First, a few thrilling updates!Thrilling update #1 - After much trepidation building up to the final vote, the Presidential elections in Senegal went through peacefully and we have a new president, Macky Sal. My best friend in village, Nyuko, had a baby boy on election day.... Macky Sal Balde :) Had he been a girl, they were going to name him after me, but you can't have everything...
Thrilling update #2 - We've hit water on the first of two wells being dug in the village! Not quite finished yet, but it's a huge step - pictured, fellow PCV Dan Hodson, swinging into the second well on a rope to the amusement of several villagers.... It's always a wonderful feeling - you've been hard at work in village for a few months, and you finally leave village for a week or two to participate in a couple of trainings or to work on some other project. A few weeks later, you roll back into village after an exhausting 17 hour car trip back from the coast and wander into your backyard -- only the find out that your mango trees have been dug up by chickens and your entire tree nursery has been decimated by a few particularly sadistic sheep.
As I mentioned in my last post, I've had a seemingly constant stream of visitors coming through my village. Earlier this month, I hosted two American college students who are studying abroad in Dakar for a few months. As part of their curriculum, the students in this particular program (CIEE) are required to go out on a "rural visit," which in most instances means that there's a good chance that they'll be staying with a Peace Corps volunteer. Obviously, it's a great chance for them to get out of the city and get a feel for what the rest of the country is like, but it was also a rare chance for me to have a little bit of a reality check. After you've been in village for a certain period of time, I feel like you tend to become slightly complacent. You're so used to pulling water and camping out and eating corn every day in the dark that you begin to lose your perspective on how radically your life has changed. Which was why it was so interesting to have these two students come out for a few days. You start to lose your sense of what is and isn't normal for your life as you've always known it, and end up normalizing so much of your experience that you no longer really appreciate all of the quirky and fascinating aspects of your life as you're now living it. Which is why it's so important to inject a certain amount of fresh perspective and naivete into your life at various points along the way. I would hate to think that I've become too complacent, getting lost in the daily routine of village and the stresses of language, communication, and the disappointments that inevitably come when projects and plans go awry.
One of the nicest things about the visit was my greater appreciation of how my interactions with people in village have developed the longer I've been at site. I arrived in my village over a year ago, barely able to greet people and with no contacts, friends, or concept of how the village interacted as a cohesive unit. Finally, while there are still people that I don't really know and plenty of people whose names I can't remember, I have my set of close friends in village who I visit every day, and I finally feel like a member of the community. It's something that you need to see in contrast to other situations in order to fully appreciate how much progress you've made, and it was so much fun to be able to show these students around the village, introduce them to people, translate (especially translating), and to actually be able to show a fellow American who is non-Peace Corps a little bit about what my life is like in village and what it's like to work in this kind of scenario.
The notion that a PCV can ever really describe their experience in a way that accurately reflects how it has impacted their life is virtually impossible. Be it family, friends or random strangers, we're all very aware of the fact that no matter how close you are to someone and how much you tell them about your life here, that unless they've been here and physically witnessed some aspect of what you're trying to describe to them, that a huge piece of the puzzle will always be missing. For most volunteers, I feel that the positives of this experience far outweigh the negatives, with the low moments making the highs so much more powerful and memorable. The things that most people think would be difficult (like pulling your own water and living without electricity on a diet of rice, rice and more rice for two years) are actually the things that you acclimate to the fastest and that make the least amount of difference. If anything, you're more worried about telling people about all the little things that nag at and frustrate you on a daily basis -- people are already worried enough simply by virtue of the fact that they know nothing about where you are and what it's like to actually live there. The fact that it's such a foreign concept to most people leads you to become more concerned about perpetuating misconceptions and reinforcing concerns for your safety and well-being that are really non-issues. Which leads to a certain hesitance in being completely honest about stressors in village, like coordinating village projects when only certain people can do certain specific things (ex: women can only cut 2in wide fence posts, a 3in fencepost has to be cut by a man... just because, well, that's the way it always goes. and the men can't do it today because it's 11 am and they're resting right now. So we can't do any work until next Friday, even though today is Thursday, because Friday's are the acknowledged day to do community work and we need to give them a week's notice, and we really don't know if they'll be able to do it anyway because yadda yadda...).Nevertheless, one of the most beautiful things about my village is their willingness to accept you as one of their own. As other volunteers are now coming to the end of their service and about to go back to the US, I've realized how much a part of my life my host family and my village has become, and as my family hears about other volunteers going back home, they've started talking more and more about and getting more and more upset about he idea of me leaving in six months. As they said the other day, they're my family now. They protect me when they feel that I need protection, they help me out when I need support, and they take care of me in the best way that they know how. And as this last stage of volunteers packs up and says goodbye, I'm becoming more aware of how hard it's going to be to say goodbye to my own family. To my brothers, my mom, my best friend, my work partners, my sister - especially knowing that chances are, I'll never see them again. It just makes you appreciate the time that you've had so much more.
