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!