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