Updates and Farewells

Updates

At long last, I sit down to write a blog. I seem to have all but abandoned it this year, but with the changes in my life that I’ll detail below, I resolve to be more frequent and consistent with my writing.

I have said a few farewells recently, but farewell to Senegal shall wait another year. As many of you already know, I have decided to extend my Peace Corps service by a year and have accepted a position living in Dakar and working as the Peace Corps videographer. We have some funding to buy video equipment, so I will spend the year creating short videos: video best practice guides, instructional films, documentaries, etc. Basically, I want to document the good work that Peace Corps volunteers (or other organizations) are doing and post it on our website, available to everyone. Ideally the content will serve as a resource for development workers worldwide and will make interested people more aware of the work we’re doing.

I also hope to create relationships with some Senegalese organizations. I’m currently looking into the possibility of teaching a basic editing course for the university’s film program. I would also like to create a relationship between Peace Corps and the main television station here, in an effort to get some development programming on the air. Over 70% of Senegalese people have access to television so it could be a great medium to teach people ways to avoid malaria and improve their diets. I’m excited to use the education and degree I received (Broadcast Journalism) productively here in Senegal.

I will also make frequent visits back to Kedougou and Pondala over the next year to complete the projects I have begun there. The latrine project is on hold right now for the rainy season. Farmers spend the majority of each day in their fields growing food for the next year, and so don’t have time to dig holes. We’ll pick up again in January when the harvest is in. Thus far, we have thirteen latrines completed, and another twenty-one to go.

Project Irrigation Initiation is still about $5000 short of its goal - $8766. Work cannot begin until ALL of the money is in. Hopefully we reach the sum before January, otherwise we won’t have the money in time to dig the wells during the dry season and the project will have to be abandoned. Look to my blog next week for an opportunity to help raise money...

Videos, latrines, and irrigation will have to wait; for the next two months I’ll be living in Thies – the city in which I was trained. A new group of fifty-two trainees arrives tomorrow morning and I have been working with our training staff for the past two weeks to plan for their training and make sure that we are prepared for every single session. I will act as a coordinator for the entire group – planning events like their visit to other volunteers – and as an assistant to the Agroforestry technical trainer. I look forward to the opportunity to work with some fresh faces and to pass on some of the knowledge and experience I’ve gained over the past two years.

Once finished with training, I’ll have the opportunity to visit the states once again. Any volunteer that extends for a third year of service gets a free roundtrip ticket to America and a month of vacation. So I’ll hopefully be home in Minnesota from October 24th to December 1st, and intend to visit Modesto, CA (my Dad’s new home), Boston, and New York, with a possible weekend in Chicago. If you live in or near any of those places and want to spend some time together, you know how to reach me (email, duh).


Now, on to the significant farewells I’ve said recently...


Farewell #1

After almost two years of living and working in Pondala, I left a little prematurely in order to arrive in Thies in time to plan for training. It was a strange goodbye. Despite the announcement I made at a village meeting, some of my villagers didn’t know I would be living in Dakar next year, making frequent visits back to the village, and thought I was leaving Senegal for good. So, the morning I left, our conversations went a little like this:
“Boubacar! You can’t leave. Stay!”
“I know! I want to stay with you but my time to leave has come.”
“Ok, but promise that you’ll come back some time to visit!”
“Oh but I will. I’ll be back in about six weeks with my replacement volunteer for a few days to train him or her on the area and introduce everyone.”
“You will? Well then what’s all the fuss about? See you soon. Bye”

And the drama was over. With the exception of my family and the few people who didn’t realize I was staying in the country, few people were very concerned with my departure as they new I’d be back so often for the next year.

But it was still a farewell for me. While I know I’ll be back, I know that as I rode away looking out the back window of the small, junk-yard buss, that I was leaving something behind – something I won’t ever be able to take back. Pondala is no longer mine.

I have had many people come to visit me in Pondala, both friends and family from home and other Peace Corps volunteers. Regardless of how long other volunteers have been in Senegal, or how well they speak Malinké, no one was able to slip seamlessly into my Pondala life. No one has been able to observe the way I interact with my villagers when it’s not a show, no one has been able to observe my typical daily routine, and no one has been able to observe the work I do. All of that is only for me, and I’ve let it go. I won’t ever be able to interact with my villagers honestly or wander aimlessly into a compoud looking for someone to talk to. From now on, I will be always a visitor in Pondala.

But I found it difficult to communicate those ideas to the people of Pondala, and I found that I didn’t feel any desire to. I like my farewell the way it happened. I did not want a big theatrical display of tears and hugs. I wanted to leave out the backdoor without anyone knowing. My friends in Pondala probably think that they’re saving the big goodbye for when I leave for good, but I know that by the time I’m actually returning to the United States permanently, the strong feelings that often lead to such dramatic goodbyes will have faded and I’ll be able to leave quietly without making too many waves.



Farewell #2

In Peace Corps Senegal, we refer to the group of volunteers with which we go through training as our stage, pronounced like the French word, with an ah, like stahj. These are the first people you meet during orientation in the states before you leave, and the people with whom you spend two months in Thies, stumbling through the Senegalese culture and trying to make sense of it. Such a grand mutual challenge creates bonds often much stronger than those created with volunteers from different stages.

As my stage’s two-year contract comes to a close, people have already started to trickle back to the states, some leaving early to begin graduate school. Watching some of my best friends go was difficult. I have relied on them in many different capacities throughout the past two years and feel, to a certain extent, that my support group is being pulled out from underneath me. But despite the knowledge that they’re headed back to ‘the land of milk and honey’ and that I have such a long time left here in ‘the land of uncomfortable transport and unbearable heat,’ I haven’t had second thoughts about my decision to stay, which makes me confident that I have made the right choice and am in the right place. Here’s to a another year...



Farewell #3

A good friend of mine from Boston University, Julie Ann, has been serving with the Peace Corps in Mauritania for the past fourteen months. The political atmosphere there has grown less and less stable after the military coup d’etat about a year ago. Recently, they stopped issuing new visas to American citizens. The Peace Corps program was forced to cancel its new group of volunteers, scheduled to arrive in June, because it couldn’t get them all visas to enter the country. Later, an American was shot and killed in the capital city, Nouakchott, after illegally proselytizing on city streets. Foreigners are free to practice their own religions in Mauritania, but are forbidden by law to try to convert others.

Given those events and other concerns regarding terrorist activity in the country, Peace Corps Washington decided to temporarily remove all volunteers from Mauritania and place them in Senegal, so a team could go into the country and assess the safety situation. So the group of about forty five volunteers spent some time at our training center here in Thies, and as I was here planning the training, I got to spend some time catching up with Julie Ann, which was an unexpected and wonderful treat.

The safety analysis was completed this past weekend and Peace Corps Washington was set to give a decision about whether the volunteers could return to their sites by Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, over the weekend, a suicide bomber attacked in front of the French Embassy in Nouakchott, killing himself and wounding two others. The event was probably the ‘nail in the coffin’ for Peace Corps Mauritania; they were told Monday afternoon that they would not be allowed back into the country. They were given the option of transferring to another country or returning home.

I said goodbye as they moved the group to Dakar Monday morning, before they had heard the news. We knew it would be possible that she would have to leave, but were holding onto the possibility that she would be able to return to her village and we would see each other again soon. I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to leave my village with almost no notice, unable to pack more than what I could carry on my back, unsure if I should be saying my final goodbyes, and then never return.

I’ve heard through the rumor mill that Peace Corps Senegal will be accepting transfers from the Mauritania group. And as Julie Ann speaks Pulaar, the second-most prominent language in Senegal, I’m hoping she is able to come here so she can continue the good work she’s been doing, and, of course, hang out with me a little.

If you want to read more about Julie Ann's experiences, you can read her blog, afrique-in' out, which she updates much more often than I.