The Home Stretch

It’s hard to believe, but we’re wrapping up our time in Tassette, our CBT site.  Right now, we're back in Thies for a 3-day workshop with our Senegalese Counterparts from our permanent sites.  Our counterparts will be the major part of our technical and project support system at our permanent sites, so this is an important opportunity for everyone to get on the same page in terms of project goals and execution, roles and responsibilities, cultural differences, and opportunities for collaboration. Our counterparts traveled to Thies from our future/their current respective home communities. For the folks coming from the far north and south, it can take 2 full days of travel just to get here. That’s dedication!

After the counterpart workshop, all of us PCTs get to spend a day in Dakar, getting familiar with the PC offices, policies, and procedures there, before coming back to our CBT sites for 3 days of language study before our final language assessment, on the 25^th.  Following our final language assessment, we’ll be rewarded with a 2-day stay at the beach! These will literally be our first days off since arriving in Senegal in September. Phew! We’re all feeling quite ready for a break. We’ll swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers on November 30^th, inshallah, and then move to our permanent sites shortly thereafter. There is light at the end of the tunnel!

Given that we are beginning to wrap up our CBT stay, I wanted to share a few reflections on our CBT experience with the Thiaw family in Tassette.

The Chameleon

Last weekend, I was studying under our family’s large shade tree inside our compound. It was a windy and pleasant afternoon, and I was enjoying the relative quiet as everyone rested after lunch. All of the sudden, my “Aunt” (she’s 23), who was sitting next to me started screaming. I don’t mean speaking loudly or yelling; I mean screaming out of pure terror. I expected to see a black mamba materializing out of the sand (those don’t exist here, to be clear) or a giant scorpion creeping toward me. Instead, I saw this…

By the time I spotted him, my Aunt and the rest of the family were clear across the compound screaming bloody murder and huddling together in fear. I laughed and scooped the chameleon onto a leaf. This elicited more screaming. I laughed some more. I tried to explain to my family that chameleons are our friends, and that they only eat bugs. “No, it will bite you!” my family said. I explained that they don’t have teeth; only a giant bug-catching tongue. Despite my attempts at quelling the hysteria, my Mom refused to let the chameleon go back into the tree.  “Take it away!” She demanded.

Our family was so terrified that it took me a few minutes to convince someone to get close enough to take my camera from me to photograph me with my new friend. Keep in mind my camera is pretty much the most exciting part of my being here to many in my family… We had been told that reptiles are reviled and feared in Senegal, but I was pretty shocked at how much terror and chaos a 4-inch chameleon could create.

Like a good daughter, I took the chameleon away, largely out of fear that someone would kill him as soon as I left the compound if I put him back in our tree. At this point, neighbors had begun to gather after hearing commotion, and it was their turn to scream. Chameleon in hand, and large group of child taunters (of both me and the reptile) in tow, we set out for the bush to find a new home for the little guy. I found what I deemed to be a perfect stand of trees and watched him get situated before heading home. By that point, the kids were more interested than scared, so it made for a fun conversation/activity together.

The kakatar (chameleon in Wolof) incident has been discussed daily since it occurred. Several times a day, a family member demands that I show a visitor the photos, and we go through the whole story again. My sisters’ boyfriend visited this past week and to give her a hard time, I showed him the photo and told him she ate it. Everyone was hysterical with laughter. I’m happy that the kakatar incident is now a source of laughter for us all, and that the terror has passed. I am hoping that maybe someone in my family believes my case that chameleons are not only harmless to humans, but also beneficial to have around, especially during the fly season!

Spring Has Sprung

Well, not really, but there are a lot of baby animals around!  Season-wise, we’re in/entering the harvest season/cool weather season, so there is food available for Mamas and babies, both domestic and wild. 

When we first arrived at our compound in Tassette, I admit I perceived it to be quite barren (it is all sand, after all).  However, after being here and observing for the past few weeks, I now recognize that there’s a lot going on. In our compound alone, we have four 3-week old ducklings, two 2-day old chicks, a chicken nest hidden away by the horse/bathroom area, a duck/chicken shared nest in the kitchen building, a weaver bird nest in the Neem tree above where we eat lunch, and a finch nest in a hole in the concrete wall surrounding our compound. We have a handful of baby goats, with one who is only 2 weeks old!  As mentioned above, we also have a healthy reptile presence. We have lots of lizards and geckos, in addition to the now-famous chameleon, and this morning I saw a baby skink running across the sand. Sadly, a chicken consumed him shortly thereafter, but he was there!  There are amphibian friends too; toads and frogs come out at night. Two nights ago, a frog jumped out of the shower drain (just an exposed plastic drain in a cement room) and nailed me in the leg while I was all lathered up and couldn’t see. I screamed, thinking it might be a rat, but once I rinsed out my eyes, I saw it was just a frog seeking out a wet place to hang out. After that, he stayed in the corner and watched me finish rinsing, like a good little frog.

At night, when the power is actually working, the light above our front door is the center of both the animal and human realm. We study and chat and eat by the light, and the bugs are likewise drawn to it. The bugs provide a buffet for the ducks and ducklings, toads, lizards and geckos, and bigger bugs. It’s quite the scene, and Peter and I often sit and narrate the lively goings on, chucking beetles to favored larger animals for a treat. Our family seems oblivious, and surely thinks we’re crazy for paying attention to such strange things. However, it’s great mindless entertainment after a long day of language learning, cultural immersion, and gardening work.

Lessons Learned/An Appropriate Simulation

A large part of our Pre-Service Training (PST) and Community Based Training (CBT) has been dedicated to technical training in our specific sectors (Agro Forestry for me and Urban Agriculture for Peter). Each CBT group (3-5 people) was responsible for creating and maintaining a large garden space for practicing these skills. We were given a clear outline of what we needed to accomplish/plant/maintain in the garden and when, and the Peace Corps technical team periodically visits to make sure we are on track.

This component of training has been particularly challenging, but in hindsight, it was probably a very realistic simulation of what we can expect in future projects. The original site selected for our garden was supposed to be weeded completely and enclosed by a fence when we arrived here in Tassette. It wasn’t, so we spent a couple of hours weeding it only to find a large trash heap and several old latrine tanks in the middle of the plot. Needless to say, a garden was not in the cards there. We searched within the school for another site, spent another hour weeding another area, only to find a building foundation and concrete rubble pile. At this point, we were supposed to have double-dug 3 1x3 m beds and 2 1x1 m beds and started a compost pile, and we hadn’t even found an appropriate site. The tech team was coming to evaluate our progress in 2 days…

The next morning, we came back to the school and weeded another section that had only a small rubble pile and a well cover in it. This was it; we had our garden site! We spent the morning weeding, consolidating the concrete rubble, and erecting our fence. Side note: at some point during our second day in the garden, a man arrived and sprayed herbicide all over the remaining plants in the school, in preparation for the start of classes.  We asked him what he had sprayed, and he said he didn’t know; a Spanish NGO had given it to him and told him it would get rid of the weeds…  

We managed to get the beds prepped and a giant compost pile made before the tech team came. The good news was they were impressed with our work. The bad news was that the space was too small; we’d have to expand the garden to include the giant rubble pile and building foundation and somehow incorporate a field crop demonstration into that area. Oh, and the crew of “youths” who were supposed to weed the garden space for us before our arrival at the school showed up with weeding tools in hand 1 week after we weeded, fenced, etc. It was hilarious, and frustrating.

We expanded the area the next week, dug the extra beds and made another compost pile. Since then, we have seeded, transplanted, mulched, chased children out of the garden routinely, watered religiously, weeded, thinned, and observed. We left CBT for 10 days for technical training in Thies, and our Volunteer Visits (VV) at our permanent sites. We were overjoyed when we returned to Tassette to find that our garden had actually been watered and the plants were alive despite the herbicide application. However, this was quickly overshadowed by the realization that our garden was FULL of pests- spider mites, white flies, leaf borers, mealy bugs, flea beetles, grasshoppers, aphids, caterpillars, rats, and even cats pooping in the beds!  One of the tech trainers pointed out that we planted our garden literally just as all of the other vegetation in the school was sprayed with herbicide, so all of the critters whose plant homes were dying moved into the garden. Bummer.

I feel a strong sense of accomplishment when I think about the evolution of our garden, and I’ll keep the lessons we have learned in mind as we begin projects at our permanent sites. It isn’t going to be easy! We should expect ambiguity and misinformation in many forms, communication challenges, physical limitations- especially in urban spaces, pest plagues, less than ideal soil, trash surprises galore- without a central waste management system, it’s everywhere! These challenges will all hopefully be balanced by enthusiastic and knowledgeable work partners at our permanent site.  Peter and I are looking forward to getting our hands dirty in Guinguineo, and I am hopeful that we are armed with realistic expectations.

In addition to our family, language learning, and technical training time, we have planned and executed parts of a simulation Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) workshop and a [sparsely attended] malaria net care and repair workshop. A real PACA would span several days and would be focused on identifying current strengths and potential projects or areas for improvement within a community. Our PACA was a very abbreviated simulation, but it still took a lot of planning. Our days in Tassette have been packed! We’re grateful for the thoughtful planning of the PC training staff, as they have crammed in as much learning and practice as humanly possible during this time.  However, as our final language test approaches, we worry that these innumerable non-Wolof lessons, exercises, and assignments have taken a hefty bite out of our language learning time and energy. I trust in hindsight I’ll appreciate all the work and learning we’re putting in up front, but on a day-to-day basis, I often feel like I’m walking through (and thinking through) sand… metaphorically… and sometimes literally.  Except when I’m only metaphorically walking through sand, I don’t have to watch out for animal poop.

Tassette, Neex Na (Tassette, it is delicious)

Peter and I are both big fans of Tassette, our CBT site, and even bigger fans of our hosts, the Thiaw family.  The day we were dropped off in Tassette for the first time, we could not have guessed how much we’d come to love and appreciate it in such a short time. Yes, maybe I am romanticizing the whole thing a bit as it comes to a close, but this has been a wonderful place for us to practice with our training wheels, so to speak. It’s a small town of about 3,000 people, with a thriving weekly market, which I was told today serves 51 surrounding villages. I have no idea if this is accurate, but I can vouch for the fact that the market day is super busy here.

There’s a “garage” (a central place where cars congregate to attract passengers), several boutiques/general stores, 2 tiny hardware stores, several fabric shops (one of them being our Mom’s shop), a few “restaurants” (small rooms with a counter, serving 2 to 3 signature meals; we have not partaken, though), and we even have a fax/printing shop (my 23 year old aunt runs it).  Our family, who pretty relentlessly badgered us and criticized us for the first few days and was far from patient or helpful with our complete lack of language skills (we were later told this is their first time hosting foreigners, and they missed the “sensitizing” session where PC prepared them for what to expect and how to handle us…how convenient…), with some help from both positive and negative reinforcement from us, is, on the whole, very loving and patient with us and all of our known and unknown language and culture gaffs. We, too, try to be patient with them, especially regarding our major cultural differences surrounding time (what “now,” “right now,” and “later” mean, for example).

Our family is a hilarious mix of personalities, who all revolve around and generally gravitate toward our yaay, our mother, who is the largest and loudest family member. She is a magnetic and fun-loving person, with a great sense of humor and wit, a penchant for eating and drinking the finer things Senegal has to offer, and a knack for non-stop social and logistical choreography, all while running a household of 12, managing and running a fabric shop, and nursing a 2-month-old. No big deal! Our baay, our father, is equally as impressive, although he does not demand so much attention. He is good natured and funny, in a more subdued sense (he is not constantly yelling, and he speaks and laughs at what Americans would consider to be a “normal” level). He is obviously intelligent and is a hard worker. He helps the kids study every night and he loves to coddle Mohammed, their 2-month-old baby boy. We have come to love our siblings; even the 2 teenage girls, who pretty much laugh at us non-stop. I guess it’s a universal teenager thing. Our 6-year-old sister, Yazin, is our constant shadow when we are home, weaseling her way into/onto our laps whenever we are sitting. She wouldn’t look at us or talk to us for the first 5 days we were here, so we’ve come a long way!

We are very much looking forward to getting started on our projects and living with the Diop family in Géo, but we will really miss the Thiaws and Tassette!  We’re already looking forward to coming back to visit.

Finally, we got our new address in Guinguineo. I'm posting it below, but it's also on our "Contact Info and Visiting Senegal" page, with instructions for sending letters and packages.

        PCV Ndeye Penda and Idrissa Diop/Kaitlin Hammersley and Peter Fritsche

        B.P. 33

       Guinguinéo, Senegal

       West Africa

Jamm rekk (Peace only),

Kait

On Géo, Hammer Pants, and Yummy Pee

Hello All,

I’m writing this blog post from our bedroom in Tasette.  We’re back at our CBT site for our longest continuous stay yet, 17 days.  Pending my ability to figure out how to make our Orange internet key actually get us online, this post will likely be getting posted after we return to Thies, so please forgive us the delays.  

As Kait referenced in the previous post, the major update is that we’ve found out where we’ll be serving for our two years!  The way we were told is worth mentioning.  On the basketball court at the Thies Training Center (TTC), there is a large painted map of Senegal.  They assembled us all at the court for what was called “The Unveiling.”  We were all blindfolded and then, in-turn, taken by the hand and physically placed on the approximate location in which we would be serving, on the big map of Senegal.  After a painfully long countdown (filled with pregnant pauses and decreasing by half steps instead of integers to milk even more drama from the situation) we all removed our blindfolds simultaneously.  We opened our eyes to see both where we would be serving and who would be geographically near to us… and then who would be geographically far from us.  It was a really fun way to find out.  Everyone was so happy to finally find out where their next two years would be spent.  What a relief to us all.  Nobody seemed disappointed either.  Multiple long-time staffers told us that there are usually at least a few in each stage that are sobbing with disappointment.  One sign, among many, indicating how superb our stage is.  Fun fact: When referring to our “stage,” as in the group of people we are currently going through PST with, it is pronounced like the French (think staaaahj).  I assume it’s due to the immense French influence in Senegal.  It felt snooty and weird saying it that way at first, but now it’s the only way I say it.  Immersion can be a powerful behavior-modifier. 

Unveiling:  Please pardon the picture in the lower right, it was taken while blindfolded.

Anyway, when we removed our blindfolds, what we found is that we’ll be serving in Guinguineo, just northeast of Kaolack, one of the biggest cities in Senegal.  Feel free to Google/Wikipedia Guinguineo to supplement the very limited information you’ll receive on it until we install.  Just remember you can’t trust everything you read on the internet… except what you read on this blog, which is obviously beyond reproach.  

(See if you can find Guinguineo on the above map!)

I admit that one of the first things I thought was, “Great!  We’re relatively close to Dakar.  All those people who said they were going to visit are going to have a hard time coming up with excuses now!”  From the Dakar garage to Kaolack, it’s no more than a four-hour ride, and from Kaolack back north to Guinguineo only another hour.  That’s small potatoes compared to some of our friends down in Kolda who have a 14-hour drive to get from their garage to Dakar (or a bit less if they go through the Gambia).  So come on over!  If you care to read on, you may find further reasons to come visit, other than the obviously delightful company you would enjoy here.

Between the unveiling and now, we actually went to Géo (which is what hip young Senegalese call it) for a four day stay with our ancien (which is PCS speak for “the volunteer one will be replacing”) the virtues and successes of whom, Kait briefly extolled at the end of the last post.  It was a really fun, and really exciting visit.  It was pretty wild to finally start meeting the people we’ll be working/living with/alongside  for the next two years.  With only a couple limited exceptions, everyone seemed very nice and welcoming.  I believe we owe this largely to Caitlin’s efforts at integration.  The community truly loves her.  We’ll gladly take the “intimidatingly large shoes to fill” problem because it comes with a community that respects PCVs and the work that they do.  Technically I’m her replacement, but Kait will occasionally cram her metaphorically ample feet into the metaphorically large shoes alongside mine, so I think we’ll be okay.  We’re both really looking forward to picking up some of her projects where she left off, and putting our nose to the grindstone on some new ones as well.

Guinguineo is a small-medium town (less than 20,000 people including the surrounding tiny villages) with a lot going on.  There is a great daily market, where we’ll be spending a chunk of each day buying veggies (and the occasional beignet… these little fried dough balls are a breakfast staple)  and socializing with both merchants and other local shoppers.  There is a really big luuma, or weekly market, but we weren’t in Géo for it, so I can’t really address it, but I imagine it will be quite a scene, judging from how much of a scene the relatively smaller daily market is.  

Géo also has a lot of small businesses: tailors, carpenters, metal workers, cloth sellers, boutiques, food vendors, etc.  Kait and Caitlin were happy as pigs in poo going to all the cloth shops looking for the most beautiful wax (the incredibly colorful, richly patterned cotton fabric one almost certainly already associates with this part of the world).  I am a less enthusiastic shopper, but still had a good time, as I was chomping at the bit to get some snazzy pants made.  After the aesthetic decisions had been made by those equipped to make them (i.e. everyone but me) we took the fabric to one of Caitlin’s favorite tailors.  In addition to some smaller pieces of other fabrics, we got 12 meters of one particularly beautiful fabric.  From that 12 meters, Caitlin had a demi-bubu made, Kaitlin a wrap skirt, and me, a killer pair of chayas.  A wrap skirt is self-explanatory.  A demi-bubu is basically a billowy shirt with short sleeves and kind of open sides.  Chayas are herdsman pants.  The closest equivalent I can think of from American culture has to be Hammer Pants.  They’re like that, except waaaaaay cooler, both in terms of temperature and appearance.  We were planning to go to a photo shop to have the three of us matching immortalized for all time, but Caitlin’s bubu wasn’t ready before we had to head back to Thies.  There may yet be another chance to capture the beauty.  We shall see.

My chayas, our porch, taking a charet out to the master farm, and the master farm.

Another major life change that will take place when we move to Géo is that we’ll be living with a new family, who have already given us new names.  At CBT, I have been Pape Fall Thiaw, and Kait has been Xadi Ka.  At our permanent site Kait will be Ndeye Penda Diop and I will be Idrissa Diop.  I like my new name, as it makes me think of Idris Elba (aka the hottest man in the world, Kait and I agree).  Unfortunately, it also makes me think of Idi Amin, who I want to emulate significantly less than the former.  We are the turundo, or namesake, of a Senegalese power couple, the male part of which was a recent candidate for president.  I believe they are somewhat related to our future family, the Diops.  However, there are sooooo many Diops in this country, it’s hard to know for sure, especially with our language skills where they are.

Anyway, our new family is actually smaller than our relatively small, by Senegalese standards, CBT family.  It consists of our baay (dad), yaay (mom), maam (grandma), four kids Oulimata (girl, age 9), Soda (girl, age 8), Fallou (boy age 6) and Papa Gorré (boy age 3) and a couple of older cousins.  They seem like such a nice/welcoming/loving family, and Caitlin could not have given them higher praise.  They’ve been hosting PCVs for almost 10 years now, off and on, so they are fully aware of the drill.  One of the things I’m most excited about, is what our father, Pape Diop, does for work.  He runs a dibiterie, which is basically a Senegalese BBQ joint.  He is well known as having the best dibi around.  Everyday he slaughters and processes a ram (and now he’s getting into chicken dibi) to grill and sell.  He sits and grills in front of the house, which makes it a very social place to sit and pass the time.  I have yet to eat any, but I believe this spells disaster for any aspirations I had towards getting fit and trim during my service.  I’m excited that this means I might get to add Senegalese grilling/smoking skills to my burgeoning arsenal of American meat cooking skills.  I’m also tempted to have one of the metal workers in town weld up a rudimentary smoker so our baay and I can do some cultural exchange via meat.

The Diop Family (minus our Yaay and Maam)

This brings us to the much-anticipated topic of what our physical living situation will be…  We will be living is the Diop house, but our space is completely cut-off from theirs, and only accessible by separate outdoor door.  We have a screened-in porch (the only photo of our place I’m including on this post) which is super-great!  The screen will protect us from bugs, but it will not protect us from very energetic younger siblings, which only latched doors can dissuade.  The structure itself is cinderblock with cement floors.  We have two rooms: one for sitting, studying, cooking, (and having guests sleep over!... from America!) etc, and the other for sleeping.  Arguably most exciting of all is our en suite bathroom!  In it we have a Turkish toilet (a porcelain dish inlaid in the cement floor, with a hole in the middle; one squats over it and “goes”), shower (with elevated shower head, so no more bucket showers!) and robine (spigot).  Not having to go outside in the night to go pee or get water will do so very much to increase morale, I can’t even tell you.  We’re both very excited about our living situation.  We were prepared for a one-room hut with an outhouse and well.  Now we’ll be living in the lap of luxury compared to some of our peers.  Also, we will have [intermittent] electricity.  That’s pretty big too.  The one downside is that now our blog title is a bit misleading, as we’re living in a house and not a hut.  I hope that you, the reader, can see past our slight deception and continue to enjoy our posts.

In short, we’re enjoying CBT, and will really miss our Tassette family, but we’re really excited to get to Géo.

Since our last post, a couple of holidays have come and gone.  Thank you all for your birthday wishes!  It was great to get so many cards and internet messages.  We were in Thies for my birthday, and all the other trainees were super-nice to me as well.  They sang to me at dinner and bought me beverages to celebrate at the local watering hole at night.  Also behind us now is Halloween, which is a pretty fun holiday, so I sacrificed a couple hours sleep the night before in order to make a joint costume for Kait and me as Kait slept.  Probably around 12 people total dressed up, but it was still a blast.  Kait and I went as world-renowned fictional paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant and the T-Rex.  I made a cardboard velociraptor claw fossil for me as well as a cardboard box T-Rex-head hat and stuffed-sock tail for Kait.  We looked awesome!  There were no pictures taken on our camera (it doesn’t have a flash and thia all happened at night), so you’ll have to wait, with bated breath, for us the get the pics from a friend’s camera before we post them.  It was really funny trying to explain to the LCFs, in broken wolof what we were dressed as.  Most of them, from their having worked with Americans extensively before, were at least acquainted with Halloween, but they still laughed a lot at our costumes.

For Halloween, a bunch of people slaughtered and grilled chickens on spits.  It was really delicious!  We also all went (some of us in costume) to the favored watering hole, near to the training center to celebrate the holiday.  I wonder what the locals who didn’t know of Halloween thought of my lumbering, roaring dino-wife.  I imagine it will haunt their dreams for a while.  Almost as much as their dreams will be haunted by my explanation of how velociraptors hunt in packs, attack from the sides, and begin to eat their prey before it’s dead.  The little kids shouldn’t have told me the skeleton looked like a turkey. (Apologies to those who don’t like JP as much as I and may not understand the last few sentences.)  We also had a big bonfire at the center upon our return from the bar.  All in all, it was a festive and fun night!

I would like to conclude with what I hope will be a recurring segment in our blog… 

Misadventures in Language Learning!

When we came back to our CBT site from Thies, after VV, we were really excited to see our family.  We had missed them a lot.  We were telling them about how we were going to live in Géo for two years and talking about what we had done in the ten days we had been absent from Tassette.  One of the things we did in Kaolack, the regional capital that Géo is outside of, is eat some really delicious yoghurt, called soow.  To grossly oversimplify, it’s basically milk that is left unrefrigerated overnight, and then sweetened a bit, and sold in bags, that you just suck the yummy goodness out of.  What Kait wanted to say was… Ci Kaolack ak Guinguineo, am na soow bu neex! Which translates to “in Kaolack and Géo, there is delicious yoghurt.”  What Kait said, or at least what our family heard (due in part to us having nasally pronunciation, which we are reminded of daily by our loving family) was… Ci Kaolack ak Guinguineo, am na saw bu neex!  Which translates to “in Kaolack and Géo, there is delicious urine.”  Much hilarity ensued.  Luckily, we’re pretty good at getting laughed at at this point.  Eventually we figured out what the miscommunication had been, and corrected it.  We’re constantly learning.

Fun Phrases for Daily Needs!

Maangiy bëgg a tuur ndox.

Literally: I want to pour water.

Figuratively:  I have to go pee.

Maangiy bëgg a tuur dugub.

Literally: I want to pour millet.

Figuratively: I have to go poop.

Danga saaf loxo.

Literally: Your hand is spicy.

Figuratively: You are a good cook.

Love you all!  Miss you all!