My 6 Month Anniversary!!c

As the title indicates: I have officially been in Senegal for 6 months!! It’s the shortest, longest 6 months I have ever had…if that makes any sense. Life has been busy around my compound and village lately.
When I returned from my time in Kaolack, to my surprise the entire village as flooded…think streets turned to rivers sort of flooding. It was gross…there was overflowing douches and horse poop and all of it floating in the “rivers”. But, it was no worse than Kaolack, which was also flooded.
My host brother wanted my help distributing trees to each compound in the village, so we went around with charettes (horse carts) and gave out 2 trees to all the compounds in my village; a pretty awesome task, but so important for the health and aesthetic of our village.

The same day we hosted an Ngente, or naming ceremony, for our neighbors. In Senegal the ngente’s occur 10 days after the child’s birth and involve everyone who is related to the family. It is a highly ritualalized affair. When the parents decide on a name, the baby is given to the Imam, and the Imam whispers the name into the babies ear then the griots (town crier) calls out the babies name for everyone to hear. The baby is brought back to the mom in the room, and from what I observed there is something involving hair and salt before the mother and baby are allowed to leave their room. Then there is a party, and lots of food! So we killed a sheep. Since it is Ramadan, all the food and drink was saved for after sundown.


In other Village news, the peanut harvest is beginning to come in, and now among the other various and odd skills I have learned in Senegal (such as killing and plucking chicken and skinning vermin) I can add harvesting and separating peantus to the list. This is a monumental task, since all of the work is done by hand, and the women sit around for hours tearing the peanuts off of the vines, and eventually shelling them. Farming takes up about 90% of the arable land in Senegal, with 60% making up the peanut basin east of Dakar where I live. 36% of that land is used on, you guessed it, peanuts! So the nuts are incredibly important for the region.




Unfortunatly I came back from Kaolack with dysentery (I will spare you the details), but needless to say I went to sleep the morning of the naming ceremony and didn’t move for 2 days, except to use the facilities. It sucked, but it’s the first time I have gotten sick in country where I didn’t want to go home!


Other good news, Ramdan is over! Woot. However to my dismay, apparently the holiday extends for some time. I went into town to try and get some errands run, and none of the businesses were open a week after Korite (the official end of Ramadan party). I was told by another volunteer not to plan on doing serious project work until Tabaski (the largest Islamic holiday that is in November), because people kind of take a while to “get back in the swing of things”. WTF. I am going to try to do a latrine project anyway, so I guess I will find out!!




My family will be having an Ngente this week because my sister had a baby girl!!!! I am so excited, she was miserably pregnant, and now I am an aunt!

Surviving Ramadan

Ramadan: "is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It is the Islamic month offasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and sexual relations fromdawn until sunset.^[1] Fasting is intended to teach Muslims about patience, humility, and spirituality. It is a time for Muslims to fast for the sake of God (Arabic: الله‎, trans: Allah) and to offer more prayer than usual. During Ramadan, Muslims ask forgiveness for past sins, pray for guidance and help in refraining from everyday evils, and try to purify themselves through self-restraint and good deeds. As compared to the solar calendar, the dates of Ramadan vary, moving backwards about eleven days each year depending on the moon. Muslims believe Ramadan to be an auspicious month for the revelations of God to humankind, being the month in which the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad" (Wikipedia)



In Senegal, Ramadan and fasting is observed by almost everyone, except for the small percentage of Catholics, and even then, I think they are somewhat forced to observe it because essentially the entire country changes it’s pace of life from slow, to barely moving for a whole month. I had said to myself  before the holiday started “ I am not fasting, no way, I neeeeeed to eat!”. Well, was I wrong, since I pay my family to include me in cooking the meals, there is only food and beverages when they eat, which during Ramadan is only between sundown and sun-up. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t rainy season and peak agricultural production season also. My typical day is as follows:


5 am: Xudd (my breakfast, but what is typically served for dinner) A porridge of some sort, or bread and sour milk (like yogurt or buttermilk), or millet and beans. All not so bad, but takes a bif of getting used to so early in the AM.


8-9 am: wake up, NO coffee means NO caffeine… I struggled with this the first few days for sure.


9- 11 or 12: work. This is typical for almost everyone to be working at this time.


12-6 pm: sitting, talking, watching tv, LOTS of reading


6-7pm: I have to exercise to salvage my sanity; 12-25k bike ride, depending on weather and heat.


7:28pm: Breaking Fast!!!! We start backwards from meal times so Breakfast is first, then lunch, etc. We have bread and butter with spiced coffee (Café Touba). Then we are given glass after glass of sticky, minty, limey, sweet Bissap (hibiscus) juice. WITH ICE!


8:30/9 pm: Lunch. This is the biggest meal, and is what we typically would eat during the lunch hour…lots more veggies in the bowl, chicken or other “meat” 2-3 times a week. Often followed by a smoothie like concoction of powdered milk, pineapple  or mango juice, and bananas, or Orange Soda.


10:30 pm: Snack, tea. I am usually in bed by this time, either reading or doing stuff on the computer, but when I am not we roast corn over the fire.


So that’s that. It is rough not to drink during the day, and I am not going to lie, but I have cheated on the water thing a lot. I hate the feeling of dehydration, but my body has gotten really used to the food thing. I was grateful to get the care packages my parents sent, because it allowed me to eat AFTER dinner too, and stuff that was yummy like fig newtons and chocolate. 


I think Ramadan wouldn’t be all bad, but I have a few qualms with the idea that people here do it because everyone else does regardless of their religious convictions (kind of like Christmas for Americans). The time is meant to reflect more deeply on your spirituality, and get closer to God…unfortunately it is not practiced as that here, since most people have never even read the Koran. But my biggest problem, comes down to the women and children. The Koran specifies that women who are pregnant, nursing, and menstruating should not fast. The same goes for children below puberty. I have talked myself in a circle of this fact, since the kids and mothers are typically malnourished to begin with, it often makes the situation worse.  Of course people here say “you’re not Muslim, how do you know it’s bad”, so I say “can you read the Koran, do you know what it says?” This confrontation is usually between myself and a teenage to 20 something male, so it’s OK for me to be a bit snarky.
I was rather upset at my very pregnant sister who was fasting, and my sister who is breastfeeding. They just told me I didn’t “understand”. Despite all of it, my sister has stopped producing enough milk and my other one has a bad bad respertory infection (along with all the kids who eat mainly stale bread and old rice all day). I think what bothers me is that they ask me for advice, medicine, money, but as soon as I have something useful to offer, something that is important for health and wellbeing, they ignore it. Oh Senegal.


SO; after 1 month of not leaving the village, after fasting the whole time, after no beer or wine, after killing and plucking chickens all by myself, after a rain storm knocked down one of the huts in my compound, after a giant rat attacked a goat and we ate the rat for dinner, after both schizophrenic adults in my village came to my hut…I headed to my regional house, where I currently have a beer in my hand, and an abundance of food. (note: I still have 1 week or so of Ramadan when I head back).

We came, We saw, We trained

IST finally drew to a close. In addition to the things I listed in my last blog post, we also did sessions on tree outplanting, how to hold HIV/AIDS trainings, effective strategies for doing causeries (demonstrations of technical information to the public) and a NGO fair that introduced us to some of the other aid organizations working in Senegal, and basically what they did. For the most part the second week was pretty lack-luster. I did however enjoy the beekeeping field trip we went on! The man who we toured with was very knowledgeable about the type of problems we might face in the village with our communities, and also offered practical advice and alternatives to the traditional box style hives used in the west. The Gambia Peace Corps program has a fairly established project going on for keeping bees, and also a training. I would love to get involved with this as side project, since I live in an area with numerous tree pepineres and community gardens.

After IST, we spent another lovely weekend at the beach, and then I was off to Dakar. 
Dakar is a wonderful place ( I say this in the context that I live in a village and therefore think ANY city is nice.) But it really does have most of the things you want in a city: food, music, clubs, and a beach! As PC volunteers we get free admission into the American Club (a country club with volley ball courts, pool, tennis court, and  of course drink specials and food). I was in Dakar a week before our IST started, and then again for a few days afterward. I got to eat REAL cheese and REAL ice cream and the best authentic Chinese food I have ever had (thank goodness we had a native Mandarin speaker with us). For a bit I was able to forget that I was in developing West Africa, and just do somewhat normal things any 20-something would be doing in a large city. I guess that’s the problem with the developing world, all of the money is centered around metropolis areas where a fraction of the population is able to live and work, leaving the rural areas forgotten. 
Needless to say, I was ready to head out of the city and back to my hut!


When I arrived back in my village, to my utter dismay, my garden had not been watered, and there had been only 2 seasonal rains the entire month. My plants were almost dead, and my watermelon was very dead. I was not a happy camper with my host sister who had watered my garden previously, and she offered to me no explanation to why she didn’t. After a  week and a half of coaxing, they are all nearly back to normal, just a few weeks behind in maturation. I have 3 cucumbers that will be ready for picking very soon!!! 


I  was able to participate in a Universal Nut Sheller demonstration. The UNS is a simple concrete and metal machine that, with the help of a hand  crank, shells nuts, most notably peanuts. Since I live in the peanut basin of Senegal, this technology is well received. If you have good dry nuts, it shells peanuts 40 times faster than women can do it by hand. I personally have the calluses to prove that 40 hours of shelling peanuts SUCKS!  The cost is minimal (about $75 US) and is a great investment by a woman’s group, or co-op. Hopefully, the women we showed it to connected the labor and time trade-off, a connection that is hard to put across in a country where time is not valued, and is not related to how much money you can make. As one person put it “ what will I do with all that extra time during harvest season?”. 


http://www.thefullbellyproject.org/

In other news, my 12 year old sister is “takked’ the Wolof equivalent of engaged.  While I have been uncomfortable in many cultural situations in this Muslim country, this is by far the one where I want to scream EWWW at the top of my lungs but cannot. I have never been one to much hold my tongue, so watching all of this occur in my compound in front of my own eyes is disturbing. Yet, I do what I can by saying that she has to finish school before they get married. The marriage isn’t planned for 5 years, which is some relief, but since she began menstruating last month, she was old enough to be promised to someone. He is close to me in age.