corn over my head!

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March 20, 2012

What am I doing here?

Why am I here? Lately I've been seriously questioning my Peace Corps experience and I'm working on re-evaluating my goals and action plans. I'm back down to my Christmas weight (woo hoo!) and my goal of being able to stay in village for 3 or 4 week stretches instead of 2 week stretches has been shattered by my mental and emotional inability to handle being there for that long. I love my village but two weeks of eating, sleeping, breathing, playing, working, in Pular while also immersed in a very different and very taxing culture feels like an eternity!!

I excitedly went back to site after a wonderful and productive cleaning day at the regional house with all the volunteers. It was so nice to rearrange the regional house and clean up odds and ends as we prepare for a batch of 9 new volunteers who will be moving down here in May. The house is so beautiful and organized and we have 4 new beds! I was ready to get back to site and I wanted to bike but as it turns out, I was getting another staph infection on my left butt cheek... of all places (just a skin infection... not as bad as it sounds and the cure is simply to keep it clean and take a prescription). It's easy to cure but it certainly hurt to sit for a few days and my family and I had some good laughs about it.

When I arrived at site, I went to check on the kittens and I was warmly welcomed and they both tried to jump right onto my lap when I noticed a red thing hanging out of Kaani's butt!! I was horrified and I had no idea what to do! I live hours and hours away from the nearest vet and Senegalese are very unsympathetic towards the plights of animals (unless it's their cows because those are their bank accounts). I called up the Peace Corps doctor to see if she had any advice. Now, of all the things on my list of things I thought I would never ever do in my life, this was probably very close to the top. She suggested that I put on medical gloves and push her intestines back in and give her cirpo meds... so I did. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I wrapped this cat up in a towel and started wandering around village hoping to find a sympathetic soul who could help me figure out how to humanely deal with this cat who's intestines were repeatedly falling out. I received several general (and very unhelpful) reactions. 1st) They were laughing at me because I was upset. 2nd) They would ask me why I was carrying around a sick cat. 3rd) They repeatedly would tell me that she would get better (of her own accord, magically I guess.). 4th) They said, “she's going to die” just as a statement with no follow up of any sort. 5th) “Why don't you keep her in your room until she dies?” Or 6th) “Why don't you just leave her in the woods?”. I was hoping I might find someone who might help me more humanely euthanize her or at least someone who might take her into the woods on my behalf so I wouldn't have to be more emotionally distressed than I already was and people don't understand that by my abandoning her in the woods, it is essentially killing her in the least humane way. There was not a single helpful person. Crying, guilt ridden, and carrying this sick cat, I brought her to the woods where I left her. I did not know that I had it in me to be so inhumane, but I could not bring myself to euthanize her.

Throughout the next two days, I focused my energy on spoiling my other kitten to try to ease the guilt and it was finally starting to subside. I had spoken to my mom about Passover and she had given me an assignment to send a picture about what “freedom” is. I had a great and surprisingly productive day. I worked with the women in their gardens when I had finished watering my own. In the morning, one woman asked me if I could get a chain link fence for them because the cows keep coming in. That was an exciting moment! There is no way that I will consider unsustainably raising funds for an expensive fence that would last maybe 4 or 5 years (AT MOST) but it gave me the perfect outlet to explain live fencing... which is permanent and the only expenses would be tree sacks. A fellow Kedougou volunteer in my group has been working with a trainer from an NGO called “Trees for the Future” and they were easily able to add my village to their list of places to do trainings. We'll see if it actually works out.

Walking back through the woods that evening I was on an emotional high. I had a garden going and I was finding potentially motivated work partners. My village's needs and desires were starting to display themselves and the mile walk through the woods was becoming an important part of my daily routine. That evening was when I realized my “freedom”, the forest. It was something I had known in the U.S. and it is something that I knew when I arrived in Senegal to the extent that when we had our placement interviews, I was able to convey to Peace Corps in my first week in country that the woods are an important form of therapy for me. Camera by my side, I was taking pictures of the woods to send to my mom and enjoying my alone time in wonder at the incredibleness of the woods and life.

I was barely out of the woods and still a little ways from the village when I thought I may have heard some yelling and shouting far far off in the distance. The birds were particularly loud too so I dismissed it as just the birds being noisy and kept daydreaming about forests and got lost in my thoughts again. I took a few steps further and realized that the yelling and shouting was not only real but was getting louder and I jolted out of my daydream and looked up and thought, “OH SHIT!”. There was a giant fire that I could see above the trees while still in the woods! Fires here are a very common thing because everyone burns their fields, but this fire was too big to be the standard field burning and the shouting and yelling made it unmistakably different. I rushed over as quickly as possible and initially it looked as though the fence were burning down and I was worried that they were trying to stop it from spreading. As I got closer and closer, I realized that it was a neighbor's house!! The entire house and backyard were completely burnt to a crisp. The entire village was frantic and the women were working hard to pull water from the nearby well, filling their buckets to pour onto the fire to put it out as quickly as possibly. The women would hand the buckets off to the men would would pour the water onto the burning ground and the women would rush back to refill their buckets. I happened to have my watering can with me because I had come right from my garden and I did what I could to contribute to putting out the fire.



Standing by the well, waiting for the well bucket, I noticed one young woman who looked about 20 years old. She was working so hard to pull water and helping all the women fill buckets. Her shirt happened to say, “your life is in MY hands”... in English. People here have all kinds of crazy shirts and they never know what their shirts actually say or actually mean. They buy shirts because they think they look “cool”. The symbolism of this young woman working to hard to put out this fire and the connection with her shirt was completely lost on her. She was just helping without even a clue that the writing on her shirt could relate to the specific actions of the day. Her shirt gave so much life to that statement in a way that I had never appreciated before. I tried to get a photo of her shirt but I couldn't.



It was a sad day in Matakosi. No one was hurt but the family lost everything. I have never lived so close to subsistence and people don't have a lot to begin with, but what little they had, they lost. Watching the entire village work together to put out this fire was in itself an incredible experience. I have never seen a community like this before. This group effort to help the life of a fellow friend, family, and neighbor is something that I realize is lacking in most communities in the U.S. and it's something I would love to find when I return to that side of the ocean. Just to add some comic relief to my already crazy week, my host brother brought this sick cow to my front yard the following morning and tied it to a pole outside of my house. By 11:30 that morning, the cow died.




By the following morning the entire village had already begun the process of rebuilding the hut. The men left early in the morning to cut down grasses in the woods for the roof and other men started bringing in buckets of dirt to start rebuilding the walls. The men have most of the earlier tasks such as bringing the grass, bamboo, and dirt and building the walls and roof while the women spend the afternoons cooking lunch and making tea for themselves and for the men. When the structure of the house is complete, the women mix clay with manure and water and cement the floors with it. Within 5 days of the house burning down, the structure of the building was already complete – walls and roof – done! It was a truly inspiring process.



Anyway, this is why 10 days in village feels like an eternity especially since on top of all this, I am constantly confronting constant harassment and pestering and the heart breaking truth of women being second class citizens. Being particularly sensitive after those three major events, I was more in tuned with and more strongly affected by the comments made and lack of empathy shown by Senegalese. Among the many events that acutely tugged at me this week, A) I woman came up to me and asked me why I wasn't sleeping with my host brother because his wives are away for a few months B) My middle aged host brother told me he wanted to marry and “lie in his room with” a 13/14 year old girl who was sitting right across from us. And C) I watched little kids run around with sticks beating bats to death which they then fry and rub the ash in their hair.

What is my life?????!!!!!!!

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