"Adama"

My American name is LaRocha ("la-rock-a"), but my Senegalese name is Adama. I have a number of tokorabe (people with my same name) around Salémata. I've gotten used to it, more or less, but for several months it was profoundly weird. 

It took me awhile to really identify as "Adama," and once I actually started to feel like it was my name I couldn't really get my head around how a bunch of other people also had my name. That has never happened to me before. Ever. In my entire life. It's funny, I spent a significant part of my childhood wishing that I had a name that other people had (specifically so that I could have a personalized toothbrush and name stickers) and then when I finally did it was oddly disconcerting. 

Adama and Friends

I've gotten used to it, though, and have come to appreciate some of the perks of having a normal, phonetic, immediately understood name. Greetings and mundane daily interactions are smoother and less complicated, and when people read my name off a list they don't hesitate and look around, blinking and uncomfortable, for a few seconds before attempting to say it aloud. They laugh, sometimes, amused that such an obvious foreigner would go by such a Senegalese name, but it's always friendly and often leads to questions about my family same (Souaré, "soo-are-ay") and where I live and if my family is in peace. 


Also, sometimes people are extra nice to their tokora, which is arbitrary but pleasant, and I'm not one to argue if the peanut butter lady or the bean sandwich lady wants to give me an extra spoonful just because I'm her tokora.

New Roof!

My host family, the Souarés, are wonderful. At the beginning of each month I give my host father and mothers a modest cash contribution, to cover the cost of feeding me, sheltering me, just generally taking care of me. At the beginning it was awkwardly difficult to get him to take it, there was a lot of "No, you are part of the family now, we can't accept that!" but I would insist. By now we've fallen into a more comfortable oh-you-don't-have-to-but-thank-you-oh-no-thank-you sort of arrangement, and I've never had any problems with my contribution being squandered, (there are PCVs who have had problems) I'm confident that it goes toward food and basic supplies. 

When I gave my monthly contribution right before I left for vacation it got awkward again, with my host father insisting that I shouldn't be giving money for food that I wasn't going to be around to eat, but I said that it Peace Corps gave it to me to give to them (which is pretty much how it works) and so he considered that and then said "Ok, well, we'll repair your hut's roof while you're gone, so it will be very ready for rainy season." I said that sounded just fine, and when I got back to village I had this lovely, still-golden, water-tight, relatively spider-free thatch roof, and I was totally, totally happy about it. 

Fixed up for move-in day  - May 2011

Older, weathered thatch - Feb 2012

FANCY NEW THATCH! - Apr 2012

The End of Ramadan & Korité

Ramadan is different in different places, but in my part of Senegal Ramadan was from August 1st to August 30th. During Ramadan Muslims (if they aren't pregnant or sick or too young or too old or what have you) get up before dawn to have some breakfast, and then don't eat or drink (or gossip or ogle or whatnot) until around 7:30 in the evening. In my compound, the neighbors come over to pray, and everyone who's been fasting shares bowls of mboyree porridge. I have no idea how it's actually spelled. Ours is made from finely sifted corn flour, and it has little tapioca-like balls in it, and they flavor it with sugar, a little salt, and what I'm pretty sure is tamarind.

Mboyree on a stove. And my toes. 

My host family's great, and since I'm not Muslim, didn't expect me to fast. My host sisters said it would be good to try, just to see what it was like, have the experience, and so I fasted for one day, out of solidarity and partly just to prove that I was capable of doing it. However, not drinking any water all day is pretty terrible for you, and while one day was fine I wasn't about to do that for a whole month.

During Ramadan pretty much everyone on my compound got colds, and a couple people had dysentery last month. Ramadan's hard on your body, especially for people who still do hard labor, like farming, or who refuse to stop fasting when they're ill or pregnant, which unfortunately happens pretty frequently.

Diabou, my youngest host sister, 'helping' cook. 

On the evening before Korité, Kadé, the youngest of my three host moms, was the first in the neighborhood to spot the first sliver of the moon that officially signaled the end of Ramadan, and everyone got all excited and  called out to each other and banged on bowls and pans and, even though I hadn't been fasting, it was still fun.

And then it was Korité. Everyone got all dressed up in their best complets and went around to greet friends and family, giving them treats and bowls of fancy food.

Kids in their new Korite clothes.  

Tatiana/Taki, Little Jess/Aisha, and LaRocha/Adama

This is the complet my host family during Pre-Service Training gave to me. It's not the most flattering thing by American standards, but my village was all abuzz about how good it looked. Little Jess, my sitemate, and Tatiana, who lives in Etiolo, a nearby Bassari village, came by to greet me and my family and hang out for awhile.

My host father Sada Souare and me. 

 And, of course, the food. After weeks of eating very simple lunches at the kids' bowl I was pretty stoked about having a day of nice meals. I hang out and chat during dinner prep a lot, but on Korité I even helped cook a little, chopping onions, chasing chickens away, telling the little kids to get their hands out of the pot.

Mariama Gaulo and Mariama Kesso cutting meat

Korite dinner food prep

For Korité we had fonio and meat with onion sauce for lunch, and meat with beans and bread for dinner. The meat was goat, one of our goats, and it was good, but I'm still a little squeamish about eating little bits that are still very obviously sections of digestive tract. The sauces were pretty fantastic, though.   

Photos: Last Days in Darou

A photo album of my last couple days in Darou -- with captions, even!

Last Days in Darou

Camera Obscura

The afternoon before I left my homestay in Darou I was lying on my bed, avoiding the heat of the day and gazing up at the wall. The window next to my bed looks out on a narrow little walkway between the house and the kitchen hut, and the light shines in on the wall over my bed. Anyway, I was lying there and saw the bright pink silhouette of an upside-down person go by -- when my room is dark and I leave my little window open I guess the light reflects down the corridor and it turns my room into a sort of camera obscura, so I could see my host grandmother walking back and forth in her fuchsia complet outfit. So that was what I did for pretty much the rest of the afternoon.

Last stay in the training village!

The beach was amazing, and we're here at the center to pick up our bags and go out to the villages. I'll be back in a week, talk to you then!

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. 

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.

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. 

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!

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!