In September, Muslims celebrated the end of Ramadan with a holiday. In Mandinka, the holiday is called Sali Nding, meaning "Little Prayer," as opposed to Sali Baa, which is coming up in November and is the "Big Prayer." Importantly, Sali Baa also comes with bigger presents for the kids, in addition to bigger prayers for the grown-ups.
Volunteers like to complain about Senegalese holidays --
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Ramadan started the night of the 11th of August here in Senegal and I'm fasting as part of my neverending campaign to prove that white people aren't total wimps. And of course also to show solidarity with my host family. The funny part is, we're three days in and two people have already quit fasting. Aliou, who's 16, only made it to 10:30am on the first day before he caved and ate some porridge.
I'm gonna go with yes, usually.
Chris Blattman's blog post on this question makes me feel a little more optimistic though. Point #2 basically sums up my feelings about development work:
Aid can only speed this diffusion [of technologies] or accumulation [of capital] a little. Ultimately it’s up to the Africans or South Americans or Central Asians. If you’re not from there, the best you can
I meant to go back to my village today after spending the past 10 days in Dakar helping with an English camp for middle school kids. But five minutes into my bike ride home, I realized I forgot the key to my hut (some things don't change no matter what continent you live on...), so it was back to the Peace Corps house to search for it.
I was looking through my metal trunk for the key when a
In general, Senegalese food is pretty good. Fish, peanuts and rice with a generous sprinkling of MSG describes most meals, so what's not to love? The problem, especially in a village, is the variety. There isn't any. This is what I eat for lunch and dinner about 75% of the time:"Mafe": Peanut sauce on rice or couscous.The couscous is made from millet, corn or sorghum grains that are pounded
The garden site, with a pile of wood for building the fence. We picked the site because it's right next to the well, in the middle of the village, and it'll be easy to carry water there.The women watered the ground for two days, then we divided the space up into 17 plots (one for each woman who wanted one) and spent a day double-digging the beds and adding manure to the soil. The dirt was
My friend and fellow Tamba volunteer Jessica Scates made a great video about a project she's working on, which is building additional classrooms for the school in her town. The second teacher she interviews in the video is speaking in Mandinka!
It's not all just playing with kids and going on vacation. I actually have work here. Another agriculture volunteer and I came up with a description of what we are doing (and will do, since we're just starting out) as part of our Ag work: <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> Implementing community gardens to help families add vegetables to their diets and
She's carrying a little stuffed animal (a Christmas ornament that my mom sent me) like it's a baby on her back. The kids were fighting over who got to carry it around, and it kept falling in the dirt, so then they went and gave it a bath and put lotion on it like it was a real baby. Pretty cute.
My counterpart grows cotton as his only cash crop -- everything else he grows is for consumption by the family. It didn't work out too well this year though. The cotton company offered to let him buy some agricultural supplies (pesticides, fertilizer, herbicide, sprayer, and a plow) on credit last summer, to be paid back when his cotton was harvested. Well, the company came and bought his
The New York Times has an interesting slideshow about malaria, one of the biggest health issues in Senegal.Malaria is an especially dangerous disease for kids - it's the cause of 30% of child deaths in Senegal. Malaria is less fatal for adults, since those individuals most susceptible to it likely died in childhood, but it still keeps many people sick and unproductive for weeks or even months
There was a coup in Niger on Thursday. A military junta overthrew the president, Mamadou Tandja, whose second five-year term was supposed to end in December but didn't, because he didn't want it to. I don't get these guys who want to be president for life. Wouldn't you think that after 10 years of running a struggling country in the middle of the Sahara he would be ready to retire to a nice
The three main cereal crops in Senegal are corn, millet and sorghum, and my host family grows all three. The last to ripen was sorghum, which we harvested in December. My host father, brothers and I would go out to the fields every day in the morning around 8am and work until it got too hot at around 11 or so. Sorghum is tall, so the first step in harvesting is to stomp the stalks down so
I haven't posted here in a while, for which I apologize to my loyal readers (Hi Mom!). The truth is that life has been kind of hard, and I wasn't sure how to write about what had happened, yet I didn't want to write about the fun parts of my life here until I had explained the sad parts. In November, my host mother in the village died while giving birth to her 11th baby. The baby also didn't
This is a little late, since Ramadan ended more than a month ago, but I've been wanting to write something about what it was like to be in Senegal during Ramadan, the time during which Muslims around the world fast during the day for an entire month. In the Mandinka language, Ramadan is called sung karo, which means “fasting moon,” because the month is part of the Islamic lunar calendar.
Click below to see pictures from the last two months in Senegal!Pre-Service TrainingAlso, my friend Kate is a talented photographer and has lots of photos up on her Flickr site here.
Popenguine, SenegalIt rained in Mbour, a lot. But the rainy season stopped abruptly last weekand now it's just hot and sandy.Cassie, Luke and our Mandinka teacher Aziz planting seeds in our demo garden at an elementary school.The street outside my host family's home -- the blue gate on the right is ours. In the courtyard are two mango trees, which are great for shade and mangoes, I hear, since
The training center
My room at the training center
<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> I've been in Senegal now for 11 days and I've spent the past week staying with a host family in the city of Mbour, which is on the coast south of Dakar. I don't have internet there, and electricity only occasionally, so I'm updating from the training center in Thies
My last posting here was disturbingly prescient. My travel itinerary to Mauritania ended in Dakar, Senegal, and I thought I was so funny to suggest that I might just be stuck there, inadvertently doing Peace Corps in Senegal.So... that's basically what's happened. The government of Mauritania declined to issue visas to any Americans this summer, for reasons I can't comprehend. One week before
Peace Corps emailed out the staging information for Mauritania today:On June 15, I fly to Philadelphia. The next morning my whole group goes to a "clinic" for our shots, probably Yellow Fever and Hepatitis A for me, maybe more if I'm lucky. The afternoon will be full of instruction on Peace Corps policies, safety and security, a last chance to back out, etc. Then on June 17th, we take a bus to
The Anderson Cooper 360 blog at CNN has a disconcertingly insightful post about Madagascar (I guess it was a slow news day on the "missing white girl" beat?). The writer calls Madagascar "one of the most important countries on earth today" because of its extreme biodiversity and the potential -- but mostly undiscovered -- medicinal uses of the island's 12,000 endemic plants. For example, there's
I almost made it to Madagascar. On Monday, all 30+ people in my staging group were gathered at a hotel in Philadelphia ready to leave the next day for Madagascar. We met in the conference room at 1:30 to begin the staging event where we were supposed to sign all the forms that would make us official Peace Corps Trainees. Peace Corps staff said that one person's plane was late and we would wait
If you want to find news about Madagascar while I'm gone (ie. how many presidents do they have currently?), here are some good links:Google News Madagascar -- I usually check this first. It will show the AFP, AP, Reuters, Voice of America articles about Madagascar (along with plenty of fascinating articles about how much money Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is making at the box office).
The site allAfrica.com posted an interesting article by a human rights and gender activist from Madagascar about the underlying causes of the current political crisis."A key factor in the crisis is the problem of inequality and social injustice. In spite of a 6 per cent growth rate in 2007, 70 per cent of the population still survives on less than $1 a day, and more than 59 per cent of the
One reason people in Madagascar are upset with the president, Marc Ravalomanana, is a deal he has overseen that would lease HALF of Madagascar's arable (farmable) land to the South Korean company Daewoo for the purpose of growing crops -- mostly corn -- to ship back to South Korea! The lease would be $12/acre, extending for 99 years . If the deal happens, which isn't yet for sure, Daewoo would
Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an interview with Dambisa Moyo, a Harvard and Oxford-educated economist from Zambia, who criticizes Western aid to Africa as not only ineffective, but actually harmful:What do you think has held back Africans? "I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which
Welcome to my blog about life as a forestry volunteer with the Peace Corps in Madagascar!As you may know, I was supposed to leave for Madagascar on February 11, but my trip was postponed when a political crisis erupted in the country at the end of January. The New York Times had some decent articles a few weeks ago about the situation, but here's the summary: The mayor of the capital city, Andry
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