Adventures in my village!

Once again, I'm not entirely sure where to begin. My life over the last 2 weeks has been nothing but adventure after adventure. I moved to my village on November 11th and after that all the days blur together. I spent the first day or two going around my village and meeting everyone. The village has no running water or electricity so every night I sit outside with my family and practice my Pular and watch the stars. With literally no light pollution anywhere near by, it's incredible. I've seen shooting stars every single night I've been there. I spent a little bit of time fixing up and organizing my hut and backyard. My backyard has a cashew tree and a mango tree but unfortunately fruit season ended so I won't be seeing any fruit (or precipitation for that matter) for the next several months. Every evening I would help my Neene carry water to her “jaxatu” (bitter tomato) garden. During the day I spent most of my time those first few days playing with the kids (and toads and praying mantids), walking around, meeting people, pounding rice or corn, training for my marathon, and dumping toads out of my shoes.
I knew that the Tuesday weekly market was coming up and I imagined that I was going to be biking there. It is in a village called Chokoy which is about 7K from my tiny village called Matakosi (which has a population of about 200 people)... and thus the adventures really begin. My front bike tire had deflated some how during transport. I looked for a hole and I didn't see one. I went to get my bike pump to fill the tire only to find that it had fallen out in the car when I was moved in. The rest of Monday morning was a field day of teenage boys trying to use their Senegalese bike pumps on american bike tubes... which doesn't work, and despite my explaining WHY it doesn't work (half successfully in Pular) they continued to try it. Eventually they gave up and I followed them to another house and a guy there had a bike pump which worked!! I filled the tire and I thought it was good to go. Faster than I could have even imagined it was already time for the “lumo” as the weekly market is called. Neene and I ended up walking there so I didn't use my bike in the end but it had needed to be fixed anyway so that I could ride it back to Kedougou for Thanksgiving. I trailed behind Neene who is this wonderful, shriveled old lady with so much life and zest and love and walks at a pace so fast that I could barely keep up... all the while she was carrying a bucket on her head with such precision that she didn't hold on to the bucket the entire hour long walk. When we arrived, I found out also that she is sick too and still doing all these crazy things! At the market I was so overwhelmed meeting dozens of people and feeling exhausted. Neene wouldn't let me wander around on my own. She seemed worried about me buying things for elevated prices because I'm American. We stayed at the market until the temperature cooled off and then we went back home. This time we went back in a larger group because there were other Matakosi residents there who had left earlier in the morning to set up stands to sell corn. It was really nice because it meant that I didn't have to speed-walk behind Neene for another hour! As we approached Matakosi, I noticed that the new teacher had finally arrived! I thought it was important to meet him. I spent some time talking to him and practicing language and I told him about some of the projects that I was hoping to do with the kids.
The following morning I had received a text message that another volunteer was coming to stay for a night. I had no cell phone reception so I couldn't respond to her nor did I have any idea why she was coming or if her plans had changed since I hadn't responded to her when she had sent the text initially the day before. I informed my family so they knew and we'd see if she showed up or not. For now, I had other morning plans to keep me busy. Some of the people in my family said that they were going to the field. When I asked what kind of field, they said “tupe”. I looked it up in my dictionary but it wasn't there so it was to be a surprise. I brought my bucket because all the kids were bringing buckets and the men had machetes and hand hoes and we set off for the forest. I had no idea what I was in for. We followed the trail for about 20 minutes or so until we arrived at the river. There was no field there so I was very confused. I thought maybe we were getting water to bring to the field. Instead, the men with their machetes decided that this was the spot to clear for a field. They started chopping down trees and clearing brush. My heart sunk because I hate clearing forest. While most of the men cleared brush, two other men started digging two very large and wide pits in the ground. With my limited language skills I asked what they will be planting there and they said about 8 or 9 mango trees. They also said that they had planted mango trees last year in a different spot near a different river. I couldn't comprehend more details than this. As much as I didn't want to, this is their life and hence also my life, so I decided I'd help clear brush by dragging the cut branches out of the area and then I helped dig the pits. They ended up not clearing a very large area and it turns out that, at least for now, the pits were the primary focus. When the pits were done, the children and I carried our buckets about 100meters down to the river bank to fill them with water to fill the pits. We went back and forth until we were all exhausted. I had figured that they were filling the pits so that the water could slowly penetrate into the ground. Finally we finished filling the pits and I went for a swim with some of the teenagers in the river. We all just jumped in wearing our clothes. It was so refreshing, especially after working so hard. We got out of the river and I thought it was time to go home and once again, I was wrong. Everyone was talking really fast and they said that I need a stick because the cows are coming. I asked what we were doing with the sticks and I thought they said that the cows are going to drink at the river so I thought this meant that we were going to chase them away from the pits that we had just worked so hard to fill with water. About 15 uncomfortable minutes later everyone got so crazy and the guys started banging a metal bowl loudly and calling the cows to come. I was a little frightened as the cows came charging towards these pits and instead of guiding the cows away from the pits, we were guiding them towards the pit to drink and graze in that area. It was so crazy.
As the cows were all happily grazing, the women were guiding the cows with their sticks, the men were working on catching the bulls and tying them up. One at a time, they would take the bull, they would tie up all four of his legs and force him on his back. Two men held the cows legs and a third was holding the bull's head while a fourth had the most dangerous job of all. He would put a stick on one side of the bull's testicles and use another stick to whack the other side of the testicles. I tried to figure out the purpose of this seemingly torturous venture but my language is not good enough to understand the answer. I presume it is their very dangerous method of castration. It seems that making a tourniquet as they do the U.S. would be not only less dangerous, but it would be faster and less painful for the bull.
That evening, my friend Jackie did arrive! It was so refreshing to have some English time and to compare our experiences. It turns out that she was heading to Chokoy to meet two other volunteers to continue on to a waterfall. I hadn't known about this adventure and I don't have camping equipment (yet) so I decided I'd take Jackie to Chokoy and return home. Since my bike was fixed (at least so I thought), I thought it would all be a non-issue and all would go well. As we were starting out to Chokoy in the morning, I realized that all the air leaked out of the tire. I was only going 7K to Chokoy where I could get a new tube for my tire. I was struggling even to pedal and I didn't realize how much of that was due to the flat tire as opposed to just me being out of shape. I was frustrated with myself thinking it was just me especially since I'm running all the time but I kept going. As we approached the just over half way point I see this black thing flying out from the wheel and so I immediately stopped my bike and the inner tube from the tire wrapped itself around the bike. It's actually amazing that I didn't flip over my handlebars. I untangled the tube from the bike and took the tire off and left my bike on the side of the bike path. While Jackie rode on a head, I walked behind and she would pause once in a while so I could catch up while carrying the wheel with me. Finally we made it to Chokoy where I was able to buy a new tube for my tire and they also filled it up for me and it was good to go!! Jackie and I enjoyed a nice snack of fresh bread and sprite and water until Rob and Allan arrived. After Jackie took off with Rob and Allan on their adventure to the waterfall, I walked back to my bike, put it back together and I was good to go!
That afternoon and for the next day or two I spent a lot of time double digging a rather large 3X3meter garden bed in my back yard. My family and other villagers would come in to see what I was working on and I told them that I was making a vegetable garden. I learned that one in my village seems to have ever heard of eggplant!! It was such hard work because the ground was so compacted and there are so many trees in my backyard that it was littered with roots. I added ash and luceana leaves to my double dug bed to add some nitrogen and potassium. I think my family thought I was crazy for working so hard on my garden and for adding what seems to them random crap... I don't know how to say, “It adds nitrogen and potassium to the soil” in Pular so I just said, “it's good for the earth”. I found some large bowls that had been littered throughout the fields with no bottoms. I filled them with dirt and I planted seeds in there for my plant nursery. I'm not sure if any of the seeds will germinate since they are all 2-4 years old seeds that I brought from the U.S. Even if I get a few plants I'll be thrilled!
Sometimes the things that are mysteries to the people here astound me. The evening that I finished double digging my garden, I sat with my host dad who I can still barely understand and we were talking about how the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. He then said to me, “I know that the sun does this but I don't understand why.” So I'm trying to use my hands and broken Pular to try to demonstrate but my hands don't spin 360 degrees and all I can say is, “the world spins... like this”. I think he has no idea what I was talking about and to make things even more confusing, the word for “spin” is the same as the word for “swing”, but it was fun and the ridiculousness of the situation amused me to no end.
Around 4:00 that day as the temperature started to cool off, the women, children, and I put all our dirty clothes into buckets with our laundry soap, a towel and a clean change of clothes and we walked about 10 minutes to the river to do laundry! The novelty of how much I hated the inconvenience of bringing my clothes to the laundromat in the U.S. amused me. Inconvenience of doing laundry has a whole new meaning when you have to carry all your clothes on your head in a bucket and walk for 10 minutes to hand wash clothes in a river... That being said, what is more fun than going with a bunch of women and children to the river to wash clothes and play in the water and smack wet, soapy clothes against rocks to splash the nearest unsuspecting naked, bathing child? It was so much fun and everyone was laughing and having a great time and then we all bathed in the water before heading back. As fun as it was and as relatively clean as our clothes get, it made me contemplate how my standards of “clean” have changed so drastically. If I haven't worn an outfit 3 times, it's still clean so clean river clothes are the equivalent of spotless.
The following morning I went with some of the women in my family to harvest peanuts. We walked about 20 minutes to the field. It turns out to harvest peanuts you just manually pull up all the plants by hand. Peanuts are strange looking plants. It's hard work but it was actually a lot of fun! We all worked so hard. When I got back, I checked on my plant nursery and some baobab seeds that I had planted a few days earlier germinated!! I'm going to make a baobab bonsai tree for fun. My Neene came out to see my yard and she asked me if I wanted to go to a wedding the next day. Of course I did! I was all ready to go the following morning only to find out that Neene had left at 4 in the morning to go to a funeral of a man who had drowned in a somewhat far away village. We ended up going to the wedding the next day.
After a disgusting and unfilling breakfast of liquid corn, we walked about 40 minutes to a nearby village. I brought my nice Tabaski clothes with me so that I could change into them later. All the men were sitting around drinking tea and people were walking in from far and wide. The women were all in the cooking area with giant pots and bowls of water everywhere. All the women started cooking and I helped to chop onions. I was snacking on onions the entire time and it seemed like the most delicious thing I had ever eaten because I felt so nutrient deprived! Snacking on those onions was the most satisfied I had felt since moving to my village. After everything was finally cooking up, I was walking around village and suddenly there was a crowd of 30some kids surrounding me. I started talking to them and asking them their names and they started following me around. Some of them were eating oranges and I had them all give me their seeds. Throughout the next few hours kids would periodically bring me orange seeds and I left with 30 or 40 orange seeds to plant. Since I couldn't have an in-depth conversation with the kids, and they were awkwardly following me around, I started an impromptu project. I found a large plastic bag (which is never hard to find because people litter throughout their fields... it's gross) and I started going around collecting batteries to throw into the douche. I explained that batteries are poison and shouldn't be in the field because it's bad for health and bad for the field and soon all the kids were running around collecting batteries for me! I ended up throwing about 50 batteries in the douche that day. That was my first successful project and it was actually fun.
Soon enough it was time to change into our festive clothes and two men were playing small home made string instruments and a third was using brass finger things to use a gourd bowl as a drum. All the women paraded behind them through the village and everyone was dancing and having a blast. Some women were throwing scarves down in front of the women who they felt looked particularly beautiful... I guess in a strange way it was kind of like the throwing the bouquet tradition. We paraded and danced until we got to the hut of the couple. The couple kneeled in front of the door of their hut, the woman in a white veil, and the Imam stood in front of them and said some blessings and the couple entered the room. We had to leave right after that because it was dark already and we had a 40 minute walk back through the woods.
I was supposed to go to a rice field with my counterpart the following morning and then leave for my 20some mile bike ride back to Kedougou. My counterpart never came to get me in the morning so at about 10:00 I decided I would just leave. Unfortunately, my family wouldn't let me leave without eating so I didn't end up leaving until 11:30 so I would end up biking in the heat of the day. I biked the first 5k or so to the main road and had gone a little ways further to realize - surprise surprise - my tire was flat again! I got through the first hour and a half with no problems... but then the heat picked up, my backpack was starting to feel heavy, my dehydration started to kick in (despite drinking water), the flat tire got worse, there was no shade, and the hills started to get really bad. After that, I had to keep stopping every 10-15 minutes and push the bike up the hills. It was AWFUL!!!
I kept going; I was determined to make it. At about 2:15 or so I stopped at a nearby village to refill my water bottle at the forage and I chatted with the villagers for a little bit. They invited me to eat, but I knew that eating would definitely prevent me from finishing the massively awful bike ride. They told me I was about 15K from Kedougou. I continued on my way and passed a 4ft long metalic dark green monitor lizard and that itself made my journey all worth it and just another few minutes later I passed another volunteer who was waiting for a vehicle to Kedougou with the women from his village. He was taking them to the ciy to sell the goods that they make. It was refreshing to see someone I knew and he said that I was only 12k from the regional house. I was hoping that would give me a second wind to make it the last hour but alas.... it just wasn't happening. I made it another few kilometers and I started walking my bike. I figured that if I needed to, I could walk the rest of the way but with the flat tire situation I couldn't ride anymore. A giant yellow truck passed by and asked me if I needed a ride. At this point I was only 7-10k away from Kedougou but I took them up on their offer. They loaded my bike into the back and they took me the rest of the way where I got to see all the other volunteers and share stories and rehydrate. Now we are working on prepping our piturducken and the “pig” portion just arrived.

So that's my update. For now things are so new and so exciting. I imagine I will continue to have adventures and stories to tell... “Si Allah Jaabi” (if God agrees).

I hope all is well. I love receiving e-mails and letters so feel free to write!

E-mail: Kriegerilana@gmail.com
Mailing Address: Alexandra Ilana Krieger
B.P. 37
Kedougou, Senegal
West Africa

swearing-in!

Blog 5
So it's been a little while since I've written a blog. The last couple weeks have been crazy and I'm so ready to be done with training. Two months is a really long time to be living out of a suitcase. We've had to pack up and move our things more times than I care to count. Time is moving so fast and so slow at the same time and I'm using my mefloquine to try to keep track of the number of weeks we've been here... it's hard to tell some times.
Anyway, about two weeks ago we had our second language test. I was feeling really good about my language and I knew I had improved and when I learned that I tested at intermediate low for a second time it really brought me down. It upset me a lot and it was at the same time that we had our counterparts from our final villages visiting. It was so stressful and we had to move around from place to place and room to room and speak with our counterparts in our languages about villages that we hardly know anything about yet. I had a bit of a breakdown and I was feeling homesick and it all just snowballed into this crazy awfulness. The two days that the counterparts were here felt like an entire week. The same day that the counterparts left we all had a very rushed and very busy day trip to Dakar. We had a very rushed 30 minute tour of the area and then met many important people who spoke about mostly uninteresting things. It would have been fun if we had had some free time, but alas... The next day we had our first real weekend. We all ventured out to the beach and had a blast swimming in the ocean for a day and just bonding with each other and all the while dreading our return to our homestays for our last week.
Our last week of homestay was bitter sweet. I feel like I'm finally a part of my family and I am going to miss them a lot. They have started calling me Neene Adama, which means mother Adama... not in a Catholic Monastery kind of way though. In this polygamous society the children call the other wives Neene insert name here. The children have really started to see me as a mother figure and I love it. It wasn't the most eventful week because I spent so much time studying and practicing Pulafuta so that I could pass my test at intermediate mid but I did have a few adventures. One day I cooked pasta and tomato sauce for my family and they LOOVVEDDD it! While this is a dish that would take 20 minutes in the U.S., it took me 2 hours here! The pasta itself took half an hour because we cook “camp-out” style over hot coals and I was cooking a quantity that would feed 15 people. Simple meals are not simple here. Even tea is a long 2-3 hour long process. They cook the tea over coals with so much sugar it's disgusting. They only have two shot glass size cups that everyone shares and they have to make this foam by pouring the tea back and forth from glass to glass and it's rude to leave early and not drink it. It's awful when I feel like I'm in a rush to get somewhere and I'm being held back to drink the most sugary tea any American has ever had. I had another adventure with another volunteer on a different day. We had the afternoon off and we ventured a kilometer down the road to the “Tortoise Village”. It's a rehabilitation/breeding/tourist site for sulcata Tortoises. I love sulcatas and it was so nice to see them!!! They had different enclosures for different ages. I learned a really fun fact about Baobabs trees. There are two types of Baobab trees.... there's the Baobab Digitalis which has branches that look like fingers and there's the second type which is called the Baobab Sulcata. The Baobab Sulcata as it gets older has a hollowed out trunk like a sulcata tortoise shell. Senegalse burry important people in the hollows of the baobab trees. It's amazing to me!
Well anyway, this week is it! We're all back at the training center and we had our final language and tech exams yesterday. We're done with the hard part and next week we move to our villages!!! OFFICIALLY!! On Friday we have our swearing-in ceremony in Dakar where we are sworn in as official volunteers. It's going to be televised nationally. We all had special clothes made for the ceremony and my host dad made mine for me. There is SO MUCH EMBROIDERY that it's so crazy and so tacky and so perfectly Senegalese!
November 11th I will be moving to my village where I will have no electricity or running water. I will be 45kilometers from Kedegou City where the post office is. Letters are welcomed and expected. I will update my address on Facebook when I can this week. For the first month and a half after I move to my village I will be out of commission because we are not allowed to leave our villages for 5 weeks. I miss all of you.

Look out for my mailing address!!

Ilana