Falling Down huts

There are a lot of huts in various states of disrepair around. In other parts of the country you'll see mostly apartment buildings, or square brick-and-mortar huts, or round mud huts covered in a protective layer of cement. Most of the huts around me are mud, though, just mud, or maybe mud spackled with a village cement made of sand and cow dung. My little hut is just whitewashed mud, with a thin cement floor added on later in order to comply with basic Peace Corps housing requirements. It works, I enjoy it, I feel very at home in my little mud house. But the mud huts aren't permanent, and when they're no longer tenable they crumble in all sorts of interesting ways. 

This hut on the left isn't really falling apart all that much, but it has a lovely squash vine on it and I like it very much. Some of the huts, especially the bigger ones with ample surface area, have stunningly large squash vines. They remind me of frilly old-timey bathing caps or something. The one on the right has slid down quite a bit over the last few weeks, the roof just sinking lower and lower after each rainstorm.

This is my favorite falling-down hut. It was at its best last month, when the tufts of grass around the wall were still short and neon-bright and the inside space was filled with corn stalks. Now the grass on top is grown long and looks slightly dry as it starts to go to seed. The broken-down huts are ruins, but ruins from a very recent past. They're made of dirt, so watching them slowly tumble back down to the ground while the grass and trees rise up around them seems symmetrical. Back from whence they came and all that. A solid hut can last for many years, a decade or mere. It's interesting, living in a structure that isn't intended or expected to last for ages. 

All the over-lush grass spilling out of the ruins of the hut on the left reminds me of a river, crashing through floodgates, and the one on the right makes me think of a game of pick-up-sticks. They're interesting, the falling-down huts, they're quiet and weathered and caught in the midst of a drastic transition; they're a little like clouds or inkblots. They look like sandcastles, or haunted shacks, or Andy Goldsworthy installation pieces. They're neat. 

"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.

Transport

Transport is usually the worst and most unpleasant part of living in Senegal. Unless you're well-to-do and have your own car and driver the "public" transportation system is made up of a chaotic, ramshackle network of privately owned beat-up buses, rusty jumbo-vans, smaller-but-equally-rusty vans and mini-vans, pick-up trucks, horse/donkey-drawn charette carts, and safari cars. It's expensive and unpredictable (cars leave the garage as they fill up, so you wait three minutes or nine hours), the guys in charge of cutting tickets are usually loud, aggressive, and will often stretch the truth to pressure foreigners into buying tickets, and the baggage guys frequently try to extravagantly overcharge people (last time I went from Tamba the guy tried to charge 2 000 FCFA for a bag that should cost 500 FCFA) but they also tend to relent pretty quickly when you tell that that you've been here before and you know the price.

A typical transport receipt 

Each city has a "garage," which is just a big parking lot where cars and buses park and wait for passengers. The garages in Dakar and the other big cities are sprawling and hectic, filled with vendors and ladies selling ceeb u jen, but the mayhem is somewhat organized. There are garage managers, and the guys in charge of selling tickets who make sure that cars get passengers and leave in the proper order. In the smaller cities, like Kédougou the garages are smaller, slower-paced, and more manageable. In a mid-sized village like Salémata the "garage" is just a bench in front of a sandwich shack, with a guy who sits around, making tea and writing out little ticket stubs. (I happen to glue all my travel tickets, baggage stubs and other paper miscellany into my journal, so at this point I have a comprehensive catalog of the kinds of hand-written receipts that there are in Senegal.

We don't get many nice transport cars out in Salémata on account of our road being rough, dusty, unpaved, somewhat washed out in a few places, and 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) long. It gets worse once the rainy season starts; the road gets muddy, occasionally floods completely by the bigger bridges, and we don't get very many cars at all.

A sept-place and a green van in the Salémata Garage

The nicest vehicle in the Salemata Garage that morning

I got lucky with this car because it had decent-looking tires, the engine sounded ok, the uplostery was still pretty much intact, and it had been painted pretty recently. The interior (below on the left) looked pretty nice. The photo below in the right is of the Salémata garage and main street, where the weekly lumo market happens on Tuesdays. There weren't many people around this morning (which is partly why I felt comfortable taking photos), just people stopping on to buy bread and boutique owners sweeping garbage into little piles and lighting little trash fires. 

I only had to wait for about an hour and a half, which really isn't too bad. The car also didn't stop that many times to pick people up along the way, so it never filled up to the point of being ridiculously over-capacity. They also let me hop out right in front of the Peace Corps house (conveniently right on the road in from Salémata) and that made things easier, too.

Les Dakarois

After the  Health/EE Summit my friend Leah and I went up to Dakar and had a wonderful time visiting Rachel & Emily at their completely lovely home, which, coming from village, pretty much seemed like Hearst Castle to us.

(Rachel is going to make the best baby blankets.)

I took some photos out the window of our sept-place (the hearse-looking station wagons that have seven seats) to capture the stunning scenic beauty of the Dakar freeways. 

It was mostly partly finished houses and rubble piles and the occasional baobab, but also a surprising number of these bizarre billboards encouraging everyone to "Be clever like Leuk!" and get bank loans to buy Christmas/a fridge. Leuk is apparently the father of a family of rabbits with human bodies? 

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS

There used to be a big mirror in the Regional House shower, but someone knocked it off the wall and broke it.

Last month our plastic house French press cracked, and we bought a fancy new glass one in Dakar. It lasted a week and a half before it broke.

We were having a lovely time making delicious banana-and-yogurt smoothies with our slightly-cracked-but-totally-functional blender but then I dropped the plastic pitcher and a piece of the black base part chipped off. We thought it was still going to work, but it didn’t, and we made a huge sticky mess all over the floor. (We use the blender on the floor, under the desk with the phone, because that’s where the outlet is.)

Luckily there are volunteers expecting visitors from the USA pretty soon, and they’re nice people who’re willing to pack replacement blender parts and purportedly indestructible French presses into their checked luggage.

Someone took a photo of that smoothie mess somewhere, I’ll try to get a hold of it. 

Trouble with the Interwebs

Bad news.

This isn't actually my laptop, but you get the idea. Thanks to Senegal's wildly unreliable power grid and all the recent lightning storms something went horribly wrong while I was charging my computer and now it doesn't so much turn on anymore. *sigh*

Luckily there is a somewhat-clunky-but-totally-functional house computer at the regional house, and other volunteers (especially Sully) have been unnecessarily gracious about letting me monopolize their laptops to upload photos and e-mail and everything.

This trip into town has had pretty sparse internet access for everyone, though. The wifi at the house has been sluggish and choppy (slower then cold molasses, one might say...) and frequently unplugged, due to the thunderstorms and lightning strikes that come with the onset of the rainy season.

So, until I can get a replacement laptop or netbook sent over (in a Diplomatic Pouch, doesn't that sound fancy and important?) I will not be able to Skype/e-mail/etc as much as I would like. O well, I suppose.

Lessons Learned

In no particular order, here are a few of the things I have learned so far:

1. I've been told that the giant, scorpion-looking spider things (which are attracted to light and come skittering in around my feet when I turn on my headlamp at night) are harmless, but the caterpillar-ish centipede things (which I have not seen yet) have a nasty, poisonous bite.

2. My neighbor Sully was right about the Salémata Health Center having fantastic food. Last week (when I came to observe a 10:00am sanitation presentation that didn't wind up starting until 2:30pm) they invited me to have lunch with them and they served delicious rice and fish and vegetables.

3. You really can't buy vegetables in Salémata. Aside from a few sad little tomatoes and onions that sometimes show up at the weekly lumo market, you have to go 80 km (50 miles) to buy them at the market in Kédougou. Or plant a garden yourself.

4. Pulaar grammar and vocabulary is all sorts of fun. Jangugol means "to read," "to study," and "to learn." So no one really has any idea when I'm being a serious student and when I'm relaxing with a good book. Which and be both good and bad. Also, Pullo Fuuta has 24 classes of articles, meaning that there are 24 ways to say "the." It gets even better when you throw "these" and "that" and "this" into the mix...

5. I have come to think of 'cold' as a flavor. As Cady knows, it it currently my favorite flavor. Along with 'Snickers.' (I was not a huge fan of Snickers before, but I have recently realized that they are fantastic. And also almost entirely unavailable outside Dakar.)

4. My host brother was right about how much easier it is to fetch water by strapping the covered bucket on the back of my bike than it is to carry it on my head.

5. It was maybe not the best idea to read As I Lay Dying straight through in one ungodly hot afternoon. It put me in a strange mood and set me up for a series of extra-strange social interactions.

6. According to some people, my life here sounds just like Little House on the Prairie, except with a hut, and in the hills, and in Africa, and with texting. (I never actually read Little House on the Prairie, so I will have to take their word for it.)

7. Infinite Jest is long.¹

8. I am really lucky to live in a village (almost more of a town, really) that has a bean sandwich lady. And extra-extra lucky that the beans are pretty tasty.

9. I can be needlessly difficult and contrarian at times. Particularly when I am hot and/or hungry. (This isn't so much something I have learned so much as been made more vividly aware of over the last few weeks...)

10. If everything goes well it takes three hours (squished in between a girl with two live chickens and a man holding a very small baby) in a van-type vehicle for me to get from Salémata to Kédougou. Yesterday everything went well, alhamdoulilaye.

________

1. In Senegalese culture it's really incredibly offensive to eat things in front of others without sharing (but serious nose-picking is ok) and people will not decline to eat half your Clif bar, bean sandwich, etc, if given the opportunity. If people have something they want to eat then they do it in their rooms or in some other non-public space, and so I frequently do the same, holing up in my hut to eat a secret apple or packet of Biskrem,^a especially since lunch is often not until 2:00pm. Also, I don't yet feel comfortable openly using my laptop or iPod in village, so I only listen to music and podcasts at night and at naptime, and pretty much hide in my room whenever I have laptop-based work to do. Given all this daily pseudo-secrecy, combined with the fact that I have an assumed Senegalese name (Adama Hawa Souaré) and often pretend to be married or engaged, Infinite Jest is maybe not the worst book to be reading at this particular time in my life.^b 

________               
                   
a. Biskrem is an extremely tasty chocolate-creme filled cookie, produced by Ülker (a Turkish brand owned by the Yıldız Holding group) and wildly popular in Senegal, West Africa. 
b. Apologies for all this footnote business to everyone except for the three of you who I am mostly sure will find it amusing.

I'm feeling much better!

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