Story of a Seneguy

Livin for the City

2010-03-13T04:32:00.000-08:00

Ok ok ok, so I promised more frequent blogs now that I have internet at my fingertips at all times of day... and I made that promise two months ago. It took a departure from Dakar and the crazy pace of life there to have a moment to sit down and write. Let me back up...

Since my last post, I spent my time preparing for an All Volunteer Conference we held in Dakar, traveling to see other projects, and shooting instructional videos.

All Volunteer Conference

Our country director asked a group of about five third-year volunteers and me to organize a two-day conference for every Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal. We also reached out to other West African Peace Corps countries and invited all of them to send as many representatives as they could. At the beginning of February, we had about 180 participants from six different countries. Sessions were offered throughout the day about best practices for twenty different types of peace corps activities. I gave a session titled "Approaches to Multimedia as a Tool for Counterpart and PCV Education," that had a pretty good turnout.

On the second day of the conference, we had an applied technology fair with volunteers explaining different types of machines that can be made with locally available materials to make life easier here (like a solar fruit drier made from oil barrels). Then we offered field demonstrations on urban gardening and agroforestry techniques, held a seminar on grant writing, and had a national meeting for our gender and development organization, SeneGAD.

I think the conference was a success, overall. I videotaped the whole thing, but haven't had a chance to put together a feature yet. For now, click here to see the page of our website with all the details: West Africa Peace Corps Volunteer Conference, Sharing Best Practices from the Field

Velingara Malaria Prevention Campaign

I also had the opportunity to do some traveling to observe and document mosquito net distributions in Saraya and Velingara (a department of Kolda). Let me back up...

Almost a year ago Ashtun Kutcher challenged CNN to a race to one million Twitter followers, and said that he would buy 10,000 mosquito nets if he won. The challenge spread, Oprah, P-Diddy and some others got involved, CNN matched the offer, and suddenly $500,000 was donated to Malaria No More. Peace Corps Senegal applied for some nets, citing our success in smaller scale distributions.

80,000 mosquito nets arrived in Senegal this winter, 7,000 headed to Saraya (the department I lived in) to finish the distribution we did there last summer and the remainder to Velingara, which is also in southern Senegal, to give the entire health district - 230,000 people - universal coverage.*

In January, Malaria No More's Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Smith, the mosquito net company's marketing director, Lisa Goldman, and a professional photographer, Maggie Hallahan came to document the Saraya distribution. I was lucky enough to travel with them for about four days, helping them as a translator as they took their photos, and assisting Maggie as a producer in the field and logging all the photos she took afterward. To see a slideshow of some of the photos she took, look here: Malaria No More slide show.

To see the page on the Peace Corps Kedougou website about the Saraya distribution, click here.

In February, the PC/Senegal Country Director, Chris Hedrick, and I traveled to Velingara to document the first few days of the distribution there. Once completed, the Health District of Velingara will be the largest area in the world to have been provided universal mosquito net coverage. I put together a short video feature and, having recently been designated as the PC/Senegal webmaster, created a page about the distribution for our website: Velingara Malaria Prevention Campaign.

Given the scale of this distribution, it is receiving some international attention. Anderson Cooper 360's producer has been writing about it on his blog. Click here to read what he has to say about it: Lifesaving Tweets: Malaria nets distributed in Senegal

* Universal coverage means a net over every bed in a community. We work with local health relays to do a census of every household, counting the number of beds, and the number of mosquito nets already hanging. We use those numbers to calculate the need of each household and distribute accordingly.

Instructional Videos

While visiting an Agroforestry volunteer to show a visitor the work he had done, I videotaped his giving a brief description of how he pruned a particular species of tree into a live fence. I edited it into a short, 90-second tutorial with a low production value. The country director loved it and we've run with the idea.

Over the next year we hope to create as many instructional videos as possible (he says he wants 100). They will be short tutorials - maybe ten seconds to two minutes long - that demonstrate efficiently, without any frills, specific techniques and technologies.

The videos will be compressed and made into video podcasts for volunteers to take into the field with them on their iPods. They'll also be dubbed over in local languages. The idea is that before demonstrating something like composting, a volunteer can watch the instructional video in English to regain confidence on the topic, and then watch in a local language to secure his confidence in the necessary vocabulary. He can even show the local-language versions to his counterparts on his iPod if he needs to clear something up.

I plan to spend much of my time over the next putting as many of these together as I can. Here's an example of the pilot one I did.

Videographe

2010-01-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!!!

I have just finished the first month of my third year in Senegal. After a wonderful thirty-seven days in the United States - visiting home in Minnesota, Dad in Modesto and San Francisco, and friends in Boston and New York City - I was back in Senegal by the beginning of December.

I've had a busy month already:
I participated in a Permagardening workshop led by a specialist in town from Tanzania.
I attended a Food Security Conference hosted in Dakar, including representatives from every Peace Corps country in Africa.
I accompanied an environmental specialist from Peace Corps Madagascar to view some agroforestry sites near the city of Kaolack.

As I plan to do for the next year, I had my camera rolling throughout everything. I've begun editing the material and getting it ready to go online. Most of the videos I create will be posted to our website, http://pcsenegal.org via our YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/pcsenegaladmin. If you're interested in what I'm creating, check out either of those sites.

Now I'm adjusting to living in Dakar, which is a significant change from the village, and learning how to live alone. I make my bed every morning and do my dishes after every meal. Any bets on how long that'll last? Mom?

My blog has become more difficult to write. I've tried for two years, even if sporadically, to provide you all with insight into Senegalese culture and the ways in which I find it interesting and different from what's familiar to me. However, the more accustomed I become to my surroundings here, the more difficult it is to notice those differences. It's hard to identify topics that are blog-worthy any more.

So on this issue I am calling for help. Send me your questions. What do you want to know about Senegal? What do you want to know about my life here? What scares you about Africa the most? What's the biggest mystery about the third world to you?

Coming soon in my next blog... More detailed descriptions of the work I hope to do during the next year, and a virtual tour of my sweet new apartment.

BENEFIT CONCERT!!!

2009-08-27T04:49:00.000-07:00

A benefit concert, featuring four of the Twin Cities' best bands, will be held at O'Gara's Garage in St. Paul Minnesota on

September 3rd at 7:00 p.m.

My good friend, Bryce Jasper, has taken the lead on this project and has organized an incredible concert. I encourage you all to go out and enjoy the great music and, at the same time, help a worthy cause: installing irrigation systems for four hard-working farmers.

The Bands
Allison Scott - 8:00 p.m.
GB Leighton - 9:15 p.m.
Doctor Salty - 10:30 p.m.
Soul Tree - 11:45 p.m.

Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and music should go until around 1:00 a.m.
$5 at the door - all proceeds go to Project Irrigation Initiation

I'd like to thank all of the bands participating for donating their time and music to the Project Irrigation Initiation. Thank you to everyone who has helped with organization, I know an enormous amount of work has already gone into planning the show. Thank you to O'Gara's for hosting, and thank you in advance to every one who attends!

Click here for directions

Also, if you'd like to help in a quieter way, please Endorse my project on Africa Rural Connect. If Project Irrigation Initiation receives the most votes this month, it will be awarded $3000. Please note, if you don't receive a confirmation email from the site, it may have arrived in your 'Spam' or 'Junk Mail' folder.

Click here to vote!

Updates and Farewells

2009-08-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Project Irrigation Initiation

2009-04-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

As promised, I come in search of funding. I have written a grant proposal named Project Irrigation Initiation, which has been approved by the Peace Corps. For this type of project, the community must contribute 25%, and I need to find the other 75% from other sources. This is where you come in:

I need to raise $8766 before we can begin work on the project.

Sina Danfakha, Diakhaba

Executive Summary
The project will help four farmers from different villages install year-round water sources and effective irrigation systems in their fields, allowing them to improve food security and increase annual income. They will serve as demonstration farmers for the entire greater community

Context
For those of you who don’t know, I have been spending my last eighteen months serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kedougou, which is in the southeastern corner of Senegal. Despite the fact that Kedougou receives more annual rainfall than the rest of the country, it remains one of the poorest regions due to untapped water sources.

El Hadj Fawa Mady Danfakha, Sanela

The Project
I want to install irrigation systems with four different farmers to allow them to irrigate their trees and garden year round. Currently, the unreliability of their water source and the labor hours of hauling the water to their workspace restrict the amount of work the four farmers can do.

With the help of a professional digger, we will install wells in three of the orchards – one farmer already has a well – and then we will build small water towers adjacent to the wells, with a locally made hand pump to get the water into the towers. One hundred meters of hose will allow the farmers to water even the most distant trees, and to garden in multiple sites.

I have already identified these farmers as the best and most motivated in their respective villages, and they are excited to work as extension agents themselves, helping other people in their villages establish orchards and gardens, using their own as a demonstration plot.

The farmers themselves will be contributing 10% of the project costs in cash, which is a monstrous sum for them. The other 15% will come in the form of an in-kind contribution. They will be providing four men to work for fifteen days digging the wells. They will be collecting and transporting all the sand and gravel needed for the cement work on the wells. They will be constructing the tables to hold the basins for the water tables with locally found materials.

Donations for this project will help establish four highly productive fields, rich in both fruit trees and vegetable gardening, allowing local farmers to not only increase their food security, but also to being to meet a rising demand for produce from international mining companies that have begun work in the area. Donations will provide year-round water sources and irrigation systems for farmers who have shown their ability to benefit from them, and who can inspire and help farmers also interested in increasing their productivity and moving beyond subsistence farming.

Cissé Mady Singoura, Faraba

Donating
Many people have been asking me how they can help with the work I’ve been doing over here, and this is the perfect opportunity. It is a well-planned project that will make a difference for years to come.

I know the economic downturn has left many people strapped for cash, but please donate if you are able and help significantly improve the quality of life in these four communities. Please help me in spreading the word to as many people as possible by contacting any organizations or community groups that may be interested. Ask your book clubs (Mom), your co-workers, or your softball teams to help. I will be taking photos throughout the entire project and posting them to my blog so you can see your donations in action.

All donations (tax deductible!) can be made easily online at the link below:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-118

Thank you in advance to everyone that helps with this.

Sadio Mady Keita, Pondala

Tragedy

2009-02-04T06:03:00.000-08:00

Before I begin this rather morbid blog post, I must once again apologize, for it's been almost three months since my last post about election night. I have been busy in those three months, hosting my friend Adam for two weeks here in Senegal, then a two-week trip home to Minnesota, then two weeks back in Senegal with my little sister. The two trips here were incredible, allowing me to see parts of Senegal that I hadn't yet visited, and share familiar parts with people close to me. The trip home was everything I had hoped it would be. It was filled with good food, good beer, and good friends. I can't wait to see you all again.

Hit and Run

On Friday, January 9th I witnessed a terrible accident in Thies. Following is what I wrote about it later that night. Another volunteer, Mandi, and my younger sister Nikki were also present, but here is the account from my perspective. A little background info first though: A talibé is a child who has been sent by his family to study at koranic school. The community is expected to support these kids by giving them food as they walk around when not attending class. So a young boy with a small bucket to beg with is a common sight in Senegal.

As Mandi, Nikki and I walked from Pamanda’s (a local bar) to the chicken dibby restaurant, we heard a loud, crunching crash. Our heads snapped to the right immediately beside us to see a talibé rolling away from the bumper of the taxi that had just run into him.

I instinctively ran straight to him, but quickly realized that I was ill-equipped to handle the situation. I got down and held the boys head still in my hands, not knowing what else to do. He lay on his side in the fetal position, writhing, screaming, and sobbing in pain.

Within moments Mandi came running over and said, “Andy, what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what to do! Call Etienne.”

So while she called Etienne and the fire service, I remained crouched next to the boy clutching his head as a crowd began to gather. Some diverted traffic, a few called for an ambulance, others tried to help me – although we were all clueless – and the rest simply watched. The cab driver had quickly disappeared after the accident.

When another man offered to hold the boys head, I looked down at my hands that I thought had been soaked by the boys tears, but realized they were covered in blood from the back of his head. I tried to tell the others but few people spoke French (I’m helpless in Wolof) and no one seemed to care.

Finally an ambulance arrived and a man jumped out, picked up the boy in his arms, jumped back into the vehicle and drove away.

A bystander saw the blood on my hands and pulled me away to his shop to wash my hands. I returned to the sidewalk as some boys threw dirt on the small pool of blood. A man asked the surrounding talibé questions about who the boy was. But the scene quickly dissipated as business in Thiès continued as usual. The three of us stood and stared for a few silent minutes, with nothing but the lumps in our throats as evidence of the horrific scene we had just witnessed.

I’ve never felt so helpless. I’ve gone through basic first aid training a few times in my life, but I felt completely unprepared and unable to deal with the situation. I know Peace Corps prefers that we don’t get directly involved in administering first aid, and I’m sure they have their reasons. But as a friend reminded me, it’s important to think about how I personally want to react to situations like these, and to make sure I'm prepared with the knowledge and skills I deem necessary to take the appropriate action.

Funeral of Yaya Camara

Somehow, this is the first funeral I’ve attended in Pondala, despite my fifteen months of living here.

We got word shortly after lunch, while I was napping in my new hammock, that Yaya Camara, the old man with the thick glasses had passed away less than an hour ago. I asked how he died and they just said that he had been sick for a long time.

Diangoba, my host father, and I went to the Camara family compound, where a small crowd had gathered, and we greeted everyone to pay our respects and then left for a few hours while the funeral rites were prepared.

When we returned, a large crowd of women had gathered just outside the gate of the compound under a shade structure. Some of them cried. The men were sitting under a shade structure and along the fence just inside the compound while a few of them dressed the body.

They had constructed a makeshift shade structure out of sheets of straw. In the shade and out of sight, they wrapped the body in white cloth, then a sheet of woven reeds. They brought in a bamboo stretcher and tied the body to it. Then they dismantled the shade structure and brought the body out in front of the group. Each person who wanted to took his turn to speak about Yaya and say a prayer. When everyone had finished the men stood up and all faced the body, shoulder-to-shoulder in three rows, took off their sandals, and said a prayer.

Then all the men walked to the cemetery on the outskirts of the village. The same men who dressed the body carried, and a few carried buckets of water on their heads.

When we arrived at the cemetery a narrow grave had already been dug. As we walked many men had grabbed leafy branches from the bushed on the path, which they threw into a pile next to the grave.

We all squatted on our haunches and more prayers were said before the body was untied from the stretcher and placed in the grave sideways, wrapped only in the white cloth. As some men put the leafy branches and a few long logs on top of the body, others mixed the water into the loose earth next to the grave.

The wet dirt was put on first, and then the rest of the dry dirt was mounded on top, filling the hot air with hanging dust that filled my nostrils and lungs. Another prayer was said and we returned to the Camara compound.

The women remained in the same shade structure. All were solemn, some were glassy-eyed, others still sobbed.

The men crowded back into the compound onto benches and plastic mats. Dego (a sweet rice paste) and kola nuts were distributed to everyone, a final prayer was said, and the service was over. Village life resumed its normal pace.

Thoughts

Both of these stories are of brief tragedies that passed without any lasting effect on most of the people in the respective communities. A small child was hit by a car, a large crowd gather, he was whisked away, and the crowd dissipated and the traffic jam thinned, all within fifteen minutes. Yaya Camara woke up on February 1st alive, but by the time Pondala went to sleep that night, he had become a memory.

The rate at which life continues to flow here despite tragedy has had two effects on me. At times it puts me at peace, able to acknowledge a balance in the world and the part that tragedy plays in it. But sometimes it frightens me.

Malinke Lesson of the Day

It's been a while since we've had a Malinké lesson, but here's a proverb I recently learned:

"Inin kilin kilin kunin." (Pronounce, eeneen, keeleen, keeleen, kooneen).

It means, "May we wake up one by one." They say it at the end of the night. The idea is that if there's some catastrophe during the night, we'll all wake up at the same time, but if everything goes peacefully, we'll all wake up one by one to the dawn (or the rooster).

Guinea

2008-11-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Halloween 2008

I’m somewhere in the mountains of Guinea. After buying our tickets two days ago, Steve, Jordan and I waited by the phone until this morning to hear that the car was full and ready to depart Kedougou. We were lucky enough to get cabin seats as we were the first to buy tickets. A last minute phone call telling of a family tragedy kept Steve in Kedougou, so Jordan and I were on our own.

They put two grown men up front with the driver, then Jordan and me in the back seat with two women and a medium child, then they crammed ten people into the tiny bed of the truck on small wooden benches.
At times we had to get out and walk because the road was too steep and rocky for the truck to carry us up. Once we had to stop and dig underneath the truck because we were stuck in a muddy ditch. We stopped for dinner in a village along the road, where we bought rice, sauce, and two large pieces of chicken for $1.80 each. The mountain views are spectacular. We often go up and down small hills, but spend much time on plateaus surrounded by peaks.

The girl sitting next to me in the cab is named Aissatou Diallo. At first she barely reacted when Jordan and I joked with her in Kedougou – a little cold. But now she puts her arm around me a we drive, not for affection, but for necessity.

We stopped because it started to rain so the driver dropped tarps around the cage over the bed so the people in the back wouldn’t get wet, then we pressed on. With the windows closed up front and the engine working hard, the cabin was sweltering. But as the raid faded and the front windows dropped, a lively breeze revived us. But Jordan has a fever so he got the chills and had to put on a sweatshirt.

At about 11:00 we stopped to let the other lady from the cab out (not my snuggle buddy), and the driver decided we’d stop for the night. I pled, “But you told us we’d drive through the night and make it by tomorrow morning, we’ve been waiting for three days to get into this country!” “I know I told you that,” he said, “But I’m tired.” Tough to argue with that. So he showed us to a hut with a couple stick beds and we drank a little Jameson and went to bed. We continue at sun-up.

November 3, 2008

We made it to Labe at about noon the next day, just in time to find people waking up from the Peace Corps Halloween party the night before. We decided to spend a few days with the Guinean volunteers in Labe, which is a large town tucked into the mountains. Despite its size and amenities, Labe has no running water. The streets are hilly and crowded and often smell as bad as Senegalese market streets. The Guinean volunteers were more than welcoming and showed us a great time. They seemed to be down to earth, down to work, and down to party.

This morning we left and got a ride in a Peace Corps vehicle to Doucki (resist the chuckle... OK go ahead). The village of Doucki is home to a campement run by a guy named Hassan who speaks five languages, one of them English. He’s a great guide and has multiple hikes with names like ‘Wet and Wild’ and ‘Chutes and Ladders.’ Today, shortly after arriving, we went to ‘Indian Jones World.’ A hike through narrow passageways formed by cliffs and ravines took us into the rainforest. We swung from vines and climbed to the tops of rocks.

Trees on top of the plateau 100 feet higher sent roots down the rock faces to drink water from the pools below. At the end we swam in a pool fed by a stream whose source disappeared into a cave. We watched monkeys fly from tree to tree and gazed by at the rocky maze to wrap it up.

Jordan and I have decided to spend the rest of our trip here at the campement. We have a limited amount of time and don’t want to waste it on the road. And transportation in this country is... testing. With the recent drop in oil costs, the Guinean government announced that they would be dropping the state-controlled price of gasoline, but not yet. So stations are refusing to buy from their suppliers until the price drops, causing a sever shortage of petrol for the cars that go from town to town. Here’s hoping we make it back to Kedougou.

Election Day, 2008

I woke up early but kept on dozing because at this time of year in the Guinean mountains, mornings are chilly: a rare treat. At about 8:30 we set off on our day’s hike with Jill, our British travel writer companion, and Abdoul-Rahim, Hassan’s brother and our guide for the day.

The hike began with a walk through meadows of dew-drenched grass, greeting Pulaar women harvesting fonio as we went. The wet fields made for treacherous terrain at times as we slipt and sled down the gently hills, but we arrived at the edge of the canyon unscathed nonetheless. We then traced a waterfall down the face of the cliff, many times crossing the shallow water on slick stepping stones. We stopped to rest at ‘Bob Marley’ Stage,’ a flat rocky lookout over the Green Grand Canyon. The view was breath-taking, but the moisture in the air formed a haze that dulled the colors and contours of the other side. So the faraway mountains and peaks faded into the sky like blurring clouds.
We pressed on, down into the valley where we trekked through fields of rice and sorghum, greeting more Pulaars along the way. We stopped to eat some freshly cultivated rice and sauce with some men who sat with rifle in had to protect their fields from animals and received the common gift of fresh peanuts from a woman who sat straight-spined shelling them on the ground.

We began our ascent gradually at first, as we entered the woods. We came to a falling river with a stick bridge across it and stopped on a rocky platform to rest and eat lunch. Our guide had been carrying a big pot of beans and squash in a backpack ince morning. Before we ate, we swam in the many pools created by the boulders that the water massaged as it swept by.

After a swim and a meal, we set out to seek our task of the day. The cliff whose foot we had tiptoed along for a few hours pinched at one point to form a narrow gorge, home to a segmented waterfall that fed our playground of pools.

For over a hundred years, villagers have built ladders to ascent the steepest part by lashing vertical logs together with bark. There are eight ladders in all, and the constantly trickling water from above keeps them less than easy to grip.Finally we arrived at the top, after stopping to drink some water that had filtered through hundreds of feet of rock. We found ourselves back on gently rolling meadows, but on the other side of our departure village. So we walked along the ridge, through a few more villages and stopped to lie in the hammocks in the home of our guide’s cousin.

We made it home in time for a quick bucket bath and a meal of fonio and mafé tiga (peanut sauce). The owner of the campement brought out a shortwave radio so we could turn on the BBC World Service. We realized everything would be speculative until deep into the night, so exhausted, we hit the hay quite literally; our mattresses are stuffed with straw.

November 5, 2008. 6:00 a.m.

Jill, Jordan, and I strain our ears to listen past the high-pitched whine coming from the radio. We hear that Barack Obama has won, and in a clip of his acceptance speech, he references “those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world.” We cheered. Some corners are better left forgotten.

NetLife Experiences and Crafting some Grafting

2008-09-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

NetLife Experiences

To the other side of a mountain and back... and nothing to show for it but a pair of busted Birkenstocks.

Months ago, an NGO named NetLife, founded by a former Kedougou PCV currently in med school, contacted a volunteer from our region in hopes of a partnership. He had lots of mosquito nets to distribute, but given his rigorous med school schedule was unable to come to Senegal to actually give them away. Enter Peace Corps volunteers.

As part of our regional plan, we decided to concentrate on one Rural Community (a political division consisting of a dozen or so villages) per year, and to get nets over every bed in that rural community. This year we decided to focus on Fongolimbi. Given its location on top of a mountain, Fongolimbi is often overlooked by other NGOs because it’s so difficult to access.

The volunteer that NetLife approached, Robyn, had formerly been stationed in Fongolimbi and so took the lead. With the help of the local health infrastructure she organized the local health relays to do surveys to find out how many beds were in the community, who was sleeping in them, and how many of them had mosquito nets over them.

Given that information, she ordered the nets from NetLife – 4,000 in all – got them all the way down here from Dakar in a truck, and then organized a car to take the appropriate amount to each village.

Then, for an entire week, in shifts of a few days, the volunteers of Kedougou went from village to village distributing the nets to individuals. We would set up in one person’s compound in the village, and then call the heads of family in one by one. They had to present an identification card for each person who was to receive a net. We then removed each net from the packaging and wrote the person’s name, village, and the year on each net. The idea was to given the person a sense of ownership over the net and prevent it from being resold in the market.

A team of two, working basically dawn until sometimes after dusk, could cover two villages in a day. I was on the last shift with Nik, another volunteer from our region. We were stationed in the capital of the Rural Community, the town of Fongolimbi, and stayed there each night and ate there, going out to the different villages during the day.

On the way back from our first distribution a storm hit. While riding along the plateau on top of the mountain, the rain began to fall. At first we began riding really fast, trying to beat the rain, but as it fell harder and harder we slowly accepted our soaking fate. The shift in frame-of-mind allowed us to really enjoy the ride and do some ‘real’ mountain biking – taking huge puddles and streams head on. Then the lightening came. At first the distant grumbles provided a soothing soundtrack. But as they grew nearer we grew more anxious. Finally a bolt struck so close that the delay between the light and the pound didn’t even allow me enough time to turn my head. Luckily, we arrived back in town unscathed, but a boy in the town hadn’t been so lucky. He had been struck by lightening and received burns all over his body.

Two days later, Nik and I were given an adventurous assignment: Samba Galou. No Peace Corps volunteer had ever been to Samba Galou. It was on the back side of the first ridge of the mountain range that runs along the border of Senegal and Guinea. Completely inaccessible by car, we had to send the nets to the village on the backs of four bikes ridden by some boys from the village. And the village was scarcely accessible by bike. After spending the night in a village on top of the mountain, a guide took Nik and me down the other side on a rocky path, or a collection of rocks.

When we inquired about a gentle bellow we heard in the distance, he told us there was a waterfall a little ways off the path. So we left our bikes and wandered off into the woods. My Birkenstock sandals had slowly been deteriorating. The hike up the front side of the mountain that was too steep and rocky for a bike had been hard on them. And biking through all of the rain finally did them in. As I tried to hike toward the waterfall my feet kept slipping off to the side. In fear of rolling my ankle miles from any help and in the middle of the mountains, I left my sandals with the bikes and sought the waterfall barefoot. We emerged on top of a cliff, overlooking a majestic, rolling waterfall with multiple layers. We pulled out Nik’s camera to take a picture of it, but the battery had died. Content with the idea that we were possibly the only Americans ever to have seen these falls, we moved on to our task at hand.

After having distributed the nets in Samba Galou, the entire project was officially finished. I still didn’t have any functioning shoes though, and so gave a village boy $2 and asked him to find me some sandals. Forty five minutes later he returned with a new white pair of plastic sandals. So we headed back to Kedougou, but not by retracing our steps through Fongolimbi. We heard that there was a direct path from the village to Kedougou over the mountain. So we asked the villagers about it and they confirmed that indeed, a path did exist. They showed us to the beginning of it, and said, “When you see a bamboo fence, go right, not left. It should take you about three hours.”

With the detailed directions stowed safely in our heads, we embarked. The images on the ride that ensued will be forever sketched in my memory, but given the lifeless camera, I won’t be able to share them with any of you. A cave with roots that came through the rocky ceiling to form a prison cell. Bamboo that had grown so tall on each side of the path that it arched to form a tunnel. A path through a marsh that was under two inches of water for thirty minutes. The great, broad Gambia river valley and swimming in the fast-flowing water. A village in a mountain pass painted in a rainbow of green. We came upon an unexpected fork in the road (well after the bamboo fence) and didn’t know which way to go. So we rested and ate a well-deserved feast of crackers, beef jerkey, and sardines. As luck would have it, a man came along while we ate and told us the correct path to take.

We finally came into Kedougou from the “other” side, crossing the river in a small boat, and arriving at the regional house with nothing but a tale and - as mentioned before - a busted pair of Birkestocks.

Crafting some Grafting

Below is the summary of a training session I did about grafting that I wrote for the Peace Corps Senegal website. To remind you as briefly as possible, grafting is a technique through which orchard owners cut a branch from a tree with good fruit and paste it onto another they have just planted to ensure that the new tree will bear equally good fruit in the future.

A mango grafting training session for Malinké speaking farmers in the department of Kedougou was organized by PCVs Amy Truong and Andy Jondahl on August 13, 2008 . The training was funded with money from the Small Project Assistance (SPA) program fund.

Eighteen of the area’s most motivated tree farmers attended the training, which was hosted by Sina Danfakha. Danfakha is a dynamic farmer from a village 30km from Kedougou with a great example of a young orchard employing many of the agroforestry techniques promoted by the Peace Corps.

Demba Samoura, a local grafting expert, conducted the training. He conducted the training in Malinké (his first language) allowing the participating farmers to understand in depth the benefits and techniques of grafting.

It began in Danfakha’s compound with each farmer introducing himself and explaining what work he is doing with trees. Next, Samoura gave a short lecture about grafting and showed the farmers how to prepare plastic for the wrapping. Then he did a demonstration graft on a mango branch, carefully explaining each step of the process. Then every farmer practiced a graft on his own. When Samoura had approved each farmer’s work, they all went down to Danfakha’s orchard and grafted six mango trees. Later, everyone returned to Danfakha’s compound for a big lunch and group picture.

The training was a great success, particularly because the volunteers played such a minor role. They did the organizational work leading up to the training, but did very little during the actual event.

The Middle of the Earth, Bumpin' Basketball, and God Bless America

2008-07-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Middle of the Earth

My life consists of more than baboons, but my experiences with the noisy creatures seem to be some of the most story-worthy. Forgive me if you’re bored of the baboons, I promise I’ll switch to some different subject matter for the next entry.

My village lacks power, running water, and cell phone reception, and is at least 16 hours by car from the capital city – as far as Senegal is concerned it is off the “beaten track.” However, I recently realized that it is relatively accessible.

I heard about a village from a former Peace Corps volunteer with some mature mango trees that fruit a lot because a couple forward-thinking farmers planted them twenty years ago. Many of the villagers in the surrounding area go to this village by bike to buy the inexpensive mangoes and then sell them in their own villages for a profit.

One day in April, I went to this village with a friend of mine who wanted to buy some of the mangoes. After leaving the main road that my village is on, we biked 17 km into the woods on a bike path that you couldn’t drive a car down. We occasionally had to dismount our bikes to traverse steep, dry, riverbeds, that are now undoubtedly filled with water after the rains we’ve had lately.

After an hour and a half of biking in the bush, I found two family compounds, and a total population of sixteen people. Each of the men in the village had a shotgun strapped over his back and a string of cartridges around his waist. While it appeared strange at the time, strange has become the norm for me and I quickly forgot it - until I heard a shot. Moments later one of the man dragged a baboon by the tail to the center of the mango grove where we had been eating freshly fallen mangoes with the other villagers. Not wanting the baboon to go to waste, they skinned it and hung it up to dry to be eaten later.

A couple hours later everyone started shushing as one man ran off. This time I watched him take a knee, take aim, and fire at the second baboon of the day. With more than enough meat for the day, and no means of refrigeration, they gave the second baboon to the dogs for a meal.

While I was initially put off by the seemingly senseless killing, they explained to me that the mango trees are the village’s main source of income, and that if the baboons were left un-hunted, they would eat the only revenue the village had for the entire year. For the two months that the trees are fruiting, they are on 24-hour patrol, with somebody even sleeping in the orchard.

Even though strange has become the norm in my life, my day spent out in this village was surreal. I didn’t feel as if I was at the end of the world, more so somewhere in the middle in a completely forgotten pocket of it. It’s illegal to shoot baboons in Senegal, or even to have an unlicensed firearm, but being in this village I was reminded that sometimes laws simply don’t apply. To be in a truly lawless, and yet peaceful and functioning micro society, was actually a reassuring – even if a violent – experience.

Bumpin' Basketball

Kedougou has a basketball court in town funded by a U.N. project years ago. The court gets almost daily use thanks to a Brazilian missionary who runs a pickup game every evening and who also conducts workshops and lessons.

One of our volunteers played basketball in college and started participating in the pickup games and convinced a few other volunteers to join, so we strapped on our tennis shoes and went down there, even if a little apprehensive to walk onto a court where we didn’t know anyone. The Senegalese guys were not only great basketball players, but also incredibly nice guys. After a few of us had played with them regularly, they suggested the idea of a Peace Corps vs. Senegala full court game. Thinking it would be a fun, casual game, we agreed, and set a date to make sure everyone was in town.

On the date in question we all set out from the regional house bound for the basketball court and found fifty or more people congregated at the court. The court regulars had chosen their most loyal ten to play on the team against us, and each of them had chipped in to pay for a sound system and DJ to blast popular hip-hop music while we played. They had mesh jerseys ready for us – they played in red and we in green. A referee was ready complete with whistle and we played four ten-minute quarters.

The game was entirely light-hearted and jovial, despite the fact that they dominated us. We all shared some cold hibiscus juice at the end and took some great group photos. The crowd that had gathered to watch the game cheered equally for every basket. They rushed onto the court at the end, most of them putting their cell phones in our face, pretending they were microphones, and interviewed us about the game. One even complained to the Brazilian missionary, who had organized the entire game, that the Senegalese national media hadn’t been invited; they’re promised for the rematch.

God Bless America

As a volunteer in Senegal I am constantly striving to better understand the culture and customs here, and to assimilate seamlessly into their traditions. However, sometimes I need to act and feel American to preserve my sanity, and the 4th of July offered me the perfect opportunity.

The Kedougou regional house offers a perfect setting for a 4th of July party, because it’s a mostly outdoor compound, lending itself to the vibe of a typical American barbeque. So we invite every volunteer in Senegal - and any other Americans we run into - to come to Kedougou for a big party every year.

This year we had about eighty people, including ourselves, for a crazy day filled with horseshoes, flip cut, beirut, foosball, a professional sound-system and DJ and even a man-sized piñata. We had tiki torches lining the walkway. We had a large party tent set up for food and another for dancing.
We cut up, marinated, and grilled an entire pig, topped with two large bottles of BBQ sauce that conveniently arrived in a care package days before the party. We made 15 liters of potato salad, 15 liters of coleslaw, and over 20 liters of pasta salad. We baked loaves of bread and cut up veggies to dip in the homemade hummus, baba ganoush (sp?), and a dill yoghurt sauce that we made. We had M&M cookies, peanut butter cookies, brownies, and mango cobbler for dessert.

While we may not have had the spectacular fireworks display so commonly associated with our Independence Day, the party certainly felt like our own slice of American apple pie, even if the pie served was made from mangoes.

Drummers, Inc. and Misguided Adventures

2008-05-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

Given that my past couple posts have been largely about the work I'm doing, I decided to focus this one on the Senegalese culture and my place observing it and participating in it. The first entry is a transcription of a journal entry I wrote on January 4th, but decided some people might find interesting, and the second story is a description of some of the things I've experienced over the past few days. Enjoy!

Drummers, Inc. January 4, 2008

On January 3rd I wrote that I had heard drums playing from across the village while I lay in bed, but hadn't had the motivation to get up and explore.

They say patience is a virtue. I'm back at the writing block tonight because I need to write about what I saw. After putting down the pen as Pops arrived at the fire, more and more people came out of the dark and we had our regular, peanut-cracking bonfire party. They asked if I had heard the drums the night before, which I obviously had. Pops told me that they'd be playing again tonight and that we could go over there later on. Soooo I stuck around past my normal 9:00 hut-time and talked with Sira a little. Just as I began to wonder if I had misunderstood Pops, a few faint bass beats drifted across the chilly village into our compound.

Pops and I went over there together - he with the hood of his windbreaker up, I in a small white T-shirt. The drums, which had picked up in pace and volume, were all the way on the other side of the village. Somebody explained to me that these two drummers go from village to village playing as their form of livelihood.

We entered the compound to find a group made exclusively of women - save the two men drumming - and a small group of young boys. They stood in a circle clapping and singing while one or two women at a time jumped into the middle to dance.

I felt lost between cultures. The women were mostly attired in traditional dresses of bright colors and intricate patterns with shauls to match, and they sang Malinke songs. One woman would sing a line and the others would reply (but not repeat) in song. To that extent I found myself in a cliché African drum circle. But they weren't lit by fire or torch light, the spot light that illuminated the middle dancers came in the form a flash light held by Pops, powered by D batteries.

The drummers themselves were a cultural paradox. They played nearly impossible African beats on hand-made drums, but wore knock-off Golce&Gabbana jeans and lit up a cigarette in the middle of a song.

The display of rhythmic independence and adapation amazed me. I couldn't find a common beat between the singing and the playing but there must have been because both drummers and singers continued without falter in their own rhythms despite each other. Perhaps there was a common rhythm and my sluggish ear couldn't hear it.

Sometimes a dancer would march up into the face of the drummers and almost challenge them to a battle. Herein lies the rhythmic adaptation. Once in a while the drummers would change beats unexpectedly (at least to me) but one beat later the dancer would be right with them. I was slightly impressed by that, but not surprised. Good dancers can always follow the music. My surprise came when a dancer spit her own change of beat right back at the drummers, who both adapted - perfectly in sync - as the entire package continued through the night.

The group of little boys behaved as any group of boys does at a dance. I think this is universal: They would dare each other to go dance until one finally got up the courage to jump in the middle, where he would shake his body for three beats before running out embarrassed.

Senegalese dancing seems to be all about the footwork. They will try to fool you with large and distracting arm movements, but I think those are for balance. The real dancing goes on at ground level, where the black bare feet chatter and stomp, occasionally kicking up behind to reveal their pale, calloused underside in a small cloud of dust.

As I write this I can still hear the unrelenting beat and unison singing. Pondala can be so romantic.

Misguided Adventures

An area known as 'Basari Country' lies about 80km west of Kedougou. It is named for the minority ethnic group, the Basaris, who inhabit it. The Basari people are comprised mostly of animists, meaning their religion is based more around nature and the soul of every object rather than one supreme being (I think). About 25% of Basaris are Christian converts.

Every year in May the Basaris hold an elaborate initiation festival, complete with masks, ritualistic dancing, and one-on-one combat. I had seen pictures of the ceremony in books and it definitely seemed like everything you'd hope for from a tribal African ceremony. They keep the date of the ceremony a secret until a few weeks before, but it's always a Sunday in May. Our sources told us this year that it would be May 10th and 11th.

A few friends and I decided to bike out to the Basari festival and to visit a few villages along the way to make a small vacation out of it. First we visited my friend Jordan in his village and looked at some of the work he did. We spent the night there and then went to my friend Amy's old village (she had to change her site after a few months of service because the water situation in this village was so dire).

In the second village we decided to put together a skit in Malinke for the village people about the importance of bug net usage in the prevention of malaria. Many of the women in the village came after dinner and really got into it and laughed at all the jokes. When the skit was finished we sarcastically told the women that they had to put together a piece of theater for us. However, they took us seriously and threw something together in moments: a skit, complete with props, about women going out fishing with nets and the difficulty of catching fish. After the skits, we sang for each other in English and Malinke. Later the young girls in the village played a game for us similar to Red Rover that involved a beautiful call-and-response song. The game quickly evolved into a dance circle similar to the one I described in my journal entry, but this time there were no drums, only clapping and singing, and six rhythmically incapable Americans were trying to participate.

One of the other volunteers asked me to beat box a little to provide some music for the dancing. So we told them all to stop clapping, because now it was time for some "musiko Americain." The little girls loved it and danced away. Later, one of the grown women came and asked me to give her another beat because she really liked dancing to the American music, so we got it going again and it quickly turned into a dance party with everyone dancing at the same time. Nobody had their cameras out for that night, but I'm content to have these memories saved in my head. Sometimes cameras change everything.

The next night we biked to Salemata, the big town near the Basari initiation festival village, brining our biking total to about 85km. Upon arrival, we saw a driver that we knew and asked him if he knew of anywhere that we could pay to wash up a little, as we were disgusting from the ride. "Of course not," he said, "My friends house is right over here, you can wash up for free there." So we sat down in this stranger's house and washed and sat in the shade and ate mangoes. We asked his friend if there were a small restaurant around where we could buy lunch, "There is," he said, "But they don't know how to cook. My wife is a much better cook. We'll cook for you." So we bought a bunch of food and had an amazing Senegalese meal for lunch.

After lunch we locked all of our bikes up in one of his huts, because the path up to the village is so narrow you can't even push a bike along it. The hike is about 6km through mountains. Despite the lack of rain over the past 5 months, some of the views were absolutely breath-taking. I'll be sure to go back in the rainy season. The driver's friend walked with us for a while to show us the path, and then went back to Salemata. Suddenly we found ourselves hiking through the African mountains, miles away from cell phone reception, on the assumption that we had been shown the right direction.

The path split a couple times and we luckily found a couple random people in the mountains that we could ask for directions. As time dragged on and we couldn't hear the chanting of the ceremony, we grew suspicious that we were on the right track. We found a young boy and asked him if he knew where Eshelo was. "Are you going to the campement there (collection of huts that makes up a rustic hotel)?"

"Eventually we want to go there to sleep tonight. But right now we want to go straight to the ceremony."

"That's impossible, the ceremony is next weekend."

So after a three-day trip and and a hike over a mountain, we learned that our sources had given us the wrong date. Discouraged, but not defeated, we followed the boy to the village, where we found our friends who had decided not to bike and took a car (up a different, much wider but much longer path). Now we numbered sixteen. The villagers confirmed that we had come on the wrong weekend, but invited us to drink home-made palm wine with them. We accepted the invitation, brought our luggage to the campement and returned to the village center with empty water bottles to be filled from the buckets wine. I have never consumed a drop of alcohol with a villager because almost all Malinkes, Wolofs, and Pulaars are Muslim and so are forbidden to drink.

We integrated ourselves well into the group of villagers and talked to them in our respective languages. While we were a long way from Malinke country, I did find a few men who spoke at least enough to communicate. We saw a man smoking home-grown tabacco from a pipe he had wittled and asked if he had any more to sell. He brought one up and told us we could buy it for about a dollar. Two of us were interested in it and started to play paper-rock-scissors for who got to buy it. When the man realized what was happening he immediately offered his own pipe for sale, so we both left happy.

As the sun disappeared and the villagers worked up an appetite, they started to disperse to their homes for dinner, and we returned to the campement, where the cook had prepared a large chicken dinner. The next day the owner of the campement gave us a small information session about the Basari festival, in lieu of actually observing the festival itself. Later we hiked down the mountain where a car waited to drive us and our bikes down to Kedougou.

While I'm disappointed that we missed the festival, and definitely don't have time to return this weekend, I will remember the weekend for the rest of my life. Tourists go out to watch the initation every year, but I'm assuming few ever go out just to socialize with the villagers. The journey there proved to be a much more interesting destination - one without an information session to accompany it.

Malinke Lesson of the Day

The woman who asked me to beat box again told me she liked it by saying, "Boubacar la sigo diyata!" 'A diyata' is a versatile phrase used in Malinke to say that you like something. It can be used for food, cities, or even songs. We really don't have a direct traslation in English.

Beeware of the Well and What's Work

2008-04-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

Beeware of the Well

We have officially entered the hot-dry season in Senegal, with temperatures over 100 degrees during the day, and having had no substantial rain since early November. As we get deeper into the hot season, before the rains come in late May, most small streams and ponds have been drying up, leaving the Gambia river as the only local above-ground water source.

It never occured to me before arriving, but bees need water to make honey, and as all of the natural above-ground sources disappear in the woods, the little yellow and black soldiers have been coming into the villages on water missions. They swarm around our well and our hand pump to get any water that is spilled on the ground, and even to drink from the buckets as they are pulled out of the well.

The women walk calmly into the swarm and throw their bucket down into the well, pulling out load after load. Having faced my fear of baboons, I thought bees would be easy. So I centered my zen and walked right into the swarm. Just as I finished filling my bucket I was stung on the wrist. I thought I just hadn't found my peace with the bees.

The next day I tried again, taking a deep breath and trying to "be one with the bees." But this time I somehow managed to infuriate a particular bee who started taking nose dives at my face. I started dancing around, swatting him away and swinging the bucket at him, but finally gave up and fled. The angry bee hadn't finished with me, though, and gave chase, swinging around in front of me and stinging me right smack on my upper lip. While a painful experience for me, my ballet with the bee provided a good piece of entertainment for the villagers watching.

The following morning I was determined to outwit the bees. The girl who served in my village before me said she had left some bee-keeping equipment in my hut. So before heading out to pull my water I suited up in full bee-keeping garb, complete with a mask and heavy leather gloves. I expected the villagers to fall over laughing at how ridiculous I looked, but while some giggled, most had an unexpected response: "Boubacar, that is a really nice suit."

What's Work

Last Friday, I had the busiest day of my Peace Corps service.

In anticipation of the rains in May or June, my first busy AgFo work season has arrived. In order to give trees a decent chance of survival, many species need to be started in a nursery for a few months so they get a chance to become seedlings before outplanting them to their permanent homes. We try to outplant our trees at the beginning of the rainy season so they can be watered regularly for the first few months after outplanting, so we are beginning our nurseries (or pepinieres, as we refer to them) right now.

So last Friday, I had to go to four villages to arrange days to come out and do pepiniere training sessions. I left my village in the morning, and then spent my day going to the farmers in the villages and asking them to prepare the locally available materials needed (manure, sand, ash). In the evening I went to the biggest town near me - not Kedougou but a smaller town named Saraya - to have a meeting with the director of the local radio station there. This Saturday night another Malinke speaking volunteer and I will be hosting a one-hour show, completely in Malinke, about how to construct a tree nursery, while also playing music of our choice.

Finally, after 120 kilometers on the road, I made my way back to my village, exhausted and barely able to move, but feeling satisfied with a productive day of work.

Tales from the Borodula and Motivation Nation

2008-03-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

Malinke Lesson of the Day

The Malinke Lesson had to come first today so you'd understand my first title. I think I've already mentioned that I jog some mornings and that some people have a hard time grasping the concept and always want to know where I'm going. The concept that I would run without a destination doesn't register. So they've compromised, and decided that I'm going to the "running place" - borodula. People often ask me, "Did you go to the borodula today?"

Tales from the Borodula

A few weeks ago I left my hut for my morning jog like any other day, and followed my normal course. About ten minutes down the road I saw some animals up in the distance. "Are those baboons?" I asked myself, "I haven't seen any baboons in a while, awesome!"

As I approached and their images became more clear, I verified that they were, indeed, a group of about seven or eight baboons. Usually, when I approach baboons in the road, whether on bike or foot, they run into the woods when I get close. But these baboons just sat and stared until I was uncomfortably close. I considered turning back to avoid conflict, but decided I couldn't live through two years of baboon fear in Africa, so stayed the course.

Just before we would have met, they ran into the woods. I stopped where they ran in to peer into the woods and get a better look. I expected to see their backs as they ran away, but instead found a group of twenty or thirty standing about fifteen meters deep in the trees staring right back at me and barking ( a baboon sign of aggression). One stood up on his hind legs and measured - at the very least - as tall as I.

With no interest in a baboon brawl, I continued on my jog, hoping to leave them behind. But instead they remained about fifteen meters deep and ran next to me. Contrary to monkeys, baboons make a lot of noise moving through the bush, so I was all too aware of their presence as they crashed from tree to tree and along the ground. Finally a big truck came from the other direction and scared them all deeper into the woods and I could finish my run in peace - almost.

I got to my turn-around point and headed back to my village. As I ran past the same place that I had seen the baboons before I crossed my fingers that they wouldn't be back. Luckily, they weren't in the road waiting for me, but when I was about 100 meters past the point, three of the biggest came out into the road to stand on their hinds and bark, as if to say "And don't come back!"

Motivation Nation

Peace Corps Senegal received a new Country Director (CD) almost exactly as I arrived, and the entire program has been in dramatic transition ever since. Volunteers who have been here longer constantly remind me of how lucky I am to be here with such a motivated adminstration and tell me they envy my position and the work I'll be able to do.

A point the new CD emphasizes more than any other is cross-sector collaboration. A common criticism of Peace Corps is the lack of communication within the organization and a consequential lack of effect on our communitites. Peace Corps Senegal has six sectors of volunteers: Agroforestry Extension, Sustainable Agriculture, Urban Agriculture, Health, Environmental Education, and Small Enterprise Development. In the past Agroforestry volunteers and Small Entrerprise Development volunteers conducted their projects independently of each other, with no infrastructure in place to share ideas or offer each other help. Each volunteer had his/her own agenda and did what he/she could to help his/her own village (sorry for all the slashes in that sentence - just trying to live the gender equality I preach).

The new CD wants to not only encourage, but actively enable cross-sector collaboration through an overhaul of the current system. He has chosen the volunteers in Kedougou as his pilot group, partially because we're one of the smallest, most manageable regions, and partially because he is a former Kedougou volunteer and has no shame describing himself as "Kedougoucentric."

On Friday all the volunteers from Kedougou went to Dindefello, a near-by village with a small, rustic hotel and a beautiful waterfall, to draft a Regional Strategy and six-month action plan. We used the Millenium Development Goals created by the U.N. as a launch board and created a realistic, practical strategy for the development of Kedougou until the year 2015. We addressed the broad areas of Malaria, Nutrition, Food Availability Extension, Economic Growth, Water Availability / Santitation, and Protection of Natural Resources. We discussed not only the work that we can do, but also work that other NGOs can do, with a plan for how we can all collaborate toward a common goal. From that, we created a six-month action plan for the volunteers of Kedougou,with specific projects and concrete, quantifiable goals, and a point-person for each project.

It was a weekend of long hours and tedious work (on Saturday we worked from 8 a.m. until 11:30 p.m.) but we finished with a document of which we can be proud. The energy of our group has drastically changed and we are more excited than ever to attack our goals with vigor and hold each other responsible for the good work we are committed to do. As I looked around the group, I realized that never in my life have I been surrounded by a group of individuals that I found more intimadating and humbling. However, they are simultaneously so supprotive and encouraging that those forces will serve the positive roll of helping me find the initiative to get projects off the ground. I really am in the Motivation Nation.

Senegal Nice, Life Takes VISA, and WAIST

2008-02-22T05:08:00.000-08:00

I apologize for my blog neglect over the past month, but be assured that I used the time productively to learn new things about Agroforestry, take a short course in Pulaar (another language spoken in my area), socialize with my friends from training, and play some "serious" softball - details to come.

Now that my training is finished and I have "entered my community" from here on out it's just hard work. I get started as soon as I arrive in my village and won't stop until I get home in two years (except for my daily nap, of course).

Senegal Nice

While the Senegalese people can sometimes be aggressive and demanding for cadeaux (gifts), I have had two experiences over the past two weeks that attest to their honesty and hospitality.

Story #1: On my way from Kedougou to Thies for my In Service Training, I stopped to spend the night at the Peace Corps transit house in the city of Kaolack. My friend and I got a cab from where our car dropped us off to the house with all of our luggage. We unloaded everything at the house, but as the cab pulled away, I realized that I had left my day bag - with my iPod - in the back seat. My attempt to flag him down failed so I trekked back to the garage (car hub) and tried to find him again. After an hour of waiting around and talking to the other cabbies without any sign of the driver, I gave up and went back to the house.

At about 3:00 a.m. I woke up to the ringing door bell. Somebody shouted that a man was at the door for me. Groggy-eyed, I stumbled to the front of the house where the cabby stood and said, "I got all the way to my village, 35km away, and found your bag. I remembered your saying in the car that you were leaving first thing in the morning so I drove back to make sure you had all of your things."

Everything was still in the bag. I thanked the man and gave him whatever cash I had in my pocket. He humbly accepted the small tip and drove away.

Story #2: A couple weeks ago, thirteen of my friends and I took a quick one-night trip to the beach in Mbour, which is close to Thies. We arranged to have a house that would fit twenty people for the night. Upon arrival, though, we met the man with whom we had arranged lodging who showed us to the bedroom he had prepared - with a single bed. After a brief argument and a dramatic walkout, we had nowhere to stay. A few of us went to the grocery store to find supplies for the night while another group tried to find somewhere for us to stay. They wandered from hotel to hotel, asking about prices, but everything was either full or too expensive.

Then a man approached two members of our group and said, "Are you looking for somewhere to stay tonight?"

"Yes we are. We lost the house we had planned on staying in."

"Well you can stay in my house. I'll only charge you 100 dollars and I won't even be there, just my two nephews."

"100 dollars is way too much, I won't even consider it for more than 60."

"Deal."

So, while it seemed a little shady, we checked it out and were pleasantly surprised. The man had a brand new house that was completely gated in. In the backyard was a pool, and the back gate opened directly onto a sandy beach of the Atlantic. It seemed too good to be true. We went inside to a tastefully-designed living room and kitchen with cushy couches, a TV, and original pieces of artwork on the walls. Upstairs, a row of bench seats with pads bordered a hexagonal loft that opened to a westward-facing balcony. We put our beer in his fridge, cooked dinner in his kitchen, and had a happy hour as we watched the sunset over the ocean. Meanwhile, he went to Dakar for the evening, leaving us to the charge of his two nephews. One of his nephews was a professional djembé instructor (African drum) and gave a couple of us a lesson.

We spent the next day swimming, lying around, and throwing a football on the beach until we had to leave in the evening to make it back for training the next day. It amazed me that this man left 14 young Americans in his house to party and enjoy it, and for about 4 dollars a head.

Life Takes VISA

You may have seen a recent ad campaign from Visa with the slogan, Whatever you want to do in life, life takes VISA. I was going through a magazine with a teenager in my village, showing him the pictures, explaining who people were, etc., when we came across one of these ads. It had a picture of a vending machine with different countries' flags in the place of candy bars and chips. I translated the slogan to the kid and explained the concept of the ad. He's a smart kid who goes to school and so could grasp the idea, but he had one question: "What's Visa?"

WAIST

After completing my three weeks of In Service Training I went directly to the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (WAIST). Over 500 expats and Peace Corps volunteers from all over West Africa participate in the WAIST tournament, with both a competitive league and a social league. Festivities center around the American club, where players can swim, drink beer, and eat hot dogs between games. At night, parties and dances are planned, with a banquet and ball on the last night. It's the only time of the year that we get the chance to truly feel American. Americans living in Dakar put up the PCVs in homestays. I stayed with the Director of USAID with four other Senegal volunteers and five Gambian volunteers. He was incredibly welcoming and opened his home to us, even when we asked him to open it at 5:00 in the morning.

My team consisted of the volunteers from the Kedougou region and from our neighboring Tamba region. Historically, our team has not taken "winning" the tournament seriously, and has instead had some serious fun. Most teams wear T-shirts for jerseys. Our jersey theme this year was short jean shorts / red-neck. I can't help but say that we looked amazing (see pic at right), and even won our first game in four years. We rotated in new players every two innings to make sure everyone got a chance to play, bended the rules as often as possible, had a tunnel gauntlet for the opposing team at the end of every game, and even had a spontaneous dance party on second base in the middle of a game.

One volunteer referred to the day of our last game as "one of the best 37 days of my life," while others said it was the most fun they had ever had. In any case, we created memories that I will never lose. Only 358 days til next year's tournament...

Wolof Lesson of the Day

Wolof is the dominant language in Senegal. That said, with its speakers' exposure to western culture, a few English words and many French words have managed to sneak into every-day vernacular, particularly in the cities.

A phrase that embodies this melange of languages is "Dafa nice quoi!"

Dafa is a Wolof word meaning that is in English. Quoi meaning what that the French use at the end of a sentence to accentuate it. You all know nice. So a three-word phrase spoken every day in the urban areas of Senegal and understood by almost all of the urban inhabitants contains three different languages. I like that.

This entry will be the last you hear from me for a couple weeks. I'm headed out to the village until our regional retreat (all Kedougou volunteers get together to discuss our goals for the region) and an AgFo summit (all AgFo volunteers from Senegal get together to discuss strategies etc.) that are conveniently back-to-back.

Keep commenting, y'all've been slackin lately. And if I don't know you, definitely comment, I'm curious to see what kind of people are reading this.

Peace and Love,

Andy

How to Make a Fishball, No Better Way..., and Dangerous Culinary Endeavors

2008-01-25T09:42:00.000-08:00

Quick Update

I have officially completed my "Community Entry" phase and so will be headed back to Thies for more training tomorrow morning. Although I'll have plenty of internet access there, I'll be incredibly busy with training, so this could be the last entry for a few weeks. That's why this one is so long.

How to Make a Fishball

- Boil some peanuts, let them cool, and shell them. This should be done ahead of time, preferably the day before.
- Put the peanuts in a massive mortar and pound them with a princely pestal. These are generally hand made from wood. You can hold the pestal with one hand and alternate if you wish, but two hands provide more power. While the pestal is on the upswing, briefly let go and clap to add flare.
- Sift the peanuts into a bowl and pound the larger parts again until all is well ground into a powder. Remove and set aside.
- Place one chopped onion and salt into mortar and pound into a paste.
- Add one tray of small, catfish-looking things and pound until of goop consistency, gradually adding the ground peanuts and some millet flour (also make earlier by pounding in a similar fashion to the peanuts).
- Mixture is finished when you can't see any recognizable part of a fish. Remove mixture, roll into balls. Fry in oil.
- Eat and enjoy. Bone crunching is optional, but I prefer to remove them as I find them (left hand only).

These are made on the special occasion that we have fish around, and served with our normal meal. The bones really bothered me at first, but I got used to them, and have even started crunching some of the smaller bones. I figure the calcium won't hurt.

No Better Way...

I went to visit a farmer in his orchard last week that the girl I had replaced had worked extensively with. When I arrived in his village, the kids told me he was out at his orchard, which is 3km from the village, so they showed me the way. He was excited to see me and show me around his orchard and then gave me a stool to sit on in the shade. Then we shared a snack: There is no better way to eat a Papaya than moments after a Senegalese farmer has picked it from his orchard and cut it up with a handmade knife.

The African Cup of Nations began group play this week, and a TV and generator miraculously appeared in my village. I had no idea they were there. There is no better way to watch an African international soccer game than crowded with 60 people into the same small hut, sharing a bamboo stool with three other guys, listening to the gentle purr of a generator.

Like many kids, I used to look out the window of airplanes and imagine myself jumping from cloud to cloud, in awe of their majesty.
The chief cash crop in my village is cotton. The farmers sow it, pick it, and transport it 4 km from there fields completely by hand. The only buyer in the area is a semi-private company named Sodefitex. This week, the Sodefitex truck showed up to pick up all the cotton my village had produced. All the men from the village worked from dawn to dusk loading ton after ton of cotton into the tall truck trailer, which was open on top. As half of the men carried the cotton to the truck and threw it on top, the other half stood on top and walked around on the cotton to pack it down. I helped out on top. Then came break time: There is no better way to take a nap than on a truck load of cotton. My imagination has been put to rest. I have slept on a cloud.

Dangerous Culinary Endeavors

When I was in training in Thies in October, my family bought and killed a goat for the family to eat. The meat lasted us for a couple of nights, but got progressively less familiar with each meal. On the third night I sat down to a bowl of rice with a goats face in the middle, smiling up at me. My host brothers tore whatever they could of the meat off of the skeleton, and put some pieces in front of me. I'm fairly confident I tried eye for the first time, but I really can't be sure.

A goat's face, however, did not trip my stomach. I readily ate everything they put in front of me in Thies. The dangerous endeavor came a couple months later in Kolda at Christmas time.

My friend Jordan and I prepared a meal for the other people in the regional house we were staying in. I prepared the salad, with grated carrots, chipped cucumbers, and sliced tomatoes. Those who know me well are likely aware that although I will cook with tomatoes, I gag at their very smell and have only eaten them raw twice in my life. As I sliced them for the salad I explained to Jordan that they were the only food in the world I refused to eat. He asked me if it was a texture thing or the taste, and I replied that it was neither, that it was more likely a psychological issue. Suddenly, something came over me and I felt empowered. "Listen to me!" I cried, "I will eat the face off a goat but cower in the presence of a small red fruit!" (Or is it a vegetable?). With that I popped a slice into my mouth, chewed it, and even pretended to enjoy it. Yes mom, I now eat tomatoes. Aren't you proud?

Malinke Lesson of the Day

Malinke only has one word that means both "if" and "when": nin. So "nin inaata Thies" means both "When you arrive in Thies" and "If you arrive in Thies." I think the reason behind this is that they put everything in God's hands, and so nothing is certain until it has happened.

This is Andy signing off, I'll try to write a quick post in Thies, otherwise, you'll hear from me at the end of Febuary, if and when I come back to Kedougou.

Love Andy

Wandering Minds and Men, and Wacky Tabaski

2007-12-26T06:08:00.000-08:00

Before we get into today's main events, I have a few quick notes.

Probably won't do a full Christmas blog entry. I went to a different city in southern Senegal and stayed at a house with a full kitchen. Ten other volunteers were there and we spent four days cooking amazing food (all of it from scratch, of course), and relaxing and watching movies. I may write a blog entry at some point about transportation in this country though, because it's not exactly luxurious, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
People were asking me for more direction on what kind of food I would enjoy. I put a list up as a permanent feature and can edit it as I please. It's all stuff that could eat all day, so don't worry if you're duplicating what someone else has already sent.
My senior journalism project was published on the BU website as part of a student showcase. If you're interested in seeing what I learned to do in college, check out the link on the right above my list.

Wandering Minds and Men

A couple weeks ago I was walking back to my hut having just pulled a couple buckets of water, when a man that I didn't recognize crossed my path. The first thing that struck me as strange about the man was that he didn't greet me. Senegalese people, especially village people, greet evreybody, so when he stared straight ahead and continued on his course I grew slightly suspicious. The next thing to strike me as strange about the man was that he was completely naked.

A few months ago, I may have dropped the buckets of water in shock and told the story for days, but I'm growing accustomed to seeing things I find odd and I simply can't get hung up on them because it happens too often. And nobody seemed to be making a big deal out of it, so I just continued on to my hut to take a bucket shower and didn't really think about it for the rest of the day.

Later that night, though, one of my friends in the village saw me and said, "Did you see that crazy guy in the village today? He was completely naked!!! Everyone was afraid and stayed in their compounds, peeking through the fence. Except for one woman who tried to give him clothes but he freaked out and refused!"

I am reminded from time to time that Africa isn't an entirely different world. No matter where you are, a man walking naked down the road is weird.

Wacky Tabaski

Tabaski is the most important holiday in the Muslim calendar, falling on a different day every year because it's dictated by the lunar calendar. This year we celebrated on December 21st.

The day began as normal with our normal porridge and wearing our normal clothes, but then the fun began.

At about 10:00 a.m. the villagers all put on their nicest Grand Boubous and went to the field to pray (our mosque isn't big enough to fit everyone). I stayed behind in the compound playing with the kids and helping my sisters cook the biggest and best meal I've had so far.

When the adults came back from praying I changed into my Grand Boubou too and at about 12:30 we ate lunch.

First dish: findo (a grain) served with a tomato-based sauce that had vermicelli, onions, eggplant, and cabbage. Then fish balls, which have the same basic characteristics of a meatball, except, of course, for the meat.

Second dish: Millet served with large slices of egg-plant on top and some sort of a bird. It wasn't a chicken, but some sort of poultry they had managed to catch in the wild, maybe Guinea Fowl? I never saw it alive.

Third dish: Rice with a peanut sauce and beef. The whole village got together and killed a cow, splitting the cost and the meat. My family got two kilos.

There were more dishes that I didn't eat. My dad warned me that the stomach can handle three dishes without incident, but four dishes would be too much to bear. I had no reason to doubt him and no desire to test him.

After lunch my dad, brother, and I went to a different family's house where some other Dunfaxas live and spent a couple hours just kickin it there. We went back to the house about 3:30 or so where things were pretty quiet so I took a nap and played with the kids a little more.

Once the morning prayers, lunch, and afternoon social scene are all done, Tabaski is pretty much finished. So we had a pretty low-key meal in the evening and then made a fire and sat around that for a while. My dad and I made some rounds in the village visiting some compounds and saying hi to people, and then I hit the hay because I had to make the trek into Kedougou the next day.

Malinke Lesson of the Day

When a baby is born in Malinké culture, it does not receive a name until its baptism a week later. My sister just had a baby and all week we had to call it "Kéékuta" which means "New boy" because he didn't have a name. ps. African babies are tiiiiiny.

Ok, so that's all I'm writing for now. I have lots of little ideas for stories that I keep in my book, but I don't want to overwhelm anybody, so we'll leave it there for now.

Keep the letters, emails, and blog comments comin'

Love Boubs

Grandma

2007-12-26T05:57:00.000-08:00

My grandmother, Leona Jondahl, died a couple weeks ago. I considered leaving it out of my blog, but decided to write about her as a tribute. I wrote a letter that my older sister Michelle read at the service:

Dear Leona, Lee, Grannyma, Mrs. Donald E. Jondahl, Onie, Mrs. J, Mom,

Your multitude of names can only hint at the amount of people - and groups of people - with whom you intertwined your life, your efforts, your talents, and your love. But I can only speak for one, so let me begin again.

Dear Grandma,

I want to thank you.

I want to thank you for daring to be an old-fashioned Grandma in the face of the 21st century. For giving me the opportunity to escape to a countryside oasis when the suburban desert just got too hot, and for fighting to your last breath to keep that Big Red Barn as a fixture in the Metro landscape. I know you would never allow me to thank you without giving credit to your partner in farm, so Grandpa, if you're listening, props. Your farm has always been a point of pride and source of bragging rights for me: "Hey. You know that farm by the Carlson Towers and Park Nicollet with the Big Red Barn and all those sheep. Yeah, that's my Grandma's farm."

I want to thank you for making Christmas cookies just the way I like them. Gingerbread cookies with the secret ingredient - duck fat - that makes them sound so gross but taste so good. The spritzers that I could feast on for days without pause or hesitation, or concern for the abdominal consequences.

I want to thank you for fruit jerkey. I am one of few lucky children in the world who has had the dream-fulfilling experience of licking clean a bowl twice his size.

Mostly I want to thank you for your independence, your fearlessness, and your downright stubborness. Although we've found it frustrating at times that things had to be done 'Grandma's Way,' it's that very insistence that nobody else can tell you what's best for your life that I have come to admire in you. As I reflect on our relationship, I see that there might be a little more 'Grandma' in me than I had thought. It's the Grandma in me that led me to a college 1400 miles away, even though Grandma probably wanted me to stay close to home. It's the Grandma in me that led me to transfer 3000 miles to another school, even though everyone told me I was crazy, and then transfer back even though everyone told me I was getting "a little ridiculous."

And it's the Grandma in me that ultimately gave me the courage to depart for another continent, no matter how much I would miss home and home would miss me.

I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you in your final moments. Family has always been your top priority so it breaks my heart that I couldn't be by your side. But I will forever cherish our final phone conversation, and remember how lucky I am that I got to tell you one last time that I love you, and to hear you say it back.

I love you, Grandma.

Animals That May Eat Me, and Qu'est-ce que Agroforestry?

2007-12-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

I would first like to write about some of the wildlife that I've been coming across out here in the bush, and then I will try to explain what my Peace Corps work will include for the next two years, because those are two subjects about which I've been getting a lot of questions. The work description is a little long and technical, so my feelings won't be hurt if you don't read it, but I wanted to have some sort of reference up for people who asked.

Animals

Many of the animals that I've seen have actually been in the road, either during my morning jog or while biking between Kedougou or my neighboring villages. On multiple accounts I have seen small monkeys. Usually you see them cross the road well ahead of you, and then hide as you come. But I usually stop where I see them go into the trees and look for them. Without fail, they have only gone about 10 meters into the bush and then stare at you as you go by, sometimes darting away when they realize they've been spotted.

Also while running I saw a warthog up ahead of me, staring me down as I approached. Showing no signs of relinquishing his position, I considered stopping my run short - I have no desire to wrestle a warthog. However, just in time, a big truck came by from the other direction and honked at the hog to get out of the road. Warthogs are stubborn animals and he waited until the last second to run off into the grass, seemingly pondering a game of chicken or even a tusk-on collision with the truck. I may have to put my money on the hog.

While riding in a station wagon back from Tamba today (I had gone to visit the bank), I saw a whole family of baboons cross the road right behind our car. Mother, father, some smaller ones and a baby riding on the mother's back. I expected them to be black, but instead found a muddy brown.

One of the birds I've seen most commonly in Senegal is the hornbill, ala The Lion King. They're slightly smaller and skinnier than I imagined, but beautiful nonetheless.

At night I've learned to live in harmony with the small gecko-like lizzards that wander in and out of my hut and hang out on the walls. I assume they're eating bugs, and they never bother me, so I generally just leave them be.

Agroforestry

During my two months in Thies I received training not only in my local language, but also in Agroforestry techniques, and I'll return for more 'AgFo' training in a couple months. "But Andy, what is Agroforestry?" I hear you cry, "What exactly will you be doing."

I don't have the text book definition with me, but basically Agroforestry is the use of trees to increase the production from a given field, and the use of trees for many other purposes.

For example, trees can be planted within a field for multiple reasons: to protect the soil from water erosion, to return nitrogen to the soil to keep it fertile, to drop their leaves to the ground which decompose and provide nutrients to the soil, etc. Often time trees are planted around the border of a field in a "live fence" to keep livestock and or people out (these are usually thick-growing, thorny species" or as a wind break, which are generally tall growing trees that serve to protect the soil from wind erosion, and the crops and or fruit trees from wind damage (a well-protected mango tree will produce more and better-quality fruit).

Which brings me to my next two points. As an AgFo volunteer in Senegal, I am to encourage the production of mango and/or cashew orchards, as these two trees are well-suited to the Senegalese climate. In addition, for trees that have been outplanted in the past couple years, I will show farmers how to "graft" trees, which is basically cutting a branch off of one variety of mango tree and pasting it onto another, by wrapping it with some plastic. The result is a tree with two different genetic maku-ups, and genetic diversity also increases production (this technique is not exclusive to mango trees, but that is the most commonly grafted tree in Senegal).

I will promote the use of all these trees by building a community tree nursery, which I will place in my villages school yard. It will be well-protected there, is close to a water source, and is a good way to get the kids involved and interested in the techniques. In addition, I will give training sessions to farmers and encourage them to build their own tree nurseries (the idea of Peace Corps is sustainable development. We want our efforts to continue to produce results after we leave).

I will travel to other villages in the area as well to promote AgFo practices, particularly grafting techniques.

In addition to my AgFo work, I am also encouraged by the Peace Corps to undertake secondary projects, not necessarily related to AgFo. For example, I plan to help the women with a permanent community garden near a water source so they can continue to produce vegetables (even if only for their own consumption) throughout the dry season. This week, I will be going to a neighboring village with two other volunteers to give a training session on how to build a mud stove (mud stoves are being promoted all over Senegal. They can be produced using locally found free or inexpensive materials, and conserve fuel and cooking rates, allowing the cooks (almost always women) more time to rest - which they deserve - or more time to devote to other productive activities.

So that's AgFo in a nutshell. Hope this makes my life and purpose here a little more clear. Coming into this, I had practically no experience with Agroforestry, and still feel a little clueless, but am using my countless free hours in the village these days to read the AgFo textbook, and manual, and the fruit tree manual, etc. to try to put myself in a position to help these people.

Keep up the love, and thanks for all your comments. Don't be afraid to comment on every blog. It really is encouraging to know that people are reading it.

And continue to send email and letters. When I am around internet I should have a little more time now than I have up until now, because I won't be on such a structured schedule.

Love Boubs

Reading List

2007-12-01T08:18:00.000-08:00

I'm going to post the books I've been reading for a couple reasons: a) I don't want anyone to pay to send me something I've already read, b) To give you conversation fodder for emails if you've already read them, c) I want to show off how much I'm reading, because I've already read more than I did in four years of college.

I'll keep this entry updated, so if you're about to send something, check this first.

Hells Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
The World is Flat, by Thomas Freidman
Paris in Mind, ed. Jennifer Lee
Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins
Bastard Out Of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins
Jazz, by Toni Morrisson
Dubliners, by James Joyce (in the middle of)
The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift (in the middle of)
On the Road, by Jack Karouac
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Beloved, by Toni Morisson
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

I'm not on som H.S.T. fix, I just ran out of books in the village and the guy near me had it. Also, note, when I arrived in my village two and a half weeks ago, I was still reading the world is flat. For those of you who know my reading habbits, five books in three weeks hasn't happened since my books had pictures on every page.

Look for the new entry on Weds or so.

Love Boubs

Email Address

2007-12-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

Real blog is coming in a couple days, but in the meantime...

If anyone is having trouble commenting on my blog, as many people seem to be, feel free to email me at andrew.jondahl@gmail.com instead.

Hi my name is Andy and I live in a hut

2007-11-23T03:08:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T08:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

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.

Dakar Ain't So Far

2007-10-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

I had another great weekend out of town. We need to fit them in while we can, because I will be going off to my site in less than two weeks! I'll be sending out some sort of mass email with more info about my site, but they recommend we don't post that in public places for fear of identity theft.

That said, I spent this weekend in Dakar, which is the capital city of Senegal and probably the biggest in West Africa. I hadn't really seen it before because we flew in at 4:30 a.m. and left quickly on a bus for Thies. I had been to African "cities" before and so had my doubts about how big Dakar would actually be, but it is every bit a big, urban, modern city as most cities I've been to in Europe or the States. Or at least close.

Now a short break away... a name I've been hearing as a walk or bike down the street since I arrived is 'Toubab' (too-bob). It's actually a nickname for anyone who's French, but it's generally applied to any white face and the kids love to shout it out as you go by. It's not necessarily derogatory, the Senegalese just love to point out their physical differences (it's not taboo hear to point out and laugh about the fact that someone is a different weight or race than you - and noone takes it personally).

Anyway, for everything in Senegal, especially in Dakar where they have more white tourists there is a 'Toubab price). So when I arrived via public transportation in Dakar and had to find a cab to our hotel, the cabs were offered to us at 3000 cfa each (about 6 dollars). This may seem cheap but by Senegalese standards it's outlandish. After some arguing in French and some dramatic storming off I managed to talk them down to 700 each, which is a more appropriate price. The entire weekend pretty much went like this, having to negotiate prices.

My favorite part of the weekend was a meal we ate at 'Point des Almadies) which is the Western most tip of Africa. We ate at a restaurant right on the beach, so last Sunday night I was about as close to you all as I could possibly be while in Senegal. The food was incredibly fresh. You order family style, so we had a platter (we're talking heaped up lunch tray style) of clams come out first, then a platter of raw sea urchins that were still moving - you just have to scoop the goop out of the middle. Then a platter of the biggest muscles I had ever seen. Then, came the skewers of grilled seafood: tuna, lotte (a white fish), huuuuge pieces of calamari, and king prawns. All of this food cost a total of 26 dollars, split among 7 people. So we each paid less than four dollars for the whole thing. Not bad.

Anyway, I have a busy week ahead of me, two men that i'll be working with in my village are in town for a three day workshop, so i'm really excited.

More letters emails and posts!

Love Boubs (another nickname for Boubacar)

The Beach and Fritz

2007-10-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

First, to answer Dan's questions: I rode my Peace Corps-issued mountain bike. Not all of the gears really work, but it does the job fine. And to be fair, it was 25 miles each way, so 50 total, not 44.

Also, a lot of people seem to want pics. I just found this internet cafe that has comps with usb ports (no Tom Friedman, the world is not flat) so hopefully I'll be able to get some up soon.

Ok, so this weekendall of the people I'm training with went to the beach. For 15 dollars each, I rented a huge 5-bedroom house directly on the beach, had round trip transportation from the training center, and bought enough food to make a spagetti dinner, and to have coffee, tea and bread in the morning, plus snacks. Not a bad deal.

So we took off Sturday right after our morning classes and piled into an "alhum" which is a minibus type of thing that they cram 35 people into and a sept place, which is a station wagon that they put 7 people plus driver into. All luggage obviously goes on the roof. And often the assistant of the alhum driver hangs off the back.

We had a great day of swimming in the atlantic, which is a perfect temp here, and thena fun dinner and a night full of dancing and more swimming. People crammed into beds, slept on couches, and one group even through a couple mattresses on the beach and slept out there.

Sunday was followed by more swimming and small groups making their way to local restaurants for lunch. The local vendors heard we were there and so stoppe by the house with fresh fruit and fatayas, which are little pastrythings stuffed with a little fish and stopped with some sauteed onions. Delicious.

At 5:00 we all had to pack up and go home, although I'm sure i'll make it back there at some point. It was a nice little slice of heaven.

My best friend of the trip was Fritz. Sitting on the beach on saturday a stray dog approached the group I was with. He was light brown and had scars all over his body from countless fights. I obviously started to pet him and he became the trip mascott (although some people refused to touch him). I named him Fritz and he sat down behind me. A couple minutes later I started singing whatever song was in my head and Fritz started singing along with a great howl. I was in love.

He followed us back up to the house and hungout onthe balcony all night, and then he slept ne"xt to the group on the beach and growled and barked at any stranger that walked by. Then on Sunday he followed us all the way to the restaurant and sat under the table while we ate, thenfollowed us back to the house to hang out until we left. He came running every time i whistled. I sadly had to leave him behind, but he will be missed. Good ol' Fritz.

Joxonke lesson of the day: The word for "bike" - nege suwo - directly translated, is "metal horse."

Love you all, and love your comments, don't be shy,

Love Bouba

Adventures and Korite

2007-10-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

First a couple of clarifications:
1) The man who passed away was not my language trainer. There were two trainers at the site named Lamine. Lamine the Safety and Security Trainer was the one involved in the accident. Lamine the language trainer is the one I spend every waking moment with.
2) The crazy beach weekend is this coming weekend, not the past.

That said, I did take a bike ride to the coast to check out our beach site last weekend. The beach is 25 miles from Dakar, and on Sunday two other guys and I decided to do the round trip in a day. So we packed a couple backpacks full of water and cliff bars and set out at 7 a.m. to beat the sun. The ride there was pretty easy, mostly downhill cause we were going toward the ocean. Got there around 9 - no prob Bob. We spent the day on the beach, got some good lunch of fresh seafood and rice. Had a beer, devoured a watermelon, talked to a few locals and left around 3:00 to be sure we'd be home by dusk.

The ride home was not so easy. Mostly uphill, into a headwind, and after already biking 25 miles and a day in the sun. Ouch. It took us about 3 and a half hours, almost double the trip there. Uncle Dan, if you're reading this, I hope you're proud. It's about 44 miles farther than I had ever biked in a day (the second farthest being the 6-mile loop at French park that I did when I was 7).

Last weekend was also Korite on Saturday. Korite is the holiday marking the end of the month of fasting in Islam, known as Ramadan.

African hospitality continues to impress me:

One of the customs for Korite is to buy new fabric and have a tailor make you new clothes for the day. Then you spend the day with your family eating well, going to the mosque to pray, and visitng other familes to apologize for any wrong-doing you may have done to them and to generally wish them peace.

A friend of mine, whose family I had met once, heard that the majority of my family had gone out of town for the holiday to visit their extended family and so immediately invited me to spend it with them (it turned out that at least 10 people were still at my house, because my family is larger than I can keep track of). Anyway, my friend's family had also heard that I hadn't had the chance to have any clothes made for Korite. When I walked her home on Saturday night they handed me some clothes and I gathered that they were lending them to me to wear the next day.

So on the next afternoon I put on the outfit. It is called a Grand Boubou and is the fanciest of Senegalese outfits. A pair of pants and large shirt that reaches almost to the ground made of the same fabric. I visited my friend's family but brought a change of clothes so I could leave the outfit with them. But as I left they chased me to the door and insisted that I take the clothes as a gift.

Basically, a family I had only met once gave me the Senegalese version of a nice suit, just to be nice.

Sorry if this anecdote was too long, let me know if I should be more brief. I'll try to post again soon about thiiiis weekend's Beach Trip with everyone.

Leave comments galore,

Love Andy

Some bad news

2007-10-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Today is a sad day at the Peace Corps Training Center.

Last night, our Safety and Security trainer Lamine was killed in a car accident. He left behind a wife, five children, and dreams of one day working for the United Nations. Classes have been suspended for the day and a memorial service planned for this evening.

We will miss Lamine and keep his family in our thoughts and prayers.

A Brief History of Senegal (as it concerns me)

2007-10-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd fill people in with a little timeline of what's been going on lately.

On September 10th I arrived in Atlanta with 43 other new Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs). We spent two nights at the Sheraton there, doing activites during the day to prepare us for culture shock and to fill us in on the logistics of the flight and our arrival. It was also just a good time to get to know the other kids in the program. In addition to Agroforestry, I am also with kids in programs of Sustainable Agriculture, Small Enterprise Development, and Eco Tourism.

On Sept 12 we flew directly from Atlanta to Dakar, arriving at 4:00 AM and boarding a bus to Thies (pronounced "chess") where i currently live.

The Peace Corps training center, an old French Army barracks, is in Thies. During my first few days at the center we splept there and had some cross-cultural courses and survival wolof classes (wolof is the dominant language, along with french, in senegal).
After 4 days at the center we were sent off in pairs (i ended up alone) to stay with current Peace Corps Volunteers in their villages to get a taste of what our lives would be like and what type of work we'd be doing. I spent 4 days with a guy named Ken in a village of 500 people without power or running water. Vilage life really isn't that bad, but I'm going to have to find a way to supplement the protein in my diet, cuz they're not big meat eaters here.

Then we returned to Thies (pop. about 500,000) and were sent off to live with host families. I live with a huge family of about 20 people who also speak the language I'm learning, which is Jaxonke (you can say Juh Hon Kay). The last name of my family is Cissé, which means chicken, and they have given me a Seneglese name of "Boubacar." In fact, they never even asked what my real name was. As far as they're concerned, I am Boubacar Cissé. They call me Bouba for short, or Bouffs.

I have been living with them for the last couple of weeks, taking classes from 8AM to 6PM M-F at the center and 8am to 1pm on saturdays. Classes are mostly in Jaxonke and Agroforestry, with some cross-cultural, security, and medical training thrown in as well. We started with 44 people in my training "stage" as they call us, but we've already lost 5 who decided they just couldn't hack it.

I'm the only one learning my language, because it's not very common, so all of my language classes (either 4 or 6 hours a day) are one-on-one with my langauge instructor Lamine. Jaxonke is is first language, but he also speaks French, Wolof, Pulaar and Mandinka fluently. He doesn't really speak English, so our classes are conducted in French, which gives me good practice there too.

We are in the month of Ramadan right now, in which Muslims fast from Sunup to Sundown every day. Senegal is 90 percent Muslim, as is my family. On Sundays I do it with them, as I am right now. It should be my last time though, it ends next weekend with a holiday called "Korite," should be pretty fun.

Anyway, I should get going now, running out of internet time. I'm happy here. Going through a little social withdrawal because we're expected to spend most of our free time with our families. But we're allowed to leave Thies on the weekends after Korite, so I took it upon myself to organize a beach vacation. I have rented a huge house directly on the beach for us and all 39 of us are gonna get the heck outta Dodge.

Post your comments, I love to hear from you. And email or me send me letters, I hate the walk of shame from the letter box!

Miss you all,

Love Andy

More on the eating ceremony

2007-09-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sooo... some people, particularly my mother, are curious about the eating habits of people in Senegal.

Yes, everyone eats out of the same bowl, but it's not because they don't have enough plates for everyone, it's because everything is done in community here. In fact, the language I'm learning - Jaxonke - uses the same word for "my" and "our." they just don't even bother to make the distinction. A kid can't say "hey, that's myyy toy" because the other kid would hear "hey, that's ourrr toy."

Before the meal, everyone washes their hands with a bowl of clean water and soap. Some families use spoons, whereas others (like mine) use their hands. But as I explained before, they exclusively use their right hands. You cut vegetables and meat, and scoop up rice all with your hands.

I don't mean to paint a picture of a mad dash for food either. We had an entire session on eating etiquette. You only pull rice from in front of you, and after cutting off a piece of vegetable or meat, you put the big piece back in the middle so everyone has equal access. If you want something on the other side of the bowl, you can't just reach for it, you have to ask someone to pass it over.

We're in Ramadan right now, in which Muslims fast from sundown to sunset for an entire month. Every evening i break the fast with my host family at dusk by drinking water and eating "mono," which is a sweet porridge made from millet and eaten with big wooden ladel-style spoons.

About 2 hours later the main course is served. The national dish here is cheib ou gen (butchered the spelling on that) which means "rice and fish" in wolof. A base of rice is covered with fish and vegetables, usually a carrott or too, manioc, egg plant, cabbage, and something i have never seen before. There is also often some kind of sauce.

Many of the sauces here are peanut based or leaf based (bissap leaves are a favorite).

Later in the night a sweet drink made from peanuts or a sweet bissap juices is often served. And if I stay up late enough there's usually another dinner served.

Anyway, I'm out of time, so I'll write more later. Write your responses because I can read them all!

Love Andy

Post 1, 9/27/07

2007-09-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I only have a couple mins so I'm gonna give you the quick details before a more legitimate blog later.

I am in Senegal.
I live with a family of about 20 named Cisse in a city named Thies - pop. 500,000.
I have already spent 5 days in the bush, eating almost nothing and crappin in a hole.
I am learning the lanugage Jaxonke, I'm the only one in my program learning it because it's an obscure minority language. That means I'll be sent to the Kedegu (sp?) region, which is in the southeast, and the most beautiful part of senegal, with mountains, forests, and waterfalls. I'll be a 2-hour bike ride from the nearest city.
Because of this, i will have access to internet cafes as often as i have access to mail, so I my elaborate blogging scheme is not nec. I will be able to do it all by myself on a computer most likely made before I was born.
My address here is:

PCT Andrew Jondahl
Corps de la Paix
b.p. 299
Thies, Senegal
West Africa

Letters are better than email, cuz I have time to read and reply with thought, rather than a mad rush. But email and facebook are good too, cuz I'm all about immediate gratification.

In Senegal, you have to greet everyone you see, even as you ride your bike down the road.

If someone hands you something, you have to take it with your right hand. Never touch anyone here with your left hand, it is most definitely dirty.

More on that later, about to run out of internet time.

Love you all, keep in touch.

Andy