Weeks 3 and 4 The longest weeks.

Blog 3

Hey guys. These last two weeks have been crazy at the homestay. For the most part, we had a very basic and honestly, somewhat boring, schedule.... until the last few days. We had language class twice a day every day and then we spend the afternoons and nights with our families, struggling to communicate. Our conversations are pretty basic, “I like this food”, “Tomorrow I have class at 9:30” etc. The only difference from day to day, generally, is that I understand what they are saying faster and I can respond more quickly. I have a few new words each day that stick. It's coming along slowly.

My baby sister is no longer sick and I'm feeling more comfortable sharing out of the communal bowl. Every day it's still rice and more rice and usually fish. The fish is not filleted like it is in the U.S. so I end up swallowing bones sometimes. The few bites of fish that I end up getting are pretty much my only source of protein so I can't just not eat it. I miss vegetables and I miss variety of food but at least we have a little variety of sauces which makes me feel a little healthier.

So, anyway... on to the fun “atypical” days. About half way into our two week homestay stretch I started to bond more with my family. Now that I understand more, it's easier to have conversations and more importantly, “interesting” conversations. One evening, my host dad asked me to go for a walk with him and he took me to his sister's house and we watched the sunset on the roof (not in a romantic way...). It was so beautiful. After sunset we went back home for dinner and then we picked up another volunteer afterwards and we went back to the roof. We sat up the mats and rested under the stars. From the roof we can see the lights of Dakar and the lights from the hotels at Lac Rose. The roof is one of my favorite places I have been so far.

The next night the other volunteers and I and our language teacher and our host fathers and my host mother all went to the roof. Our language teacher and the other Senegalese were having a very long Pulafuta conversation about cannibalism and shooting stars. Apparently the Pulafuta word for shooting star is cannibal. Our teacher was trying to translate for us and we had no idea what she was talking about. The whole situation was very amusing.

After that our next few days were rather uneventful until our first real day off this past Sunday. Saturday evening my Baba said, (in Pulafuta) “Hey, tomorrow, you have the day off. Let's go to Gendouf. There are cows and goats and I'll show you some fields. Oh... and the town is on a mountain.” When I asked him how far the village is, he said that it's 2kilometers away... I was dying to find out how there was a “mountain” 2K away. We had a whole fun miscommunication about how we were going to get there. He said we could walk or take a donkey cart. When he said to walk, I thought he meant “bike”. I told him what I thought was “I don't have a thing with which to bike.” when in reality I told him that, “I don't have a thing with which to walk” (basically telling him I don't have legs). There was a lot of laughing and confusion and then everything was cleared up and all better.

The next morning after breakfast, we picked up two of the other volunteers at my site and started walking to Gendouf. It was so beautiful and so green and we walked past half a dozen baobabs and my host dad was showing me all kinds of different seeds and things and identifying plants. I'm surprised he knows so much about plants since he's a taylor and doesn't have a field. It was really hot that morning so the walk felt longer than it was. We got to the tiny village. I don't thing Gendouf has more than 500 people. Only one or two of the people spoke Pulafuta but we were still somehow able to communicate. I'm also pretty certain that we were the only “Tubabs” (white people) that this village has ever seen. They brought out benches for us to sit under a tree. We sat there awkwardly with all the kids standing in a circle around us staring at us. It occurred to me that this is what my village would be like. I had been hoping to go to Kedougou but if I end up anywhere in a small green village like Gendouf, I'd be more than thrilled. I could live in that village for 2 years and we're not even 2 hours from Dakar. It really helped open my mind.

So, after sitting around, my Baba said, “let's go to the field”. We passed herds of cattle and goats on our way to the field. We got to the field and it was a lemon/lime orchard. The smell of citrus was incredible. A few older ladies were sorting and bagging hundreds of lemons. An old man was also suddenly dropped and the wind picked up. We decided to pack up and head back to thethere helping them. He brought over a mat for us to sit on in the shade of the lemon trees. He and who I presume to be his grandson brought over a kettle and a gas stove to make some tea. They were about to set it up but they seemed hesitant. When I looked at the sky I understood. The sky on one side was bright blue with pretty white fluffy clouds and looking the other way, the sky looked black. These dark clouds were fast approaching and it looked as though it were about to pour forever. The temperature in the village dropped significantly.

The village has a lean-to so we crowded underneath it. The storm was underwhelming but it was so beautiful. It didn't storm as we expected, but we had a wonderful sun-shower for about 20 minutes and then it cleared up. The wind was so refreshing especially after walking 2k in the ridiculous heat. As the rain calmed down the villagers came out and sat with us. They made tea and roasted peanuts on the gas burner. We sat around talking for quite a while. Eventually the women went to go start cooking lunch and I sat with the men and we talked and drank tea. My Baba told us that Lac Rose was only 4km from where we were and we asked if we could go. He said, “it's possible” and he asked our friend from the orchard if he could take us on his donkey cart. He agreed. The village invited us to have lunch there so we would eat lunch and then go to the Lac.

After over an hour we were getting really restless and the rain had completely stopped. While we were waiting for lunch the guy who was cooking the tea (which is a very lengthy and involved process) was chatting with us in English. We learned that he is a Chemistry student in Dakar. He invited us to see his field and we welcomed any idea that would get us out of the chairs that we had been sitting in for hours at this point. As we walked through his amazing orchard filled with fruit trees of every kind of amazing fruit you could think of in addition to countless types of vegetables and beans and Hibiscus. We passed by a grapefruit tree and he picked one and gave it to us to eat later. We walked to this one tree that was unlike any I had ever seen before in my life. It had a yellowish-redish fruit and this giant funny looking seed looked like it was growing out of the top of the fruit. I picked the giant funny looking seed off the top of the fruit and kept it (and I also picked up a few more of the funny seeds from the ground) and we would try the funny fruit later. I'm excited to have the seeds to plant later at my final site. When we finished the garden tour we sat down in the village again and shared the funny fruit which was so delicious and so juicy but had the weirdest texture (almost like a cross between a sponge and a plum). It made our mouths feel really dry despite being extremely juicy. Needless to say we didn't eat very much of it. I think in the future I can see myself eating this fruit more often now that I know what to expect.

We sat around a little more (which seems to be a lot of what we do here) and FINALLY lunch was ready. We had rice and beans. It was nice to have the protein mixed into the rice as opposed to just a whole fish on top of the pile of rice. It was delicious and we went through our very familiar charade of, “Eat! Eat!” …. “but I'm full! Really! I'm full!” We were stuffed and my host father finished eating and we thought we were ready to go and he said, “we have to go have lunch”. We were confused but we obediently followed him to another family's house where we had to politely stuff a few more bites of rice and beans into our mouths before we hit the wall of WAYYYY too much food.

We followed my host dad and the old farmer back to his lemon orchard where the donkey was grazing and the cart was laying around. We watched as the old man struggled to tie the stubborn ass to the cart. The donkey was kicking and fighting and it occurred to me that it might not be the most pleasant ride. He finally got the donkey tied to the cart and the donkey tried to kick the cart off once and ended up with a giant gash on the back of one of his legs. It certainly stopped the donkey from kicking. The cart was ready to go and we all piled on. It was a much smoother ride than I anticipated. It was also quite beautiful. We passed through so many small towns and we waved at and greeted every one we passed on the way along the sandy road. It was such a great way to see what Senegal is like.

As we got to the lake, we didn't understand why it was called the pink lake. It wasn't very pink at all. I was surprised how big it was. It was much bigger than I expected. All along the lake were giant piles of salt that people were collecting. It occurred to me how ridiculous we must have looked; a bunch of tubabs and two Senegaleses men riding on a donkey cart along the lake. We got to the end of the lake and we passed a whole lot of tourists. They were all in groups on tour busses and walking from their overpriced hotels. I wonder what they thought of us tubabs riding on a donkey cart. We walked through one hotel that was lined with so many vendors. In my entire month here, I never felt like tourist until I started walking through the hotel. The vendors all tried to sell their sob stories about how their families were broke and I tried to speak to them in Pulafuta but they all spoke Wolof and none of them knew of or understood Peace Corps or the fact that I'm living as a Senegalese with a Senegalese family. My Baba laughed at me watching me try to tell these “fake” fruit and jewelry vendors in Pulafuta that I don't want that mango or necklace. On the other side of the hotel there were “sand dunes” and “camel rides” on imported camels. The whole thing seemed so ridiculous.


We got sick of being tourists and left pretty quickly. It was only about 4k back to Sangal Kam so we decided to walk back. It took a few hours. I thought we were going to walk back on the main road but we walked back on these quiet little sand roads through these little villages. We rested at one village about half way where my Baba had family. We were all starting to get tired by this point having had walked for hours and spent hours in the sun in many fields and on donkey carts but we trundled on. We walked through several mud pits and peanut fields and baobab orchards. My Baba pointed out a monkey that ran across the road and then we approached this one tree where a dozen children were climbing the branches like monkeys and a few women were sitting there roasting cashews. They called us over and shared freshly picked and roasted cashews with us. I looked at the tree and at the shells from the nuts and I realized that that strange fruit I had eaten earlier was a cashew tree fruit! And the seeds that I had were cashew seeds! I can't wait to have some cashew trees growing. Completely and utterly exhausted we trudged on and we finally arrived back in Sangal Kam.

After showering and unwinding back at the house, my Baba was sitting in the yard looking upset. I asked him if he was tired. He said his mother was very sick. I didn't quite know to what extent because she had been sick since I arrived. I rarely ever saw her because she was in her room the entire time. My Neene and my Baba's sister were her primary care takers and they bathed her and fed her in her room. She had only come out of the house for the first time a few days ago to sit under the tree. The children were playing around her and bringing her serees (which is a type of really sour fruit that resembles unripe green grapes). That evening (after the walk), I could barely stay awake until dinner which is never until 9:00-9:30 here. I went to bed as soon as I finished dinner. I woke up several times throughout the night and it was completely crazy at the house all night. My host grandmother was throwing up all night, people were in and out refilling buckets of water from the tap, and early in the morning they called a taxi to take her to the hospital in Dakar which is about an hour or so from Sangal Kam. All her sisters came from far away (near Mauritania) and all her children came from other parts of Sangal Kam and Dale Fore to pray for her and help take care of the house while she was sick. There were so many people visiting from out of town.

I had language class as usual and our first language test in the morning and in the afternoon I spent time talking with the family that was visiting. After dinner my Baba and I picked up the other volunteers and we went to the roof for a while and watched the stars. When we got back to the house all the mats and two mattresses on top of them were set up in the middle of the yard. It was like big sleepover. My Baba told me that Pati was coming back from the hospital around midnight and we were all anxiously awaiting her return. I went to bed and I woke up several times throughout the night with commotion and chaos again taking care of this woman. The following afternoon they had a taxi take her back to the hospital. At around 4:15, everyone started sobbing hysterically and I knew this meant that she has died. I was so upset and so confused and had no way of knowing for sure what was going on or what was happening but I knew she had passed away. I went to my language teacher and explained the situation and we all (the volunteers and my language teacher and I) went to the funeral at my house that night. The women all pray from home while the men go to the mosque. They Imam announced her death over the loud speaker and it seemed like the entire town of Sangal Kam showed up for the funeral. The women were sitting on mats around the courtyard of the house and the men were at the mosque except for Jubal and Cameron who were with us. Everyone was waiting for the body to come back from Dakar. Houssey (our language teacher) explained that normally if a woman dies, the women will wash the body at the house and if a man dies the men will wash the body. They decided for some reason not to bring the body to the house this time for some reason that I couldn't understand and I began for the first time to feel the deep inequality between men and women. The women are then not allowed the same closure that the men are when it comes to death. I am having a hard time processing this. Women are outright not allowed in cemeteries. The women were still expected to provide dinner for their husbands despite the fact that everyone was grieving and could barely function.

I had to leave for Thies early the next morning to meet up with all the other volunteers and I could barely stay awake. I waited until the entire town of Sangal Kam (except for family) had left and I fell asleep on the mats outside. Before my host grandmother died I had told everyone in my family that I would be leaving early in the morning for Thies and that we would have breakfast there and I was very clear that I did not want breakfast before leaving. When I woke up in the morning, I finished packing and was ready to leave for the bus and my family literally blocked the door because I had not yet eaten. They insisted that I could not leave because I had not eaten. I reminded her patiently that I would be eating in Thies but that didn't mean anything to her... “Just eat a little”. I was unable to leave until I had eaten. I am having so much trouble processing the fact that my host mom's mother-in-law had just died and she's worried about me eating before I leave for a place where I am going to be eating AGAIN when she should be thinking about her family and herself and figuring out how to cope. It's really frustrating and really hard for me to understand and there is so little I can do to help because of my limited knowledge of language and hugging is not a part of Senegalese culture.

We finally arrived at the training center in Thies and I was able to have some time away from my family to write about all of this and to try to process the last few days but as with most of our days, our schedules are jam packed with language and technical training and today was supposed to be the most exciting day of our pre-service training because we found out where we will be placed for our final placements. I've been feeling a bit subdued trying to process everything that had just happened with my host family but it was still very exciting. There is a large outline of Senegal painted on the basketball court at the compound. They blindfolded all of us and put us on the map where we will be going. I am going to Kedougou which I have only heard good things about. It is supposed to be amazing. It is the region “with mountains and forests and waterfalls and happy children” as one current volunteer told me. I'm pretty excited about it. We will all be going to our sites for a week in just a few days.
Well, anyway... I'll be sure to keep you updated when I have some more crazy stories.

Week 2 The first Homestay

Blog 2
I am so so happy here all the time. I am also really sweaty here. I haven't stopped sweating since we landed in Dakar. Showers at the center have become my best friend and I miss them tremendously. Last week we spent our first week at our first homestays. So far it has been great and exciting and difficult. We have such a limited language base but it's improving every day and very quickly. I have been purposely trying to forget my Wolof because I'm already mixing it up too much with my limited Hindi and Tibetan and French. My homestay is an interesting can of worms. Each volunteer lives with a different family that speaks their respective languages and everyone's living conditions are so different. My household is more of a compound with a few homes and a courtyard and my host family and the extended family all live there. There are a ton of kids in my family but it is hard for me to know which kids belong to MY Neenee (Mother) specifically. They named me Adama, after Adam from the Garden of Eden but half the time they call me Adalai. (I find it amusing that I have two Hebrew names that are so similar in nature... Ilana = Tree and Adama = Earth). The kids are raised communally and the women of the households share the responsibility of bathing and caring for them. One of the things I love about Senegalese communities is this sense of shared... umm.... everything.... even food. For our meals, they are pretty much all rice based dishes with sauces and maybe fish and usually some vegetables. We all sit on the floor around a giant metal bowl and we all just dig in. Most of the women in my family use their hands but my family gives me a spoon to use. I'm very glad of this for several reasons... I'm sure you can use your imagination to understand why (hint... we don't have toilet paper). Two of my baby siblings are sick with fevers but luckily, I'm strong and healthy and I can supplement my diet with multivitamins (and medicine if necessary). Unfortunately, my baby siblings cannot so I'm very worried about them.

I have not had problems living with the culture and family nor have I had (too many) issues with homesickness... yet.... but I had a bit of a breakdown about language. I have to keep reminding myself that no one speaks a new language after only one week but it's hard to take it to heart when your Neenee is yelling at you about something and you have no idea what she's saying and there is no french or english to translate. It's really difficult. I spoke to my language teacher (our LCF whose name is Hussey) and she is going to have some one on one sessions with me. Languages have always been easy for me and I'm emotionally having a hard time swallowing how difficult this language has been. I think if there weren't pressure to master it in 2 months, I think it would be different. But I'm determined and I'm going to do what it takes!

A few days into our homestay the 3 other volunteers in my village and I had a really amazing experience. There was a street that was blocked off and there was music and all kinds of craziness. Hussey asked us in the evening after our language class if we wanted to go. Of course we had to go! Who would turn down music and a fun new experience!!??? The wide and sandy street where the event was taking place was blocked off on either side with a large curtain. It was 200 CFAs to get in (about 50cents). We paid and went in and sat in the plastic chairs that lined the street. There were mats on the ground too on which people would sit. There was a group of around 7 men standing at the tom-tom drums banging away. There were two guys with mics singing as well. It was so fantastic. After about 10 minutes or so of watching this music, there was a very tall man dressed in a crazy traditional costume with feathers and loin cloth and bright crazy colors and I have no idea how else to describe it. His entire face was covered in black and red facepaint, he had sharp pointy costume teeth and had his tongue sticking out with a leaf on it. He walked very slowly and intimidatingly with scary knives in each hand. As he walked by, he would turn his head slowly back and forth staring people down then leave. Soon I realized that there were four men in similar costumes to his and they would walk back and forth patrolling the audience. As time went on, the audience grew and it was almost entirely comprised of young kids most without parents there. (Senegalese raise free range children). The men in scary costumes gradually increased the frequency of their visits and would stay in the "arena" for longer and longer periods of time. They also began dancing in spurts interchanging dance and scaring and hissing at the kids and getting them (the kids) all riled up. There were two mounds of sand in the middle and a bucket of water. Someone splashed a little water out of the bucket near the mounds and the guys in costumes took their knives and stuck them into the mounds. Soon they were all dancing and it was so beautiful and amazing and the guys would go around to the different groups of kids and dance and get them to shout and clap and cheer. There was also a man on stilts dressed in the shiniest brightest clothes you could imagine and was walking and dancing on stilts over and through the crowd. It was truly amazing. I had 3 Senegalese children literally sitting on my lap and another little girl was playing with my hair. The girl who was playing with my hair was chewing on a stick (which is a very common thing here.... they call them chew sticks) and one of the guys came up to her, hissed and glared at her, grabbed the stick out of her mouth and put it in the sand mounds. It was really very funny. A little bit later, another one of the guys in costume was parading a little boy around the arena. He looked about 8 or 9 years old. The “actor” was making him shake everyone's hand an apologize to everyone individually. They took him over to where the bucket of water is and pretended to beat him and then made him dance in front of everyone. Afterwards they made him wash his head in the bucket of water. Then they let him go. I asked Hussey what was going on and she said that this is what they do when children don't pay the 200CFA to get in. It was so fun and such a great event for the kids of the village. Everyone was laughing and having a great time and then everything just stopped very suddenly. It was prayer time. After about 5 minutes, they resumed their dancing and singing and drumming and this time there were 4 more really tall Senegalese men dressed as women. They were dancing too and it was so fun and so great. It ended finally around 8:45.
Until next time...

Week 1 The Compound.

We all arrived in Washington DC on August 29th. Many of us had been communicating through facebook and making plans to share rides from the airport to the hotel. The situation became more complicated because the hurricane shut down several of the airports and so everything seemed quite chaotic. I was pretty lucky that my flight had not been canceled from Laguardia so I made it in on time. When I landed I got a phone call from Missy saying that a group of them had arrived at the airport and were at baggage claim. I met up with Missy, Jubal, and Adrian. When we got to the hotel there were many people already there. Everyone was introducing themselves to everyone else. It was a Peace Corps frenzy.

We went through “staging” in D.C., as it is called, which basically included speeches by people who work at the Peace Corps D.C. Headquarters, activities where we would discuss our fears and aspirations about going, and most importantly a lot of Stagier bonding. Before we even left D.C. we knew it would be a good group. We only stayed one night in D.C. But it felt like a week! In the morning we all checked out of our rooms and split into our groups and drove in two buses to the health clinic where we all got our yellow fever shots.... there was a lot of walking around D.C., more bonding and then our uneventful journey to the airport where all 55 checked in, ate our last U.S. Meal for 2 years, and then boarded the South African Airlines airplane.

The plane was scheduled to land at 5:45AM. We got off our flight in the capital of Senegal in Dakar. As soon as I got to customs, I already had to deal with what we now discuss as, “unwanted attention”. The customs official gave me some compliments that were both flattering and creepy at the same time. When I got through customs, I was immediately approached by a porter who wanted money from me to take my luggage to wherever we were going. I told him no and was then greeted warmly by a tall blond man named Chris Hedrick. He is the Peace Corps Senegal program director. At 6AM we all loaded our stuff into a large truck and then ourselves into two peace corps buses and drove for about an hour and a half to the training center compound.

So far, I can tell you am am LOVING this place. I was welcomed by the mosquitos and the Peace Corps staff members. We arrived here on the Muslim holiday called Korite... (from what I understand is the end of Ramadan) so all the staff members except for the Peace Corps Staging coordinator (Mike) were on vacation. There were other 3rd year volunteers here though to help Mike out with everything that needed to be done.

Over the last few days we have been getting to know each other and we have had many survival Wolof lessons and we have begun our cultural and technical training. All the Peace Corps trainees have had interviews with the staff members to determine where we will ultimately be placed and we will find out our “permanent site” languages on Monday. While Wolof and French are the national languages, most of us will be placed in rural areas where we will learn smaller local dialects (but of course we are currently taking survival Wolof lessons because most of the country still knows Wolof). My Wolof is already getting pretty good but I keep mixing it up with Tibetan... strangely enough. The other volunteers and I like to practice our Wolof with each other and with the Senegalese staff members. One of my favorite expressions is "Amulsolo" which means, "ne pas de probleme". It turns out we won't be getting training in French at all but the little that I know will probably come in handy.

On Tuesday, once we know which language we will be learning ultimately, we will be going to our training villages. We will each have our own host family who speaks our language and there will be 4-8 volunteers in each training village. We will be living with these families for 2 months and 90% of our training is going to be mastering the language. The other 10% is going to be agriculture and cultural training. We are all so excited for Monday to find out what languages we will be learning which will also give us a general idea of which region we will be in.

Tomorrow we are going to leave the compound for the first time. It is not a very big compound so our entertainment is somewhat limited but we've been having fun just hanging out, training and learning, talking with the Senegalese staff, having jam sessions, playing frisbee or volleyball, observing the stars and wildlife etc. It has been a blast. Speaking of, the wildlife here, even just in the compound is so fantastic. We have doves that fly around everywhere and nest in the roof of the gazebo which we call the disco hut (which amusingly enough actually has a disco ball). At night we like to hang out in the gazebo and there are some bats that come to visit us and hang from the rafters. Giant flocks of bats fly over us every single evening and it's so amazing to watch. Of course, I also enjoy looking at the lizards and giant caterpillars that infest this place. http://a6.idata.over-blog.com/500x375/3/04/96/63/s-n-gal-avril-mai-2009-868.jpg This guy is my favorite kind. Tomorrow the staff and the 3rd year volunteers will FINALLY be taking us all on a tour of Thies so we will be let out of our very cushy prison.