Dindefelo

I'm off to help out with a youth camp in Dindefelo, a village about 50 kilometers away from the city of Kedougou. I'll be back to town and internet access in a couple weeks! 

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.   

Panoramapalooza!

Ah, spring, that magical time in August when epic rain storms start up and seemingly overnight everything has turned a ridiculously vivid green. Like Crayola green crayons and neon highlighters put together. 

May 2011

August 2011

The field near my house, next to the elementary school. 

My compound is behind the trees on the left.

The cornfield behind my host family's compound. 

Afternoon Coloring Time

So, the kids who live on my compound love to write and color, but there's an almost complete lack of art supplies in Salémata, so they don't get the chance to draw very often. There aren't any art activities for the kids at the primary school, and many kids don't make it to middle school, when art classes start being offered. The Senegalese school system's curriculum is in the process of being reformed and I've been told that the administration is trying to include more opportunities for creativity and critical thinking, but it still tends to be pretty rigid, relying heavily on rote memorization in French, which, since people speak local languages in the home, is everyone's second language.   

In any case, a wonderful friend of mine from Camp Unalayee sent me a fantastic box of art supplies, and so one afternoon my host brother Mamadou (below, on the right) helped me wrangle the rest of my host siblings and some of the neighborhood kids while we made little drawing notebooks and drew and colored.

Kids were really into it, but it took a little while for most of them to think of things to draw. Several kids kept checking to make sure that they were really allowed to draw anything, and everyone thought it was really funny that no matter what they drew I said it was really nice and that they'd done a good job.

Mamadou is a really responsible kid and was doing a good job of helping the littler kids, making sure they didn't eat the crayons or lose the marker caps or draw on each other. After our informal art session I gave him a stack of paper and some of the markers and crayons and made him officially responsible for coloring with the younger kids.

Fatoumata Kindi was in charge of the big kids.

Littler kids drawing under the mango tree.

Return of The John Boehner Laterite Road Tan

Salémata is about 80 kilometers down a red dirt road from Kédougou; in a Peace Corps Land Rover it takes about two hours, but in a mini-bus or a truck it can take a lot longer than that. Ever since rainy season started up in earnest it's been even more of a trek than usual, and on bad days it's completely flooded in several places. My neighbor Sully and I waited until it had been sunny long enough for things to dry out a bit, and decided to head in to town.   As you can see, even with the recent rains tamping things down it's a pretty dusty ride... 

The best part (other than the icy icy cold Coke that I bought as soon as we arrived) was that when we got back to the Kédougou Regional House the water was on (it's not on a lot of the time) so that I got to take a shower not out of a bucket, which was lovely. 

Packages!

My birthday was over a month ago, but with all the power outs, flooded roads, and finicky cell phone reseau it's been hard to get online lately, so I haven't had a chance to gush about all the great mail I got last month.

I got an amazing package from Switzerland!

The girls I used to nanny for made me some beautiful drawings and a really wonderful calendar -- it was a lovely gift, and it's going to be great to have all these photos up in my hut:

I got some pretty sweet cards and letters. 

My American family sent me this fantastic package...

... and this lovely new sunhat!

I was particularly excited about the hat, the fruit leathers, and the gel pen that was filled with glue. A glue pen! So good! It works really well, too.

This package from Troll wasn't technically birthday related,
but it was really, really awesome. 

Incommunicado!

So, everything's been pretty good lately, except for the recent lack of internet access and our road being flooded on and off for most of the last week or so.

I'm back in town for a few days and am using a little USB InternetEverywhere key to connect to the cell phone network and get online. 

I'm going to slog through my Gmail for awhile and then will get to uploading some photos and posting some updates.