The True American Rainbow

There is a television show called New Girl, and on that show they play a game called True American. The Peace Corps Volunteers of Kédougou have talked about playing the game in real life several times, imagining how we could add in our own rules, quotes, and trivia.

Having already bade farewell to Digital Ben and the songwriter, phenologist, and re-birthed living legend Patrick Hair, the PCVs of Kédougou gathered on the occasion of the imminent departure of Marielle, Martin, Ian, and myself and actually played True American. We cooked garlic bread and Bucket Soup, made mojios and pesto pizza, combed the market and the Free Box for the appropriate attire, dressed up like a rainbow (because why not), and they showed themselves to be as True Americans as there ever were.

After the abject heartbreak of leaving Salémata, True American Rainbow brought some much-needed levity to my week of good-byes. We managed to cover the whole spectrum - Reds, Oranges, Gold, Yellow, Greens, Teal, Blues, Sparkles, Pinks, Purples, Plaid, and Gray.

 

Complementary Colors! 

The Crayola Fun Pack

At the Start of the Rainbow

Basically, playing the game involved dressing up, hopping from base to base (the ground is molten lava), calling out silly trivia questions and quotes, and switching clothing items in order to finish the game wearing as many colors of the rainbow as possible. It was fun and funny, and, as always, it was great to spend some quality time with the 'Gou Crew.

These are the people who've been there when all the tires went flat, when the ATM didn't work, and when my Sriracha ran out. They got the baignoire tubs out when it was too hot to live, fixed my bike when the gears got mangled, commiserated when work was going disastrously, and lent me a hair brush when I didn't have one (which was always). They've bush-messaged me Malarone, interpreted my dreams, put up with my affinity for confusing picture-messages, and made up songs about the terrible roads that leave us over-jostled and caked with orange dust. They've cooked Spanish omelettes, baked birthday cakes and pizzas and Ghirardelli double-fudge brownies and brewed countless French presses of hot coffee. When I lost my phone for the umpteenth time they called it, and laughed good-naturedly when it inevitably turned up my pocket. They've shared their M&Ms and their diarrhea stories and their huts and their palm wine and their fancy cheese. They took pictures of my rashes and forgave my irritability and taken team costumes to a whole new level. When I got sick they left Ricola in my basket, when I was away they greeted my host family, and when my American family came to visit they showed them a epic good time.

At the End of the Rainbow

I'll see some of the 'Gou Crew in the not-so distant future (inchallah) and in the meantime I'm grateful to have been a part of such a fun, brilliant, ridiculous, generous, beautiful, motivated group of True Americans. I'll miss them collectively as well as one by one, and I'll think of them every time I eat Pumpkin Spice, take a garlic shot, see a gold star, catch a glimpse of Cinderella, make bagel, hear a real nice chant, read a sexy book, sing my way down a river, throw it in the fan, eat too many beignets, count the birds in my backyard, or see a rainbow breaking through the clouds. 

Cute Overload

So, maybe you thought that just because I'm single and childless I wouldn't be churning out look-at-this-baby posts, but I'm here today to tell you about Fatou. Fatou is adorable. That is just a fact. She’s chubby and boisterous and as gregarious as a person can be without being able to actually talk yet. Now that she’s old enough to not forget me every time I leave for a few days, she likes to come over stand in the doorway of my hut, waving "bye-bye" and chattering away in baby Pulaar.

A few weeks ago, at the Tuesday lumo market, her grandmother bought her a new complet outfit and her mom, Mariama Kesso, bathed her, dressed her, doused her in baby powder, and brought her by for an impromptu photo shoot before she had a chance to get it all dirty.

Look how cute this baby is. Cute and smart and sassy. She's got the adorability trifecta going on. I cannot even handle it.

Chalk It Up

The wall of the Kedougou Regional House's kitchen hut features a large calendar, painted with blackboard paint and outlined in white house paint. Every month someone wipes it down and chalks in all the important upcoming events - birthdays, trainings, vacation dates, and holidays real and imagined. 

The House Calendar for April 2013

I like to do the calendar, and this is my last one, so I tried to make it count.

A few notes: COS = Close of Service, when people leave; VV = Volunteer Visit, when the new arrivals come to check out their sites; UAG = Urban Agriculture; AgFo = Agroforestry; True American Rainbow Party = We've been watching too many New Girl episodes lately.

Cups and Kettles

Diabou is now the second-youngest kid on my compound. She’s taciturn, obstinate, and small for her age. She doesn't like new people and refused to acknowledged my existence for my first three months at site. She has a big head and little arms and thick, slightly bowed legs, like a tyrannosaurus. She understands things just fine, but frequently pretends to have not heard when people tell her what to do, and she doesn't speak very often. When she does talk, it’s in this raspy, high-pitched little mouse voice, like a gravel-filled squeaky toy come to life.

Obviously, she is my favorite.

After the initial cold shoulder she warmed to me, and now we're friends. She sits on my feet when I'm trying to read, delivers little piles of mango leaves to my doorstep, brings me her peanuts to shell because she knows I don't like raw peanuts and will not keep a portion for myself.

She calls me “Ada” and she's taken to padding into my hut in the early mornings to perch silently on the corner of my bed and watch me boil water, attempt to sent texts, organize the junk on my table, whatever I happen to be doing. Sometimes after lunch I'll let her come in and play around, like this:

She spent about thirty minutes pouring water back and forth, seeing how high she could lift the pouring cup and swishing things around. She spilled a lot, but nothing disappears faster than water off a cement floor in hot season, so I didn't mind. Also, it was kind of mesmerizing, like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

First Mango of the Season

The mangoes in Salémata aren’t quite ripe yet, but last week Katie O. and I walked over to the Bassari village of Ethiolo, where the mangoes have been ripe for a few weeks now. We went to greet our friend Tatiana’s old host family and to buy some souvenirs – the Bassari craftsmen make fantastic masks and figurines. Over the years the Bassari have been mostly converted to Catholicism, but they’ve retained a lot of their traditional animist culture and hold initiation ceremonies every spring.

On the way back Katie’s shoe broke, and she did what any Senegalese kid would do in that situation: root around for a bit of plastic bag, MacGyver it back together, and keep on walking.

W.A.I.S.T. 2013: Get off of our lawn!

The January 2013 West Africa Invitational Softball Tournament in Dakar was a great success for the Kédougou team. Not so much for winning games, but we lead the league for style and team spirit. 

Each year each region comes with a theme (Superheros, South of the Border, Beach Core, etc) and the costumes are generally intended to be flattering, not unlike Halloween on any given college campus. With that in mind, this year Kédougou's theme was Geriatrics. We pulled our pants up as high as they would go, baby-powdered our hair, filled our pockets with hard candy, and went searching for sweater vests. 

 We didn't have very many throwing or catching skills, and we weren't super clear on all the rules and positions, but had a lot of good cheers and we did our best. Jubal played Outfield Guitar, Katie O. and I covered Third Base from time to time, and Kyle pitched, with some help from Karen. We made the most of the element of surprise when Country Director Chris Hedrick got a solid hit and we all ran to first base, and we got a semi-standing ovation (and Captain America came over from the sidelines) for our mid-game rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.

We ate hot dogs, drank cold Cokes, watched the other games, just generally had a good time, and all too soon the tournament was over. 

Most of the Geriatric 'Gou Crew 

Snacktime for the Kiddos

The kids on our compound are really adorable. Much more so than most kids. They do have their disgusting moments - the runny noses, the peeing on my lap, the grubby little hands trying to shove gnawed-on biscuits into my mouth - but they're funny and affectionate and they listen when I tell them that I'm busy and they have to go play somewhere else. They're also healthy. My host dad once worked as a community health worker and one of my host sisters is training to be a matrone, which is a kind of birth attendant/women's health worker, and I think that helps. It also helps that he's the traditional village chief and the family has enough corn and rice to go around.

Some people in our area have some pretty unsettling ideas about maternal health, such as the all-too-common misconception that pregnant women shouldn't eat too many vegetables and fruits because vitamins will make the baby fat and cause a difficult birth. Very few women go to all four of the recommended pre-natal visits and many don't make it to any at all. Thankfully, while she was pregnant my host sister made a point of going to all her appointments, of drinking lots of milk, and of eating as well as is possible in our area. She practiced exclusive breastfeeding during those early months  (which is particularly important in areas with unreliably potable drinking water), made really nutritious weaning/supplementation porridges, and ensured that Fatou, her daughter, got all her vaccinations on time. And it shows. It really, really shows. 

Afternoon snack for Fatou and Sajou

Fatou just turned one, she's walking (and dancing, in her wobbly little way), and is quite a bit taller and bigger than a lot of two-year-olds in town. People are always saying that she's "all cheeks" because she has such a chubby little baby face, which is exactly how toddlers are supposed to look. In an area where it's not uncommon to see little kids with the brittle, orange-tinged hair that signals chronic malnutrition, she has dark, thick hair that's already long enough to braid. As a Health PCV I could do a thousand talks about proper nutrition and healthy weaning foods and the importance of vaccinations and still not make as convincing of a case for improved nutrition and preventative care and Fatou and her chubby cheeks do simply by existing.

Siblings Abroad: The Island Life

After our mom flew back to the U.S. my brother and I went to Cape Verde, a little Portuguese-and-Creole-speaking island nation off the coast of Senegal.  We didn't get out to as many of the islands as we would have liked, but we did enjoy the ridiculously blue water at the beaches around Praia, on the main island of Santiago, and we walked along the black sand beaches and climbed up the volcano on Fogo.

One of the nice things about Praia are these little outdoor gyms plunked down along the shoreline -- I thought they were playgrounds for kids (and kids do seem to like them) but there were a decent number of adults using them, too. Also, tidepools.

To get from one island to another you can take a ferry or a plane. We went to a little travel agency and got tickets to fly to Fogo and then ferry back; it was just what worked for our schedule and price range. The airport was pleasant and had wireless internet and truly magnificent vending machines. Hot chocolate, cold beer, ginger soda, Kit Kats, ham pizza-flavored chips, yogurt flavored gummies - you name it and drop some change in and a metal coil will push it your way. The prosciutto-flavored Ruffles were really good, but I think the best snack we had were the bananas. The Cape Verdian bananas are exponentially better than the bananas we get in the U.S.

We spent an afternoon in Sao Filipe, the main city on Fogo, and then headed up to the caldera to see the volcano. It was beautiful, and it was cold, especially at night. The next morning we got up early to hike up to the volcano peak (2,829 metres (9,281 ft) - the sunrise was nice, and the shadow of the peak on the rim of the caldera was really neat.

 

 Once we got up to the top there were sulfur vents and a spectacular view ans two gaggles of pleasant enough middle-aged French and Belgian tourists (though one of them apparently thought that French was some sort of secret language and made a comment about our inadequate footwear; she was quite startled when I replied that our sneakers were working just fine, thanks).

At the tippy top there was a part where you had to scramble up and over using a cable hand-rail, and, feeling a little loopy from the altitude, I chickened out. Ben and Josef, our guide, went all the way up, though, and then came back for me. They were quite gracious about it, even.

   Like Mt. Shasta, coming down was much more fun (and a zillion times faster) than going up. On Fogo it was gritty volcanic sand instead of snow (our shoes were packed painfully full of rock powder by the time we had bounded all the way to the bottom) but it was still really fun to careen full-speed down a slope that we'd spent all morning walking up.

There were more sulfur vents at the bottom of the hill (I stuck my hand near the opening of one and it was hot and steamy and smelled of egg) and a variety of other minerals that made for these lovely rainbow-ish swathes of color across the smaller craters. 

We cruised back to the little compound where we'd let a room, eating tiny apples from the apple bushes and tart grapes from the grape bushes (impressive that things grow in such a sparse landscape) and had a very nice lunch of leftovers. 

I have to go back to my site now (work stuff beckons) but will be back in a week or so to post the best of the rest of my travel photos. Hope you're well & enjoying 2013 so far!