Friends

A few nights ago, after accompanying Victoria to her host house, I walked the twenty minutes back on the route nationale with two Senegalese friends. While it was dark, it was only about eight thirty and we could see by the car lights streaming past us. Randomly, a shiny new truck pulled off the road. A middle aged white man, cigarette in hand, leaned out the window and called to us. We walked over and my friend whose French is the best out of the three of us stepped forward. He quickly indicated, however, that he wanted to speak with me. He told me he had seen me on the road before and wanted to make my acquaintance. Not wanting to be rude but feeling like this very forward man was being inappropriate and knowing that it would probably not be a good idea, I quickly searched for a way to kindly get rid of him. Before I could say anything my friend was already giving him my number. At that point there was nothing I could do but stand there. As I was walking away quickly as possible I realized my friend was still talking to him. A few minutes later she came running up clutching 4,000 CFA he had just given her.

When we returned to the house my two friends recounted the whole event to another friend as if we were freshmen in high school and I had just been asked to homecoming. The next day the usual “nanga deff” was replaced with “did he call?” He had but I decided not to answer. This news was met with shocked faces and exclamations of “why not!?” I tried to explain my reasoning to them but from the beginning I knew it would be difficult for them to understand since relationships are different in Senegal. Many women marry in their late teens and early twenties, often to men much older than them who already have money to support a family. In addition, Senegalese women tend to be open and flirtatious, so one of the most challenging things for many of my friends here to understand is that when I say I don’t want a boyfriend I mean it. Somewhere in the middle of all of this I realized that if any of my friends in the U.S had given my number to a complete stranger I would have been mad at them and thought they were crazy. But here, the culture and relationships between men and women are just different. Read more…

Five blogs in one: apprenticeship updates

Last Saturday, the 15th of January, marked the halfway point of our seven-month stay in Senegal. Three and a half months down, three and a half to go. I find it hard to believe that we are already on the downward slope, when so many things are only just beginning.

In my apprenticeship at l’Ecole Sebiroute for example, I have suddenly found myself launched into a whole new array of exciting activities: introducing students to the computer lab and the library, starting an english club at the high school, and sitting in on women’s alphabetization classes (see previous blog…). I feel as though my first two months here were but a gradual preparation for being able to do what I do today; and I feel as though I’ve had to travel miles to get to this point of actually starting to work. Its like when you’re hiking in Maine and for the first good portion of the journey you’re under tree cover and you can’t be entirely sure of where you are or where you’re headed, or if you’ll ever break through. And then suddenly you break through the tree line and you can see all around you, and ahead of you – the fruits of your current and past labors. The path isn’t any easier, and often times it gets rockier and steeper. But still, its definitely the best part of the climb.

I’d like to dedicate this blog post to retracing the various steps I’ve been through in my apprenticeship, in order for any subsequent stories I’d like to tell to make any sense. I apologize in advance for the length of this blog, which probably should have been staggered in four or five previous others. But I decided it was needed, to give a more realistic picture of what its really like to be a volunteer. I stopped writing blogs about my apprenticehip for a while because nothing significant was happening. There have always been lots of exciting possibilities, but nothing was concrete enough to write about. Often, a day’s worth of ‘progress’ would consist of merely managing to have a casual conversation with a certain someone; although I rarely failed to find some way to occupy myself for the remaining five hours I would spend at the school.

For my main task over the past few months has been to determine my role within the school community, a challenging, delicate process considering what I had to work from. For the teachers at the school, I arrived on day one as nothing more than a nineteen year-old white girl who looked even younger, who had no teaching experience whatsoever, and who could barely speak French. No one was openly skeptical (the Senegalese are incapable of being anything but welcoming) but the obvious question hovering in the air, that even I began to ask myself, and that I sometimes still ask, was: what right on earth do I have to claim any role of significance within this school? Even if that role was going to consist merely of sitting around and watching? Read more…

Musings on Islam

It is nine thirty on thursday evening and someone has just installed a new loudspeaker in Sebikotane, right above my bedroom. And currently blaring from this speaker, for the past half hour or so, is what seems to be a never ending chant of verses from the Qur’an. Every once in a while the voices will abruptly cease, and for a minute or so I’ll hear only the distant chatter of all the other loudspeakers in Sebikotane, but then it’ll start up again on a fresh verse. Usually I really don’t mind all the loudspeakers and the singing, and sometimes even find it soothing, but there is something about this new one (maybe the fact that it was installed, uh, right above my room) that makes this singer sound particularly off-key, and the accompanying mush of voices particularly static, and the screeches particularly sharp. I think tonight’s broadcasting must have somthing to do with the fact that tomorrow is Friday, the day of the week when all the men go to the mosque, and everyone dresses in their nicer boubous, but most evenings of the week are rarely without some sort of background narration. And if all the loudspeakers are taking a break, my neighbor, an arabic teacher who rents the room next to mine, never neglects to fill the silence with verses recorded on his cellphone, which he listens to while he prepares his academic charts, sitting at the wooden table where I am now, wearing his funny little winter hat with the pom-pom.

Anyways, I sat down this evening to write a blog post about more practical things (such as my apprenticeship, and don’t worry its on its way) but then the racket started and I felt the moment was only just right for writing a a little bit about our discussions of this past weekend, on Islam. This past weekend, we GCY fellows were in Dakar for our second monthly meeting. As is typical for our monthly meetings we spent a good portion of the time seated around table in Rachel’s living room either talking or eating – assuaging our cravings for good food, english conversation, and believe it or not, academic activity. Away from school for over seven months by now, you’d think we’d been starved for knowledge or something – the way we gulped down the information that Rachel emitted so profusely, diving into the good old tasks of “notetaking” and reading fine print. “Intellectual Stimuli” is what Matt calls it. Read more…

Transportes Rodriguez

Have you ever thought about where your water comes from and how many people are involved in bringing it to your faucet?

Recently, out of curiosity, I headed off with Don Omar in his water truck. Don Omar is a pretty successful businessman in Santo Tomas; he owns a small farm and also owns a water delivery service called Transportes Rodriguez. Starting work at 6:20 a.m., we headed to a farm nearby to use its deep well to fill up the 55 barrel truck for the first run of the morning. We then headed to a small colonia (the romanticized word for a small neighborhood on the outskirts of a small town) where “not much water falls”. We drove through the Municipalidad de Magdelana Milpas Altas, heading out one of the only roads leading toward the mountain, across a small bridge and through fields and fields of corn before we finally reached the colonia. Somehow, Don Omar’s Tigo clad water truck made it up the steep hill at the entrance and through a narrow gap between the trees before we began delivering water house by house

As we went along, I learned about the fascinating history of this small colonia of about 700 people. The neighborhood, creatively named “El Once de Augusto” was founded on the eleventh of August. Positioned on the side of a mountain, it is a very impoverished place, with dirt floors and muddy, rut covered streets. This undesirable land was formerly owned by the municipality until, on the eleventh of August following Hurricane Mitch, the government of Santa Lucia Milpas Altas purchased land from neighboring Magdelena for its constituents whose homes were destroyed in a landslide caused by deforestation. Now, the area faces problems because its position is such that no water falls into the local cisterns and the residents must purchase water from Don Omar in order to eat and bathe. Although the mayor of Santa Lucia built a public pila for washing clothes, it is void of water and the residents of the Eleventh of August wash their clothes in a nearby river. Read more…

Shadows Of Aid

The morning is still dark as I sit in my Ndiaga Ndiaye on the way to Rufisque. The single light bulb hanging from a failing red wire illuminates me, casting a grand silhouette, maybe four times my size, on the passing scenery.

The past few weeks I have been getting a wealth of opinions on aid projects in Senegal from different people. Always associated with the white foreigner, the missions seems to be like my shadow-bloated, by inefficiencies and lack of follow up. There is plenty of money being thrown into the aid pot. For if you have a cause, there is likely to be someone supporting it, from environmental protection to helping school children to mental illness. The main difference seems to come from what creates the shadow. Is there something concrete behind it, or is it just the wind?

The first popular path is the politicians route where one procures the aid funding (from the government or an aid organization), creates a project that is usually focused around “sensiblisation” (informing part of the population), obtains volunteers, feeds and gives shirts to these volunteers with half of the funding, and finally keeps the last half of the funding to fill up the coffers. Corruption is rampant in almost all developing countries and on the rise in Senegal specifically. However, there are some projects where only the government can sufficiently address the problem. As private organizations who give to the campaigns though, NGOs have the opportunity to see exactly where their money is going and what it is doing.  For their caused can be worthy, but if the money and effort do nothing but further a fraudulent system, what is the point?

The next path is a half support system, represented perfectly in my apprenticeship site of the Village des Tortues. It was created with the help of SOPTCOM, the European Union, the Senegalese government, and other donators. Currently my host father acts as the representative of SOPTCOM for the Village, working there around twice a week. The major issue within the Village itself is the structure that now exists. It was started, and can now subsist and function by itself, but there is no real room for improvement. Every now and then the government will give money if there is not enough to feed the turtles, or SOPTCOM will donate something or other to help update the Village, like a computer. Both resources give the Village a bigger safety net up to a certain point, allowing it to beg at both ends when there is some dire need, but never really let it progressively function independently. Just like this confused system, the actual impact of the Village des Tortues is buried underneath possibilities and dead ends. Read more…

Don’t think twice, it’s alright

Friday the 15th marked the halfway point of our stay in Senegal. I’ve been keeping close track of the days, and feeling the halfway mark looming upon me was, frankly, kind of depressing.  A month ago, I had written a proposal detailing all the activities I wanted to initiate at the preschool. The director approved it the day I submitted it, and said he would explain it to the preschool teacher. After a week, I tried to organize a meeting between the three of us. While I waited for that meeting to take place, I continued what I’d been doing at the school – helping the kids color, opening snacks, handing out materials, and drawing the curricula on the boards. A month passed while I waited, and I decided to just explain it to the teacher myself on Wednesday. I launched into a long, painful speech in my stunted French, and she listened and nodded. Then she brought me a stack of 50 notebooks and told me to copy the same picture into all of them (I’ve been designated official artist, because they somehow think my atrocious drawing skills are fabulous) so that the kids in my group could color the next day. She had obviously missed my entire point – that coloring every day was getting them nowhere, that I was tired of being forced to draw pictures and make endless paper chains, that I was not accomplishing anything at this apprenticeship. As I sat there, drowning in a sea of empty, waiting notebooks, I could feel a scream rising rapidly inside my throat. I was perilously close to either letting it out or bursting into an absolute torrent of tears.

That was and will undoubtedly be my lowest point throughout this bridge year. That Saturday, there had been an extremely uncomfortable situation with my host family. Sunday, I got the news that my aunt had just succumbed to her fight with pancreatic cancer. I took some time off work to cry and calm myself down and when I returned, I was still pretty high-strung. When that conversation happened, the frustration and feeling of helplessness that had been building up over the past week completely took over. Luckily, I refrained from exploding, knowing that would distress the teachers to no end, and that moment became a pivotal one for me.

I truly love GCY. I think the program is absolutely phenomenal and plan on being one of the loudest, most enthusiastic voices promoting the GCY experience when I return to the States. Read more…

El café

Of all the possible skills I thought I might be able to learn while living in Guatemala, using an espresso machine never ranked very high. But that is where expectations could be deceiving.

Helen, another volunteer with Soluciones Comunitarias in Nebaj, brought a small espresso machine back from the States so that El Descanso, a small restaurant and favorite hangout place of gringos passing through town, could improve its coffee options (currently, they fill a big container of instant coffee).

What better way to get tourists to stay in Nebaj a little longer and put more money into the local economy than by offering quality coffee – there’s no shortage of it growing here.

That said, the majority of the highest quality coffee is sent directly for export. So, needless to say, the first three blends we’ve experimented with have come out less than ideal. But, we’re still hopeful to find something incredible and then teach the meseros in the restaurant how to make our favorite lattes, cappuccinos, and espressos.

So, even if the coffee we’ve made has been less than superb, Shreya (another volunteer, pictured) and I are already stellar espresso machine users. Ultra important life skills for the win.

Out of the kitchen and into the classroom

Watching Mame Ami carefully trace the lines and curves that make up her name reminds me of me when I try to help cut onions without a cutting board, or clean rice, or help with laundry back at home. I am always amazed by the speed at which Kine can shave an onion without cutting herself, rotating the juicy white sphere in one hand while hacking at it with a knife in the other, or the way she can empty an entire calabash of rice into the pot without spilling a single grain. And as for laundry, no matter how hard I try, as I rub two soapy corners of my t-shirt vigorously between my wrists, I just can’t get the right sound. Kine and Ami Ndoye will laugh – by now more at my determination and persistence than at the awkwardness of my attempts to copy them – bend over my bucket next to me and dipping their palms to the surface of the water, in one graceful gesture, effortless but firm, produce the most wonderful, satisfying sound. It’s the sound of soap suds being squelched through the layers of my host mother’s boubous, or through the frills of little Cogna’s endless collection of ridiculously frilly dresses. It’s a sound of strength and precision, of cleanliness and cool water on a hot, dusty day, and it’s the sound that I come home to almost every day at one o’clock, and that I sometimes wake up to in the wee hours of the morning. Read more…

A Bride's Moving Day

The Thursday after my debut as a Senegalese bridesmaid was the night when close family and friends accompany the bride to her husband’s home and involves much tradition and festivities. I arrived at the bride’s house just as she was being prepared to depart with a shower and two foulards (big pieces of fabric) wrapped around her. Her two suitcases of cloths and a giant supply of cooking equipment waited on a mat spread over the dirt court yard. But as the older women lead her out of the house their way was blocked by the bridesmaids who sang and clapped while demanding money from the groom’s family. The price started at 15,000 CFA then dropped to 10,000 but they ended up having to make due with 5,000.

Finally the bride made it to the middle of the mat where she sat by her little sister. I could not see their faces but their bodies shook with silent sobs. Everyone gathered around as the griot spoke about how difficult but necessary the move was. At this time I was motioned by a friend to follow her. We piled into a car overflowing with girls and were rushed off to the groom’s family’s home in anticipation for the bride. Her arrival was signaled by the honking car horns and four cars jammed packed with people and the bride‘s possessions pulled up in front of the house. Read more…

The British Are Coming, the British Are Coming!!! Or, err… the Bread?

An account from the morning…

8:00 a.m. – Wake up, get ready for the day, head over to our family’s restaurant to go eat my bread and tegga degga (natural, no added hydrogenated oil, peanut butter, yum).

8:30 a.m. – Find out that the bread has, in fact, not already arrived at Mamour’s Boutique, and so we stop and pass the time by trying to be the first person to find the white, hearse shaped, bread car. There are an amazing amount of impostor cars.

9:15am- People search the other boutiques in town for the remnants of last night’s bread, which isn’t exactly soft anymore. About three people get to eat and go on with their days. Currently the whole village is at a standstill- no one goes anywhere or does much of anything, as we are all playing the waiting game. This would be why people have so much patience here.

10:03 a.m. – Thomas and I spot the bread car, I run to the restaurant to tell Penda (and the waiting customers), and the bread arrives!!!!!!!!! We  cheer, people eat, lives commence, and I go to work.

It’s easy to take something simple out of this situation – like if there was ever a war in Senegal, just go for the bread makers and the whole country would stop – yet it exemplifies so much more. The plain, empty, usually abundant, cheap white baguette bread that is sold here is essential to almost every person and household as a cheap way to get calories. While people eat things like chocolate spread or eggs with their bread sometimes, it is simply not within most families means to make meals, most of the times for huge households, that don’t contain a one food or another that can inexpensively fill people up. Here its rice, couscous for the poorer families (even though it has more nutrients), and bread and, from what I gather, its beans and tortillas in Guatemala. Either way, it is distinct example of the poverty and fragility with which the people around me live. One little thing, like not having the bread delivered, or how yesterday there was just simply no water, can completely change or halt life here. There are no back up plans, no second options to help life continue. For that takes money, space, liberty, ideas, whatever you may- all of which are harder to come by, the poorer you are.