SeneGAD Newsletter

One of my projects in Peace Corps is working as Co-Communications Commissioner for our gender and development group, SeneGAD, with my good friend Nicky.  Here’s a link to our latest newsletter, which includes information about gender projects in Senegal and an article we wrote about the woman who inspired our successful, nationwide scholarship program for middle school girls.  Happy reading!

You can read the newsletter as a Google Doc or download it via our Peace Corps Senegal website:

Google Doc 

Downlaod from Peace Corps Senegal site 

Can You Help Me Choose a Penis?

Today, I had to go to the market to find an appropriate vegetable for a condom demonstration.  Last time I did a condom demonstration, we had some handy penis models that looked diseased and terrifying.  This time, the penis models are in Dakar (and when I say penis models, please know that I mean wooden penis figurines, not men paid to model their penises), so a little improvisation is required.  Hilarity ensued when I went to the market on this mission.  Here is a sampling of some conversations I had, translated from Wolof.

Me: Oh hey homegirl, Yacine!  My favorite vegetable lady!

Yacine: Mame Diouma!  I haven’t seen you in so long!  What’s up?

Me: Not much.  I need a penis.

Yacine: What?  You need tomatoes?

Me: No.  I need a penis.  (points to genital area).  Man.  I need a penis.

Yacine: You need... a penis?

Me: I’m teaching about condoms today and I need a vegetable to use as a penis.

Yacine: Ohhhh!

Me: What do you think?  Carrots?

Yacine: Yeah, definitely look at the carrots.

Me: But these turnips look like penises too.

Yacine:  Yes, the turnip can be a good penis.  200cfa.

Me: I only need one penis.  Which is a better penis?

Yacine: Hmmm... the turnip.

Me: You don’t think this turnip is too big?

Yacine: No.  This one is a sweeter penis. (winks at me)

The fun continued later, when I realized I could walk around the neighborhood telling people I had a penis in my backpack.  I think a lot of people assume that living in a predominantly Muslim country, sex is taboo.  I guess having sex is kind of taboo, but trust me, there is no better way to earn the love and respect of neighborhood women than to start explicitly joking about penises and vaginas.  And so this conversation happened:

Fatima: Mame Diouma!  Girl!  I miss you, I haven’t seen you in so long!

Me: Oh, I’ve been around.

Fatima: Are you going to the school to teach today?

Me: No, I have a community lesson to do.  I have a penis in my backpack.

(Fatima gives me a blank look)

Me: No, seriously.  I have a penis in my backpack.

Fatima: You have a penis in your backpack?

Me: I have a penis in my backpack.

Other random woman: HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH

Random woman #3: HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!  SHOW US THE PENIS!  SHOW US THE PENIS!

Me:  Sure. 

(I produce a black plastic bag.  Fatima holds in her hands but seems hesitant to open it.)

Me: It’s for condoms.  To show people how to use condoms.

Fatima: Whose... penis is it?

Me: Just open it and see.  Just look at it.

Random woman: OPEN THE BAG, SHOW US THE PENIS!

Random woman #3: WE WANT TO SEE THE PENIS!

(Fatima opens the bag and reveals the turnip)

Fatima: What?!  This turnip is way too big to be a penis!

Random woman: This penis is not realistic at all!

Me: Dude, the lady at the market told me it was the sweetest penis!  I wanted to choose the carrot!

Fatima: This is not a good penis.

Me: Well I can’t return it.  I’ll just eat it later, we can cook it with rice and fish.

Fatima: Next time you need a penis, come talk to me.

I’m glad I have such great friends like Fatima in the community.  Hopefully, next time I have to purchase vegetables in the market that resemble penises, she can help guide me through the process.  In the meantime, I’m still confident in my current choice, because I think it is aspirational and perhaps even a little intimidating.  Today should be the best condom demonstration ever!  Wish me luck as I embark on our weeklong Men As Partners tourney, where I’ll be working with other volunteers to host our Language and Cultural Facilitators in leading discussions for local men about health, sexuality, and being a man in Senegal!

Holiday!

Sometimes, tough choices do not need to be made, as I learned during this past holiday season in Senegal.  Should I have a party for my family again, or go see a rap super group?  Should I serve cookies or brownies?  Should I cook on Christmas, or be served by a lovely Vietnamese woman endorsed by the ambassadors of numerous countries?  Should I sit, or should I dance?  Should I watch a movie about meth, or a comedy?  The answer is yes, to everything.  Christmas 2012: A case study in having your cake and eating it too.

I decided to hold my second annual holiday party for my host family, though to be honest, they seemed pretty ambivalent.  Even Bigue, who delighted in last year’s festivities, proved that Christmas at five years old is different than four.  Last year she was all about hot chocolate and snowflakes.  This year, she just kept yelling, “PERE NOEL BETTER BRING ME SOMETHING GOOD!”  For the record, he did: she ended up with a geo-safari-esque computer learning game.  And for the record, I was not Pere Noel. 

The snowflakes are still hung on random trees around our compound, YES.

Luckily for my family, their lack of enthusiasm did not deter me.  I made sugar cookies in weird shapes traced with cardboard, whipped up colored frosting, sewed a tree made of scrap fabric, made new stockings for the new family members, popped two bags of popcorn, set up supplies for snowflake making, and invited all the girls from my health club to the party.  My underlying message was YOU WILL TAKE THIS HOLIDAY AND YOU WILL LOVE IT.  The party seemed moderately successful, buoyed by the fact that host mom happened to be out of town, which made it an unsupervised party.  I mean, Joyce and I were there, and I guess we’re adults.  But not real adults.  Not sassy, angry Senegalese adults.  So the kids all really cut loose and I think they had a good time.  Christmas Step 1: NICE.

Festive treats!

Decorations!

Later that night, I headed out to a Daara J concert.  Daara J is Senegal’s rap super group, and I had VIP tickets!  But first, someone had to try to mug me again.  Yes.  I appear vulnerable and easily defeated.  As Joyce and I rode our bikes down the street at 7:30pm, someone jumped out of the bushes and tried to rip my bag off my bike.  It was terrifying.  I imagine it’s very similar to hitting a deer with your car, only the deer jumps in your car tries to rip off your head.  Luckily, I just kept peddling, and the $1 purse I bought at the market refused to break.  A Christmas miracle!  I went to the concert and all was well.  Christmas Step 2: SUCCESS.

The next day, I headed up to St. Louis, one of my favorite cities, to spend Christmas with some of my favorite people.  I rented a house with a few other volunteers, and we decorated with tinsel, stockings, tiny trees, and presents wrapped in plastic bags.  One of my housemates was a Christmas Eve baby, so we all went out to celebrate her birthday in addition to that of our Lord and Savior.  At one point, we ended up at the fateful dance club which has thrown me to the curb one too many times for always dancing and never buying anything.  I just wanna dance!  This time, I came in and danced, and they let me, and they let all of us!  Christmas Step 3: Dancing.  Check.

A Sorority House Christmas

On Christmas Eve, a local restaurant was kind enough to host our big Peace Corps group and home-cooked dinner.  My house didn’t have a kitchen, but we did our best to cook mashed potatoes, mulled wine, and mix up a salad with one pot and one gas tank while jamming out to Christmas music. 

We also had no spoons, which meant we had to stir and taste-test our food with daggers.

As a whole group, we managed to deliver an amazing meal of meat, pasta, seafood, bean dips, charcuterie, cheese, tapas, and desserts along with our house’s contributions.  It was a thoroughly delicious Christmas meal, and definitely the best Christmas dinner that could be made in Senegal.  On Christmas Day itself, I watched Winter’s Bone (my friends thought the title made it sound holiday-esque... no, unless holidays are a time to appreciate not being addicted to meth) and Moonrise Kingdom.  We also went to a rooftop, ocean-view liquor tasting and then ate at one of my favorite restaurants in country, Restaurant Saigon.  Coconut Chicken Curry and Pho: the Christmas dinner of champions!  We also finally exchanged white elephant gifts, and I ended up with a sassy pair of culotte pants and a book about a girl raised by hippies in an Indian ashram.   Step 4: everything else, done.

And New Year’s?  My friend Nicky’s family was visiting, and a few of us joined them in a lovely beach house.  We cooked a lot of pasta, braved freezing water, danced on a makeshift sand stage, and ducked behind wooden boats as a nearby hotel accidentally shot fireworks at us while blasting an Ultimate ABBA disco remix.  I also got into a fight with a small child over a party hat.  At 11:50pm, we went on a photo binge to document every last drop out of 2012.  

Hats provided by Nicky's family.

It was my second holiday season away from home, and while it was hard, I feel like I figured out how to do things a lot better this time around.  Lots of phone calls, lots of baked goods, and making sure a few well-worn traditions happened – my keys to a good holiday.  But ultimately, I look forward to next year, when I’ll hopefully be back doing the usual – holiday parties, a ridiculously decorated and electrifying tree, driving to light festivals, Christkindlmarkt, Christmas Eve with the family, morning with mom and my sister, Christmas Day movie with the sisters, Maggie’s birthday, and watching strangers fall into trash cans as we all sing “The World’s Greatest” at a house party in Chicago.  2013 is going to be bomb.

Let's Hear It For the Boy!

I feel like I’ve talked a lot about some of the girls in my life here – their situations, their challenges, and how I’ve been working with them.  The situation for boys and men, on the other hand, is just as interesting, and I suppose challenging in its own way.  I do a lot of work with SeneGAD, our gender and development group, and one of our big pushes for 2013 is Men As Partners’ Tournees.  Some of our Language and Cultural Facilitators (LCFs), who are the Senegalese teachers who guide us as we learn Wolof, Pulaar, cultural intricacies, and everything in between during our first few months, have been trained to lead gender awareness talks for other Senegalese groups.  Some of the male LCFs wanted to specifically target men for these talks, so we’re hosting them around the country to lead gender discussions.

Personally, I have a complicated relationship with males in this country.  I live in a female-dominated household, with only two host brothers, a quiet 14 year old and a raucous toddler.  Living in a city, I deal with more street harassment than a typical Peace Corps volunteer, and almost all of it comes from males aged 15-25.  These are the people who yell at me in baby voices, hurl racial slurs at me, chase me and ask me to marry them, and basically try to provoke me in any possible way for their personal amusement.  I’m sure there are plenty of nice, upstanding men roaming the streets of Senegal, but for my own personal sanity, I sacrificed interacting with them.  Maybe this is unfair, but ultimately, it was a survival mechanism.

Some great guys from my English class, including Pape Samba, who is somehow involved in every single project I've ever heard of in Thies

Then again, I’m also aware that men face their own challenges here.  Certainly, I do think their lives are easier than the lives of women.  Women, after all, are the ones who clean morning through night, cook all of the food, chase after the children, lug water, and run errands.  During all of this, men are usually lying on mats and being responsible for the labor intensive process of making tea.  That was sarcasm.  You can make tea lying down.  But as my English class of men, really great, open-minded men, once explained to me, men are responsible for supporting everyone, their households, extended families, and relatives.  And in an economy where almost half of the population is unemployed (in 2007, the CIA World Fact Book said the unemployment rate was 48%), that can be quite a hefty burden.  The culture says their job is to have a job, and when they can’t do that, they feel helpless: there’s nothing to do but try and look busy.  There’s nothing to do but try to feel like they’re contributing, maybe by making tea for everyone.

I’ve tried to take that perspective and let it temper the annoyance I have with the men I run into every day.  At the garage, which is the transportation center, you can’t go two steps without some man accosting you about where you’re going, then trying to direct you to a car or bus.  I used to find this process incredibly annoying – I know where the cars are, thank you very much, I take them every week, I live here, let go of my bag, I can walk over there myself.  I used to think that all of their aggression and insistence was related to the prospect of getting a commission for delivering a passenger.  But I’ve since realized that actually, most of these guys just want to feel like they’re doing something. 

Some of the great Life Skills coordinators and teachers from St. Louis and Louga.  

It’s the same with the men we sometimes pass standing in the middle of the road, directing traffic.  They aren’t policemen or traffic controllers or transportation leaders.  They’re literally just normal men who stop to take this up.  The other day a male security guard described how I would need to wait in a line before using the ATM.  Thank you, sir.  I wasn’t sure what this progression of people standing outside the bank was, and I had no idea that I should stand at the end and wait until the person in front of me takes a turn.  But then again, he just wanted a job to do.  I think they all might just be normal men who want to feel useful. And isn’t that what we all want?

It doesn’t help that Senegal is deeply entrenched in the talibe system, which sends young boys to religious schools, or daaras, at a young age to study the Koran.  In many ways, this system is a noble religious tradition, keeping Arabic and Koranic studies alive for the younger generations.  But often, it becomes an easy way for families to discard young boys when they can’t support them.  Someone once commented to me about the lack of orphans in Senegal.  She attributed it to the lack of AIDS crisis, which I think does play a part. But I also think Senegal lacks orphans because overtaxed families hold on to their girls, who can provide in-home labor, and send their boys to daaras instead of simply giving them up.  In a way, daaras are culturally-approved, free boarding schools.

At many daaras, there isn’t enough money to support the high number of students, and the compulsory begging meant to teach humility becomes a necessity for running the school and feeding the kids.  At worst, some corrupt marabouts make kids beg and keep money for themselves.  Daaras run the gamut: there are good ones and not-so-good ones, and there are some that incorporate progressive, French schooling and some with frightening levels of abuse. The talibe system as a whole obviously has all sorts of consequences for Senegal, but for me, one of the most interesting is the sheer amount of teenage boys without real-world skills it produces.  As one PCV once explained, so many boys leave their daaras with only Arabic fluency and the ability to beg.  They struggle when they return home to their villages, and many end up back in the cities, hawking phone credit, newspapers, magazines, or working in the garages – doing what they’ve done best for the past 10 years.  And I think many of them end up as the bored, listless boys who can find nothing to do except sit outside and yell at the random American girl who passes by on her bike.

Women hold incredible potential to develop Senegal further, and they should be supported.  But then again, men here are not the enemy – like the women, they are trapped in a lot of systems of their own.  Then again, because men hold more power, they have more power to change things.  It’s funny: whenever I talk to a Senegalese person about implementing some kind of gender discussion for men, their agreement always takes the same response – “Yes, because sexual abuse happens to boys too!”  That is true, but let’s be honest: men represent something less than 5% of sexual abuse victims, but yet, this is the default understanding of men and gender in this country.  In other words, few people have any idea of the power and connections that men hold to shift gender ideals, and ultimately, health, economic, and environmental ideals, for both women and themselves.

So here’s to the boys and seeing how our new, male-centered gender initiatives pan out.  And here’s to that hopeful day in the future where I can be less scary on my bike and maybe even drop a smile or two to passerbys on the street.

Two of my favorite Senegalese guys: my host dad and Mohammad