Feasting Follies

Sadio, Me, and Wopa ready to go visiting on Tabaski

It's been a rough couple weeks of holidays here. 

Djiby, Jawo, and Usman slay the goat

First, the household got all excited for the slaughter of a goat for Tabaski, and the ensuing feasting.  I got out the bag of candycorn I'd saved to give the kids who come around visiting in their new clothes (they were wary at first, because the pumpkins and corn kernels look like the two kinds of hot peppers that grow here...)

Trick-or-treaters, basically

The first day found me in an already slightly ill state, from some unknown cause, but after the first meal of fried meat and rice dripping in oil I was in true gastric distress. (It lasted several days, just long enough to hold me over till the next illness - a nasty cold that every single villager has contracted).

Helping cut onions

I wasn't the only one who reacted adversely to the surfeit of rich food - after that first meal, Woura and I requested soup and plain rice for the next few days. By the second day of meaty, oily meals everybody in the household had stomach cramps and was begging for milk and biscuits.  It made me wonder, yet again, why they spend all that money and time preparing rich meals that just upset their digestive systems....

Then came Thanksgiving.

Herman, as we christened him

Now it was our turn to get excited for the slaughter of a turkey, who had been bought from a nearby town and was being kept live in the backyard of the regional house. None of us were too savvy, but Geoff took the helm and we managed to kill, gut, pluck and deep-fry the fellow.  The rest of us spent all day and a fair amount of footwork and money (not to mention earlier contributions from the States that had arrived via mail) to get the necessary items for all the classic Thanksgiving dishes.

I made the dressing

Meg and Geoff 'carve' (e.g hack)

The dinner turned out to be a masterpiece, better than last year.  We even went around and said what we were thankful for.  We stayed up playing Scrabble, Taboo, poker and other games, and talking wistfully about holiday traditions back in the States...

Charlene, Wilma and Cara working on a puzzle

The next morning it all came back to haunt us, and it was a rare moment when the two bathrooms were unoccupied or not foul-smelling.  I'd be willing to bet that 3/4 of that delicious food we labored over came out less than fully digested. Actually, I still haven't completely recovered, and that made me realize that we, like Senegalese villagers, also eat certain foods for the sake of holiday tradition, regardless of the discomfort we know it will cause us afterward, and the effort and money it costs to prepare. I guess I can't judge anymore.

I hope everyone had a great holiday back home and the beginning of winter weather isn't cramping your style too much. Sending love from Kolda!

I brewed an IPA the day before Thanksgiving

Little Hut in the Bush

At Kai's prodding, I finally gave my blog a real name. I've seen some really clever ones, so please don't judge. I just hope it's at least obvious that I'm referring to one of my favorite childhood series, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a bit of an obsession with pioneers. I'm not talking about space age pioneers, or pioneers of modern medicine - since I was little I wanted to be an American pioneer of the Oregon Trail-traversing order. Mid-nineteenth century, no running water, no electricity, little log cabin, living off the land and carrying out all the hand skills like spinning, sewing, and churning butter that are lost to most modern Americans - that was the dream for a long time. Eventually I acknowledged that, yes, I was glad I hadn't died of pneumonia as a baby, and yes, computers were pretty useful, and yes, in a world of over 6 billion people, it isn't really plausible for everyone to have acreage and cook over a wood fire. But my love of the 'olden days' never really went away (as I'm sure most of you are aware), and suffice it to say that when I was asked at my Peace Corps interview how I would handle the possibility of being placed in a site with no running water or electricity, living in a thatched hut, I essentially told the woman that if I wasn't placed in a site like that, we could forget about the whole thing.

Well, I got my wish, sort of. I've spent a year living in a mud and grass hut, with no running water or electricity, plowing and harvesting by hand, riding on donkey-pulled carts, cooking over an open fire, and washing laundry with a bar of soap and a bucket of water. It has made it difficult, at times, to do my job, that on some level I don't want to change these people's way of life; it's what I always wanted. At other times, it's been frustrating to see how far behind even nineteenth century American farmers they lag - nobody can mend or sew their own clothes, the literacy rate is very low, nobody even has a washboard for the laundry, the tools are of such poor quality, and craftsmanship of any kind is hard to come by... People just seem so much less skilled and driven than I expected.

It's one of the most common complaints among volunteers, that the average Senegalese farmer does not seem to show any initiative in improving his own life. One of the biggest realizations I've come to is just how much a part of our culture the 'American dream' attitude is. Sometimes it seems like, in the way development work is attempted, this attitude is taken for granted - for example, if you hold a free grafting training, you would expect everyone who came to go home and graft trees, or if the villagers get a milling machine from an NGO and it breaks, you would expect them to find a way to fix it, rather than letting the investment go to waste... There are certainly some Senegalese who show initiative and a desire to improve their lives, but many seem to act like the benefits of development work are a given, and refuse to really make any changes in their lives to meet the developers halfway.

Senegalese people will readily acknowledge this to you, too. I can't tell you how many villagers say to me, shaking their heads, 'white people work much harder than black people'. The most common English saying they repeat to me is 'Time is money'. Clearly they are getting the developers' 'hard work = getting ahead' message. But maybe the message is a little anachronistic. They know full well how far they lag behind the developed world and how much they are missing out on - they know they're not pioneers of anything, that no matter how hard they pull up on their bootstraps they'll always be catching up, while they see around them the evidence of the 21st century already in the grasp of Europeans and Americans and their own immigrant relatives.

Well, I'm not trying to be depressing, and I'll keep attempting to make opportunities for individuals to improve their lives in small ways. But on a larger scale, if we are ever going to lessen the divide between rich and poor nations in the interest of global harmony, I don't think relying on the work ethics of those in the most humble circumstances is the way to do it.

Back in the Merry Old Land of Senegal

Been back in Senegal for a couple of weeks now, and had a lot of fun giving gifts from America. Here's a picture of the little outfits I brought back for Sadio and Aliu. Aliu's got his toy motorcycle there, too. The best gift by far was the Red Cross solar and hand-cranked radio, which works beautifully. It's interesting to see how people here view things that we might call 'green' or 'sustainable' in an appeal to trends or political standpoints, like this radio. They just see it as something that is obviously desirable and superior - 'why would anyone ever use batteries again if they have the money to buy technology like that?' they wonder. It's a good question - we've been using solar powered basic calculators almost exclusively for years, and yet we don't see solar powered cell phones/chargers or radios or even solar panels for homes as anything more than an item for situations where conventional power isn't available (e.g. Red Cross radio), or a sort of statement from people who are 'into' the sustainable movement. Why isn't there unanimous excitement in America for development and improvement of the kinds of technology that make us less dependent on conventional power sources?



Wopa also had her baby a little while after I had left - a little girl who is my namesake, Diatou! Here's a picture of the romper I brought back for her. There are also some family photos behind her - that day they brought out stacks upon stacks of pictures they had saved from previous volunteers and local photographers and we looked at them for hours. It just seemed like such a universal family thing to do.

By the time I got back, the millet had been harvested, and now every few days the women spend the entire afternoon threshing it. Now all the field work is revolving around the peanut harvest. The men are digging up the peanut plants, letting them dry, and piling them into huge mounds (you can see Usman, our adopted Guinean transient worker, carrying the smaller piles on a big stick). The women and I then spend our mornings in the field picking up the stray peanuts that have been detached from the plants in the course of uprooting. That's a ton of peanuts, and provides for our household's daily peanut sauces. Within the next couple of weeks, some of the rice should be ripe and we'll start harvesting (here's Nene proudly showing off our faro). It'll just be Nene and I, since the young women don't really know how to harvest, according to them, and they also have the millet threshing to keep them busy.














For the past week I've been in Thies with Tumani Diamanka, the pilot farmer in Sare Gagna, for another training. It was a little disruptive to leave site again so soon, but it's been a good training, and I've gotten to see a bunch of volunteer friends that I missed.

The pilot farmers learned about grafting, composting, companion vegetable planting, pest treatment, and accounting and budgeting. Here are a few pictures from the classroom and the practical grafting workshop.

Demba Sidibe, probably the most knowledgeable tree guy in all of Senegal, is our agfo program director. Here he's talking to the pilot farmers about grafting and taking care of mango seedlings.

I think Thies is my favorite city in Senegal, although it would be nice if people here spoke Pulaar so I could communicate. There are many good restaurants here, several educational institutions, pretty neighborhoods... One of our favorite restaurants here is a chicken place that we refer to as 'Chicken Diby'. For approximately $5 you get half a roasted chicken, a salad, and french fries. You can see the guy cooking over the fire behind the restaurant.

September 2010

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August 2010

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P.S.

Forgot to mention what some of the pictures are - Djiby graduated high school and passed his big college entrance exam, so our household had a huge party for him (that they had to take out loans for...). Also, a village child brought me a baby bunny that he found in the field, and I had a pet for a few days, that I nursed with cow's milk. Then I came back one days and found him dead...

A Year In

[A year in Senegal, that is, not a year into my service. That won't be for another couple of months, just when I'm getting back from the States. Yes, I'm coming back for a bit at the end of September, and I apologize in advance for not being able to visit everybody, as much as I'd like to...]
A quick synopsis of July is that I spent a lot of time working on the garden at the Sare Bidji health post - planting tons of banana bulbs, seeding moringa, jatropha, baobab,leucena and pigeon pea trees, and outplanting a live fence of sisal around the gardening areas within the health posts walls (it's a pretty big area). The moringa is the miracle tree that I'm sure I've mentioned before - the dried powdered leaves are pretty much a multivitamin, and the seeds have many possibilities for food, oil, etc., although people here mostly just pick a handful of leaves as a last resort addition to flavorless meals, as they have a hint of horseradish. The jatropha is a folk antiseptic, but with real usefulness - I've seen them break off a young branch and dab the milky sap on babies' healing belly buttons. The baobab - that huge tree that is often used to symbolize Senegal or West Africa - has an odd fruit that people love which is high in vitamin C, and the powdered dried leaves are added for flavor in certain dishes.
There is a large section of the health post that I hope to next year use as a demonstration of field crop techniques, and in preparation I planted rows of leucena and pigeon pea to demonstrate alley cropping.
The sisal is a plant that looks kind of like an aloe, and gets huge with little spikes along its fronds (tentacles? leaves?) and makes a good living fence. Everybody in town wanted some of my sisal starts that I had in nursery after getting them near Thies. They only seed every 10 years, so it's hard to find for people.
The bananas I planted for obvious reasons - they're super easy to grow and everybody wants them, but no one seems to have them in my village, allegedly because they don't have a source of starts. This awesome guy from Sare Gagna offered to go to this place that I forget the name of, a ways from here, where everybody grows huge fields of bananas, and got me 30 starts, not expecting any payment. I payed him, and then Jason used his help too. Almost all of the 30 have come up now. It took a long time to dig 30 big holes and mix in compost, and although my 'counterpart' and another friend said they would help, they never showed up.
I had a frustrating week or so when first it looked like all the banana starts were rotten and only 2 or 3 would survive, and next, well-meaning citizens paid for a kid to rototill the entire field crop area where I had leucena and pidgeon pea coming up. They felt really bad, and I reseeded, and it's ok, but sloppier now. And finally the banana leaves are peeking out.
The end of July and all of August so far have been spent working, every morning and afternoon except for Fridays, in the rice 'faro' with my nene and Sadio and Wopa. (Demo just had her baby - a little boy named Nanaman after Nene's dead husband - but she's pretty lazy and probably wouldn't have worked much in the faro anyway.) First we hoed and weeded and seeded the nursery beds, and lately we've been rotating among hoeing, weeding, and pulling up and transplanting rice starts in the flooded faro. It's knee deep mud and water all day, and if we're hoeing, it's essentially head-to-toe mud and water, thanks to splattering. But I find the transplanting more physically tiring because of being in the bent-over position for so long. All in all, though, I've been enjoying labouring in the rice fields - it's basically just getting to play in the mud (and sometimes rain) all day.
The work is not fun and games for those (the majority of people, really) who are fasting for Ramadan. Ramadan started the same day we started going to the faro, and about 2/3 of the way through the men's heavy field work. The requirement is that all healthy, non-pregnant and non-breastfeeding persons must not eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk, every day for a month. This, or you're not a real Muslim. I, like every volunteer, find this very frustrating and obnoxious - to hear complaining all year about how much they are suffering (very little, for most people) and to be nagged for money for medicine and food, only to have them choose to wear out their bodies and/or do very little work, and spend more money than usual on after-dusk treats for a month out of the year... Yesterday I refused to give Djiby aspirin for his splitting headache, telling him that I wouldn't give medicine to fasters, as they knew what discomfort they were in for when they started fasting. I immediately felt very guilty and couldn't look him in the eye for the rest of the evening...but really, I still agree with myself. What's really amazing, and also entirely insane, is the people who fast like this and also work from dawn to dusk in the fields (without a lunch break, since they aren't eating). You have to admire it a little, but it also just makes you cringe.
I held an evening (after the 7:30 Break-fast meal) birthday party for Maimouna on the 22nd, which was a big hit, although it was lacking Maimouna's best friend and sister, Ellie, who's on vacation in Kolda with relatives. I baked cupcakes in the Kolda house, and even found sprinkles and birthday candles! They got soda too, and then the crowning event was playing with the little candles (this is not America, folks. Kids are perfectly welcome to play with fire - they learn pretty quickly what happens when they're not careful).

July 2010

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June 2010

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Miss Moneybags

Never before have I ridden my bike so much, nor spent so much money in such a short span of time as in these past few weeks. Since the money came in for the two projects, there hasn't been a 3-day period when I didn't go to Kolda, to meet up with Tumani to buy materials, or to buy things for our community garden, get receipts, etc. It was pretty fun, and very exhausting. But worth it, because now our village has an enviable garden, and Tumani's project is well off the ground and back in Shames' hands (as of today - he just got back to Senegal a few days ago).
I also finally held the belated permagarden training in our newly fenced garden, so it was probably a good thing I didn't try to do it somewhere else earlier. It was very chaotic, because we had around 40 villagers come, but now my plot in the garden is made into a pretty little permagarden. I also paid for lunch for essentially the entire village, and they were ecstatic. They can't stop thanking me, for lunch and for the garden fence. (They seem to tie for importance in their minds.)
The 15th, I think it was, was Ellie's birthday, so I threw her a birthday party of sorts in the village. She invited her friends, and I bought lunch and candy and soda. (They don't normally celebrate birthdays here, or even know when they are.)
I'm in Kolda for a few days now, trying to do my grant follow-up report and get some other things done. I've been a little sick the past few days, but feeling fine now.
Oh! How could I forget to mention - it has now rained twice in Sare Fode. Both times were quite stormy, with fast winds, thunder and lightning. My Nene is pretty scared of the wind, and also covers everything metal in the rooms with cloth, to keep away the lightning. She made me turn off my cell phone, and wouldn't let us turn on flashlights for very long either. My backyard fence fell down both times it stormed, and my bed got a little wet the first time, and then absolutely soaked the second time. I need to buy a new tarp to hang above my bed.

May 2010

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You know it's a good day when...

you go to the bank to make a withdrawal and you see your balance has miraculously risen by several thousand dollars. Especially when you know that means you will get to make some villagers very happy in the next few days, and not have to worry about finding work to do. In other words, the USAID food security money for both my garden and Tumani's demo site came in yesterday, and now we can get to work! Alhamdulilah.

Where did April and half of May go?

Well, let's see if I can answer myself - at the beginning of April, I finished writing the SPA grant proposal for chain-link fencing for the community garden. There's already a well and an area where they used to garden successfully, until animals broke down the barbed wire fencing and they stopped using the space. The proposal was approved, and after some more frustrating back and forth between Sare Fode and Kolda for various signature pages and other minute changes here and there to the proposal, the funds have been requested by admin from stateside and we are now twiddling our thumbs and hoping that they arrive before the rains start in the next week or two. Similarly, Shames submitted all quotes and paperwork for the pilot farmer program, and I signed off to receive the funds, since he's on vacation in the U.S. this month, so now Tumani and I are also crossing our fingers that the money comes any day. Once the rains start, people don't have time to do any extra work beyond their fields, thus prices go way up and/or the work just doesn't get done. Also, transportation is a challenge because of flooding/mud.
So, while we have been biding our time, we've also been doing things - I got really excited about planting trees and starting a garden within the walls of the health post in Sare Bidji, and while there isn't a lot started yet, I've got a few guys who are also enthusiastic about it, and water for me when I'm gone. One of them also helped me dig holes for bananas. I've got a great compost pile going there, and a papaya nursery that just sprouted last week. I also planted sunflower seeds and watermelon in some raised beds near the medical buildings, but at least half the starts got munched.
The watermelon in our family's garden, on the other hand, is one of two surviving things there after we had a beautiful garden going, and then goats got in, even after Djiby thought he'd fixed the barbed wire. Goats are the most harmful creatures here! And people only eat them once or twice a year, it's so ridiculous. My sisal nursery is still doing ok, although it got munch a bit too. The next plan for the family garden is to fence off, with bamboo fencing, a six-by-six meter area within the larger garden and hold a 'permagarden' training there for the village, after which we'll have a little garden all set to go. [Permagardening is the PC/USAID food-security idea that you can see in a few of the pictures I posted from the training Maya hosted in Kolda recently, and that I took my Nene to. It is meant to be a small house garden that maximizes how much can be grown in a given space and uses water efficiently. You dig contour walls where you plant perennials, leave pathways that channel water to the beds and to reservoirs in the corners, and you dig the beds very deeply and mix in azadarachta indica leaves, wood ash and charcoal dust, and manure or compost.] Nene was really excited about this after we went to Maya's training, so we're going to shoot for eventually having one for every house in Sare Fode (that's only like 12).
Over the past month I also helped create tree nurseries with Seidou in Sare Sambachika and Tumani in Sare Gagna. Seidou's is off to a slow start, because he's so busy with his job that takes him all over. Tumani, of course, has more experience with gardening and nurseries, so our nursery of cassia siamea (for a windbreak for the new pilot farmer demo plot) is looking beautiful. We also just started a nursery last week of a live-fencing species, acacia nilotica, which hasn't sprouted yet. He's so much fun to work with, and talk to. Really intelligent and ambitious.
A couple of disappointments were the citrus nurseries I tried to start with Boola, an old woman in Sare Fode, and Arfang, a young man in Sare Bidji. The seeds were old and I was skeptical from the start that they would sprout, but since our training instructors had harvested them and given them to us as ideal citrus rootstock seed, I thought I'd give them a try. But citrus seed is notorious for not storing well, as well as for having a low germination rate anyway. Oh well.
So for the past few days I've been in Kolda to welcome the new stage of volunteers to the region, and then I got sick, so I've been here a couple extra days. Most days I don't really have anything scheduled, so this wouldn't be a big deal, but I actually was supposed to do the Sare Fode permagarden training and also a garden training for the schoolchildren and teachers in Sare Demba Mballo (nearby Sare Bidji- the teachers asked me to come), so this has been kind of a pain. I still have diarrhea, but I feel better today.
As much as I'd like a few more weeks to work on nurseries, I'm really excited for the rains to start! I miss the rain so much. But not as much as I miss you guys... ;)

Captions

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April 2010

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50 Years of Senegalese Independence

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March 2010

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Hello, April

I've been back and forth from Sare Fode to Kolda, working on writing this SPA (small project assistance) grant proposal for chain-link fencing for the Sare Fode community garden. Pretty much done now, I think. We also just had the agroforestry summit here, so all the ag.fo. volunteers in Senegal came down for a few days and we exchanged seeds and stuff. I haven't been back in the village very long, but I'm hoping in the next few months to stay there as much as possible and finally start to get some actual work done. I feel like I've been at the regional house way too much, and most of the villagers don't understand all this Toubab business of seminars and conferences and summits and grant writing and pilot farmers... It must seem very odd to some of them.
In the few days I was in the village, here's what was new: Djiby and Jawo came back from school in Kolda for Easter vacation, and most of our high school students went home. Aliu is all better, but now Nene, Ellie, and little Sadio have colds. Demo and Wopa are both supposedly pregnant, and sort of switch off days of being laid up with morning sickness. Sadio has been living with Woura while he teaches for the past few months, and we've all really missed her, but I think they will both be back in Sare Fode when I go back today, Sadio for good, Woura for Easter break. Since women have been scarce in the household lately, I've been helping Demo and Wopa with the cooking and pulling water, depending on which of them is in good shape on the given day. Djiby wants to add to the barbed wire for Daouda's garden so he can start gardening there and raise some money to pay for entrance exams and other university expenses. He's a hard worker, but he has literally no money, so I think I'll end up buying him some seeds and stuff...

Quick explanation of the photos - apparently, what you do here with stickers is stick them all over your body. I loved that the high school boys put sparkly heart stickers on their ears like earrings, and left them there all day. There are a few pics of us cracking open a bunch of peanuts for seed. One of the more wealthy Diamankas in the village is paying people a little bit to open up tons of peanuts for his seed this year, so we've been doing a lot of that. Then there are a bunch of the chameleon that little Sadio spotted in the mango tree a few days ago. They say seeing a chameleon is good luck. It was so cool looking, especially when it changed! The last ones are of the men and boys of the village hunting. I went along, and got to carry the bird that Daouda caught. Somebody else got a rabbit. They just run around, over quite long distances, beating the bushes with sticks and yelling, to scare out the animals, and then try to catch them by hand.

Pilot Farmer Program Begins

I've been in Thies again since Tuesday, and will be until Saturday, for an orientation/training of Senegalese 'pilot farmers' for a new USAID/Peace Corps initiative. USAID has the money, the PC has us, to help train and support these farmers as they establish demonstration sites. Right now there are only 7 pilot farmers in Senegal, and one of them is Tumani Diamanka, Shames' counterpart and host brother in Sare Gagna. That's why I'm here, since I'm so close to Sare Gagna, and will have to work with Tumani and Shames on establishing the different agroforestry, gardening, and field crop technologies at the demo site. Then people in the area will have access to periodic trainings which Tumani will present there, a seed and seedling source, and just an idea of the possibilities. That's the plan, anyway.

Grudgingly Headed Back to Site

Well, I've got to head back to Sare Fode this morning/afternoon, as I have now been gone almost exactly a month, and my family kept anxiously calling me and asking when I was coming back. The did this all through training, even though I had told them before and every time they re-asked, 'I'm coming back when February's over, at the beginning of March.' I'm not looking forward to going back and hearing all the little guilt trips - 'You really spent a while there', 'you didn't call enough', etc. Oh well...after a week or so I'm sure I'll be back into the swing of things.
But that brings up another aspect that I'm not looking forward to - telling them that I have to leave again several times this month - this Friday I'll have to come back to Kolda for our house meeting; on the 15th I'll leave for Thies again for a USAID pilot farmer training (Shames' counterpart is one of these pilot farmers, and they are each supposed to have a network of nearby volunteers to help them set up their demonstration sites, etc.); then on the 20th I'll head back down here with all the Agroforestry volunteers in Senegal for our Ag. Fo. yearly summit, which will last a couple of days at the house here. I'm looking forward to that one, because we'll get seeds and stuff that I need. It feels like a lot of 'training' to me, even, and I can only imagine it is frustrating for my family and community to see me run off so much... I hope I come off as knowledgeable enough to justify all the training!

February 2010 (Pics!)

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Trainings and Other Less Industrious Pursuits

Well, it's been a little while, because it seemed like nothing much was going on, but now that I look back, there's actually a lot to write about. Back in January, just about a week after I got back to site from my bout of diarrhea after New Year's, my household and I hosted Natalie, Shames, and Samba for a couple-day-long language re-training, which turned out to be mostly hanging-out and chatting in Pulaar. We also rode bikes over to Sare Gagna to see Shames' potato patch, which is doing quite well, and which he can talk about for hours if you let him.
With that out of the way, I just had a couple of weeks before leaving for IST (In-Service Training, where I am now), so I tried to do as much as possible. Daouda had fenced in the garden while I was sick, so I prepared a nursery bed of lettuce and three big outplanting beds, dug pits and started composting, and planted some tomato starts that had been raised in the Sare Bidji garden. My cabbages are starting to form heads in that garden now, and they're so pretty! I fertilized those, and my tomatoes in my backyard with homemade fertilizer ('manure tea' is what we call it here :) and of course, now that I'm gone, they're probably ripe. The tomatoes were producing like crazy when I left!
The other thing I wanted to get done before I headed off for a month was hold a meeting to give people a better idea of what I came to do, and what 'agroforestry' could potentially do. It was kind of an ordeal to hold such a big meeting, because I invited one person from each household in Sare Fode and Sare Bidji, plus a few other people who are acquaintances from other villages, and provided lunch afterwards (a must, according to my Nene). Daouda and I rode to Kolda and brought everything back for the cooks. But it turned out to be quite a success, in my opinion, with around 45 people in attendance. A couple of awesome, educated guys who happened to come were a huge help in translating my broken Pulaar into concepts that people ended up getting really excited about! I asked them to come find me at my hut to tell me what sorts of projects they were interested in before I left for IST, and about 20 individuals did come and gave me really specific project ideas. I was surprised to discover a widespread interest in palm trees, whether for oil, coconut, or dates. There were people interested in fodder trees, live fences, and interplanting trees in their field crops too. So I went away feeling very optimistic, and with specific information to ask for during training.

I left a couple of days early for IST with Shames, Maya, Natalie, and a few other Kolda folks who were going to take the SAT in Dakar. (By the way, Jason's been gone for a month in the States for health issues. Poor guy. But he's back as of a few days ago!) I hung out in Mbour, visiting my pre-service training host family, which was pretty fun, and they were so pleased. From there, I went to Dakar for a night, and got a ride back to Thies in the PC buses for two days of USAID food-security initiative training. This involved creating 'perma-gardens', for maximum cultivation of small, home garden plots that are enriched with a lot of organic matter, charcoal and ash, and dug very deeply with trenches and mounds for efficient use of water.
Next, we all went to Dakar for WAIST (West African Invitational Softball Tournament), which is three days of debaucherous amateur softball, and is attended by volunteers from Mali, Senegal and the Gambia, as well as ex-pats and other Americans and Senegalese softball teams too. There's a pool at the club, hotdogs, beer, ice cream....and we were all assigned homestays at beautiful homes of Americans living in Dakar. Obviously it was a very pleasant couple of days, although mine was dampened by the fact that my giardia came back for a second round and I was really sick for a couple of days. But I'm all better again.
So, to bring you up to today, now we've got two more weeks of technical agroforestry training at the center in Thies, which has been very useful and interesting so far. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of questions answered and gaining a lot of knowledge. We have Senegalese homestay families here in Thies, and mine is a very wealthy family with a large house, running shower, electricity and television. We don't spend much time there, but they're very hospitable and kind.
Sorry for so much all at once, but I hope your curiosity is somewhat satisfied now!

Photo Site

Well, I'm finally going to head back to my village this afternoon. I've been at the Kolda regional house for a few days, waiting on my diarrhea to go away. I bought supplies today, and I'm going to try to fix spaghetti and salad for my family for dinner tonight (or tomorrow, depending on when I get back). Their previous volunteers made them spaghetti, and it was a big hit - they keep asking me when I'm going to fix it, and I figure now's a good time, since I need to ingratiate myself a little after being gone so long.
I finally got most of my pictures up on a site for you to see - the address is http://diatoudiamanka.shutterfly.com. Hope you like them! I don't pretend to be any sort of photographer.
Love you all! Until next time. (Hopefully I'll stay a while in the village this time.)

2010 Begins

And hopefully these first few days aren't indicative of what's to come. I've been really sick for the past three days or so with another GI ailment, complete with high fever, chills, and splitting headache at times (diarrhea's a given). Still haven't made it back to Kolda after travelling to St. Louis for New Year's Eve (I'm holed up in the Kaolack region's PC house, mid-way between St. Louis and Kolda), which was it's own sort of fiasco, but ultimately a very enjoyable one.
First of all I was borrowing money from friends most of the time because I failed to take into account that banks would be closed for New Year's, as well as the weekend that came directly after, and I haven't gotten my Senegalese ATM card yet.
Second, I made it to the New Year's Eve party my stage-mates had planned as it was underway, because my travel companion, Martin (quite a character), was mistaken about what day it was. He arrived at the Kolda house the evening of the 30th, thinking it was the 29th, and we didn't leave until the morning of the 31st. But we got there after all, and it was a thoroughly festive night, at a beachside inn with a pretty big group of us.
I just spent a couple of days there, but from what I saw, St. Louis is a lovely city (by Senegalese standards). Lots of tourism means there are plenty of decent restaurants and hotels, and stores with interesting crafts. We ate at a deliciuos Moroccan place one night. St. Louis is the art capital of Senegal, and has a yearly jazz festival and lots of art for sale. The city consists of the mainland, an island (the main tourist area), and a smaller island called the 'hydrobase', which is where our hotel was. Lots of fishing (really beautifully painted wooden boats!) and fishmongering takes place there.
So, after getting out at the Kaolack garage Sunday afternoon to transfer to a car to Kolda, but finding that they only have one at 5 am every day, I was lucky enough to find a cab driver who knew how to get me to the PC house here (because I sure don't know Kaolack at all). He then promised to have another driver come pick me up at 4:30 the next morning, but he never showed up. However, since I ended up getting too sick over the course of the night to go go home, that worked out just fine.
End of the story is - in between bouts of feeling absolutely dreadful these past few days, there have been a lot of people I know in and out of the house and it's been kind of fun. I sure feel guilty for being away from my site for so long, though... But it can't be helped. Hope they're still watering my tomatoes and cabbages, and maybe the demo-plot fence will be up when I get back.
Love you all, and I hope you've had a great start to your new year!