After a year in Peace Corps, it finally occurred to me that the time has come for me to start blogging about it.
So here we go, starting with a little bit of background info...
As I said, I've been in Peace Corps for about a year. But unlike most volunteers in Senegal, I started my service in another country - Niger. Unfortunately, the Peace Corps program in Niger was closed early in my service and all of the volunteers in-country were evacuated due to security concerns. So here I am in Senegal. And I love it here.
Like most Americans, I knew little or nothing about it before arriving in country, and after three weeks of language training and a crash course in local culture, I was on my way to my new site. In all honesty, timing was an important component in me not freaking out about leaving Niger and switching my service to Senegal.
When you start off in a new country, you start psyching yourself up to the expectation that, barring any unforeseen circumstances, this is where you’re spending the next two years of your life. Once you finish training, you’re going to go to a village/town/city that will in all probability comprise your family, your workplace, and your primary social network for the next two years of your existence. Life as you know it has effectively ceased to exist.
So that’s what I did, and after going through all of that I went to my new site in Niger and was pulled out shortly thereafter and evacuated to Morocco, where I had the option to either go home to the US or apply for a new post in a new country. And that decision ultimately led me to Senegal.
One thing, however, has remained the same. Yes, I had to learn a new language and yes, my sector changed slightly from generic agriculture and natural resource management to the more specific heading of "Agroforestry," but the concept of living and working in village has remained pretty much the same. My village is stashed away in one of the more remote areas of Senegal in the
Kolda region, about 7k off the main road. We have two primary wells in my village, about 1500 people, two small "boutiques" where you can get matches, soap or maggi cubes, a school, a health hut, and a broken deep bore well. As is the custom for most Peace Corps sites, I'm the only volunteer in my site- my closest PC neighbor (
Dave Glovsky) is in my road town, which as I mentioned before, is 7k away.
Unless I bike out of my village to go hang-out/ work with other volunteers, it's all on me in my ville, which leads to a lot of cross-sector work for most volunteers. So with the broader category of "agfo" (ie: planting lots of trees) set aside, a lot of my work in village is done with the local school, the health hut, the women's group, or simply with individual community members, and frequently has nothing whatever to do with planting trees at all. Example: About 36 hours after the Peace Corps car dropped me off at my site with all of my worldly possessions and drove off into the sunset, people in my village started telling me how badly they needed to start a community garden. Since the timing was off and it takes a significant period of time to a) coordinate the village around a project plan and b) raise enough money to make the project actually happen, we're only just starting to prepare the site now, nine months later. Things take time. In the interim, I work with the health hut to educate the community about nutrition and a fascinating superfood megaplant called
Moringa, practice math and English with the kids in my village, work in my personal demo-garden in my backyard, study for the GRE, work with the kids on their school garden, and plant trees whenever the opportunity presents itself.
All things considered, I manage to stay busy but still have a surprising amount of downtime. I do, after all, live in a village in West Africa, which is a thought that still has the potential to blow my mind on any given day when I actually think about what that means. But more on that later....
