Hi my name is Andy and I live in a hut

Ok, first of all, I'd like to offer a small outline for this blog, so you can scroll through it for the bits you're interested in.

But before we get started I'd like to mention that the comments on the blog have tapered off significantly. If you don't comment on the blog, I don't know that anyone's reading it, and if nobody's reading it, I may as well just be writing in my journal. So if there aren't like 20 comments or something on this entry, I may never write another one. Dun dun dun....!

Outline:
A) Wish List and New Address
B) Hut/Village Description
C) Day in the Life Slash Food
D) Thanksgiving
E) Malinke Lesson of the Day
F) Final Comments


A) Wish List and New Address

So I've been advised by some seasoned Peace Corps Volunteers to shamelessly put my wish list up on my blog, so as not to burden my parents completely. My address has changed, so if you do want to send a care package, or even just a letter, check the last blog entry for the new addy. Now without further ado...

- Food. Any kind of food you can think of that I might like, I will like. High protein stuff is good, since there's not much meat aroud, like beef jerkey, but also any kind of junk food or packaged food in general is always a treat and would make my month to receive.
- Neosporin. I'm always cutting myself. Can of tuna opened my finger up the other day.
- Hand sanitizer. Gotta stay clean, and I shake a lot of hands.
- A decent pair of tweezers. Impossible to find here, clutch in the event of a splinter in the bush.
- Bugspray. I have rub on stuff, but sometimes it's just easier to spray. And I don't wanna get malaria.
- A leatherman. I know these are expensive, but they come in very handy for a lot of things. I have a mini one that I keep on my keychain and it's priceless, but for bigger jobs i need a bigger knife.
- Photos. Send me pictures of what you're doing in every day life. Pictures of the weather (I showed a picture of boston in the winter to some of my villagers, who had never seen snow before).
- Posters. Gotta decorate the hut somehow. If you do want to send me a poster, probably the best way is to get it online and have it sent to my dad, so he can put a couple together in a tube. Email him for his address if you're interested.
- Books. Anything interesting that you've read, I want. From classics to the new hit. I have lots of time to read.
- Discman. This is the coolest part. I have my iPod and it's great and I listen to it every night. But I don't want to lose touch with the music scene back home. So if someone can send me a basic discman from home, then anyone can mail me a burned CD with lots of their favorite music on it for me to listen to. And stay hip and with it in my music knowledge.

So word, that's my wish list. It's long, I know. And some of the stuff isn't cheap. But I promise that any letter or package that is sent will get a reply from moi. Also, make sure to include a letter, or at least a note, in your packages.


B) Hut/Village Description

I live in a village of 400 people in the region of Kedougou, which is in southeastern Senegal. Kedougoug is absolutely gorgeous, with more elevation changes and greenery than anywhere else in the country.

The ride out to my village is about 37 km and takes me about 2 hours by bike. My village has no electricity or running water, but I do have a small solar panel on my roof to charge my iPod with. I also have no cell phone reception. In fact I'm about 2 hours from it. But that's not such a bad thing, it's kind of peaceful being disconnected sometimes.

My village is organized into family compounds. I live with the village chief and his family. He has two wives (but the second was simply the wife of his brother, that he took in to support when his brother died, and I think their relationship stops there, because they have no children together). A family compound is a fenced-in area with a collection of huts used as bedrooms and one is the kitchen hut. We also have a storage hut to keep the harvest in.

I have my own hut which is huge - 15 feet across - and circular. It has a thatched roof and a cement floor, with a front and back door. I also have a fenced-in backyard of my own and a small fenced-in area to use as my bathroom. In my hut I have a bed made of bamboo poles with a foam mattress and a three-tiered table also made of bamboo. I have a small gas can with a stove attachment so I can cook.

I don't know what it is about the sky in Africa, but somehow it just looks different. Every sunset is breath-taking. A few whispy clouds always seem to wander into the western sky just in time to be painted by the sun. The sky almost looks smudged some evenings, like an impressionists painting.

My camera is broken and a new one is en route, so I don't have any pictures yet. But be sure that you already know what my village looks life. When Hollywood went to Africa for a day to see what a village looked like in Africa, I'm pretty sure they came to mine because I laugh every day at how cliché it looks.


C) Day in the Life Slash Food

I wake up at about 8:00 am every day and go for a jog. Any villager that I run by usually asks me where I'm going and laugh at the idea of running just for the sake of running, but I'm sure they'll get used to it.

Then I come back to my hut, get my bucket and an extra T-shirt and walk to the well, which is about 150 meters away. I pull my water by hand - no pully - and fill a 5-gallon bucket to the brim and put a lid on it. I'm the only man in my village who pulls water because it's considered women's work, but I'm trying to rock their ideas of gender roles a little bit.

After carrying the water back to my hut on my head, using the extra T-shirt as a head mat, I eat breakfast. My family is up and has eaten before I wake up, so I eat breakfast alone in my hut, which is mono, that porridge I've written about before. It's possibly my favorite part about Senegal so far. I also make a cup of coffee.

Then I use the water to take a bucket bath in my backyard and get dressed to go about my day. So far I've only had a few days in the village but I've been using them to meet people, travel to other villages to meet farmers there, and I've gone into the fields with my family to do work out there twice.

Lunch generally comes around noon and is rice or findo (a very small grain) covered with a sauce. The sauce is usually made out of leaves, or is peanut based, often times with okra, which makes it sort of slimy. Dinner is usually similar to lunch. Sometimes with the sauce is whole okra or pieces of this orange squash that is sweet and delicious.

At some point in the afternoon I try to make it into my hut for a good nap. Then I like to spend my afternoons reading or studying Malinké (which is extremely similar to Jaxonke, but not the same). I hang out in my compound with the fam until dusk, at which point they say their prayers and then we eat immediately after dusk.

Often after dinner I go to the teachers' hut (i have a small school with three teachers in my village). The teachers speak French and are extremely nice and welcoming. They have told me that I'm already a member of the family, and am welcome at all times of the day. They eat much better than my family, and sometimes even have meat, and eat later than my family. So, often I eat dinner twice. Even so, I usually eat at least a clif bar every day.

Then I go back to my hut around 9:00 or so, shut the door and have some Andy time. I listen to music, read, write in my journal or write letters. I also usually make oatmeal or eat a can of tuna. Then at about 10:30 or so head lamp is off and I'm asleep. And that's a day in my life.


D) Thanksgiving

All the volunteers from the Kedougou region came in to the regional house, which is in the city of Kedougou, to make Thanksgiving dinner together. The regional house doesn't have electricity but does have a small stove and oven, and also has running water. It's more of a compound than a house, with a collection of huts that we use.

The volunteers who have been here for a while have gotten extremely creative with their cooking so we had a great meal:

We had chickens and ducks (turkeys were 80 bucks a pop) that we cooked on the grill. We had garlic mashed potatoes and turkey gravy (the gravy was sent in packet form from home). We had delicious mashed sweet potatoes with a bissap mirangue on top (bissap is a flower here that they also use to make juice). We had fresh baked bread - sourdough, rosemary, and something else. We had stuffing made from scratch, right down to drying the bread ourselves. We had green been caserole made with a can of mushrooms and powdered milk because we couldn't find cream of mushroom soup. We had a delicious carrott and raisin dish that someone dreamed up. For dessert we had squash pie (no pumpkins around) lemon bars, a fudge cake, a chocolate-peanut butter pie, and cream. All of these were made from scratch, including the crusts. Betty Crocker and Baker's Sqaure took the day off.

So while I did miss eating with you all, we did have a meal of which any American could be proud, despite the lack of turkey.


E) Malinke Lesson of the Day

"I speak Malinke" and "I speak English" are "Nse Malinko kan mee" and "Nse anglais kan mee." Directly translated that means that you "hear" or "understand" the languages. I think it's an interesting difference in approach, that once they learn a language they say they can hear other people in it, whereas once we have learned a language we "speak" it.


F) Final Comments

With that I congratulate anyone who managed to get through all of this. I know it was long but people have been asking me for different things on here and I wanted to make sure I had something for every one. Keep giving me ideas for what you want to hear about.

And don't forget to write comments, or I may never write anything again.

Love Boubs

Address

I'll be back on tomorrow to write an extensive blog about my first week in village, but I did want to quickly get my new address up.

PCV Andrew Jondahl
b.p. 37
Kedougou, Senegal
West Africa

Phone number is the same. Call me, I'll have service til Fri morning.

Love Boubs

Goodbye Easy Life

It's official. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer. After eight weeks as a Peace Corps Trainee I have completed all of my assessments, learned the latin names of 25 tree species and their uses, achieved the level of Intermediate Medium in Jaxanke and adapted to the culture to Peace Corps standards. So, I have been officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and will depart for my village tomorrow morning at 6 a.m.

I have a two day trip ahead of me to get there, and will be traveling with two other volunteers going to the same area. The volunteers already in the area will be there to welcome us and help us settle in, and then it's off to the village as of Tuesday morning.

As I've said before, my region is Kedougou, which is also the name of the closest "big" city. I have a two hour bike ride to get to Kedgougou, which is where I can get my mail and find an internet cafe, but to find a bank branch I'll have to go to Tambacounda, which is four hours from Kedougou in a car. So yes, I am about as out in the boonies as any volunteer in Senegal (some people from my training class will be living in apartments with electricity and refridgerators, and one even has wireless). But I'm glad I'm going to the bush. It's pretty much what I expected. In fact, I'll be more connected than I thought, because I assumed I wouldn't have any internet access at all. I'm going to try to make it into town once every two or three weeks, so keep your emails and facebook messages coming, and blog comments, and I'll keep up my end of the bargain. My mailing address will change, so I'll post it on here as soon as I know what it is.

A couple notes about Senegal in general.

Hospitality: If somebody stops by your house unexpectedly when you're about to eat, they eat with you, no questions asked. So the other night some people stopped by my house the other night and before I knew it we had twelve men around the same bowl with two small fish in it over a bed of rice. But nobody would ever think to complain that they werent getting enough. By the same token, a different night this week I finished stuffing myself on a big dinner at my house and went to my friend's. When I arrived they were just sitting down to dinner, so I was expected to sit down and eat dinner again, less than half an hour after i had finished. I guess it all comes around.

Jaxanke lesson of the day: "sate" (pronounced like a chicken sauteé) means village. It also means city and town. They only have one word for all these things. I guess it shows how rural the language's roots are.

Also, they have the same word "sigi" (see-gee) meaning "to sit" and "to live." Any discussion of what that could imply?

Anyway, I better get going. We have a party for at the center with our host families tonight. I helped prepare for it by grinding the pepper. And by that I mean I had a two foot wooden mortar and pestal and a bowl of pepper corns that I had to grind up. One of the cooks and I took turns pounding and holding the mortar - it's pretty physical work.

Love and miss you all, talk to you the next chance I get (i'll def be back into "The Gou" for thanksgiving dinner with the other volunteers in my region).

Boubs

ps. Yes, it's pronounced like Boobs. And my new last name will be Dumfaha. Sound it out. I love it.