For about the last year, I have been fascinated with the idea of biking The Gambia. With those of you not familiar with the country Senegal envelops, Wikipedia has a nice concise description: The Republic of The Gambia, commonly referred to as The Gambia, or Gambia, is a country in West Africa. Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa, surrounded by Senegal except for a short coastline on the Atlantic Ocean in the west.

 

After meeting Gambia Peace Corps volunteers at the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (WAIST) in Dakar last year, I was further determined to make this dream a reality. Given that most of the year in Senegal is either unbelievably hot or unbelievably rainy, I realized it was in my best interest to wait for cold season. This would ensure the best (and easiest) possible ride.

 
Day One

On November 28, I set off, taking a care from Tambacounda to Manda Douane (douane=customs in French), a large border town with a road to Guinea. What it doesn’t have, however, is a road to Gambia. Or at least a real road. Only a bush path. After getting directions in Manda, I turned off onto the bush path and waved goodbye to the customs people at the gendarme post.

Then I stopped. And threw up. A lot. Oops.

Maybe it was the fact that the day before I ate a Senegalese lunch of rice and fish, a delicious curry that my friend had made, then for dinner washed it all down with a dinner of biscuits, gravy, spam and eggs (in Senegal we think this is amazing). I’m pretty sure that was the cause of my illness. I had been feeling sick all morning so I wasn’t all that surprised. I felt better immediately afterward, and took off on the bush path.

About an hour later I was in Fatoto, home of two Gambian volunteers, Julia and Sonia. I met Julia last year at WAIST, and she was a great help in planning this trip. Upon arriving in Fatoto, I asked for “Adama” (her Senegalese name), but was brought to Binta’s (Sonia) house. I think the people in Fatoto were confused by the white guy from Senegal showing up on the bush path.

After hanging out at Julia’s and eating lunch, we went down to the river to enjoy the view. Fatoto has a “ferry” to the other bank, and by that I mean a tiny little boat that will take you across the river. I didn’t take it. Instead I hopped on my bike and biked almost two and a half hours west to Basse Santa Su. I had to stop again to throw up about halfway through this ride. Basse has a Peace Corps regional house and is a thriving metropolis (by Gambian standards). There were a couple volunteers there and some Gambian staff, and we went out for a delicious dinner of chicken and spaghetti with onion sauce. Then I went out for a beer, which was really smart given my digestive status. Oh well. I needed it.

Day One’s biking was a lot hillier than I thought, given that in Kolda our hills are all little baby ones. But it was pretty and green and a lot like Kolda, except with a lot more Mandinkas (Kolda is predominantly Pulaar, the language I speak).

Total distance: roughly 65 km (bush paths don’t have kilometer markers)

First Day of Biking

Day Two

The second day was less eventful than the first, mostly because I didn’t get sick. Leaving Basse before 8 AM, the first few hours of the ride were on terrible road and hilly. I stopped for breakfast in a small town called Bakadadji, where I confused the people with my knowledge of French but my lack of knowledge about integrating English in Pulaar.

In Senegal, we insert random French words when Pulaar ones just won’t fit. “Mi yahat ecole” means “I go to school,” because there was no word for school pre-colonization. Other examples of this include the words for soccer ball, trainings, vacation, etc. When I tried to order breakfast and asked for half a piece of bread, they looked at me like I was a crazy person. You mean you want “Mburu half,” she said. Of course. When you talk about bread you give the portion size in English.

About an hour after Bakadadji, the road, which had been hilly, choppy dirt until then, turned into a beautiful, hilly paved road. A couple hours later, there was a turnoff to “Georgetown,” otherwise known as Janjanbureh, Day Two’s destination. At the turnoff, I had a lovely conversation with a customs person about if I was a Christian, where I pray in Senegal and whether I brought a bible with me. My madeup answers to these questions were yes, sometimes the church near where I live, and yes. Sometimes it’s easier not to explain the whole Jewish thing.

To arrive in Janjanbureh, you cross a small little bridge. In town, I met up with Joanna, a wonderful volunteer who offered me her extra bed without ever having met me (we spoke on the phone the day before for the first time). Janjanbureh is a beautiful town on an island with a well-developed tourist infrastructure. We had drinks at the hotel at the bird sanctuary, and because of all the biking, I was exhausted and asleep before 9.

Total distance: roughly 75 km

Overall distance: ~140 km

Second Day of Biking

Day Three

Leaving Janjanbureh to go north is harder than getting to the island, because there no bridge. Thankfully, there is a ferry that takes only about ten minutes going north to a village named Lamin Koto, and the people on the ferry love Peace Corps. As such, my ferry ride was free.

Once you get to Lamin Koto you get kilometer markers. To put this into perspective, imagine driving in America, but without the helpful signs that tell you where any towns or cities are, or how far you are from then. Obviously a bike has no odometer, so you have no sense of how far you’ve gone or how much is left other than your own intuition. I have a pretty good sense of how fast I go at relatively flat, paved roads, but hilly dirt roads, no idea.

As soon as I saw the kilometer marker, I knew exactly how far I had to go that day (78 kilometers). After an hour, I got a hard-boiled egg sandwich in Wassu, a town most notable for the “Stone Circles of Senegambia” nearby. I didn’t stop there, but sometimes I wish I had. It’s not like there are many tourist attractions along the road in Gambia. About halfway through this day, I felt a sharp pain in my knee that continued pretty much the entire ride. I had to stop with about a kilometer left just to catch my breath and get a break from the pain.

Powering through, I reached Kaur about 1 PM, my destination and home of a volunteer, Deb. Deb was kind enough to host me, since I really had no other options. Kaur isn’t exactly a big town. A volunteer I met last year at WAIST, Kyle, lives near Deb, and contacted me to let me know I should stay there. Kyle was there when we showed up, and hung out with us during the day. Again exhausted, I was asleep by 9 for the second straight day.

Total distance: 78 km

Overall distance: ~218 km

Third Day of Biking

Day Four 

With only 152 kilometers left, I had a decision to make on the second-to-last day of my biking. Optimally, I would have done about 80 kilometers, leaving myself 72 to do on the last day. Only, there wasn’t really a place to stop. There was a volunteer on the road in Kerewan, about 98 km from Kaur, which was only 18 km further than I was planning.

The difference between 80 km and 98 km is the difference between biking about five hours versus six. That sixth hour, especially with a bad knee, is pretty much all mental. After making the decision to make it all the way to Kerewan, I knew I needed something escapist to listen to while I biked. Day Four was the day of Savage Love podcasts. For those of you who’ve never listened to Savage Love, the host, Dan Savage, gives advice to people with all sorts of sexual problems, from cheating partners to strange fetishes. It was the perfect antidote to thinking about my knee. I listened to people and their foreign problems and I didn’t think about my very local one.

The only big town along this road was Farafenni, a large market/transit town I had passed through briefly on my way down the first two times I went to Kolda (we are no longer allowed to take the road that re-enters Senegal south of Farafenni because of security concerns west of Kolda). Farafenni had plenty of culinary options, but I stuck with what brought me here, the hard-boiled egg and mayonnaise sandwich. The real breakfast of champions. Suck it, Wheaties.

Deb recommended a hotel in Farafenni that she said had great food and a pool, but I had 61 more kilometers to go and no time to dally. With only a couple short snack breaks, I biked until 2 PM (I had left Kaur at 7:30 that morning), and called Vicky, the VSO (British equivalent of Peace Corps) volunteer who was to let me into Nathan’s apartment. Nathan, the Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) in Kerewan, offered to let me stay in his spacious apartment (two big bedrooms, a huge common room, a bathroom) even though he wasn’t there.

I was having difficulty walking at first due to the pain in my knee and the fact I had been biking for six hours, but it went away for the most part and I made it to Nathan’s place, dropped off my bike and went back to the road for “chicken and chips.” As a British colony, Gambia has adopted the custom of calling french fries chips and calling the little meat pastries we eat in Senegal (and call fatayas) meat pies.

They sold popcorn in the boutiques in “downtown” Kerewan, so I bought some, cooked it on Nathan’s stove, and brought it down to the pier and watched the sunset over the river. Bedtime again was pre-9 PM.

Total distance: 98 km

Overall distance: ~316 km

Fourth Day of Biking

Day Five

Knowing there was only 54 kilometers until freedom, I decided to leave Kerewan early, snack a little on the road, but wait until arriving at the ferry to actually eat a meal. By 11 AM, I had made it through the beautiful coastal mangroves and on to the ferry terminal at Barra. It strangely costs as much to transport a bike as it does a person on the ferry, and the ferry was slow and boring. I met a man who said he worked for Peace Corps as a driver from 2006-7, and I have no reason to dispute his claims.

After arriving in Banjul at 1 PM, I decided to splurge on a taxi to Kanifing (a district of the largest city in Gambia, Serrekunda), where I was staying the weekend at a Gambian volunteer’s apartment. All the volunteers from Gambia were coming in for the 50^th anniversary celebration of Peace Corps and having interlopers at their regional house seemed like a bad idea. After lounging around in the afternoon, I had enough energy to make it out at night for a delicious dinner of pizza and beer with two volunteers also staying at the apartment, Devin and Mallory. We then went out to karaoke, and around 1 AM, when some people decided to go out dancing, I needed to go home. I was already running on fumes.

Total distance: 54 km

Overall AND FINAL distance: ~370 km

Fifth of Biking

After all the biking was done, I enjoyed a lovely second Thanksgiving with Gambian volunteers (the national elections were on Thanksgiving Day, so they couldn’t celebrate), took a nice walk at sunset along some coastal cliffs that ended on the beach, then went back and passed out early.

Sunday I got up early to travel back to Senegal, since we had a regional meeting beginning in Kolda the next day. I’ll spare you the details of that travel, since I’ve already broken 2000 words speaking about this bike trip. Next time I’m in Kolda, I’ll post pictures from the trip, so you can see that Gambia really does look like Senegal, only with a river.

Since I last wrote, I took a trip down the Senegalese coast to some beautiful mangroves in a series of villages named Palmarin, went kayaking through them for my birthday, and followed that up by going to a liquor tasting for the birthday of two other friends. I attended a summit for the volunteers in our sector, then went back to village leading up one of the two biggest religious holidays of the year, Tabaski (known worldwide as Eid Al-Adha).

Tabaski commemorates the day where Abraham was about to slaughter his son, before God stopped him and instead, Abe slaughtered a ram. The next part is where Judeo-Christianity and Islam differ. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is Isaac that is about to fall under the knife. However, Tabaski deals with the near-death of Abraham’s other son, Ishmael.

This story is not about religious lore. This story is about a feast. After the praying was complete, we returned to my house to eat. My house is far from busy at its most packed, and Tabaski featured a whopping four people at my house. My host mother, somewhere around 60 years of age, my 20-year old very pregnant sister-in-law, my six-year old nephew, and yours truly.

For the four of us, plus whoever came over to say hi, we killed an entire sheep. Plus a chicken, because I bought one. I also bought my family four pounds of onions (approximate cost: $1.60) and four pounds of potatoes ($2.40). We began by mixing the onions in a mustard-vinegar sauce, and then grilling various parts of the sheep and eating it with the onions.

After that, we fried up pounds of potatoes and snacked on some of them. For lunch, we fried the chicken I bought, and put it on a bed of onion sauce, and made sandwiches with the bread. Note: Senegalese fried chicken is NOT the same as American fried chicken. Though it is still quite good. There just doesn’t happen to be any breading. On the side, we ate the rest of the potatoes.

For dinner, we had delicious pounded millet with sauce, although that was slightly diminished by the bad meat in the bowl with it. I had to try to pick around the meat, which oftentimes was difficult in the dark. After dinner, I went to bed, exhausted by the pounds of food I had just consumed.

I awoke the next morning, went outside and greeted my mother. After we finished greeting, she told me to go into my sister-in-law’s room, where I saw a baby approximately seven hours old. A Tabaski miracle! After I told my sister-in-law how pretty her new baby girl was, I asked her if her husband (my host brother) was coming down for the baptism. She said she didn’t know, they hadn’t talked yet. When I asked her why not, she shrugged and said, “I don’t have any phone credit.” Horrified I quickly gave her my phone, she called my brother, greeted him, said “The baby came,” and hung up.

Horrified yet again, she informed me he would call back soon. Afterward, we posed for pictures with the baby, but not in the same way people in America pose for pictures with babies. In none of the pictures was anyone actually holding the baby, but in each one they were sitting next to the baby, who was lying prostrate on the bed.

The baby was and still is very light-skinned, leading everyone to say that she resembled me. I made jokes that I must be the father, which they all thought was hilarious. I’m not sure that joke would have gone over as well in America.

Wonderfully, everything is shared in Senegal, even babies. My mother still insists on calling the baby “Samba’s baby” to all of my guests, even though I had nothing to do with her birth, and she is in no way related to me. It makes me happy to be included, even if I’m only going to be there for the first five months of her life.

Happy Birthday to me. If that sounds too self-congratulatory, too bad. I deserve it. You only turn 5²+1 once, right? For my second (and last) birthday here in Senegal, you all likely want to know, “what can we do for you Dave? You’ve been working so hard over the past year and a half, and we want to do something to help you.”

WRONG. Do not do anything to help me. I am fine. I am happy. I like being here. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate getting care packages, and those of you who want to send them, please keep sending them (PCV Dave Glovsky, BP 26, Kolda, Senegal, West Africa). But I really want for my birthday, more than anything else (other than a moto, and Peace Corps won’t let us have those), is a donation (please designate Senegal as your recipient).

I have written about my computer project before, here and here. Fundraising has been more difficult than I ever thought it would be, but I’m pushing ahead because I think it is worth it. No children in my town know how to use computers. Very few adults even do (it’s really only the university-educated teachers).

So if you can help in any small way, we’re trying to reach $15,000 to send 200 computers to 12 schools and community centers across Senegal. These computers will go to teaching youth the skills they need to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Thank you all, and I’ll see you in America for 5²+2.

In an effort to increase cultural understanding, this year I celebrated both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in my village. For Rosh Hashanah, I bought apples in my regional capital, Kolda, since apples are occasionally but not always available in Dabo. Honey was a lot easier. You can buy honey anywhere in Dabo. In fact, I’d say it’s easier to get honey in Dabo than it is just about anywhere in America.

When the New Year began, I told my family that we were going to celebrate “my New Year.” I explained to them that one of the things we do to accomplish that was dipping apples in honey, and eating them. This confused them. They like apples. They like honey. But combining them? My host sister-in-law took an apple and ate it, then when I asked her to dip it in the honey, she refused. “That’s what you do,” she said, “not what I do.”

After a good deal of cajoling, she caved. She immersed her slice of apple in the honey, and emerged with a giant grin in her face. “Samba, this is really good. You spoke the truth.” I explained to her, “I know. That’s why we do it.” When it comes to food, Senegalese people do not like thinking outside the box (neither do many Americans, I know). When principal dishes are made, slight alterations are few and far between. If I ask my mom to put something different in our lunch bowl, to add to the flavor of rice and sauce, I usually get a quizzical look, indicating, “Really? You think you know how to make maafe follere better than I do?” So I consider my apples and honey triumph even sweeter.

For Yom Kippur, I told my family in advance that I was going to be fasting from sundown to sundown. Since we always eat dinner after sundown, they brought me leftover lunch for my pre-fast meal. While it was nice, it did make fasting more difficult than it typically is in America. The morning after, I woke up needing to bike to a town nearby to measure the doorframes for a hut in a village receiving a new volunteer. I biked the 26 kilometers (~16 miles) out there, and then the 7 kilometers (a little over 4 miles) back to the main road, before deciding anymore biking on an empty stomach was a terrible idea. At this point I took a car home (cost: roughly 40 American cents).

Upon returning home near lunchtime, I retreated into my room to avoid watching my family eat. I passed the afternoon napping and hanging out with my family, until finally the sun went down. Soon thereafter, my host mother came out to ask, “Is your fast finished?” When I answered in the affirmative, she immediately returned with a giant bowl full of chopped up cucumber. After finishing all of that, she brought me a plate full of french fries. Then of course came dinner. All I have to say is, I think she understands how to properly break a fast.

I think that this probably is one of the greatest Jewish-West African Muslim cultural exchanges of all time.

After my post yesterday, I received a couple of concerned e-mails. Despite my being thought of as Arab sometimes, and despite some people’s fears here, I am in no danger whatsoever. People here are wonderful and non-violent and I feel safer here in my village than I do most of the time in America.

Rest assured I would shave my beard if I thought it was a safety issue. Thank you for all of your concerns.

Since late January, I have been sporting a classy beard, causing much consternation here in Dabo. I may be the only person in the community with a large quantity of facial hair. This is because people here are 1) remarkably poor at growing facial/body hair, and 2) according to the good people of Dabo, the Koran requires them to keep their hair short and clean. Whether or not this is a different interpretation than that used by people in the Arab Muslim world, I do not know. All I know is what people here tell me.

Oftentimes villagers will tell me things about Americans I did not know. A few weeks back I was told that non-black foreigners (locally known as tubakos) do not eat rice, EVER. Apparently, in America people just give you money just for being there. Probably the largest (and strangest) conception of America is of who is a “vrai Américain” (true American). To those in Dabo (and throughout much of Senegal), my neighbor Wilma is not American because her parents are Chinese. For a country where people are Pulaar (or Wolof, Mandinka, Sereer, etc.) before they are Senegalese, this is not exactly surprising. You would think that after the election of Barack Obama, that attitude would have changed. Nope. Black Americans are not black, they are African, or incorrectly assumed to be Pulaar.

Back to the beard. Since its introduction here in the region of Kolda, I have been told quite a few times that I am not American. It turns out that a few Senegalese people have gleaned something about my genealogy that I never knew: I am Arab. Lately, this has whipped up into a frenzy. People I’ve never met tell me that no, despite what I say, I am not American. Before my facial hair experiment, I was always asked if I spoke French, English, Spanish or Italian since clearly I’m not a native Pulaar speaker. Now, I’m often asked if I “speak Arab.” Most people have enough common sense to realize that a beard does not equal Muslim, but many do not.

Given my religious background, this is more amusing than anything else. I know not all Arabs are Muslims, but people here don’t. If you taught them how to make Venn Diagrams, and then you asked them to make one of Arabs and Muslims, the Arab circle would be contained entirely within the Muslim one. Most people don’t know what Judaism is, but my guess if that if they did, and I then explained to them that I had a Bar Mitzvah, their heads might explode

I cannot speak for the rest of Senegal, but at least here in Kolda, Arabs have a bad reputation. No matter how many times I try to protest otherwise, I have been told on countless occasions that I should fear Arabs. One of the men who works at my middle school told me that when I go back to America, I need to stay away from Arabs because they will blow themselves up next to me. All Arabs. Upon telling one person I have a Arab friend, he replied, “And you’re still alive???”

About a week and a half ago, while at a bar in Kolda, I was told (despite my explanations of the countries of my ancestry), that not only am I Arab, but I am Osama Bin Laden. Those of you in America may not be scratching your heads, because as you know, Osama Bin Laden is dead. While people here in Kolda have also heard this news, they don’t believe it. I was told by a group of teenagers in Kolda that “he has two faces. America just killed one of them.” In Dabo, I have heard, “Bin Laden said that America would say they killed him, but not to worry, because when they make that announcement he will go into hiding and we will not hear from him.” Yet another person claims Obama faked it to win the presidential election.

It doesn’t bother me at all to be confused for a person of Arabic descent. It bothers me somewhat to be told (upon showing American governmental ID) that I am not actually American. However, it does bother me to be called Bin Laden, or to be told (granted, by a slightly intoxicated person) that he wouldn’t dare go near me because I would slaughter him. It confuses me the animosity many people here have towards Arabs, given that they associate so strongly with their Muslim faith. They have affinity for Arab countries, because they hear or see of the wealth in some of them, but they would never want to be around Arabs. Usually this dissipates as education/interaction with foreigners rises, but that is not always the case.

Being in Senegal: a cultural experience for the ages.

The Summer Exodus

 

 

Dabo is not a summer destination. Maybe it should be, but upon the close of school, students flee home for vacation. Unlike the United States, many students live too far from higher education to travel from home. Instead, they find relatives/family friends/strangers to live with, even though it may just be eight miles from home.

 

Eight miles may not seem much in America, but here it is a vast chasm. If you don’t live on or near the road, you would have to walk, bike or hire a donkey cart to take you that distance. As you may imagine, eight miles quickly becomes too far to travel on a daily basis.

 

At the busiest of times, seven people live in my compound, which consists of five huts. For America, this might seem crowded, but in Senegal, it is absolutely expansive. Most compounds of our size feature at least twenty people. My family during language training featured somewhere between 40 and 45 people living in one building, dispersed among seven or eight bedrooms. One volunteer lives in a massive compound of over 100 people.

 

While many volunteers lack for peace and quiet, I am rarely bothered. I am left to my devices, engaging with my family and the community on my own terms. I spend a lot of time with the people in my compound, but I never am forced to. Needless to say, this is wonderful. I am often told by others that they cannot have a minute to themselves. This is not my problem.

 

The problem becomes when summer arrives. Of the seven people who live at times in my compound, two are students. They are gone until October at the earliest. The remaining five includes my host uncle, who is blind and does not leave his room, in addition to only living here part-time. That leaves four, but that number contains my host sister/work counterpart, who bolts for the big city of Thiès each year in early July to see her husband and children. Though I don’t blame her, she will not return until November.

 

Who remains? Well besides me, there is my host mother, who is a lovely woman probably about 60 years of age, but not the world’s greatest conversationalist. The other person, my 6-year old nephew, who while entertaining, doesn’t really supply any adult companionship. Essentially, the tumbleweed rolls through my house right about now.

 

This isn’t the worst of things. I plan on taking the GRE when I vacation in America in August, and this gives me plenty of time to study. I can take practice tests to my heart’s content without worrying about neglecting the people I live with, or them arriving and interrupting me. It also gives me time to watch television on my laptop secretly in my hut without feeling guilty (I know, tough life).

 

In the past week, I finished up home visits for the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship Program. A home visit is exactly what it sounds like: you visit the family to see their level of support for their daughter’s education as well as to accurately understand their economic state. Doing my last visit in Dabo, the father offered me his daughter, which unfortunately is exactly the attitude we are trying to combat with this program. There’s still time for him to learn.

 

Before I go, I’ll leave you with a strange story from a little while back. I was speaking with one of the students at the high school in Dabo, and he informed me that the United States never landed on the moon. “They fabricated it,” he said. Wondering where he managed to track down this conspiracy theory, I asked him where he had heard this. “My teacher,” he replied.

After a year-plus in a village, you start to have an existential crisis. How you choose to deal with this is the difference between going crazy and staying sane. I’d like to think I’m more on the sane side, but life has taught me that we are the worst judges of our own sanity.

Why does this crisis occur? There are I imagine, many reasons, a few of which I’ll spell out here:

1)      You lose all sense of time. Your first year at site, you live by landmarks. Soon you’ll be at the 4^th of July, or In-Service Training, or your sector’s summit. This is followed by Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and the granddaddy of them all, WAIST (the West African Invitational Soccer Tournament). After this, there is nothing. I’m currently at 4 months without landmarks, and that’s where the grind sets in. It’s a similar feeling to that which happens when you’ve been at a job and all the novelty wears off, except the job is living in a village and not speaking English.

2)      You haven’t left the country in far too long. Perspective disappears at this point. I’m phenomenally impressed with volunteers who never leave Senegal in their Peace Corps service, because I took a week off in November, and I’m still feeling the itch to get out of here. Even when work is great, you need to know the outside world still exists. And you don’t. This is reason #1 I’m going to America at the end of the summer.

3)      Work isn’t taking off like you’d hoped. I was having this particular crisis about three weeks ago, wondering what to do with myself when school let out for the summer. Faced with months of searching and lethargy, a feeling I went through last year when trying to determine my long-term village goals, l thankfully had an idea fall into my lap (I’ll explain later). We all came here to be productive and help our communities. In the first part of your service, you know you have plenty of time left, and that you are focused on integrating. In the second half, you need to get work done, or why else are you here?
For those of you less interested in existential crises, and more interested in my professional duties, a brief rundown of my current work. I am finishing up in the next couple of days interviews and home visits for the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship program in Dabo, a long-standing Peace Corps Senegal program which helps keep high-performing, low-income Senegalese female students in school by paying for school fees and buying school supplies. I participated in this program last year, helping my neighbor Meg, who had already started in on this when I arrived.

After three interviews the past two days, I am halfway through a four-interview day, the first of which was about 8 miles away this morning. This was a student who lives during the school year in Dabo, before returning to her village upon the close of school. If any of you remember my neighbor Kelly, this village, Bassoum, is adjacent to her. Because there is no cell phone reception in Bassoum, I biked out this morning, unsure if Aissatou would be there for me to interview, or whether I would need to bike back out tomorrow and try it all again. Fortuitously, she was there, and her family fed me a nice breakfast. All was well.

As a male volunteer interviewing female students of an age acceptable for marriage in Senegal, this can be a little awkward. During just about every interview, either when walking to the student’s house, or sitting there conducting the interview, I’m asked “Is this your wife?” I’m sure if there was an American who married a local girl they would have all heard, but yet they still ask the question. It is at this moment that I need to bring up that I am not interested in marrying a child, and that this girl needs to stay in school.

On another work-related note, we are spending much of the month of July doing neighborhood-by-neighborhood malaria causeries (a word which I’m not sure translates into English, but is essentially a public teaching session). We’re still working on the logistics, but hopefully we can ensure people are sleeping under mosquito nets, making homemade mosquito repellent, understand the causes/symptoms and are minimizing their and their families’ risk of acquiring malaria. We are hoping to do the same thing with HIV/AIDS afterward, but in all likelihood that will have to wait until September (also known as after Ramadan).

This project came about after attending a women’s group meeting just over three weeks ago. For those of you not living in Senegal, a women’s group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of women who get together regularly and work on projects. It could be a large-scale soap making project, fabric-producing, really anything they want to do. I had been asked repeatedly to come to this group’s meetings, but hadn’t been able to due to scheduling conflicts.

Upon arriving, I was asked if I could help them get money for chairs, tables, notebooks, and other materials. I declined, since I cannot in fact do such things. Then they asked, “What can you do for us?” This is a question that originally infuriated me. After all, Peace Corp volunteers are supposed to be working on community-driven projects, using our resources and knowledge to work on projects the community wants. But I’ve learned that this is just how things work in Senegal. It’s not meant to be rude, it’s just something we have to get used to (#1 on the list of things to get used to: No one asks nicely for anything, or exercises, they just say “Give me your bike,” or, “Bring me the chair”).

I went through the description of every possible Peace Corps sector/project, after which they decided they wanted me to buy fencing for a dilapidated garden, so that they could use it once more. Unsure of my feelings for this project, I agreed to at least look at their space, not committing to anything. Upon arriving the next day to look at the garden, I was told the garden was on hold, and the new idea was to do malaria and HIV/AIDS causeries. The new idea being more up my alley, I gladly accepted.

When I have reliable (re: not hut) internet, I will post about the 2^nd Inaugural Dabo Girl’s Health and Leadership Day, since I want to share the photos with all of you.

Thanks for reading!

On Monday morning, I arrived at my elementary school to discuss with them our plans for expanding our tree nursery. While about to leave, one of the people in the office mentioned to me, “This afternoon we have a magician coming. It’s 100 cfa,” to which I responded, “Absolutely.”

First off, 100 cfa (or West African francs), is less than 20 cents. Secondly, what better things do I have to do than see a magician performing in Dabo? I make all my major and minor life decisions based on one simple question: What would I regret more, doing something, or not doing it? In this case, the alternative was a long bike ride, or talking with my family. I had to see the magician.

Everyone gathered to watch the magician.

The magician was supposed to start at 4 PM, and had this been a year ago, I probably would have shown up at 4. But I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been burned by this before. I show up at 5, and the magician didn’t start until 5:20. He started off by leading the children in a song for virtually 10 minutes. I’ve never seen a magician do this before, but I’ve also never seen a magician in Senegal until this week.

Waiting for the show to start.

His entire act consisted of three illusions. The first two were common tricks in America. More or less. After calling a student up on stage, the magician had him swallow a razor blade. Or at least that’s what we were supposed to think. After proving to us that it was in the student’s mouth, then proving that he had swallowed it, the magician started to wave a giant brush of imitation hair. To be fair, it could have been real hair. I simply have no idea.

He's about to "swallow" this razor blade.

What followed was five minutes of singing, also involving numerous pat-downs of the students, the kind of which would never be allowed in America. The trick ended with the magician pulling a razor blade out of the student’s bellybutton. I don’t believe he actually did this, but that’s what we’re supposed to believe.

The second trick was something I’ve seen many times in the good ole U.S. of A, but again, with singing and a great deal of call-and-response. The magician put 100 cfa in the palms of three students whose hands were clasped together, and after some magic words and more flaunting of the hairy brush, it appeared across the room in another student’s closed fist.

Where's the money?

It is the last and final trick that I’d like to make mention of now. I’ve seen many magicians in the United States, but nothing I’ve seen could possibly measure up to the bizarre nature of this trick.

The magician began by bringing out a frog. This is important for many reasons, most prominent of which is that Senegalese people (or at least Pulaars), are terrified of frogs. I don’t mean just that they don’t like them, but that they scream like little schoolchildren and run away. The magician put the frog in a bag being held by one of the students, who was doing his best not to look or show visible fear.

Next the magician asked for a cigarette. He lit the cigarette, took on small puff, and then placed it in the bag with the frog. Almost immediately afterward, we saw smoke coming from the bag. It did not look like the smoke caused by a burning bag, but like the smoke one sees when casually smoking a cigarette. We were all wondering what was happening, and it was at that instant that the illusionist revealed his trick: the frog was smoking the cigarette.

It would be easy for you to think at this point that the frog simply had the cigarette in his mouth. In fact, that’s what I thought. Until I watched it smoke the entire thing right in front of us.

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like

Subsequently, the cigarette-smoking frog was brought dangerously close to the boy’s rear end, before I saw something I never hope to see again. In Senegal, things happen that would never be tolerated in America. This is one of those things.

The magician stuck his hand in one of the student’s back pockets and dug around. Then he did the same thing to the other pocket. He started frisking the student, around the crotch, around his ass, his upper thighs. He lifted up the student’s shirt and looked down his pants. He grabbed his ass. All in a very aggressive manner. My only thought was “Dear God this would be a lawsuit in America.”

Would you let someone do this to your kid??

The trick ended with the magician pulling many sticks of gum from the student’s behind, an outlandish end to a peculiar hour. On my way out, they were giving out those sticks of gum, but I just couldn’t bring myself to say yes.

I'm certainly not eating that...

Just over a year ago, I arrived in the community of Dabo, a newly minted volunteer. Because, at the time, there were two incoming groups of trainees each year, and Peace Corps is a two-year commitment, there were four groups (or “stages”) serving at any given time. Thus, I was a freshman.

Because each sector comes in at the same time each year, the stage one year ahead of mine, the only other Health/Environmental Education group, were juniors. They seemed impossibly wise despite only being here a year. There were three of them in Kolda: Amanda, Martin and Olivia.

Ten months after that, Olivia finished her service and left the country. About a month and a half after that, Amanda and Martin left their villages and moved to Dakar, where they will be for at least a year serving as third-year volunteers working out of the Peace Corps office.

I cannot express to you how exceptionally strange this feels. When I first came to Dabo, I had three more-or-less equidistant neighbors: Kelly, who was in my Pre-Service Training language group, Meg, who left her village in October and moved to our regional capital of Kolda, and Amanda.

For both Kelly and Amanda, Dabo is their “road town.” To those of you who’ve never had the privilege of living in a town where the only form of motorized transportation is buses/cars that only travel along the national road, a “road town” is just what it sounds like. It’s the last semblance of civilization on the path to the bush. And by civilization, I mean a place with a boutique that sells tea and sugar and a few women who sell bean sandwiches (which are EXACTLY what they sound like). My community has more than that, but that’s the gist of it. It’s where you often eat breakfast, wait for buses into your regional capital, and do any shopping that you can.

So naturally Amanda (and to a lesser extent Meg) were my sources of all vital information about Dabo. “Amanda, can you buy paint in Dabo?” “Meg, where should I buy a bean sandwich?” “Amanda, tell me who to leave my bike with at lumo?” (Lumo is a term for a weekly market held in decrepit wooden structures that offers such thrills as frozen hibiscus juice, beignets and hats that say “Obama for President of Space”).

I have no doubt that this was annoying for them. In fact, I imagine it was like how upperclassmen feel towards freshman arriving on campus. “Where’s the dining hall?” “Where do I buy my textbooks?” “What classes should I take?” And perhaps most importantly, “Where’s the party tonight?”

Of course, Peace Corps is not college. Your “neighbors,” who typically live anywhere from 3 to 15 miles away, you see intermittently. I see my closest neighbors about once a week, and have little idea what they are up to on a daily basis. There are 200 volunteers in Senegal, a country of 13 million people, and though we may be overrepresented proportionally in Kolda (where there are slightly over 30 volunteers), that is still over a stretch of road about 145 miles long. Moreover, you interact with people from older stages a heck of a lot more than you befriend upperclassmen in college (especially as a freshman male).

In the fall, I had my first experience with a group of volunteers leaving. But they were the seniors when I was a freshman, and while it was sad to see them go, it always seemed as if their departure was an inevitability. After all, I knew when I arrived I had just five months with them. We had good times, but it was always understood that the clock would run out soon. They went back to America, or moved to Dakar/Kolda, and I became a sophomore, despite still feeling too green to make that leap.

When it came time for the new seniors to leave in April/early May, it was the first time I was fully conscious of the departures. These were people I had spent the entirety of my Peace Corps service with, who had seen me at both my best and my worst, who I had met when they had helped out at my training a year before. I had celebrated holidays with them, spent quiet evenings at regional houses, and spent significant amounts of time with them in my (and their) villages.

Undeniably, part of the separation anxiety is the fear of the unknown. Can the new stage, their replacements, possibly ever live up to their legacy? I soon realized that those leaving had certainly felt the same way about us a year before, and I think we more than held our own. I met some of the new people, particularly my new neighbors in Kolda, and my fears were alleviated.

The primary difference though between leaving college and leaving Peace Corps is that in Peace Corps, you can’t go home again. People eventually come back and visit, or become Peace Corps Response Volunteers doing projects in Senegal for a few months, but it’s not like when I went back to Dartmouth for Homecoming, Winter Carnival or Green Key (and yes, I made it to every one of those my first year away).

This past Saturday, I welcomed five other volunteers to my home for a “Lumo Party,” which consists of going to the weekly market, buying some vegetables, maybe a chicken if you’re feeling flush with cash. Then you eat lunch, hang out and chat until it gets cool enough for everyone to bike home.

A year ago, we were doing the same thing, but back then Kelly and I were the new volunteers being welcomed by our older (only in Peace Corps terms, since I was older than all of them) and presumably wiser brethren. This year, I had seniority over all, and I was the one regaling everyone with stories of my first year in Senegal.

Our new volunteers are great, and there are three of them close enough to regularly come to lumo. I imagine we will have plenty of fun here in Dabo and the surrounding area in the next year, and then they will be the wise old souls welcoming my replacement next May. In many ways, it feels like being in a fraternity all over again. When you are pledging, everything is new. You go to your first weekly meeting and can barely believe what is happening around you (especially because in my case I was fasting for Yom Kippur). In Senegal, you get to your village and you turn to those around you, because you don’t know what is normal and how to react. Everything’s a novelty, and while that feeling never goes away, it certainly dissipates over time. You learn how life works. You learn how not to be shocked by what goes on around you. You know how to bargain for the baggage fee on a vehicle.

Time progresses and you eventually reach a place you never thought you would. People turn to you for advice, and you realize that your relationship with them will eventually develop into the relationship you had with their predecessors when you came here just 365 short days before.

Wednesday marked the one-year mark since I moved to Dabo. In that time, I’ve read somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 books, visited 13 of my stagemate’s sites, took almost every possible mode of Senegalese transport, gone on vacation to Germany, had a visitor from America, rode a camel, and saw Akon in concert. It’s been a busy 365 days.

The year-mark unfortunately brings back the worst time of year: hot season. I left Kolda less than two weeks ago with life at a manageable temperature (somewhere in the 110 degree range). I’m defining manageable as “you don’t sweat every hour of the day, even if you’re simply sitting in the shade.” When I returned to Kolda on Sunday, manageable season was over.

The sweating is far from the worst part of hot season. The worst part is the scheduling. I live my life here on my bike. If I can’t bike, I can’t do work. At least not as much as I’d like. In hot season, all work must be accomplished by 10 AM (11 if you’re a masochist), at which point you press pause until after 4 PM.

Thursday, in an effort to be more active, I decided to hop on my bike bright and for a ride of somewhere between 30 and 40 kilometers (19-25 miles). My back tire wasn’t as firm as I would have liked, but I figured I’d just make sure to inflate it when I got back.

About 2-3 kilometers out of Dabo, I knew something was wrong. However, I figured I’d just bike a few more kilometers, turn around, and go home with a partial bike ride. After 6 kilometers, I was about to turn around, when I realized I had no air whatsoever in my tire. Time to walk home. This had happened to me once before, but that time I was barely a mile outside of Dabo, so little harm done.

Ten minutes later, a charet pulled up next to me and stopped (a charet is essentially an animal-drawn cart, either horse or donkey) and asked me if I’d like a ride. Thank God for Senegalese hospitality. We strapped my bike down to the charet and galloped off. Half an hour, I was home. My cousin and I set out to examine the tube in my back tire, at which point he found about six holes, an inch or two separating each one, and essentially said to me, “There’s no way we’re fixing this. Just buy a new one.” Then he found a spiky piece of metal in the tire itself. We found the source of the problem.

Moments like these are when I’m glad my town has over 5000 inhabitants and is on the national road. I just went down to my neighborhood hardware store, which stocks plenty of spare bike parts. It’s almost like being in America, except that buying anything is a complete crapshoot.

A few days ago, someone asked me what spending a year here has done to me. I had to pause, because truth be told, I barely remember what I was like in the United States. That’s not to say I’m all that different, but it’s a part of my life that seems foreign when I’m living in a hut and barely speaking English. But as I thought about it, I realized that things I find commonplace these days would have terrified me a year ago. Walking to a hardware store and communicating in Pulaar that I needed a new tube for my bike (and you better not rip me off on the price!), hopping on a horse charet in middle of nowhere, biking hundreds of kilometers because someone asked you to.

I remember having a conversation sometime last summer with a friend from home who said to me, “When you get back you should meet this girl, she’s adventurous like you.” I’ve never found myself to be all that adventurous, and said so, to which my friend replied, “Dude, you live in a hut.” Point taken.

Fast forward to this past week.

One of the many wonderful things about Peace Corps is that everything happens at roughly the same point year after year, so now after one year at site, it was time to install (bring to site) the newest group of volunteers. I was sitting in the car with our Training Director, talking about his career working with Peace Corps, and he said to me, “This is the best job you could ever have. No two days are ever the same. It’s challenging and not always enjoyable, but it pushes you to grow and after doing this, everything else will be easier.”

He said this to me just after we had just dropped off a newly-minted volunteer in her village, where they had given her a formal baptism/naming ceremony, holding a cloth over her and announcing her name to the village (there’s usually a head shaving involved, but our Safety and Security Coordinator put the kibosh to that quickly). I could see she was overwhelmed, but if you can get through 500 strangers fussing over you in a language you’re only beginning to understand, at a party thrown in your honor that lasts eight hours, then job interviews or major life changes won’t knock the wind out of you.

If I’ve learned anything from this job, it’s to get over your own hang-ups and fears. It’s terrifying to give your first public speech in Pulaar, to explain a complicated nutrition talk in your third language when you haven’t even mastered your second, to buy supplies and construct a garden when you’ve never done so and are struggling against established cultural norms.

But these things aren’t all that difficult. The only thing that holds me back here is my own feelings of inadequacy. You won’t communicate perfectly, but that’s not what’s important. If I can get over my feeling embarrassed, the rest of the job is still tough, but manageable.

Probably because of the language barrier, and the slower pace of life here, I feel much more patient than I ever did in the United States. Life in the U.S. is characterized by order, while in Senegal, it is chaos. Though I miss the order of America, I don’t doubt I’ll miss the disorder when I return home.

When I left America over 14 months ago, I felt stuck in the mud, broken down by the aimlessness of my life since graduation. The future terrified me. I still don’t know what the future holds, but after being here, it’s more exciting than distressing.

Happy Monday everyone!

Thank you to everyone who has given to our computer project so far. These computers will go to helping over 16000 youth in 11 different towns and villages throughout Senegal.

If you haven’t yet donated, and are interested, you can read more about the project, and if you’d like to donate, you can do so here (and please designate Senegal).

If you’re donating, please click on the Network for Good (the donate link here), or the blue link on the World Computer Exchange page. This will ensure that even more of your money goes directly to this project.

To give you an idea of what we are going to do with these computers, at my school, we will be teaching basic computer skills, everything from how to turn on a computer, to typing, word processing, web browsing, etc. We hope that by giving students this opportunity, they will be further inspired to work in school and gain valuable life skills. I’ve seen this work before in cities, and I think it can be more effective in rural communities, where these opportunities previously seemed foreign.

P.S.-For everyone who donates, once the computers get here, we will try to skype (or some other form of video chat) you so you can get a personal thanks from the students. I know everyone at my school is very excited.

Because nothing of any importance has happened since yesterday, I wanted to share with you the search terms that have led people to find my blog. I’ll skip the uninteresting ones.

baobab: 331
Pretty obvious…the baobab is the national tree of Senegal.
popenguine: 30
To be expected. Popenguine is a beach town I’ve blogged about before.
rachael honick blog: 7
Rachael is another volunteer in Kolda. Not so strange.
richard spark-depass
Not sure exactly who this is, but probably a relative of my stage-mate Evan Spark-Depass.
dakar beachfront: 3
No idea.
spring tree Dakar: 2
Again, no idea.
people sitting on baobab: 2
Fun.
diaobe kolda: 2
Diaobe is a town near Dabo. Logical.
gambia tree baobab: 2
I don’t live in The Gambia…
boab tree black and white: 2
Two people searched for this?
thailand luggage “peace corps”: 2
Or that?
tree that looks like peakers: 2
Nice.
gendarmerie national diaobe kolda senegal: 2
Never been in trouble with the law in Diaobe.
senegal africa thiewal
Thiewal Lao is the name of my neighbor Kelly’s village. Logical.
urban agriculture mbour: 1
Well I did once live in Mbour…
tree looks like it’s dancing: 1
Baobab?
a person roaming around: 1
Is that me?
big faim restaurant senegal: 1
A restaurant I’ve been to in Thies. Awesome.
you know you’re Senegalese if: 1
I’m not.
sex in mbour: 1
Never had it. But there is prostitution there. Not sure what this person was looking for.
things you don’t need to take gambia west africa as a peace corp volunteer: 1
Was I helpful?
dabo gambia: 1
Dabo is in Senegal. I know this because I live there.
mayotte biggest baobab: 1
Did I find it?
steve turnbull stream of consciousness: 1
Steve Turnbull was my roommate during training. He is great, but I don’t know why someone searched for this.
baobab tree things fall apart: 1
Was a baobab tree mentioned in that book? I read it a year ago but I don’t remember.
raining in the countryside: 1
Can’t wait for it to come back
eileen glovsky birth date: 1
Eileen is my aunt. Her birth date is not contained on my blog.
temendo –systems meaning
Temento is the town next door.
“sara visits the dirty south: 1
Who?
what are you when you live in Senegal: 1
Senegalese. Or a Peace Corps volunteer.
what is best transport from dakar to see countryside for 1 day: 1
Don’t come here. It’s not worth it.
i volunteered for a non-profit In mbour—a wonderful fishing town: 1
1) Not a town. 2) Great for you.
jenae woodward, volleyball: 1
Jenae was in my training language group. She played volleyball.
names of catholic reverend fathers in kolda dakar Senegal: 1
Ask the church.
“saly” I am looking for house rental popenguine: 1
Can’t help.
address of cathedral of our lady of victory kolda, kolda, senegal: 1
This led you to me?
what a productive i am?: 1
Victory.
laying in water: 1
I love to do this.
david benioff biography: 1
Enjoy the writer. Don’t know his bio.

Hope this was as fun for you as it was for me to look at. Who knew I can be found all these ways?

Those of you expecting a deep and intellectually stimulating post from the title will unfortunately be profoundly disappointed. But I wanted to clue you in on a revelation I had today, while sitting with my neighbor Minnie.

In America, we judge a person’s wealth by many factors: their home, their clothes, their method of transportation, and perhaps even (if you know someone well enough) their investment portfolio. We see the money they spend at restaurants and the credit cards they swipe at swanky department stores, pictures from their expensive vacations. Oftentimes wealth is very conspicuous in America. You walk into a house, you see an absurdly large television hooked up to a comically large stereo system, and you know the level of wealth you’re dealing with.

What if you lived in a place where that wasn’t the case? What if you lived in a land far, far away, where your net worth was determined as such, by these conversations?

Dave/Samba: I promise, I actually don’t have much money.
Yero: Yes you do, you’re American. All Americans have money.
Dave: If I had money, do you think I’d be sitting here with you? I’d go back to America, I’d buy a house, a car, a big television and a refrigerator, and I’d sit around and have a lot of “fun” (note: the verb “to have fun” implies, at minimum, minor gluttonous spending).
Yero: You would buy a lot of cows.
Dave: No, in America, people don’t usually have cows.
Yero: But patron (a term which I imagine is loosely like the English/French word, but I like to think is based on this) people have many cows.
Dave: Nope. How many cows do you have?
Yero: Only 3. I am not patron. How many do you have?
Dave: I have no cows.
Yero: Why? Are cows expensive? Do you like sheep better?
Dave:
No, I have no sheep either. I have no space for them. I only have a dog.
Yero: (Not trying at all to stifle his laughter) You are right. You have no money. But why do you have a dog? Do you eat dogs?
Dave: The dog is my friend. I would never eat it.
Yero: But if you have an animal, you should eat it.
Dave: America and Senegal are different.

Though that was a long, loose transcription, I wanted to give it to you to prove a point. Wealth in Pulaar villages is based more on the amount of animals you own. Pulaars specifically “worship” (obviously as Muslims, they don’t technically worship them) cattle, so much so that if there was ever a Pulaar nation-state, their national soccer team would have to be nicknamed the Mighty Cows/Bulls/Cattle Herders. Once, while talking to a Pulaar-speaking volunteer in the north of Senegal, she mentioned to me that her host father was the proud owner of 300 cows.

I’m not sure that the average person in America understands the amount of wealth indicated by that amount of cows. From what I’ve been told here, a cow can be sold at market for 120.000 West African francs (cfa), which is somewhere in the neighbor of 250 American dollars. Her father is sitting on $75,000 worth of prime Senegalese steak, briscuit, etc. You probably wouldn’t be shocked to know that here in rural Senegal that would be more than enough to live off at an insane standard of living for the rest of his life.

Her father would, in true Pulaar fashion, never sell his cows. In America, we might look foolishly upon that. After all, what good is that money if it’s tied up in an investment that will likely never pay off? But here, money isn’t power, cattle is. My friend’s dad is chief of her village, and though I can’t guarantee it’s because of the cows, I imagine that his social standing is certainly enhanced by his mass quantities of livestock.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned after being here, don’t judge people from how they get their kicks.

By an inexact estimation, there are probably somewhere between 20 and 30 computers in the town of Dabo, where I currently reside. Just about all of those are owned by teachers or other community leaders, who use them for their own work/personal purposes, and understandably, do not share them with the community. In fact, I’m still not sure anyone in my village knows I own a computer and store it in my hut (we’ll see…maybe they will after this blog post).

I imagine few of you likely know that I have spent much of the last three months wrangling 11 volunteers to arrange the shipment of 200 computers to Senegal through a wonderful NGO named World Computer Exchange. Twenty-five of those computers are going to my dear community, where they will be shared between the College and the Community Center, and available to thousands of youth in Dabo.

Think of how much time we spend on the computer. I wrote this blog post on the computer and when I get to where internet is available, I will post it to the Internet, where you are reading it right now. This is far from unusual in the United States, it’s downright normal. You won’t be shocked to know that would be highly abnormal here, particularly in smaller, more rural communities.

That said, the impact of computers here is awe-inspiring. Students here eat up whatever technology they are given. They watch terrible, painfully abysmal soap operas from India because there is nothing else on television. They would love to browse the web, to explore worlds unknown, even just to get the answer to that often-asked question, “Is France in America?” (Don’t laugh, people really do ask that)

I don’t have to sell any of you on the benefits of the Internet, or even just computers. Having computer skills is essential in the United States, and is becoming increasingly important here. As technology further spreads throughout Senegal, opportunities are popping up all over the place for those with a basic level of computer skills. Simple computer manipulation, even typing, may seem to us unexciting, but here it unlocks a whole world of possibilities.

While my program is technically Environmental Education, I believe that my best work is often done working to expand students’ horizons and help them see the benefit of technology and staying in school. In a country where high stakes exams often lead youth to quit school early, it is important for them to see where an education can take them.

I don’t believe access to computers will change every student’s life, maybe not even most of them. But if enough students are inspired enough by the skills and information they learn using computers/the Internet that they stay in school and work hard toward a professional career, my project will have more than provided a return on investment.

My school director is a motivated man. During our two-week school vacation for Easter, he personally taught computer classes, free of charge, using a few laptops donated by USAID. Though he gained no monetary benefit of it, he sat in a classroom on his vacation teaching students the basics of using a computer.

I have spent a substantial portion of my Peace Corps service so far trying to see that he and his students in Dabo have access to resources that we in America take for granted. I would like now to ask for your help. If you would like to contribute to this project, you can donate here (and please indicate that you want your donation to go to Senegal).

Between the 11 of us, we need to raise around $15,000, so this won’t be easy. But I wouldn’t be undertaking this project if I didn’t think it was worth my time and yours. Thank you.

In 2010, Easter fell on the 50^th anniversary of Senegalese independence while I was still in training. I was in Thiès at the time, and went to mass with a few other trainees. The only non-Peace Corps volunteer we recognized at church was the bartender from the local watering hole down the street.

This year, I decided to make the effort to attend Easter Mass two straight years, a feat I doubt I have ever accomplished prior. There is a village 15 kilometers (about 9.3 miles) east of Dabo, Mampatim, which for reasons I never understood, has a church, St. Claire d’Assise. I have worked often in Mampatim, and traveled through it many other times, but have never seen the church open. I figured if there was one day a year they would have services, it would be Easter.

Not knowing when the proceedings would start, I left Dabo on my bike around 7:30 AM and headed out to Mampatim. I arrived a little before 8:30, finding the front door of the church closed. I was going to just sit and wait, but I noticed a cross on the house next door. In Senegal, unlike America, you can just let yourself into people’s homes and ask questions. So I did just that.

It turns out the home next door belongs to two nuns of the church, who informed me that mass would start at 10. I went back to wait by the church, but the other church worker, a man named Bartholomey, invited me in to wait there until mass started. One of the nuns offered me breakfast, and refused to take no for an answer after I told her I had yet to eat.

Mass started, and it was different than anything I had experienced to date, but in a positive way. It took place mostly in French, but with a substantial portion also in Pulaar. The choir, full of mostly young girls and boys, also had local drums and other percussion instruments, giving the music a uniquely Senegalese feel. As the only white person present, I of course was spotted by the priest, who came up to speak with me while his announcements were being translated into Pulaar. Typically, I tell people my Senegalese name, Samba, because for the purposes of my life and work here, that’s what I go by. But being in church, I decided to tell the priest my given name.

Almost immediately after returning to the pulpit, the priest decided to give me a formal introduction, and to thank me for my “coming here to live in poverty, while working to lift people up out of poverty.” Then everyone stood up and applauded. It was sweet, but unbelievably awkward. After mass, I was asked to stay for lunch, which I accepted for the following reasons:

1. I was enjoying myself.
2. I figured whatever I was going to have for lunch there would be better than I would be eating back at home.
3. It was noon and there was no way I was biking home that time of day.

While waiting for lunch, we were invited back to the priest’s house next door, where they immediately pulled out the gas cans full of palm wine. For those of you not currently living in Senegal, this may seem like an unusual storage device. It’s not. Most public transportation vehicles store water in them, and there’s a supermarket in Thiès that sells wine in them. If you ever drink palm wine, that’s the proper storage container for it.

Since I knew I had to bike home, I passed up most of the palm wine offered to me, and nursed my drink relatively slowly. They tried to get me to drink more all day by saying, “Today is Easter. Today you celebrate. Tomorrow you will not drink.” Thankfully, I have self-control. After drinking palm wine with a chain-smoking priest, I returned to the sisters’ house for lunch.

When lunch was finally served, it was (on a Senegalese scale), epic. First we ate a salad made of tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and olives, followed by French fries, and the kicker, fried chicken. I have told this story to 3 or 4 Peace Corps volunteers so far, and the fried chicken is always what gets them, mostly because you never see fried chicken in this country.

Since I don’t usually hang out with Christians, I was shocked by the amount of alcohol that was offered to me during this meal. I was offered “martinis,” (what I assume was some kind of mixed drink labeled “martini”), wine and beer, and due to the solar panels present, the beer was actually cold. I carefully picked my spots, since again, I had to bike home. Just when I thought lunch had wrapped up, they brought out the cake.

My plan was to go home around 4, but lunch ended around 3, giving me time to kill. My new friend Bartholomey suggested we pass this time by going around and greeting all the Christians in the village. As I had nothing else to do, I accepted. The first house we stopped at happened to be the home of one of the teachers who came to a training I did in early March. Here they offered us vermicelli with onion sauce and chicken, another delicious meal I would never, ever eat in village. I was offered more palm wine, which again, I politely declined, despite the argument of, “Today’s a holiday. You must drink!”

We continued on, Bartholomey on his moto, and me on my bike, visiting five or six other homes, all of which offered me delicious food and booze. Unlike being with Pulaar Muslims, Christians also have pigs, so I wanted to lay the groundwork for future pig-eating, so I emphasized to everyone how delicious I found pork, at which point, they invited me back to eat pig sometime (I love Senegalese hospitality sometimes). Most of the Christian population of Mampatim is Jolla, which is an ethnic group in the Casamance, particularly out east in the region of Ziguinchor.

By around 5, I was ready to go, so I hopped back on my bike and made the hour trip back home. It was an Easter to remember.

Today was garden construction day. As one might expect in this lovely, dirty, hot country I live in, that isn’t as easy as it sounds. A couple weeks ago, before leaving to help with training, I bought 50 meters of griage (wire) fencing to line the outside of our garden. Yesterday, our school groundskeeper chopped up wood to make enough fence posts to attach the fencing too. I arrived bright and early this morning ready to plow ahead.

That was my first mistake. My two construction partners were Yero (spelling on all these names is imperfect), our school groundskeeper, and Boubacar, who works in the school office. We were briefly helped by a math teacher, whose major contribution was saying whether the holes we were digging were fewi (straight).

In order to get to the point of digging the holes, I had to wait for both Yero and Boubacar to eat breakfast and then make about an hour of small talk with the teachers/administration of the school. By around 10 AM, we were finally ready to go. The garden building itself was uneventful, and we got most of the work done today. All of the fence posts are safely in the ground, and now all we have to do on Tuesday (school is closed Monday for a 3-day Easter Weekend) is attach the fence.

As soon as it was done, Boubacar and Yero asked me to come into the “teachers’ lounge” with them, at which point they asked me to pay them “a little” for their work. I told them that as a volunteer, I was not going to do that. Thankfully, my wonderful school director overhead this conversation occurring next door, stormed into the room, and ranted to them that this project is for the community, and if they don’t want to be part of the community, they shouldn’t be working at the school. He told them that I was working hard on this project and not getting paid, and so what makes them think they should take money out of my pocket. Needless to say, the school director is probably my favorite work partner.

Unfortunately, since we have now entered the wonders of hot season, we have to wait another month before we can actually plant any crops.  In the meantime we’re going to plant as many trees as humanly possible, dig some garden beds, and wait until a couple weeks before the rains come.

For those of you wondering what exactly we talk about here in village, here’s an idea of some recent conversations:

• A conversation at the school, beginning on debating the merits between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (much more superficial than it sounds), talking about other former American Presidents, then moving on to what was actually a really interesting discussion about term limits for political leaders (they think they’re a good idea, and are frustrated that they rarely if ever exist in Africa).
• Today I had a conversation with my host cousin about “girlfriends,” which sounds tame except that the way that word translates into Pulaar is very racy. He wanted to know who taught me the word, mostly because he thought it was hilarious I even knew it (he also spoke with a whisper during this whole time).
• Just a few hours ago I helped a high school student here with his English essay. The topic: write a letter to your friend to convince him to stop smoking. As I’ve learned from having three younger siblings, the key to successful help, is to clean up the mess, but keep it in their own voice. This experience also frustrated me as to the level of English education, as there were a few words present in his essay that just don’t exist in English. Though let’s be honest, I’m sure my French in high school was pretty poor as well.

And last, but not least, my favorite of all conversations. There is a very nice man in Dabo, Boubacar, who has an overarching desire to visit America. He also likes to explain things in incoherent English to make a point. We were sitting around talking one day, when in English, he says to me, “I want to find you…girlfriend.”

At this point, unclear of what he means, I switch back to Pulaar, asking what exactly he means by a girlfriend. Boubacar explains (this is my loose translation), “Someone to come see you on the weekends and make you happy. Samba, I want you to be happy.” I now know where this conversation is going, but I want to hear him say it, so I let him continue. “Someone to come to your room and spend the night, and leave in the morning. This way you will be happy and not ever leave Dabo.” After I give him a raised eyebrow, he keeps pushing forward, “Someone for you to have sex with.”

Now, being the professional I am, I feel it’s time to push back. I assert, “No, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. That’s not my thing. After all, I wouldn’t want to get anyone pregnant.” Given that my friend has yet to give up, he doesn’t get this hint either. He looks around, makes sure no one is listening, and whispers to me “Préservatif,” the French word for condom.

Continuing (and failing) to extricate myself from the situation, I tell him I’m worried about HIV, STIs, etc. I should have realized by this point that logic wasn’t a great exit strategy. We’re back into English here, as I’m told, “You will have noooooooooo problems. I will find you good woman.” Terrified of what a good woman in my town of 5500 entails, I tried to get up and leave, only to be told to stay for tea. Since it’s rude not to stay at that point, we went further along this path.

Boubacar, who is married with two kids, then tells me, “If I go to America, I can only stay one month. If I stay 40 days, I will need to find a woman.” Futilely, I try to clarify that finding a woman in America is not all that easy, especially if you don’t speak English. His strategy for finding a woman is as follows:

1. Go up to a woman and ask her if she wants him.
2. If step 1 fails, ask another woman.
3. Continue until someone accepts.

Life in village: sometimes slow, but always bizarre.

Apologies for being out of touch. I have no excuses, other than that the longer I take to blog, the harder it is. On the plus side, I have an internet key, which usually works, so depending on how much extra money I have out of my Peace Corps monthly allowance, I can occasionally browse the web, check e-mail and be an overall internet nuisance. Not to the level I am in America of course, but more so than before.

I write to you from my hut, where there is currently a family of chickens storming my door. The mother hen has realized she can jump my fence (which is about 5.5 feet high) while the baby chicks can sneak under the door. They do this multiple times a day until I chase them out of my backyard. They’re not the world’s most intelligent beings, so they fumble around my backyard looking for an exit, until finally returning to their entrance and ducking out. I have to chase them back to their spot in order for them to figure it out, which is both hilarious and frustrating. I have still yet to understand what it is they hope to find in my backyard, but they are quite persistent.

Given that is about to be the 5^th night of Passover, I am making a valiant attempt to keep Passover in my village. This isn’t exactly difficult, given that nothing my family gives me for food is off limits for this holiday. The problem becomes, everything I use to supplement my diet (chips from America, cookies bought from the boutique, bean/egg sandwiches) is.

Today, in an effort to battle my hunger, I went to the “market” (a woman selling vegetables under a bamboo roof with no sides) and spent the equivalent of $9.80 on food for my family. You may wonder, those of you in America, what you can buy with that much money. That answer is as follows:

4.4 lbs. beans (2 kg)
4.4 lbs. potatoes
4.4 lbs. onions
2.2 lbs. cabbage
1.1 lbs. carrots

My nutritious bonanza immediately paid dividends, as my lunch bowl (in addition to its usual glob of leaf sauce), contained multiple potatoes, an entire carrot, half a head of cabbage, and plenty of delicious onions. Life’s little pleasures.

For those of you wondering what’s going on in Dabo, the Cabo of Southern Senegal, things are busy. Tomorrow, we are finally constructing our school garden at the middle school, a project that has been months in the making, but now everything is bought and the fence will be constructed tomorrow. The garden will be used both for education purposes as well as to supplement our school canteen.

Many schools in our area (and I imagine throughout Senegal) have canteen programs to make sure children are well-nourished. Typically, UNICEF provides giant sacks of rice, and it is up to communities to do the rest. In order to increase the nutritional value of this canteen, we are constructing a garden to grow vegetables to add to the lunch bowl (cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, etc.). I started a similar project with my elementary school a few months ago, and I have been highly impressed with how motivated they have been. We hit a rough patch there after an early project failed (I left for my In-Service Training and let’s just say they didn’t maintain it), but after challenging them to prove to me they wanted to work with me (and not just “eat money,” as the Senegalese say), things have never been better.

For the second straight year, I am helping the Dabo Middle School (Collège in French terms) participate in Peace Corps’ Michelle Sylvester Scholarship Program, recognizing the academic achievement of outstanding girls in our communities as well as encouraging them to stay in school. An early exodus from school, particularly among female students, is a big problem throughout rural Senegal, and one we seek to address by helping to pay for school fees and school supplies, as well as providing young girls and their families with recognition by the United States government as to their daughters’ academic prowess.

This year, with the help of my neighbor Kelly, we are expanding the scholarship to a town 9-10 miles down the road, Mampatim, which happens to be getting a Peace Corps volunteer in just a few weeks (more on that in a later post). In order to further recognize our girls’ academic accomplishments, we are holding the second annual Dabo Girls’ Health and Leadership Day on June 1, focusing on sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention, as well as empowering these students to stay in school and become leaders in their communities.

I have some fun projects planned for the near future as well. I plan to start screening movies, since USAID generously donated a projector. I’m going to start with something in the vein of the BBC Planet Earth series, since I think giant nature videos will hopefully be shocking (in a good way) to students who’ve never left the region of Kolda. We’ll hopefully then move in to movies dubbed in French, but I haven’t really fully thought this out.

Since I find that blogging begets blogging, I’m hoping that posting from my hut will be just the motivation I need to keep up with this more often.

Stay classy everyone, and I hope to see you when I go back to visit the States in August.

After presidential candidate John F. Kennedy announced his proposal to form the Peace Corps on November 2, 1960, his opponent, Richard Nixon, labeled the idea “a cult of escapism” and “a haven for draft dodgers.”

When I read Nixon’s comments in Worldview, “The Magazine of the National Peace Corps Association,” I had to say I agreed with half of it (the draft dodger part isn’t all that relevant anymore). Joining Peace Corps in a way is an escape.

It’s an escape from a 9 to 5. An escape from structure. An escape from traditional responsibility.

But it’s not. Peace Corps forces you to analyze yourself in a way that you never have before.  After all the free time to read, hang out with Senegalese friends, family and co-workers, listen to podcasts and go for scenic bike rides, what you’re left with is time in your own head.

We have a long-running joke here in Senegal that Peace Corps forces you to reflect on even the most innocuous of moments. When you see other volunteers once every week or so, then spend the rest of the time speaking local language, you tend to reflect on those moments, for good or bad.

First there are the bad moments. You have an unproductive meeting about a project. Someone insults your language abilities. A local counterpart fails to do what they promised. This is unfortunately all too common.

Then there are the good moments. Your community is excited about a project. People compliment you on how well you speak. You see your work coming together. You visualize a project succeeding. The right people are in the right place and are happy to be working with you.
Finally, there are the truly bizarre. You realize your village has a dance club for teenagers. You realize the dance club doubles as a place where taekwondo is taught. You’re told that elsewhere in the village is a separate facility where they teach karate. Only in Dabo, the village where ordinary things seem extraordinary and the truly bizarre is a daily occurrence.

I spent the last week visiting 15 schools in the greater Dabo area. My interactions varied from lukewarm to downright encouraging, based primarily on how the school directors felt about being in their villages. The ones who were itching to leave came off as such. The ones at home in their villages were welcoming and excited for the opportunity to work with Peace Corps.

Students at these schools are always excited to see volunteers. I went on a tour of a school four miles from Dabo, and was sung to by students in some of the classes. I’m not sure if they’d ever seen an American before. I suspect most of them hadn’t. That will change. The village is supposed to get a volunteer soon.

Lately I’ve been sitting in on classes at the middle school and the high school in Dabo. Every time I go the teachers make a concerted effort to thank me in front of the class, and explain to the students that it’s a privilege to have me there. I can’t say I understand why that is, but I know it helps me build relationships. The students recognize me more often. They go out of their way to talk to me. They come to me with ideas. This is how projects start.

Peace Corps can be a frustrating experience. I came to my village 10 months ago, and I have little visible evidence of my service. But that’s what separates our work from NGOs. We’re embedded in our communities. We create work from the inside instead of dropping by in a truck with a well. NGOs do great work. They are great partners. But their work is visible. It’s tangible. It’s emotionally simple.
Friday morning I met with a man who runs the library in Dabo. He wants to work every day, but the mayor’s office doesn’t have the money to pay him. Still, he spends his spare time organizing books, and stopping by two days a week to allow children to check out books. He doesn’t have to do this. He gets no monetary gain. But he does it anyway. It’s important to him. Literacy is a big problem in Senegal, but in my mind, an even bigger problem is under-literacy. That may be a non-existent term, yet it gets at what I want I believe. Students here are smart. They are curious. But their options are limited. Reading for pleasure consists of whatever they can get their hands on.

I met with the man at the library because a wonderful volunteer in Kaolack named Jesse Seiler is leading a project I’m involved in with an NGO named Books for Africa. Their name is self-explanatory. If we can raise enough money, they will send 22,000 books to Senegal to help out volunteers in all types of communities. This is step one. Once we get the books, we can get a full-time librarian. That is step two. I believe in this library. I believe in the power of reading. I believe in the students of Dabo. Now all they need are the resources.

If you’d like to donate, you can do so here.

In early August, I was elected the Training Coordinator for SeneGAD (Senegal Gender and Development), an organization within Peace Corps Senegal that deals with all things gender and developed-related. My primary responsibility, as one might expect from the title, is coordinating all training-related activities for SeneGAD.

I arrived a day early to prep for a four-day tournee, visiting every PST site for this stage and doing a half-hour informal conversation on issues relating to gender and development in Senegal, and approaches volunteers can take to solve them (especially in their first few months at site). I convinced my friend Leah, who broke her ankle in early July and was hanging out in Dakar recovering, to come along with me.

The tournee went well, and it was great to meet all the trainees and see all the training sites. It was strange to be at the center as a trainer, and not a trainee, but it did lead me to discover the wonder that is bumper cars in Senegal. Bumper cars would seem to be a universal concept, but they don’t translate well to Senegal. The bumper cars themselves were a lot of fun, but Senegalese people don’t actually bump in the cars. They just drive around the track trying to avoid each other, which meant we got a lot of very dirty looks when we would collide at the fastest speed possible.

Other highlights of being in Thies included my first (and second) ever trip to Massa Massa, a classy French restaurant which features probably the best food in Thies. Between my two trips I had lasagna, osso bucco, potatoes au gratin and green beans in garlic. It was some of the best food I’ve had since being in Senegal, and a nice break from the rice and sauce I get in village.

I spent the weekend in Dakar, where I hosted trivia night on Friday (won by Team Dorothy and the Sapphire Claw). Saturday featured a delicious brunch cooked at a friend’s apartment, and after some work (and getting caught in a rainstorm), a bunch of us went to Happy Hour to do a fantasy football draft.

I promise I’m a Peace Corps volunteer, it’s just that my day-to-day life in village doesn’t lend itself well to blog updates. If you want to hear more about my dietary habits in village, please let me know!

Anyway, back to my time in Dakar. On Labor Day, we convinced the American Club to let us grill and have a celebration there, and cooked burgers and hot dogs next to a swimming pool. I felt very American despite being in Senegal.

I came back to the training center to help out with site announcement and to lead a session on SeneGAD. Site announcement, for the non-Peace Corps folks, is when trainees finally get to hear where they’re going to spend the next two years of their lives. For some of them, they already have a good idea of where they’re going based on language, but for others, they have no idea coming into the announcement. The trainees are blindfolded, spun around, and finally placed on a map of Senegal and handed a packet of information on their site. Finally, they all toss off the blindfolds at once to find out who their neighbors are and where they’re going to be. I have some great video of it, and again, I’ll try to put it up when I have more bandwidth.

The next day, I led my session, which consisted of an example activity trainees could do once they get to their site relating to gender norms. It led to a good discussion, then after a summary of SeneGAD and how it relates to their sectors, I was done with training. It was a lot of fun, but it was time to get back down to Kolda.

Soon after I returned, the new volunteers arrived, and we threw them a welcome party in Kolda. Wilma cooked delicious spring rolls and fried rice, we had a dance party, and I think the new volunteers coming down here had a great time. They’ll be back in a month for install, and it’ll be nice to have some fresh blood down in our regional house. For now, that’s all I got. Take care and be in touch!

P.S.-I wrote all of these stream of consciousness and didn’t edit, so apologies for any mistakes.