revisited

I feel like my camera has a hidden Funhouse Mirror setting; last time I posted a photo of the Salémata castle it looked like a mini-golf prop, but in pictures from a couple weeks ago it looms over me. You get the idea, though. 

The Day of the Neem Mural 

Volunteer Visit

This is the poster of Bob, the guy who had the castle built. I don't really know what else to say about it, except that in real life is much older and heavier and more leathery than he is in the poster photos. 

This is Bob's poster.

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