First day of color--thanks to CJ and Jess!And here I am...I look black in this picture (3/3 PCVs agree)Yes, I made the logo backwards. Sorry, bird. You don't get to be above the star and the morphing star. It'll be interesting to see if anyone ever notices this...There's not actually any magical shiny stuff hovering over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.The moon was out when I finished (now that's dedication for you), thus the backflash in the above picture and the aesthetically blurred one below...

Over the course of a week, Rachel (6 days) CJ (1.5 days) and I (7 days) got the Koboye World Map to the outlined stage. This is a different method than is normally used (in which you draw the grid and countries first, then color everything in, and finally draw the black lines), but I'm pretty optimistic about it. I'm hoping it'll give the map a longer life...but whether or not it does, here it is, for your viewing pleasure and whatnot.

W

(The Internet tanked before I could post this my last time down....so it's written by me-of-last-Tuesday instead of me-of-Now.)

Hello again!

After we made it to Kedougou (a pretty quick trip, although we did end up as the last two in both sept-places), we spent a few days at the regional house. We spent one more day than we wanted to, actually, because the morning we strapped all our gear to the back of the bikes, my mom's borrowed bike (which I'd fixed up for her to use) suffered a comprehensive lack of suitable front inner tube. After four or five efforts to patch it up on the road, growing increasingly thirsty, sunburned, and frustrated, we decided to backtrack and try the next day.

We did make it to village, though, fording the half-mile puddle (exactly what it sounds like), two rain-swollen creeks, and climbing up the mountain path. My mom is a real trooper--she's nearing 60 and she did a lot better than some of my young PCV cohorts have with the entire ride. Go mom! All along the way we were treated to all that is most frustrating about Pulaar and its communication foibles. If I led the way, various villagers would give me grief for 'leaving my mother behind'. If I let her go first and called the bushpath turnings out to her from behind, of course, I shouldn't have been shouting at my mother. In fact, I should've been carrying her on my bike, or buying her a car, or anything, in short, rather than what I was doing. What was I doing? Well, of course, I was causing her to suffer.

My family was overwhelmed and overjoyed to have her visit. We were lucky enough to have my 17-year-old sister visit for a week while we were there. My mom got her hair braided, learned some basic Pulaar, got caught in a rainstorm with me, pulled her own water and carried it, and went on field visits with me. We worked in my garden, did laundry, played a LOT of Bananagrams, and made up silly names for things like her crank flashlight (Cranky, since you asked).

We went to the weekly market in Katie's town, where my mom ventured out and bought some traditional Pulaar fabric with only minimal assistance from Katie while I, useless expat that I am, lounged around in Katie's yard and enjoyed her hammock. Over the course of the next few days, my mom made herself a complet with the leppi she'd bought, and wore it to the big party I threw for her.

Think about it--under $200 for a huge lunch for my entire village. We killed a goat, cooked around 100lbs of rice in 20L of oil with a few cabbages and jaxatus. And by we, I mean the women of the village. It was truly a great party...as I went to go pull water near the end of it, everyone told me that if I wanted it to be a truly great party, I should have bought them some music so they could dance all night. Ah, right. I'll import loud, expensive electricity and powerful speakers. Definitely going to do that. That wouldn't be annoying to have at all in village--Akon on repeat. Mmmm-mmm good. I told them to dance without music. As I was coming back from the well for the last time, the storm I was watching obscure ridge after ridge of hills and mountains finally reached the village and then drenched the village for around 4 hours. It was a really great way to end a party--and I mean that in every sense of the phrase. I loved the party--it was great. I'm very glad I did it. And I will never do it again.

Even though we got to get rid of the most annoying goat around.

We had planned to leave the next day, but then my mom broke her toe stumbling on her way back from the latrine late at night, so we put it off for a couple days. On the day before she was scheduled to leave, Tamba disappeared with my machete...and came back carrying a 50-lb bunch of bananas--his gift to 'his wife'. That's what he calls my mom, because I gave her the same name as Aissatou, his wife. He doesn't mean it in any predatory or disrespectful way, it's just a very affectionate way of emphasizing that she is part of the family. So he brought her 50lbs of bananas, 30lbs of which I brought back down on the back of my bike. They made carrying my bike on my shoulder a little bit complicated, but the hardest part was getting the bike up there. My mom helped me, but the first time we both underestimated how much the other person was going to lift, so I ended up nearly falling over backwards as we enthusiastically (nearly) tossed the bike over my head. But we made it to Kedougou.

She got sick for a couple days, but then we were off to Kaffrine to visit a good friend of mine who is the volunteer there. My mom and my friend really got to bond over gardening, and it was fun to see her site, since she's seen mine. After that, we went to Dakar and spent a couple nights in the Fana Hotel, and attended the newest stage's swear-in ceremony at the US Ambassador's residence before heading to Lampoul with my friend Teresa and riding some camels, staying in Bedouin-style tents, and meeting some delightful French tourists, Paul and his daughter Margo. My mom said the tents were way too warm, but Teresa and I thought it was nice and cozy. That's acclimation for you.

After Lampoul, my mom and I spent a couple days in Thies, and then went back to Dakar for my birthday. We stayed at a really nice place that overlooks the straight between Ngor and Ngor Island, and went out to the island to have dinner with Mark and Brigette that evening. All in all, it was a delightful birthday, even though my mom had to fly out very early the next morning. I took her to the airport, and then discovered an ingenious way to get a great fare from a taxi from the airport with minimal bargaining. You just walk over to the arrivals area--the taxis aren't supposed to pick people up there, because they're basically hopping the line that waits at the departures area. But the pseudocops can't really enforce that very well, so you go up to a cab and tell them a ridiculously low price (i.e. the price for any normal Senegalese person to go where you're headed). They'll agree, so you quick hop in the back and off you go. Much safer than walking out to the Rte de l'Aeroport.

For the next couple of days, I stayed with Mark and Brigette and worked my tail off on the application for the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. When I'd turned it in, I went down to Kedougou like a bat out of, well...and went back to village. While I'd been having my birthday, the new stage had installed, and so it was fun to come back and have new people in the region.

In November, there was harvest in village--fonio, peanuts, corn, beans, millet, sorghum...I spent a lot of time handwriting the many drafts of my NSF Predoctoral Fellowship application and my graduate school applications. I felt sort of like Abe Lincoln, actually. Except, I'm pretty sure he didn't sit on one plastic bucket and stack two others to write by candlelight with a ballpoint pen on graph paper. But the candlelight is definitely a similarity. Anyhow, I bought my tickets to come to the US for unofficial graduate school interviews, turned in my applications, and then headed back up to Dakar with CJ and Yasmin (the two new Ag PCVs) for the Sustainable Agriculture summit. Right after the summit, I discovered I'd lost my wallet in Dakar.

Luckily, neither my personal passport nor my Peace Corps government passport and WHO card were in my wallet. So, I lost some trivial things, but nothing hugely important. And in early December, I flew to New York to visit Andrew and Paul before going on my whirlwind grad school tour.

Andrew took me shopping for presentable clothing and bought me lunch--both completely lifesaving things to do. Especially given how much I truly am bad at shopping for clothes. Paul fed me all sorts of delicious food over the course of the long weekend he and his housemate were kind enough to let me spend at their place. He also took me on walks all over the city (with an emphasis on bridges, photography, architecture, and gallery exhibits). It was wonderful to feel chilly and to have the acres of conversations we had...also to walk in companionable silence. I really can't say how much I like New York City in general--and I know everyone's going to disagree--but it seems awfully clean and polite to me. Everyone's courteous, and there's hardly any trash around at all.

Okay, I promise I'm not a bot, but MegaBus. Gosh. I'm so impressed by MegaBus. I paid (well, actually, a friend paid, and I still haven't paid him back) $13.50 for a wireless-equipped four-hour ride to Boston South Station. How is that even possible? What will they think of next, in the magical land of the USA?

In Boston, I got to spend a bunch of time with a finals-stressed Maddy. The time was good, regardless, and I also got to talk to two really awesome professors about possibly working in their labs. I was blown away by how relieved I was to discuss science with people, and to have many of those conversations under many different circumstances. The campus was impressive, the students and professors interesting, hospitable, helpful, forthright and encouraging. The department to which I'm applying seems like it'd be a great fit for me, and I'm excited to think I might have a chance at getting in, despite having forgotten a word or two of English during my talk at a lab meeting. (Yes. I forgot the word for 'production' and asked a room full of non-Pulaar speakers "...does anyone know the word for 'fewnugol ngol'? It's like....when you're making something? The making of something? OH! 'Production'...right...")

Another highlight of Boston was that Kevin, bless him, came all the way from Ithaca to spend most of a day with me. I can't really tell you how much that meant to me, or how much I enjoyed it.

From Boston, I flew to Toronto, where I met more amazing, kind, interesting, helpful, brilliant scientists. I loved the campus, the professors I talked to, and the potential lab. It was also my first experience with real cold (something I really miss here, if you hadn't heard). I stayed with some wonderful undergraduates, got to talk to a lot of really great, bright scientists, both professors and students, and came away with a really positive impression. Oh, and the undergrads I stayed with taught me how to play Settlers of Catan. I was resistant to learning to play it (the same way as I was resistant to reading Terry Pratchett for the longest time), but it's. Just. Awesome.

Toronto to Austin was the next leg of the trip. (I had to go in and out of security twice because of snowstorms and flight cancellations, but the CanadaAir people were incredibly helpful. They caught the problem before it became one and routed me more efficiently--one less stop--and cheerfully. So, go them!) Rob and Beth put me up and facilitated my getting a tour from Nichole...neither of the professors I'd like to work with, potentially, were there. But Rob, Beth, and Nichole pulled out all the stops and showed me research stations, greenhouses, tons of butterflies, the student radio station, the turtle pond, the program secretary (who knows everything there is to know and who was also incredibly helpful) and the phenomenon that is deep-fried avocado tacos. I can't thank them enough for their kindness, generosity, hospitality and patience. Hooray, Austin!

From Austin to Denver--I nearly didn't catch my plane. Thankfully, the security people looked at my Peace Corps ID and my flight time, and were very, very helpful. From Denver airport, I went to Golden, showered at my dad's place, and then we went over to Boulder for my last two meetings. I got to meet students from the two labs I'm interested in, and went to lunch with one of the labs. Then I went to the other lab and was able to talk with Susan, a student who's doing her Ph.D (partially) on a sister system to the one I looked at in Costa Rica. We had a great time talking--she gave me a lot of her time. Boulder's campus is gorgeous, and of course it's pretty close to home (relatively). And, unlike anywhere else, it does have mountains. This isn't a dealbreaker, but when I saw the Rockies from the plane, I choked up a little bit. So sue me, I love my mountains.

Just to be clear: I love Peace Corps, and my stage-, sector-, and region-mates, but I do miss the kinds of discussions I got to have while I was visiting schools. It was like getting a drink of water after a long, dry hike.

After Boulder, I finished turning in my applications! I had dinner with my younger brother and my dad! My dad and I drove over the mountains! I got to see my stepmom and her mom and brother, which was really great. I also got to meet my mom's huge dog (who is incredible), and just got to spend a bunch of time at home--both of them.

Not a lot of snow happened. But then, right as I was planning to leave for three days or so in New York to see more of Andrew, and to see EmN and Jess...the weather started dumping on NYC. Great. I spent 6 hours on the phone fighting with airlines, was postponed a day, and then flew through DC, where Ari and Sophie came to my rescue by providing me with a couch, breakfast, and a ride to the same airport from which I initially departed for Senegal.

Upon arrival, I went to Mark and Brigette's and worked on my last application, turning it in 30 minutes before the new year. Woo-hoo! I came back down to Kedougou. We're going to try to adapt Fern Gully for the Earth Day radio show. I wrote a new version of Cinderella, which I'm now translating for radio, also.

I'm in terrible shape for biking up and down the mountain, but that's okay. I'm also a lot healthier than when I left. It was great to get back to village, and my geckos were happy to see me. How do I know? Well, now one of them talks to me from wherever he is in the hut. And if I talk to him (mimicking his noises), he'll answer me. So, now I don't just have pets, I have a roommate. So that's fun.

We also had a regional retreat for a couple days at a nice campement in Mako, which is maybe an hour away from Kedougou. It was good, productive, interesting, all those great things that you always want a regional retreat to be and only sometimes end up achieving. Tomorrow I'm going up the mountain in the Peace Corps car to help set up Katie's site for her replacement (congratulations, Katie! Newest Kedougou RPCV!), and then we're going to my site to keep working on the world map mural that's in the works. We means me and Rachel (a new AgFo PCV), and possibly CJ. CJ might not come, but we'll see.

Other than that...I should start hearing from grad schools in the next three weeks or so. I should also put a caveat here that my descriptions of schools shouldn't be taken to be intentionally denigrating of any of them. I loved all the places I visited, and any disparaging or belittling comment I may've inadvertently made is simply a result of it being very late and my wanting to go to bed so that I can get up and get on the car nice and early tomorrow morning.

In a couple weeks I'll be heading up to Tamba to help translate for the eye clinic there, so I hope I can post pictures of the finished world map at that point, and also get back into the habit of updating the blog more often. Until then!

Hello! Thank you for your patience. First I got behind because I was busy, and then I became overwhelmed at the amount of things I had to chronicle, and there you have it: five months explained. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll give a much better explanation (or at least a summary) in the following.

I’ve offended Kate by not mentioning her visit to my site. First. (This is an inserted paragraph.) She did visit my site, and we played lots of cards and had a lot of fun. She made fun of me, and facilitated my family’s laughing uproariously…which is sort of impressive, given that she doesn’t speak much Pulaar at all. A good time was had by all, and Kate, I’m sorry I didn’t say right out at first how much I enjoyed your visit.

The rainy season really hit us hard starting in mid-August. My hut leaks in a problematic way on the uphill side, so it wasn’t an unremitting joy to have four or five torrential downpours per week. But as an alternative to the long trek to water, I’ll definitely take it. Right around Korite (the end of Ramadan celebration), I was in Kedougou for a mail run and a radio show, and got caught in town because the Gambia River rose until it was too wide for the normal barge to cross it, too fast to cross in a little paddled boat they use for backup, and all the way over the honest-to-goodness bridge in Samecouta. So, I got stuck in Kedougou.

This didn’t make my Senegalese family very happy, but it didn’t break my heart at all. Why? Didn’t I come to Senegal to get the full cross-cultural experience? Well, yes, I did. But my experience with holidays here is fairly varied—and the way they end up being celebrated is not varied at all, at least with respect to me. First, we all dress up (so for me, Senegalese clothes, which somehow manage to feel billowy and huge while being constricting and tight at the same time), and then we kill an animal. Because it’s a special day, we’ll snack on little bits of barbecued meat, and then for lunch there will be an oil sauce that has some macaroni, some deep-fried potatoes, and various tube meat bits on a bunch of white rice. There will be onions, but very seldom will there be other vegetables (although credit where credit’s due, the time that I brought raisins, they tossed those into the sauce too). Then for dinner, there’s the head of whatever unfortunate animal drew the short straw, stewed with some onions and flavor cubes (MSG) over some corn couscous.

So, it’s not a very exciting food day for me. Nor a fun clothes day. What pushes it over the edge is that a whole passel of Senegalese men come to visit from other villages. Because they don’t know me, and the culture isn’t really conducive to much circumspect behavior, at least where interacting with a Strange White Female…there’s an awful lot of “Hey! Hey Whitey! Where’s your man? Take me to America/Give me money/Some other annoying and reductive request!” This isn’t maliciously meant. It’s usually just in fun (although if I acceded to the request, I bet you dollars to donuts it wouldn’t be refused), but as my village says, it is not pleasing to me. So missing Korite wasn’t a heartbreak. And missing Tabaski in November was similarly un-heartbreaking.

After Korite it was time for the demystification of the new Ag/AgFo/SED stage. And, because Ashley’s site was getting filled with a new Ag volunteer, I got to demyst my new neighbor, CJ. We were going to get a nice, posh Peace Corps car ride up the mountain, but the car got stuck in the mud (notice a trend?) while delivering some other trainees to their demyst site. So CJ and I heroically strapped our stuff to our bikes and set out. We forded creeks with our bikes on our heads, slipped in calf-deep mud, and made it ¾ of the way up the mountain before the sun set. Undaunted, we used our flashlights to make out enough of the path to get home before dinner.

CJ is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty dang awesome. He kicked my butt going up the mountain, but not in an arrogant way. We had a great time—we went to one of my farmers’ fields—allegedly about 100 meters across the Guinean border, we swam, we napped, and on the way back into Kedougou, we visited his new village. He’s very enthusiastic about learning Pulaar, and is probably going to get involved in radio. We really hit it off (right, CJ?) and we’re planning all kinds of interesting collaborations with my other new neighbor, Jess (who replaced Kevin), and fun adventures on bikes, foot, and anything else we can think of. In CJ’s words, “If I had had any doubts about how awesome Peace Corps service can be, this trip has totally removed them. I’m so excited!” He probably had the best demyst experience in Senegal, if I do say it myself.

Right after demyst, I took a bus up to Dakar with Sheila and Tim, who were COSing. It was sad to see them go, but I was also excited because my mom arrived for a month-long visit! She was a real trooper, too. After more than 16 hours of airplane business, I pulled her out of the airport, put her in a cab, and immediately got into the last two seats of a sept-place to Tamba. She can tell you the story of the trip better than I can, but it was sort of long and sort of crowded.

I’m having trouble focusing because David’s opening a very large CARE package two inches from my shoulder. Mom’s visit and the other four months: next time (which won’t be long from now).

In 1 year I have:

Written 23 blog posts

Gotten on antibiotics 3 times

Visited the US once

Eaten more Biskrem than I can count

Gotten two new names and families

Planted an awful lot of trees

Learned a new language (and pretty much lost my French)

Helped build the hut in which I now live

Gotten more marriage proposals than I've eaten Biskrem

Applied for and gotten a grant to get two-ish wells dug in village

Fallen in love with a giant mahogany tree

Learned to say "I told you so" in Pulaar (Wanna mi halani maa?)

Been to Dakar 8 times, although that's pretty nitpicky. It's really more like 3.

Could've been more communicative, but in spite of the lapse since my last post, I've been pretty chatty so far, yes?

The wells are done. Have I already said that? It's a big deal. The seed-extension corn has sprouted, the beans are doing fine, my garden has produced radishes and lots of buggy curcurbits. I squish the beetles and their babies, and hope that reincarnation doesn't exist, because if so, I'm definitely going to be a beetle in my next twenty lives and get squished over and over...

Before I left my village for the VAC meeting (Volunteer Advisory Committee) in Dakar (to which I ended up not going, woops), I harvested a ton of moringa (M. oleifera) leaves from two intensive beds in my garden. I've been trying to talk up intensive beds (good for fast leaf-production, and the leaves of the Moringa trees are incredibly nutritious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moringa_oleifera ) for about 2 months now, so it was a bit of a surprise to hear about five women ask me "Where can I get leaves that easily? How did you do that?" But, I guess this is what I was hoping for with this garden of mine--do weird things and hope that people seeing the weird things pay off and then imitate them.

Triumph?

Lately, it's begun to seem even more complicated--I know the three official Peace Corps goals, and I can remember a lot of the Peace Corps / Senegal Agriculture goals and objectives. But I'm not convinced that if I fulfill them I should feel as if I've accomplished something. It's not apathy, exactly, and it's not that I don't care about my job (or my effect), but everything seems too complicated to nail down into "This is a good thing I've done". Because even if it seems good, it's not necessarily permanent, and the degree to which I've done it is pretty debatable. Of course, for now, it's nice. But I'm having a really hard time feeling that warm fuzzy "I'm helping to save the world" feeling I thought I'd get from having successful projects. Oh well--maybe it's still to come.

We have a house meeting at which we'll be talking about the sexism issue, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm not looking forward to it, because I have this terrible expectation (probably unreasonable. I hope so) that I'm about to get scapegoated.

My mom bought tickets to come visit me later this fall, so that's pretty exciting.

A couple weeks ago, my friend Susan, a PCV from midcountry, came to visit me, and we went to Ingli, which is this really beautiful waterfall. Turns out, it's technically a few hundred meters into Guinea, too. We rode out the dirt road heading toward Salemata, then hung a left and a quick right and spent a few hours following convoluted dirt pathways until...Susan got a flat tire. I stayed behind with her to fix it, and Sheila and Katie went on ahead, telling us they were going to leave flags at each fork they took (it was getting dark, and we wanted to get camp set up before that, so it made sense). After Susan fixed her bike, about 100m later its gears gave up the ghost, so we started walking. Got to a fork in the road...and there were no flags.

A long and frustrating time later, during which we tried to figure out how to go get Katie and Sheila from wherever they'd gone (we'd met Frank on the road and he'd told us which fork to take, although he hadn't seen them), we made it to the falls to find Katie and Sheila swimming.

Eventually we had a good time making s'mores (Thank you Lauren! For the amazing package!) and crawled into bed...to get drenched from 2:30am onward by a massive rainstorm. It rains a lot in Guinea. Katie and Sheila left the next morning; Susan and I stayed another night. Had a nice calm day, in which we ended up eating a lot of spam-knockoff sandwiches, since all the wood was too wet to make a fire. Went to bed after finishing the cold s'mores materials (mmm, no, really)...and the next day we headed out early, since the rain that began at 4am wasn't letting up much.

On the way there, we'd had to carry our bikes through a waist-deep river/creek, then carry our gear across over a very rickety "Africa Bridge" This bridge was basically 8 2-ply steel cables (a thin pencil in diameter): four had finger-thickness sticks woven and laced through them and made up the bridge deck, and four worked as handrails, that were tied to each other and the decking every two meters or so. On the way back, the water was much too high (and the current too strong) to ford with bikes...so we took them across the scary bridge.

Scary's the word for it, too. I don't like water, as most of you probably know, and I also don't like wiggling things above the water that might cause me to fall into it, so after Susan had gotten her bike across and I edged out onto the span, my legs were pretty shivery. Inch the bike forward, inch the feet forward, take a breath, continue. This worked fine until a stick snapped under my left foot, letting it poke through the bottom of the bridge in a sort of cartoonish way. The stick made a theatrically understated 'plob' as it hit the water. And of course, because I'd moved my weight to my right foot (and the bike was on my right side), the back wheel of my unladen bike slid off the other side and was caught by my panicky grabbing lurch and the seat's getting tangled in the handrail wires.

I eventually made it across, and Susan and I eventually made it back to Kedougou. We spent the night and the next morning there, and then went up to my site. It was a really great visit, and it was a lot of fun to get to know her--she's a great person to go camping with. I don't know of anyone else with whom a camping trip where neither of us got any sleep because we were massively rained and cold spam was the sole menu attraction would've been filled with hysterical laughter.

First of all, thanks to Six Senses Resorts and Spas for funding my well project in full. I really appreciate it, and so does my village.

It's been a tough couple of weeks up at site, although there is now water in the well, which changes a lot of things. For one, I no longer carry my laundry a total of around 46 km to wash it--I and my clothes are a lot cleaner these days. Since Mari left, I've been helping Aissatou cook, thus learning a lot about how to cook Senegalese food. Know what that means? It means that when I get back, I can provide nearly-authentic cuisine...for now, though, to business.

Peace Corps feels to me to be largely an exercise in controlling stressors, one long balancing act. The toughest one for me (and I think other women here) to deal with is balancing between cultural expectations of women and having any self-respect: sexism. In any given day, any man I meet--and many that already know me--will ask me within the first two minutes of speaking to me, "Where's your husband?" (the 'polite' ones will ask HOW he is--no answer will let me escape the following exchange). I can deny that I have one, or tell them he's in America, or tell them he's shopping 'over there', it won't matter. The next question (it counts as a question, because culturally, you respond as if it were) is, "So, I'll be your husband." I can say yes, or I can say no, it won't matter. There is no escape until we're several minutes in and I explain that no, it's not because I'm racist, it's not because I don't like black men, it's not for any reason other than I do not like men who treat me the way that they treat me. I'm tired of having to come up with reasons not to marry rude strangers. "Because I don't want to," should be reason enough, but just try explaining that in the American cultural [hetero]norm a man has to woo a woman, convince her that he can make her happy. "I can make women happy--I'll eat the food you cook, give you babies, and make money so you can have lots of pretty clothes," was the response I got when I tried. Of course, any more successful and I'd probably just have Senegalese guys giving me stuff trying to get me to like them...as horrible as it is, it might be easier this way. Yuck.

It's no fun, interacting with men (and a lot of women) who think that a woman's place is in the kitchen and the bedroom (and pulling water, washing clothes, and taking care of kids) only, and have no cultural taboo against expressing this in nearly the coarsest of terms. Why would they be ashamed? That's what women are for.

Female volunteers deal with this all the time, and I think it is probably one reason that it seems like so many more men extend their service than women do. And being in the pervasively sexist culture seems to make the male volunteers--or many of them--forget the extent to which they need to actively be feminists.

Men here (PCVs) have a hard job. They're part of a demographic group that oppresses another one very categorically, and they don't believe that's right. But it's exhausting to do battle over it all the time, especially because there really isn't any cultural space for the kind of rhetoric involved. "Stop hitting your wife, hitting wives is bad/unjust/etc" is all very well, but so much of everyone's identity here (Senegalese) is tied up in sex (which is the same thing as gender in this conservative society). And women have a function, which means you get a certain amount of, "He's my man, you stay out of this, he'll hit me if he wants to!". So, nobody wants to do battle over sexism (especially) all the time every day. I can't blame the men (PCV) for bowing out. I wish I could bow out--I do, sometimes. There are times when I lie and say that I'm married and going to go back to the states and have kids; or I don't speak up when a man orders his wife around. You can't fight all the time--but as women, here, we don't have a lot of choice. For the most part, it's one long fight.

It's really hard to be a woman here--and I hate saying things that reinforce gender stereotypes or exclude anyone from understanding based on a demographic identity. Here is one of the few times it is appropriate. None of the women here like to say that the men (PCV) 'don't get it' because they're men. It sounds mean, and condescending, and bratty. Be that as it may, it's true. So we don't say it, and we try to ignore it when the omnipresent sexism leaks into their brains and they're rude to us. Or they fail to back us up. Or they act in ways that require us to assert ourselves as real people and then are very rude and denigrating when we try to do so. And know what's even worse? That the sexism and assumption of second-class citizen gets into our brains, and we start to act and think as though, because we're women, we should be quiet/not confront/not offer opinions.

To the male PCVs, I understand not wanting to fight, fight, fight about it all the time. I just want you to remember that some of us do not have the option of bowing out, because just to get away from it a little, we have to totally buy into the culture and say, functionally, "Yes, you're right, I'm property, but I'm not yours." Just as you balance between interfering every second and choosing not to do so, we balance between being treated as if we were property and trying not to sound condescending and whiny. It's difficult for everyone. But yes, it's harder for us.

A lighter note--sort of--is the Senegalese sense of humor. In my village, the sense of humor has been coming across as really judgmental lately. Visitors show up and call out to me, "Mari Keita, where's my breakfast?""What?""Where's my breakfast? Didn't you cook? Give me food.""I didn't cook breakfast for you--the food's all gone.""You can't cook.""True, I don't cook Senegalese food.""You can't cook at all. And you don't speak Pulaar.""What am I speaking now?""I said, 'Where is my breakfast' and you said 'what'--you don't understand anything.""I said 'What' because you didn't greet me."

And so on. I forget, a lot of the time, that it's supposed to be fun, that they're just playing. Most of the time it seems pretty mean-spirited to me, but fine. Aissatou pulled me aside the other day and reminded me, "They're just making jokes, Mariama.""But Aissatou, they're not funny.""They're jokes. So, you should laugh.""But they don't make me laugh.""That's because you don't know that they're jokes.""Aissatou...in America, jokes are supposed to make you laugh because...they MAKE you laugh" (there is no word for 'funny')"Yep. And here it's the same. When someone makes a joke, you laugh.""Even if the joke doesn't make you laugh?""Jokes make everyone laugh.""Not me.""That's because you don't know that they're jokes.""...Ah."

Amusingly (and it's amusing to me in an infinitely metarecursive loop), my village thinks I have no sense of humor. Maybe it's telling that there's no word for 'funny'...

In other news, I'm chugging along at grad school applications. Anyone that wants to help me revise my essays, just say so.

Byron and Kenny's adventure

Byron and Kenny were complete heroes on their trip up the mountain. After getting into the Kedougou garage at around midnight (after their car hit a cow), they were up at 7, raring to go. I was not really feeling excited about the ride because I was still physically exhausted from my long ride and subsequent lack of sleep plus more riding. We rounded up what we thought were rideable house bikes for the two of them, grabbed some stuff from the boutique, and set off. We got to the barge to cross the Gambia River, and about halfway across, I realized that what I had thought was a big bundle in the back of the truck we'd squeezed on around in fact was a brown fleece blanket wrapped around a long package. On a stretcher. And then I realized that it looked like feet at one end (underneath the blanket). In one of my celebrated less-than-eloquent, less-than-articulate utterances I turned to Byron and Kenny and said, "Uh, guys? That guy, I think he's dead or something!" Disconcerting experience, but not day-ruining. But nor was it the best of omens.

On the other side of the river, Kenny's bike gave up. We fiddled with it, but after a couple kilometers, it became apparent that there was nothing we knew how to do to fix it. I think I was the one (but it may have been one of them) who suggested turning it into a fixed gear bike by shortening the chain. Over an hour later (just before the self-imposed deadline of "If we can't finish it by 11, we'll go back"), we'd finished fiddling with it, having been the object of fascinated observation by at least six passing groups of Senegalese people and two cows. Everyone commented, everyone would have tried to be helpful had we asked, and we were very glad when each moved on. The cows weren't that disruptive.

I switched to the BFG (Bike of the Fixed Gear), Kenny rode my bike (Blue Nellie), and we went along maybe 5km more. Then Byron's bike's back wheel's rachet started to give out, making the chain tension pretty erratic. We pressed on. I was exhausted, because riding a fixed gear when you're with two people who aren't is a tough proposition. But we made tracks, and I felt bad asking either of them to take the BFG because I don't know how much biking they do and at least I know the path. Plus, in spite of my reputation, I'm a lot nicer than I have obligation to be. At the forage at the base of the mountain, Byron and I switched bikes.

Kenny and Byron are possibly the most determinedly positive people I've ever gone on a Murphy's Law adventure with. Not once did they complain, whine, groan, bellyache, or otherwise indulge in negativity. Not even when they saw the path we were going to go up, not even when we had to stop and just sit for a while to get our breaths back. I tossed them ORS packets, they drank them, and when they started to smile a bit, we kept going. "We have SO MUCH respect for you right now!" they kept saying. Eventually, we made it to the top, then to my village.

Where my family had not saved us any lunch. We ate raw peanuts, bathed in water we borrowed from Aissatou, and then went to get water. They each scooped a bidon of water out of the spring, carried it up to the bikes, and pushed the bikes back to the compound. In spite of not being used to the biketrek with water, they never complained, not even when the gear of Byron's bike perforated his leg a bit.

Another wonderful thing about having them visit is that far from turning up their noses at my "just weird, but whatever, if you like it" (according to other volunteers) normal village standby of oatmeal, dried refried beans, flax seeds, and hot water, they wolfed it down with me. It rained, with terrific lightning and thunder, and we all slept like dead things. The next morning, I took them to the edge of the mountain, said goodbye, and went back to my hut.

Where I subsequently collapsed. It was, I think, mere physical exhaustion. In any case, it was a controlled collapse--a lot like when you get sick after a period of stress, except without the actual being sick, which was a nice change. I drank water, ate, and slept, reading intermittently. The next day I was less incapacitated, but not operating at full. I built a couple bamboo chairs, seeded my garden a bit, and mulched the bed to which I am planning to eventually outplant my tomatoes.

Mariama leaving

The lowlight (not highlight) of the last week in village was definitely Friday night, when I went out to ask Aissatou a trivial question, and her reply was something like, "Oh, there's a fire for the guest. Mariama is leaving tomorrow."

"What? Tomorrow? For where?"

"Her husband's house."

"In Tambacounda?"

"Yes."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"She's leaving tomorrow and going all the way to Tamba and she isn't coming back?"

"Right."

"Oh."

I refused to eat, called my mom, sat in my latrine, and cried. It may be the best deal she is going to get out of life, and she will probably eventually like it more than village itself, and it gets her away from her terrible mother-in-law (the one I have taught that "Crazy Old Bat" is a term of respect in English) who refuses to feed her and beats people with large bamboo sticks. But it was still pretty upsetting.

The next day I tried to explain to Aissatou that the reason I was having such a hard time is because they gave me no warning. While I was trying to explain, I was tearing up and my voice got sort of scratchy. Aissatou said, "Don't cry! Don't cry!"

Initially I thought that was just another cultural thing, but she kept repeating it. "Don't cry! Don't cry! If you cry, I am going to cry!" And I saw that she was serious, that seeing me nearly cry was opening up all of the sadness she felt at having her daughter leave home with basically no warning, to live far away and not come back very often at all. So I stopped myself from tearing up anymore, and went to finish mulching my garden.

Three minor observations that are more positive:

Cinnamon rice

Rice with cinnamon and sugar is a wonderful thing to eat when the sauce tastes like rotten fish. Thank you, Aunt Teresa.

SOS

Is what it says on the back of one of the t-shirts I have taken to wearing in village. I was hanging out with my 12-year-old brother the other day and he said, "Sauce."

"Sauce?"

"I eat sauce on my rice."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your shirt. It says 'sauce'"

"...so it does..."

Bananagrams

I am making quite a name for myself as unbeatable at Bananagrams, although often this involves Meera (for example) making much cooler words than I do. Still...it's nice to know that all that solo practice up at site makes a difference...wherever I go to grad school, I will have to start a Bananagrams club.

And with that, it's up to village I go for another ten days or until I can't deal with it anymore. It's a difficult period, but so it goes. Soon, soon, soon, there will be water in the well and vegetables in my garden. And that will be nice.

I do not like asking for money, so I'm not going to.

Appropriate Projects funded my well project, though, and they asked me to post the link to the project page on their site.

I appreciate that they are funding this, and there are a couple pictures of my site up there, too, so if only for the photo value (and to boost their hits, which I think helps them in some obscure-to-me way), you might want to check it out.

But I don't want you to contribute money because it's my project. If you think it's a good idea, or for some reason would back it even if I were not involved, then by all means, please contribute. But I hate, absolutely can't stand, it when people hit up family and friends for money.

I guess that's more than enough overclarification.

Because our Internet was struck by lightning (no, really, and it fried the router AND the region's external hard drive), I don't have a lot of time, and because I'm exhausted, this will be sorta quick. I'm sorry I haven't been posting more often; I'll try to fix it when I'm back down in Kedougou in ... about a week. After that, though, I am going to try to be out for a little over a month.

Well update

Both new walls for both of the wells went up just fine, but because the rainy season started (whew!), our digger had to go back to his home village to start farming. I can't really hold it against him, but I did not pay him in full, either. He had gotten to the point of pulling out wet dirt (not mud), and wants to come back next year. Actually what he said was that he wants to come back in January, when his harvest is done, but that struck me as one of the head-against-the-wall lack-of-logic situations so common here. Why "finish" the well when the water table is high? I mean, other than that it is less digging that way. To his credit, he agreed to come back next time the water table is low and finish digging. Current feeling on the well project: I'm glad I started this year. And I really, really wish that the water table would come back up so that I wouldn't have to make a kilometer trek for water. It's not a big deal, but it is one of those things that wears you down after a while.

Termites/ants in hut

Those of you who know me know that I love hymenopterans. Even honeybees. Even though they attacked us. But now that the termites are chewing my new roof down around my ears (and itty bitty pieces of thatch are ITCHY), I am reconsidering my opposition to spray poison. And those ants that bite me every time I sit down on my floor? Seriously unwelcome. Luckily, though, the skinks (I named them all Spink, to keep it simple) and geckos (all named Forcible--yes, the names are a Coraline reference) are eating them as fast as they can. Not fast enough to keep me from being itchy and antbitten, but I bet it'd be worse if I didn't have them.

Map at Frank's

At the beginning of June, I biked 40-odd km out to Frank's village where I helped him paint a world map at his village's school. One of the most recently installed stage, Meera, came and hung out with us for a day, helped us draw and paint, and that was a lot of fun. From Frank's, I went via a bushpath through Jordan's old village, a few others, and ended up at Eric's. He'd gone to the weekly market one village more along the road, so I rode there and had lunch with Eric and Hannah at her house, hung out for a while, and then tackled the 28km to Kedougou. It was quite possibly the most beautiful ride I've taken yet. The grass and trees were newly green, the dirt was really red, the sky (finally!) was blue instead of a sulky yellow-gray, and the road seemed to tip just slightly downhill for at least half of the way back to Kedougou. When I got off my bike, it seemed like the world was moving farther away from me, because my eyes had become so acclimated to the scenery zipping by. I subsequently got really sick, though (that night and the next day in Kedougou). Thanks to Melanie for sitting and keeping me company while I lay on the ground and puked.

Radio

Thomas, our regional radio guru, is out of town this month, so it's been interesting trying to cover for him. Last week I completely failed--live, on the air--at keeping the conversational ball in the air. Granted, I was the only one on the air (we had scheduled an interview, but the guy never showed up). In any case, this week was AMAZING (the guy showed up). I don't know what we are doing next week, but I hope it can be done without me, because I don't want to ride in that soon. Why?

The 100km Ride

On Thursday, I rode back from Leah's (another one of the most recent stage). Her site is around 100km out, and though all but the first 30km are on a paved road, it was still a long day. I rolled into Kedougou, ate everything that was not nailed down, and then slept the sleep of the justly exhausted. Friday I rested. Saturday I went to my village. Sunday I worked in my garden (see below). Monday (today) I rode to Ashley's old village to drop off more seeds, and then into Kedougou to DJ the radio show and pick up two of my stagemates from Kaolack who want to visit me. They do not know what is in store for them, bikewise. Best of luck, Byron and Kenny.

Development and Aid

I've become increasingly uneasy about the ethics of Peace Corps and International Development/Aid NGOs in the past month or so. To put it really succinctly (I've become adept at this), I often feel that my very presence here exacerbates the tendency of many Senegalese people to wait for an NGO/Development/Aid organization to fix a problem rather than fix it themselves. I've heard from a lot of people who find this thought very offensive--coldhearted, even. I'm not going to go into it here, but for those of you whose immediate reaction is jaw-dropped astonishment that I could be so cruel and heartless, let me ask you exactly how you think, say, Senegal, is going to become self-sufficient (in any way) if the problems it experiences are all eventually solved by (or solution-determined/initiated/paid for by) Rich Other Countries. For an economics perspective, check out The White Man's Burden, by (someone) Easterly. It's not a very pleasant or convenient truth, but aren't we in the era of those?

Garden

So in my effort to find a way to be here that is not contrary to what I believe the ultimate goal of my work here is, I have started a garden. I bought the fencing, put it up, built rock retaining walls, and am in general focusing on being different and willing to answer questions about why that is so, rather than first motivate people to want change and then find a way that they won't have to pay much to get it. That, at least, I have learned from the well fiasco.

----------------------------

If you want to discuss my views on Development/Aid work and funds, shoot me an email or comment on the blog and I'll email you. I'm not about to get in a public flame war about it, though, so be ready to (a) have an individual interaction and (b) pay attention to what I'm going to say, rather than simply lambasting me for violating a moral imperative of some sort.

But I cleared out my profile in order to keep Facebook's massively privacy-invading policies from putting everything out there. So, here they are.

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things you need to believe in the most. That people are basically good--that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything, that power and money, money and power, mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy, you remember that. Doesn't matter if they're true or not, y'see, because a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing *in.* "

--Uncle Hub, Secondhand Lions.

"So everything that doesn't fit into some stupid idea of what you think God wants you just try to hide or fix or get rid of? It's just all too much to live up to. No one fits in one hundred percent of the time. Not even you."

--Mary, Saved

"As someone had pointed out, when man first dreamed of flying he had seen himself rising on his own silver wings into the blue empyrean, but it hadn't turned out at all like that. First he was trundled to a field, then he was shut in a box, then he was terrified, then he was sick, then he was in Paris."

--Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands

"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interferences, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness -- all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands, feet, or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature's law -- and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction? "

--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do--merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. I mean, here we all are, you know, and what are we to do about it?"

--Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night)

Well, here I am, back in Kedougou, Senegal. The new stage is installing today, tomorrow, and the next day--they arrived day before yesterday, and yesterday, we took them shopping for all kinds of exciting things like door curtains, floor mats, and all kinds of plastic buckets and basins.

I can't tell you how the wells are going (or not) because I've been away for about a month. I went to Kaolack for the Ag Summit, then to Dakar, then to New York, California, and back to Dakar. I didn't post this on the blog or facebook for a few reasons: (a) I didn't have time to see everyone (b) I was trying to surprise a particular person, who was very surprised (c) I didn't want to be inundated with a to-do list of people-to-call while I was in the states and (d) I was just plain busy. But I am sorry that I didn't get to see everyone--honestly, I am.

I got to see a lot of great people, though. Got to see Heidi and Kyle get married. Got to see my best friends from high school, many of my best friends from college, my mom, my best friend from middle school, and lots of family. In short, I got a really brilliant reminder of all the ways in which I am in love with the people in my life, and that is why it is a good thing that I am back here. Doesn't follow? Yes, it does, because if I hadn't come back when I did, I think I would've lost my nerve and not torn myself away.

Things I learned:

(1) I like the city (also, The City) much more than I had thought, and would even live there one day

(2) It is surprisingly easy to switch between cultures, at least heading back to the original one. It is not as difficult as I'd expected to come back to Senegal, so far, either. Which isn't to say it's easy, but that's the risk I took

(3) It is possible, contrary to my former belief, for me to love rain even more than I did before leaving the US.

(4) I miss home.

(5) I may be becoming a similar kind of cynical to the dear, COS-ed JB. But we hope not.

(6) I missed bean sandwiches.

(7) Humid heat is really less fun than dry heat.

Anyhow, I'm back, and going up to village for a couple weeks tomorrow. Then I'll come back down, go visit a couple of the new stage with Frank or Kate, then go out to Frank's village to do a world map. When I come back, one of my friends Emily (who is a PCV) will come visit.

Not a lot of news, but at least it's an update.

The old, re-dug well. Soon it will have a new wall. When the ATM works and I can send up concrete on the Luomo Car, that is.

The digger for the new well, praying quietly while breaking the ground. He said the same phrase that people say when they're thirsty: "Offer me water."

The women, surveying their new well site.

Before getting on the Luomo Car...I got to ride in back, and savored the whole way there as time I was not riding a bike

The path branching off the main road South, to go to my village, you take a right.

“But they left out the sisters / I’ve been prayin’ to a Father God so long I really missed her / Good old goddess of benevolence / And you should listen to your momma if you have a lick of sense left. “Pushed under by the main thrust / Buried under the photographs / Relegated by the Vatican / But you can’t keep a spirit down if it wants to get up again. “It doesn’t come by the bullwhip / It’s not persuaded with your hands on your hips / It’s not the company of gunslingers / The epicenter of love is the pendulum swinger. “ If we’re a drop in the bucket / With just enough science to keep from saying ***k it / Until the last drop of sun burns it sweet left / Plenty revolutions left until we get this thing right.” --Indigo Girls, Pendulum Swinger Peace Corps continues to be incredible, infuriating, and all-around conducive to getting to know myself a lot better. And, as it says in the song, what I’ve been doing most of lately is feverish “wanderin’ ‘round and wonderin’ how it oughta be.” Two Thursdays ago, my neighbor Katie woke me up by tapping my foot in the not-to-be-mistaken-for-cool-fog-because-it’s-actually-just-not-painfully-hot-and-also-very-hazy morning. “KC, do you want to go up on the Luomo Car? We have to go put our stuff on.” “Uh…okay. Yeah, sure. Let’s go.” I gathered up my massive shipments of books and food (THANK YOU Lindsey, Maddie, Dad, Mom, Andrew, Andres, and Ari!), hopped on the bike and off we went. The Luomo Car (actually of a giant, lumbering truck) is the cat’s pajamas as far as I’m concerned: you get a ride all the way to the Luomo town and your bike, too, for about $2.50. So much better, on those days when it’s more than I can deal with to both go back to the land of possibly-no-water-and-definitely-no-English AND go up the mountain. I’m learning to choose my battles, and last Thursday, it was hard enough to just go back up there. But when I got back, my hut floor was done, and lacking only painted walls and a backyard before it’s totally done (the floor is pretty dang cracked, which is too bad, but I can live with it for the duration). More excitingly, they were nearly done re-digging the old well, so I did not have to walk all the way to the river to get my bathing and drinking water. That was the good part of the homecoming. The bad parts, though, were a lot more harrowing and engendered a lot of soul-searching and tears on my part. The first thing was that everyone was so excited to tell me that my tokara, my 17-year-old sister, was getting married off on Wednesday (NB, I realize that “off on” is a really terrible syntactical thing, but she was married OFF and it was dissonant enough that it merits the horrible prepositional structure). She and I were the only ones unhappy about it; seeing her face and asking her how she felt about it when we were alone was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to do since coming up the mountain the first time. I also had my first total breakdown that afternoon, influenced by being totally powerless and bereft about my tokara. Before he left for the Luomo, Tamba pulled me aside and explained that the well-digger was sort of high-maintenance and kept asking for money, that he’d already gotten an advance, as well as a lot of special treatment, and that I was not to pay him, no matter what he said or did, until he, Tamba, returned from the market. I thought this was unusually emphatic in this culture of accommodating and turning a blind eye to the faults and foibles of others, but figured, okay. I told him I wouldn’t pay the guy until he returned, and he and my dad/older brother (I still can’t figure out what to call him, but I usually just say “Dad” here…) left. No sooner had they left than the well-digger started a theatrical complaining and production about how the work was too hard, the pay was too poor, and how nobody would help him. I couldn’t decide whether he (a) had an apprentice who’d left (b) had an apprentice who was to arrive soon or (c) had no apprentice, but he was really laying it on thickly about how lazy the village was. And how, if Tamba and the Toubab (sounds like a great band name, right? Tamba and the Toubabs) wanted a well, they should pay for it themselves, since they’re the ones with money. And the village felt the same way, that’s why they resented being made to help pay for the well and being made to help pull the dirt up out of the well. He ran through this production once, largely for the benefit of his captive audience (the women of the family). I was about to cry in anger at the injustice of it (they asked me for the well, they were happy to contribute the pittance, he was the one who set the price for his work, he does it for a living, so if it’s “too hard” perhaps he should find another vocation), but then my Dad called me and pointed out that what a man says in front of a group of women (when he’s clearly angling to get more money out of one of them, moreover) when the men of the family (who are normally in charge of the money) are not present cannot be trusted. I calmed down, went back to the compound, and kept reading my book. He went through the same spiel again, and this time I thought, “Well, maybe I do just not understand what he’s saying,” so I asked Aissatou what he was saying. She looked really uncomfortable, and said, “Well, Mariama, you know…the people here in the village, they’re complicated in the head…” in short, I was right. One of the women asked Aissatou, “Does she understand?” Aissatou looked at my face, and said, “Yep. She does. She understands.” I still wouldn’t have totally lost it then, although my hold on dignified behavior slipped a bit when the well-digger came over and started shouting his piece into my face—again. I shouted back, “STOP! STOP! I understand! Stop talking!” No, I lost it after he went back to sit down and I decided it would be better to spend an hour or so in my hut alone with my journal. As I walked away, he said in a crowing, loud announcement, “Touuuubaaaaacooooo”. Before he was finished, I’d grabbed the small handful of pebbles on the ground near the door of my hut that I kept there for chasing the chickens. I whirled around, and threw them as hard as I could at his bare back. While he turned, surprised and taken-aback, I shouted in a voice torn ragged on my tears, “DO NOT SAY THAT! DO NOT SAY THAT—YOU ARE IN MY HOUSE! WHERE ARE YOUR MANNERS? YOU ARE ENTIRELY WITHOUT INTELLIGENCE!” As I went into my hut, I could hear Aissatou explaining what I’d meant. I cried for an hour, and I can’t remember feeling so completely at a loss for something I could do to fix my life. (NB, I do realize that my repartee is somewhat limited in its acerbity and fluency, but honestly, I’m just impressed that I reacted in Pulaar rather than English or French.) I think my conclusion was something along the lines of, “Fine, they don’t want water, they don’t want to work, I won’t work, either, and I’ll tell them why, too. Jerks.” Later that night, I told my [Senegalese] mom that I was too angry to eat, and it came out that it wasn’t that the villagers thought that Tamba and his whitey should dig their own damn well…it was that they resented the well-digger telling them that they should stay home from their market (the social event of the week) to pull up heavy buckets of dirt in the hot sun. I’m still not sure how all of that reconciles with the things he was saying, but then Tamba came and he spent about 10 minutes explaining that people ARE happy that I’m there in the village, and they do know my name, and they’re really happy about the well, and so forth. The well-digger apologized, and said he was only joking. My family told me I shouldn’t listen to him, because even though he’s a good worker, “his head is unfull of water.” (To have a head full of water is to be intelligent, but also to be sane.) Over the next few days I had an interesting sinus condition (my nose dripped bright orange liquid, resulting in my, yes, fourth course of antibiotics), cooked macaroni and cheese for some of the women of my village—a big hit—and painted and moved into my hut, so that we could use the small one for guests for the wedding. The wedding was two days, but I only took part in one day of it. People from all over, family and not family, came to see us, hang out, and everyone in Aissatou’s women’s group brought some rice and oil and onions to help with feeding all the guests. That night, some neighbor women came over and cooked huge pots of oily rice seasoned with the goat they’d slaughtered (I’m serious, I could sit in one of those pots with the lid ON and you wouldn’t know I was there). My sister went over to her friend’s house while, between 11pm and 3am, there was a dance party with traditional Pulaar musicians, called Ñaamakalabe (NYAM-uh-kah-LAH-bay). All the women formed a four-or-five-deep ring and took turns dancing in the moonlight. Yes, I was pulled into the circle. Yes, I danced a little bit, but seeing those grandmothers and mothers celebrating the (what to me still smells of) oppression and subjugation of a young girl was not something that made me really feel like cutting a rug. My mother in particular danced with a wild kind of triumph that deeply bothered me: I wanted (still do) to ask her, “Over what do you think you have triumphed? Your granddaughter’s slender but nevertheless heroic attempt at self-determination in the face of her family and her culture? You celebrate that? Do you not remember what it was like when you were young and married off against your will?” Let me be really clear, here. I do not think that the Pulaar culture is unsophisticated or primitive: I think it’s a beautifully complex way of living, and there are many, many times per week that I look at something and feel nothing but appreciation, awe, or delight. But that night, with the men smugly asking me whether I was happy, clearly believing I should be, because my sister was getting married and that is clearly the culmination of every woman’s life: getting a man, with the women celebrating the anguish of their daughter…the only adjective I could feel or think of was “barbaric”. They are not barbarians, not any more than we are in the USA, or the French, or the Chinese, or the Aztecs. But in every culture there is barbaric behavior, and that night I saw it in the Fulbe’s. When they were finished dancing, my sister’s age-group sold her to her family (they let her out of the house) for about $6 (a very high price), and they took her to my mom’s hut, where, if I understand correctly, the children sang outside while the male friends of her nearly-husband wash her and dress her in white. They then carried her to her husband’s house, where she sleeps in a room with her father’s younger sisters. They won’t have children until she goes to live with him in his house in Tamba, a year from now, so for now, she trades off weeks at our compound and at his mother’s. There, she cooks, cleans, pulls water, and is basically the general factotum. It’s hard to see. I did not go to the second day of the wedding; I told everyone I was too tired and would just growl at them and make them all unhappy. And, for the most part, it was true. Two days later, I spent the day at my sister’s mother-in-law’s house (whose husband shared a father with my mother; my mother is also the mother of my sister’s new husband’s father as well as being my sister’s direct grandmother. I’m not sure what percentage of DNA that makes my mother have in common with his makeup, but I think it’s more than the average grandmother has with her grandson…someone do the math, am I right?), my sister’s husband had gone to Kedougou to get treatment for a snakebite…my mom was really worried about him, though. But, the next day was a lot better, because they started digging the new well! Originally, the village Matron (like a nurse) had seemed to think she could hoodwink me into putting the new well really close to—or even in—her compound. But although she tried to bully me, I successfully put her off, and then Tamba stepped in and explained to her that if she wanted a well in her own compound, the digger would be happy to discuss prices with her. And we all know she can afford it, as the chief’s wife and a member of the family that owns possibly the most cows in the village…so she had no recourse but to stop dogging me. Monday, I went to Katie’s village to spend the day and charge my phone at the tower; the guy who runs the tower messed something up in my phone, though, so now it’s locked and may have to go to Dakar before it can work again; this is not an optimal situation, but tomorrow may bring a miraculous hacking-into-my-phone. And if not, I may just spring for a new phone and wait until I’m actually IN Dakar and get this other one unlocked. Then I’ll have a spare phone… Today I rode to Ashley’s old village to talk with them about doing seed extension there, and they were really excited and supportive. I was going to fill up my water bottles at the covered pump-well in the village (I trust that water mostly, because it’s covered, and really, why not)…but there were a lot of bees, so I didn’t. As a result, the subsequent 90-minute ride into Kedougou really hurt; when I arrived, I chugged two liters of water, an hour later, two more. I think it was around 100 degrees when I rolled into town. My trying to play basketball later did not make it hurt less (sorry, Mom, but I’m fine, if exhausted, now). Overall, a stressful but productive two weeks. I am sending concrete and rebar up on the Luomo Car this week if things go according to plan, then in a week-and-a-half, I get to go up to Kaolack for a conference. I am pretty proud of working on this well, though, so that plus noticing another step up in my Pulaar has helped me get through, as have all the phone calls from my parents. Thanks, you guys.

Peace only, for lack of a better response. And it is a sort of peace: there's no violence and war, which is the only linguistic alternative in Pulaar of which I am aware. There's just this emotional exhaustion that comes from always feeling like I need to be doing more than I'm doing. This is related to my observation that my ability to cope with life here seems to be indexed to exactly how overwhelming it is: I keep thinking it will get easier, but instead, as I become better at Sénégal...Sénégal becomes better at me. Duh, this is inevitable, because as I become more comfortable, I push the envelope.

I exhaust myself. Knowing is half the battle. The other halves are figuring out how to change it, finding a way to thermoregulate, and finding a way to easily supplement my nutrition, and growing a thicker skin to people asking me for things.

Up on the mountain for 11 days, two days in, I locked myself entirely out of my cell phone. This is impressive, but more importantly left me entirely without any way to communicate in English for 9 days. I think my Pulaar got better, I know that I was quite talkative when I came down the mountain. With a bad cold.

"It's because of your sleeping in the wind, Mariama," Aissatou told me. "It's because you sleep outside," my Senegalese mom said. I'm getting to the point where I don't mind contradicting people in a culturally insensitive way. "No," I told them, "It's because Luis and Binta do not wash their hands with soap and reach into my section of the bowl." They argued with me a little bit, and in the end we agreed that both of those factors were a cause. Sleeping in a dry wind certainly does not help, it's true.

As soon as I got back to site, Tamba once again began hitting me up for money for the hut. After a lot of anger and a very small breakdown at Katie's house, I finally gave in. This prompted extremely fast action: by the time I get back (this afternoon or tomorrow), my new hut will be ready for me to move in, except for my painting the walls and them finding me a backyard fence. Oh, and my latrine fence is such that I can greet people and pee at the same time. Once, one of the neighbors even said "Good morning, Mariama! Did you sleep in peace? How are you doing with the peeing?" It was a kid. But, still. No, I'm not joking.

The Eye Clinic is going on right now in Kédougou: a couple American doctors are doing free cataract-removal surgeries. I've been helping a bit with translation, but it's time to go back up the mountain...I thought today, but now I think, tomorrow.

Oh, and those glasses I went to Dakar to get? The new prescription gives me a headache. This is not the easiest week of Peace Corps, but I didn't come here because I thought it would be easy, and if it were, there'd be no bragging rights. (Yes, I plan to be incredibly fond of bragging when I get back. You're warned?)

I've spent nearly the last calendar month in Dakar, so I don't have a lot of great village stories. No, I haven't been sick--this was the last round of training that my stage has with Peace Corps combined with the infamous WAIST weekend and the much-touted All-Vol conference to make a full month of being out of site.

Before I left, I had one of those "I might seriously injure someone" moments. Let's back up--my family has been building me a hut, as most of you know. And they've been stressing that it's my gift, their gift to me. I've helped with the work on this gift to me, and also fronted about $100 for Peace Corps to buy things like doors and cement for the floor (and white latex wall paint, my one extravagance). This is great for my family, because after Peace Corps leaves, it means they get to have a really spiffing hut all to themselves. They know this, I know this, the village knows this. And this is why, when Tamba asked me for an additional 40,000 cfa (about $90), I got really mad.

"We need money, you know, because your hut...all those things you see cost money," he told me. When I refused, he continued, "And, you know, you're not giving us money for food for the time that you're gone. Our other volunteers did not do that. We even cried, trying to get them to take the money, because we knew they needed to buy things like sodas and snacks on the road--we don't need much, here. We don't need sodas. But the other volunteers told us they could give us the money anyway because they care for us so much..." I told him I knew that was not the case.

Then he said, "Well, will you give me a pen? I don't have any pens." I said fine, I'll give you a pen. But later that day when--yes--a bee stung my hand, I lost it. "Why are you crying??" my family asked. "She's crying because she's scared of bees. Because bee stings hurt and last time there were lots of bees. White people do that, they cry like children when they're scared."

The next morning, I left. I visited Kate, but stupidly left from Kedougou at exactly the hottest time of day (and yes, there was a headwind). I was convinced that I'd be fine--two liters of water was fine to get me the 37km out to her site. Well, it wasn't. 17km out I got off the bike and lay on the ground in the shade and napped for 10 minutes. I drank a liter or so of untreated well water about 25km out, given to me by a family who didn't understand a word I was saying, but could see that I was hurting. But I had fun visiting Kate (although I now have some sort of intestinal weirdness again), and the next morning we rode into Kedougou, and the NEXT morning at 4am our house dog walked us to the bus station, where we caught 3 buses (one transfer, one broke down) over the course of 34 hours (9 were a scheduled layover in Tamba, 2 an unscheduled layover by the side of the road waiting for a replacement bus) to Dakar.

I stayed at an awesome American ex-pat family's house during the two days of the All-Volunteer conference (at which someone I did not know walked up to me and said "You're Katherine--I hear you are really good at editing papers, and I have this essay...") and the three days of WAIST (West African Invitational Softball Tournament). I did not play softball, and nor did I go out and party (I read Anna Karenina), so I missed the two chief activities of the latter, but the conference was really great. Then it was training time.

It was great to see the other people from my stage. It was really wonderful to get to interact with everyone outside of my sector. But the PowerPoint presentations were long, the host family I was being bussed out to every night spoke Wolof and French (not Pulaar, although since I asked for that family, it was pretty much my fault), and I've decided that training is really important and it's actually done really well. But there is no universe in which it can be categorically "fun". Like vaccinations--you're glad that you have them and you're glad that they're over.

Now I'm back in Dakar for an eye appointment, staying with the same family (I told you, they're great--2 RPCV parents and their really hilarious, intelligent kids) until tomorrow evening, when I'll take the night bus all the way down to Kedougou. In the next month I plan to: start my tree and coffee pepiniere, have meetings with my village farmers and Ashley's village* farmers about seed extension and who wants to try out which techniques, nail down with my village if they actually want the new well, and get my hut finished (pouring the floor is my job).

In other news, I hear I have four packages waiting for me down in the 'gou, so thank you so much! And to those of you who have written and not received responses yet, I'm sorry, I'm on it, and I'll mail them in the next couple of weeks. This month's slightly paternalistic and reductive but overall extremely useful book recommendation is 'African Friends and Money Matters'.

My computer has not returned to me yet, so my Internet time will still be more arbitrary and sporadic than usual.

Hello, everyone!

I'm borrowing a computer before everyone else is up to write this very quick blog post because I know that if I wait a week until I am back in Internetland I will miss some things. But because I am getting a ride up the mountain (!!!) in the Peace Corps car (!!!), I have to be quick so I can go pack my stuff--thus, the list:

~I have more stuff than usual to pack because I bought things like concrete, corrugated metal sheeting, and 23 kg of paint in order to outfit my new hut.

~If I'm lucky, Peace Corps will reimburse me for that.

~The walls of the hut were built but not plastered when I left village last time.

~I'll be in Dakar region most of February for the all-West Africa Volunteer Conference, WAIST, and then IST (In-Service Training). Everything is fine here, and did I mention that the giardia I was sure I had ended up going away after one last painful hurrah that led me to call the med people and beg them to let me take the drugs. Which they did. So I am vindicated.

~The well project is going forward, but the plan now is to dig only one, because UNICEF is apparently putting in a forage--deep, covered, pump-well--not 20 meters from the site of one of the wells I was going to dig. The other well I have decided needs to be partially paid for by the village, so that it will be more of an "our achievement" than "our Toubab's gift", and so am waiting for them to commit to feeding the diggers and buying 4 sacks of concrete.

~I'm getting lots of practice at designing my own clothes.

~If anyone knows how to put an .mp3 up on blogger, let me know, because I have some radio clips that I'd love to share (in Pulaar, of course) if possible.

~We had a three-day language seminar recently and it went really well. Given that putting four people with different strengths, language skills, and learning styles together in a really stressful but unstructured environment to steer a class for which they've all got different objectives is never a recipe for a warm fuzzy feeling, it still went well. I learned a lot and am pretty happy with my language skills so far. I think they'll only get better over the course of 2 years and am confident that they're pretty adequate right now. Not bragging. Well, not bragging much.

~I'm trying to make plans about grad school--it's early, you say. Not so much, say I, given that this fall is when I'll be applying if I am going to attend directly upon returning to the states. Even if I don't attend until fall 2012, it's still good to start thinking about applying, because when you're me and have no idea of the general discipline (let alone field and focus), it's good to have a good run-up. So that's part of February, doing lots of grad school research so I can finally decide what on earth (maybe that is more literal for me than for many other people) I am going to study.

Lastly, but certainly not least, I recently got a bunch of letters and 5 packages in the mail. Carol, mom, dad, Ari, Jen, Marian, Paul C., and Maddy, thank you for the letters! I haven't written back to all of them yet (except Paul's and Maddy's, which came a while ago), but I will, soon. This week. To Ari goes the keeping-my-brain-alive prize, because he sent me two awesome books relating to ethics, which is something that increasingly interests me. Yay Ari! Thank you! To Mom goes the keeping-my-body-alive prize, because of the massive amount of food (3 lbs of dark chocolate! 2 lbs of dried apricots! Many other things! Including dried figs!) you fit in that box. Thank you! And to dad and Kate goes the prize of THANK YOU FOR ALL THE PACKAGES, because they sent me three, each one full of great stuff--from a travel backgammon game (wooo!) and a knot-tying kit to dried berries and (amaaaazingly) granola. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you! THANKYOU!

For all of you who have sent packages and been frustrated that they have not yet arrived, thank you in advance. Also, do not fret: the packages get stuck in Tambacounda until either they get so many that they finally do send them down here in a car or someone from Kedougou goes up and rescues the packages and brings them down here. On my way back down from IST I plan to stop in Tamba and rescue any remaining packages. So, don't worry--it doesn't mean they're stolen.

For all the rest of you--write me letters! It costs a dollar and earns you a shiny letter in return--all the way from Africa! The only obligation is, keep my letter so that if I want to copy all of them and make a binder of "letters I wrote from Senegal" I can. A nanni? (Ya hear?)

Oh and one last thing--I have started dropping the Pulaar "ya hear" into my English. Yes, I now say things like "If you drink my boisson I'll be really unhappy with you, hear?" I shudder to think what will happen to it in the next 20 months.

Love to all. Except in cases where that would be awkward. Oh, why not--even in cases where that would be awkward. Thanks again everyone for all the support.

Hello, everyone. With luck this will be a short post, but probably fairly scatterbrained, because I am exhausted.

You know, I've noticed that being constantly exposed to the equivocation of repeating "If God wills it" after even the most strict appointments or inevitable occurrences (waking up in the morning, the sun coming up--no, really), that I find it hard to assert things anymore without equivocating. Since I'm not religious about anything but taking my antimalarial prophylaxis (Hi, Chris. Hi, Dr. Ararat. No, I'm not kidding.), I end up referencing luck a lot more than I normally do.

Since I end up having a lot of luck most of the time, it doesn't really bother me, but I remember getting really annoyed at the blogs I read always dropping "inchallah" all over the place. I don't mean "I'm lucky" in the 'I have a wonderful family' sense, but more in the 'I'm 20 minutes late and the last bus of the day just so happens to also be 20 minutes late'. Glad we got that cleared up.

We interrupt this routine program for a special announcement: speaking of reading lots of blogs, hi Nathallie! I know you're out there, hope you had a fun time here, and enjoyed meeting you. Send me a letter!

And now back to our regular programming. The last two days, I've been helping with Sully's PACA--that's Participatory Analysis for Community Action to you--meeting. Yesterday was amazing because I got to help facilitate part of the meeting with the women of his village. Specifically, it was really great because as I wrote things on the board, they would correct my spelling. Think about that for a minute--women who probably have not been to school more than a few years of their lives and certainly not for literacy in their native language were correcting my spelling. Not big errors, either, but just small ones. Granted, there's no standardized spellings here, but given that the women here are pretty nonconfrontational towards authority figures in many cases, that's really wonderful. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized what a wonderful thing it is, and remembered to apply my sense of humor to the situation.

Today I got to run a session nearly by myself, with the women again (I was the only female PCV there, so I guess it worked out well having the only Pulaar-speaking female Outsider work with the women), voting on things like "Would we rather, as a village, have latrines or electricity?" The priorities were surprising to me--people in the states would probably give up electricity before they'd get rid of their toilets...but not the case, here. And they'd rather have a good road than electricity, okay, but they'd rather have electricity than new wells or a water pump? Whole different frame of reference, folks, and I feel privileged to have gotten a peep of it from their point of view.

It was a really rewarding experience, but in total I've spent 8 of the last 36 hours on what's actually a good road but still engenders high levels of carsickness. Sully, the PCV whose PACA it was, was also the one whom I visited during PST. He's turning into something of an older brother figure for me--I'd like to be like him when I grow up. Superstar Ag volunteer, speaks beautiful Pulaar, all-around really kind person...Hi, Sully. Yes, I know y'all are reading this.

Oh, and I almost forgot, my new best time coming in from village to the Gambia river--67 minutes. If you remember, my previous best was 83 minutes, and previous volunteers have, I believed, clocked about 120 minutes.

Hello again! I assume that most of you will have already read a rough version of this post in the form of a mass e-mail, but for those of you who haven't, and for my own sanity, here it is again. And yet again, I am writing in the form of paragraphs with headers because it's just easier for me to make sure I stay on track that way. All those years of studying English, and I only start making outlines when I've gotten a BA in the damn subject. Well, fine. At least I learned something, right?

ChristmasWas a lot better than Thanksgiving, in my opinion. There was not too much food, it was not partially spoiled by the time we ate it...and it was a lot smaller of a crowd, so it was a lot more personal. I cooked some really great pork chili over a charcoal fire in a giant pot (we bought and killed two pigs), passable cornbread, and delectable (hey, it was) squash pie. There was a gift exchange. Santa filled our stockings with cookies, soap, snacks, and yes, MSG. Oh, and to my everlasting pride, none of the food that I cooked got thrown away--even the gallons and gallons of chili were eaten. So, I am slowly building a reputation as a good cook in Senegal. Yes, I still am eating milk powder at site. Shush. Don't call it an inconsistency. Call it admirable versatility. Call adaptability. Call it eclectic taste, or a striking dichotomy. Remember, I can haz English Degree.

Nathalie and Austin VisitNathalie came for Christmas, and Austin arrived soon after. We had planned to welcome 2010 at my site, but as events conspired against that, we rolled back into town on the evening of 12/31. The trip out was pretty tough--N. particularly was a real trooper. Even though it took us five hours to make the normally 2.5-hour-max trip, she kept after it and made it to village in one piece, if not in great shape. When we arrived, we found out that Aissatou had had her baby while I was gone, and so that was very exciting. Also, I carried a folding metal cot up the mountain on my back, tied on with twine and padded with the plastic foam that passes for mattresses here. Pretty pleased with myself about that. It works a lot better than the other bed (the one I made), and is more small-hut-friendly, which is great when you have a small hut.

New hutSpeaking of which. As I'm sure many have gathered by now (at least, I hope you have), my current hut is quite small. Very cramped. Supertiny. Infinitesimal. Macroscopic, but only just. Sometimes I call it "boson". Not really. Anyway, my family decided to build me a new one, and the construction started last week. First my dad and my counterpart sketched out a circle on the ground, carefully measuring it to be bigger than my current hut. Then they dug a bit of a trench. And then they began making mud balls and dropping them into the (3-inch deep) trench. After a while, it was walls, a perfect circle, broken in two places (for doors), rising up out of the ground.

The women's work of hutbuilding is to bring the water, the men get to play in the mud to build the walls. Then the women plaster the walls and the men put the roof up. Since I've been sleeping outside lately and the moon has been rising late, the moon has been my alarm clock. One morning, I got up and pulled water by moonlight, carried 40L on my head before breakfast.

We mix the mud by battering the clay soil into small pieces, adding water, and then adding goo. The goo comes form soaking a chopped up vine in water until the result looks like...well, like a giant sneeze, to be honest. It makes it stick better. Or, if you want the literal Pulaar translation, it makes the dirt accept until [it's] good.

Old Women and GuiltI think I've mentioned how much I really can't handle the old women here. They enjoy guilt tripping you about anything and everything, and always try to play the "I'm a poor, oppressed, malnourished, illiterate, underprivileged, undereducated woman without medical care, the knowledge of where next year's meal is coming from, or any of the myriad technologies that so many in this world enjoy" card. Which is all true. But the implied, "And it's ALL YOUR FAULT!" is the part I can't stand. Yes, actually that's why I joined the Peace Corps. So that I could take responsibility for millenia of oppression of women by men. Because, obviously, you know, I'm so very responsible for that sort of thing. I don't know how they know I have that button, but it's like a sixth sense they have. The old men are also pretty bad, but because somehow they've got a little more face to want to save or something, they usually lay off you after you tell them you're not a tourist.

So the women of my village have recently discovered that I hate being guilt tripped, or that I am very prone to crawling under whatever mountain of guilt I can find. Their new hobby? You guessed it--guilt-tripping me. Which is why I was so happy to get out of there, because when some random old woman comes up to me when I've been working hard at making good mud for about three hours and tells me I haven't been working and she has (and I've seen her sitting in the shade for at least two of the last three hours), because she brought more water to the mud pit than I did...there's just nothing to say. Even if I were fluent in Pulaar there would be nothing to say, except take a flying leap.

More VisitorsMy friends and fellow Kedougou PCVs Sheila and David both came to visit me, David bringing a guest who, conveniently, has the same name. We'll call him "David too". They showed up, we hung out and ate baobab fruit, watched the light change across the vista from the nearby overlook, and ate dinner. We talked some about my well project (did I mention I've scheduled two wells to be dug in April? Yes, I am actually getting stuff done! And I'm doing wells instead of gardening because the lack of available water is preventing, flat-out preventing, getting any kind of garden or compost going. Yes, really.), and they talked me into going on their excursion.

Where were they headed? To "The Spires" Why did I decide to go? Because in spite of having been out of there for two-and-a-half weeks not in village, the guilt tripping was really getting to me on the day they showed up. Anyway, long story shorter, I was talked into the 19km (one-way) adventure. Next morning early, we set out with plenty of food, four spoons, four bikes, and about 15 liters of water.

The Bike RideThe ride across the plateau is beautiful. Winding, twisting mountain bike paths are what pass for roads, and we flew through baobabs, mahogany, and various tree-names most of you won't recognize (kinkilliba, flambouyant, etc) until we got to my market town. There, we ate some bean sandwiches, drank some cold, sweet, blood-orange-red hibiscus tea, and hopped back on the bikes. A couple hours later, we arrived at the base of the Spires, which are big rock teeth that jut up from the hill they stand on, about 50m higher than the surrounding plateau, which is 100m or more higher than most of Senegal. They're somewhere between granite and sandstone and so these very brittle and the butte-like formations are full of cracks and fissures--in other words, perfect amateur bouldering material. We filled our water bottles at the forage (water pump) of the village at the hill's base, locked the bikes, carefully stowed the key in Sheila's backpack, and hiked, climbed, and scrambled our way to the top of one, where we decided to make camp.

The SpiresGetting there was a bit scary for me, because it involved trusting that the friction between the rubber of my shoe and the sandy rock would hold me on the face, rather than spit me 7m down into the bamboo stands. Twice I climbed oh-so-slowly and at the very limits of my comfort zone, but David was really encouraging, so we all made it without mishap. Several sardine sandwiches later, the Davids went on a climbing adventure while Sheila and I sat and admired the view while talking about life in Senegal (she's a year in, so has a lot of good insight and advice of which I try to take advantage). Soon, there were about 6 honeybees bouncing off our heads. We hid under our sheets and laughed because it was sort of funny, six tiny insects making giant mammals cower in fear. The sun went down, the Davids came back, and we cooked, made a campfire, sang songs, ate some (coveted and rare and worth more than twice their weight in platinum) peanut M&Ms and went to our windswept beds.

The morningThe wind blew all night, and I woke several times to admire the view of the crescent moon over the rocks, the night sky and its beauty without light pollution of any kind, and even the distant forest fires, looking like so many false dawns on the horizon. We all woke up before dawn and lay there, anticipating breakfast (bread, peanut butter, and--rare treat--jam) and saying good morning. We heard a few bees, and thought "Damn, they're probably after the water we left in the pan to keep it from congealing overnight". Then we heard a few more while we were packing up our stuff and putting on shoes. One of the Davids swatted one dead from his face, where it had stung him.

"I hope that doesn't bring more of them," I said. More began to arrive. "Is there anything we can do?" Sheila asked. "Maybe a fire. Maybe smoke, but I don't know if that would just enrage them more," I said. And then hundreds of bees began to arrive, their buzz more of an angry scream. They went for our eyes, our faces, our hair. I was the first to break and leave my gear where it lay, and while I was swatting them away from my eyes, I slapped my glasses off. All I could hear was the buzz, because they were stuck in my hair (I'm so glad I didn't have dreadlocks anymore), and beyond that, the shouts of the others. I went down the way we'd come up, instead of down the other side, which the Davids had found was much more traversable.

The AftermathI don't remember much. I know that I went down the mountain much faster than I'd come up, and I know that at some point I must've performed rock-climbing acrobatics that would make my rock climbing friends very proud. How do I know this? Well, I remember jamming my hands into a crack in the rock and swinging my entire body across a gap. But mostly, I remember running, falling, scrambling, sliding in a totally hindbrain-driven mad dash down the mountain, terrified. I know I was sobbing, "Stop! Stop! Go away! Stop! Stop!" As if the bees could understand. It's odd how having your face and eyes under attack can do more to turn up the panic than almost anything else. Luckily for me, either through instinct or training, I was able to keep all but a couple of the around-60 stings I got from anywhere near my eyes.

I made it down, went around the side of the mountain, met up with David too. The other David was coaching Sheila down the mountain, because in our panic, she had initially tried to hide from the bees rather than escape them. I was ashamed that I was the first one to break, but after thinking about it, I'm glad my survival instincts are good enough that I can be a coward and not care until I'm out of danger. And even then, I didn't care that much.

Sheila's face was covered in stingers, and she was not far from shock. David had little or no took my cell phone and hers (the only two what'd made it down the mountain) to call Peace Corps for help, and David too and I went to the water pump with Sheila, where we got a drink and began to remove stingers. Sheila freaked out again when a few bees showed up at the forage, ran off to the village. David too followed her.

I ran after them, and managed to communicate to the villagers (who do not speak Pulaar very much at all) that they were sick, they needed water, and a shady, sheltered spot to lie down. The villagers immediately took them into two huts and pushed them onto beds. The aftermath was that David got in touch with Peace Corps, who sent two doctors with hydrocortisone shots on motorbikes, and a car up from Kedougou. Sheila and David too rode back on the backs of motos, and David and I did a DIY medevac on our bikes, with two Senegalese kids riding the others' bikes. Which, superman that he is, Volunteer David had freed not with a key, but by dint of smashing the heck out of the padlock holding the bikes together. Good to know they were so secure. We met the car and the others, came back into Kedougou and started drinking water, taking the antihistamines the other volunteers had bought for us at the pharmacy, and in my case, having a nervous breakdown after-the-fact.

The next dayI am sore to the point of being barely able to walk and can't move my arms well. My face, arms, and neck are all puffy but not drastically swollen, and David went up and got our stuff, so I once again have glasses and a sleeping bag. I'm not sure when I'm going back to site, but I think I should be able to walk without my legs buckling from muscle spasms before I try to go up the mountain. So even though I feel like a slacker, hanging out around the regional house and cooking for the mosquito net distribution crew, there's not a lot more I can handle. Oh, and someone has my cell phone battery, so if you're trying to call me, that's not gonna fly just yet.

Sorry this is really rough. I'm sure the others have more detailed, better-written accounts. I keep meaning to polish this (and will keep meaning to), but am not sure when I'll have the motivation, because honestly I've told the story so much recently that I'd just as lief not deal with it for a few days.

...brought to you courtesy of Mefloquine, the antimalaria prophylactic drug I'm on for the next two years. Being insomniac is no fun, but it does get stuff done and hey, being sleepy and out-of-it during the day sure beats dying of malaria, right? I think so.

So, continuing from last night, Thanksgiving was a lot of fun, although sort of overwhelming. What was nice was the end of the five-week challenge. It marks no real significance of any sort, being a totally arbitrary time demarcation after which we've supposedly achieved something...but still, it was nice to have that out of the way. Tabaski was okay, and I've written about that already, as I have the radio meeting and the warthog.

I've been out of village for about 8 days now, and the village guilt is really starting to ache. But, most of it has been either for work purposes, or for work purposes once removed. What do I mean by that, and how come it's not just rationalization? I came in a week ago yesterday, a day earlier than I'd planned, because there was stuff I needed to discuss with the Urban Ag PCV in Kedougou. We left for the Ag Summit really early on the morning of the 14th, and did not return until midafternoon on the 17. I had planned to go back to village on the 18th, but as I spent the afternoon of the 16th not in the meetings for the summit but curled up whimpering on the floor with a 102.5 (Farenheit) fever, I was not really feeling up to climbing the mountain. Then I thought about it some more and realized that the Peace Corps doctor had a point when she said that even if I am not doing a lot lately, it is still enough, somehow, to keep me weak enough that I can have a chronic cold. So I decided to stay until after Christmas.

Not that I'm sitting around doing nothing. In fact, I am sitting around a lot less here than I would be in village. Among other things, Matt and I built a gray water system to water the compost pile Thomas dug with the laundry water, and he's helped me start hatching my new well plan. I also dug out the shower drain, planted some papaya seeds, ordered some tropical fruit seeds online (with Matt and Kate), did a lot of coffee research (that was last night's insomnia), and am working on a viability test of some coffee seed that Matt found in the kitchen.

This is actually pretty amazing because, per my research, Coffea canephora seeds, if not fresh, can take up to 6 months to germinate. I counted out 100 seeds this morning to soak for 24 hours before planting in a test pot to see what the germination rate would be, and by dinnertime, several of them had sprouted! I'm really excited about this, because my approach to my Peace Corps service so far is to get as many balls rolling as possible and then chase as many of them as I can as fast as I reasonably can for two years. So, these seeds are going into a bed at the Peace Corps house in Kedougou tomorrow, and I'm taking a bunch up to site when I go, to start the pilot. Another really exciting aspect of this is that because C. canephora is a cross-pollinated species, it needs bees to really do well. Boy, what a beautiful coincidence, hey?

My other really exciting (and rapidly growing) project is to make water a nonissue up on my mountain. To this effect, I've been researching the cost of digging two new wells up there. This is really important, because of the three villages in my area, there is only one with a well (right near my compound). I want to dig one near the school / health facility (so I can have a demo garden at the school next year and the health post can have clean water), and one closer to my market town. After digging them (I'm hoping they'll be around $500 per well), I want to install a crank-pump (like a water wheel on a rope inside two vertical pipes--diagrams to follow when David's given me his blueprints) for each of the three wells, and put a cover on each of them. Before that, I will probably put a concrete skirt and drainage ditch around the current well. But then, after that, I want to build about 10-15 biosand filters, that use sand, gravel, and a bacterial film to filter large amounts of water and don't really wear out.

As the first Ag volunteer in my village, it is important for me to identify the people with whom it is good to work--this is what Peace Corps says. I agree, but I think that even more importantly, my place is to try to put as much of the infrastructure in place as possible for my replacement to hit the ground running and really be able to do things like have a garden right off the bat. To do that, you need a reliable water source, and a permanent garden area.

One thing I learned at the conference that was not a result of any meeting was a cool design for a round garden, which is my plan. The Tamba Urban Ag PCV was really helpful in doing that, and we spent a fun day playing in the garden he's developing there. It made me realize, though, that I really do need a permanent garden site. Because I want to plant fruit trees, among other things.

Other than that, I've been finally getting over my cold, still convinced I have giardia (although Peace Corps Med doesn't think so), and really glad that I have a direction for my energy: water, garden, and coffee. In a couple months it will be time to plant trees, so I may wait to do the coffee until I've gotten my tree pepiniere going and then just have a mammoth pepiniere with the coffee, too, but I think I wouldn't mind watering it (my mind may change drastically quite soon) if I could get the plants started right now. One thing about coffee is that it takes four years or so to actually bear fruit. But all this means is that my double-replacement could work with a SED (Small Enterprise and Development) PCV to create a coffeegrowers' co-op. Maybe they could even export it to somewhere that would pay sixteen million dollars per ounce. Cart before horse, yes, I know, but isn't dreaming big what I'm here to do anyway?

Speaking of "here," these are the rest of the videos of my compound in my village. [EDIT: Here's one. The Internet ate the other one after I'd uploaded it for an hour. Boo, Internet.]

In a really exciting development, while I've been waiting for these to upload, I've been doing some more coffee research, and have gotten in touch with a couple people who do research on which varieties of C. canephora produce the most efficiently, and may be able to get seeds from the breeder who produces the highest quality, highest yield seed in the world. This year. This is really exciting, and I guess it means I should really get my ducks in a row in village to find someone who wants to try to do a coffee pilot field with me.

Well, folks, it's been an eventful few weeks. Today while shoveling a shoulder-jarring mix of gravel-plus-everything-up-to-head-sized rocks, I had my first, "Gosh, the time has flown" moment. Slightly over two months at site; if my time in Koboye were a day, I'd have been there for two hours already. Yow. I know everyone says, "Don't count the weeks or days," and I understand why. But it's fun to do once in a while, just to see how things are going.

Thanksgiving was nice. Austin and a bunch of the other people from Tamba, the region north of us, came down and made a Turducken and we made and ate a lot of food. Like, a LOT of food. I spent the Wednesday before cooking various sets of vegetables in a giant (15-20L) 3-legged pot over a charcoal fire. My sleeping bag, which my dad mailed in early September, got here in the Peace Corps car that came down for the occasion.

Speaking of packages, my gosh, people. You have gone so far above and beyond what I even hoped to get in terms of packages and letters that I really don't know how to thank you at all, let alone enough. Dad and Kate, you've been wonderful at keeping the packages coming--the food, gloves, earplugs, pens...amazing. Mom, the seeds! The seeds, and the food, and the books...words fail me. Kevin (and Whitby), the baking chocolate and stuff from the bulk section of Wegman's got me through more than you might think. Especially the brewer's yeast. Steve and Teresa sent me a wonderful surprise package with a book and some cinnamon (!!!!! How did you know I was running low?), a wealth of drink mixes and ziploc bags and--Allah jaraama--some grooming tools. Could any of these people be more wonderful? I think not. Then there's everyone who has sent me a package that hasn't gotten here yet--Kevin, my parents, Andres, Ari, Liz, and then whoever has kept it a secret--thank you in advance. And THEN there's the people who write me letters! Mom, Dad, Jen, Ari, Maddy, Marian, Carol, Erika, Kevin, Steve, Linjie, Pat...thank you all so much! I keep my letters at site, and on hard days there are few things more comforting than reading a few. And really, I am replying to whomever writes me, except Dad and Mom, because they write so often. Sorry, guys. But I will get better at it, I promise.

This was going to be longer, but I'm exhausted. Still, you haven't got too much to complain about, because here are two little video clips of my compound. In a couple days I'll post a few more, since each of these took over an hour to post...

I say "Limited edition" because I may very well delete this post very soon after publishing it. Depending on how much I like my philosophical tangents, I may just delete parts of it; we'll see.

Last Thursday my nearest stage neighbor (the person (a) nearest my site who (b) arrived in Senegal when I did) ETed. Well, no, that's not entirely true. She called one of us stage-members to find out what the fastest way to Dakar was, and then peaced out (har) the next morning. She left her phone behind, so there was no way to contact her. She did not say goodbye to anyone, to my knowledge. I didn't contact her to try to say goodbye or good luck because I assumed that whatever had triggered her ETing was probably pretty traumatic, and if she wanted to talk to me and have that complication in her life, she knows my phone number. If not, then okay, I understand.

There's this really strange double-standard semi-stigma that goes along with ETing anyway, so I can totally see why you wouldn't wanna talk to anyone about it or have to see the faces of the people you're leaving. I still contend that it would've been the decent thing to do to say goodbye to everyone to one person and let that one pass it on, or, failing that, to leave a note or send an email once out of the region... But if you don't, fine. Burning your bridges is an understandable thing to do, emotionally, when you're making a hard decision, and that is what she did.

How did she do that? How can I say that when I have no idea what happened at home to cause this sudden turnaround (because she was, to all appearances, doing really well at Peace Corps--yes, I know that's a reductive thing to say, but bear with me. You know what I mean.)? How can I be so cold and judgmental?

Folks, going through PST is a traumatic experience. This person was in my language class. We were roommates at the Training Center in Thies. Yes, we stressed each other out sometimes, drove one another crazy, but that's inevitable...and as such, we ended up a part of each other's lives. A fairly close part, in fact. And so, to suddenly leave without explanation, good-bye, or acknowledgement, that, to me, is tossing some gas and a match on the bridge. Because it's treating me--treating us--like we don't matter. But like I said, I can accept that I don't matter, and it really doesn't bug me.

But I sound bugged, right? Well, that's because I am bugged. I'm not bugged because she left, though, I'm bugged because she might be coming back. That's right, because she might be not ETing after all but going home to deal with whatever it is for x weeks or months, and then coming back... I do not know the value of x. I do not know what has come up and therefore cannot judge her for thinking it requires going back to America. I can't even judge her for being willing to take the hit and ET because she thought it was her only option, because that smells more like being true to yourself, and I don't have any kind of problem with that. Nor can I judge her for potentially taking the opportunity to deal with the problem or issue and then come back to her work her if possible.

I still haven't said why I'm bugged. Well, I have, but let me say it more clearly. I'm bugged because (a) I don't like being on tenterhooks about it and (b) I resent very much being burned (in the bridge sense) and then the possibility that the arsonist comes back and says "Oh, whoops, guess I do need this after all". There's nothing anyone can do about (a).

But I'm annoyed as all get-out at the prospect of being asked to unburn myself as a bridge (necessary if this person comes back to Kedougou region, because you can't just have two PCVs from the same stage in the same sector and subregion who don't speak or work together, not to mention that my family likes her) or suffer the social consequences of being thought unreasonable. Posting this online may or may not be a good idea, but aside from being a more-honest-than-usual post about the difficulties of Peace Corps, it's also my plea for understanding to whoever may read this. It may be the bigger-person thing to do, to forgive people and second chances, and so forth, but I don't think my reaction is unreasonable and I don't feel really inspired to go around being bigger-person at this point in time. I really don't like being the object of arson.

What do you think?

That said, I do hope that everything of hers works out fine and that she's happy. I just hope that her being happy does not involve me compromising my integrity or my generally in-good-standing relationship with the PCV community.

Awa gasi (Okay, finished).

How come I'm posting so many updates if the computer's broken? Because I've been borrowing computers. And that's why I haven't posted pictures yet. But here's one... This is the inside of my hut, looking towards my shower. It's not the picture I meant to upload, but it's the one I accidentally uploaded, so it's the one you get.

Woops.

Hello, much earlier than y’all thought to be hearing from me! I’m in town again for a meeting, and will be in again on the 13th en route to a conference in Tambacounda, back to Kédougou on the 17th or so, here for a day or two to work on a project, and then out to village and back in again on the morning of the 23rd probably until the 28th, if not longer.

December is going to be a very busy month. Today’s meeting was an introduction to the radio show that the PCVs here in Kédougou do every Monday; those of us who want to start getting involved showed up yesterday evening, shortly before a surprise guest arrived. The roadkill warthog showed up on top of a car just into dinnertime. So, this morning, instead of immediately getting on the radio business, we (mostly Daniel) started taking apart the warthog. I am trying to tan the hide, so Sheila and I scraped it clean-ish and now it’s sitting under a layer of salt in the sun. Good thing it’s the dry season, right? Anyhow, there’s a lot of warthog around right now, and I’m not really able to eat any of it because of stomach issues.

Radio looks like it’s gonna be a lot of fun, though. I’m helping host the “Year in Review” show on December 28; if I can figure out a way to post an mp3, I’ll do it, even though it will sound like absolute silliness to pretty much everyone out there. If I’m really with it, I’ll also post a transcript. And I plan to buy a cart, too. No, I haven’t got a horse. Whatever gave you that idea?

So, during the last less-than-a-week at site, both a lot and a lot of NOTHING has happened. First, I found that the hill I was so worried about is actually not that bad. In fact, the road leading up to the hill is a lot worse than the mountain itself; once you’re at the slope, it’s just four pitches of slope. 30 minutes later, you’re on top of the mountain. If you’re me, you’re wondering, ungrammatically, “What was I so worked up about? Was that IT?” I guess it’s because the first time I climbed it, I was in a pretty bad emotional place and was also really exhausted, both physically and emotionally. So it goes. It’s kind of neat how internal state can influence perceptions.

I got back to site 2 hours after I left the Peace Corps house, which is a new record, to find that my family (which had been kind of grouchy when I left) was ecstatic to see me. Tamba in particular was pretty excited, and kept saying, “Go look in your yard! I think the chickens made you a present!” I figured he meant they’d left some eggs in there, and they had left two. But what he meant was that he and Babagalle had thatched my fence as a surprise, so now instead of nominal privacy, I have the real thing. At least to waist height. Kind of endearing how he kept saying it was the chickens who did it, though.

Tabaski was overwhelming, but not impossible; I made a copy of a shirt out of some material I bought in town, and started working on a bed. The shirt took two days, the bed took three. To make the bed, I was able to have a day or two of what I’m sure everyone imagines to be the picturesque Peace Corps experience. I took my Leatherman, my machete, and my hat partway down the mountain and cut some bamboo poles (blisters). I wrestled them out of the thicket of bamboo (sore shoulders and cut hands). I saw monkeys. I chopped the side branches off the bamboo (poor shoulders, more blisters), and then I carried about 80 linear feet of it up the mountain (on my shoulders), through a thorn patch (I skinned my eyebrow, people. My eyebrow.), past a tamarind tree and several baobabs to the workspace beneath the mango tree. Then I cut it up (yep, blisters), and tied it together. And was very proud of myself! But, because I made the legs too tall for their girth, it fell down in the middle of the night. Yes, I swore at it for about 10 minutes before figuring out what I needed to do the next morning to fix the situation. Yes, I was awake for another hour because sometimes my malaria prophylaxis gives me insomnia.

Here’s a word of advice: if you’re really hungry, without any way to prepare food (because you don’t really have any food), no matter how good of an idea it seems like, do NOT read a cookbook. That’s what I did for the hour or so that I was awake, and it ended up with me drinking a LOT of powdered milk, and even eating some with a spoon. Hi, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer and I eat powdered milk with a spoon at 3am. And sometimes at 3pm. Don’t look at me like that—go out and send me a package instead of thinking, “With a spoon? Like, dry? You EAT milk powder?” No, really, don’t worry; I’m still adjusting to site and what I need to do to live there successfully. I’m not one of the starving children in Africa, and not just because I’m not a child. I’m not really eating what would qualify in the US as a balanced, healthy diet. I eat rice, peanuts, corn, and some salt, okra, leaves, onions, hot pepper, and boullion flavoring. Oh, and powdered milk. And on days when I go into town, I eat bean sandwiches. And Laughing Cow ™ cheese product on bread—that’s a new favorite. Hey, soft ‘cheese’ on chewy bread—it’s practically brie on sourdough. My self of five months ago is currently horrified, but hey, self, it’s what ya gotta do.

Lately, I’ve started feeling this weird combination of totally uninterested in food and absolutely famished. Let’s back up a few paces, and I’ll explain that, since arriving in Senegal, I’ve been fostering a vendetta against white rice. Because it’s basically…simple, simple starches. Blurgh. I actively whine a little about it, and have not been able to sympathize with more senior PCVs who point out that one reason rice is good is that it tends to stick with you for longer. I dunno about the stick-with-you part (in any sense of the word—have I mentioned that I think I have giardia?), because I’m still starving about two or three hours after I eat (no matter how much I eat), but I really have started to love it when there’s rice. Hypocritically, I have not admitted this to any of my family yet. Perhaps because when there’s rice, there’s usually peanut sauce, and that’s got actual nutrition in it. In sum, I need to fix my food situation, and I’m working on it, so don’t get too worried. When I have a garden, things should be better.

Right. We started painting the world map in the market town about 9km from my town, and when it’s done, I’ll post pictures. It’s going well, but slowly, and there are enough frustrating bits right now that I don’t want to write about it much because I really do like the project a LOT and I really am having fun with it, but the frustrations are foremost in my head at this point in time. Let’s leave it that it will be freakin’ awesome when it’s done, and that I hope I can find a place to buy a chalkline to make the grid for the next one we do.

Moving on and looping back a bit, I still have not started my garden. WHY I have not started my garden is hard to explain, but the best reason is that I do not have a fence yet. I don’t have a fence yet because I haven’t been able to buy one because the men who make the fence panels are all busy harvesting. I was thinking about the garden the other day, though, and decided (after re-inventing the circle as the optimal maximization of surface area : volume via some trigonometry…yes, I am intellectually lonely up there on my mountain) to make an n-gon garden. When I tried to explain this to Tamba, he got very impressed and said that he hated math, and so wouldn’t disagree with me. It was funnier at the time. Anyway, I have a TON of really great seeds, and am going to plant many kinds of beans, and some cabbage, cucumbers, amaranth, sesame, and I forget what else. But it’s going to be great.

It’s going to be near the well, too. This makes me happy but also nervous and guilty. It’s good because then everyone can come gape at me while I do my weird white person stuff in the garden. It’s bad because I’m worried about the water situation—as in, what if I use up all the water? And it’s also bad because it means that people will probably steal my produce. Which is fine, really, because if they steal it, it means they’re eating it, and that’s the whole point. But I am partially doing this because I want some vegetables in my diet.

Oh, the well. After 6 weeks of total dormancy on the well front, suddenly Tamba decided that we needed to have our let’s-redig-the-well meeting on Wednesday. The day that the Peace Corps doctor is coming up to see if my hut and bathroom and family and village are okay for me to live in/with/around for the next two years. My job is to buy tea, powdered milk (to drink, not to eat. Shush.), and sugar, so that the people will come to the meeting. I won’t finance the well, because it’s not my job to finance it, but I am willing to facilitate it. For now, that means buying tea et al. So it goes. Thus, I have my first community meeting on Wednesday, and I’m kind of nervous about that, too.

Another reason this bugs me (and something that’s been bugging me a lot lately) is the ethics behind International Development. In the same way that you can’t have trickle-down democracy, you can’t just go around handing out fish. And I worry that financing the tea situation is handing out fish. I’m willing to help someone learn to fish, and to help the person figure out good ways to teach everyone else how to fish, and to teach them all about how you can’t overfish, nor pollute the habitat, and so on…but I refuse to just give out fish, dammit.

(This will seem like changing the subject, but bear with me here) Peace Corps policy states that I shall not pass out medications nor lend my bike to villagers. My villagers come to me all the time asking me to give them medicine for problem X. I usually tell them how to treat it themselves (if it’s a cut, wash it with clean water and cover it. If your shoulders hurt, make a hot compress or do stretches or get a massage or rest. Etc). I feel like I ought to feel guilty about this. I’m a rich, privileged American—why am I hoarding my aspirin when I and Peace Corps and the Rich American Taxpayers can afford more? Well, aside from that Peace Corps has a policy about it (for which they have many good reasons), it would be giving out fish. And as soon as I set a precedent of giving stuff rather than help, the ship of Peace Corps in my village might as well just turn turtle, stave itself in, and sink. Because the whole point of International Development work, as I see it (and as I keep explaining to my village) is to obviate it. I’m supposed to make myself irrelevant and obsolete. My job is to put myself out of a job.

Cool, right? I think so.

And that is why it makes me so angry when people here try to make me feel guilty about not giving them medicine, or my bike, or batteries, or an American visa. It’s like yelling at the clerk at the store about a store policy. The clerk’s got no control over the policy, and yelling will only make his job harder, which is actually not in your favor, because then he’ll probably squash your bananas. Or something. Anyway, it really burns me up that people keep demanding gifts, gifts, gifts. “CADEAU!!!!” the children scream when I ride by, “CADEAU!!! TOUBAC, CADEAU!!!” Or when I buy beignets for my family and a little old lady comes up and starts demanding that I give her one without even greeting me…it’s hard, because I’m culturally not allowed to be rude to old people. I didn’t give her a beignet, though—that was my small victory.

But I’m happy that I’m here, even on the hard days (of which there have been several lately). And although I’m getting what is currently a disillusioning perspective on development work, I think it’s really more of a demystification than anything more sinister and dream-shattering. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just not an easy thing, and four months in is not a bad time to end the honeymoon period.

In summary: life is good, food is a project, the radio, well, map, and garden are all in various stages of “gonna be awesome,” and except for probably-giardia, I’m healthy. Oh, and I made it into town in record time yesterday: 1 hour and 23 minutes from my front door to The Gambia river. Mido waawi Senegal, folks. Sedaa e sedaa. (I’m able to Senegal, folks. Little by little.)

I know I keep saying this, but really, next time (two weeks), there will be lots of pictures and videos. Really.

Send me letters! Thanks to my mom, dad, Kate, Marian, Jen, Ari, and Maddy for the wonderful letters. Keep them coming--I'm now reply to every one I get.

Lately in my village we've been having water issues. Either the well gets dirty (don't ask me how), or the pulley breaks, or someone loses the rope-bucket combination down the well. If none of these things happen, you're me and have had 6 guests in the past two weeks, and thus have had to pull a lot more water lately. Whatever the one of various reasons is, I've recently come to a much deeper understanding of value. I value being able to drink water when I'm thirsty with a part of me that never had to think about the water before. I value each splash of water when I bathe with a part of me much deeper than the simple muscular appreciation that goes along with pulling it and carrying it every uphill step of the way to my hut. I always thought that, child of the high Colorado desert and baking California drought that I am, I understood how very valuable water is, and I'm sure I did, before I got here. But now I understand it more. It's always easy to think that before the now moment comprehension of any given thing was incomplete. Thus, young children will speak of “when they were little” and 24-year-olds will talk about what it was like “when they were growing up”...the nature of time is such that we have one direction of perspective, one that constantly revises our previous concept of 'complete' and places it as inferior to the current one. With the exception of things like mathematics and quantum mechanics, we never look back and say, “Boy, I sure understood before, but I'm a royal idiot now.” It just doesn't work that way.

Before I came to Senegal, started living in a village by myself, alone in a way I'd never been alone before, I'd always considered myself independent of other people. I didn't have many friends until the last few semesters of college, and having gone far from home to attend university, I entertained a vaugely mystical idea that I was emotionally independent beyond what “everyone else” was. This is utterly untrue. The idea I had that I was totally independent of my family turns out to be predicated on a very close degree of contact with them, whether through the Internet, or phone wires, or letters. So although I could look with gentle—but uncomprehending—perplexity at the people who let their families rule their lives, or who wouldn't go far from home to do research for a summer / go to college / etc, I never realized that I was equally depending on mine, just in a less-obvious way. Families here stay, for the most part, in a giant block. Maybe it's this that has flicked the switch in my brain, that duh, I miss my family in a very basic sense: they are missing from me. I miss my family in a way I did not realize I could miss them, and I appreciate in retrospect all the time I spent with them before leaving the country. I value the letters and e-mails they send me, and I actively think about them—my extended family (and by this I also mean all my really close friends—my definition of family is a wide one), too, not just my parents and brother—more frequently than I expected. I wonder whether realizing this simply catches me up to the rest of the people I've always wondered about, or whether I've gone through another cycle of development. This is irrelevant; what's important is that I feel blessed beyond measure to be able to understand how lucky I am to have the family I have while they're still here, contactable and breathing. I feel like I've been given the most precious and beautiful gift possible—to understand (although I still can't possibly fully comprehend it and am sure that some day I will look back on this moment and consider myself ignorant) how valuable what I have is—before it's gone. The well has not gone dry, and while I understand that once it does my perspective may become more complete, for now, I truly believe that I understand the worth of the water. Thank you all for everything you do and have done. Thank you for being who and how you are. I love you.

The WHO!

My family is no longer a mystery to many of you, but the basic outline goes: Koumbouna's husband is dead, and her two sons, Tamba and Karfa, both live in the same compound as she does. Karfa is older, and has had two wives before his current wife (one divorced, one died). His son from his second (deceased) wife also lives here, and is around 25, named Moussa. His current wife, Nenegalle, has two kids, around 6 and 3 are real brats and they're named Ibrahima (“Bura”) and Binta. Tamba has one wife, Aissatou, and they have four living children: Mariama (14), Babagalle (12), El Hadji (9), and Luis (4). I'm an awkward addition to describe, familially, because I call Koumbouna my mom, but Karfa (because he's the eldest man in the compound) is technically my dad, although he treats me more like a respected sibling than a child. Most of the time. Tamba is usually called “older brother” but sometimes is my dad, apparently. Aissatou is always my older sister. Nenegalle is always annoying. So it goes (I recently read Slaughterhouse Five, and highly recommend it).

The WHAT!

Miscellaneous:

What have I been up to lately? Well, mostly, I've been pulling peanuts off of plants, although in the last couple of weeks I've been doing somewhat less of that and a lot more things that fall under the category of “random stuff that feels like I've done nothing useful but seem busy all the time anyway.” Also, very exciting, my market town now has a volunteer stationed there. PC Guinea closed its program recently, because of political problems, and so PC Senegal was able to absorb a few—and so lucky me, I get a neighbor! In the last two weeks, I've also had six (count 'em) overnight visitors, and so that's been both a lot of fun and also really weird in terms of continuity, if for no other reason than that I've been speaking a lot more English. Go figure, though, because my Pulaar feels like it's getting a little bit better.

Food:

Village food is usually fine corn couscous, but because I give my family money every month, we get to eat white rice for lunch every day, and sometimes they cook it for dinner, too. I don't really like rice more than corn in general, and have adopted an “ew, rice” attitude, but I have to say, in the past few days, I have definitely come to appreciate rice as a little bit superior. You can, for example, chew it a little bit. So, that's the base. Then we have one of six things. Sometimes there's peanut sauce, which is good. Sometimes there's leaf sauce, which is usually good. Soup sauce is gross more often than it's tasty. Kosan is soured milk—sort of like yogurt, but if you go into it expecting yogurt, you will probably not be happy with it—to which they add a TON of sugar, and you eat it exclusively on the couscous. The last thing is nunkatunk, which sounds funny (extra funny if you lived in Risley), and is just rice cooked sorta gooey with hot pepper and seasoning.

Breakfast is something else entirely. I make it myself, and it's been oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal. Which is nice with powdered milk and a little bit of Foster Clark's (it's like Kool Aid and Crystal Light had kids in tropical flavors). But they only sell oatmeal in Kedougou, and carrying every bite of oatmeal up the mountain is really not what my idea of fun includes. Too, I would then end up with around 50 empty oatmeal cans up at my site by the end of my service, and that's just not a good scene. I was worried about this, but then I solved the problem and was ecstatic for about three days straight. My village has lots of corn. My village has a corn-grinding machine. Thus, I now have about 2 big liters of corn flour, out of which I make fairly boring (but very cheap and relatively tasty) polenta. It's fermenting slowly; I don't know what to do about that, but in theory, this is a great stride forward for...me-kind. The machine also grinds beans, so bean-corn porridge may be in my future, in which case, wow.

Water:

It generally comes from the village well, and it's a matter of pride to me that I haven't used a drop more than I've pulled and carried myself. The well itself is a crooked, fern-bedecked affair with several lost buckets swimming around in the bottom like so many disconsolate, widemouthed fish. There is—with any luck—going to be an entry all about water specifically, so that's pretty much it for here and water.

Shelter:

My hut is the smallest one of those in my family's greater compound, except the tiny ones given the goats and chickens. This is fine with me and the three toads, two geckos, ex-mouse (you'll hear the story), and transient bat that share its 75-ish square feet with me. It's round and mud, topped with a cone of thatch held together with a bunch of bamboo strapping and joists. It has a richness in doors (two), and a small backyard, in which I used to have a tiny garden. The garden died from the attentions of the chicks; chickens can't make it in through the stick fence, but their babies can, and those babies liked nothing more than a fresh baby-green salad. Can't really say I blame them, since vegetables are things that happen to other people, but I was still kinda sad. I shower in the back by standing in a big basin and pouring water over myself. I used to use the gray water to water my garden, but I'm not sure what I'll use it for now.

My toilet is a hole the size of a coffee can that leads to a big tank, in which many maggots live. Two skinks also live there, and I have named them Spink and Forcible, for obvious and silly reasons. Also in residence in my latrine are one pair of sunglasses (Sheila dropped them while visiting) and a dead snake (which Matt killed while visiting). I don't think the snake is still there except in memory, but the sunglasses are visible for given values of the word.

The WHERE!

My village is on top of a mountain—not a large one: it can't compete with any of the mountains near my home in the U.S. It's enough of one to be really painful to go up and down, though. On my way back last time, I ran into a guy who was going up the same path. He does the trip a few times a week, and basically charged up the steep, slidey pathway pushing his unladen bike while I stumbled and gasped and made little sobbing noises in my throat trying to get oxygen into my system. It was actually kind of scary, because I was deprived enough of air that it felt as though my throat was closing up; I couldn't breathe without making whimpering, whistling noises. Towards the top of the hill, I felt the chills again, and knew that my legs' shaking was not going to go away. The man I was with kept trying to get me to let him push my bike or take the bike's load or something. I refused at first because I was still holding onto pride enough to feel embarrassed at my ineptitude, and in the end because I was just set on making it up the mountain and wanted, in a theoretical way, to say that I did it all myself.

The village itself is beautiful, though. Baobab, mahogany, and all kinds of other trees, many of which are large tree-trees, not just scrubby chapparal. Picturesque Pulaar huts are all over the place, but the village lacks not only a road, but a centralized place of any sort, so from the main trail (like a bike path) running through town, you just have to know which branches lead to whose compound, and from those, which other branches lead to which OTHER compounds. This contributes to the fact that I haven't really met all of my village yet. Or else I have met my village and it's smaller than I thought.

There's a school, at which there are four (count 'em) teachers, only one of whom speaks any Pulaar, so the village is convinced that, since my Pulaar isn't the worst around, it's actually pretty good. It's a nice ego boost, if artificial, because I've heard any number of stories from other new PCVs about how their villages tell them ceaselessly how bad their Pulaar is. The reason there are teachers there who do not speak the local language is that Senegalese schools are conducted in French, and teachers are employed by the government and then told where in the country they are going to go for the school year. They appear to have several years at each place, but I don't know anything more, and I also don't know why the government doesn't take into consideration which languages the teachers speak. Or maybe it does and there are just no Pulaar-speaking teachers around.

Guinea is visible from my hut. It's a lot greener and more forested than Senegal is—I can say this because I see Guinea from the mountains of my village and Senegal from the mountain as I descend the slippery, dangerous, oxygenless path down the mountain to Kedougou. Going east from the village to my market town is about a half-hour bike ride if you're in a hurry, a 45-minute bike ride if you take it easy, and over an hour if you're me and sick. On the way there's a path that branches off the main trail that goes down a chimney of a creekbed down the mountain. My family swears it's just fine if you carry your bike down it, but I've seen that path and I don't know if I'll ever feel I have enough testosterone to make doing that a necessary part of proving my worth. In other words—heck no!

The WHY!

I, unlike so many people in this vast, spinning universe, have a purpose. I know why I'm here. I mean, obviously, I'm here to work on agriculture-related development projects, spread awareness of American culture, and collct Senegalese culture to take home and share with all the people I know in the U.S. who aren't here right now. So basically, all of y'all. What're my projects, so far, you may ask.

No, I'm not kidding. You may ask. Go ahead, ask me.

Okay, so I have no projects yet. But my project ideas are on the ground waiting for their wheels to be affixed and they are thus: a garden (I need a fence), redig the well (so that it won't go dry in a few months), get a solar panel for charging phones (this is a carrot with which I hope to tempt people to do ag work with me), seed extension (Peace Corps' idea and one of my main purposes), beekeeping (utterly in its infancy in terms of project-ness, and likely to remain so until I've gotten the rest of my stuff going), and agroforestry work, which right now includes trying to plan out some live fence places, and also making plans for a wood lot. That's it. What have I done so far? Not a whole lot, to be honest.

Why? Because, it's hard to comprehend if you're not here (or I'm assuming it is—maybe you all are smarter than I am about this), but time here has a different type of quality. It isn't money, here. It's not even related to money. It's more like a resource that's so abundant that nobody seems to think of it as a resource. Like sunlight, except for even more available. Why would you try to save it, in that situation? There'll be more of it tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, and next year. So why would you want to have your garden started in your first five weeks at site, when you've got a good 114 weeks at site at your disposal?

Seriously, though, it's because the garden and the well redigging are at the top of my list, and for the former, the guys who make fence need to be done with their peanut harvest to make the fence. And for the latter, I need to have a community meeting to decide how we're going to finance the situation, and that also needs to wait until the harvest is over so that people will actually show up to the meeting. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of letter writing (everyone who has written me a letter has gotten at least one reply, with the exception of my parents, who write way more letter than I reply to, and Kevin, who gets way more replies than he sends letters), peanut harvesting, and, recently, drawing.

The new Guinean refugee PCV just installed in my market town has organized this map to be painted on one of the walls of the local middle/high school. Ashley and I have been helping her—first, we drew a grid on the wall, and then we transferred a map onto the wall by drawing it square-by-square. Soon, we'll start painting, and I hope to put pictures of it up when we are done.

The HOW! (some anecdotes and some musings on stuff in general):

One thing we (Ashley, Katie, and I) did in the last two weeks was go to a community meeting held by WorldVision, a Christian (I think) International Aid Organization. They're trying to establish a six-year plan for developing health- and education-related infrastructure and classes, which is kinda neat. So they had a meeting, to which many important people (Imams, village chieves, elders, presidents of women's groups, and the local PCVs) came. Credit where credit's due—they spoke great Pulaar. A lot of governmental organizations don't even speak Pulaar down here, so it's really great that an IAO would. But they were trying to organize things. As in, they wanted to make a committee for overseeing the expenditure of money. But of course most of the people at the meeting were like, “Just give us the money, that's what we want,” and everyone in the room knew that if that happened then several people would end up with new motorbikes and life would go on the same way it always has. Not, you understand, because the chieves and Imams and so forth are bad people. It would just end up that way—it's hard to explain why that's not as jawdroppingly corrupt here as it is in America. It is corrupt. But it's not really anything that anyone would hold against anyone else, or at least not that I've seen.

If you can buy a moto, then you do. Awa, gasi. (literally, “Okay, finished,” but figuratively more like “That's all she wrote.”)

So WorldVision spent around four hours trying to explain that the people needed to be responsible for mobilizing their communities, and so forth. After that amount of time, we decided that our presence wasn't helping, and that it was time to go. As we walked out of the room, one of the WV workers came up to me and asked me what they were doing wrong. Why the people weren't just organizing. This was odd on several levels, first because he is Senegalese and I'm American. How would I know more about his country than he does? Well, because even though I'm an American, I'm a villageouis. I don't have running water, electricity, or Internet in my village. I live in a hut. And it struck me that, whatever its insufficiencies, Peace Corps really is good at putting people into communities. It is unique in that—otherwise how would a Senegalese Aid Worker (who is more fluent in Pulaar and has more development experience than I do) think that an American has more of an understanding about how people work? So, go Peace Corps. But it was still a very strange experience.

Another odd NGO experience is more through observing the local TOSTAN workers. TOSTAN is a great organization, let me just say up front, and I really respect their goals and effort. But they way their work is going in my village is really something that nonplusses me.

They're giving out cell phones to women. The women may not get to keep the cell phones. The cell phones are part of their women's literacy effort, as near as I can make out. So, in addition to teaching Pulaar literacy (which is great!), they're teaching about texting and phone calls and stuff. Literacy is awesome. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But I've got to wonder...why the cell phones? So I asked Aissatou why they were giving out cell phones, since she goes to the classes, I guessed she'd know. Because presumably they tell people why they're teaching them what they're teaching them. She said she thought it was so that the women would go to class. So that they wouldn't have to walk a long way to communicate with one another. That's two reasons rammed up against each other without room for a transition, and I did that on purpose because that's how she told me.

A couple days later, I got it. “Ohhhhh, they want to let the women communicate with one another without having to walk across 'town' AND they want to encourage them to come to class.” Check. But giving out cell phones. Could we try to think of a less sustainable thing to do, please? Because as cool as it is to have a cell phone, what that organization has done, effectively, is created another set of needs that requires money to be fulfilled in a community without a whole lot of the jingling—let alone the folding—stuff. Now the women need to charge their phones, which means they need to go into town more often, or find someone who is going to town. They need to pay for the phones to be charged. They need to buy credit to put on the phones. But the giving of phones has created no source of income—they're just a status symbol. So now instead of spending that money on food (maybe even vegetables!?) or clothing or some requirement, it's going towards...what? Phones. Which were not missed before they existed, but now that they exist, must be taken care of. This baffles me. I have no right to say that they SHOULDN'T have phones. I have no reason to say that TOSTAN shouldn't give them out. But it strikes me as deeply backwards that giving out cell phones should be the method of choice of creating literacy and developing an area.

Related to this is the whole question of, “What role do IAOs play?” Are we, the workers, here to help the people with what they want, or to give them what we think they should have? Well, if the former, then TOSTAN's cell phone business is right on the money. If the latter, then how are we really that much different from the imperialist colonialists of the 19th and 20th centuries? I mean, sure, we're not enslaving anyone nor exporting everything valuable...but we're messing with their lives in order to give ourselves that warm fuzzy glow of having-done-something-nice-for-someone. Altruism, by the way, axiomatically does not exist in my universe. If you want to argue that point, go do it elsewhere.

So, presumably our role is something more like parents, and I mean that in as nonpaternalistic a way as possible. We're not supposed to just pass out candy—we need to help people understand why just eating candy is not a good option. Education is key. Broccoli is good for you. And it needs to be education without devaluing the existing cultures. We run into another problem here: what if the culture is fundamentally exclusive of development, and vice-versa? Should we work to conserve the culture, or figure that it's their culture, they're allowed to leave it by the wayside if they so desire?

But what's been getting to me lately is this nagging doubt that education is anything more than making people feel unsatisfied with their lot. I mean, if they're happy to live in huts and have no teeth and live from dime to dime, spending everything they could be saving for future use on sugar and cell phones and so forth...who am I to say they shouldn't be doing that? Isn't it their right to kill their environment and rape their ecosystems just as much as we in America have done so? So if my 14-year-old sister doesn't want to be literate, doesn't want to go to school, or learn French, or do anything more than have a family and enough money to get fake hair braided into her hair to make it look like she has white person hair every holiday...is it really my role as a development worker to tell her that's wrong? Or just trying to show her another way of doing things—doesn't that imply that I think my way of doing things is better? And even if I think that, is that really the point of my being here, to try to get the people here to do what I, a total outisder with a barely-scratching-the-surface view of life here, think they ought? I don't know. People here have so much less than we do in the U.S., and yet they seem so much more contented. If to motivate them to become more developed is to take that contentedness away, what have I done? Is that really “aiding” the people here?

Maybe the problem is that in order to raise the standard of living, you have to do just that—change the standards. Which means to make people unsatisfied with what up until now has been satisfactory. But doesn't that seem odd?

Obviously, there's a lot of work that can be done that doesn't touch those questions, with gardening, and vegetable consumption, and just helping people do their daily work (pounding peanuts, for example) and so forth...but I really do wonder about all of this. What role do IAOs and their development workers play, philisophically? And is that role ethically defensible? What about morally?

This may be a result of my spending an awful lot of time alone in my own head for the last five weeks. It's not something that can be avoided, either, because I doubt if my Pulaar will ever be good enough to discuss abstract concepts, and even were I able to discuss them, the nature of these concepts is such that I cannot really discuss them with the people here. Or maybe that outlook is my problem. Maybe it would solve everything if I tried to discuss it. But I don't think I'm that brave, so I'll content myself with trying to make a garden and help them figure out a way to redig the well...

On to happier topics.

Sometimes when I sleep, I wake up with what I think of as the creeping itchies. The creeping itchies are when there aren't actually bugs or bug bites, but you feel crawly itchy things all over your body. So the other night, I woke up with a very distinct creepy itch on my leg. And then I thought, “No, that's way too real to be a creepy itch.” I turned on my flashlight, threw back the blanket and there was a mouse! Crawling up my leg! Inside my mosquito net, inside the blankets. It ran and hid. I pawed through all the bedding, looking, looking...didn't find it. Decided to go back to sleep. Woke up an hour later to something falling from my ceiling, and was just MAD. I mean, fine. Toads, geckoes, earwigs, ants, bats which do laps in the room every night...but mice, dammit. Mice have fleas, and fleas make itchy things happen AND carry diseases. So I turned on my light again and started shifting all the stuff in the hut. Find the mouse. Find the mouse. Find the effing mouse and kill it dead. Then I hear my dad's voice from outside. “Mariama. Mariama? You're not sleeping—are you okay?”

“There's a mouse in my hut. I want to kill him.”

My dad comes into the hut. “A mouse?” He holds his cupped hands up to the top of his head, “With EARS?”

“Yeah! A mouse!”

“I'll kill it. Where is it?”

“In the bed.”

“In the bed? In the NET?”

“Yeah.”

“THERE HE IS!” and with a leap and three or four whaps, he suddenly emerges from the bed/net tangle holding a very floppy (but thankfully not leaky) mouse. “Okay. Sleep well.” And, taking the mouse with him, he goes.

I am not sure what he would've done if I told him it was a mouse without ears. I don't know why the ears were the operative thing, or the defining characteristic, or whatever. But it was very strange.

Another strange experience has been that my obviously dirt-poor village has been giving my an embarrassment of gifts. Usually food, and I give it to my family, so we all eat it, but here are people who have less than almost anyone I've ever met doing way more than the equivalent of bringing over a casserole for the new family in the neighborhood.

And finally, I'll close this mammoth blog entry with a list of things:

72: number of bamboo ribs in my roof

3: number of buckets swimming in the bottom of my well

8: number of huts in my compound (counting the kitchen and goat-house)

10: number of feet my hut is in diameter

5: number of bead bangles my tokara, Mariama, gave me

2: number of books I've read so far

1478: number of pages in one of the books

5: types of sauce we have on our rice or couscous

3: number of toads that live in my hut

100: approximate number of meters tall my mountain is

12: number of goats Tamba has

The title is a reference to an Antje Duvekot song that has been running through my head for the past few weeks.

I have forty minutes here in the Internet Cafe in beautiful downtown Kedougou before I head back out to my site (25 + km with 100m gain in elevation).

Before swear-in was nice. We went back to Sangalkam and stayed for one last week, during which I had a fight with Issakha, who was trying to shake some more money out of me for my swear-in clothes. It left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, especially because I had given him a very generous gift of money just before the dennaboo, and he'd had the cloth for a long time. And yet, he still pressed me "Oh, Hali, I just don't know how I can get the money to turn the electricity back on to work. I just don't know where to find the money. It's so hard to live here in Senegal, where we have no money," and so forth. This was clearly a bid for money, but I got angry, embarrassed him in front of the entire neighborhood, and my clothes were finished the night before we left.

Swear-in itself was quite the party. The US Ambassador's house in Dakar is beautiful, in a mansion-like way. Many people, including me, gave speeches (mine was in Pulaar), and then waiters dressed to the nines passed around silver trays of miniature hamburgers. It was surreal.

Two days later, we headed down to Kedougou in a car that had to be pushstarted, and the next day we went install-shopping. Overwhelming, to say the least. The best part of the day was when Daniel and Thomas, who took us newbies shopping for our stuff, disappeared around the corner and then showed up carrying a beautiful raffia cabinet. "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" they shouted. After buying buckets, beignoires, a sleeping pad, lots of various odds and ends, and enough tools to make my little agricultural heart sing, we went back to the regional house for a very delicious dinner (Matt cooked).

The next day we went around and met all the really important people of Kedougou, or tried to. Half of them weren't there, but that didn't stop us from greeting everyone in absentia. Melanie installed, and then it was my turn. I'll write a more detailed account of install when I have my journal with me and a little more time, for now I'll describe my site (at breakneck speed).

My hut is, as Matt says, "Tesoko haaaaaaaa tesoko" (literally: small untiiiiiiiiiil small), but very cozy. The front door is low enough that I have to stoop nearly double to not scratch my back on the thatch, and once inside, it's a roomy 10' in diameter (yes, it's round). My back door is about as low as the front, and leads to a shower area that is about as large as my hut. It's fenced and has a big, beautiful shade tree, and now also a clothesline and a very small garden as well, which I water with my grey water from showering and doing laundry.

To get water, I walk down a slight hill to the well, pull water myself (to the amazement of the village), and carry it on my head back to my family's compound. I do this to wash myself and my clothes, and that amazes everyone,too. I'm not sure if they're more impressed that I DO my laundry or that my clothes actually come out CLEAN (major achievement), but they're impressed, so I'll take what I can get.

My family is large and confusing, but basically I have a lot of parent figures and a lot of sibling figures. Tamba is my older brother/father and he is nothing but helpful and kind. His wife Aissatou is clearly proud of how much I work, and tells me to do chores when people visit from other villages to show off how hard her volunteer works. Mariama, my tokara, or person-with-whom-I-share-a-name is 17, and is probably my best friend in village. We hang out, and she likes to teach me to do things, or to make silly jokes, or try to understand what I say. Karfa is Tamba's older brother, and thus also my father, and his wife, Nenegalle, has two really annoying little kids. The elder makes everyone cry and the younger never stops crying. She also can't cook very well, but I don't have to interact with her much, so that's a plus. My mother, Koumbouna, is also Tamba's and Karfa's mother (I think), and she's a jolly mother archetype. Strong, funny, kind, and absolutely not standing for any crap from anyone. My three younger brothers (Tamba's kids) are Babagalle (12) Alaji (9) and Luis (4). They're true younger brothers, in all their annoyingness and glory. This morning I got on my bike and discovered that they'd disconnected the front breaks and messed the gearing up, so we'll be discussing that when I get home.

This morning I left at dawn, and Tamba decided he had to go with me. This was not my favorite thing, but it ended up being fine. He took me to the place where the road plunges precipitately down the mountain, and reminded me to go "doucement, doucement," 'til I got to the bottom. I got to the bottom of a pretty rocky thing and then it flattened out. I said, "Huh. That was the mountain? Ooooooh no, watch out, skeery mountain gonna GITCHA!" and things of that sort until, 50 feet later, the ground fell away and I was looking at something easily as steep as E. Buffalo St. in Ithaca. Big, loose rocks the size of your head. Anyway, that took some doing, and as I got to the place where it leveled out for good and looked back at the sunrise over the mountain, I thought, "Wow. I'm really in the Peace Corps now." Riding down, I kept feeling like an REI or Trek Bikes advertisement.

It's a long way. And it's hot. And everyone keeps telling me I'm bonkers for planning to go back up tonight, but it's about time to do that. When I'm back in town in two weeks I'll bring pictures of my site, the road down, and my family, and with luck, post them.

Please keep sending letters! I am replying to everyone, so if you want a letter from Senegal, write to me! Also, big thank you to Kevin for the two amazing packages, to my mom for the seeds and soap and books, and to my dad, although that one hasn't gotten here yet. See you all in two weeks (where by "see" I clearly mean "will write")!

One thing that makes Peace Corps' mission a lot more feasible is that they find Counterparts with whom PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) work. A Counterpart is an HCN (Host Country National) who lives in the community and (in theory) a lot of facilitating, from explaining to the community the PCV's role and goals to acting as a linguistic mediator and general go-to person.

One thing that has made me a lot less nervous about install (say it "IN-stall", which is when Peace Corps takes me out to my site and leaves me there), is that we just had our Counterpart Workshop (CPW). My two counterparts are named Tamba Keita and Aissatou Diallo. Tamba is one of my two older brothers in my host family, and Aissatou is a woman who lives in the village as well. They're both really sweet people, and they both speak French and Peul Fuuta, and I think also Wolof and just a smidgin of English. Peace Corps brought in about two counterparts per PCT for two days of intensive meetings and workshops.

Basically, what we did was (a) get to know one another a little bit and (b) listen to Peace Corps lay out the ground rules. The "Here is what your Americans are for, and here is what they're not for. Here is what they will be good at, and here is what they will not be good at. Here is what will come easily to them, and here is what will not come easily." To drive it home, they had some of us do a few "example" language classes in languages like Hebrew and Polish, and asked the counterparts to all imagine that they've been dropped into a totally foreign place without any knowledge of culture or language.

You may think, "Well, duh, it's obvious that the PCTs and PCVs are in a situation like that," but even if you've grown up understanding that there are other cultures, if you've never really thought about it a whole lot, you may not realize that EVERYTHING would be different in, say, America. People in America are white and rich, but most Senegalese probably would not assume that we can buy our rice ready-to-cook without picking, washing, or anything else required. Or that we have machines to wash our clothes and dishes. It's the small things...and so you might not get that no, it gets cold in America like Minnesota cold, not like oh, it's 60 F. And so you would expect your American to get little things like how to pick rice, or greet, or something. Because there are things so basic to your way of life that you don't even think about them. Like looking both ways before you cross the street, holding the door open for someone, tipping a waiter, or things of that caliber.

So, now our Counterparts know a lot more about us, and we know a little bit about them. Tamba called our elder brother to ask him what my name is, and it turns out that in Kedougou (so, basically, everywhere but Sangalkam), my name will be Mariama Keita, which is a pretty name. I count myself lucky.

The rest of training will fly by, I expect. Tomorrow we visit the Official Peace Corps Bureau in Dakar, and then Tuesday we go back to village for the final week, coming back to Thies after our final language test on 13 October, pack like crazy, swear in (in Dakar) on 16 October, and then travel down to Kedougou before install, which for me is on the afternoon of 20 October. I would prefer, of course, to travel on the 17th, because that leavse the 18th for shopping and th 19th for hanging around doing nothing, or perhaps cooking tasty food. So, between now and then, I need to convince two of the other six PCTs headed to Kedougou to leave on the 17th, since we're taking two cars (and therefore the other three can come down whenever they please).

Expect another update in a week or so, after I've left Sangalkam for good and am even closer to the coveted PCV title.

PSA first: I figured out what the problem with the video stuff is: you can't upload files larger than a given size (sensible), and the ones I wanted to upload were too large. As a result, I took a bunch of really quick ones, which will be a little like hiccups to experience but are, I hope, a little more real than photos. If not, let me know and we shall not try this experiment again.

So what is a dennaboo? It's an Islamic baptism ceremony that normally takes place one week after the birth of a baby in which the baby's head is shaved, its name is announced, and everyone eats a lot. Jeneba had her baby two weeks ago, and since the dennaboo would've fallen on Korite, they just gave the baby a name then (Yaasi), and had the party the next week. The pictures are all G-rated, but some of the film clips may have butchering-of-animals going on, so be warned.

Toubabs from left: Frank, Zach, Ashley, Melanie.

Zach and his host nephew.

Frank and Zach's other host nephew.

Turns out the kid isn't the only one capable of making silly faces.

The kids here really like to be obnoxious and touchy. Frank is really taking advantage of that here.

So that the women of the family do not have to do a ton of cooking on the day they're throwing the party, there's a women's co-operative that does it. I don't know if they get paid to or if they just rotate through themselves whenever one of them has a baby, either way, here they are in all their laughing, chatty, hardworking glory.

There were at least three of those pots.

Zach's host sister and Issakha, wearing a boubou he stayed up all night to make out of cloth I brought him from Kedougou. He likes that hat a lot, but I think he'd look better without it.

My other namesake, with a water bottle, looking like a bottled-water commercial.

"Hali, atchu!" ("Hali, stop!")

Wooli, I think his name is. One of the nicest people ever, the dogsbody of my compound. Very kind and gentle and patient with the children and with me. However, he has never had to threaten to lash me with a switch to keep me out of the sewer, so we have a less strained relationship than he does with, oh, say, Yero (aka Hiero), for example.

Nogay with pinkeye.

Aissatou, my eldest sister, visited from Dakar to help with the dennaboo.

A small child in very embroidered clothing.

Alpha Omar Sala, my second namesake's and Nogay's brother. Also one of my favorite people.

Here he is again.

Another of my favorite people--this is Frank's older brother, Ibrahima, who is endlessly patient and speaks very slow, clear Pulaar. He reminds me of what a full sibling of both Barack Obama and my father would look like (if such a thing were possible).

Issakha. And hat. Sorry the picture is so dark.

Jeneba, who is even smaller now that she isn't pregnant anymore.

Jeneba, in her gold-embroidered splendor.

Funny, I didn't notice that woman not want her picture taken until I watched the clip.

Yaasi Ba, appearing for the first time to the world at large.

Zach wants to get, like, ten goats. That much English is unusual to hear. It's funny, you'd think that as I've got a first-rate degree in the study of it and am a relatively introspective, analytical type, I would've noticed by now that I really like my first language. Especially given my sensitivity to how it is used. But no, it took six weeks of foreign-language-immersion training to get me to notice that not only do I like my language, butＩmiss it. Yes, I am sometimes dumber than a box of rocks.

GORE ALERT--nothing dies in the following, but things are being cut up that are already dead.

In which Omar Sala thinks I am taking his picture again.

Wooli and company cutting up a sheep.

This post is the place to comment with things like, "Do not send her a hammock--I am sending one!" I won't come scroll through the comments, promise. Also, with respect to the gloves, if anyone finds a longer pair, that'd be awesome, because then I could maybe do some Anacardia sp. work.

Oh, and if you want to comment with other things that you are sending, that's fine. Prevent my getting sixteen packages full to the brim with raisins...

Okay, let's see if I can get through all of this. There will be no pictures this time around, because I took very few and, honestly, I'm too lazy to walk over to my room and get my camera. If we are lucky, I will add some more stuff from the journal later, but for now, here's today.

Kedougou and environs

Kedougou is absolutely beautiful--full of rolling hills, tall green grass, short-ish (10m) trees of all kinds, corn fields, millet fields, cows, seasonal streams, the Gambia River...I know, it's the rainy season, and it won't be nearly as amazing in the dry season, but it's Truly Beautiful, and I hope that everyone comes to visit me. Maddy, my parents, Kevin and Jess are all on the list somewhere, and I expect everyone else to sign up, pronto.

Party and Dinner

When we arrived in Kedougou after a 12-hour car ride (that's fast, apparently), the current PCVs were really happy to see us. They were so happy that they'd spent a ton of money and time making a dinner that included: hand-ground hamburgers, onion rings, sweet-potato fries, fried okra, potato salad, coleslaw with RAISINS (!!), tomatoes, cheese, and homemade hamburger buns. I nearly died of amazing.

Kekeresy

The village I visted was beautiful, welcoming, and tiny. I fell down in the mud and the villagers observed that "The mud got her dirty". So as to avoid embarrassing me.

Warthog sandwiches

Are readily available, cheap by US standards, and very tasty.

Today is a hard day, not in an "I'd like to ET" kind of way, but because I'm underslept, I'm running out of stamina, and training (PST, Pre-Service Training) is only about half over. I feel like I'm the stupidest person in my language group, and that really bothers me, because a big part of my identity is that I am intelligent. I also truly do not like certain circumstances surrounding and related to my language class, as some of you may have gleaned. And, so as to remain fairly circumspect (being as this is a publicly identified forum), I'm not going to specify further, but if you are curious, try to imagine the kind of person with whom I would completely not get along, and then put me in the same room with that person for multiple hours per day. It's just an exhausting day, we had a really intense session about rape and sexual assault, I'm discouraged, I am chafing in a subordinate position to someone I feel is totally incompetent (never a good situation for me), I'm feeling isolated and insular and really tired of the specific ways that the world continues to suck, and there is not a break coming up anytime soon.

My family in Sangalkam is amazing, but staying there is not restful. Jeneba just had her baby, which is wonderful, except I do not like babies. I also do not like parties, and here comes Korite (one of the biggest holidays of the calendar) and right behind it, a Dennaboo (say it "Den-uh-boe"), or baptism. And a language test, which, coinciding with a trough in my competence is really not great. Frankly, I'm sure this is just a PMS-y kind of day, and normally I am neutral-to-chipper...but, yeah. Not all blog posts are happy ones, and I just wanted to let y'all know the other side of training: there are days when nothing feels right, everything is overwhelming, there is no respite in sight, and you want to cry, go to sleep, hide, scream, or who-knows-what. Because you feel stupid, you feel overwhelmed and inadequate, but at the SAME TIME you just want to go out to site and get the training over with, already.

But on the up-side, I'm not really sick, my laundry will probably dry before we head to Sangalkam, we just got paid so I have plenty of money to go shopping for things to take with me to village, and I talked with Maddy, Kevin, and Andrew and they made me happy. And I got a really wonderful note from Bert, too. Thank you all for being wonderful!

To my Dad, who sent me pens, earplugs, and a letter-a-week so far, and who woke me up with a really welcome phone call during a tough week at homestay...

To my Mom, whose letters and pictures have also been coming thick and fast...

To Pat G., who sent me a letter and a picture that reminded me of Colorado and the Real Mountains...

To Jen Y., who sent me a wonderful postcard that kept me from having a really terrible day...

To Ari, who sent me letters, only one of which I have gotten so far, that made me smile and remember how lovely language specificity and snarky humor is...

To Adam G., Elaine, Kevin, Bert for Facebook encouragements...

To Sarah, Kevin, and Ari for chat support, especially when I was sick and miserable...

To everyone who replies to my emails...

To everyone who has sent wishes and prayers my way...

To anyone who has done something wonderful for me but I forgot to mention...

Thank you, as I have rarely thanked anyone before.

And, to Heidi and Kyle, congratulations on your engagement! I will look into coming back for the wedding, but right now it is nearly impossible to say whether I will be able to make it or not. Either way, my thoughts will be with you.

[Insert failed attempt to upload video]

I'm going to make a list of things about which I would like to write, and then use those as subject headings again. We'll see how far down the list I get.

C'est facil, ou bien?

Nyami niebe

Fasting

Messes you up good. I did it for one day, didn't eat or drink (minus the mouthful of water I needed to take my last anti-mangoface steroid pill that morning) until 7:30pm. The not eating is not a big deal, but the not drinking water is really, really a painful thing to try. The next day I was covered in lethargy. The day after that I was fighting off a virus and losing, felt like I had been beaten with a pipe. Five days later I was finally back to functioning at around 90%, where I feel like I pretty much stay. But yes, I fasted for one day, and although I am telling my Sangalkam family that I am going to fast vraiment, tellement (really, totally) next year, I don't know about that. Because really. Just, ouch. But it made my family happy.

Issakha

My koto, or older brother, is really amazing, but has taken it into his head that I need to win a Toubab Ribbon of some sort, and so has been praying for me to "Prendre le meilleur note". No pressure. The day of our language test, he woke me an hour early to practice Peul Fuuta with him for an hour. He is taking this way more seriously than I am, and I think he is engaged in some sort of possibly-informal contest with at least a couple of the other host families to see whose American is the Best. Huh.

Phone calls

Are free to receive, but cost me through the nose to make. So, please call me if you can spare the money to talk. I hear rumors of websites that let you pick five frequently-called countries and get a vastly reduced rate, but I do not know what they are called, yet. When I do, I'll post them. Until then, yes, please call me. I'm four hours later than New York, so calling me after 8pm their time is really not a good plan. If I'm in class or busy, no biggie. People in Senegal answer their phones while teaching class, having a conversation, or sitting in class. Much different in terms of etiquette than in the USA. So if I can't talk for long, I can offer an estimate of when I will be able to talk.

Stress

Pulling water

Slapstick and praying

Helping to cook and chore increase in general

Long conversation with Ibrahima

Watching people work and helping!

Lac Rose and my revenge on the flies

Embarrassing biriti/billet moment

Ready, set, pee

MIDO FAALA

What we probably sound like, vraiment

Garden

Country Director

Losing ability to articulate

Lists of things to write about (we love infinitely metarecursive things!), or I miss you gu ys

LPI

Cookbook

Things I wish I had

Dried Fish and concept of food

Anger going back in on itself

Journal excerpt:

"August 28

It's been raining a lot. Yesterday it rained with increasingly torrential fury for about an hour, or just under (45 minutes). We had to stop class and went under the school's overhang outside to escape the worst of the noise. I was trying to present my family tree, but literally could not shout loudly enough to be heard Especially in Peul Fuuta (there are no standardized spellings, so that's my chosen one). Standing outside the room, watching the water pour down, I listened to the rain (obviously) and thought I heard a rhythm in it. Not possible, given the nature of thermodynamics. I decided that I must've been hearing my heart, and that seemed so poetic and fitting that I have decided to believe it.

...

Last night I slept inside. That's right, I SLEPT inside. Now, given it was night-after-mefloquine, sleeping is really sort of an optimistic misnomer, but the point is that if it is raining and my wooden door is open, and so is my window, then I am able to sleep. What a relief."

Note on sleeping--I have now gotten pretty good at predicting (a) when it is going to rain and (b) when it is going to rain enough to matter. At least in terms of overnight weather. I'm also pretty pleased with myself because although I can sleep through roosters, calls to prayer, children, enthusiastic Parcheesi games, arguments in the street, and tea parties (loud things here), I wake up as soon as the pre-rain wind starts to blow, or when water falls on my face. NB I know I

can sleep through these things because I keep hearing about other people being waked up by them and/or they are still occurring, but I no longer notice them. And whenＩam sleeping inside because I've decided it's going to rain and it starts to really rain and I wake up slightly and hear it, well, I don't think I've ever felt more smug.

So, I think I am technically disallowed from revealing the actual name of my site. So I won't tell you what it is. Barring that, though, I'm going to type in my COS report, which was written by a Health PCV who left in 2007. So, things will be different in some ways, but here is pretty much all the information I have.

"I served as a Health volunteer in ____, a small village about 25-30 km south of Kedougou. ____ is located on a mountain ridge within view of Guinea and is home to about 300 people. Though not terribly far from Kedougou, _____'s mountaintop location makes it a bit remote. This is both a plus and a minus. The area is beautiful and peaceful but travel to and from the village involves pushing a bicycle up and down the rocky mountain paths. Also up on the mountain ridge is teh village/town of Fongolimbi, about 9 km away. There you will find teh Poste de Sante, lumo (weekly market), Sous-prefet, a large school, Eaux et Forets, telecenter and a handful of boutiques.

"The best parts of my service have been my location and my family. The Kedougou region is unique with its greenery and mountains. And ____, especially, is beautiful with its scenic vistas of the hills in Guinea, foggy mornings during the rainy season, regular breezes when it's hot and still elsewhere, many biking trails, nearby waterfalls and varied wildlife (beware the snakes!). The village is small but spread out. My family's compound is surrounded by corn and peanut fields. They have truly been like a family to me. They're playful, funny, sincere, generous, and are always looking after my best interests. I've had no troubles with them at all and completely trust each and every one of them.

"The people of the village are also very friendly My original village counterpart was always welcoming and often asked if everythign was goign well with me and my family He has since been replaced by another villager who has been a friend and is eager to do good work...

"There's no public transport anywhere near ____ other than the once-a-week lumo truck that struggles up the mountain "road" to Fongolimbi from Kedougou. The road is about 5 km away from ____ and can be very treacherous during ascent or descent. Most of us volunteers in the Kedougou region bike everywhere. It takes me less than two hours to bike into Kedougou and about half an hour longer to get back up onto the mountain to ____. During the rainy season some of teh trails can get very muddy and the creeks and rivers become swollen with rainwater. Biking to and from town you WILL get wet. Accept it.

"Most of my work has been in ____ and in the surrounding villages. I've done malaria prevention and AIDS awareness. It's been difficult convincing villagers to show up for meetings and presentations, but once there they've been receptive. Prevention and awareness are long-term ideas that aren't always considered by poor village people living hand-to-mouth. It's best to propose projects in a way that shows an immediate benefit to the people. Children in the classroom are easy since they're essentially a captive audience. Conducting presentatiosn on lumo days is a good idea since everyone is likely to show up anyway. Women's groups or health committees might need some incentive to show up (i.e. tea, lunch, snazzy take-home visual aids).

"Possible projects for a new volunteer might include improvements at the health hut, more malaria prevention and AIDS awareness (always), working with kids and the school (English classes, painting murals, educational games), supplemental gardening, improved water sanitation (fix the forage, deepen the well). I think most of the villagers would be willing to support any project started by a new volunteer.

"I would have liked to have accomplished more during my time here in Senegal but overall my experience here has been good. There is so much to be done, especially here in the south. I'm sure that the next volunteer will find their service in ____ to be very rewarding. I wish them the best of luck."

So, what will I be doing? I'll be working with farmers to try to improve seed varieties, selection, and storage techniques. I'll be trying to get people to garden and eat vegetables, and to teach them how to organize as a community (!?!????). What I personally am really interested in is drying produce, beekeeping, live mulch, composting, gardening, and tree propagation.

I am super excited about this site, and really think I got the best assignment in Senegal. Breeze, no water issues, a back yard in which I can have a garden, a place that makes me exercise...couldn't be happier. Plus, I will be as close as humanly possible to where Sarah and Jacob are, and not all that far from Katie. And, since my site is really awesome, it means I will get plenty of visitors. I'm also within a day of travel from a National Park, where there are chimpanzees and (allegedly) lions. There are, sorry Paul, also snakes, though. And since some of them are Elapidae, I will be carrying an Ace bandage everywhere I go.

I have a lot to write about, but I think I'm going to leave you with this for now, even though most of it is just my ripping off my site assignment. Other news is that we cut my hair today so that my head can fit into my bike helmet, and some more stats about my site. Tomorrow, inshallah, we will have a mammoth update and some more videos.

Site Stats:

Population: 400

Language: 98% Pulaar, 2% Bambarra

Groups: Men's, Women's, Young People's

Projects: Fornio cultivation and processing, peanut field for school canteen

Site description: Compounds are distributed in two or more distinct quartiers that are separated by a short distance (less than 0.5 km), 3 km from a paved road, access road is clay with gravel, town is mostly Muslim (as in, practically unanimous)

Schools: French (5 classrooms), Koranic, Literacy Class

Cash crops: peanuts, millet, cassava, rice, gardening, animal husbandry

Main source of income for women: peanuts, cassava, rice, gardening, animal husbandry

Some men leave the village to work elsewhere to supplement income, but this is seasonal.

Weekly market during dry season, all sorts of goods

Boutiques in ____ sell tea, batteries, onions, sugar, rice, etc

Public buildings: Health Post, Mosque

Three greatest problems villagers identify:

No cash to buy peanut seeds, fertilizer

Lack of assistance from outside agencies

Lack of training (literacy, numeracy, management)

There is sufficient water year-round, and no salinification issues, which, I admit, really is something I am glad to escape.

Concrete-lined wells in village: 1

Ashley, Frank, and Melanie after our first LPI (Language Placement Interview). Melanie's hand is sorta blurry, but that's just because she has superpowers.

Frank in his room. I wanted to crop this one, but figured it was better to get it uploaded than to forever intend to improve it and upload it and never quite get there.

My host mother, cleaning the kitchen. Her name is Fatoumata Dya (I think), but I call her Nene (say it "nay nay") when I talk to her, which is not often, because she terrifies me.

My older brother Assiz, husband of Rama and father of Fatou (you'll see, she looks exactly like him). He can be sort of a jerk sometimes, but is really good underneath it all.

My eldest brother, Issakha, husband of Jeneba and father of Hiero. He's one of the gentlest, most kind and patient people I have ever encountered, and takes frighteningly good care of me with the help of Rama and Jeneba. He's also incredibly good at what he does.

Issakha again, in his shop.

Jeneba, Issakha's wife, and some neighborhood kids. The one with all the bright things in her hair is Adalai, who is Korka's granddaughter and incredibly annoying. The one in yellow is her younger brother, and the one in blue and white is Jeneba's son, Hiero. The other three are not from my compound.

One of the two children I like. Her name is Nogay (say it "NO-guy"), and she was the one who, my first day when I was nearly exploding from overwhelmed terror, stood next to me and answered my questions of "What's that?" patiently. She's a little annoying, but she's a great kid and a good person and very patient with the younger kids and very self-possessed. I really like her. She also keeps some of the kids from yelling "TOUBAB!" all the time and is thrilled to go with my anywhere. Very valuable asset, aside from being fun to have around.

Korka, my eldest sister, doing laundry

Korka and her laundry in its final stage. If it rains, she will run and grab it all and take it under a roof until it stops raining. Otherwise nothing would ever really dry, as evidenced by the faint smell of mold on some of my shirts. Luckily, it's the green shirts.

To be continued when the Internet speeds up:

88 Jeneba and Hiero

55 Rama and Fatou. Rama takes incredibly good care of me, and speaks French, so I am closer with her than with Jeneba. I have started to joke around with her, and so that is a lot of fun. She laughs at me a lot, but mostly in a nice way. She is also one of Frank's older sisters, who married my brother, making Frank and me...in-laws. In Senegal, that's practically full siblings.

69 Rama and Fatou again.

90 My namesake, Halimatu. She is my older sister Aissatou's daughter (Aissatou is older than Issakha and Assiz, but younger than Korka and the other sister, Hassatou, who lives in Dakar).

123 Cherif, Frank's younger brother.

96 Frank's older brother, whose name I don't know. This may be El-Hajii.

107 Sojuu's son (I think). Sojuu is Frank's eldest sister, and she's deaf, so communicating with her is pretty much funny, since it's non-standardized sign language.

100 Sojuu

132 Ashley and Sojuu from across Frank's compound

119 Hadi, Frank's older sister, and a girl in her family. Possibly the girl does not live in the compound--I just barely got my family mostly sorted out, so I haven't even started with anyone else's yet.

127 Hadi and her baby. Beautiful picture, I think.

81 My courtyard. It's sand. On nights when it doesn't rain, I sleep under those two trees in the middle of the yard.

143 It's my room! And it's very nice. I normally have my tent on the bed if it's raining, if not, it's outside.

27 The kitchen again, blurry, but I thought the light was pretty neat in this picture. It reminded me of a van Gogh painting. Not the quality of the photograph, but the lighting and the subject matter--if van Gogh had had a baby blue plastic handwashing station...

I'm going to try having subsections so that I don't wander all over the place, since this is probably going to be a long post. If there are things I promise that I'm going to talk about but then don't, you should get on my case about it on the comments, okay? Good. Here goes.

My Family:

Is, to put it flatly, amazing. Absolutely lovely people, all of them. They're hospitable to an embarassing degree, and take absolutely amazing care of me in every way. I am still not sure who everyone is, or who the toddlers belong to, but here is what I've gotten so far. Jeneba is married to Issakha, and they have a small boy toddler whose name I don't know. Issakha's brother is Ady Assiz and also lives in the compound with his wife, Rama. Their house/room is separate from the main house, and is next to Issakha's workroom. They have a very precocious nine-month-old girl, Fatou, who is very chubby and very, very beloved by everyone. "Faaatou" is a pretty common cooing. Assiz in particular is absolutely in love with his daughter, and it is beautiful to watch him interact with her--she prays with him, which is to say, she climbs on him and he gently moves her so that he can do obeisances (is that what they're called?). There are two women who also live in the compound and each have at least one child (each have a boy toddler, one is named Abdou) and one has a five-ish-year-old girl whose name I used to know.

Jeneba cooks for me (and everyone), and is hugely pregnant. Both she and Rama are incredibly thin and probably really badly underweight, although there is plenty of food in the compound. I think it is probably because they are either pregnant or nursing children. Issakha and Assiz are incredibly kind men, and although the women do all the work, they seem pretty progressive. Assiz occasionally cuddles a little bit with Rama when we're all sitting outside at night, and Issakha sometimes does work for Jeneba if she's feeling extremely out of it. This is really inadequate as a description of them all, but with luck, I'll have pictures of them all.

Interestingly, Rama's sister's compound is just over the wall, and Hadi is Frank's host sister. Family trees get pretty confusing, but I think that Ashley has a sibling married to someone else somewhere in my extended family. Up until the last day, I wasn't allowed to help cook, but finally they started to let me help! I have stripped leaves from stems, sifted rice (thus learning the verb 'to pour' because Jeneba had to tell me several times, "Yupe (yoo-peh), Hali, yupe!"), and helped prepare bwuiri, which is a couscous (millet) porridge flavored with lemon-type-things and sugar and eaten to break fast during Ramadan. Maybe I will even get to help prepare dinner some day.

Your Mission: bathing

Kevin, Chrisses, Helen, Emilys, Erica, Lindsey, Jen, Jess, Maddy, and anyone who is contemplating visiting me ever, this is your assignment. For everyone else, you really should do this at least once, because it's fun and informative, and if nothing else will make you really love your shower.

I bathe once or twice a day here in about a gallon and a half of water, on my extremely luxurious days. If you want to try the way I bathe (and you really ought to), here's what to do. Get a bucket. A clean bucket. Get water in it--I use unheated outside tap water, but you can get whatever temperature you prefer, since technically I could heat water and have warmer baths if I wanted. Use about a gallon. Get a quart yogurt container, or some other plastic scooper--a mug will be frustratingly heavy and small--you want it to float in the bucket so you don't have to get your water dirty with your soapy hands. Okay, now take the bucket to the shower, and put it in the bathtub (if you wanted to be really authentic, you'd do this outside, but some people may not be able to do that, public nudity laws being what they are). Get your soap. Squat down and pour water over your shoulders and commence to bathe. If you are washing your hair, I recommend dunking your head in the bucket first, turning to each side and trying to touch your shoulder with your chin--that will probably get your entire scalp wet. It works for me. Then shampoo, etc, use the lather for body wash to whatever extent you like, and slosh water all over yourself to wash. Last, rinse your hair by pouring water over your head, and work your way down to your feet until you're all washed. If you've been good, you still have about four scoops or more of water left in the bucket. This is the best part: lift the bucket up and pour is over your head or down your back. It feels amazing.

Cashews and Medical stuff:

I had a popsicle the other day. Frozen pulped fruit from a little tied-off baggie. Bite off the corner and go to heaven. I didn't recognize the flavor, and thought it might be mango, but I was in one of my "It's too awkward to talk or inquire about anything, I don't want to be rude, I really want to eat something cold, and I would rather be sick than say anything other than 'Jaaraama,'" which is hello and thank you and goodbye and how are you all rolled into one. Two days ago I broke out in a horrible, horrible rash. Woke up from sleeping--badly--in my room on my bare matela (didn't have the energy to make it, since I ran inside with all my stuff rolled up in my tent at about 4am). There had been semiraw cashews and their skins spilled on the mat, and I thought nothing of it. Assiz had, sweetly, given me a bunch, saying "Garde les dans ta chambre pour manger pendant la Ramadan," the night before, after the announcement that Ramadan was starting the next day. I noticed a bit of a funny feeling on my face from the mat, but it went away. Then, I ate the cashews. And the next day or so I woke up with the beginnings of a super terrible bout of mangoface.

For those of you who don't already know (can't be many out there), I dearly love and am deeply allergic to mangoes. When I eat them I get angry, yellow-puss-oozing, skin-cracking rash all over my face, neck, and sometimes other parts of my body, if it systematizes. My first thought was the juice, and when my family decided to offer me a bottle of the juice, I lied and said I was too sick (yesterday) to drink anything but ndiyan, which is water. I asked what it was and they said baobab fruit, but I was skeptical. Maybe they added mango. So anyway, that is why I asked everyone to go look up plant families. The short version of the answer is that it is basically impossible for a mango allergy to translate to baobab. They're related, but only because they are both rosids, which constitutes about 60,000 species of plants. I was really confused until I realized this evening that, duh, I had been eating cashews. Semiraw cashews. And slept with my face pressed into a cashew-hull-inundated semi-rough foam mat, sweating, for several hours. And wondered briefly when I woke up if I was allergic to the mat.

I called the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer), Doctor Ararat (who, incidentally, learned English in Ethiopia--I think--from PCVs there as a child) initially prescribed washing my face. Then, the next day, when the rash had started to spread rapidly across face and neck and was coming out on arms and hands, she prescribed me some steriods (Prednizone, I think, but check the spelling on that). I have no pride when it comes to this--normally, I would not take steroids for something like that, but in a hot humid climate with no clean water to soak off the puss crust (any water I would use here is bleached--OW--or could carry infections), I'm not a hero. Steroids for me, and the rash is much less bad, although it has made it all the way up to my eyes and down to the vertical part of my neck.

In other news, I got my med kit today, which may not seem exciting, but it means I have my own supply of all kinds of general first-aid type stuff. Before, they did not have enough, so three of us were sharing one in Sangalkam. Which was kind of sad, since we all got sick in one way or another. But most of us are better now, and those who aren't are getting there. Sickness here is inevitable, you just have to hope that it happens at a relatively convenient time.

The Tayer's Wife:

Issakha is a tailor (in Pulla Futa, that's "tayer"), and he makes all kinds of absolutely gorgeous clothes. Tailors here, by the way, are incredible. You can show them a picture of a garment, and give them fabric, and magically they make the picture into that cloth and you can wear it. Super amazing. He seems to be a pretty highbrow tailor, too, because he has his own coutier (younger guy who cuts the fabric), and spends most of his time lately doing incredibly intricate, repeating, symmetrical and completely perfect patterns of gold embroidery freehand on an electric sewing machine. I don't know how to explain how perfect his work is, but it is exquisite.

And now a little bit of a cultural note. People here don't really brag at all. They don't talk about how great they are, and even if they say they are doing well, it is usually followed by, "Thanks be to God," even for those who are not particularly religious. Yet, often if you compliment someone, they'll just say, "Merci," which would be rude in French culture (you say "thank you," when someone compliments you, which is seen to imply that you think you deserve the compliment or something, that isn't really the point, but it's an interesting aside), but is normal in America. But the real point here is that nobody seems to brag. The other thing you need to know is that people wear (a) the same clothes for a week or more and (b) not particularly super-fancy clothes, either. Jeneba, though. Jeneba's normal around-the-house clothes are fit for a mid-to-upscale social gathering. Her hair is coming out of its braids, and she always looks tired, thought not particularly grubby. But her clothes--they are covered in intricate gold embroidery, they have decorative wrap-around shapes also accentuated in gold embroidery, and yet there is enough yellow in the fabric's pattern that you don't see it initially. At first I wondered why she wore such nice clothes around the compound, and then I realized that it's Issakha's way of bragging, both about his wife (whom he clearly really loves and cares for) and his skill in his trade.

Such a different thing than bragging in America--we talk bigger than we are, exaggerate our claims to emphasize their importance. Issakha's wife wears incredibly beautiful clothes as a matter of course, and Issakha, thin and with one crossed eye, smiles happily and goes quietly about his tailoring. It makes me happy in the same way that seeing Assiz pray with Fatou makes me happy--expressions of love are always beautiful. Seeing something that is genuine by definition, though, is even better. Issakha wouldn't make Jeneba such beautiful things merely to advertise his trade; he would make her clothing, of course, and it would be well-done. But it touches me deeply, somehow, that things are the way they are.

Kool-Aid:

It isn't really Kool-Aid, but there's something here called Foster Clark's that comes in many different flavors and is about twenty cents to get a packet that makes a liter of drink. Yes, I know I normally would not drink Kool-Aid if you held a cup to my lips, but this is different. In addition to flavors like 'Cola,' 'Mango,' and 'Tropical Punch,' (none of which I bought today), there are: Berries, Lemon, Passionfruit, Orange, Mandarin, Pineapple, Guava, one I can't remember, and Pineapple-Ginger. This last, I was so curious that I had to try, and it actually carries a hefty ginger kick. I may be in love with Foster Clark, whoever he is. Seriously, though, don't bother sending drink mixes--this stuff is in better flavors and is cheaper here.

Eating:

I've already described our Thies breakfast food, but in village, my breakfast is amazing. At first it took me a bit to warm up to it, but now, I love it. And I love Jeneba, because she makes it. I get about a third of a loaf of french bread, fried eggs (very bland), and salty fried onions-and-oil as a thing to eat with eggs and bread. It doesn't look so hot, described like that, but I promise you it is one of the tastiest things you'll ever eat.

Lunch and dinner are communal, eaten out of a large bowl with your right hand if you're adept, and with a spoon if you are not. I am firmly in the "spoon" school. One night I tried eating with my right hand (nyame njoowo), but all I really did was provide entertainment. There are a lot of food types, but mostly it is rice with some vegetables and some sort of sauce with fish. The sauce is usually red, or else the rice is red, which means there's tomato or palm oil, or both--I feel lucky that there are vegetables. Everything is pretty oily, but so far, so good. It's all either tasty or neutral, too, which is also nice.

Other foods I've come to love are bissap (very sweet dark red hibiscus tea, sometimes with mint, drank cold or frozen), stale Biskrem cookies (I fell in love with those in Turkey), and, now that I know I am not allergic to it, baobab fruit. Oh, and the bread-with-chocolate for breakfast, well, it grows on you, that's all I'm saying.

French:

I know I already mentioned it, but I was thinking about it more today, and with respect to French, I am really so surprised that I don't even know where to look. I don't want to seem like I'm bragging at all, but it's incredibly impressive to me that I've been able to just start using French. Like I had it there all along, just waiting to walk on out of the woodwork and be used. Sometimes I don't understand what people say, sometimes I have to ask for clarification or vocabulary help, but by and large I can speak at a Real Person pace and communicate effectively enough that people--even outside the training center--don't seem to have to slow down for me. Another huge milestone is that I have started remembering conversations I have in French as concept, rather than vividly and specifically in English. The crossover isn't 100% yet, but it's so much closer than when I was in Burkina Faso. One of the teachers here (who will be my boss when I swear in to become a real-live PCV, insha'Allah) asked me today if I had ever lived in a Francophone country, and whether I had learned French from a young age. I haven't got a swollen head about it (other than the rash, anyway), but it really boosted my confidence.

Today, walking back from town, I was thinking more consciously about it and noticing that I really am just comfortable in that language in a way I didn't think I was going to be able to access. Clearly, I am not fluent, but I am functional, and I don't sound like a brain-dead two-year-old, so that's a start.

Islam: Ramadan and praying:

Senegal is proudly secular, I want to say that from the get-go. Still, though, a good 96% or so of the population is Muslim, and with the start of Ramadan, that has become really apparent. The calls to prayer here are very different from the ones in Turkey, but I find them similarly comforting, and one thing I really love doing is watching people pray. I feel a little awkward about it, somehow voyeuristic, but it's like watching dancing or listening to music: pure, genuine, and real. Something about the ritual of it all, so much more apparent to me than the ones to which I've really been exposed, is just supernaturally lovely. It's like watching flowers--they're beautiful because they are what they are, and nothing else.

Less peacefully, I bought [stale] Biskrem and [cold! with real sugar! in a glass bottle!] Fanta to celebrate going through a week of language class and getting my first evaluation. Ramadan started a few days ago, so most people are fasting, and by a few weeks from now, apparently everyone gets really crabby. Anyway, I was eating and drinking in the public square, which is sort of rude, but I'm such a spectacle anyway that really, it doesn't seem to matter a whole bunch. Peace Corps, I know you are reading this, so I want to be clear--I don't go around flaunting the eating thing, especially to my family. However, there was a sort of secluded space right in front of the store with some shade, so three of us were partaking there, as I said, fairly furtively. And a woman walks up and starts absolutely berating me in French. When I could get a word in edgewise, I protested, "Mais, je suis cretienne!" (But, I'm a Christian!) and she let me go, left in a huff. What was she berating me for? I was being a bad person for not following the fast, since I am clearly old enough to be doing so.

My apologies to Christians--both in my circle of friends and outside it. I know that professing false belief is really not good; in this case, I hope that you can understand why I am doing it. Basically, unless you want to be ostracized, you need to be (to my understanding) Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Clearly, I am not Jewish, and it doesn't really seem that anyone in Senegal is, not noticeably, anyway. Therefore, the other option (and, coincidentally, the one about which I know most) is to be Christian.

The Garden:

We have a garden in Sangalkam, me and the five other trainees. It is mostly sand, and we have carried baignoires (big plastic basins) of manure to it. Plans for the future include lots of tree seeding, and renting a horse cart to haul enough manure to make manure tea for our so-far-a-little-sad garden. I will post pictures next time.

My Name:

Halimatu Ba is my Senegalese name, for those of you who were confused by my somewhat surrealist last entry. Everyone has one, it makes things easier and clearly says to the entire community that I Am Here To Be Part Of Things. It doesn't stop the Toubabbing, but I respond "Nam!" (what you say when someone says your name) more often than I hear Toubab. Which, incidentally, means "white ghost" in Wolof.

Language:

Language continues at breakneck pace, but I am so far holding on by the skin of my teeth. Thanks to Cornell and the craziness that was the Chemistry major, actually, because by treating it as an intensive college course and putting in the same amount of outside time (rewriting and rereading notes, etc) I seem to be staying nearly abreast. Of course, I am not functional, and so use mostly French with my family, but I am using more and more Pulla Futa, and hope that will continue.

Funnily enough--Andrew and Andres, this makes me think of you for some reason--the way to tell someone to eat, eat, eat! (which is what you do to guests here) in Pulla Futa is to say "Nyame! Nyame!" and the way to say "I'm eating, already!" is "Mi nyami! Mi nyami!" You can extrapolate from this what happens before and during meals. Afterwards, I argue with at least one person--genially--about how I actually did eat enough. Mi nyami bui! O'oo, a nyame sedaa! And so forth.

Incidentally,Ｉam a little intellectually lonely, but I don't really want to go into it here partly because I don't want to give the impression that I am judging my fellow Trainees or teachers, suffice to say that most of you know what I normally talk about (nerd things) and think about, and there isn't much of it here. Which is fine, I just miss Cornell's climate a bit.

My Five Favorite Things:

Okay, this is a hugely long entry, and I'm nearly done. Thank you, whoever you are, for reading it all. The five things I love most that I brought here are:

REI BugHut2 (saves my life every night)

My 2.0L Platypus water bladder (keeps me going every day)

My hemp Pance (a little heavy, but comfortable, tough, and don't show wear or dirt)

Large Timbuk2 Messenger Bag--I packed it in a different bag to get here, but it is so incredibly helpful to have an *additional bag* to pack for village.

Teva Flip-flops

To put this in perspective for you all who know me--I would not trade my BugHut for any number of Terry Pratchett books nor any amount of Bavarian Raspberry Fudge ice cream from the Cornell Dairy nor anything else on earth. I would not trade my Platypus for any amount of any foodstuff, but it is a close second. Pance come in a clear third, but you'd be hard-pressed to get me to part with them. Flipflops and messenger bag are kind of in a dead heat for fourth place, though.

Next time: pictures, more about technical training, a day in the life, what happens during the evenings at my compound (Ibrahim, whether I've met Tupac, and Franglofuta) and anything else you want me to talk about (post comments!).

We left the Training Center in Thies (say it: "chess") in a bunch of different vehicles--an AlHam*, a couple sept-places*, a Peace Corps Land Cruiser or two, and a van. One by one, people climbed into their cars, throwing their ten-days' estimate of stuff onto the top or anywhere it would fit. As the last group to leave, the Sangalkam crowd sat and watched. Before we left, one vehicle came back--someone had forgotten their med kit (more on this) mosquito net (aka "mousquitaire"), and possibly also the water filter. If you could pick three things to not forget, well, you pretty much ought to. Anything else, well, you can do without it, but your malaria shield and health maintenance stuff are a must.

We finally got on our way--Cellou (our Language and Cultural Facilitator, or LCF), Frank, Ashley, Melanie, me, and Tim. I wasn't nervous on the way there, not really. I had bought cola nuts, tea and sugar the day before to bring with me as a thank-you gift for hospitality, and had packed what I thought I would need, and somehow was oddly emotionally absent from the whole thing, until we got lost in Sangalkam trying to find our neighborhood. We looked at each other, and I felt my nerves start to hum a little. "This is one of the hardest moments of the entire two years, I bet," I said, answering someone who said that nerves were about to fray past mending soon. Tim, who used to be in Mauritania and is 15 months into his service, reassured us that it was the case. Melanie was first, followed by Tim, Frank, me, and Ashley.

I clambered out of the back of the Land Cruiser (known affectionately by some as the Vomit Comet), holding (somehow) my water filter, my messenger bag, and all the gifts. I stepped into the compound, and I swear to you that I remember nothing of the outer wall or the people in the street all shouting hello (not crowds, but not a few), nothing about carrying all the stuff, nothing about seeing the compound for the first time. I remember a woman looking into my face and saying, "Halimatu! Halimatu!" Cellou had told me I was allowed no French, so I pointed at her and said, "Halimatu?" thinking maybe it was her name, or maybe it was a variation of "Welcome!" or even "Toubab!" Not so. It was my name.

I stepped into the compound and a tiny, very dark, very pregnant woman with huge eyes, shyly tried to put the gifts I had handed her in my room. I took them and carried them away with us to the other end of the courtyard, where two other women were sitting on a mat. They sat me down on a chair, above them, and carefully poured orange soda (cold, from a fridge) into what in the U.S. would be cheap, clunky Goodwill stemmed glasses but here are the Best. I drank. They drank. I did not know what to do with my hands. I sat there, remembering that in Burkina Faso, it is not considered rude for a guest to just sit with nothing to say. If you have nothing to say, do not say it. A man with one slightly crossed eye was talking with Cellou, and they handed me a key to my door. Cellou left at some point, and, utterly at a loss, I just stood there until Jeneba (the pregnant woman) asked me using Pullo Futa and sign language if I wanted to shower.

This, by the way, is not a commentary on how I smelled. It is respectful--if someone has been traveling, you offer them to bathe when they arrive, because clearly they must be tired, hot, and dusty. As a gesture of hospitality it was hugely wonderful, because it gave me the chance to get away from everyone's eyes and regroup. I remember feeling totally inadequate to explain that I had my own shower shoes, and Jeneba giving me her own, much too small, rubber sandals to wear. I do not remember much else about that evening, except that I went to bed around 8, feeling completely at a loss and overwhelmed at the prospect of the next two years. Or even the next two hours.

Cellou showed up about 20 minutes after I had gone into my room. I came out in my pajamas (modest by U.S. standards--a too-big tee-shirt and basketball shorts), which are pretty scandalous by Senegalese standards and downright lewd when it comes to the standards to which I believe I would've been held in Mauritania, and had to go get re-dressed. After that, I went to go to bed, but because I had to close the solid wood door to be "safe" and have only one small window, there was no airflow. I counted 300 breaths, was still awake, and about to burst into tears at any moment. Until I remembered.

The bucket lid.

I had a bucket lid. From the bucket one of my host sisters had brought to me. So I lay in my tent all night and fanned myself every 10 minutes or so. I dozed, I'm sure I even napped, but it was only to dream strange and disquieting half-finished stories of confusion. At 7am, I was not rested, but I had to pee. But of course instead of a front door, what the house has (which is four rooms branching off a main porch-thing) a double-locked front wrought-iron gate. So I waited in my room, hoping that I wouldn't need to use the bucket.

I didn't. I made it, but spent the greater part of that first morning trying my utmost not to break down and sob. I talked to children, I wrote the names for the things I could poitn to. I tried to eat breakfast, but could barely swallow past--if you can forgive the expression--the lump in my throat. Poor Issakha, my chief host brother and Jeneba's husband, went out and bought beans for me to eat with bread, and when I couldn't/wouldn't eat that, he went and bought eggs. I had a devil of a time explaining that I wanted no coffee nor tea, and so for most of the morning I sat in the front yard in the shade, trying not to cry and bewildering everyone around me.

Frank, Ashley, and Cellou arrived, and without wanting to, I cried. I didn't sob, and I didn't wail, and I didn't even sigh, but my eyes just let go of a bunch of water. Poor them, they didn't know what to do. Ashley gave me a hug, and I kept saying "Ca va aller, it will be fine, it's fine, I'm fine, I just didn't sleep last night because it was too hot and I'm so tired ..." it was comforting to see how close everyone else is to my compound. Ashley is across the intersection diagonally, Frank is next door, and Melanie is across from the opposite corner of my block, as is Tim. That first day, all we did was meet people. I was so upset that I didn't keep track of any directions that we walked or anything. I just followed the group around, and wished with all my soul that I could find a good excuse to go back home, tout de suite.

I don't really remember that evening, but I slept outside in my tent that night, and woke up the next day not happy, but not sick with worry. Since then, everything has been looking up drastically. I'll post a more detailed version of the rest of the week tomorrow afternoon or evening, and I'm sorry this one post has been such a downer, but know that I have gone from that emotional state to actually being sad to leave my family to come back to the Training Center for three days. And on that positive note, it's bedtime for this Toubab...also, if someone reading this could look up Baobab fruit, leaves, taxonomy, and relatedness to mango, I'd be deeply grateful. Do it, then let me know via e-mail or by commenting (if it isn't a comment, I will post why I want to know after I find out. Suffice to say, please, someone, do this for me ASAP?).

P.S. Please weigh in:

1: Haircut (==de-dreadification) yes/no?

2: If haircut, then mohawk yes/no?

3: If haircut but no mohawk, what?

* Remind me to explain.

First, because I am secretly a Biology nerd, we have a picture of the really awesome (and prolific) caterpillars that are all over. Two days ago, Matt and I raced a couple of them, and his won. If you blow on them, they will stretch out and be very still for a few seconds before continuing with whatever they were doing.

Next, a showing-off-what-my-camera-can-do-in-spite-of-me picture of a beautiful moth. Its body has been eaten by ants (it's dead, by the way), but its wings are gorgeous. Those silver spots are actually transparent if you hold them up to the light.

People hanging out in the front of the compound just after the arrival of the 5 displaced Mauritania PCVs who are now part of our stage.

Our room. Danielle's bed is to the immediate left, Ashely's to the immediate right (behind the door), Emilie's to the back right, and mine to the back left. These are really, really nice rooms, by the way.

The well that we all thought was really deep until the Senegalese people showing it to us told us it was not only way deeper than we could tell, but also the water was unusually high in it. 30 feet down is high. I pulled water, though, without a pulley, and it didn't seem too bad. Of course, I was pulling just one bucket, without having done any other physical labor that day.

More hanging out. Something was, apparently, really funny.

The Disco Hut. Not sure why it's called that, but it is where we have all our stage-wide meetings and where a lot of people hang out. The post thing hovering in the left frame of the picture is one end of the volleyball net, and the building behind it is the Med Hut to the left and Demba's office to the right. Behind you and to the left is where people were hanging out and laughing, directly to your left is the building with the Refectoire (breakfast and dinner) and the Foyer (general hangout zone, and where the letters you're all sending me will be delivered).

Which reminds me. Everyone wanting to send me stuff and complaining that you don't have the address, if you are on the mailing list, you do. It is in "Peace Corps Update #5" at the bottom. Everyone not on the email list, email me at my first name dot my last name at gmail dot you-know-what. (There. Hope that keeps the bots out.)

And anyone to whom I've related a story about Senegal, if you wanted to be really awesome and post a non-typoed, slightly more literate version than the one I probably gave you directly, I'd appreciate it. Just post it as a comment or something.

Tomorrow evening we leave for Village for a week or so, and I will try to update with a general explanation of what and why, as well as a description of what language I will be learning and what that means, before then. But I might not. At the very latest, look for another post in a little over a week telling all about (a) Village (b) my host family there (c) my language and (d) how I'm doing. Currently, I'm great if a little overwhelmed. Why great? Training center, staff, and my stage are all awesome, plus I used my bugtent and actually slept last night. Overwhelmed? Tomorrow we start host families, and I was way overwhelmed last time I tried that in West Africa (my goodness, doesn't it just sound like I'm such the world traveler).

'Til later, everyone.

Staging was tough. For me, it was harder than the Madagascar staging,because Peace Corps finally became real. I mean, I knew that doing Peace Corps involved going to Africa (or somewhere) for two years. I knew that, and it was part of why I originally really wanted to go. Staging made it all real, but since I've been sort of going through the wringer since February, I was running low on excitement, and high on anxiety.

I won't lie—I had a harder time with leaving this time than ever before. It didn't make sense, but there you go. Tuesday night I had a breakdown, and was absolutely convinced that I could not go—could not do it, didn't know why I ever thought I could, that sort of thing. Thank you to Jan, Nashily, Kev, and my mom for being there for me and pulling me out the other side of it.

If I were to try to describe my day, I am pretty sure it would read like a fever dream. The most surprising thing so far is my lack of anxiety about Peace Corps. I'm not scared of it--I feel tremendously unfamiliar, but not as much as I thought I would. Still, so far there hasn't been a whole lot of True Senegal in my experience. We stumbled out of the airport this morning, onto a couple--or maybe three--small buses/big vans. They had air conditioning, which was a big surprise. A couple hours later, we pulled into the Training Center in Thies (pronounced "chess").

As we left Dakar, I was awake. It looked a lot like Nairobi, except more people carrying things on their heads, a little cleaner, more horses-with-carts, less muddy, and nicer cars [read: cars that would be considered nice in the USA]. It looked a lot like Ouagadougou, except fewer people carrying things on their heads, more people riding motos with helmets, fewer women with babies tied to their backs, way more cars, and more muddy. Sometime between leaving and arriving, I fell adoze (sleeplike state, but not actually restful), and woke up in the middle of green. Children waved at us excitedly as we drove towards the Peace Corps Training Center. Adults stopped what they were doing and waved. I nearly teared up--how welcome we are, and it seems silly, because we haven't really done anything yet. Hell, most of us may not make a dent in any of the issues we are ostensibly here to address. But it means something that we're here. It means something that we care enough to try.

We got to the training center, met too many people to remember very well, found our rooms, and ate breakfast (french bread with chocospread/butter/jam/peanut butter). Then--thanks be to whatever power reigns in West Africa--we got free time until lunch, which was rice cooked with spices and oil, some vegetables, and some tasty meat (goat, I think). We met some current PCVs. We ate all out of a big bowl together. When we were finished, we ate an apple apiece, and had another meeting. Our country director thanked us for making this decision, and us Sustainable Ags (the whom of which I have decided to call "Hicks from Sticks" (like Fox in Sox, but different) had to give up one of our own to the Urban Ag program.

Filled out a survey--things like

"How often would you be willing to bike 6 miles? 12 miles?"

"Do you mind being isolated?"

"What are your feelings about parties?"

"How often do you want to see other volunteers?"

PC/Senegal differs most greatly from PCHQ in Washington, D.C. in that the former they want you to have preferences and specificity, and in the latter they rake you for it, a bit. (Sorry to the Peace Corps people reading this, but it is true, or sure feels that way to a lot of us.) I said that I would not mind being isolated, that I'd be happy to bike 12.5 miles per day (well, you know, not happy, but willing), and that I didn't mind not seeing other Americans very often. I am expecting, based on this, to get a very remote site. This is pretty overwhelming to think about all at once, but I'm here to be immersed, there's no point in trying to diffuse the experience.

Had a language interview, talked with a really nice Senegalese woman in French. I'm pretty sure that I didn't fail, but at this point I'm so jetlagged, sleep-deprived, and generally out-of-it that it wouldn't surprise me if I had been speaking absolute gibber. Per my usual, you say? Psshh, c'mon now, be nice.

Had a Medical interview. Apparently, being allergic to mangoes can influence where I will get placed, so, I have to go back to my placement interviewer when he gets a spare second and let him know about that.

Major blooper of the day: When my placement interviewer asked me [in French] how I thought I could use what I had listed as my special skills (communication ability, problem-solving ability, and sense of humor) to work with a group, I thought he was asking me if I wanted to be at a site where I collaborated a lot with other volunteers. So I carefully explained that in the past I had not liked working with a group because sometimes that meant that the group did not do any of the work, that I had to do it all. He was really nice about it, but then explained that No, in fact what he wanted to know was how did I see those things helping my village. Woops.

Good things of the day: Singing with my roommates, playing fife for a couple people later (people really seem to like my musical stuff, which surprises me because it's been a while since I thought of myself as Musical), a cool bucket-shower (with about 6 cups of water!), the meat at lunch, and not feeling totally inept at African French. And getting about six billion email responses to my first-ever ACTUAL email from Africa. Thank you all, so much. It really helped.

Hard things of the day: Being super sleep-deprived.

Other things: It's really sticky here. Like, very, very sticky. Like Ithaca was the last few days before I left, except without the thunderstorms, so far. Other trainees seem great. Everyone seems to be holding up okay. Gotta go talk about mangoes now.

This is totally optional, for everyone. But if anyone is feeling like they want to spend money on me, or have a gift card to a bookstore that you're not going to use, ever, consider that I have a list of recommended reading, I am probably not going to buy all of these for myself. Even cooler, there's a stateside address to which they can be shipped and they'll then get to me without anyone having to pay Int'l shipping rates or customs fees. This won't work for everything, because technically everything is not work-related. Too, though, if you want to get an idea of what on earth I'll be doing (now that we know, theoretically, where on earth I'll be doing it), you too can read some or all of the following:

Lost Crops of Africa, vol. 1 (Grains): http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=2305

Lost Crops of Africa, vol. 2 (Vegetables): http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11763

Lost Crops of Africa, vol. 3 (Fruits): http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11879

Emerging Technologies to Benefit Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12455

Two Ears of Corn - Roland Bunch

Indigenous Agriculture Revolution - Paul Richards

The Greening of Africa - Paul Harrison

Black Rice - Judith Carney

Dirt - David Montgomery

An Agricultural Testament - Sir Albert Howard

P.S. Seriously, though, don't worry about buying these for me. I am putting them up here so I can remember where they are and also as information for anyone in the future who is a real go-getter or wants some resource recommendations.

Oh, Peace Corps. Currently, I'm on dental hold, thanks to a small chip in the enamel of tooth 13.

The dentist's office has been amazingly helpful (Dr. Duthie's office in Ithaca--if you need dental work, so far I highly recommend them). First, I needed sealants--ouch, without insurance, but okay--so I got them. Then, we sent everything in, and Peace Corps sent all the paperwork to my mother in Colorado. We like to keep everyone in the loop. No, really, it's because somehow my address change didn't take. So, my mother (bless her heart) sent it all back to them.

I had another dentist appointment. Got more x-rays, yesterday the dentist sent in a signed letter explaining why he thinks it is not necessary to drill and fill. Called Peace Corps--did they get the letter? Yes, they'd gotten it. And they'll get back to me next week, or sometime, because their dentist is on vacation. Their one dentist. Is on vacation.

Their dentist. They have. One. Dentist.

One.

One dentist.

They have fewer dentists than I do.

I leave the morning of August 11th. They want the information that my tooth has been filled a week before staging. Their dentist returns to the office (note: no guarantee about when he will get back to me) on August 3. Today is July 28. I wonder from where they think the time is going to come, that's all. Clearly, I cannot make an appointment for anytime before Aug. 6 or 7.

In the past few weeks I've been buzzing around Ithaca, doing odd jobs: tutoring, yard work, grinding up leaves, and just today, finishing a metabolic study. As a subject, I mean, not a researcher. It's pretty neat, what they're doing, using stable iron isotopes to measure iron-absorption from different iron sources. Today was the blood draw, because obviously the easiest way to measure iron is to spin down blood and look at heme groups.

This is my moment of glory. This is how we know that my brother and I, as different as our coloring is, are in fact blood siblings*. This is why you are all proud to know me. Except those of you who do not like the mention nor description of throwing up. And my mom, who can handle that sort of thing but does worry about me--Mom, don't worry, I am fine. I am eating lots of molasses and dark green vegetables, drinking lots of water, and taking it easy.

I was fine through the stick-the-needle-in-your-elbow part of the blood draw. 10 to 20 mLs of donation later, I was still fine. Off came the tourniquet, and there I am, chipper and chatty. Then, for the fingerprick (to see if similar results could be garnered). Prick the finger, I start asking questions about experimental procedure and statistics. The researcher is in the room, answering questions, leaves for just a second, and suddenly I'm re-enacting Sleeping Beauty.

Naturally, I put my suddenly-much-too-light head down on the armrest. Nurse asks if I am okay, and I tell her I'm fine, just a little lightheaded and nauseated (not nauseous, for those of you who have not yet heard that lecture). Next thing I know, I'm in the middle of a very intense but not wholly memorable dream, being pulled gently out of it by the nurse, who is holding my head up, and telling me to, "Stay with me, now, stay with me. Wake up." Which is the very last thing I want to do. Passing out cold is a beautifully pure escape from whatever is torturing you, a period of true oblivion followed by a moment of total peace. It must be like being a newborn, a brief second of blank awareness before you remember why you fainted in the first place. Not a good recreation, but not to be complained of.

I said, "Hello."

She said, "You fainted. Can you drink the apple juice?"

I nodded. Sipped the juice. Put my head down briefly, but she kept talking to me, so I could not go back to sleep (too bad). And was suddenly very certain that I was about to be sick. I said, very originally, "I think I am going to be sick." To her credit, the nurse did not try to argue with me on this (I have had them do so before). She handed me a bucket.

As I began to get it over with, the researcher came back in, and utterly aghast, said, "Oh no!! Are you okay??"

Barely conscious, blind with nausea, in the middle of tossing my cookies and wishing I were anywhere but inside my own body, I said, cheerfully, "For given values of 'okay' (blurrrrtttttt!), I'm just (blurrrrrrrrrtt!) great!"

I am extremely proud of myself for this. I subsequently lay on a bed drinking apple juice for about 45 minutes, sat another 20 equilibrating and then walked--very slowly--back to Whitby.

*My brother is fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed. But once, when he was about to have surgery on a greenstick fracture in his finger, a nurse gave him an IV in his hand. But missed the vein. So, after his hand swelled up like it had half an orange under the skin, she came back over and said, "Oh, I guess I missed the vein." My brother, who was either in intense pain or else drugged nearly to unconsciousness said in his best deadpan tone, "I guess you did," and passed out. This is such stuff as we are made of.

It bothers me when...

...people claim creds or merits they don't have and when people deride themselves thinking to somehow defend against potetially painful judgments or truths.

...people put others down to build themselves up and even more when they pretend explicitly or implicitly that isn't their intention.

...people misuse words, like breaking beautiful tools or art or something. It offends me deeply, in a painful way.

...people are dogmatically selfish.

...they will not engage in dialogue.

...they do not think about precedent or general application or implications.

...they are ideologically inconsistent.

...they perpetuate hatred and unacceptance (forget tolerance--it's just a nice word for ___ism).

...they whine all the time.

...self-anointed liberals/openminded/educated/unprejudiced people are usually exactly the opposite, and they are usually also self-righteous and patronizing.

...everyone holds their emotions so close to their chests--how will it hurt you to tell you that you love me? How can it hurt me to tell you I admire you? And then everyone wonders why nobody expresses anything. And then I get grief for being direct about emotions.

...your friends lie to you and beat up on you and occasionally completely betray you.

...people act like being well-rounded is some sort of social disease ("I don't read fiction.." "I don't 'do' science/math.")

And here are some things I love about the world:

~There are people who can look inside you and tell you who and how you are. They can do this and love you anyway, and that allows access to a higher level of genuinity.

~Music brings people together in beautiful ways, both because it is often about what it is to be and often also to express love.

~Love exists and sometimes people are not afraid to express it.

~Words are so powerful that they frequently leave me speechless.

~If you wait long enough then things will turn out okay.

~The rain, and having a picnic in it with thunder and everything.

~Lots and lots of people really, really care, even if you can't tell.

~Strangers are kind, and people will smile at you if you smile at them.

~A lot of the time, people are worthwhile and have interesting thoughts about things, you just have to give them the chance to show you.

~People forgive each other, love each other, and trust one another.

~Empiricism is enchantingly beautiful.

~My brain and what it can do.

~Senegal has been stable for 48 years.

~Making friends is not as hard as I thought.

~Sometimes you meet people who are consistent and when you do it is breathtakingly amazing.

~The outdoors is a beautiful place with so many exquisite, fundamentally inexplicable, and unique things to discover.

~Silence.

Anyone want to add anything to either list, go for it.

Every time I mean to write this post, I either get distracted or become overwhelmed at the task of mental organization. The last (is it only two?) weeks have been intense enough to nearly floor me entirely, and so the prospect of trying to explain it all cogently is daunting. With that in mind, please try to read for what I want to say, rather than what I might say. Normally, I am with it enough to make sure those are the same. Today, we need that disclaimer.

After being postponed, I came back to Ithaca, for a lot of reasons. The top few were that there are jobs here, and not so much in the hometown, there is a social life here, and there is a lot of autonomy that you do not get in a spread-out western town where you need a car to get pretty much anywhere, or else a lot of bike. Too, I started to notice how lonely I can get without a constant group of people around me--I like it for a while, but having lived in a co-op and dorms, I am not really accustomed to not having people around all the time. Lots of them. So, even though Ｉ miss my family and the farm and everything, I came back.

I came back and had a job interview for NYPIRG--New York Public Interest Research Group, the largest environmental and consumer advocacy group in the state. Aced the interview, got a job offer on the same day (standard practice, so don't be too impressed). This was, let's see, Wednesday, two weeks ago. Had my training the next Monday, they did not have room for me in the car on Tuesday, so Wednesday a week ago was my first day of work with them. I did well, convinced some people to give me enough money to beat quota. I was exhausted, emotionally and physically, because knocking on doors and pushing as much energy at someone as you can while trying to keep them from slamming the door in your face and also like you and your cause enough to give you money, well, it is hard. I got yelled at more times than I like to really be yelled at, and I realized that I am not really on board with the idea of door-to-door. They tell you that you are just going to be informing people, which is a noble goal, but all of the training is basically desensitizing you to social niceties enough to feel comfortable and even justified knocking on doors and pushing political agendas. "Not interested," means "Not informed," they tell you. Unfortunately, I also did not agree with a lot of things I was supposed to say at each door, too. On the up side, all the people involved were amazing, and I really wish I had been able to get to know a lot of them better. When I got back Wednesday night, though, I learned that Mauritania had been canceled.

That was hard, but also very intense because although there was the horrible sinking feeling of 'not again,' it was hard to be completely depressed about the cancellation itself. Not when there was a sentiment being expressed (excuse the passive voice--we are protecting the innocent here) of 'having dodged a bullet' and 'won the lottery'. This is not to say that I was simply between overjoyed and utterly knocked over, though. Let's interrupt the narrative flow to bring everyone up to speed on why.

The indefinite postponement hit me really hard, and I think that is one reason I wanted to leave Colorado, just to change the scenery. Being told in February that we were postponed until March, well, that was tough, but okay, it was only a month. Bouncing back was easy, because I had just returned from Kenya and a trip to California and was really not packed well, mentally or with respect to gear. March was harder. Having Madagascar yanked back that way, just when we (okay, Chad, many of us) thought it would be real, that we were beyond the point of no return...that was tough. But we were all there together, and it was inspiring to see everyone deal so well with it. It softened it, and we knew that we would be re-placed as soon as possible, so that helped. Being re-assigned to Mauritania, which I was ready to commit to, was rubbing sand in the wound. Madagascar to Mauritania, well, okay, universe. There were a few of us in the situation, and Katie in particular really helped me decide to keep going with Peace Corps.

New paragraph. The indefinite postponement was hard because we were supposed to somehow keep holding on to the enthusiasm that was threatening to be overcome by nervousness at the prospect of Mauritania (and everything that goes along with that in Peace Corps lore, and for me as an individual). Now, holding that torch for a month, okay. Holding it indefinitely, with only the vague prospect of perhaps being reassigned come the end of September, now that was a load under which I was really staggering.

I began to wonder whether Peace Corps was for me. Waiting, living my life two months at a time, ready with my bags to go where they said when they said. It is not their fault, and with one or two exceptions, everyone to whom I have talked on the phone has been really polite and as helpful as possible. And it really is not Peace Corps' fault that some of us have uncanny destroyer-of-nations superpowers. But waiting like that, it is tough. In Ithaca, I saw some full time jobs hiring. Jobs with benefits, reasonable wages, tasks I would not at all mind completing. I could stay in Ithaca, I thought, and have a job and a social group and autonomy, and apply for grad school this or next fall. Why not? Aside from that I do not know what I want to study.

And so, when Mauritania was canceled (which, by the way, the Peace Corps did at least partially to spare us all the torch-holding above), not only did I have the "Well, if it isn't Mauritania, how bad can [my new reassignment] be?" reaction (I think everyone must have, at least a little), but suddenly not becoming reassigned was an option. And suddenly there were too many options for me to handle well.

I maintain that I have the best luck of any person I know,though. Sure, bad things happen to me, but more often than not, I have preternaturally good luck. I lose people who are important to me, sure, but last time that happened I realized that I had so many truly good friends...I digress. Anyway, the point is, I have either a huge "in" with the governing powers of my universe, or I'm just really good at seeing situations in that light. Either way, that is good luck for me. The next day, I called NYPIRG and asked for the day off in order to spend it next to the phone. Friday morning, I realized that with all the stress of "Do I want to continue with Peace Corps?" and "When is my new invitation coming?" not to mention a bunch of miscellaneous personal stuff, I just could not face a day of slammed doors and tapping energy reserves to push a rap at people. So, I called and quit. Thanks to Jed and Kim, by the way, for providing excellent advice and really welcome perspective and ears. You guys are awesome.

Speaking of luck. Monday, I learned that my new invitation was to Senegal, as a Sustainable Agriculture Extension Agent. And Senegal, for those of you who do not live inside my head, is one of the only things that could have breathed enthusiasm back into my Peace Corps outlook to this extent. Why? Because the first blog I read about Peace Corps was a Senegalese Ag volunteer's blog, and it was amazing (Thank you, Clare Major. You do not know I exist.). Because Senegal and Madagascar were my first two choices. Way back when everyone asked me "Where are you going to ask to go?" I would answer, "I do not get to choose, but if I did I would choose Madagascar or Senegal." So, Senegal it is. And Senegal has been stable for the last 48 years, so that gives me a lot more confidence in the probability of my departure, on schedule, on August 10.

Oh, and unless I find a worthwhile job, I am going to just be unemployed and spend a bunch of time down at RIBs learning to do bike maintenance, which I imagine is a very marketable skill in Senegal. Particularly because I will need to repair my own bike frequently.

I was planning to write a lot more extensively on the following subjects, but it has taken me all day to write this much this cogently, so we're doing bullets:

~~Theory of co-operation: Summer residents of co-ops are part of a somewhat forced community (there is an inherent "it's just the summer' mentality) and as such tend to be a little bit unclear on the idea of precedent. If you only live somewhere for a summer, it is not something you think of, apparently, that an action one time and okayed generally, would lead to a problematic policy. This probably also applies to the community housing on West Campus, and the forced community there, but having no experience with that, I don't know for sure.

~~Rules, as they relate to religion and individuality: Mostly, I just need to get my hands on a copy of the rulebooks and spend about six years reading up on different religions. I want to know how you can subscribe to a religion that supports things in which you may not believe. Where does the fundamental lie of inconsistency start and stop, what is a gray area and what is dishonesty with self, church, or G/god(s)? And what does this have to say about individuality and free will? The emotional turmoil through which I have been going has stymied my investigation of the Bible, but I expect to get back on track soon.

~~Why people are cruel to the ones they love. That one still confuses me. Why people are not honest with each other when it is clear that the consequence will be bad--small deceptions I can understand, if they make things smoother. But concealment of a problem of significant size can never go anywhere good, because it makes the relationship a lie, since it is not mutual and bidirectional.

To start, a news update: yesterday (I think), an American aid worker who had lived in-country for six years was attacked by would-be kidnappers, allegedly associated with al-Qaeda. When he resisted their kidnapping, one or more shot him in the head or face with handguns. He died. This happened in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Peace Corps has not told the Invitees anything about the situation, probably because it is too early to know anything. It is something of which it is good to be aware, though. If you want more information, do a news search for "Mauritania" in Google or the search engine of your choice. I am not posting my speculations about the situation, because they're not founded on much of anything more than you would find in the news. Plus, I have been through this sort of thing before, although it is more disconcerting than Madagascar's situation. Why? Because in Madagascar, the violence and unrest was internal, directed by part of the population at its president/ruling party. An attack on an aid worker, especially an American aid worker, is not at all internal. It isn't necessarily personal, but it strikes a lot closer to home, for obvious reasons--as such, it is more unnerving than Madagascar.

What I really wanted to write about, though, is the culmination of responsibility that I feel weighing on my mind. I do not know whether it is the Cornell culture of frantic working just to keep up and the eventual (and inevitable) metastasis of that consciousness or simply a result of something me-specific, but I'm sinking underneath it just a little (no, Peace Corps, I am not mentally unfit, just philosophically introspective with a side of metaphor). Let's be clear: I am not sinking INTO a depression, just into a swamp of feeling as though I failed to fulfill some pretty basic responsibilities through an inadequacy entirely the result of poor choices. For those of you who are not used to talking with me about my feelings, this is the feeling of having procrastinated on an assignment for no good reason and to no good purpose and knowing that any day now you will be called out for not having completed it. Additionally, the current circumstances are such that you know you cannot complete it before being called out, so it is a matter of time...for those of you who do not know this feeling, congratulations, you have disgustingly healthy work ethic.

So, we know that feeling responsible does not in fact have anything to do with where the responsibility lies. Otherwise, all the decent people in the world would be overwhelmed with responsibility and everyone else would be totally free of it. For some interactions, there would e no responsibility anywhere, while for others, there would be a double helping. Thermodynamically, this cannot be true (yes, yes, I know, but bear with me). This does not help, though.

I had a conversation with a close friend recently in which we discussed productivity, achievement, and the perceived level of requirement relating to each. We have both known people who, although extremely capable, for one reason or another were prevented from achieving at a corresponding level. For some, this was the result of decisions. For some, it was not. For me, it is not an option to not do as well as I can. Less that seem a tautology (or an outright lie), yes, there have been extenuating circumstances and yes, there have been plenty of times in which I did not demonstrate my capacity, but as a general rule, that is true. Further, "doing as well as I can," means in fact my raw ability, not my ability under certain circumstances.

At what am I getting, anyway? Well, I feel oddly culpable for not having left for Peace Corps yet. As if, somehow, it related to my choices, or my preparation level, or something like that, that this is becoming such a production. Clearly it does not, but it is interesting, and it is there. So, my apology to everyone--I am sorry I have not yet left the country, I swear I'm trying, and for all of those I have put through an absurd number of goodbyes, well, I'm sorry about that, too. There is also more than a vague suspicion that nobody--including me-- is ever going to believe me that I am leaving anywhere ever again.

In other news, congratulations and felicitations to Nick and Sam, who got married this past weekend! If you read the New York Times, you probably saw the beautiful picture of the two of them (I did not see it, but it is online, and I saw it there). Hooray!

They come at dawn, all

the sandaled elephants rush

down the stairs to eat.

Boom creak slap thump bang

all the way down the stairs they

trample, excited.

They pass my room, all

heading directly for the

refrigerator.

Slam bang shout thump whack

they crash dishes and call out

to each other loudly.

They trumpet and frisk:

how perfect to be alive

and in the kitchen!

But suddenly they

all rush at once for the door

calling out farewells.

Shout slam whump thwack bang

It is time to go work, but

they'll return tonight.

First of all, I'd like to apologize to everyone in the Mauritania (RIM) June 2009 Staging class. Everyone, I'm sorry. I thought I could hold it together, but I couldn't, and now I've caused postponement-for-political reasons. Also known as "Causing political strife in a country to which I was supposed to go with an institution"...It's my fault, I know it doesn't matter that I didn't do it on purpose. I'm sorry, okay?

Everyone else, it may be a result of my sense of humor.

You: "Your sense of humor causes international disasters? Yes, we knew that."

You guys are so funny. Now, lady, gentleman--and all of the rest of y'all--let me present the EXCITING NEW EVIDENCE, the evidence we've all been waiting for--the evidence for interpreting my dark and cynical humor as being too powerful for everyday use. Lights? Thank you.

When I was finally in the airport to leave for Madagascar, my dad said, "Well, now we know you're finally going!" I said, "Haha, no, all we can be sure of now is that I'm going to make it all the way to Philly!" 32 hours later...my goodness, what do we have here? We're going back home!

Sunday, a member of the RIM June 09 stage class sent me a message that said, basically, "I heard rumors of us getting postponed, but I don't think that will happen, 'cuz I'm sure they would've told us by now." I said, "Yeah, well, actually if we don't get calls today or tomorrow, we can be fairly sure that it'll be a surprise to them if we can't go." And yes, we started getting calls yesterday telling us that yes, in fact, we are postponed.

You: "Postponed? Postponed until when?"

My goodness, y'all are a bit impatient, aren't ya? Peace Corps wouldn't like that. Because there's no way for them to know--or at least, if there is, they're keeping quite mum--exactly why the Mauritanian government did not give us the visas, there's no way to know when that will change. But if you make bets, consider the following:

~ There has been enough strife about the upcoming Mauritanian election that they postponed it from June 5 to July 18, with the runoff election to be held August 1.

~ There's not likely to NOT be unrest after the election, to my way of thinking.

~ The POTUS recently sent a letter of support to the ousted-last-August-in-a-coup ex-president of the RIM.

~ August COS PCVs have been given the option of COSing in a week or so.

~ Peace Corps is going to give us between a week and a month of notice about our new staging date.

~ We won't be considered to be moved into other programs until we have gone through September without obtaining visas.

~ The RIM wants Peace Corps to continue its programs there. (I don't know its position on Peace Corps programs in other places, so I can't speak to that.)

So, there's a good (I'd say, maybe 60%, but that's just me guessing) chance that we'll depart in August. I hear rumors of August 11th being 'the day,' but I see no reason to suppose it'll be the 11th rather than, say the 10th or the 12th or the 22d, other than perhaps those days are weekends. However, if there's, like, Me-grade political unrest (I hear it's normally too hot to riot in Mauritania, so this may be unlikely), then it would not be at all surprising if they postponed us until September. I'd give that whole scenario maybe a 40% chance of happening, with about 40% once that has happened that we'll be postponed again. So, the rundown on my expectations by probability:

60% chance leave sometime in August

40% chance leave in September, 40% chance of being postponed after that

Another factor in this game is that my Medical and Dental clearances may have expired. If that has happened, it introduces a whole new factor into this game, which is, "Do I want to try to get medical and dental clearance all over again?" Maybe so, maybe no. This is an argument for applying to the Peace Corps very last-minute, because if I'd applied later, I would've gotten my medical clearance later.

Another factor in that is that GradSchool v.2010 is an option, although I'd have to get my rear in serious gear with respect to finding a field in which I'd want a Ph.D. I mean, I can't just do what I did for undergrad.

In the meantime, I'm looking for jobs. In the Ithaca area, primarily, so if you know of any...don't tell anyone else!

That's the news from the Destroyer of Nations--Destroyer of Nations, Accept No Substitute! (For those of you who do not believe me, try this and this.)

It's hard to take a good picture of the moon, but this one came out okay.

This is all the stuff. Plus a very nervous dog.

My dog. Doesn't have laser eyes, but hates it when anyone starts packing.

Minus Chayanov, binocs (both of which got booted), razors, external HD, and mandolin. The messenger bag is empty, I just have to figure out a way to fit it in. Nothing is organized in there, but at least it all fits. Whew.

"This is as close as I'll ever come to riding a motorcycle!" --Ari, back of pickup truck going 50mph--you can't see it, but he's got a death grip on a rope tied to the truck.

Enjoying the view, but not to Land's End yet.

Ari Rabkin, Intrepid Nature Photographer. Note the expression on the chipmunk's face, please.

OM NOM NOM: an even better chipmunk expression!!!

Yes, it looks like a watch advertisement, but I like it anyway. Greed on the part of chipmunk engenders cute encounters.