Sunday

It is a sunday inthise, which means all volunteers arecampedd out at the 3 cafes in townwith wierless, attempting to getstuf done,moe or less successully. less for me,however, i did, with the helpof marissa's computer, upload a bunch ofpics to my picassa album, so checkthem out!

trainingis goingwell. wolof isstarting to makesense, evenwith the melange of languages flooting through my head, english, french, serere, and now wolof. im really enjoying having a fixed schedule these few weeks, soi am not minding the long days and extrawork. not at all, though i may be aminority.

just one mor eweek of training left...then to dakar sunday for a meeting with other volunteers to giveout scholarships to girls for lycee for this coming school year. i will probably be backin thevillge next thursday or friday. then ramadan starts monday...yipee...

dad, yes,thetypos arefrom this crazy laptop. le pere de cru, "cru" and i just had a convo about how poorly this computer actuallyworks.

Maangiy dox

(I am walking, en wolof)

So we ar enow inweek 2 of IST and inmany ways it still feels like the fisrtweek, mainly bc the languageclasses started this week which also means that mostof the language tutors showed up for the first time since PST and the center feels like "normal." I started Wolof, which will become the 3rd foreign language I usein country. i am bsically learning it to better communicate wiht people outside of mysmall serere village. while i dont really want tolearn it right now, bci still dontknow serere perfectly, i recognize thatit will be a goodskill to have. alli really want to learn, however, is to convey basic ideas while shopping at the market and how to insult children/men in wolof when theyannoy me and theserere doesnt work9like when i am inkaolack). wolof is going ok and it is much easire thn serere grammtically speaking, howeve i am constantly mixing up serere words with wolof and remember how hard i twas to just start learning serere backin march too. that being said, iam still known aroundthe training center to most people as "serere oo,"rather than by my name, american or senegalese. as a serere, it basically meanstht anyone and eveyone willpick on and tease me at thecenter bc as one of twoserere speakers (and theres only a smallgroup of staffers who speak the language) i am in a smallminority. its okthough bc they only do it bc they knowi can take it and dish it back out too, lol. thatbeing said, if i had been assigned to another languge, i doubtiwould hve themerelationship wiht all of the taff that i have right now. as a fellow vol said thisweek, "who knew how much thelanguage you were assigned in the fisrt week in country would come to impact all ofyour interactions here?"

well, i am going togo now. i have wolof homeworkand it isgettingdark. the lightbulb inthe shower t myhomestay dosntwork anymore, so iam going tohaveto take a showerinthe pitch black, whether itake it tonight or wait until tomorro am before training. talk to you alllater and sorry for the typos and lack of spaes, this xo is weird...

Olympics

So the Olympics started this week. I absolutely love watching the Olympics and basically spend the 14 days with the TV constantly turned to NBC, or whoever happens to be airing them, and fully or partially paying attention to the different events. I realized it will be another 4 years before I get that chance again. You see, the next Olympics will be in 2010, winter, and unless the Winter Olympics aren't until May, I will still be in Senegal, and will thus have to wait until Summer 1212 to see friendly international competition aired 24/7. This being said, here in Thies, we are not totally cut off from this international event, thankfully. In fact, right as the lunch drum sounded on Friday, many of my fellow Vols were parked in front of the tv in the foyer of the training center. The program? Not wacky Senegalese wrestling or soccer or even Coeur de Peche (a ridiculous Brazilian soap opera dubbed in French and on tv almost every night). No, it was the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics! A few people even brought a lunch bowl into the foyer to watch the crazy lights and girl flying from a kite, though most of us just returned to the foyer after we were finished with our maffe and rice. We returned and didn't leave for an hour and a half... Now, to be fair, there was a point to our lengthy watching...we were waiting for the US and Senegal, our two countries (though some claim Canada, Ethiopia, and Ireland as well), to walk their athletes across the arena. So we waited. And waited. And waited, all the while making comments (see Alexis' blog for some fab quotes) about the athletes of large and small countries alike, commenting on costume, size, appearance, names, anything to occupy the time. (That, and acknowledging how great they all look while we look varying degrees of sickly...jk!) After an hour, the US finally shows up, looking slightly like sailors, but it brought a cheer across the room, filling us all with pride and amazement at the sheer size of the US Olympic team. But that wasn't enough...we needed to see Senegal. The drum for class came and went, until we were all over 30 minutes late to our afternoon session. Where was Senegal? No clue. Trainers came and went until Demba finally unplugged the TV and forced us all to class. Apparently the Olympic spirit doesn't carry all of the way over here, because our trainers called us silly for wanting to see the Senegalese team walk across the arena, in whatever costume was chosen for them (we all hoped for some wax and crazy Pulaar pants!).

Then again, it is hard to justify the importance of the Olympics in a country where the majority of the population has to worry about whether or not the impending harvest will be adequate enough to feed their families.

I love the Olympics, but this was just a thought brought up by another Vol when a family member back in the States asked about Olympics excitement over here.

Thies time

Quick note from IST in Thies...

Coup today in Mauritania, no probs here though PCSenegal is monitoring things. There hasnt been any violence, so things are relatively calm, just a little exciting, lol.

Danny G, yes that is the correct address.


So I am using my weidr XO laptop that sadly wont letme upload pictuers or anything like that. Lameness. At some point, I will once again update pictures again. Someday...

Training going well and its fab to see everyone from my Stage again. Sorry to keep this so short and lame, but I needto gethome now. Hope everyoneis enjoying the start of August!

Almost there

Dear friends, I have almost made it through the first 3 months at site, as IST starts Monday. I am really looking forward to IST, being in Thies again (electricity and running water!), seeing the Vols from my Stage, and getting away from the village for the intense August rains. I am hoping to head out of the village Thursday and spend a few days in Kaolack (to do some work pre-IST) before hopefully heading up to Thies on Saturday; though it may be Sunday, depending on what my fellow Vols in Klack want to do. Tomorrow I will be hosting my first "formation" in the village, teaching a small group of women how to make Neem Lotion, a natural mosquito repellant made from the leaves of the Neem Tree. Hopefully it will go well (think good Serere thoughts for me please) and people will use it. I already know of two women (one of my sisters, a young mother of at least 5 or 6 kids, and another friend in the village, mother of her own army of children) in my village with probable Malaria, but they cant or wont go to the Health Post, luch against my protests and insisting someone take them. However, money is low, the Post is far away, and most of the charrets are in the field. Its crazy scary and frustrating that they cant go to the HPost, esp since Malaria cases are only going to rise from here on out.

I just picked up a few more packages/letters from the Post Office. I guess some others are on their way, but will have to wait until the end of August for me to pick them up. Thank you all very much, I am very excited and it means a lot to know people are thinking and carring about me. I love you all and my next post will either be from Thies or Kaolack, depending.

Quick Q

For those of you who are tech inclined, how does one get blog updates emailed to you? I want to do what I can to stay on top of fellow PCVs and friends' blogs, but cant figure out if its w Google Reader or otherwise.

Sorry for this pathetic post, I had one about the great guests I had last weekend, but Internet Explorer freaked out. Annoying.

Oh yea, I actually have a job here...

Hey Friends. Once again in dirty, annoying Kaolack.

So I’ve come to the realization that my blog mostly shares the horrors and ridiculousness of my Service thus far, so maybe I should actually share a little about my job and what I’ve been doing (or should be doing) with these first few months at site (and honestly, the first few months following IST which starts in just two weeks). This has been spurred by reading fellow Vols blogs and remembering, “hey, I’m actually here to do something, maybe people are interested in that too?” We shall see.

I came here for a meeting with my new APCD over the new direction of the Health Education program. The meeting was a good chance to sit down and talk about ideas for training and what we want the program to be, and while it was a tad frustrating, it was overall good. I think I went off a little over my own frustrations with some aspects of my assignment, but I think he has a better understanding of the importance of proper site selection and Volunteer placement for the future. [Note: there’s nothing wrong with my placement, I merely commented on the fact that the Nurse (one of my counterparts) doesn’t actually speak Serere nor really know much about the Peace Corps and if I wasn’t able to effectively communicate in French, it would have been a disastrous and ridiculous pair-up. I just really wanted to make sure that they know issues encountered for future groups.] It was also a good chance to share my desire to work more with the schools than the health posts as well.

Anyways, so as many of you may know, during these first three months at site, we aren’t really supposed to do much “real work,” like projects and such. Instead, we are supposed to focus on getting to know our villages (integrating), learning about the area, and learning the language. This is hard and also basically means a lot of sitting around, or wandering around, hoping someone wants to talk to you. It would be a lot easier if I was good at small talk and/or had a better grasp on Serere, which I do not. As part of learning about the area, we are supposed to ask a lot of questions, about everything from health to crops to families to education, etc. Health Volunteers have what is called a Community Health Survey to complete, by going house to house, or otherwise collecting a decently-sized sample of the community. It asks about things such as sanitation (Do you have a douche/toilet? Do you clean it?), maternal and child health (Do you give birth at home or at the Health Post? At what age do you begin weaning your child? With what foods?), basic illnesses (What are the most common diseases in your village?), food and nutrition (How often do you eat vegetables/meat/fish?), and water management (Where do you get your water? Where do you store it? What do you do with it before drinking? What do you do with dirty water?). It is basically an attempt to learn about the health practices of the village, not to mention work on the language and meet/hang out with people. After some procrastination (and language frustration, let’s be honest), I started conducting my survey with my counterpart. It basically involved me translating the questions from English to Serere, talking over them with him, and then him basically asking all of the questions very quickly as we went house to house, me understanding about 70% of what was said (and by 70%, probably 50%, lol). We’ve done it two different afternoons so far and will do at least two more afternoons together, then I may wander alone to the places we didn’t get, though I’m getting a pretty good idea of the answers, or at least what they are telling me. The reality and what they tell me though may be very different things. It’s interesting and eye-opening to say the least.

Sometimes I wonder if my counterpart was feeding people the answers, especially to the question, “Why do you want a Volonteer? What are the major health concerns of the village?” The answer to both of those is “We should have a health hut, with medicine, and maybe a communally shared charret to take people from the village to the Health Post in Djilor, esp for those who don’t have charrets or when the charrets are in the fields and people don’t have time to take away from the fields.” That, and “we should have a millet grinder because pounding millet is hard on the body.” (Note: we do have a millet grinder, but it hasn’t worked in over a month, for some unknown reason) Great, all anyone will tell me is that they want a health hut, a charret, and a millet-grinding machine. Good start, but those are not going to be easy things to tackle or even good places to start out in my work. We are supposed to come up with a plan of things to tackle in our communities, a combo of our own ideas and what the community wants and needs. I’ll add a health hut to the list, but the village also has other issues like hygiene, nutrition, and Malaria, not to mention training people in the village to run health education programs and work with the schools. I feel like my list of things to tackle grows on a weekly basis. Exciting but very overwhelming as I have no idea of where to start, esp with my current language level. O ndang o ndang (little by little).

Part of the difficulty though with starting the survey now (though I don’t really have much choice, IST starts in 2 weeks), is that everyone goes to the fields on a daily basis here in the Delta. The millet was planted over a month ago, so it’s now coming up, as are the weeds. That basically means that everyone except the really old, really young, or very pregnant (so the men, women, teens, kids), go to the fields from 7:30 until 6:30 or so, to weed, re-seed, and who knows what else. I’ve gone a few times, but don’t go everyday because, well, I have other stuff to do, both around my hut and in preparation for IST. It’s definitely weird being around though because it’s just the 4 really old people at my compound, a few of the babies (those under 4), and me, the crazy white girl who reads and writes a lot. And now that the teachers are gone, there’s no one else hanging around that’s not a farmer with fields and crops. It makes for a creepy and deserted feeling around the village during the late morning and afternoon. The women, of course, are the champions. They are up before sunrise pounding millet for breakfast (I heard my sister once around 5am), cook, do laundry, sweep, etc, then work in the fields, one or two come back to make lunch and take back out to the fields, work, come back around 5:30 or so, pound more millet, cook, bathe children, eat dinner, and then even after dinner, around 9pm or so, sit in the dark sifting millet for the following day’s meals—While the men rest. It’s kind of ridiculous, but they are definitely the champs, so strong and yet totally exhausted by the end of the day.

Here’s a common convo I now have on a daily basis, translated from Serere:
Person: You don’t go to the fields?
Me: Yes, I went yesterday but I didn’t go today.
Person: You have a field?
Me: No, I don’t have a field.
Person: You don’t have a field? (shock and disbelief) You can’t farm, can you?
Me: I can farm.
Person: You can farm?! (shock and disbelief again)
Me: Yes, I can farm, I can gnos (basically weed, with a spade-like tool).
Person: You can gnos?! (more shock and disbelief)
Me: Yes, I can gnos. (I walk toward them in the field, take their tool and start weeding) I can gnos, I have a gnosi (the thing you weed with)
Person: You have a gnosi?! (shock and disbelief) You can gnos! Oh Khady Diouf, haha
(I walk away, glad to have shown them that I can indeed gnos, even if I don’t have a field and am not actually a farmer)

However, I have only gnos-ed for a few hours at a time, whether in the field or in my backyard, and doubt my ability to spend 10 hours a day in the fields gnos-ing. The farmers (ie everyone here) are tough, but I guess, they have to be, their food supply for next year depends on it. This is subsistence farming, ladies and gentlemen, not the big corporate or otherwise subsidized farms of the US. There’s a food crisis and the people of the Delta are doing everything they can to keep food in their bellies. Makes you appreciate what we have, doesn’t it?

Other things to work on pre-IST while people are in the fields include maps of my village and what’s around as well as a map of what’s in town, lists of activities I’ve done to “help with my integration” (uh, I sit around in the day, and walk around the village in the late afternoon and greet people…I dance at baptisms, is that enough?), and a kind of analysis of the health situation in the village, done through the help of the Health Survey. We are supposed to write something up as well as do like a 15 minute presentation at IST…we’ll see how those go.

I’m going to go now that this post is ridiculously long and full of insanely long run-on sentences. Please don’t judge me J