Water harvesting + heat exhaustion = Awesomeness

The whole group in Fodé Bayo, the third site on the tour

     Last Friday, my cousin Samba, my neighbor Coumba and I, set out to meet four other volunteers and their counterparts in a village about 3 hours away. After months of planning and kicking this particular project idea around, five of us decided that we were going to do a series of five water-harvesting and soil erosion training demonstrations, one in each of our sites, and include our local counterparts on the tour. The idea was that, by all of us visiting each individual site, we would have a better idea of what kind of work each other is doing, the individual challenges and strengths the belong to each site, and the variety of water harvesting  methods that might be applicable in one particular village vs another. So off we went...

 As wonderfully and conscientiously trained as we all are, there are times when the work that we do depends on the expertise of another volunteer or a Peace Corps training guru - in this case, third-year volunteer Austin and PC staff member Youssupha. This training tour would never have happened without their help - Austin leading the training in English (he's Wolof, which is almost useless in Pulaar-country), and then being translated into Pulaar by Youssupha. Also, we would have all melted without the women who dedicated themselves to providing us with constant access to drinking water - it's the hottest part of the hot season in Kolda right now, which means that it's averaging about 115-120 in the afternoons and doesn't cool down much during the rest of the day. Not necessarily ideal conditions for a week-long field-training and work in the field with a pickaxe all day, but vital in terms of the upcoming rainy season. Everyone in village is prepping their fields for planting about a month from now, so this was the perfect time to go out and install contour berms, water catchment basins, etc.

The demo terrace - compost will be added during the rainy season

The first village on the tourney was a medium-sized village of about 1000 people on the far-eastern side of the Kolda region. We were hosted by Ruth (red shirt), who is one of the new sustainable agriculture volunteers that arrived this past fall. This was one of the slower-paced and more tiring trainings out of the entire tour, simply because of the amount of explanation that had to go into teaching unfamiliar techniques to seven counterparts and the various villagers who showed up to help/watch. After building contour berms and catchment basins all morning, taking a break during the afternoon, and then finishing work during the late afternoon/evening, we spent the following day traveling back from Timindallah to my site, Nghoki, which is more in the central part of the Kolda region. And it was incredible. All of our counterparts had picked up the techniques from the day before and were ready to run with it the next day. Whereas Ruth's work was all being done in a field, we were working in my community garden site, which is on a slope leading out from my village. Due to the topography of my site, which was very different from Ruth's site the day before, we ended up doing a combination of catchment basins, terraces, and boomerang berms to slow the flow of water down the hill that our community garden is being built on. It was great, though. About 20 of the women from my village's women's group showed up to help, and our counterparts jumped in and did most of training and demonstrations over the course of the day. We knocked out the terraces, boomerang berm, and catchment basins before lunch, and were able to travel to Mary's site in Fodé Bayo that afternoon. The exciting part about the whole demo was the fact that the village could get an idea of how quickly the work can get done if you have enough people working on it, especially in groups.

 

Next up, Fodé Bayo, which is Mary's Mandinka village about 20k north of my site - we crammed all 13 of us into the back of the Peace Corps car and onward we went. Unlike Ruth and I, who are both the first volunteers in our villages, Mary is the third volunteer at her site, so her village was primed and ready to get some serious work done. And once again, the counterparts jumped in and took the lead, determining the contour of the land with homemade A-frames, demonstrating the new techniques, and explaining the entire process to anyone who showed up to help. Her village also has a lot of energy, far more than the other sites we visited - the women started a dance line along the tops of the contour berms to pack down the soil, which went on until we finally broke for lunch and headed on to the next site, Sinchian Sirin. 

Soil erosion in Sinchian Sirin - the whole village is washing out

As it turned out, Sinchian Sirin was the village that most desperately in need of the work that we were trying to do. It's a fairly new village, only founded about 15 years ago, but they have managed to create a canyon running straight through the center of the village by cutting down all of the trees around the village to make room for their cows and field crops. This mass deforestation has resulted in a huge washout every rainy season, causing massive erosion that will force them to move their village in a few years if they don't do something to fix it immediately.

The final stop on the tour was in the city of Kolda itself, where we met with an urban agriculture volunteer, Jordan, to install spillways in the rice paddies that were built in her urban garden site. The problem with that particular site was that they built the garden in an area that is typically flooded to about knee-height every rainy season due to a drainage pipe that empties into a dip in the landscape. Without the spillways, the rice paddies will overflow and the garden beds will be completely submerged.

Whitney & her counterpart, Abdoulaye

But the best night of the tour was the thank you dinner. We decided that we would throw a soiree for our counterparts, so Ruth and I made a world-fusion dinner of guacamole, salsa, salad, vegetable sauce and pasta, and frozen yogurt with chopped mangoes and bananas, and finished it off with banana bread and snickerdoodles. Given the kind of food (rice or millet with peanut sauce, usually) that we all eat all the time, our buffet line was a little too confusing for our counterparts. But in the end, it was a huge success, polished off with a thank you ceremony, photo shoot, and a slideshow to highlight some key moments from the tour itself.

We're already planning to adapt this model to other types of trainings, and hope to start a community garden training tour based along similar lines in July, working primarily on alley cropping, permagardening, live fencing, and the chance to check up on the work that we did during this tour and do some minor repair work once the rains have started. In the end, this tour turned into an incredible experience that, not only resulted in getting a large amount of serious work done that we might not otherwise have been able to do, but sent us back to our sites all with a lot of positive feedback, great energy, and some wonderful moments. I can't wait to start planning the next one...

Youssupha explaining the next steps for maintaining the boomerang berms - also, Mary, Seini, Samba, & Abdoulaye

Me, Samba, Abdoulaye, Youssupha, and various village helper-outers working on the terraces in my village

Mary and the ladies from my garden group, digging along an erosion channel to install the catchment basins.

My counterpart, Samba, leveling-up the dirt along the top of the terrace. Accompanied by my dog, George Michael.

Mary's village and her counterparts, Seini and Fanta

Austin and Ruth - Peace Corps Gothic

Starting the catchment basins at Ruth's site

Flashbacks and Reality checks

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.

A Hard Day's Night

“You know you've really done it well when you're just emotionally drained at the end of the experience, because you've really reached in and you've transferred some emotion from another part of yourself, and put a different set of clothes on it.” - Randy Goodrum

Over the last few weeks, life in village has been pleasantly broken up by the unusual influx of visitors and hut guests who have been passing through. Since it's the hot season, work is at a minimum for most volunteers, so traveling around to other sites is finally a possibility. Unless you're me, in which case, projects that have been in the works for the last year are finally getting moving at a startlingly rapid pace.

One of the hardest things to adjust to in Peace Corps, for myself as well as for most other volunteers, is the drastic reduction in the pace of life in Senegal. I think it's especially difficult for volunteers in my age group, 22-30, who are accustomed to constant stimulation in the US, whether it be work, school, social, or the mere fact that we're constantly plugged-in and overachieving to the best of our abilities.  The lack of input, combined with the fact that you're pretty much constantly off the grid and on your own in village, tends to make you a little stir crazy anyway. Which of course leads to the need to develop seemingly inordinate amounts of patience and the ability to stare blankly at the wall of your hut for hours on end.

Personally, my biggest challenge in Senegal has been to remain objective about the work that I can actually get done, without feeling completely stagnant and ineffective. Again, it's the little things that account for most of what you accomplish as a PCV, and being able to recognize the difference between harrying yourself with busy-work just to feel like you're doing something and actually accomplishing something, albeit at a much slower pace. Much slower. When it comes to getting work done, you find yourself more often than not waiting for months on end before seeing the results of all of your planning and frustration. Prime example, I've been working on the same community garden project in my village since my first week in village, over a year ago. Due to the seasonal community work calendar in my village, the project needed to wait until after the harvest, once the rains had ended - last October. After a series of meetings, delays, promises, etc, we're finally breaking ground on the project - a year after the project was originally discussed, six months after submitting the budget for the project. Among other things, the lack of community organization has proven to be the most consistent obstacle in the way of the project's progress. I constantly find myself torn between wanting to scoop the project up and do it all myself and actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is to facilitate the project's implementation and allow the village to take ownership of the project. Swooping in and taking control is so tempting... SO tempting... but it's completely counterproductive in the long run. So, as your average volunteer, I end up struggling with what to do when everything seems to be going wrong. But when so many things don't go according to plan, you're completely beside yourself with joy when things finally start coming together. Which is where I am right about now :)

So this month's note to self and the void: development is gradual and a group effort. It also has to start from the bottom up. Once you get the village behind a project, all of the little pieces start falling into place, and it's only because you've been consistently, tirelessly, patiently lining things up for months, explaining the details to people in the village, reiterating the fact that it's not your pet project, it belongs to the community - if they don't want it, it won't happen. If it matters enough to them, you'll be surprised at the enthusiasm that the mere mention of the project can bring. Yesterday, my host dad and I marked out and measured the fence line for the community women's garden. Tomorrow, we start digging two new, desperately needed wells in my village. Yettaare Allah, things are finally coming together....

A Tale of Two Pregnancies

Once upon a time, there were two Senegalese village girls. Outgoing, vivacious, confident - at every soiree, every wedding, they would deck themselves out in their finest outfits and dance the night away. The primary difference between the two friends was that one had moved to my village from the Gambia for the sole purpose of learning French in school, while the other had never been to school a day in her life.

Then, about nine months ago, they were both frequently absent from the family compound, much to our family’s annoyance, and a few months later they were both trying to hide their very own, very obvious baby bumps. Maimouna, the one who was going to school, was kicked out of our house, pulled out of school and sent back to live with her father, who promptly beat her. The second, Binta, suffered few repercussions, with the possible exception of now being the butt of every dirty joke and sly comment at the village well.

Months went by, Maimouna's father continued to beat her on a regular basis and then did himself one worse by refusing to let her go to the health post for prenatal checkups. Binta's family, on the other hand, pumped her full of vitamins and monthly visits and took the situation in stride. They were both 15 years old.

So after returning to village after the holidays, waves of gossip started hitting me in rapid succession. A day apart from each other, they had each had a baby boy. Now, regardless of the outcome and the children's survival, in the eyes of their families and community they're both damaged goods. The most that they can hope for now is to marry some old man as a 3rd or 4th wife. But while both girls had survived the delivery without any complications, which was a relief given the high maternal mortality rate in Senegal, one of the babies was small and in poor health. You can probably guess which one it was.

The next morning, the news broke. Maimouna's baby had died in the night. She won't stop crying. She's alone, in pain, miserable, ostracized, and worst of all, her baby just died. And all her family has to say is that she should have known better, that it's better that it died. She needs to shut up and stop crying. Meanwhile, Binta is two houses down the street, walking around and feeling pretty good about her life, basking in the attention that a healthy baby boy brings. For Binta, her family’s attitude had made every possible difference.

One thing that I can say about my family is that they're very understanding people. When we realized that Binta was pregnant, we wished that it hadn't happened, given the cultural implications. We talked about what a problem teen pregnancy is in the village, but happily, nobody felt that attacking her with a bamboo stick would have resolved the situation or done anyone any material good. It happened, it was an unfortunate choice, but she still needed to go in for her prenatal visits and get her prenatal vitamins. As my host mom said, it's a problem in our village. These things happen. It's sad. But we still need to be understanding.

My sister and I went to visit Maimouna the day after her baby died, and her father was just sitting outside of their house - he wouldn't even acknowledge our arrival, which is a heinous offence in Pulaar culture, where greetings and hospitality are paramount. He just didn't care. He was making a point, especially to me. I’m a twenty-something educated white woman with no husband who does whatever she wants. I just don’t understand. Meanwhile, Maimouna is curled up in a ball in her room, sobbing, while her relatives and the women in the village cluster into her room to berate her. And there was nothing I could say. My only comment before I left was to tell her to keep crying. It's painful, it's sad, it sucks. She needed to acknowledge that pain. What she really needed was a hug, which I gave her. But that's all that I could do.

So my reaction to this situation.... yesterday morning, in cooperation with Peace Corps training staff, we held a training at my village school with students and parents to address girl's education, gender roles and respect. As I said, teen pregnancy is a huge problem in the village setting, and is frequently the result of rape or coercion. It typically results in girls dropping out of school and losing out on their only opportunity to obtain any kind of education or exposure to anything other than pounding millet and pulling water with a baby on their back all day. Hence, the push to increase community awareness of the importance of communicating with their children, keeping girls in school, and promoting women’s reproductive healthcare

Three weeks after going to visit Maimouna, we finally have some good news. She passed the exam to continue on to middle school last term, and now she's going to move to our road town and continue her education. In brutal honesty, if the baby had survived, this would not have been possible. But at least now she has the opportunity to move on with her life and get beyond this whole experience. And at least now, we’ve created a semi-open discussion in my village about women’s health and access to care and education. It's a bittersweet ending to an all too common story, but it's something. 

Episode 1 - Tali kulu si meets djam tan

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....

For more information about the Peace Corps program in Senegal, check out their website http://pcsenegal.org/.

First day of work on the community garden - October 2011

Mahmadou, Yero, and Souleymane - 3 of my host brothers in my hut

A side street in St. Louis, Senegal - formerly the capitol under French colonial rule

My host mom, Mariama, and one of her daughters in her rice field - September 2011

My little sister Maimouna, helping me pound cow manure for the school tree nursery - March 2011

Starting the school tree nursery - May 2011

Collecting rainwater during the rainy season - October 2011

Inside my hut sweet home

Traveling by cow cart in Sabula, Niger - December 2010

The pat toward the market in Sabula, Niger - December 2010

Women pounding millet in Niger - January 2011- It's done exactly the same way every day in Senegal as well