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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.