Life as of Late

So things have been kind of a whirlwind lately! Well, they haven't been too crazy actually, but my internet has been incredibly spotty. I have a few different places around town that I default to in internet emergencies... my office, this randomly fancy hotel by my house (which strangely smells like cinnamon rolls and I need to go back there to discover why), the training center, and the restaurants downtown. It shouldn't be hard for me to find internet. But so often in the past month, it's like the perfect storm has conspired to remove wifi from all of those places whenever I want it. Or maybe the perfect storm is just Senegalese telecommunication company politics happening right under my nose.

In any case, I have internet right now! Yeah!

So the last few weeks have included the aforementioned girls camp and killing a grasshopper in my room, but I've also done exciting things like train 30 Senegalese teachers for my Life Skills curriculum! Boom! I mean, I didn't do it, but I organized it, which is really all an American girl in a faraway country using her third language can hope to do. The trainings went really well. I got to see a whole bunch of Senegalese people become confident teachers in condom demonstrations, not to mention be treated to numerous pieces of theatre starring disorderly, drunk characters in an effort to curb teen drinking. Really, I live for this shit.

I also started branching out of my little corner of Thies. It is my home, and I love my family, and I love that the baby has literally become so obsessed with me that he screams until he is allowed to crawl across the floor and jump into my arms like a puppy. I love my little sister and her penchant for slurring the words "I Whip My Hair Back and Forth" into something that sounds like 'Iupma AIRRR bata forth i upma AIRRRR bata forth,' and I love my family's new inexplicable love for serving spaghetti with shrimp for dinner. But sometimes it is nice to get out and explore the rest of the country, or at least the region, a little bit. So over the past few weeks, I've visited other volunteers near me to observe and occasionally join in on some work projects.

I had the chance to see an open field day with our Master Farmer project, which trains local farmers in more sustainable agriculture methods and then encourages them to teach other farmers in their area. All of the local farmers seemed super into the project, and when I looked around at all of them, I couldn't help but feel the pride that I know John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson felt when they started Farm Aid. I'm serious. Feed the world.

I also went to Mbour to help with a gardening project at an orphanage. I didn't realize this at the time, but this place isn't just your average orphanage: it's also a place where French families send their delinquent kids. Like Outward Bound, except they send their kids out of the country, to orphanages in Senegal and are all like KIDS GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER. It was pretty interesting to see the French delinquents frolicking among the orphans, and I mean that in the best way, like it was beautiful. My job was to supervise children painting tires. I did an okay job, but I think I'm too domineering to be a proper art teacher. The project as a whole was great though, and as a group, we finished some composting and planting for the garden. Then we went to the ocean, where I had a transcendental experience using a floatie in the ocean. It was seriously fantastic. In the words of one of my friends when she was using the floatie, "I will never go back to normal swimming." Nor will I.

I've been trying to reach out to some places around Thies, specifically keep up my relationship with the local middle school and start one with the local cultural center. My love for the school only grew when the other day I stopped by to say hi, and THEY GAVE ME A SENEGALESE OUTFIT. And it is beautiful... pink tie-dye! Our time together has been brief but I feel like they already understand me as a person. I'm stoked to continue helping with English classes there, and wear my new outfit on the biggest Senegalese holiday of all, Tabaski, in a few weeks. I went to the Cultural Center the other day for a film screening. I was pretty impressed to walk into a packed room, not to mention impressed with the discussion that followed the movie. The movie was about the Joola, a ferry that sunk off the coast of Senegal a few years ago between Ziguinchor and Dakar. I couldn't understand a lot of it, but what I did understand is that the Senegalese are pissed at the government.

I've also joined a softball team in Dakar! There was a time in my life where I would play softball in the summer, and I have memories of myself hitting the occasional double. But that is not my reality. I don't know if I have repressed my actual softball skills, or maybe time has simply wasted away my body. Whatever the case, I am not a strong addition to the team, but I've really been enjoying the chance to go eat hot dogs and heckle 13 year old children (our ex-pat competition) every couple weeks.

In slightly sadder news, I recently found out that my Ugandan host mother, Hajati Sarah, passed away last weekend. Obviously, since I'm in Africa, she'd already been on my mind a lot... she and the rest of the people I met in Uganda were just so fantastic, and certainly a huge factor in making me want to do the Peace Corps. It sounds like a cliche, but she really was an amazing woman: she took in orphans and paid their school fees, she took in older homeless Ugandans and gave them a place to live, and she took in crazy American study abroad students like me. She ran a circus yo. We didn't really speak the same language, but we danced a lot, and we understood each other. So here's to Hajati!

But on the upside, one of my host sisters is pregnant! My amoebas are dead! This is the circle of life!

I will leave you all with a story:

In Senegal, people always assume I'm French. I get it. Most Westerners, and especially white people, that roll through here are French. What I don't get is the second guesses I'm given: I'll tell people I'm not French, and they will immediately launch into a barraging list of nationalities to deduce exactly WHAT I am.

This is how it usually goes:

Spanish? Greek? Chinese? English? Portuguese? Brazillian? Israeli? One time someone asked if I was from Mali. MALI.

But my favorite moment happened the other day when I told someone, straight up, that I was American. "American! Etats-Unis! Ahhh!" he cried. "Hola? Como estas? Gracias!"

Yes. Some people in Senegal think that the national language of the United States is Spanish. Somewhere, the mayor of a small town in Pennsylvania and a Tea Party member are sitting together and crying.

That's all. Hope all is well! Thinking of all of you, and much love! Beware of the wild animals loose in Ohio!

P.S. Big shout out to my dad for the glorious package I received yesterday! The face paint is just in time for me to do something weird on Halloween, and I've already started making beaded bracelets for my sisters. Also the cookies are already half gone. <3 !

Wet Hot Senegalese Summer

Work! So a while back, I wrote about my building anticipation for our region’s girls camp. Ladies and gentlemen, girls camp has come and gone. And as predicted, I slayed the children in various competitive sporting capacities. Also as predicted, I had a really good time.

The girls we invited to the camp were all top students in their middle school classes, nominated by their teachers and schools based on academic achievement, leadership, and financial need. Consequently, they were a smart, sassy bunch of ladies. After spending so many months seeing girls only in their home modes – aka cooking, sweeping, running out on errands, trying to study in the small window of time between cleaning up from dinner and falling asleep from exhaustion, and usually just sitting quietly, it was incredibly refreshing to see girls just being girls, laughing, dancing, and getting riled up. Our camp had a different theme each day, covering topics like health, environment, money, creativity, and the future. We, the Peace Corps volunteers, organized sessions and activities, but for the most part, Senegalese counterparts and campers from last year took control in leading and executing most of the plans. It was pretty cool to see: a project made possible by Peace Corps volunteers organizing logistics and funding carried out in a huge way by the local population.

Personally, I had many favorite moments from camp. As a health volunteer, I was ecstatic to see how the girls responded to a question and answer session with the local nurse. True, some questions were kind of weird, like “Why do some girls smell like garbage?”, but many of their questions were just heartbreakeningly simple, at least by American standards. Watching a group of girls finally hear their burning questions answered, such as “What if I DON’T GET MY PERIOD BY THE TIME I AM 12 WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME????” is just really great. Knowledge is power! Many girls said this was their favorite session.

I also really loved one of the gender activities we did. We read blanket statements, like “Men are better at managing money than women” or “A man should be allowed to hit his wife,” and told the girls to stand on either side of the room, depending on whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement. For many questions, the girls were evenly split, but I was more impressed by the spirited debates that followed. They’d argue points and counterpoints and girls would be running back and forth, changing their minds and reevaluating how they understood gender roles. It was like seeing a visual representation of a confused 13 year old girl’s brain. I LOVED IT.

And of course, we did fun things like throw water balloons at them and send them on scavenger hunts. The wildnerness scavenger hunt included a direction to “find something living!”. We imagined the girls would bring back things like, I don’t know, leaves. Maybe a cricket. Our girls were so dang creative that they captured things like one-eyed toads and baby birds. Yes for thinking outside the box, children! Yes! Another awesome part of my week happened when I rode a donkey charrette for the first time. Pretty much everywhere in Senegal, except for big cities, people move around on rickety wooden carts pulled by donkeys and horses. Until camp, this opportunity had been denied me,. But camp finally gave me that common Peace Corps experience of holding 30lbs of leaky fish on my lap as I slowly felt like I was sliding off a wooden cart to be trampled by domesticated animals on African bush paths. Now, I have lived!

So even though girls camp was only a week long, and even though it required a ton of stress and organization and logistics, I have no doubt in my mind that the camp was well worth it. It’s strange to me: sometimes I really have to stop and remember where I am, because sure, I’m surrounded by health tragedies and economic injustice and poverty, but at the end of the day, the lack of creativity and fun and learning is what I continually notice. It sounds cheesy, but to me, I guess that’s what the life of life has always been about. And consequently, having a week full of those things made girls camp one of my favorite weeks in Senegal so far. So much thanks to everyone who supported our girls camp this year… it was a good thing.

Strangers in the Night

I think it is time for me to give everyone an accurate portrayal of my evenings. Sure, I spend the early twilight hours sitting outside with my family, watching the baby roll around on a mat, repeatedly failing to catch a rolling tin cup. But inevitably, there comes a time when I retire for the night into the darkness of my apartment. The good nights happen when we have electricity. The bad nights happen when we do not.

I never expected myself to be so terrified of the darkness here. Scratch that: I fully expected to be terrified of the darkness here, but I expected that time and experience would wear me down, eventually revealing a courage built up over surviving things like snake attacks to my face or cockroach parties in my pillow. My plan has not worked because my apartment has remained largely insect, animal, and creepy sound free. This is great, except that it means my imagination continues to live in fear every night.

So every night, I walk into my room, just to see the lizard sprinting across the wall and back behind my bookcase, just like you always imagine the monsters under your bed. Hiding, at the most convenient time, before you can prove their presence. I take my vitamins or the malaria drugs that give me nightmares, then I go brush off the beetles, or what I imagine as baby cockroaches dancing around cockroach eggs, from my toothbrush and use it. An important part of my bathroom routine includes turning on my non-working faucet so that I can fill a tub with water at 4am when the water turns on for one hour.

When it comes time to get into my bed, I do a spot check for crickets or dead bugs that have accumulated on my mattress during the day and brush them off. Then I pull down my mosquito net from the contraption made of dental floss on my ceiling. If we have electricity, I turn my fan on: this is essential to combat the heat, the baby termites that sometimes break into my net in the morning, and the creepy noises I hear at night. Since the incident where I awoke to three crickets taking revenge on me, I tuck my net in extra carefully, but inevitably, there is always a fly hiding somewhere in my net and I spend a good 15 minutes trying to destroy its life. Flies are really the worst here. When they’re in my net, they just act like drunken fools. Flies might be the new crickets in my life: I just want them all dead. What are they contributing to this world? If there is answer to that question, I encourage you to pass it along to me before I do something catastrophic.

I always wake up at 4am, sometimes because the water has turned on, sometimes because I’m just having a nightmare that the water turned on. My body has gotten so used to turn off the water at 4:30am that now I have to pee at that same time every night. At that point in the night, all of Senegal is finally sleeping, and that is when the noises really keep me awake. I don’t know why I’m always so scared at this point of the night. Sometimes I hear noises in the room, sometimes I hear creepy religious chanting that eventually turns out to be frogs in the road. Even if animals live in my room, I doubt they want to bother with me, and plus, I have trapped myself in a chemical net fortress far from the ground. But I just always imagine mice in mutiny and stuff.

One noise in particular nearly drove me to the edge. I would hear a rustling every night. I was convinced I had a mouse, or a mole, or a cockroach army – but in the morning, I would look for evidence and find none. No plastic bags rustled through, all garbage untouched. But night after night, I would lie in my bed and just listen, terrified. I eventually deduced that rats were living in my wall, then I deduced that they were slowly breaking through my wall, Shawshank style, and rustling my Beatles poster, because Ringo always looked like he was moving. One morning, I finally worked up the courage to peel back the poster and reveal whatever was there: a muskrat hanging out of a hole, a cockroach nest, a sheep, an alien baby. I slowly peeled back the poster and… A GRASSHOPPER-CRICKET was trapped in the duct tape behind my poster, WHERE IT HAD BEEN LIVING AND RUSTLING FOR TWO WEEKS. And that is literally how the story ends. I spent two weeks crying under my mosquito net because I thought a grasshopper was trying to kill me.

So that is what happens at night in my life in Senegal. The end.

*Note: I wrote this before the intense, life-altering insect experience of our Girls Camp during the past week. EVERYTHING HAS NOW CHANGED. I have been to the edge of bug hell and survived! But I’ll write about camp and the living conditions that challenged me as a functional human being later. Camp was fun though!