Korité

I spent Korité, the feast day celebrating the end of Ramadan, in Salémata with my host family. I woke up, puttered around, got my complet outfit out, and waited for my host brothers to pound the big drum, signaling tat it's time for everyone who's going to the mosque to get a move on.

The drum, warming in the sun

 After mosque I walked around the compound, greeting people, being greeted, and taking photos of everyone's new clothes. My host cousin, Bineta wanted photos of both her new outfits, and we all took turns posing with my host sister's baby, little Fatou.

 Fatou's mother, Mariama Kesso, was busy all morning with food prep and cooking. We had steamed fonio (grown, processed and sold by host moms' women's group), meat, and an amazing vegetable-heavy onion sauce made with the onions, cabbage, carrots, and bitter eggplant that I brought in from town as my contribution to the family celebration.

Dinner prep under the mango tree

 After lunch, dinner prep started and the greeting continued. My host mothers Saliou Njan and Mariama wanted photos of their new outfits, and my neighbors Tatiana and Jess came by to visit and greet everyone, hold the babies and admire all the new outfits.

 

Adama and Fatou

 I also took a few pictures with Diabou, the stubborn, clever girl who was extremely slow to warm to me after I moved in, but who is now a great little friend. She refuses to accept having her hair braided (I can't blame her, it looks like it hurts, especially at first) so they're still shaving her head.

 After all that it was time to go greet people all around the village. I went greeting in a little group with Mariama Kesso, Fatou, and Diouma, the little girl in the blue and gold. Since the bridge to the far side of town was thoroughly washed out we picked out way along the creek bed, looking for a suitably shallow and solid place to cross.

Crossing the gulan (taro root?) field

 After a wonderful dinner of warm bread, spicy beans, flavorful yellow potatoes, and onion-y meat sauce I went to turn in at a reasonable hour and greatly relieved that the Ramadan schedule of dinner at 10:30 or 11 o'clock at night. Before I got to sleep, though, my host sister Kindi and her friend popped in to pose (sprawled out on my bed) for one last round of photos.

All in all it was a lovely holiday and it left me looking forward to the Tabaski celebration we'll have in October. 

More Birthday Cake

I am pleased to share my birthday with Marielle, another Health PCV from my training group, and this year we had a remarkably delicious birthday celebration. With help from Jackie we made veggie spring rolls with peanut dipping sauce in the afternoon, and very tasty squash and sweet-potato soup (the secret ingredient was oatmeal, no joke) with double-butter garlic bread for dinner. 

Later in the evening we brought out the cakes (one chocolate, one double-Ghirardelli-chocolate) to be decorated, set ablaze, and blown out.

 

It was a great birthday and a very nice little break from village life. Even if you aren't fasting, Ramadan in village can start to wear on you a bit. Food is scarce during the day, dinner usually isn't ready until well after 11 o'clock at night, people are tired, and if you're not going to the mosque there isn't much happening in the evenings.

Experiencing Ramadan in Senegal has been really interesting, but it was also really nice to get together, speak some English, hang out around the kitchen table, play music, eat wonderful food, and catch up with people. We also took a bunch of with Katie, the other most recent birthday girl, and I modeled of my fantastic new shirts from my birthday packages.

 

Summer Birthdays! 

I obtained guests.

A couple weeks ago my neighbor Katie had a birthday and since she'd been traveling a lot recently decided to have a party out in village instead of slogging in to the Regional House. It rained quite a bit during her ride over to my place, so she wound up do a fair big of slogging anyway, but she made it safe and sound. 

Ramadan was in full swing so we had a discreet little mac & cheese lunch in my hut, and then PCVs Jackie and Jubal came in to celebrate with fancy hors d'œuvres (Laughing Cow "cheese" and salami gifted to us from a friend), hot chocolate, and cake. 

Katie blew out the candles on her Nutella-frosted loaf-cake (imported specially from Kédougou), opened her presents (cards, seed packets, candy, and her supply refills from the med office) and we watched a few episodes of Summer Heights High on my netbook. 

My host family likes it when I have visitors, especially Jubal because he's funny, plays music, and bring seeds, and kept popping in to say hello, exclaim that I'd obtained some guests ("Adama! A hebbi hohbé!") and ask good-naturedly which of us were fasting for Ramadan. (Jubal actually is fasting, but he's still drinking water during the day.) I like having visitors, too; all in all it was a lovely little evening.

Bowls

Bowls, like buckets, are a big things around here. We eat all our meals out of bowls, food is kept warm in lidded bowls, gifts and purchases of corn or soap or oil are delivered and carried in bowls. When women get married they're given bowls with lids and enamel pots in different sizes, and many women proudly display the fancier ones year-round, stacked up on shelves or tables in their sleeping huts.

Bowls are great, but everyone has pretty much the exact same ones, which can lead to confusion, especially during big events when lots of people are cooking and eating and carrying all sorts of things around in nearly identical stainless steel bowls. To keep track of things, most women like to paint their names and initials onto their bowls, usually with nail polish or whatever's on hand. Since I've been working with the other PCVs in my area on our little World Maps project my host family knew I had a bunch of little pots of paint on hand and my host aunt Hassanatou Bâ asked if I had any extra that I could use to paint her name on her bowls before she went back to Guinea for two months to visit her parents.

Hassanatou, posing for the camera. 

Hassanatou lives on our compound but I'm still not sure how exactly she's related to my host family, so I just think of her as my aunt. In any case, she is a very sweet woman; she thinks it's funny when I get things wrong, is happy to repeat herself two or three or nine times when I don't understand, and makes delicious sugary little fried dough beignets on market days. When I came back from my vacation I gave her a three-pair set of the earrings that my American family had sent with my for the women in my host family; she particularly loved the dangle-y one shaped like little golden leaves and she wears them every single day. Obviously, I was more than happy to paint her name on a few bowls.

Once I got started my host moms Saliou Dian and Mariama Souaré poked their heads into my hut to see how it was going. They liked what they saw, and asked if they could bring their bowls over, too. Pretty soon my hut was overflowing with bowls of all sizes, and with little host siblings eager to "help" with the painting. I let three of the older kids come in to do some painting and (aside from spilling paint on my floor and paint thinner on my floor mat) they were actually pretty helpful.

My hut, full of bowls. 

I made sure to use a different color for each woman's initials, for aesthetic purposes and because it makes it easy to tell them apart at a distance or in dim light. Since this bowl-name-painting-day I've been asked to do the same for the neighbors behind us and across the way, and am pretty sure that it will happen again soon. It's easy, it's fun, it hardly uses any paint, and it's nice to do something so immediately useful and delightful for people. 

Between the bowls and the map murals I'm pretty sure that there are a few people in my village who think I'm a Decorating Volunteer, sent over by the American Government to with a bucket of paint, a pack of brushes, and a mission to make things pretty.

Fancy paint for Saliou Dian, Mariama Souaré, and Hassanatou Bâ 

Blue Sky Day

On the afternoon of this summer's solstice I kept getting sidetracked by the striking blueness of the sky and how everything just looked so vivid all of a sudden. It took me a little while to realize that lately most days are hazy, making the sky gray, the light pale, and the shadows faint. Everything seems a little flatter without a distinct shadow.

Here are a couple views of the roadside on a normal early-rainy-season day. The laterite dirt looks a little extra red on the left because I used the Beach Scene Setting on my camera. 

My compound on the solstice. 

Also here are some butterflies
on a twig in my yard. 

"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.

Radio Party

Until just a few years ago the Kédougou was just a somewhat forgotten Department within the larger Region of Tambacounda. Now Kédougou has full regional status and over the last year we've been seeing all sorts of changes. For instance, as of last month the National Highway is now completely paved (but it wasn't last year) all the way to the city of Kédougou, our regional capitol, and they've started putting in sidewalks and streetlights along part of the main road through town. There are even (still non-functional) stoplights being installed at the main intersection by the market. It's all very impressive. 

Within Kédougou, the Salémata Health District (where I live) is still pretty much the least developed and most isolated. The road out to the Salémata Health Center is rough, unpaved, and often impassable in the rainy season, electricity is scarce, cell phone service is often patchy and weak, and until very recently just about the only radio stations that we could pick up were coming from Guinean stations, missionaries, or the BBC World Service. And then U.S.A.I.D. showed up built this lovely little community radio station and set up a broadcasting tower, which is really fantastic for a variety of reasons.

I didn't even know that the radio station was done (the U.S.A.I.D. agent in our area isn't exactly known for being thrilled about Peace Corps Volunteers) but my host family invited to the inauguration and it turned out to be quite the party; people really wanted to put on a show because the new American Ambassador, Lewis Lukens, actually came out for the inauguration ceremony. Because Americans are stereotypically extremely punctual, people here thought it was funny that he and his entourage showed up a little late (frequently people used to Dakar don't take into account how much slower one has to drive on a washed-out laterite road when calculating driving times) and couldn't stay long, but people were still really glad he'd come. It made them feel like Salémata was important, and that the American government cared about their community specifically. 

Middle school students dressed up like traditional Pulaar villagers, drawing on pretend face-tattoos (which you still see on older women sometimes), chewing on teeth-sticks, wearing blue leppi fabric outfits, and carrying traditional decorative woven discs. I gave my camera to Mamadou, my little host brother, and he took some great photos, including these ones of me sitting in the crowd (I'm still shocked sometimes by how much I really just don't blend in at all) and of my host mother Mariama (below left, you can see a snippet of her bright orange headwrap) dragging me up in front while she slipped the griot singers some change and had them sing my name in a song, which is a really nice thing to do for someone.

The Bassaris were the main attraction, though, and they lined up to pose for photos before starting to dance and march around to the music and singing of the griots.

A lot of Mamdou's photos were of his friends posing with the Bassaris or posing with the kids dressed up in traditional Pulaar garb. This his Mamadou and one of our neighbors, posing with my host sister Mariama Gaulo (one the left) and her friend, both dressed up in leppi and make-up.

Having a community radio has already started to make a big difference in how things work in Salémata and all the surrounding villages. Everyone listens to the radio, which makes it a great way to make community announcements, remind people to come to baby weighings, get the word out about vaccination campaigns or upcoming trainings. People also really love to hear their names on the radio, so people will swing by and give the D.J. a few coins to have him greet their friends and family live on the air. I haven't done that yet, but I'll definitely be sending a greeting to my family in the near future.