Well, I did a rather slow job at updating this before I was done. I have a series of half finished entries that maybe I will complete when I get the chance.

I am done in Senegal now. Quick update:

Right now I am on vacay in America and will soon be heading out as a volunteer in China in a little more than a week. Senegal was amazing and I learned so much about Senegal, about Seereer, about other cultures and people and of course about myself.

Im starting a new blog on my China experience so check that out if you are interested.

bismillah!

I really should have done an update here long ago, but, well, I have been in my village pretty continuously, with short, non-computer filled stints into cities. The village is a bad place to hang out if you want to update people on your life, write a blog entry or things like that. But as it turns out, it seems to be a pretty good place for going and getting some work done. Go figure.

Ok, so the latrines are going. They are taking slightly longer than I had expected, but honestly we have had hardly a wasted day. As of the current tally, this the 11th of March, forty-two families have fully contribted to the project and another two have given a good chunk. While I am hoping, nagging, enouraging, doing everything I can think of to have the full fifty familes involved in the project and finishing next month with a latrine, there are a few that have all but come out and said they arent or cant participate with the rest of the village.

One is one of the Pulaar families, most of the children and them have moved to the city, the father I hardly ever see even going over to his house several times in a week. According to the neighbors he is thinking of moving himself and has changed his mind and doesnt want to invest in a latrine.

Another is a very small family, the rest of the grown children or relations have apparently moved away. So it is just a middle aged guy and his wife and three small kids. He says he cant afford the contribution portion. Additionally the neighbors who might be inclined to help, say his house is one some really hard ground and besides the few of them could just as easily use a neighbors latrine.

One last guy just hasnt seemed very into the project from the get-go. He has an average sized family but didnt really see the point of a latrine, despite my best convincing until his surrounding neighbors, some his brothers, joined in the project. Now he is saying he will contribute as soon as he gets the money, but he hasnt made a move to dig a pit either.

But then, even with these three, I am fairly certain that we can get the other forty-seven done. And if once we are done with them and certain that the other three are not getting on board, we can consider other nearby families, up and coming heads of households and all that. But all that is politics. Really what I have been doing the past several weeks is playing in cement.

If you havent seen them, I have been taking pictures of our progress. Two days ago, we "finished" our twenty-fourth latrine. I say "finished" because they are not actually usable yet, they still need the pipe that leads to your toilet, a small but in fact critical piece. I have asked the masons why they havent finished them up thusly and they tell me that it will go so quickly that they might as well wait and do a whole area of them at once so they dont have to repeatedly go back and forth for such things in different parts of the village. That does sound resonable i guess, but means that a latrine might not be usable until next week at the earliest, where the first swath of the village should get all of its completed latrines- the ten houses furthest to the west.

I need to go and put captions on all those pictures, but basically how we have been doing it is that the brickmaker comes in and makes four or four and a half sacks of cement worth of bricks. He can usually do two or three houses worth in a day. Then after a few days to let them dry the masons come and brick up the pit all morning till lunch time. Then they go to latrine that they bricked up the previous day and prepare and cement the lid for it. Its a pretty cool thing. They are going to have little doors such that when they are full - after more than about 5 to 10 years with an average sized family according to my calculations- then a truck can be sent from Mbour to come and pump them out.

Ah, composting, I almost forgot. So after much discussion, mostly with PC staff and my counterpart, the consensus is that, no, thats not going to work. Basically it boils down to the people refuse, the culture and religion does not allow for the handleing of even ones very decomposed waste, no matter how awsome it would be as fertilizer. The truck would dump out the moist soil junk out in peoples fields though, so in a way a very small space might see benifit, but then wherever it was they probably wouldnt be farming there. So, yeah, I hear these kinds of things have worked well in South America and work in Southeast Asia, but in West Africa, people regularly refuse to do such a thing. Sad.

Anyway, so more pictures are coming, oh, and I have been keeping my self busy with other stuff too. I made a second mud-stove the other day, much better than my first one and I think looks pretty awesome. I also went to the nearby college recently and did an English lesson that involved gender inequality. I thought it went ok, but it could have had more discussion or questions or something. I needed to wrap up better I guess. But it was really cool and I think they enjoyed it too.

Us Seereers in country, particularly Bethany and one tech savy Jack Brown, and I have been getting this Seereer-English dictionary into some final book like stages, so that will be awesome to have a version done by the end of my service.

Right, so those latrines will keep on coming and I will keep yall in the loop with pictures too. Mexe nosa

So, lots of stuff, gee, good news, bad news, great news.

Of course latrines are taking up nearly all of my time, but other stuff is going on: I have been going to the local middle school twice a week and have helped in a few English classes. I even did a lesson on environmental problems, in English! I, like totally, like speak that language! And I know all about environmental problems, that is like what I do! Anyway, so that went well, some of them even asked some good questions afterwards, like when there are less trees and plants is there also less rain. It was fun, they got to hear a native English speaker talk for a while, they learned some useful vocab, they all copied all my little bullit points into their notebooks and so may actually think about things like pollution and deforestation.

I also did a really fun lesson at the kindergarten. A big part of my service is supposed to be around supplementing teachers lessons with environmental and health knowledge, to give them a more rounded understanding of their environment and health and sanitation. I havent really been able to for my whole servie, mainly because the school has been such an extreme headache to work with- constant strikes, teachers never following through with plans, constantly leading me on then not doing anything, and more strikes. The local kindergarten teachers are a lot, a LOT easier to work with and I dont know why I havent done more with them. Mostly they are easier because they are local, they are from the village, and they are private, so dont strike. There is a building recently built next to the kindergarten that suddenly has a class in it. Evidently there is a private teacher there now with the youngest grade of primary school -the public school youngest class is tiny now- and he is supposedly going to take the same kids through the years teaching each class till they graduate primary school. It is pretty cool deal, he isnt a local guy, Wolof but nice, but he also doesnt strike, so big plus. I got all of them together one day, the one primary school class and the two kindergarten classes, about sixty children in all, and we did a lesson on handwashing. I had a bottle of glitter and after one of the kindergarten teachers, the most take charge, a woman named Marie Sarr, gave a nice simple engaging talk about where disease comes from and how microbes get you sick, I presented my glitter as bad microbes. The teachers and I put it all over our hands and hten went around shaking everyones hands. The children then looked to see if they had gotten it, if they were 'sick'. Then in small groups they all came up in front of the class and washed their hands well with soap and water till the glitter was gone while the teachers explained more about how washing was important and when they should do it. Definetly the best part was near the end when a teacher in wrap up asked where it was that people got microbes. Several students shouted 'from that bottle!' and 'from Ndiouma!' (my name). We all paused for a beat, then 'umm, ok, and where else?' That was awesome.

I have also been given premission to do some gardening and a tree nursury in the protective walled enclosure around the kindergarten. My school garden area has completely been destroyed once again, fence posts stolen and plants completely eaten. It was a failed project before I began and now it just needs to be moved somewhere else.

More fun, I also am doing a few mud stove repairs and building a couple from scratch. People here know how to make them from other trainings they have had in the past but people arent so motivated to do it unless someone takes some initiative. I hadn't done one on my own before and I am waiting to see if it all falls apart before I move on to the others. They are a great thing, they make the stove more efficient by channeling heat, you use less wood, food cooks faster, you dont have to gather as much, cut down so many trees in a year, everybody wins and it is free.

Lastly, latrine news, I will have to do a long entry on this one by itself when I have more time, but I can give some highlights: Construction is underway! We have gotten full monetary contributions from 23 families and partials from six others. Most families have dug their pits. The village doesnt like the composting idea, can explain later. And we have essentially finished construction on five so far! Well, we still need to but in the pipe that will actually make it usable an dnot just a box in hte ground, but they are basically done. Go go gadget- douche!

So Thanksgiving and Christmas and the new year are all rolling by without much written here about it, so... oh, and also I have what is becoming an absurdly big post about my bike trip, whice people probably dont really care about that much, so itll go up backdated later.

Well, thanksgiving for us was pushed back by several weeks. I spent the actual day of thanksgiving in the village, not doing really anything that resembled holiday stuff, but it was a good time to use as an excuse to relax a bit.

The saturday after was Tabaski, the grand holiday which here involves great sheep slaughtering. Last year I broke out my new camera and took a ton of pictures of the day. This year, I chilled with the old men who were mostly playing cards. I purposely missed the slaughtering and ended up missing about all the butchering too. By the time lunch came around I realized I had taken basically no pictures but wasnt really in the mood to start then. It was like a very chill time of eating that wasnt as great as I remembered from last year, but nice enough. That night there was a big soiree at this fenced in area set up next to the school. They had a generator and huge speakers that blasted music until nearly sunrise for two days. This year that all happened about a hundred meters from my hut, it was not a great time for good sleep.

The other unfortunate part of the holiday was the meat. Even after the first night, eating it for lunch and again for dinner, was something my stomache did not appreciate. I wasnt sick at least but it felt mostly like something was slowly twisting my digestive organs into pretzels. Then we had the meat again for lunch and dinner on sunday. Then more on monday. And more tuesday. Wednesday I was so happy to see it absent, joyous that it hadnt killed me. And then we had more meat on Thursday and I thought i was going to throw up just from the smell. I came out ok in the end. But still, keep in mind I am in a village. We have no electricity, no refrigeration, no ice. The meat is just left out in chunks on a concrete shelf or on the floor in a small metal roofed cooking hut that the air for the most part has been replaced with flies. I try to avoid going near that building after holidays.

Anyway, so then, after my big ole bike trip, I got back to site on the 23rd. Most of my holiday plans were made pretty last minute. I hosted two voluteers that day, they were coming from Tamba and were headed to Saly, just north of Mbour, to spend Xmas with a small group there. Also that day, an American young woman named Ruth came to the village. She is working with the large garden in my village that is owned by a guy from Dakar. Surprisingly she is staying in Louly for about a month, living in my house even, with my family.

Anyway, so then I went to the beach with a different group for Christmas. We got a house up in Popenguine and had an amazing time. There were maybe more than a dozen of us for the actual day of Christmas, some were there earlier than others, some, including me, left later than most. We grilled food on the beach, later made an amazing roast and other food that was all fantastic. We even did white elephant- I got a platic gun which i promptly broke trying to get it working and an inflatable Santa with a squeeking foot which I gave as a present to the people of Popinguine who would surely appreciate the off-season holiday spirit more than the people of Louly...

A day or two after Christmas was tamxarit, a holiday here marking the Islamic new year. Last year I was in the village to see it but this time I missed it, though there is not really too much to see till nighttime anyway and these days I like to sleep after sunset. Yeah, I know, I have gotten really lame.

Then after a couple days in the village again I went up to Dakar for New Years. Though I didnt really do much but sit at the regional house, which in fact is the same thing I did last year. But there was a lot of people out in the city and we say and heard a huge amount of fireworks and noisemakers the whole night and into the next day.

Anyway, now I have been in the village a lot, trying to get just about everything done at once and for once actually accomplishing some of it. I will write up a good post later on the latrine progress. It is progressing!

Developments in Progress!

Ok, so this is a long long overdue response to inquiries I recieved from several people on the subject of composting latrines. I had started writing a post about it ages ago, then stopped and wanted to do more research on it, then forgot about it amidst other work, then remembered it again to look further into it, then i forgot to write up a response, and now I am back at it again, for real this time.

So, lets see. There are several ways that a composting toilet can work. But basically the idea is to limit wasted water, even maybe separating liquid waste from solid, to prevent the spread of pathogens, and to manage the solid waste and aiding decomposistion until it is ready to be used out in the fields or gardens.

Now, for our latrines. The idea of public latrines was brought up and floated about the village for a while before being nearly unanimously voted down. What people wanted, and understandably, was for each family to have their own latrine to clean and manage. Each household getting a latrine meant an emphasis on the utility and minimal resources and something easily incorporated into the already existing village layout. This meant pit latrines topped with a turkish toilet, aka a hole. Now this design works in its simplest form in most parts of the country, all you need to do is put a slab of concrete with a hole all reinforced with rebar over the pit and voila, your very own latrine. Our soil is super sandy in our area and so we are forced to modify the design slightly. We have to cement the walls of the pit, or as we are doing, brick it in. Also, we could have had the hole in the center of the slab, but this would need extra cement and rebar. Cheaper than that is to make a solid slab and fix a pipe to the side that can run to whatever one wants to have at the elbow bend, turkish toilet or a fancy seat or whatever. There will also be a 2m pipe coming from the corner going straight up, acting as a ventilation stack.

So then, with such a design, once it is filled, five or ten years from now depending on the size of the family and all that, a new pit can be dug and cemented for relatively minimal cost, and the slab and pipes can be moved over to that one. Then what to do with all that junk? I had been thinking about this from the begining though explaining it to the community has proved a bit challenging. They have little ideas about the usefulness of compost, but they do know about spreading manure in gardens and around field crops, so there is a base of knowledge.

One option, of course, is to simply do nothing with it, leave it there. This in fact opens up some other avenues of waste disposal. What can we do with these old razor blades, throw them down the latrine. What about broken glass, this old rusted metal or barbed wire? Even more dangerous, all these old batteries that just lay around in the sun and break open and invite young children to put them in their mouths. This seems such an obvious and immediate solution to this growing hazordous trash problem that for a while it seemed just easier to advocate that then try and push any other kind of strategy.

But doing composting is also an excellent benifit to the comunity and to the environment. One issue though is that the layout of the the latrines themselves does not yeild itself particularly well to making efficient compost. There is no way to stir, to aeorate the solid waste. While it may not be that hard to add good imputs like sawdust, this is not available in the village and might not be stustainable to try and push its use village wide, especially if people would have to go and buy it from a nearby town.

So I think I can explain the different sides of it to each family as we go. My plan all along has been to include some health lessons family by family about proper handwashing techniques, about where disease comes from, and the importance of having a clean environment. Then people can decide for themselves if they would like to try and see how the composting option works. Once their latrine is full, a new pit is dug and they can should leave the other pit, covered in grass for example, for several months or maybe a year for the cold compost process to break down the waste. Then they can empty the pits and use it as compost, as fertilizer, wherever it is needed in their gardens or in thier fields.

And then thats about that. Honestly any more complicated approach may work on a public latrine basis, but that is not what people want here. People do need latrines, any latrines, because now there is nothing. I will do my best to present all the information I have avaliable to them and explain it particularly to village representatives who can pass that information along after PCVs are gone. If a family wants to just throw trash down into it, it may fill up a little faster, but after it is full they can dig them selves a new one and the old one will decompose on its own and can be buried. If they want to be brave and try the compost thing, if they can get over the stigma of where it all came from, then they can go for that too, maybe not in the most efficient way but they have the basic tools and can do it for an added benifit of soil quality and a healthier environment.

Looking back on my recent entries I realized that I havent really made any real update on what is going on in Louly right now.

So the harvests are finishing up now. The millet was tons of itchy fun. Peanuts are tons of all kinds of work but worth it. The beans are pretty much done and now people are waiting on bissap. The sorghum is also getting all cut down now and we have been eating that most nights.

With the kids finished with that I hope that we can actually have some legit afterschool ee club meetings. We had a couple little things, and one of them was actually kinda cool. Mostly we transplanted some mango trees. A mango that sits protected in a big garden had tons of seeds strewn about it that have turned into a tiny forest of little saplings. We moved a bunch into the school garden in plastic sacks that we are watering for a couple weeks to outplant in peoples fields or wherever the kids want them.

The teachers love to string me along but they say they would love to do some environmental lessons with their usual topics. So, maybe that will happen soon, inchallah.

I am trying to get some good stuf going with the college in Sandiara. The English teachers there say they can really use some help, the students get used to their accent and expressions and could use a native speaker. They are as slow to get going as the primary school though and only slightly less frustrating with strikes. At least they are genuinaly interested and communicating.

Something good going on now though- I have been pestering the heads of household a lot recently. The latrine project, yes that project that I am so honored to have gotten funding for from friends and strangers back home that I thank you all so much for, well it is still getting itself started. This is Africa, as they say, eh? Well, so we were waiting for the rainy season to end so we could start building. Then all the men and boys were busy with the millet and peanut harvest. Now that is wañing, err English... work is finishing, so we can start now. And so I have been telling them. We should start now, ndiiki, ndiiki ndiiki, now now, like yesterday would be better. The thing holding us back is that we decided that a family needs to contribute their full amount before they can get a latrine and that we would build them in groups. So now, eight families of the fifty have given the full amount but all but three are pretty scattered around. So we decided to start with those and the mason, my counterpart and I went and marked off where they should dig their pit.

This little activity sparked some good interest and people came up and after some discussion my counterpart and the mason agreed to mark off everyones pit dimentions so they can start digging. The beauty of doing it at the end of the rainy season is that the ground is softer, but its getting dry pretty quick and people would rather do less work in the short term than wait and have more to do. Thats good there, its a kind of planning ahead I think which is not often seen here.

Anyway, so now they are busy going from area to area in the village when they have time, marking off where the pit will be. They are nearly finished now and several people are nearly finished digging too. I will definitly get pictures of the process as it goes so you all can see how amazing this is to them and how much they want this.

So thats the main stuff going down. I am mostly pestering husbands and wives to give the money that remains for them to give. With the harvests being sold off, this is the exact time of year that people actually have money to spare and will more than likely throw it away at tea and sugar if i dont gently nudge them...

Ok, so I have been doing a lot of thinking of what i will do post-Senegal. For all the same reasons that I liked the Peace Corps, selfish reasons, I still want to see the world, learn about new cultures, maybe learn a new language or two, live in a place and do things that will be expensive and hard if not impossible when I am older, settled and working a real job. Then it is just a question of where I want to go and what I want to do.

Earlier this year I gave some thought to trying to learn Arabic and after PC I could get a job with an development organization or other work in a Mid-Eastern Arabic speaking country. This seemed rather bold and I hadnt really narrowed anything down. This summer I started to drift from the idea of Arabic, at least right now, though I do hear it is a very logical and interesting language. Senegal is not so bad, but I could always go somewhere with a different majority religion for a change.

So then I started to think about where else I could work, what other language would be challenging and amazing to learn, what I could do. Then I started to think about China. It is a really interesting place to me and is diverse and undergoing many changes. It is a growing sprawling industrial power with vast and growing environmental problems. And hey, I am an environmental volunteer, right? Not that what I do here would qualify for much there, but maybe it would be an in with some NGO. I have some friends of friends who have or are teaching English in China. That certainly is a possiblility but I wanted to see if there would be other options that could get me a toe in otherwise. I would love to learn Mandarin. I realize it is one of the hardest languages for a speaker of a European language to learn, it being tonal and all. But I studied linguistics and that certainly helped with my Seereer. Plus, what better way to learn a language than with PC and its resources?

So then, three months ago now, I was talking to a couple volunteers from the north of Senegal and explaining my thought process and how after PC I could find away to move to and work in China. They mentioned the fact that there was at least one Mauritanian volunteer who, this past spring extended his service with PC China.

I had not even concidered this possiblility. I had thought of extending in Senegal. And even now I go back and forth on it. The problem is probably my own perceptions on a justification. I dont hate Senegal now, I could do another year here I think, but I would rather go somewhere new. Also my village could totally use a new volunteer, not many EEs extend in their own sites and do the same work here. So that would mean a Seereer town. My French has deterioated to mostly useless. My Wolof isnt good enough for anything more elaborate. And I dont know what I could do in a Seereer town but work with a college and that would need to be a new site and I am not sure if I could do that or could justify it here, or if there would even be such a site avaliable and wanting a volunteer.

I had emailed PC Senegal's country director soon after but it was right when the new trainees were coming in and he was far to busy and overlooked or forgot about my email. Since then I have been trying to corner him whenever I come to Dakar, which has not been that frequent really. The day before yesterday I did finally get an appointment with him. I had prepared for him to ask a dozen complex questions and appeals for me to at least extend my service in Senegal and I wasnt sure how to be articulate when I am so easily intimidated. Anyway, so as usual all tension was just in my head. He was surprisingly easy about it. I just need to update my resume and write a letter of intent that would get forwarded from him to Washington and that would be it.

China has a program that is excusively English education, and from what I understand, all teaching at the university level. An extension of this kind is not just out of the country, but the region, Africa, and out of my sector. He explained that it would probably not be a problem for me. China is looking for extending 3rd years, they are safe bets for stable volunteers. Also I was initially invited as an English education volunteer, I volunteered at my Univerities center for English as a second language, tutoring exchange students. Here I also worked a week of English camp at a highschool in Dakar and I have made plans to work more formally with the nearby college in the next town, helping in thier English classes and maybe facilitating an afterschool club. Our country director said that all that would probably qualify me enough for this program.

I was shocked at how simple it was put. Just update my resume, type up an intention statement, email those off and there I am. Instead of haveing to look for a different NGO in the states, apply when I get home, probably fly myself out and find a place to live, PC will get me out there, where I need to be. They will get me the training nessesary, resources, money and housing. They provide basically free medical everything for as long as I am with them. It almost seems crazy not to try and stay on with them when I have had such a good service thus far.

So thats where I am now. I got my old resume out and boy does it look simplex and silly. I understand that China's program starts in June. Six months before countries generally send out all their invitations. So I would like to get these out as soon as possible and get a slot early. In talking to some extending volunteers here in Dakar I have some idea of what to expect and what I still need to figure out.

I know that PC has extending volunteers take a month-ish, i think, vacation before extending. I guess from a mental health standpoint they dont want us to be away from the rest of the world for so long we lose sight of it or otherwise flip out. So, for all you out there who ask me one and only one question, I should be back in America sometime if not for all of May. There is that wrestling tournament May 7-11 in Louly that I would kinda like to be at again, but I could stand to miss it.

So, ok, there it is. English education in China in 2010. That has a nice ring to it.

Every six months or so volunteers get asked if they are interested in hosting one or two American study abroad students who are studying in Dakar for the semester. Last November I hosted two, I am sure I prolly blogged about it, I should check, but it was full of things like peanut shelling and staying up all night in my hut listening to the bbc on my shortwave to hear about the election results.

In the spring I think I had stuff going on or meetings or something and I wasnt free to host anyone for that whole week. And then when I saw the email about them wanting volunteer volunteers to host, well I didnt see the email till the thurs before the monday they would come, so I decided not to make a big deal out of it, they probably had enough other sites and hosts and I wouldnt change my plans.

That Sunday I left to Popenguine for some fishing with the volunteer there, Ankith. It is a really nice beach town and when I got there I played a little bocce ball before we went and got drinks at this bar that is right near his house and then we had a huge amazing chicken dinner. We then slept on his roof where it was actually nice and cool and in the morning we all woke up dewy. Yay, changing seasons!

Then we went out to the beach. There was a nice little group of us. Jen my close neighbor was also there with her friend from the states, the new volunteer from Mbour, Alex came too.

Oh, I never announced this. Mbour Has A New Volunteer! My "site mate" has been given a real site mate!! :( But, seriously, he is cool, he lives on the other side of town from Jen and has connections to an amazing campement on the beach. I guessit doesnt really change too much for me but I have more neighbors, the petit cote is full of beach side volunteers and i am the only silly inlander.

Anyway, also a couple extending volunteers were down from Dakar and another volunteer from the sand-locked land of Linguere. So the eight of us got taken out in a pirogue by two Senegalese fishermen, we went out a few kms from shore and fished all morning. There are pictures on facebook, (i didnt bring my camera, i know, i am brilliant), we used fishing line with two hooks and a sinker tied around random bits of wood. The fish that we used for bait, yep, you guessed it, the very fish that is the only fish that we see in my village. Awesome.

So the fishing was cool. Pretty different in some ways and similar in some ways to the first time that I went sea fishing years and years ago. On this little boat though, i did become unexpectantly minorly sea sick. I didnt think I would, but i am not often on rocking boats out in the ocean like that. It wasnt so bad that I would throw up but it was annoying that I couldnt really enjoy myself that much and on top of that I didnt catch anything. Plenty of fish got some nice chunks of my bait though.

After all that and a great lunch I went back to site. My host dad had called and said there was a toubab there or something. I figured it was just some micro-finance person or, more likely, another WWOOF volunteer that needed my help translating.

Oh, I should probably explain that WWOOF thing, see there are so many things that happen here that I dont get to blog about. Ok, i will write something on that soon, I swear.

So anyway, big surprise when I get home to see there are two young women at my house and they are CIEE exchange students from Dakar that got placed in my village anyway, regardless if I responded to them or not. They were very laid back and said they could follow me around or just do their own thing for the week they would spend in Louly. I did have a couple things planned to do that I still needed to get done but there was no reason that they couldnt follow me around and I could accompany them out for field work stuff and help translate. Also, cause I thought it would be simpler for everyone, I told them they could stay in my hut and use my douche instead of trying to work out a thing with my oft crazy family. We also shared breakfast and ate lunch together and dinner with my dad.

It was unexpected but it was a good week. The first day we walked 5km to Sandiara, my nearest town to talk to the English teachers there. I think some things that I was doing for my work was pretty boring for them but they were really cool about it. Also as often happens when around English speakers, I suffer from a kind of verbal vomiting, I just talk and talk about everything and nothing, just happy to be talking with ease and being understood. I think I talked way more that week than I have in a long time and more than is probably good for anyone. Later in the week we also went to the kindergarten for a little and worked in various segments of the peanut harvest. We beat the peanut piles with sticks to get them off the plants and get the plants broken into smallish pieces, we sifted the peanuts from the plants, we shelled peanuts, we ate peanuts, roasted peanuts and had them in sauces.

I think they had a pretty decent week. My family and neighbors liked them. My three year old brother Abdou was offered as husband to one of them, Victoria, who was from New York and had been at school in Vermont. My equally toddlering cousin Bass was offered to Jocelyn, a student from California. Most of my pictures and most of the week felt like it was spent sifting peanuts. It really is amazing how much work goes into those little things, and I couldnt help thinking how there was probably a single complex machine that does all that we did that whole week in a few seconds in America.

Thanks for coming over you two, come back anytime! And anyone else who wants to visit, come on over! I have sorghum couscous!

Ok, so I should do a legit post but, well, heres what you get-

I am in the midst of a massive picture upload, so... check them out!!!

They are pictures from rainy season, pictures from bike trip, from harvest and more!!

I am in Dakar right now with some lovely connection avaliable. I also hope, in the next few days, to decide some of my future fate, but that can be explained later...

So I think I should have mentioned it on this at some point that I am doing a dictionary with Bethany another Seereer PCV. Together we had enough personability, boldness, linguistic background, and sheer insanity during PST to make us think that we could attempt to put one together during our service. It has taken a lot of work, a great deal more work than we had previously thought, but we are nearing what may look like something of a half-decent first edition draft of a legitimate Seereer dictionary.

It has been a lot of our own work, words that we have heard, gotten our own definition of and written down as best we could. We also have gotten some from other volunteers, particularly one who just COSed, go Guy! Through formatting issues and problems with different interpretations, different spellings, different, dialects, different roots, all kinds of mess, we are finally getting together something.

I just felt like I should write something about that, since it is what I have put a good deal of work into. Seereer is a difficult language and I should do a much more involved post just on how interesting it is and the different facets and amazing aspects of it.

word of the day- niangeniang: rainbow

Ok, no, there is no moldy macaroni. So I am not good at titleing.

And also, reading through that last entry. I am not really as good a writer as I like to pretend I am. At the least I need to go back and fix the typing errors that I still blame on the french keyboard. -This one right now has especially sticky keys to make it even more fun to use. Ghaa! stupid shift-period!

Ok, so where was I, oh yeah, so trying to pull myself together from terrible day. Eventually it did stop raining and my pants at least dried as I wore them. Eventually night fell and one of my other shirts I had hanging up in my room was dry enough to put on for the evening. I sat with my family while they broke the fast, they asked concerend questions and neighbors shook their head and gave the usual 'the rainy season is very hard'. I slept on a mat on the floor that night, it was hot and humid enough anyway not to want to sleep on a matress even if they wernt so wet and piled with papers.

Anyway, so the next couple days were more of just getting things fixed and getting things dry. I put everything back out again the next morning, cemented part of the floor, gave all my clothes bed sheets and my sister (keeping pants I was wearing and two shirts, one with a huge tear in the back). I cleaned up everything as best I could, the cameras seem rather deceased though. Then over the next couple days I went to reasembling everything better than it was. I hung up my bags and sleeping bag. put the trunks up on tin can legs, put the surviving three boxes with semi drying papers up on cans too under the bed. I fixed up my water filter in a nex brick stand and threw out everything that looked gross or i realized was not important enough to keep.

It was rather inconvenient not having clothes or sheets for several days, It involved a lot of sleeping on a bare cot and probably not looking so great. But then I didnt really go out much except to hang out with the men in the village center. I was fasting with them again and didnt really have the energy to do much else.

A couple days after my cleanup began we had a hard rain that didnt last long but dumped a lot of water. When I went out in the afternoon I noticed all the men from the neighboring compounds were all gathered over near the boutique. There was a well there that hadnt been used in a while but, low bricked with crumbling cement. In three-quarters of the way around the ground had split and sunk a couple inches in a neat circle a couple feet out from the well walls. The men were tsking about how much rain there has been this year, something I thought was generally a good thing, but they were saying how full all the wells are and how they hoped that none of the other ones fell in. then with poles they pushed in the top bricks as best they could then filled the full well, it had water maybe two meters down, with dirt and rocks so no one would fall in it and it wouldnt collapse anymore.

Anyway, so then there was Korite. Korite is the day after Ramadan is over, when the moon has been spotted again and people, instead of sitting around all day not doing anything, we all sit around and eat and drink water and eat some more. The moon was spotted a night earlier in my area than people expected to see it. Some villages kept fasting for a day and I, since no one had told me different the night before, woke up all early and had breakfast and went back to bed, only to get up to everyone else having breakfast. Not that that was terrible. My sister brought me a dozen begnets wrapped in a sheet of newspaper to snack on and when I went out into the village I had more cups of tea.... well, it was enough to make up for not having any for a month.

I remembered my family had chicked last year and so I was excited that we might have that again. Still sitting with people in the village center, girls started bringing bowl after bowl of lunch and set them for everyone in the neighborhood to eat. I was surprised to see we all were having cow meat with our macaroni and onion sauce and potato chunks . It wasnt bad and I actually was pleasantly full at the end and not wavering on mildly ill.

Dinner that night was just leftovers from dinner, but I was excited the next day to have millet again for dinner. We did indeed have chicken at my house and somehow those leftovers lasted a couple days after.

In the last throws of the rainy season, we have been having really hard rains and really hot nights, with the icing on the cake of tons of mosquitos. They should be on their way out soon though, when the rains end my area is not usually so buggy.

Yes, unfortunately that is a pun... all too true...

...or wait, maybe it is not a pun at all since I really just mean it in the moldy sense... oh dear.

Maybe a good title could have been Mold, Maccaroni and Mosquitos...

To start with, the bike trip finished well. It was a good break from site and one of my longest times away from site at one time and it was only a week and a half! The Kolda house was very nice to me and I had a fair amount of food and recovered well from being sore and broken from my trip to just being my usual uselessly feeble self.

After a few days to get back on my feet, wash some clothes, realize I had forgotten several items of clothing along my trip, eat my weight in pasta, and listen to some quality music, it was back to my own region. This involved a 4am car up through the Gambia, across river and borders. The garage in Kolda was one of the most frustrating experiences ever, and I wont go into that, but we did leave, near around 5, but we left, bike on the roof and all. I had deliberated riding all the way back home, actually do part of a whole leg of this big curcuit with just biking. But alas, I am not strong enough for that, have never crossed the border before even in a car for a reference, didnt really know the way, and there werent any pcvs to stay with for a good chunk of the way and would have had a long haul all the way to kaolack. Anyway, so I am a wimp, and took a car up to Mbour instead.

Jen was hosting some PC trainees at her place so that they could see wha a volunteers life is like and get some good first hand knowledge stuff. I came over to scare them with my village wisdom and my crazy self. They seem good sports, much more understanding and less culture shocked than I recall being all the time. The next day I had a great big package at the post office. I was super excited but had planned to ride back home on my bike. I shoved the box under everything, but only had one rope long enough to go around everything, once in one direction and once in the other. It was a miricle that it didnt explode all over, or throw me to the ground infront of a speeding truck, or fly off the back and get run over on its own. I got back home, back to the village, back to my hut, feeling accomplished and worn out, and ready to get things going again, fasting and all that leading up to Korite. Ready to get school and projects going after a nice littel break. Then I walked into my hut...

So yeah, just to clarify- I often hate going on long trips, if for no other reason than for the fact that my backyard is under constant attack from curious goats and chickens attacking the fences, weeds are stubborn, geckos poop all over my room adding to the layer of sand that is sure to blow in through the window and the beetles that are drilling into my roof beams keep leaving absurd amounts of sawdust all over everything. So thats what I expected when I came home. Instead, in the dwindling light of dusk, I saw the backyard looked ok, but the floor of my hut was covered in a weird film, and my bed felt gross. That night I slept on my cot with the mosquito net pulled over. The next morning was the revelation.

To cut to the chase, it must have rained when I was gone. Quite a bit too. If it rains really hard, for a long or short time there is a decent chance that in front of my front door becomes a lake mesa above the larger lake that forms a few meters out from my hut. This water threatens to encroach into my room sometimes and so i have cleverly dug a small trench, even with where the roof drips down, along so the water can slope into my backyard, which is also at a lower level than my hut. In fact, there is no reason water should be up by my hut at all, the ground it is on is higher than whats around it, its just that there is an inconvenient build up in front of my hut making a big mound even bigger around the edges. Anywho, so water falls from the sky, the ground is inundated, it puddles, the lip on both my doors is about another inch and a half above the door jam itself and above my interior floor. The water was enough to spill over this. And keep spilling over this.

From what I figure, with water stains and whatnot, this must have leaked in to capasity. Nearly two inches of water on my floor with enough time to soak into everything or else evaporate before I get back to find my floor covered in a layer of mold.

So, well, that day was fun. First was pulling out the matress and getting at under the bed stuff. I kept a few boxes from care packages and had, well mostly just papers and stuff in them. Nothing super important- notes from training, a bunch of pamphlets and handbooks from the former volunteer, various odds and ends and visual aids for different activities. Also a couple novels. Those all were wet and gross but salvageable, I start laying them out on the matress outside, and start to worry about how one could ever get the floor clean. Other things under the bed- shoes not worn since swear-in if ever in this country, along with a pair of nice-ish leather sandals I got a while ago are growing some funky blue fuzz all over. My canvas messenger bag and army bag are both soaked and fuzzy too. My sleeping bag, dripping wet, doesnt seem moldy though. All that goes out into the sun.

Then I see the box that I use as a nightstand, it is soaked like a sponge and I realize I kept 'valuable things' in it. My passport is all curled and funky but ok. My film camera is home to several forms of life and when I open it, water poars, poars out. The old digital camera my brother gave me before I came to country is no better, some how also full of water. The camera straps and bags for both have long hairy white mold that makes me want to throw up when I touch it. Thats awsome. Out in the sun too.

Just when I think the worst is that, those are the only things coming in direcct contact with the floor, or in a cardboad box that was. I realize my clothes trunk is dripping. Sure it sits on little runners and is nearly an inch off the ground, but alas, not enough. I fling open the lid as my stomache drops, this seems rather more serious than I had thought. The top layer of clothes seems ok, moist, but ok. then the middle layers, bright, cheerfully colorful mold erupts from all corners and folds. The lowest layer, of course, had the all too likely just-bought-bright-red-fabric. So several items are horribly stained and splotchy. the bottom of the trunk had time to form large rust spots over several items and leave a big permenant rust stain on the floor.

I heave the trunk outside, i start, pulling things out. Maybe if i just leave them in the sun, it will all be better. I start to mutter to myself, have to stop, sit down, get up, go find my sister. My sister and aunt are cleaning some fish when I come up to them. They all asked me last night if the water went in my room. As i had always said, and as I then hoped, 'no, its dry, dirty but dry'. Well, that was wrong.

'Water. Water went in my room. Water is in my room. It broke... It broke... My clothes are broken.' I think that is all I get out to them. They look at each other before getting up and following me back to my hut. After much tsk-ing, they saw to my clothes. My cot was set up outside, they start piling stull on it. This pile is washable, this pile we need to go get re-dyed, this pile is ruined so throw it out. Great. Now keep in mind I am still wearing my clothes from yesterday, the clothes I slept in, the clothes I biked in from mbour in. I have some other clothes with me, that I had on the bike trip, not clean but not molded. And that is all my clothes.

Then my sister gets to helping my clean everything else up. We pull the bed frame outside. The water filter and the other trunk and my shoes and everything outside. I put my big basin to the side and throw the things in it that are not messed up- my notes and drawing pad, my spare sheets, my clothes from the bike trip. The dresser is ok, it sits up pretty high so water couldnt get into anything, the wood soaked up a bit and I am not sure about underneath it or behind, but that can wait. We sweep first, and sweep and sweep. Then pull up the flooring sheets and sweep some more. Then we replace the flooring sheets and mop them with a couple of my shirts that fell into the ruined pile. Then she leaves and I start laying out all the papers and notebooks in the sun. The clothes are a big mess I can get to later, but the paper needs to get dry.

Oh, my brothers care package that I got included a random handful of bite-size airheads, I ate all of those that morning. That was nice.

It wasnt really a sunny day, still technically the rainy season of course, but I was too flustered to care except that the books would take forever to dry. With the floor swept and cleaner, I could tell some obvious places that needed cement repairs- the floor had caved in in a couple places and along the wall there is always issues with the cement being helped in crumbling my bugs and wildlife and those all needed to be sealed. Luckily I had some cement left over from a different hut improvement episode so I got to work on that too. The floor needed to dry so I couldnt begin right away and had to do it in stages. Sometime that day, afternoon, its hard to tell cause it is still Ramadan and so no lunch to give reference, The skys darkened and a storm suddenly and violently rolled in. I went to work as fast as I could, trying to prioritize what can get wet and what cannot.

Cameras went in first, then the mattresses rolled around the papers and books. The bike can stay out and my plastic shoes but not the leather ones. The bed frame should come in, and my water filter and canvas bags. The sleeping bag can stay out, its the best wash it will get. The clothes on the cot can stay out, they are already wet and moldy, they cant get worse in a couple hours of rain. The cardboard boxes should come in, as wet as most are, some may be salvagable at least. My pillow and towel and my most recent care package of course need to come in. By this time it is pouring. Like step outside for a second and you are soaked to the skin. And I have to keep running back and forth, trying not to spash things or drip on the things already inside. I notice the water is rising again at the front door. Great, I forgot to scoop out that trench again so the water will go the other way. As I go out to the back to get my shovel, I realize I forgot my big basin. I run over grab that, dash back inside. I have to pour out more than a leter of water thats already collected at the bottom through all of my other clothes. So, a quick update, now all of my clothes, including what I am wearing and had brought on the bike trip, now all of them are at least soaking wet, if not filthy with dirt or mold or rust stains. This is awesome. Shovel, run back out to the front and start shoveling away. The water is at the lip of the door frame and some is slopping in as I shovel. My younger mom walks by. 'You should not let the water go inside,' she adds helpfully. I glare at her, 'I know!' I yell above the rain dumming down on both of us. I felt bad for yelling at her like that, but seriously, I coulda figured that one out.

When I am done, I go back inside to wait out the storm. I am dripping a large puddle over where the floor was just finally drying. For lack of a better option, i just stand there in the middle of the floor. I pull of my shirt, heavy and wet, and tear a huge hole in the back of it. Even better. The bed frame is in the middle of the room on its side. I pull out a book Ive borrowed from the volunteer library, a book on science and spirituality, specifically Buddhism, by the Dalai Lama. I tie my dripping hair back and try to read. Or rather, I try not to go tottally crazy at my utter helplessness.

+As this is turning into the longest journal entry in my life, I should stop here for a breather and make a new one with the wrap up to this pointless story and maybe talk about the Korite and other relevent things that have been going on...

More from those little things that happen to me that make me think- 'i should make a blog entry about that' but then never do-

wells and water-

The rainy season winds down with some nice big storms. Hard rains that last an hour or two or more. Winds that knock down fences. Clouds that roll in and streak past without warning. Lightning that shimmers in the distance and tolls overhead. It was after one such storm, just before noon the skies opened up and soaked everything immediately, but then for good measure kept going for a bit, drizzled for longer, then sun and steam. I was out by our boutique and a group of old men was gathered around staring at an old well that has sat there unused, looking at it like it was full of vipers. Keeping there distance too. Naturally I walked right over and looked too. The ground all around it, about two feet from the concreted well itself, had cracked and sank about a foot. The concrete of the well was buckling and fissures ran down several feet. This well has never been used since I have been there, but this was different. Now our wells dont go that deep in our village anyway, the wate table is close, so 12 or 13 meters is plenty deep. The rains though have swelled all our wells and the ground everywhere is squishy. It was kinda scarry seeing that well like that. They threw rocks into it, then pushed the upper blocks themselves in, then filled the whole deal in with dirt. Before it fell over the rim into the water that was less than two meters down, I spotted the carved initials of the mason and '1987'. Harsh season.

healthy babies-

I occasionally help my aunt with baby weighings around the village. She is helping out the local health hut, collecting data on children under 2 so that peopale can keep thier kids healthy. Aound on one of these trips we come to a compound. My job was to frighten the kids as much as possible by, a-being there, b-hanging a scale from a tree branch, c-greeting them all in a friendly non-threatening manner. Oh and occasionally asking them why they were afraid of me. That usually got them to tears the fastest. I dont really know what it is about the scale that frightens them so much. I think it is just that one kid, usually a baby will cry at it- ok, so it is hanging in a tree, they have to be pulled from their mothers chuckling arms and swing in it a few seconds before I pull them out, bounce them a few times in my arms, maybe toss them into the air and hand them back to their parents. It is kinda frightening. Anyway, so one kid crys and then that gets more of them going, thinking surely it must have electroshocks or I will throw geckos at them or something. Then the older kids, the four five and six year olds, get the idea that making the younger ones cry is actually the funnest game in the whole wide world. They taunt them, push and pull them for maximum tear-age. Those kids are great, really help me make friends... Anyway, so on this day we were at a big compound but only a few people were there. The first few babies were fine, grumbly, confused, but fine. Then with only two to go, one busrts into a fit. We get her weighed and she hides behind her mom after, afraid to look at my face. My big scary toubab face. Then the lat girl. She is clutching her moms leg, tears roll down her face. I crouch in front of her, make soft cooing noises, put the harness-thingy on the ground like a pair of ants she could step into. Basically I pull out my whole arsenal of scary tactics I have learned from all my classic horror films where the boogey man goes around weighing kids and leaving them otherwise alone. I reach for her hands to urge her forward, she is hit by a hard sob, leans slightly forward and throws up at her feet. O....K... The mom appologizes, it didnt get on me, and I help wash off the harness straps. After that she is quieter, moaning, but we weigh her quietly and leave without any other incident. Look at me go, keeping all the kids in my village healthy and happy...

proof of integration?-

So a couple weeks ago I came into Mbour and bought a couple plastic chairs for my family. The ones they have are breaking, legs falling off and whatnot, as would be expected in a house of so many kids and very few forms of entertainment. My dad had asked me about chairs months ago, but like most things my parents insist I buy early on, I avoided it on principal. One of my lovely passive aggresive strategies to show that all toubabs are not money fountains. Anyway, I do ease up sometimes. So I bought these two chairs and I am a couple kms from the garage, but I dont do public transport, also on principal, so I do what any normal Senegalese person would do, put them on my head and started walking. It occured to me, sometime soon, after a couple blocks, that I surely looked rediculous. But the Senegalese do carry lots of things on thier heads-buckets, bags, rice sacks, matresses, firewood, haystacks. In my own village I carry water on my head from the well everyday, usually several times a day in both afternoon and morning. And I sometimes carry dirt too, and most recently, over the course of several weeks, a few hundred trees in small sacks. Anyway, so I was hyper aware of people walking through town back to the busses that would take me home. I was sure everyone must surely want to stare at me. The wierd thing though was that I felt like I got less stares, and less people called out 'toubab' than usual. It was strange when i expected it so much. Actually only one little girl muttered 'toubab' as I walked past that I noticed, surely some kind of distance record in Mbour. It may be that people dont really stare or yell at me that much usually but cause I was looking for it so much more and noticed so many people just going about their business that it seemed odd. Either way, I mark it as a victory for community integration.

Howdy from Kolda! I just finished the main biking section of my grand bike-venture. Well, let me back up,

So after my long stint in Dakar for English camp, I had a nice long three weeks in the village. It was probably my most solidly productive consecutive days so far in my service, but also the most solidly frustrating and difficult. Mostly I was simply outplanting. This process is the final step in my rainy season reforestation project, that generally sounds a whole lot cooler than it really is. So months ago, April and May I think, I filled plastic tree sacks, put them in my backyard, put tree seeds in them and watered them. And watered them. Until the rains came, then let the sky do most of that work. But then weeded them, and weeded some more. And now, of the nearly 450 sacks I have, nearly 400 have good pretty trees, and as of now 315 have been planted out in peoples fields, gardens and compounds. Most of them were mango and cashew trees, but there were also species of acacia and moringa and papaya and lemon and several other species both local and foriegn.

I decided to hadle my outplanting differently than most volunteers I have talked to. From most of them, no really from all of them that I have heard have had problems in this area, it is always- oh, i gave 20 out to some family and they didnt plant them and they died, or goats ate them cause they were unprotected, or the family didnt know to water them, or people put them in bad locations, or children played with them and pulled them up, and on and on. If I have gone this far with them, I am not just going to hurl out these dozens of trees at random people, cross my fingers and check up on them in a month or two. No dice.

I decided I would go and actually physically plant all of my trees with the farmer or family that I was giving it to. In practice, this was exhausting and difficult, but I have good hopes now for a good portion of my trees. The vast majority were planted in peoples already protected gardens, something that is unique to my area I believe as not many other volunteers have villages with anywhere near the number of gardens as we have. So at least a high percentage of those will at least not be eaten or pulled up and have the potential to be watered and weeded and looked after like trees in a field wouldnt get. Some were also put in compounds with different kinds of protection and I have mixed feelings on most of these (one of the nicest tree protections was my neighbors stick and rice sack construction around a papaya tree, he un pinned a sack to water it, forgot to put it back on, three days after planting the tree was bitten off less than a foot off the ground, stupid goats). People wanted mangos for shade trees and and moringa and papaya for food.

The stressful frustrating parts came about for a variety of reasons. Mostly it was little things that just built up over a day, sometimes it was something big and rediculous. Often it was simply the rain. Yes, i know, rainy season, right? Yeah, that it is, but then it only needs to be dry for an afternoon and semi dry that morning for a day to be successful. But there was a week where it would just consistently rain all afternoon or be so flooded from a mornings downpour that the ground is just muddy water and nothing can be planted. So it was when one afternoon I had about 20 trees to plant and couldnt, the next day i had scheduled another 20 but had to push those back to for rain, then I eventually had a day where i told a dozen different people we could get nearly 80 trees done but then of course, I cant always find everyone, people go to the market in the afternoon, do silly things like attend funerals in other villages, or simply they are not to be found. Fun days.

Anywho, i could talk forever on this, but would probably bore myself to tears, so moving on.

After this fun filled three weeks and nearly all of my mango and cashew trees are out. I decided a little time away from site was in order. I have been really interested for a while in going to the south. The south-central area of Senegal, the part below the Gambia, I have heard is the prettiest part of the country and this time of year it is green and rainy and mosquito-y and great. Also, from my 4th of July exploits, I have let myself believe that I am an acually competent biker and could survive a multi-100km journey. So I decided to bike to the south, well, not really, let me explain-

The first couple days are just getting out of my region. I biked from my village east to Fatick, spent the night with SED PCV there, Daniel you are awesome, then went to Kaolack and stayed at the PC regional transit house. This whole part is just shy of about 100km all together. Now, I had hopes of making this an all biking, all the time, kill myself or die trying kind of adventure, but sadly that was just not feasible. So I had to skip over 175km, most of the way east to Tambacounda where i stayed in a little village 11km off the main road. This was my first toe into Pulaar country. The people are so nice, the food is so good, but then again, they did call me slave a lot for being Seereer, ah well... Then it was on to Tamba itself, eastern Senegal, like past the tip of the Gambia. That was a long day in the sun, left Ericka's village at about 9am didnt get to Tamba PC house till 630. Just a little sunburned and starving. After that night I went south over 100km to another PCVs site well off the main road. Amber introduced me to the fine snack of Pulaar roasted corn and more good food than i thought possible. After that I went south a little ways more, only 20 or 30km i think, and stayed in the booming metropolis that is Kounkane. Ok, maybe its not that booming, but it is a road town with electricity. Dorothy showed me just how nice a hut can be with just simple imporvements, like doors that open and close properly, and a roof that doesnt leak. Magic. The next day I went a very short 5km to another Pulaar site where the gods of rain decided i had biked dry far too long and had a good time with me on a muddy path. Kelly has a new roof though and a dog that makes one forget their troubles. Relaxing. My final day of biking was about a 100km west into the city of Kolda itself. This ride felt very fast and I surprised myself by not dying on it. I think those easy days beforehand really helped.

Now I am in Kolda! Sore-er than I have ever been i think, butt hurts, cant turn my head that well, back is killing me, sunburned and skin infections and fungus, oh fun! But I am here. And here they have more magical things, like boutiques with eggs and canned chicken and pasta. They have electricity and running water. They have wifi in the PC house! So life is good.

I head back up on Monday. Through the Gambia and all too! I hear it should be interesting. We are supposed to have no problems cause we are officialy working in Senegal and Senegalese citizens get through free. But well, this is Africa and all. But there are border people that i would rather not bribe, a ferry that i would rather not sink and my stuff i would rather not lose after getting off said ferry and back to our car. But well, I will let yall know how that turns out. I hear right before the ferry there are ladies selling chicken sandwitches too!

Oh, and there will be pictures of bike travel when i get around to a computer and internet that can handle them...

So this week I was in Dakar for English camp. It was with this really neat program that puts teams of PCVs in different highschools to run whatever kind of English program we can think of for four hours a day for five days.

Our big group had a big school. Actually it was, or so they said, the largest lycee in Senegal. I feel like someone said eight or nine thousand students. It had a big campus. So twelve of us volunteers had about 140 students for the week. We all called them 'kids' but they were not that far from our age, most around 19 and 20. Most of them spoke at least marginally understandable english, but they all wanted to hear moer native speakers teaching them because getting the same accented language all the time from one or two people will stunt your understanding of it if you try to use it in a real scenario.

Anyway, so we were there to do whatever we could think of that would be fun and educational. Over the course of the week we had small group discussions, we played interactive games in the class room, we played sports and games outside including a rediculous game we dubbed 'frizball' and kickball. We also had an olympics day where the five main events were a three-legged race, a frizbee toss game, a ball toss game, a sack race and a tournament of tug of war. We talked about american culture vs senegalese culture, politics and even had some really interesting gender roles discussions. The last day we had them put on gender roles plays and we had a little party with food and drink that more or less fell apart under poor organization and too few food with too many kids.

All in all though it was an amazing week. It was exhausting, it was difficult, I learned a lot, and it was really fun, definetly worth it and apt for my possible future considerations that may be discussed later. I took some pictures, but others took more I know, i just dont know how to find where they are now. But my pictures will be up at some point, along with stuff from rainy season at site.

This meant-

-amazing bike mis-adventures, -breaking crosscountry speed records, -more warthog sandwhiches than advisable, -more amazing bike adventures and through a mighty storm, -waterfall of wonder in an unexpected mountainous tropical wonderland,-a rather swift and less adventurous bike trip,-a 4th 4km of sweaty fun, -fruit salad = slave labor,-3m of red fabric = awesome,-socializing = meat all gone by the time you get up to get it,-sleepy sore wet exhausted trip back to Louly.

There are a few pictures to be put up, Jared has put up more better ones including a video of said mighty storm

Refoona onjac. So recently, on a few occasions, I have been getting into conversations about 'when you were young', with my old men friends in the village. They say some of the most amazing things. They talk of animals- various types of antelope and giraffe, on hunting big cats, the commoness of monkeys, jackals and hyennas. They talk about the landscape difference- the abundance of trees in the village, the different kinds of trees that they have not seen for years. And so many other really intersting things- modes of transportation, how they dug wells, the names of places before the French decided that they needed a different name, and how life was so much different, often so much harder without things like plough animals, reliable shoes, cement. I really want to learn so much more, I want to ask about food and religion, and other village history in general, the people the language. So facinating, so much lost culture.

Horse. Next door we had a horse born about a month ago now. It is so cute. They even had a baptism for it, just for any ole excuse to sit around for a day and eat and drink tea. They named it Xemes, cause it was born on a Thursday, from the Seereer-ized arabic word, Arxemes. I just thought that that was interesting, he is cute.

Story time. I also have had other random conversations with the old men. This included the fact that America in fact lies on the other side of the ocean. They knew that man has walked around on the moon, this is because, they say, Americans are hard headed and just want to know and do everything that can be known and done. Americans canot walk on the sun because they would catch on fire. I also think I did a decent job explaining, quite vaguly and with many examples, the US economic crisis. Though, its not like i really have any idea of what is going on...

More story time. My brothers and sisters were sitting around one night after dinner talking. We stayed up way late with them telling jokes and stories and me teaching them english and reading a textbook by flashlight. I also translated 'the boy who cried wolf' story. They thought my rendition was hilarious and said that teasing people was bad. True.

Types. Walking around the village last week I came across a baobab with a ceramic bowl half buried next to it. It was spontaneously explained to me that this was a sacrifcing deal, where, paticularly if you are sick for example, you can be brought here, a sacrifice is made of a chicken, goat, or millet is offered, or sour milk, and you will get better. In asking about this i stumbled upon an odd fact that Seereers have types. These types are not exactly a religion, not exactly a class, not exactly anything and i am not really sure at this point what the point is. Fathers pass their type to their sons, so I am a Soos, like my host father. Mothers pass their types to their daughters. The women who I was with named off nearly a dozen different types, some that we dont have in the village, most that we do. Everyone in my family that can be different seems to be, moms, aunt, both grandmothers and father are all different. I suppose it must be a kind of symbolic tribe, but then i dont know why it would be so diffused when all other aspects of Seereers are so segregated. Definitly need to ask more questions.

So right now, most everything that I have started or been working on has now imploded or a the least is in a holding pattern.

Some of this is a natural course of things: The school year ended in the way that school years here do, just sorta fizzled out without to much clear understanding of when or how till it was done. This means an actual end to the non actual work i was doing with the teachers there. Also this marks the end of any hope of getting my environmental club together til next year, though really all we were 'doing' was the school tree nursery.

That was were my biggest frustrations and most stressful interactions occured in the past couple months. Long story short, squirrels eat sprouts, especially lemon orange and papaya; kids are super impatient about growing things themselves and would rather rip sprouted seeds from the ground in effort to prove to me that they are not sprouting, despite my imploring them not to do this; if i am away from the garden, the gate will be left open; if i am away from site, the gate will be broken; if the gate is left open or broken, goats eat everything; some kids see order and take time and energy to push it into chaos; gardens make me insane.

My trash management trial fell more or less apart. Or at least the burn pit aspect of it. I will need to dig a new pit, dig it into harder clay, instruct people better as what to put in it, and generally get the local kids to work with me not against me. I did bury the glass and batteries. The location was ok, but otherwise, not super happy about it. Saved the metal and looking into a recycling pickup program. We have a ways to go before compost can enter into things.

Finally, the big news, the money came for my project. We all talked in the village and decided that it was clear we needed to wait 'boo ndiig ne a wata', for when the rains end. The one caveat to the whole deal is something that may or may not present itself as a big deal. It turns out my research was good for our budget except for in one critical area that i didnt really give much thought to, the currency conversion. I figured they would just give me the amount i asked for in local currency with the prices i have for things detailed in local currency. They however filled and sent the amount in dollars. This would be ok if the dollar hadent taken a massive nose-dive right after i sent in my proposal. Bottom line is i got ninety percent of what i asked for.

In all likelyhood this is not fatal. I am hoping that i can even just put up whatever money is needed out of the living allowance that the PC gives us each quarter. If there is any further issues about this i will let yall know but i am thinking that this may not be so terrible, i tried to estimate a little high in case things went awry, but getting that much less could be something. I will keep yall posted.

Anywho, somehting that is going well, our Seereer dictionary is finally in version one! I am super excited to have somehting in progress.

I have a million other things to write about, three other entries that i havent finished and a camera full of pictures i need to put up. Alas this month is not the one for me, maybe August i will have the time...

So lots of little things and big things happened this month. All in all, it was an exausting month, though I cant claim i was real productive or anything at any point.

A few weeks ago i had a wwoof volunteer come and stay at my house for nearly a week. She was working with the organic farmer who lives in Dakar but owns a compound on the coast near me and a large garden in my village. She worked everyday spreading good 'compost-esque' material over the relatively rather dry and nutrient deficient soil in his plot of garden space. It was interesting haveing a guest for that long though i ended up just talking and talking and talking to her about everything that was going on with me and that I was planning. Prolly not the most interesting stuff ever, but i find when i am around english speakers and given half an opportunity i will just babble on and on about anything.

A few days after that, and after some other Seereer related adventures, another young woman appears at my house, this time working with a micro-finance NGO. It was really interesting getting a new perspective on things, things going on in my very village that i didnt really totally understand. It is an interesting endeavor, making loans for various projects and hoping against hope for success. But then that wasnt half as interesting as the dinner we had her second and last night at my house, a big ole fold of cow skin, with peanut sauce over couscous. Not the best thing I have ever eaten. One of the strangest, if not the strangest thing i have ever actually eaten. It was like a giant skinned ankle and tasted less chewy but no better than sheep stomache.

The next week I felt like I was actually doing something. What that something was, not so clear, but I was at least around when things were being done, so that some one could easily mistake me for having a hand in what was going on. I did two days in Mbour helping jen with an urban agriculture training. Well, helping is a strong word, I took pictures, which will be up soon, and provided moral support to the nearly entirely wolof presentation. It was of course really interesting though. We (jen me and a next closest volunteer up the coast, Ankith,) gave instruction on how garden plants grow, what they need, how they grow best, what to plant, how to plant them and so on. We also showed how one can plant in a variety of containers given that in urban areas, space is usually on the premium and soil quality is at the minimum. We cut open tires to plant in a Jen's garden demonstrates other amazing containers, from rice sacks to bottles, buckets and tables. In the end, I am assigned to help out one of the new gardeners, a Seereer speaker that lives out near me, so I will be giving gardening advice and all that whenever she needs it.

Later that same week then I randomly was asked to help out i a mosquito net distribution in my area. It was really cool but i didnt really help anything in the slightest except provide some entertainment for the health workers and garner interest (cause just what is that toubab doing in our village, anyway?) with locals at each of the nearby health huts. Basically there were a huge number of mosquito nets given out for free, based on the number of children in the household. First, health workers went around, talked to people and gave out various doses of vitamin A for kids under 5, then they got coupons to come to the health hut to get thier bed nets. I went around with them talking to families and giving out the vitamin things in the slightly larger Louly, two Louly's over from me. For some reason I had no idea the dispansaire there was so nice and taken care of, doctors, med students, a nurse from spain, tiled floors and clean rooms, it was amazing. I also spent much more time on the supervising team, going from health hut to health hut in different villages, maybe seven or eight in all, checking on their progress, inventorying supplies, refilling and redistributing vitamin a pills and bed nets. It was amazing seeing something so well organized and for such good purpose going on in my very area, with my very neighbors. My village wasn't exactly part of it. First, because we have no health hut so we go to the one one Louly in the other direction. But also, most folks in my village (or as they say, everybody) has a mosquito net. NGOs like to come and throw them at school children and sprinkle them out for various events. And so my village was one of the sources of help and not part of the recieving population for the most part.

Also that week, I went out to a Seereer town east of me with jen. Seh had to give seeds out to this farmer that she knows there but somehow we keep missing and failing to give seeds to. We had a confusing time not getting where we wanted to go and eventually dropped them off with some nice guy, got free fantas, and my month of good work was at an end.

There are always about a million things that go on in my village that I see everyday and think, 'wow, i could write a whole blog just about that'. But of course, something bigger or better jumps in the way as i sit down to write and it is lost to time. I thought itd be nice to make a quick pass over some of the many things that have happened in the past days and weeks, (even months at this point) that I have not (and probably will not) otherwise mention.

Guitar guy. Ok, first one not in my village. In Dakar actually. Everytime I go to the big long main market in Dakar where lots of tourists walk up and down I get hassled by the same guy. Not sure if he recognises me or just always thinks i am interested for some reason, but i always see him. Down that street you can get things from wood carvings to glass paintings, sunglasses to scarfs, dresses to running shoes, phones and senegalese fabric, its all there. But this always finds me when market shopping is the last thing on my mind. I am headed somewhere or coming back from a meeting or somethign and he follows me. He holds out a couple small senegalese musical instruments. Like little guitars with big round bodies. He starts by telling me some outrageous price twenty, twenty-five mille. I half laugh at his hopeless attempt and walk away and of course then he follows me. I am not even barganing, not saying any price, just 'next time, next time, i have no money now'. And he just keeps lowering it, and lowering it. I am not even talking to him, not looking at him, not encouraging him or anything, I just keep walking. And always, eventually, often right before i about to turn down a side street or go in somewhere, he says 'ok one mille.' And always this makes me hesitate. I mean, they are not the best looking things in the world and they would probably fall apart with more than a small amount of abuse. But at the same time, they arent too bad, a nice little souvenir that could just sit on a mantle somewhere or something. And for two dollars! This always makes me turn and look at him, give a long frowning glance to his little guitars, before turning and going on my way. 'Next time,' I say, 'next time.'

Grat mephloquine dreams. So I have had several good memorable ones, here are a few. One was super dark, german expressionistic - lightning, huge manor on a high craggy plateau, bats, the whole deal. Demon vampire bad guy, me and nerdy sidekick had to subdue him, had him tied to a table but before we could put him out cast a spell that blew up the house and leveled the terrain. Thrilling. Second one, beach with palm trees, rocky brown cliff set back up the beach edged an emerald rainforest. Laboratory pearched near the top of the cliff, long row of glass windows across the front. Down in the surf, in the loudly crashing waves and the white sand, epic, cinematic, an African bull elephant head to head with a T-Rex. Amazing camera angles, ferocious fight. Woke up before the end, I think the elephant was going to win, tried desperately to fall back into the dream, no dice. Third one, was long and dont remember much of it other than that when I woke I thought it was surely the craziest string of events I have ever thought of. At one point, a group of PCV friends and I were sitting around eating jelly beans of unknown flavors. I had a dark green one, thought apple or watermelon or some such flavor. Tried it, was really not sure, then someone found the guide. Sea-turtle... yeah. Other people had ones like tiger, porqupine, moose, and there were non animal ones I dont remember. Mine tasted rubbery, salty, mildly fishy. Dont recommend it.

Tree names. So, I am sitting with a handful of village folks, men, most of them older, not my usual crowd though, but nice neighbors. One points to a nearby baobab, 'do you know its name?' This was one of the first words I learned, of course. I say the word. 'No no,' he says, 'Its name.'I try 'tree?' Wrong again. He tells me all the all the baobabs have individual names. Or, as I learn more percisely in the next few days, most of the big older ones do. As it is in Seereer, the way you say something is famous is to say that it has a name. The smaller ones, less than a couple meters wide, are too babyish to have a name, to have a story. Even some of the big ones just dont have names know even village-wide. I learn the main four in my part of the village, at first stumbling over unfamiliar sounds pushed together when I realize what they mean, its so obvious that i almost laugh out loud. Many are descriptive to their usual flavor of fruit, sweet like sugar or bitter or powdery. Some are related to thier location, the one that sits in a puddle in the rainy season. Others are more just other ranom stuff the tree is known for, one doesnt drop fruit when you throw sticks at it, one is where folks used to dance around, one is named for a guy that fell out of it and died more than sixty years ago (not sure how long ago, before this old guy i talked to was born), one is the monkeys tree cause they always steal the fruit. And the nice thing is all these names roll of the tongue in Seereer pretty well. 'baak koi age' for example, 'the monkeys baobab'. I wanna learn all the ones in my village.

Abdou. My little brother has recently begun to venture into the world of organized, even purposeful speech. He still generally tottles around aimlessly, but he will throw a word or two at you sometimes in a very cute little voice. Recently he was super fussy one night. He cried for a long while, wanting his dad, who was out and hadnt come home from work yet. My other younger brothers did their best to calm him down, but he generally wasnt having it. When dad did come home, he followed him around, holding his pant leg, repeating over and over, 'dad, dad, DAD! ball.' over and over. Eventually, just before dinner, my dad gives in, as is usual in my house. Another brother goes off to the local boutique and comesback with the a mini rubber soccer ball. He carries it around, kicks it uncoordinatedly around, crys when anyone else touches it or gets too close to it, he even refuses to put it down when he goes to eat. He pays more attention to the ball than anything else and in watching it to make sure it doesnt roll away on him, he gets most of his food on his shirt and on the ground in front of him. Then he wants, as is usual, to go to sleep on his dads lap. Well, first off, dad is eating so that is a tricky endevor, but he is persistent and gets up on his knee. But he wants to hold the ball clutched to his chest. He also wants to sleep, but everytime he starts to doze off the ball slips and falls and he starts crying, 'it fell!, dad, dad, DAD! it fell.' And when my dad gets tired of picking it up, Abdou gets so fussy that he rolls himself off my dads lap gets the ball and climbs back up. 'put your ball away in the room until tomorrow?' my dad suggests. No dice. Eventually Abdou falls asleep, both him and dad holding the ball to his chest. The next day the ball pops and Abdou more or less forgets about it.

On May 7th through the 11th, my village hosted the first of a now yearly weekend of wrestling in the village. This was a grand occasion full of the wonders of traditional wrestling, Seereer music and drumming. It was the third to last weekend in the big tournament of wrestling that encompases a bunch of villages and towns around me. Folks all come in from the area whenever there is a nearby tournament going on, and most villages have a wrestler or two to cheer for.

This date also coincides with a year from when we swore in as legit PCVs and nearly a year from when I installed at my site. With this combined reason for celebration I wanted to have over a bunch of PCV friends over to enjoy the tournament and see my village and all that.

The tournament was a four night affair and for some of it I had folks over. In fact for one night I had six guests, all sleeping in my little hut with me. Needless to say, it was a tight fit.

I had been to another wrestling night. Back in January i went with a bunch of people from my village over to the next village over. We were the "Delegation of Louly Ngogom" which was cool. We got there near about sunset, so at that time of year, maybe around 7, we had dinner at 10, it didnt all finish till after 1am. And a night time ride on a trotting horse cart with no lights of anykind, a little frightening. The horse can see better than we can i guess. I trust...

Anyway, this one in my village, as it was near the end of the whole tournament, had weeded out and whittled down the opponents to a more managable thirty or fourty. So each night did, in fact, not run on very long. The wrestling was pretty good and got better each night even. They even sold food there. There was, of course, the Seereer singers, but unfortunately they were not singing in our Seereer, it was some other dialect from the south and so we couldnt even understand it. They were not my favorite part of the whole deal, but then they only sang for part of each night so it was ok. There was also about a dozen griots druming. They were very cool. People constantly went up and danced out in front of them. The wrestling itself is interesting. i took some pictures and video, but the video is so dark it is not even worth putting up here but i will put the pictures up at some point.

The arena was set up as this large square of stick fence, about an area the size of a football field or so, with a ring of wooden benches all the way around. There was a VIP area with judges and announcers and such. The drumers and singers were set there too and they had a few mics connected to big speakers and a couple of weak spotlights. The wrestlers are all out in the middle nearly the whole time. They each had their own areas to the side, with faithful helpers standing watch over numerous tokens and bottles containing water, oils, other mysterious liquids. There is generally only one match going on at a time, sometimes two though, and the rest pace around, dance, and look cool for the rest of the time.

Its basically similar to a greco-roman style deal, but they are donw as soon as one touches his head or back to the ground. They do a lot of traditional rituals and all act in a certain manner and are also dressed sparingly and usually have a variety of traditional tokens, arm bands, leg bands, ones that wrap around your trunk. Each match may be very quick, I recorded one that was no more than fifteen seconds, or they can be long, lasting many rounds, length determined by the judge, though i dont find the long ones as entertaining. At the first wrestling event I had gone to actually, the finals match went on for a really long time. After several inconclusive rounds, it was well into the middle of the night and the wrestlers were even getting obviously frustrated with one another, the judges called it, had a little meeting and declared one of them the winner. There was one really long match durring my village's event, but luckily they did not need to break it off early.

Anyway, so the wrestling was really fun, I will put up pictures. It was also a time to be silly in the village with guests, we climbed baobab trees and played board games - very fun. It feels like I have been in the village for so much more than just a year. But then again, this year is flying by way way to fast. One more year!

NOTE: way backdated entry is up about fixing up my hut WITH pictures, i think its prolly on a different page, its from april.

The latrine project has been fully funded!

I just found out a day ago that the PC website updated its information and now boasts that my project has achieved all of its required funding! THANK YOU ALL! To the people who I know and dont know, to my friends and family, to those that passed the word on and those that were more than generous, THANK YOU! I know there were even more people who were all set to give more, people who just found out about it and people with great kind hearts, -thank you too for your interest and support!

If you are still giddy in the giving spirit, I know there are other PCVs with worthy projects that are as eager to get funds as I was, so check them out!

My thanks will never be enough of course, but I will do my best to proceed with this project, document and communicate to yall how everything turns out qnd how appreciative the community is.

As for the current timeline, my village counterpart agrees that trying to get this done durring the rainy season is problematic for a variety of reasons and because it has taken most of this dry season to bring the project from creation to now, the best way to preceed is to begin the actual construction after the rainy season. Unfortunately this means multiple months of nothing besides securing the materials and transport to our village.

I will keep you all in the know as to what is going on regularly. Thank you all, again, thank you!

between the moments of screaming loud noises.

So just wanted to take a moment to pause. I have about five blog entries on the back burner, waiting for me to finish them. But then something else always comes up. That plus three more things i have ideas to write about soon. I never get enough cyber time.

What i really want to do is to appeal all of you out there in radio land, that my latrine project really needs money. Actually, with the lack of comments or feedback, I have no idea if anyones read this for months. So let me know you are out there and check out that web site, its over there on the right. or here again is better

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-117

Seriously, check it out. There are hundreds of people with literally NO latrines. They would like A latrine. Help them out.

On saturday we had a mini area cleanup. Our burn pit was finished and folks had been throwing stuff in it for the whole week.

We had a little trouble over the week and i had to go around and explain a few times what exactly could be dumped into it, what could burn and what could not, what i was taking separately and burying and what was to be dumped on the ground as regular organic stuff. Ash is no good, dirt is no good, food stuff is a no, metal cannot burn, a whole lot of explaining.

Then saturday didnt start out so great. It was kinda just me picking up trash and a few random kids were either not really helping or where trying to help but then getting distracted with other stuff. I didnt really care that it was not a big fancy get everybody together and clean up. I had kinda liked the idea of just doing it small at first, starting with the kids and then the adults get interested when they see results and the kids grow up with the interest.

The afternoon was much better, i went and got my brothers and sisters together and some other kids came too cause they were so helpful and it turned into a pretty good afternoon clean up thing. In fact the kids had way more energy at it then i did and when the sun was about to set and i had to go pull water, they still wanted to find more trash and i had to stop them and tell them we could get more next time.

We first went to some spots where they knew they couldnt play cause of all the broken glass. I picked up all that and put it into my trashcan thing, along with lots of metal and lots of batteries. Everything else we gathered and dumped into the hole. Lots of fabric, broken shoes, plastic bags, candy wrappers, and other bits of things that people had thrown out.

We got a good amount of stuff from near the school. We didnt really focus on the school and next time we can get that cleaned up better. We got most of all the stuff from around that little intersection just outside of my compound and the surounding area. It turned out to be a whole lot of trash. The area really does look a lot better and the kids can run around, at least in a limited area, without a nonsensicle amount of broken glass to worry about.

That evening I burned what we had collected. It went up pretty easily and did not take long to die down. I will prolly go in now and take out the metal bits that didnt burn and then we can repeat the process again next week.

And I took pictures!

For Earth Day, Wednesday April 22, 2009, I decided to be bold. Well, I decided to be busy, and hoped that things would work out in a positive way. Thats kinda like bold, for me, I guess.

Anyway, so I had a three-pronged aproach. Ok, maybe it was a two pronged aproach and involved three things that were in many ways interconected. Well on the actual day we only did two of those things and I did something else unrelated on top of that and later in the week we did the third thing. Well, let me explain:

While my local school and its teachers has been a source of continual frustration with me, I have really wanted to do some good environmental activities with the club that I have there. Dubbed the 'school garden club', one would suppose that we would have a kicking school garden by now. Alas, this is not the case. The would be garden has been repeatedly trampled by herds of cattle and other beasts and the space behind the school thusly remains a hard packed wasteland with no protection from the dying and widly spaced live fence plants. In the past they have attempted to go all out, fix up the live fence as best they could and plant like mad before it all gets eaten. This has led to efficient garden destruction and no one in the village wants to take ownership of such a large and overwhelming mess.

My idea then has been to start small. Rather than going all out for an expensive fence and fancy garden in the midst of waning interest, I decided to just do a school tree nursury. The kids from the club could have a few tree sacks each, water them, plant what they want in them, take care of them, and when the time comes, they can out plant them in their own compounds or out in their family gardens or wherever they want. Eventually this could expand to be a garden, maybe in the fall, the kids could learn improved techniques like composting and as it expands, the teachers will use it for lessons, parents will look into it, the space will become valued and perhaps some will feel ownership towards it, kids will take what they learn out into the world, trees grow and children eat, everybody wins. That maybe pretty and ideal, but either way it could only lie further down the road.

The other big project I forsee is one involving trash management. My original idea for earth day was to do a village trash cleanup, focusing on the area of hazardous waste. Most everyones trash falls into three categories: There is all the organic stuff, the biodegradable food leftovers dirt and junk that folks want out of their houses. This gets thrown into a pile outside of compounds to turn into dirt or blow away in the wind or whatever, no problem. I will get back to that later. The rest is as you would expect, man made junk that does not decompose. Most of this is you usual plastic bags, shoes, plastic bottles, old clothes and fabric, frayed rope and candy wrappers. This stuff builds up slowly, its surprising how seldom a family will throw away something like that, but it builds up none the less, mixed into the piles of organic junk and sand and blows around in the wind and never goes away. Except that they do burn it. Unfortunately there really only seems three options that make any sense for the people in my village and in most of senegal. You can burn it, which is reasonably easy and quick, though a little messy, you can bury it, not very easy and not very feasable to do with any frequency, or you can just ignore it and move on, which is what most of the country does.

I have gone back and forth on what a trash management procedure could look like in my village. I dont like the idea or burying it, that just makes a lot of work that no one wants to do, no one will do after i leave and just leaves the probelm for someone to dig up later. I also do not care for burning it, that is simply poluting the ground and the air and then you have toxic ash blowing everywhere in the wind. But what else can we do. Taking advice from several other PCVs i decided to go halfway. I talked to a gathering of most of the women living near me and tolk them about the problem and we decided that we could dig a pit, maybe a meter deep, and put the trash in that to burn it. It is not the ideal, but i cant think of what is. The women seemed happy enough about it, even applauded me when i was done. I just hope it is used well.

The third type of trash and the most dangerous as I see it is what is left over, the broken glass, the sharp bits of rusty metal things and most of all, the low grade batteries that are widely used enough in my village that they can be found everywhere. There is no good option as what to do with any of these, there is really an amazing amount, even around the primary school where kids play soccer barefoot. I saw this as a top concern.

So at the start of the grand day of the earth, I headed out to the school to talk to the teachers and the students. I had purchased a little trash can and put a sign on it, showing that it was for hazardous stuff. My original idea was that this could be put in front of the school, or maybe i could get several of them around the village so that when any kid, or anyone, sees some glass or batteries or whatever, they can put it in the can. I could emty the can every once in a while and wrap the batteries in paper and bury them somewhere far from wells, gardens or compounds. Immediately after explaining my plan and the beauty of Earth day to the teachers, they informed me, after looking at the trash can as something trivial and quaint, a silly gift from the toubab, that it would be stolen if i left it infront of the school. I was so taken aback i didnt know what to say to that. The principle offered to keep it in his office and put it out on the steps durring school hours, they all thought this was reasonable, he took the can from me, told me they would explain it all to the students and i walked away confused.

Also that day I told a guy across the village i would pick a bunch of seeds with him that morning. I had discovered his crop of moringa trees the weekend before and they were loaded; LOADED with seed pods. I had already gone and picked a bunch, some 400 pods and a bunch more seeds. As each pods has an average of 15 seeds, this was a lot. That morning I went back and got nearly 700 more pods and many mny more seeds. Later that week i made a trip to dakar and dropped off the 10-20 thousand seeds to be given out to other volunteers, so cool.

Anyway, after that long ordeal, it was back to the school to prepare the area for the tree nursury. I also got the dirt and manure to fill sacks with so the afternoon activity could go smoothly. I also changed my mind, took my trash can back and told the principle that we would use it for a trash cleanup later. After lunch It was back to the school again and waiting for my club to show up to set up their tree sacks. While we waited, kids thought what i was doing was funny and seemed to wanna help so i told them about the dangerous trash pick up. This on the one hand, seems a little counter productive to me. You tell young kids what is dangerous, things they should not touch or play with, but then you ask them to go find it and pick it up. Anyway, it worked well. When told what to look for it is like the kids all of the sudden realized how dirty the ground really was. Like they had never seen all the trash before or knew what to make of it. I was amazed, still am amazed how much broken glass there is all around the school and my compound and the kids amaze me by finding and bringing more and more of it.

Then, even theough the club decided to generally snub me again (that can be a whole nother post), we did do a decent job filling the sacks with the children that were around. We picked up trash, made a tree nursury, it was a good earh day. But i was not done for the week.

On saturday, after I was shown and marked off a proper area for it, We started digging the burn pit. I thought it would take a day, but it lasted two and I spent two more aranging it better. Lots of random kids stopped by to help with that, my family, older kids, very young kids, some that threw more dirt back in the hole than got it out. It was fun, it wa very dirty, my hands feel awful and have more blisters than fingers, but i think it might work, if it doesnt collapse. For the same reason that we have to cement line our latrines, the pit may need to be cemented. My village sits on sand, that sand sits on a layer of harder packed sand, over sand that is ever harder packed. No dirt, no clay, sand sand and more sand. We will see i guess.

Anyhow, now I want to do a big neighborhood cleanup with my club, around the school and my compound this saturday morning. We can throw all we can into the hole, so far even the crazy wind we have hasnt blown any of it back out again, and then butn it there. I think that if people see its positive effect, this trash 'management system' of burn pits and separating dangerous stuff can be extended to other neighborhoods and areas in my village. As they sort out burn stuff from dangerous stuff the leftover pile they creat will in effect be a compost pile. This can be extended into thier gardens or fields and as I said we can demo this in the future school garden.

I think there is a lot of potential in this. I am excited as to what will happen either way. Oh my this a long post. There are lots of pictures, I put up some of them on my picture site, check it out.

Note: i have a bunch of back dated blog entries that are half finished that i will get to at some point and post, so look out!

The mango trees are growing heavy with fruit in my village this time of year and me and many other volunteers are terribly excited. Soon the markets will be flush with them and mangoes will be eaten seeming without end. My village itself has a fair number of mango trees, a couple near the school, a couple near the kindergarten, maybe more than a dozen scattered arround within walkind distance from my door. The mangoes really started to plump up and look good last month though in my village most are still pretty small. While the small green mangoes are very tart, some are tolerable to be eaten. The children in the village are ALL about them right now. Whenever they have free time they can be found hurling sticks and rocks at the trees, striping them and collecting as many tragically unripe fruits as they can. They then take bites out of all of them, usually finding half of them inedible and throwing them on the ground, and the rest they share. I am not sure about the helath issues with these unripe mangoes but they do cause mouth sores at the least. What i really dont understand is that the village just lets them do it. Those are hundreds of mangos that once mature will be a great source of income and nourishment by all. Money thrown on the ground for cripes sake! That just leads to the fatalist view of the world that id rather not get into right now.

There was just a wedding in my village. Yesterday actually. It wa not my first wedding. I have been to a handful. Also baptisms and funerals. But I feel I should write a bit about Senegalese weddings. Well, from my outside, naive, ignorant perspective.

I do not like Senegalese weddings. Well, let me rephrase- I do not like wedding when they go on next door to my hut and I would rather be doing other things. But i digress. Weddings are characterized by a few things: like every party or celebration, the day seems to center around lunch, at least that is what many of the women spend the most time on, people arrive and wait for and leave after. This is you usual greesy rice, a few veggies and a chunk or two of meat. A wedding does have other fun things though too, lets see...

At this one, as the wedding was on a sunday, random people started arriving saturday, mostly (as far as i can tell) to get ready for the food making and whatnot. A tent is erected and chairs appear from mysterious sources, and then... my personal favorite (not), the griots arrive. Kids start singing around dinner time. As my neighbor is getting married and a large open space sits between our compounds, a natural place for folks to gather and dance is there, about thriry yards from my hut. A generator cranks on soon there after, promising longer and louder entertainment to come. At an earlier time (before this all begain to bore me), I would be interested in watching the fun. Now... not so much (ok, i am a grinch, sorry). At first the generators power up some lights and the drums get going. The drums are punctuated by dancing and clapping and laughing, general endless merriment. A little before midnight a guitar is plugged into an amplifier and then a microphone is plugged in too. Singing as a high pitched yell is not my personal favorite style, especially when i am trying to sleep. This goes until a little after four in the morning. Then the generator is turned off, i suppose to save gas for the comming day. But the druming continues, the singing and clapping continues until, and this will always amaze me, until a little after seven, well after sunrise.

Needless to say, I do not greet the morning bright eyed and cheery.

Then there comes the folks gathering, sitting, greeting, talking. Folks tend to sit in groups and make tea too. I try to sit with some of the old guys in the village that I know best and ask random questions or get vocab. I usually give a couple dollars into the comunity gift to the family to pay for the wedding. There certainly is not a lack of things to pay for: food and meat, the music, entertainment and griots, the rented tent, rented chairs, rented cooking pots, the bridal makeup and hair, transport, perhaps firewood, other random wedding presents and things too. This money is collected in a variety of different places and forms, some more formally, some with a griot anouncing your name and father and how much you have given and sentiments, some more anonymous. Personally I like to go more on the un-noticed side.

There are also gifts given that have to be shown off. In adition to money, people often give fabric for whatever purpose you want to make with it. Also piles of bowls and buckets, brooms and rice, cookware and even some furnature must be displayed and talked about. People gater in a large circle around the tent while a griot anounces all, drums punctuating and people shouting encouragements.

In the early afternoon the bride arrives (at least this is how it goes in the weddings i have seen here) The groom is generaly unseen for the day. Usually I am told he is away, maybe in some house across the way, maybe off praying. The wedding does not really seem to be about the two people involved. They have very little to do in the way of public ceremony. But then perhaps they are very busy doing something else somewhere else and I just dont knoz it. I do know that they are not together for nearly the entire day as far as i can tell. The bride arrives in a station wagon with a group of other women, people hanging off the back and roof of the car, everyone having the grandest time. People swarm the car, the drummers push themselves throgh the throng, the doors open and everyone gets out, everyone except the bride. Then there is a little dancing, drumming, traditional something that is lost on me until finally the bride gets out too. Now, everyone appears to be having the grandest time except, always, not the bride. She gennerally looks like she is at her own excecution. Eyes do not leave own feet or else are closed, no smile, no talking, not moving more than a shuffle. Its odd when everyone inches away is dancing singing , drumming fast and loud and laughing giddy, the bride looks almost ill to be present. It doesnt help that the makeup and hair make her look like an exagerated drag queen, pale and vibrant at the same time. SHe makes a shuffle around the crowd, doing one of a few slow circuts of the whole gathering. Then eventually she disapears into a room somwhere, perhaps to be seen again, perhaps not. I usually dont.

And then peole go back to sitting down, talking, drinking tea, collecting money. Durring this whole time, well durring the whole day of everything, the genreator has been moved out to the middle of the village and music blares from the large speakers out there, far enough away to allow all but quiet conversation thankfully. Lunch comes near four. Men eat first and then the women and kids. Greesy greesy rice... oh greesy rice. Then the rest of the afternoon is spent lazying about meditatively, generally digesting, drinking more tea, maybe some other warm drink unless somone has saved some ice from the nearest town. I debate how much i should care about going to pull water for a bath and watering my plants- i am not that dirty sitting in one place all day, and my plants can go one afternoon without a ton of water.

And thats the end of that. That would be a wedding from my perspective at least. Folks begin to disperse as the sun sets but the music out in the vilage center continues. My family has no usual organized supper. I eat a bowl of leftover cold rice by myself and then sit up for a while seeing people off. The music only lasts until about nine, or maybe the gas ran out. The drummers go home and I guess the kids are exhauseted or else know they have school tomorrow. Blessedly that night was near its usual quiet, only a few noisy ones singing drumming and dancing out away from my compound. I sleep easily.

Ndiouma Diome's second instalment of village how-to work!

+ First get yourself a hut and maybe a nice little back yard space. This is similar to that other hut, you know, where you killed that mouse, snly you have grown up a bit, and formulated a better, more sustainable plan.

+The situation- As has been pointed out to you on numerous occasions, your hut is a veritable animal kingdom. Flys and mosquitos, or course, but also armies of ants and termites, ochestras of crickets, and all manner of other creepy crawly insects. Wasps take regular tours of your room, one style likes to bore holes into your roof beams, another prefers to make little mud hovels instead, still another just seems to like buzzing arround manaicly, irregardless of who is eating what kind of enjoyable breakfast. They come in through the rather large gap that runs around the circumference of the room, between the top of the wall and the bottom of the thatch. The wasps especially like to come in that way then make a noisy ordeal over trying to go out though the screen doors. And the screens on both doors are in bad shape anyhow. Children have poked at them so much that they are frayed and pulled apart at the edges. And the thatch is falling apart. At least it looks that way on the inside, with bits hanging down and falling off making a continual mess over everything. It even leaked last rainy season. Animals like to burrow through it, even make nests in it.

Through all this time, your hut has seen a fair share of lizards, geckos, frogs, rats, mice, a couple unlikely bats, a few snakes, several confused birds, a good sampling of the insect and arachnid sub-phylums, and even a couple of tragically lost chickens and at least one goat. Oh, and a cat, but its ok, he's cool.

Compounding this breachable-hut issue, is the regular breaching of you backyard. It is to the point where you think you spend more time fixing, repairing, rebuilding your stick fence, then you do interacting with your neighbors. You dread long trips that may last multiple days because of how bad it could be, no, how bad it will be when you get back. It starts small enough - a chicken (stupid chickens) will go on a bug hunting spree and dig out an area around the base of your fence, maybe enough for a chick or two to squeeze under. At night a rat may enlarge this hole or pay no mind to the dirt and just break off the clump of sticks above it. Durring the day, the cat finds this a convinient lizard stalking avenue and widens the hole. Chickens come in and can never, ever, seem to remember how the heck to get back out again. Goats see a well traveled opening and are stuborn enough to push on in through any space bigger than their head (and often smaller). Pretty soon, in the span of one morning, you can go from a tiny chick sized opening to a whole cow in your yard. Ok, maybe it has never come to a cow - thank your lucky stars your family doesnt own any.

And this doesnt even take into account the inconcievable actions of people. Kids see a walled off area as a challenge and a worhwhile game. But they are the least of the problem. Your fence is an old amalgomation of a bunch of pieces of fences and so, rightly it looks a bit rough, a bit haphazard. Your moms see this shambly ensemble as little more than a nice stand of dry organized firewood. They take from it liberally, nearly everyday, as my constant repairs indicate an inexhaustive supply. They also throw stuff up against it, rough firewood, stack things across it, bending and breaking it till it is no better than firewood. That is annoying to say the least.

Things need fixing.

+First things first. in your grand overhall, the first addition is a modest mouse trap. Expecting a bloody messy campaign of ridding the world of rodent terror, you are surprised, more than a little disapointed, and even relieved that not a single creature comes to harm from the trap (your fingers dont count). More than a couple hard candies and shiny bits of trash were carefully excised and added to a tiny hoard somewhere.

+Then you buy a new lenghth of screen. You replace the screens on both the front and back doors to your hut, setting them into place with low quality thumb tacs and clumsy hammering (more finger injuries). Screens also go nicely over the doors and the window, providing needed air flow for when the rest of the hut is more or less sealed up.

+Next is the roof. You go but some very tasteful blue plastic sheeting, borrow a ladder from the church and get to the (surprisingly difficult and exhausting) job of fitting the sheets up between the molting thatch and the wooden beams underneath. This takes a few days but makes everything look much better and it is amazingly more clean in your room. You realize how much airflow was permitted through the thatch and with it greatly blocked off, the plastic oddly flutters in the wind and the hut is just a little stuffier.

+Your next great scheme aims to tackle the huge space between the wall and thatch. First you clean it out. There is a surprising amount of hidden mouse treasures (and mouse poop) up there. Then you affix a couple rings of mouse poison in two popular corners. You have been very reluctant to buying any kind of poison. Poison means dead mice in mysterious locations. Poison means maybe a dead mouse under your bed, or in your dresser. Poison means maybe a dead mouse in your shoe. Maybe somewhere you wouldnt find it till it was smelling or breeding larva or something fun like that. Poison can also mean a poisoned mouse being eaten by something, like the nice cats, and then you have a dead cat. You eventually decided that you would be proactive in investigating anywhere a dead mouse might lurk and go ahead with it. Not the ideal, but youcant always been an ideal you guess.

Now comes the great fun, you have a bunch of old tree nursury sacks in your yard leftover from the previous volunteer. Most have holes in them and are falling apart, but you have been saving this small pile of plastic in the hopes of a project just like this. You pack sand into them, fanagle them as best you can, and shove them in to the space atop the wall, lining them up around the room. This almost looks like a cool interior design choice. Nice. This sack arranging takes a bit longer than you initially thought and you even have to get more sacks from your neighbor (who with a huge garden has a ton of old bags).

+Durring all of this, you go on an extended trip to Dakar, over a week away. As feared, when you get home, your back yard is destroyed. Destroyed. One whole side is more holes than fense, and the rest has been dug under and broken beyond repair. This... upsets you, to say the least. You almost want to go out on another long trip away to calm down, if that wasnt the most illogical thing one could do. Your mango tree you planted a year ago, your mango tree you planted with your dad, your mango tree, sweet little innocent mango tree, has been chewed on my goats beyond all powers of herbal healing. Several other plants and young trees are also eaten. Chickens have scattered your compost everywhere, scattered your pile of manure everywhere, The screen over your virgin attempts at a garden in this unforgiving soil has been trampled, young carrots and onions broken and killed.

The one positive in the whole mess of the afternoon that you come back to is the stack of brand new fence sections your dad bought sitting next to your hut. The next few days you and him work tearing down the old fence chunks (to be set on the firewood pile) and fixing up new posts and making the new fence straight, neat, tight, beautiful.

Rats helped identify a couple weak points of the new assembly. Late night rock throwing and later reinforcing with bundles of prickly sticks have discouraged further incursions. Soon after, the rest of the space in the hut was filled with tree sacks. The refurbishing is complete.

+Now, as the situation stands: over a month of an overhalled hut and backyard borders. The yard is not impregnitable, but the annoying things -rats, chickens, people in search of firewood, has become a much, much more managable issue. The mango died, but you have a large nursury that will replace that one and add a few more trees to the yard too. The garden is in recovery, a handful of carrots and onions fight for thier lives. Your hut is not impenitrable either, but it is worlds better. Much cleaner to start with. As of yet, no mice or other critters have decided to bore their way through the plastic bags into the indoor paradise of milk and honey (well paper and cardboard mostly). You have also cemented most of the cracks and holes in the floor things like to crawl through and live in. There are still crickets, less, but persistent. Ants but that is a given whatever you do. Flys are inevitable but if you keep the doors closed for as much of the day as possible, they turn into a negligable distraction. The only big stuff is geckos and similar lizards that you dont mind cause they eat bugs, leave your stuff alone, and are quiet (usually). You havent seen a mouse in your room. Most amazing to you is how well you sleep. You rarely wake up at all, let alone the hourly wakeups of before. This makes your alarm going off before 6 seem paticularly less sinister. You almost dont even need a mosquito net you room is so nice. But a gecko in your bed doesnt sound like too much full just the same.

+A lot could still go bad. The rainy season is the death of fences. Not just from the wet and mold, but from the wind that should be getting worse pretty soon. Sealing up a hut is nice for peace of mind but may be horrible for the hot season. The hut cannot breathe as well so may keep cool better, or may keep hot better, or both. The sacks could fall apart in a variety of ways. Even the rain and wind may ruin them or cause problems with the plastic roof sheets. Time will tell on this stuff and sooner than later.

Now if you could only aim all this productivity stuff towards actual productive work that helps other people...

Think of a better, less presumptuous, less full of myself, more realistic, more reasonable, less stupid blog title. anything is better than that old one, eh?

It starts with confusion. Then it gradually moves on to a sense of purpose. Then you begin to realize that purpose is more or less a group hallucination. Then you see how this is actually for the better and it will, at some point, come to helping people. Then you wonder how you ever thought that. Then, just when you start to think things are looking up, you realize it only ever was confusion, and will probably continue to be more of the same.

Anyway. So the past couple days I have been in Thies helping with the new training group. I was invited to talk on one of the most fun, and most delicious, topics ever- moringa uses and also neem lotion!

Ok, so when I first heard about moringa, here it is called nebedaye, sometimes I hear it called the miracle tree, I was amazed. Then my excitement gradually dulled and i have tried to get it thriving in my back yard and not really thinking much more of it. Then recently my family and neighbors have been all over me for it to make sauces out of and i realized how important this is for me to push and how great it would be if there were moringa in everyones garden and in everyones compound.

Moringa is a tree that i believe origianlly comes from south central Asia. It is pushed in developing countries around the world as a tree to battle malnutrition. The tree is fast growing, germinates easily and doesnt even need much water. While there are numerous uses for the wood, seed pods, seeds, and even flowers, I think the best part are the leaves. The leaves are hugely nutritious and since it is a fast growing tree, not too hard to get at. They have huge amounts of nutrients. More vitamin A than carrots, more c than oranges, more calcium than milk, more potassium than bananas, more iron than spinach and more protein than milk and close to the amount in eggs too.

The leaves can be prepared in sauces, boiled or steamed, or dried and made into powder that can be added to other recipes or juices.

Neem is the other topic we discussed. Neem is a kind of tree that grows readily here in Senegal but it too is from India/south Asia areas. The oil from the tree is a decent insect repellent that can be used on the skin for mosquitoes or in gardening to protect plants. The leaves can be boiled and the leaf water is then mixed with soap and oil to make a simple lotion that people can even sell here if they are so motivated, and so is a great thing for a developing country with high malaria incidence.

Our schedule got mixed around, a lot, and so I ended up doing demos to two big groups of trainees, one on thursday afternoon and one on saturday morning. They both went well but had different vibes and different things going on at each one. My good friend and fellow EE volunteer Jamie was on this tournee with me and we were assisted by the new PC Senegal Health tech trainer Adji.

For the first session we prepared some treats before we left. We gathered ingredients and cooked a sauce all morning that was made from fresh moringa leaves. We also made a juice from the powder that was not too bad. We brought stuff to prepare doughnuts and more juice on site and brought samples of the sauce with us. That day we went to a Seereer compound and had 10 Wolof and 2 Seereer volunteers with us and a beautiful afternoon to have good food and stir lotion.

On Saturday morning we left to present to a group of Pular volunteers off in a different direction away from Thies. There we were a bit more crowded together, but lots of pepole, well kids, from the neighborhood were interested in what we were doing. We didnt have the sauce for them to sample but improved on our juice making and made some good doughnuts again and lotion that everyone seemed to like.

I took a ton of pictures and posted most of them, so check it out!

Ok, so disregard that post from yesterday. The wheels do turn once everything is the way they like it.

So my project is up online and you all can check it out-

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-117

You get surprisingly little informtion about the project from the PC website, but believe me, it is really a worthy project and will be a great boost the health and happiness in the village. Anyone can donate to the project if they like and encourage your friends who have a little disposable money they arent sure what to do with to look into this too.

This project does come to be a little more costly than I had originally thought it would be, but fifty pit latrines is a big deal to the community.

All I can ask is that you guys check it out. April is totally the season of giving, I think... and donating will totally take you off the hook for not sending any letters or care pakages :)

Howdy folks,

I realize that I have had some of you waiting, and waiting, for my latrine project to materialize from the ether so that you all can generously donate to it. I have been eagerly waiting too. After a short conversation with the country director and making a couple phone calls, it turns out that I needed to re-format the budget into a pre-approved (read: utterly nonsensicle) template before it can be given the final approval. I am not quite sure why this took nearly a month to get back to me, but there it is.

As soon as I find out it is up I will let all yall know!

Also, last week, Jen and Jared came to my village for a night. Jared once again took many more and better pictures than I did. He has them up on his picasa thing but I look as rediculous in his pictures as ever. I dont know why I cant make a decent picture out here...

I Think I Skipped a Step...

Ok, so I have recently been made aware that I never really put any kind of good description of where in the world i am or what the culture is like around me. Wow, I suck. I have also been made aware how bad my typing is. This I fully blame on this stupid French keyboard. It may take me twice as long, but I will try to make this one a bit more... aesthetically pleasing? My other motive is that I have a project that should be up to be funded any day now, and I really want you all to care about my community as much as I do. No, more than I do, cause you dont have to hear the roosters at 530 in the morning.

So here is (maybe the first installment of) a quality description of some background on where I am at.

Ok so my village is one of several Louly's. 'Louly' is the way the french spell it though on a map I am convinced was made by pirates, I saw it written as 'Luli'. Anyway, I have counted seven thus far though they seem to have nothing else in common except proximity. They are not even all Seereer, and some are so spread out, like mine, that they have different 'quartiers', or seperate sections with their own name. My Louly is Ngogom, meaning roughly, the house of Ngom, though there is only one Ngom family in the village and they dont really seem paticularly special. Nice guy though. The village is spread over about two kilometers east to zest (gaa! zhy is the w down there!), and a little over a kilometer north to south. Most of the village is ethnically Seereer and speak a dialect of the Seereer dialect Sin called Seereer Jegeem. The Seereers themselves have undoubtably an interesting history, though I have only gathered little bits and pieces of it. 'Seereer' supposedly means 'keepers of the temples' in antient Egyptian, and the people themselves are nomads that left to seek more exciting shores. They settled in the Sin-Saloum delta (just south of where I am) many hundreds of years ago, and established a kingdom. They had a line of rulers in a place right next door to where I spent a week of training. I even visited the kings' burial ground where they were suposedly under these mounds, buried standing, with all their possesions and perhaps also wives and husbands (at least the first king was actually a queen). It was a pretty spooky place. Then, some few hundred years ago, there was an invasion from the north as the area was converted to Islam. The Seereers were rather stubornly against the whole deal and were driven out and scattered. Later, when the heat died down and the Animist jokes started to get old (if the sky wills it), they returned and set up more humble towns and villages. Some converted to Christianity when the toubabs, err, French came and colonized the area. The Seereers in my area were not paticularly into the whole colonialization thing and thought it a rather bad deal. As I am told they formed a resistance tribe and fought and hid from the foreigners, calling themselves 'Jegeeram', meaning 'they dont own me'. This is shortened to the 'Seereer Jegem' that they now still call themselves, err, well, call their dialect.

Other interesting facts- Seereers and Puulars generally have a joking relationship of mutual distate for one another. I have never really gotten a clear explaination of their combined history, certainly the languages are similar but the people even look different. Puulars, as I call them, are various different groups of people not just around Senegal (mostly in the far north, east and south), but are also in many other west african countries as well. The Seereers call them 'slaves' and the Puulars call Seereers 'cats', which i imagine give some clues to thier past relationships, but then, I cant be sure.

My village has three Puular families. One lives in the central area of town near me. The father insists on calling me 'Mousa' everytime, even when the rest of the village corrects him. The other two families live up in the northern section on their own. As one expects from Puulars, they have a large herd of cows (the largest around), and many goats and sheep. In my opinion they are the nicest people in the whole village to me and insist that I learn Puular. I think I get this impression for two reasons, one is that they are super isolated group in a sea of Seereers and so they are extra nice to me when i come visit. Secondly, I think that with some of them, their Seereer is about on par with my level of Seereer and so we can have easy, slow and nice conversations. I like them.

The other forty-seven families are Seereer. Most in the village and in the area are Muslim, but about a third of my village is Catholic. Instead of the usual Arabic-cally derived name like Mamadou, Seikh or Abibou, the Catholics tend to have two first names, one French, like Piere or Francois, and the other a traditionally Seereer name like Diogoye (lion) or Ndigue (rainy season).

Agriculture is really the main activity and work in the village. We are surrounded by fields. Much of time, in the dry season, these stand dry, sandy and empty, but when the rains come (as some of my pictures showed last year) it really greens up. Around me is a fair amount of Baobab, but also a good many different variaties of Acacia trees, those classic african savanna thin trees with tiny leaves and thin canopy. It is very flat where I am, and generally rather sandy, but the water table is near the surface so water is not too much of a problem.

Millet is the big main crop in my area. It grows looking kinda like corn (alas corn needs more water or better soil than we have), and developes candle like tops an inch or more in diameter and a foot or two long with hundreds of little beads, kernels if you will, of millet. They tend not to sell much of this as it is a crop they can store all year, eat all year and plant the leftovers with some to spare in the next season. Peanuts are also a big crop around me as well as beans (like black-eyed peas) and sorghum (grows like corn again but has a more grain-looking top part that then grow kernels similar to millet (i am sure you can google it (i will take pictures next time))). My village has a ton of gardens too, thirty seven by my count, and nearly, if not every, family has one to work on or help with. Bissap is a big crop around me, both green and red varieties, and it is used for a cranberry like drink and for a sauce from the leaves. To some extent people also manage fruit trees like mango and lemon, and grow eggplant, cassava, peppers and okra. The local cows generally roam about eating weeds and cleaning up stalks from the fields durring the dry season and then are relocated to areas to roam a ways to the east of us, near Kaolack, durring the rainy season. There are also sheep and goats in small herds in my village and chickens galore. These animals are not tipically eaten unless there is some special holiday, but are kept for a kind of solid financial asset. Most families keep a horse and/or a donkey for field work and for transport and such.

The village has five main wells people use to get water from for everyday needs like drinking, washing and bathing. There is a four room primary school and a kindergarten. The kindergarten sits in a field next to the one room church and recently both have been encircled by a brick and chain-link fence. I guess you gotta pen those little tikes in... that or protect the church from witches... There is also a small Koranic (so sure that is spelled wrong) school that teaches the young children their Arabic prayers and such. There is a tire-repair shop (a guy with an air pump some rubber tubing and a hammer) and a boutique. The boutique sells many wonderful things such as rice, oil, tea and sugar, matches and powdered milk, soap and an assortment of small terrible biscuits.

My family is perhaps one of the more well off in the village. My father is currently the vice-president of the Rural Comunity (kinda like the county, I guess). He is a really nice guy with two wives and more children than I have been able to determine. The oldest being perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties and the youngest was born just before I came to country last year. My younger mom has only had two children and I doubt she is anywhere near done. My dads younger brother lives in Spain and a bunch of his children and his second wife live with us too. Both my dads mom and his younger mom live in our compound as well along with at least one adopted child, my dads younger sister and her one child. It took me a while to get all of the names right. We have a horse and a recently purchased (or maybe borrowed) donkey. When I first came my dad proudly showed me a room where he was raising a good little bunch of chickens but since selling them all, that room has been empty and we simply have a little brick coop and wandering fowl that drive me nuts.

Folks around me generally eat a lot of millet. They pound it in a long and tiresome process that turns it into a grainy powder that is mixed with another powder (ours is pounded baobab leaves) and cooked into a kind of couscous. It has the consistency of warm wet sand when it is eaten, and at first i thought the texture awful, but i guess it grows on you, eh? They eat this for breakfast, sometimes with milk. Where I am it is usually the powdered variety, but since the Puulars have cows and do sell a kind of yogurt at the market every once in a while, I imagine they may also get fresh milk. For lunch, it is mostly the same all over the country. I understand that some time around colonialization or a little before or after, local lunch foods, whatever they were, based on local grains or other veggies, were overwhelmingly thrown out in favor of the rice that was imported as a time saving foodstuff. Thusly, I, with many other volunteers, 'enjoy' rice and fish for lunch every single day. Sometimes this is suplemented by small amounts of vegetables, but oily rice and fish is pretty standard. For dinner we have the couscous again but with a sauce, usually made from peanut or, if I am having a good day, beans.

Oh gosh, this post is getting way long and I should go ahead and end it. Well, I will totally have more of these 'steps back', if anyone wants to know anything in paticular, let me know.

Oh, and Jared posted pictures of me at Goree island (they are really really silly, but go see (I forgot my own camera, sorry))!!

Such a long time since a good entry, eh?

I have been here in Senegal for over a year now. It doesnt really feel like it has been that long, but then again, it feels like I have been here ages and have learned way more than I had thought possible.

It really has been a good, interesting, stressful and life changing year. I have taken a long, long weekend in Dakar, seeing friends and relaxing in a place with hot showers before I head back to my little hut. The latrine project that I am sponsoring in the village is now in the phase where we all wait expectantly and hope magic happens. The proposal was completed and sent off to Washington last friday and now PC is chewing on it before it can appear up on their website. Once it is up there I will, definetly, let everyone know it. I am really excited, it is an expensive project and the world economy is what it is, but i think if only some of the people I know give jsut a little, it can really add up. Not to mention, that it can change the lives of some 600+ people, making their days healthier, easier, and I think, just a little happier.

That being said, I feel like this project may be the most I do durring my service. The most of anything that can last at least. My environmental club has met a few times now. We have played a couple games, talked about what the environment is and how we can affect it, looked at national geographic pictures of other ecosystems and the like. But then still, I am not sure that they really follow me that much. Slowly slowly I guess. i also know that this year I am going to try and do a really big tree nursury and do a big outplanting at the start of the rainy season (with the help of the club). I have been colecting seeds from many different local species that people use for mostly for feul-wood, fence making and feeding animals, and also other varieties that have medicinal value, fruit or other edibles, and some that are just good shade trees. People generally like to have trees in their gardens and even in their fields and some varieties can be very benificial to the surrounding soil. The village seems very excited about it and have given me suggestions and seeds for planting and right now I am preparing a large area of sacks in my back yard and will, if i can get it protection, do another large area behind the school. I know that many of these probably wont survive a year, some will be eaten by goats or cows or get trampled or simply dry up and die, but i feel like it is one of those great classic PC type ways to make a modest lasting impact. I could maybe come back years from now, sit under a tree and eat a mango from a tree i helped plant. That would be way cool.

I really am very excited for this coming year. I really cant believe I only will have another year of this. Lots of volunteers have had different feelings about their service and PC life and all. Lots of volunteers come with different expectations and perspectives and with different goals and understandings of our purpose and take different ideas from similar situations. I could not be more thoroughly satisfied with my decision to come here and have the greatest job on the planet. I get to live in a totally new environment, learn a new language and do things that I could only dream of back at home.

The work here is hard, to be sure, but i dont think i would rather be doing anything else. The Peace Corps is not perfect and sometimes i do feel sometimes as if nothing i do could ever come to any good. I feel like i do so much time learning language and integrating that when it comes down to getting things done, half my service has flown by. Being a volunteer also means, usually, well for me at least, being rather independent. I have a 'boss' but i dont really have anyone telling me what i should work on or what i should be experimenting with or what would be most fulfilling. I have general guidelines for the type of volunteer that I am (Environmental education), but i am free to delve into most anything i can imagine, including work that other sectors do (latrines are health, and tree plantings are agro-forestry). I often have to be a little creative for getting certain things done or deciding what i could best spend my time on (working with another volunteer on an excellent Seereer dictionary). As short of a time that I have here I do hope that I am making it worth it for my village and myself.

Before I came here I had never really given sufficient thought to any philosophies of development work. I had just thought, there are good things you can do for people in need, these things can be done, people will be helped. period. Now i am begining to see the bigger, much more complex and often frustrating problems. I think the PC program has a great approach to developement, not that it can do everything, or hit every area of the problem. But it is unique, and connects cultures and people in amazing ways. Important PC goals in fact, involve, and I think properly, the cross-cultural exchange. There is so much I could say about all of this, but i will save it for a speech later.

As independent as we volunteers are, I also feel that I big part of getting me through this year has been our support system. Care-packages are amazing, the food and the magazines are like nothing else. Hearing from people back home lets me know the rest of the world really is still out there and that there are people who have not forgotten me to the other side of the globe. But also there is nothing that can substitute the friends I have made over here, both close neighbors and volunteers from around the country. That we can get together and actually breathe for a little while every now and then has probably played a good role in keeping me level, motivated and positive over an oftentimes very stressful job.

I really do love it here. It has taken its time to grow on me, but i really love my village. And, if I havent emphasized this already, I have the best language too (as long as you dont count most useful or prettiest sounding under 'best'). I am so excited for this next year. I am excited for this next month and for all of the potential that I see in my village and in the people there. I only hope that at the very least I can continue to entertain those in my village, yoona fo mi?

I leave this with a good quote that I was sent just the other day:

-You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future. - Thomas Sankara

Oh these past couple weeks had amazing ups and downs, but i will write on that later. Now i feel like i must brag a little, if only to keep from being completely depressed by lack of progress.

Generally now my Seereer is pretty good. Not great, there are still a ton of things that i dont get, but its good and i can get points across, talk to children, talk to older people, make small talk, speak at meetings, summarize what others have talked about, and sit and just listen to others talk idly or argue and generally get what people are talking about. When i notice this, it makes me rather proud of my progress.

Now when a stranger comes by and greets me and does the surprised 'Nana seereer?!', 'you understand seereer?', and I give my usual grin and answer 'nanaam ondik', 'i understand a little', then anyone around me, family or otherwise, is in a rush to say 'no, no! he understands everything! he understands very well!'. Grin, shrug, move on.

Now, there are times still when i am utterly at a loss. There was a big arguement in my village yesterday, a very unusual event, and that looked like it might come to blows. I had and still have no idea were all yelling about but it seemed like everyone was mad at everyone else. Also, i am slow to pick up on the ,ore colorful expressions and the metaphores and certain connotations are lost on me.

Yesterday though (before the fight), I was sitting with a bunch of the old men in the village and they were talking to another man who was passing through. 'Does he understand seereer better than the former volunteer,' he asked. Then they all thought and one said 'the other volunteer played and talked with children, he knew seereer, but not deep seereer and he did not learn all of seereer from talking with adults. Ndiouma (me) will soon know all seereer, he talks to children and to adults more§ Best compliment ever!

So I have a blog to post about December, only it is saved on my thumb drive thingy which this computer does not like and i dont feel like writing it again, so that will come later.

I do have a mess of new pictures up, stil more to go, but theres a bunch up there from october and on. I am in Dakar now but going back to Louly on tomorrow. I had come not really for the new year bu that was fun too. Every kid in the city seemed to have bought noise makers and fireworks and spent all day and night setting them off, i think they are still going off actually, fun. I went with a couple other volunteers who had their families in town and we ate at an Ethiopian place that was really nice and really different from what I usually eat, on either continent, but good. After that we just watched episodes of the Office at our regional house, someone looked up and anounced it was after midnight, we didnt even gt up, and yet i still stayed up nearly all night.

My real reason though for coming to the city was to speak to my boss, who i found out is on vacation, and to work on a grant proposal for a latrine project i am having no luck getting started. It does no help that the community has requested really fancy latrines -you know, with walls and a zinc roof that is a latrine/bathing room combo- and so each one is kinda expensive, relaively, but then when they want fifty of them, one per household, that skyrockets the price beyond all my hopes.

Unfortunately I think i will go back, probably have another village meeting with fun speech giving, and do my best to explain why and how this project needs to be scaled down, maybe by number of latrines, more likely just by reducing each one to the bare nesesity of concrete slab with hole in it over a two meter pit. I doubt anyone will be thrilled by this, but it will at least be something better than nothing which is he current norm. People just go to the 'woods' which does not really exist so they go behind trees or in brush for bathing and bathroom, even, and especially dangerously and hazardously, at night.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. When i first got to my village I did not want to do any such project where money is just given to the village for some construction or other with no rel sustainability or passed skills to anyone. Other NGOs may do this but Peace Corps is not of that kind to throw money at problems. At the same ime this was a project idea totally pushed by the village and could really incorporate heath semenars on the importance of hand washing and be a resonably sustainable betterment of peoples health.

Anyway, its still much work left to do with whatever happens.

Well, it has been an interesting month or so in my village. Tabaski was pretty fun in a weird sorta way. I just had gotten a new camera so I took a ton of pictures. In the morning I watched sheep and goat butchering, people grilling and cooking and getting things ready for the afternoon. The kids were all super excited and hyper all day and constantly wanted to be in pictures. In the afternoon I had about four lunches of macaroni noodles in an onion and potato sauce with sheep meat eaten with bread.

Most people dressed up for the day starting in the afternoon though some people had nice things on all day. I had an outfit that I had made a while ago but had not really worn it around the village. In the evening, after a dinner of leftovers from lunch (and we continued to have those leftovers for a few days later), and then there was a two day evening dance party out by the kindergarten, a kind with a generator and strings of lights and blaring music, very bizarre for a little village I thought.

Christmas came without too much incident. In the days before and after I was working on organizing a project and village meeting to discuss the project, and I also tried to get work done on Christmas day. Roughly a third or so of my village is catholic and I was told that something would be happening on Noel, I just was very much not sure what was going to happen. Really, I was looking forward to a little chill time, school is out and I have an excuse to splurge on things like alone time, and care-package candy.

In the morning, while walking to the chief’s compound, who is also catholic, others were going in the other direction and invited me to a morning church service. I couldn’t see any reason why not and I have consistently kept putting off going to any other services (mostly because Sunday morning is such a nice time to either sleep in, do backyard work or do laundry), so I agreed to tag along. As people slowly arrived in the church yard, one of the church leaders took me in and showed off a trio of religious type books, one was a Serere bible I think, and the others were like religious lessons and stories, printed neatly in serere, like to be read aloud or sung and discussed. I thought it was really cool just because it contained so much serere that I don’t know, much of it likely because of the slight differences in the dialect of serere spoken in my area, but a good deal of it was simply words I had not come across before (how often do you use ‘begat’ in everyday speech?).

Then there was the service. It was almost entirely standing and singing or chanting in Serere, and most of the older people present got to contribute a little to what was said or sung. This lasted perhaps just over half an hour and that was that. Went out, shook hands greeted people all over again. People seem happy for the harvest, or that it is essentially over, or that they have a lot of money now, or they will soon, or a combination of all of these.

In the afternoon, after lunch with my family - greasy rice and fish, how unique - and after my family stared at me for a while thinking maybe I would do something interesting, like spontaneously explode like a firework and shoot out confetti everywhere for example, I was invited to lunch in the middle of the village. I went over, sat with some of the catholic guys and some of the muslim guys, the usual guys who I sit under the trees with. A few families brought out bowls of the noodle dish, there was also some other bits of meat so maybe a goat was made a meal of that day too.

Then that was pretty much that. I chilled for the rest of the afternoon, talked with the men - they are astounded that it can rain ice for multiple days in some parts of America -, had some time out in the fields to myself - Christmas songs on the harmonica sound kinda sad when played somewhere alone -, and got some reading in -Cold Mountain is a good sad book.

The Sunday after another volunteer invited me to go to Bandia with her. Her family was visiting for a couple weeks and they offered to pay for a trip to the wildlife park. It was cool, even though i had been once before durring IST, and i took many pictures, (that will be up soon). For lunch I had about half of a chicken and fries and some pizza that other people couldnt finish. It was a good day.

The next day I had a big village meeting. It was the first thing that i have actually organized in the village so far and so i was excited and rather nervous. I had announced a village latrine project before and we needed to discuss the details of funding and how it would be carried out. It went pretty well, most people seemed to understand everything i was saying, and with the help of my community counterpart I understood pretty much everything that they said. I was really impressed by their excitement for the project and each of the fifty village families said they would give about sixty dollars in money or labor and supplies. That was way more than I was expecting; though I might need to adjust the project some and so that amount may change.

Anywho, still more i need to write about new years and all in Dakar, later.

IST now looms barely more than a week away. That means retrning to Thies for three weeks of additional language and technical training. I hope to get a small handle on some wolof vocabulary and, importantly, figure out just what it is that i can technically do. Inshallah.

This past couple weeks has seen me somewhat productive. I had made a very small pepineer (tree nursury) behind my hut with thirty-five bags to plant in. As of this morning, I have all seven nebedaye (nutriious plant of a billion uses) about a foot and a half high, thirteen of my twenty mangos are up and growing strong (thank you david!), (though my backyard friend 'scampers' or possibly a giant angry rat bit off the top of one of the mango sprouts and it hasnt recovered), four of my six lemons have come up, and my two maad (sour-patch-kids tasty fruit with ugly exterior) are starting to emerge from the soil. (I would have had one more mango but my backyard friend 'scampers' or possibly a giant angry rat bit off the top of one of the sprouts and the stem hasnt recovered, I put a couple of lemon seeds in next to it in case the mango is done for.) I know that a bunch of people in the village already have some of these trees or they have pepineers of thier own in their gardens or resting above their chicken coups. However, some people have expressed varying interest in some of them though it is clear they figured I would have had many more than I do. Well, next year, when i have an actual good head start on the rainey season I plan on haveing a nice big ole nursury, filling a corner of my yard space, next year. This year though, as the trees get big enough, i guess i will start gifting them out to folks, hopefully in some kinda orderly fashion. It sucks that I am going to be away from my village for three weeks cause i wont get to take care of them though with the rains they should, i hope, could possibly survive anyhow...

My community assesments have been coming along in spurts and stalls, but gradually I am conecting dots and figuing things out. There seem to be like a million NGOs working in and around my village. One that gives out money for the villagers to buy peanuts, one that owns annd helps maintain a huge garden in the center of the village, one that gives mosquito nets to school children, at least one that pays for additions on the schools, latrines and gives out money and medicine, two more own a garden and a tree nursury to the south west of the village (the tree nursury place has a billion trees and, no joke, at least 2000 seedlings in bags), and there is another group that is doing health education in the village that I have been helping out with. I am sure there are more that I havent yet discovered the funcion of yet but that will reveal themselves. There also are a variety of groups within the village doing farming and agricultural activities.

While of course I feel all of this is amazing, fantastic for the people in my community and for the health of the environment, I do have this nagging feeling that I am just a redundant actor, repeating the same lines that have already been said, are already being said, and that will continue with or without any of my imput. I guess on the optomistic side that leaves me to branch into neglected areas and expand on awareness and do more to actually correct problems people are already thinking about. Not that that makes any of this any easier though.

Ooh, on a different note, I have to talk a little about how cool yesterday was. So yesterday I came into Mbour also, actually yesterday was my second day in a row here making this the third, but that is because I dont plan ahead well and the first trip was more of just a waste of a morning. Anyway, so i walk out to the street from my village and it usually takes me a little while to get a bus into town but like in two seconds an alham pulls up and it is almost empty, which i would say is rather unusual from the ones i have seen. Getting in i ask how much it is and the driver says 200cfa. 200! that is about fifty cents and i usually pay twice that amount or more. so cool. Then, as we come to the cross street where i would like to get out, the bus stalls out and rolls to a stop. the driver hops out and opens the hood and i hop out, happy to be right where i want to be. I had some fabric that I wanted to have made into an outfit so after wandering the market for a while trying to figure out how i will find a serere speaking tailor who will not try and rob me, a guy approaches me, picks me out for a PCV and asks about other volunteers, in serere! He tells me his friend is a tailor and pretty soon we are agreeing on what i think is a very resonable price (though i guess i will see today when it is done if it is quality work). Then after lunch where the guy forgot to charge me for half of what i had and he looks confused when i hand him more money, i went back to the market to buy some shoes. Practically the first ones i try one are good and, again, at a good price. ...weird good day at the market... Then after meeting up briefly with my good PCV friend Jen, i walked up to the tourist grocery store to buy cereal. As i was early there and crossing the road, my old pair of flipflops broke. one of the little posts snapped off right in the middle of the street. after hobbling to the side of the road and trying in vain to put the shoe back together, (i was not really worried cause i had just bought another pair!), a guy in military uniform beckoned me to a small room where he offered to fix my shoe. He was even another serere guy! he took a bit of twine from his mosquito net (i am not sure how i feel about taking that), and made a neat little fix on my sandal. I got home to a beautiful sunset and my neighbor had made me this sweet desert thing from millet (not my favorite thing in the world but a nice change and a really nice gesture). All in all it was a really... fortuitous (is that a word?) day. really nice and convenient things just kept happening. A nice little breather from my normal struggles.

Well, gotta go now, started drizzling here just now, awsome, good thing i remembered my rain jacket!

I feel like such a remarkably lage amount of stuff happens in between each post i make that i really want to spend ages going over all the million crazy things i have seen, amazing things i have learned, and substatually little that I have actually done. Alas, there is not enough time in the day or at least in this internet cafe.

I have also been trying like mad to get either my camera or my flash drive to be recognized by even one computer here. so far they are all alligned against me ever posting any recent photos and i may have to just wait till IST and try and get a whole mess of em done.

So rereading that last post i guess i had meant it to be less dire sounding and more, well strange, as it was at the time. Recently in my village I have had many up and down moments but overall things have been coming along.

At the beginning of the month I had a grand time out in Kedougou, in the south-eastern part of senegal, where a bunch of volunteers gathered for the 4th of July. It was really cool getting to travel from my familiar -flat, desert, mildly treed- environment down to a different part of the country. There are mountains there with actual forests and the gambia river, we saw tons of monkeys and baboons and even a few warthogs doing their thing. while i could have planned ahead with my money much better, i was able to stay in a super sweet hotel (with AC and a pool!), the food there was pretty awesome (even had half of a warthog sandwitch, tasty), and it was really nice seeing so many other volunteers and friends who i wont often get to see.

Then this past week and a half has been as exciting as always. Early last week I met a guy who works at a case de sante, or little clinic thing, in the village next to mine. He is really excited to work with me, and that is super nice cause I have really been struggling to figure out ways of actually being productive to making some kind of a difference in my village recently. He is working on a 'programe sante comunitare' which is teamed up with the Presidents Malaria Initiative and a bunch of other NGOs with his group focusing on the department of Mbour (the area all around me and the coast near me). In the past week I have sat in on three mini community womens meetings, two were in serere (which i understood most of), one was in wolof (but i could mostly figure out what they were talking about), and all were about family planning and enfant maladies, pretty cool. I have also been to two rehersals for a malaria play a kindergarden group is putting on next week in wolof. While i havent nessesarily been super 'useful' at any of these, everyone seems to really appreciate my presence. (I did give some advice to the child preformers on the importance of speaking loudly, and i did do a little dance entertainment in the other meetings that seemed like it drew in more people to listen to the discussion, so maybe that is helping). Yesterday, I came into town to see the other people that he works with and he wanted me to see what is is that they do. I thought that that would be like an hour or two meet and greet in the morning but it ended up being a six-hour board meeting. I cant really complain too much though, it was in an air conditioned building, with a generator when the power cut out, and the gave me lunch with a million vegitables and a huge meaty fish, and they gave me a cold fanta.

But then just to bring me back down to earth, after lunch they passed around what i thought was tea -as it was in tea glasses with the tea foam and it is what most people drink. As soon as I took the glass, by the smell I knew i had made a mistake. I had had a glass of this only once before, but that was one time too many. They drink a kind of coffee here that is best described as gasoline. well maybe like if you scraped the dregs off the bottom of a really dirty coroded gas tank, then heated that to the point that the fumes burn the inside of you nose and lungs, and it smells about what you would expect of that. It takes my taste buds about 24hours to recover. The people here all seem to like it though, or else they are all into some kinda group denial. Anyway, I think i will have a more productive PC service if i avoid that 'coffee' as much as i am able. That makes up part of one of my two most important rules i have for myself so far. 1 - be careful about everything that i put into my mouth. food and drink and crazy straws. 2 - take care of my feet. something i learned from scouts. i can manage almost any problem, bandages or medicine or switch hands for tasks if i need to, but if i cant get around, well, then i am useless. with a cut on the bottom of my foot and the taste from coffee from yesterday still overpowering my sences, i am rather failing my two most important rules right now. some RnR this afternoon will do me good.

Tomorrow there is another meeting in the moring in the next village and there is more play rehersal in the afternoon so I think it will be a good day. Then saturday i am getting a fancy outfit made for the big presentation on monday where the play is performed and a large meeting is held. I feel like i am scrambling here at the last minute to get my village assesments done before IST which is coming way faster than i would have liked. we go back to thies on Aug 4 and have 3 weeks of further language and technical training where hopefully i will actually know what the heck i am doing.

Anywho, i need to go but some more mangos and head back to the ole village,

Boo ndiki!

Well, thats not exactly right, but yesterday was a wierd day. It had a great deal of emotional ups and downs, lots of misunderstandings, confused serere, and I didnt really get anything done. So really just an average day in my village.

It started normal enough. I had breakfast on the floor of my hut. I got this musli cereal stuff with rasins and corn flakes and it is amazing. I had planned on going and sitting in on a class while they still have class at the school next door to me. Really all I wanted to do was talk to the school director about some of my assesments and determine where the kids that go to that school live (I have gotten several different answers on that), and talk about the schools calendar. I last saw him leaving on Thursday and as he left he said 'boo tening', essentially meaning see you monday. Of course when I got to the school, only two out of the four teachers were there, and only a handful of kids were there doing what i guess was retaking exams that they were absent for. I didnt really want to disturb them so I went back to my hut to replan my morning. The previous day I had gone to a section of the village they call Pintoke, where I had sat for a while and the people at one of the compounds there were very nice and helpful and I thought I could go back there to get some of my assesment questions answered.

Just as I was gathering myself to head out, my younger mom came to my door and stood there staring at me (as she usually does. I had tried to ask her once what she wanted before I had opened the door and she gave me a long lecture on how terrible a person I was and that I should always open the door for her and never ask her what she wants first...yeah, freal). So anyway, she had my screaming brother, I will call him Biff, with her. He had been crying all morning, as he usually does on every morning and afternoon and anytime he is awake. He loves to cry. Any way, all she said when i opened the door was 'jegaa mayo, ciam', or pretty much 'you have milk, give it to me.' I think politeness might actually kill some people in my family. So I let her spoon out nearly all the rest of my powdered milk as she said Biff 'buga o yer', he wants to drink. Well, stop the presses, he is in no ways an enfant, and while i dont oppose giving him some calcium, I dont know why they have to just take it from me like that unannounced. Whatever, I really dont mind that much and when I go back I will try and bring a kilo of powdered milk just for her.

Anywho, so then I went out to Pintoke (after giving 100 cfa to some guys fixing a building for no apparent reason) and sat with the same family again, learned all their names as best I could (or at least the adults, which are more important anyhow) and we talked about what villages around have boutiques and which they go to and which villages have schools and where kids go from where to where and why. It was mildly productive at the least I suppose. They also taught me some words for making pottery and showed me bowls they made to sell near mbour (cue ominous music), and how the pottery was really good and they also had some for making couscous with and they taught me some words having to do with druming and dancing (more ominous music).

Around noon, my usual time to be getting back to my hut, they urged me to stay and have lunch with them. Most families do this when I sit with them for a while and I always turn them down saying that I would like to have a bath before lunch or study or have a nap. But this time, they insisted that everyday they have lunch at 1, which they admitted was early, and then I could go back home. They were very nice and it looked very much like lunch preperations were in full swing so I said sure, I will stay (did i mention that there were dark clouds all day, and it would have been awsome if right then there was a thunderclap).

I thought I could have lunch here, then go back home and be back before 2, in good time to have another lunch with my dad, a lunch that rarely fills me up and is almost always just greesy rice and a fish. I figured I could actually eat a fill this day and my family woudnt be insulted cause I could be back in time. So I waited for my first lunch. And waited. Lunch was finally ready at 1:30, I tried to eat quickly, but they brought out four different bowls, all of really good food with vegetables and spices and good fish... it was too much to pass up. At 1:45, i tried not to be too rude but I said 'i should go home' in kinda a question like way, and they said 'you should go home' in kinda like an answering way. Then I walked quickly back home, it is not terribly far, and I turned the corner into the compound at 1:50.

All the kids and my moms were sitting around the tree, and as I approached they all stoped talking and stared at me. Kinda a death stare, if you can imagine it. Like I had just punched the Pope, hard in the gut, and they wernt sure if they should run up and smack me or if I would probably just get struck down where I stood by a lightning bolt or something. They had obviously just uncovered the lunch bowl, but they hadnt yet started eating. I greeted them, to no responce, and said 'oh, you are having lunch' trying to smile and hoping to get something warmer from them. One of my neighbors who was also seated by the tree pointed to my dads room and said 'go'.

Now, understand that never in all my month and a half in my village, never have we had lunch in my family before 2pm. The average is probably around 2:15. So I think I made it home in good time and I really hadnt thought that I would really be late like this. But timing rarely if ever works in my favor.

So in my dads room, my dad and our farm boy, The Joker, were sitting and had just begun on a big bowl of rice mixed with small chunks of fish. I appologize as best as i can. My dad says he tried calling me, where was I and where was my phone. Pintoke is too far away and I need to get back before lunch. Ok, ok. After we eat he says that I need to be back here before lunch everyday and that I shouldnt be gone like that. Right, right, i understand now, i said, and i thought that would be the final lecture on that.

I went back to my room, had a nice bath, decompressed, got ready to head out again for the afternoon - somewhere to chill a bit. Walking out of my room i was stoped almost immediately by my younger mom. This was unusual for her to stop me like this and talk to me so directly. she asks where i had gone that morning, Pintoke. She then gives me a long lecture on 'the kind of people that are in pintoke and the kind of people that are here' she is kinda smiling as she says it, but she is always kinda smiling and my mom is laughing in the back, so i am not sure if she is really serious or not. I listen dutifully and ask what things mean. She tells me that the people there are not good people. All they do is play music and dance and ask me for money (I had to try very hard to restrain my self in pointing out that that is, fact what this family does), and she says that if she is walking by she will not sit with them and if they ask her to eat with them she says that she is full. Suddenly the caste system lectures rush back to me and i realize that my family, along with much of the village, are nobility, while those in pintoke are the artisans, storytelling and music playing caste and we are not to intermingle. Great, I think, well at least I know now.

So then I walk about two steps, and my mom reiterates the same lecture. Making sure i understand what music playing is and dancing, and how (when they do it) it is apparently bad. And how they will ask me for money (which when they do it), I should turn them down. Then I walk another few steps and my grandmother, who overheard most of what was said, ask me for what I know about the people in Pintoke and she then gives me the lecture to. Then my nextdoor neighbor walks up, ask where I went in the morning and procedes to give me the same lecture again. Almost out of my compound, two more women ask me where I had gone and feel urged to explain, several more times, that I am not to go there, not to eat there, not to talk to them or sit with them. They are not good people. Right. Heavy stuff.

So I head in the opposite direction, towards some compounds with some similarly nice people. I learn some new words and sit for a while as women in the village begin to arrive there apparently for a womens group lottery. There was music and dancing (both my younger mom and neighbors were there, dancing and druming, freal). I sit out with some of the kids and play a board game. A kid walks by and hands me a lemon. Just like that, out of the blue. My younger mom happens to be walking by a second later, sees me holding it and looks at me as if I am mr selfish. I think of giving it to her (maybe she could give taste to a meal with it), but i put it im my bag instead. 'To plant', i tell her.

Before i can leave, one of the women, my aunt evidently (or so i am told), gives me two fish that she has fried in a way that I think is the best ever. I take them back home and give them to my mom, for her to put them into dinner, i guess. At dinner though, somehow no one in our compound knows where any flashlights are and the solar powered light is out, as usual. so we eat in near utter darkness, only starlight, no moon up yet. I cant see my fish, meaning i dont eat my fish, the joker and my dad down the one in our bowl before i can get more than one piece. I finish the bowl, and go to bed dreaming of desert.

So, yeah, the moral to this long long post, i have no idea, dont let me eat food i guess is a good village action plan. Oh and today i planted the lemon seeds and lunch was at 2:15.

So, I will give this a try. These pictures are all kinda random. And I dont have many anyhow.

First here is one of my stuff at home in Atlanta before it got all packed up. It was very early in the morning.

Yeah, I have way too much stuff... yeah.

This is some of us before training enjoying our last night out in the states. Wonderfully chilly America and all its wonderful food...

Traveling can be very exhausiting. Yep.

We drove from Phili to New York, then flew to Brussels and from there to Banjul and THEN finally to Dakar where we were then bused to Thies.

This last one here is of us finally making it to the Thies training center. It was after midnight and it was kinda like most of s wernt sure whether to be giddy and excited or completely and utterly exhausted at the thirty something hour journey we had just finished.

Well, thats it for now. More pictures to come including my home near Thies and my hut and village here. For some reason many of my pictures appear to be very dark and so I didnt put up a bunch, or maybe this monitor just sucks bad, I'll have to figure that one out i guess.

Oh right, so maybe a post.

So this week was... interesting. As all weeks tend to be. I went to Dakar last weekend with Mbour neighbor, Jen, and we had a quick little tour of cool places by Jared. It was a cool weekend, spent quite a bit of money, but I figured I would and I think my budgeting is going rather well. I only really prchased two things besides meals and transport and all. I got a big jar of apple sauce from this rediculously large grocery store that is in the downtown area of Dakar, I think. And I got a jug of bissap syrup that you add water to to drink. It is very tasty and very very strong. I did the recomended 4 parts water to 1 part syrup and it was unbelievably sweet. I had to keep adding water as I drank it and hoped my teeth wouldnt fall out.

Getting back home Sunday night was also... interesting. I dont think I will put all of the reasons for that here in type, but I will say that I was rather disgrunteled and didnt even really know who to be pissed off at. Also, steps 34 through 78 appear to involve 'fence repair'.

Tuesday brought me back up again when my birthday package from my older brother, David, finally arived and I took the morning to go to Mbour and get it. It is undescribably excellent and has tons of great sugary things to get me through a day! Jen also came and visited me for that afternoon. I was excited to finally have a visitor for once, it was the first time anyone has visited me with either of my serere families or villages. It was the first time that I saw the language thing from the other side and for once I knew more of what was being said than another volunteer. That being said, I wasnt really sure what to do once she was here, I mean my village is not Dakar or even Mbour, only one boutique and some gardens and goats and thats about it for excitement. Well, after lunch with my family (though my moms were up at some wedding in a neighboring village), we walked around a bit and made our way to the village chief who live a fairly good ways away from my compound. It was really crazy how windy it was that day, there was dust and sand everywhere and the wind, which blows fairly constantly anyhow, was rather fierce.

So, lets see, yesterday it was overcast all day and fairly cool, and this morning it really looked like it wanted to rain in the morning. It might, for all I know, rain while I am gone this weekend.

Oh, right, this weekend. So I am off to Popinguine to flit away more money and see some folks from around my region, including some that I havent seen since training ended a month ago. Err, thats it i guess. Eventually I will really pretty this blog up too. It is just kinda hard from a cyber cafe to get a whole lot done at one time and with out many programs, and in French...

Boo jaf lakas!

Well, that last post was very rudely interupted by the power going out. I ended up paying for the half hour and trying to bike back when, after a few blocks, my pump made this awsome little 'pop!' and it decided to stop pumping. And then my fron tire was very flat. Some kids were walking by right when I was about to throw my bike into traffic and they said in wolof what i imagine was, 'there is a guy who can fix your bike around the corner'. I was in no mood to probe for more information so i just followed, dragging my bike along.

magically, there was indeed a tire repair place right around the corner and even more magically, working there were two serere speaking men! pure awsome. so after a tense half hour of inflating the tire, finding the hole, lighting the tire on fire, inflating the tire again, fixing my pump somehow... everything seemed to work out. I made it home in record time and before the sun set.

But anyway, so what do I do everyday, thats what I wanted to write about before, I am not even really sure what I do, well let us see:

I generally seem to be waking up between six and seven in the morning. At five fourty-five-ish the roosters would rather I wake up but I am trying to confound them and maybe eventually they will ease up. Whether or not it is a good idea, and I have heard varrying exclaimations, I have tried to run about every other day, which seems to be turning into Mon, Wedn and Fri. I dont really run that far or that fast but it feels good to do something like that, though the sand likes to get the better of me, and it feels like I am running through thousands of grains of very small rocks... weird.

Anyway, so my run usually lasys till seven or I may finally get up at seven, either way I am up and then going to pull water. For many male volunteers this apparently is a tricky situation and I have heard that they end up getting water from their families or something like that. For me, my first day, within my first two hours at my site, i had asked my counterpart where to get water. He grabbed me and my bucket and we walked to the closest well, he dumped water into it and then put it on my head. 'like that' he said, evidently it was what the former volunteer had done everyday so it was not a big deal for me to do it as well. So now I pull water every morning and every afternoon, about five or six buckets a day (it is not an enourmous bucket) depending on what I want to do that day: watering stuff, baths, drinking water, laundry, all that good stuff.

After the water thing is done, i sweep out my room, straighten things up and have breakfast on my own. This generally consists of some combination of cereal with powdered milk, chocoalte milk i make with hot chocolate mix, and half a loaf of french bread with either chocolate spread or honey. It is very small, but it generally holds me until lunch.

Then I try to be 'productive' until noon. This generally involves me walking around the village, finding various groups of people doing stuff - pounding millet, building a house, gathering leaves or firewood, often people just sitting around - and I sit with them and talk, or try to, find out thier names sometimes, where they live, what it is that they are doing and how to say it all and I try and write down as much as I can.

At about noon, I head back home for a bath, they feel really good in the heat of the day, and it gives me some time to decompress from the morning. Then I go and sit with my family and the neighbors out by the tree between our compounds until the food bowls start ariving and eventually I go and get a meal with my dad as well. Lunch, almost without fail, is greesy rice, a mouthful of carrot, and a greesy fish - fun stuff.

Then, my afternoons vary, I usually walk around more and talk to people, but only after it has cooled down a little. I often sit under the tree more till then and drink tea with the neighbors and try to understand their conversations. Sometimes I just walk around and try to explore the neighboring villages and areas around my village, I feel like the more people I know, or rather the more people that know me, even outside of my village, the more work I will be able to inspire. I hope.

Then around six or six thirty I get back home and pull more water, perhaps have myself another bath, try to recover from the inevitable afternoon misunderstanding (they seem to happen at least once, sometimes five or six times, every afternoon), and maybe i sit and read for an hour.

My family always eats when nearly all the stars have come out, around eight thirty-ish, which is earlier than I ate with my family in Thies, and it is much earlier than many other volunteers eat dinner too. Dinner is the meal that varries the most, though not really that much. It is always saac, or couscous senegalese with some kind of sause. most often it is hot salty brown water with a fish, this is my least favorite as fish + night = fish bones stuck in mouth/throat. we also have various leafy sauses, usually they are alright, and usually they are about the temperature of liquid lead. and my favorite sause that we have is the spicey bean sauce, where if i close my eyes it is like chili, well chilli that is missing many of its main ingredients, but thats why i close my eyes.

And thats about it. I turn in pretty early, nine thirty or so, and usually read for another hour maybe, or until i get tired of winding up my flashlight, or until the cricket who lives under my bed gets tired and decides to call it a night, but he is usually on his own time and pays me no mind.

So yeah, there is that. I know many of yall were wondering what it is i do and i hope that kinda makes that, well, spelled out.

Travel seems to be a big part of many of these days. I would rather it not be as I am starting to become rather fed up with my bike. Or rather, I am becoming frustrated with the tires as they seem to prefer to be flat, and are flat, each and everytime that I look at them. The rest of the bike is working splendidly besides getting me covered in greese. This morning, after bikeing almost to Mbour in record time, i was sourly interupted suddenly when the back tire decided that it would only hold air for a hundred meters at a time. I spent a good little bit of time then this morning after walking the rest of the way taking apart the bits and gibbles, even puting the tire under water and only finding one very unimpressive hole that I patched (perhaps badly, but it was my first patch and no one to tell me how). That fun little episode certainly has not stopped the tires, both of them, even now, from going flat each and every chance that they get. I will leave for home a little early and assume that I will stop every twenty feet to fill them up again. Tomorrow, among other things, will be fix my bike day. Hopefully freal this time.

[as is the way of things, this is when the power decided to cut out]

Ok, so here it goes, I can do this...

Right, so I have been at my site now for nearly three weeks, the language is comming along and everything is so far going fairly well all things concidered. Hmm, i really need to recap a great deal of information, this may take many posts.

How bout starting with now and we will go from there.

So I had my birthday on Friday, it was a good day, very chill, just the way i like it. There was a funeral in my village in the afternoon and all day people were a bit aloof and acting funky, not in a bad way, just distracted and then all of the sudden all these tiedye clothes in the evening with the only explaination of- they are for sleeping in. but i am rushing myself. so anyway, mostly a good relaxing day, i got to read, write some, i didnt tell anyone in my village that it was my birthday mostly cause i wasnt sure what theyd do and they probably just would not care. all the same i walked around some, took some pictures that will eventually make it into this blog theoretically, and talked to the kids who were equally not invited to the funeral i guess.

well, at first i was invited. some people said i should definetly come and i should even take pictures. then my family asked if i was going and then when i said i was thinking about it they said no, i should not go. and then all day folks walked by me chillin in the shade and they would ask if i am going and then say i really should not go.... yeah, i was confused as well.

then yesterday, saturday, i left as early as i could, though dramatically later than i wanted, and biked to mbour for internet stuff like this and meeting up with some other volunteers for just some lunch and then i would ride back in the afternoon. well that didnt really turn out quite like that, after lunch we had a grand ole time on the beach where i decided that i could just stay here in mbour and go back today. this gave me much more time to lounge around and eat chicken and vegitables that i am severely lacking in my village.

So today, i get to use a pretty good cyber that i found and it even has english style keyboard settings and everything, YAY!

My serere is comming along, i can understand folks when they talk slowly and speak clearly at least (though they never do), but i feel like there are lots of words i am still missing in every conversation and i can never really get them to repeat them or define them, though, such is life.

Well, ok really more updates to come and i can recap all the goings ons and whatnots...

Ok, for serious, I am really going to do this blog thing. Though it kinda sucks right now cause I only have ten minutes left. Ok next time It will be even better. Oh how I hqte this keyboard.

So, right, training is done. It seemed to both take forever and go by really too quickly. I am installed at my site and hqve been there now for exactly a week. Well a week except that I came to Mbour on Friday for Post office fun that i can discuss later, and I was here yesterdqy again for shopping fun and birthday pizza, and now i am obviously in the city again today. for the next week and a half at least though i will stay stay in my village.

so far everything is going really well. my village is fairly small, less than 600 people supposedly, and eventually i hope to know them all.

grrr, the time runs out too fast and i type too slowly. there is much more to tell, and pictures too.

Ok, so bear with me on this french keyboard.

soo much has happened since i last wrote. so much wqs happening when i last wrote.

now i am in thies. at the training center, figuring out wolof, mostly figuring out serere, it is pretty intense.

While it feels like a whole lot is going on at once things qre really going well,

Guff, not really enough time to write a decent entry...

Wow, ok so i really should have been posting about all the fun and excitement and trauma that has led up to today but i just somehow lost the time and right now there is no time either.

its 5am, i leave for the airport in an hour, i am totally running off of pure excitement, and no sleep.

i guess i am packed almost completely. the last few things still need good places to fit i guess, overall, it didnt really turn out to be as much stuff as i was fearing that i would bring. it is really amazing how much stuff, even just clothes, that i am leaving here.

well, i still gotta get all my bits and gibbles together... much more later!

Getting closer and closer to that time... gotta get everything squared away.

Tomorrow i am cutting my hair short. right now it is probably longer than it has ever been. much longer than i like it though still no one has really said that it looks as bad as i think it does. ah well, i will just feel better and more confident when it is shorter.

and i have started saying my goodbyes. well, really that started when i left tucson, but that was also a bye from college thing too. i really hate those whole farewell things. its just what do you say to someone that you know but not that well and you probably wont see them again and all of the sudden both of you realize that and then you are both kinda awkward and errrr.....

yeah, well i guess it is not something that anyone is really good at.

in any event, i gotta get my current immunization record, and figure out what i am taking and what i am not. I work at the office for only one more week, then i can give my uncle back his jeep. the play i am doing tech for is done by march 1st and i think that that is the last of my preplanned obligations. then i have a solid week for not a whole lot but getting ready to leave.

errrr, yeah, still not the most interesting stuff...

My staging information arrived in the mail yesterday! More forms to fill out booklets to read and further encouragement to study French much more than I have.

Yesterday was my big spending spree. Well, I guess I only bought two things, but it seemed like much more. After shopping around I found a reasonably priced good sized backpack thats about right for what I want. I didnt really want to buy a new bag but I only have one good easy to carry duffel that I could take but I think I really should have two bags.

Anyway, and I got a new pair of shoes. I am way overdue for a new pair, and the ones that I got were not expensive and are good for everyday wear and I could run in them and whatnot, so all around good.

Hrrrm, well, these will be a lot more interesting once I am in-country.

Well, here it goes. A whole shiny new blog... cool.

Ok, so a little what's what first:

Right now I have a bit less than a month before I leave for West Africa, Senegal, to work in Environmental Education with the Peace Corps. Whenever I think about it, I feel a rush of emotions that float between a jumpy excitement, nervousness, eagerness, and a feeling that I am way way over my head.

I have only really been far out of the country once before, almost ten years ago, I dont think my french is really up to par, and, oh right, I have never taught anyone about the environment before. maybe all that is minor, but i still feel particularly out of my league.

I had originally planned on English Ed in the Pacific islands leaving back in September, but... well... that fell through.

I just found out today that my Orientation will be taking place in the great city of, *drumroll*, Atlanta! Well that would be terribly exciting if not for the fact that I already live here and have lived here all my life. Well, its only a couple of days of leaving home but not leaving home, and then I fly off to another continent. I was kinda hoping the orientation would be in D.C. or Philadelphia or I dont know, not down the street...

So, oh right, I am going to try and update this as much as possible while I am in Senegal. That really means as often as I can find myself in a large city with an internet cafe and time to use one i suppose. That may not really be that often but I guess we shall all see.

Err, thats good for now i guess, i gotta figure out how to work all this blog stuff now...