All About that Food: Part 1

I have been meaning to write this post for months. I kept writing things in my head only to have no electricity to type it out and no internet to post it. The entries I wanted to write kept building up and I didn't know what to do with them all, but then I realized that they (much like my Peace Corps service in general) were all about food. Thus, in honor of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, this series is all things food from my past three months at site, complete with recipes!
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Tabaski
October 5th

Tabaski is the biggest holiday of the Senegalese year. Called Eid al-Adha elsewhere, it celebrates the day that Abraham was faithful enough to God to kill his firstborn child for Him when he asked, and God rewarded his faith by having him kill a ram instead. It doesn't sound like the happiest situation, but just wait until I talk about the Thanksgiving story later in the series. Anyways, like many holidays, the celebration has taken on a life of its own. Clothes are an incredibly important part of Senegalese culture and being clean and well dressed is essential to be respected in this society. At holiday time, clothes and appearances again take a central place. Young girls and boys all get a new outfit for the day, which in Katote means traditional complets for the girls and new polos and jeans for the boys. For adult men and especially women, the tabaski outfits are downright extravagant. First, women spend the entire week leading up to the event and even before then getting ready for the day. It was all I could do to get my very fashionable young health workers to focus on malaria instead of their dress orders at the end of August. You have to secure a tailor to make your outfit at least a month in advance and many of them work around the clock to get everything done. In the week before, women henna their feet and hands and get their hair braided. Buckets of fake hair, or mess, abound in everyone's yard as it is braided or sewn into people's heads. Even I got into it this year and consented to have my hair braided.

But, back to the food. One thing that has stayed absolutely true to the origins of the Tabaski holiday is the sheep sacrifice. For two months before Tabaski, sheep are shipped all around the country, mostly from the Fuuta where I and most of the herders live, to places where they don't regularly have herds, like Dakar. It makes for an interesting transportation experience and far too many of my clothes smelled like dirty sheep after the travels of our malaria tournee. Sheep meat isn't my favorite but for the past two years Tabaski has fallen during starving season so everyone is very excited for the feast. This year, I took careful notes for a recipe and took a rough timeline of the events:

morning: pull extra water to use for all the extra bathing and cooking
10:30: kill the first ram and start to skin him (a man's job). Peel onions and potatoes (a woman's job). Depending on how many kids you have, start washing them.
11:30: the ram has been skinned and cut down from the tree branch, the blood has been buried. The men move onto the neighbor's house to kill their ram. The kids are washed and dressed in their new clothes and start to roam the streets. Keep peeling your buckets of onions and potatoes and start to chop them. People will be stopping by all morning to greet you with the special Tabaski greetings.
11:35: We have been looking at food all morning and I'm so hungry I'm shaking.
11:45: Put your biggest pot on the fire.
12:30: First meat snack. There is nothing like freshly killed fried meat.
12:55: At the exact moment the cover is taken off the bucket of onions you've been cutting for hours, a soccer ball lands in it. The biggest dirt clumps are removed, the bucket in re-covered and the kids are sent away to play elsewhere.
1:15: Start cooking (see recipe below)
3:00: Shower, perfume yourself, put on your new outfit and gaudy amounts of jewelry and makeup
3:30: Have your first portion of the tabaski meal.
3:50: Your feede, or age group, is finally ready and so you bring a bowl over to the house of one of your feede members. Everyone admires each other's outfits, then peanuts, mint candies and packaged cookies are served and finally you eat. Following the meal is juice and attaya, and you go home. You shower, fold up your fancy clothes, eat some lunch leftovers, and go to sleep.

Tabaski Feast Stew

Ingredients are not provided for this as I imagine you are not cooking an entire ram for 30 people. Just add what looks right. Amounts of spices and the onion/potato/meat ratios vary from cook to cook here anyways.

1. Brown large chunks of meat in oil, remove. 

2. Mix a small amount of the chopped onions with boullion cubes, french mustard, freshly ground pepper, and salt. Pound lightly in your woyru, or pounding vessel (like a large mortar and pestle)

3. Add uncooked onion mixture to hot fried meat. This is your snack while you are cooking, enjoy.

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1. Mix the rest of the onions with boullion cubes, mustard, vinegar, salt and pepper. Let rest, covered.

2. Salt the cubed potatoes in water. Let sit.

3. Brown meat in oil in a large pot, then add water to fill the pot halfway. Let simmer.

4. After 30 min, add the onions.

5. After 10 min more, add the potatoes.

6. Simmer lightly until potatoes are soft. Everything will be mushed together in a stew-like consistency.

7. Serve and eat communally.

For photos of Tabaski, click here or check out my "photos" tab

All About that Food: Part 2

More food-related news from the past three months...
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Hearth Project

November 10-20

Last year I did a hearth project with my counterparts after starving season to address the high number of children "in the yellow," or at least one standard deviation below the acceptable weight for their age. It was a big success and so we decided to do it again this year. For 10 days, 10 women and their children came to my counterpart's house. They were divided into groups and took turns doing the cooking and donating logs for the fire. They and their children then ate the food together and practiced supervised feeding. However, we improved on last year's model this time around. With my better language and understanding of the village, I was able to have more input and was more hands-on, which felt good. This year we gave talks to the women about what healthy foods were, what categories of food they fell into, and what parts of your body they helped through the complet model, a strategy developed by volunteers that relates go, grow and glow foods to the three essential parts of a complet, the traditional ensemble worn by Senegalese women. We also gave talks on preventing and treating diarrhea and I gave one on nebadaye powder, a nutritious and easy to make powder from the leaves of a tree commonly grown in Senegal, complete with samples. I also kept track of the cooking and did my best to compile recipes of the foods we served.

I started to write all the recipes down here, but then decided it was too much. Check out my brand new "recipies" tab on the top of this page!

After the 10 days, all of the children had gained weight. We will continue to track their progress every 15 days for the next two months. Check out the pictures of the project here or in the pictures tab.

All About that Food: Part 3

And even more food!

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Thanksgiving

I was blessed enough to have not one awesome Thanksgiving this year but TWO. 

The first was with my fellow PCVs at a regional house in Ndioum. Last year, I had one of my best Thanksgivings ever, with buckets of food (no, really, the mashed potatoes and stuffing were in huge buckets), dancing, and lots of laughs. This year was just as great if not better. It made me so happy to have 20 of us volunteers coming together, bringing different family traditions and dishes into a little kitchen in the middle of nowhere and using a one-temperature oven and one-temperature burners to cook some of the best Thanksgiving food I've ever had. It is the communal spirit that every Thanksgiving should be, the reason we have the holiday every year. Maybe being away from home purified the meaning of it for us; abundance is something rarely seen in Senegal, and we rejoiced in having an abundance of all the things we have given up here- speaking English, choices about what to eat, cooking for ourselves, wearing whatever we want, showers, and most importantly, our friends and our food. 

In my almost two years here, I have loved learning about and participating in Senegalese culture, especially holidays. Korite, Tabaski, Tamharit, and even Touba Magal have been a big part of my life here. So, naturally, I've been wanting for a while to give my family here that same gift and show them what an American holiday is like. I decided that Thanksgiving was the perfect holiday to recreate for my Senegalese family. It involves food, a story from America, and didn't conflict with any of their holidays. My friend Lindsay came to visit and help and I bought chickens (an impossibly rare treat in my village), brought cranberry sauce, peas, stuffing and gravy, and made instant mashed potatoes. A week before the "fete Americain" I told the families in my neighborhood that I was planning to cook them American food for the holiday. I printed out a coloring book story about Thanksgiving from the internet, read the story to my siblings and neighbors, and then had them color in the pages and give them back to me. Now, after almost two years here my language skills are fairly good. I can translate from Pulaar to English and back on the fly, I can express most ideas in Pulaar, and I can understand almost anyone. (Exceptions to this include trying to describe skiing and understanding the old men who mumble worse than your sullen teenager.) However, I doubt that the Thanksgiving story really got to my Senegalese family. Have you read a Thanksgiving story recently?

Explaining it to my family went something like: people from England came over on ships to America. England and America are not the same, they are across an ocean from each other. There were other people already there. They were Americans. Yes, they were brown. Yes, the English people are white, and now the majority of Americans are white. But not all Americans, there are Americans of all colors. Yes, there are Black Americans, yes they are real Americans, no, they are not just Africans on vacation. Just trust me, there are lots of different kinds of Americans. But originally it was these brown people. Now, the English people didn't know anything about farming or making food, so the Americans helped them. The brown Americans, not the white English people who would eventually become Americans, yeah. (For better or worse, I glossed over awful violence, terrible diseases, and centuries of racism in the interest of time.) And so they worked together, and they were able to make food and survive. And then the English people said thank you to the Americans and they had a party with lots of food to celebrate. And that is why today we eat lots of food and say thank you. Yeah.

I tried.

But anyways, they got that it was a holiday and it was a holiday for giving thanks. I collected the colored pages from the kids that week and then on the day of the celebration we read the story again in all its colored glory. Then we ate the food, which was prepared mostly by my counterpart and best friend Penda. She did an amazing job, more than I could have ever asked for. We gave out nine bowls of food to friends and neighbors who had come for the fun and I think they actually liked it. Most people ate almost everything (even the cranberry sauce!). I think the stuffing was the least popular, it proabably had too many unfamiliar spices. But, success!

This year, I pulled off making two thanksgiving dinners for about 20 people each and had so much fun doing it. I am thankful to my American family and friends for supporting me from afar, and to my family and friends here for celebrating with me and helping me every day.

For more photos, click here or check out the photos tab at the top!

International Day of the Girl

The International Day of the Girl was October 11th and to celebrate, SeneGAD (Senegal's Gender and Development Committee) decided to do a country-wide discussion and photo project. In our sites, we asked girls to fill in the sentence "I am..." and we talked to the girls about all the positive attributes they had. I cannot tell you how much fun I had with this. They immediately latched onto the concept and we had a great discussion about who they felt they were, what they wanted for themselves, and how to toppitaade hoore ma or "take care of yourself/your life." The discussion was for them, but their amazing answers are written in English for you all. Enjoy!

The boys wanted to get in on the fun too! 

 (soccer player)

So You Want to be a Peace Corps Volunteer...

I've been wanting to write this post for quite some time. I have hesitated, because how could I know what it takes to be a Peace Corps volunteer? Just because I am one doesn't mean I am necessarily a good one. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, who knows. At a year and 7 months, I still question every day what it means to be here and what my purpose is here. However, I have seen a lot of volunteers come and go at this point. Happy volunteers, angry volunteers, productive volunteers, lazy volunteers, disillusioned volunteers, and most people who were a combination of all of the above at any given moment. I've gone through all of these phases as well. I feel qualified at this point to give advice.

Many people may disagree with me on what you need to be good at this job and I would appreciate comments if you have constructive additions. Keep in mind that this is influenced by my country's program, my sector (health), and my region. I think this is an especially poignant time to write this post, as it was the time I considered Peace Corps service, starting my senior year in college. If you are reading this and thinking about applying, I hope it helps.

Forget everything you thought you knew

This is the first rule of joining Peace Corps. I don't care if you were a CEO for 10 years, if you were the smartest kid in your graduating class, if your uncle is the president of UNICEF, or if you started your own NGO in Uganda at 15, this is different. When you arrive here, you are a baby. You know nothing. You can look back to your previous experiences and use them here, sure, but the less preconceived notions you have about your service the better. Some of the volunteers I've known who had the most difficult time with their service were the ones who had dreamed about it since they were 10 and had all sorts of ideas about what Peace Corps was supposed to be. No matter how much you (think) you know about Peace Corps or about volunteering, you don't know it. No matter how much you (think) you know about your country of service, you don't know it. You have to take time to experience it in order to know this place, this thing, and even then you won't know everything. Embrace the fact that you don't know and surrender yourself to learning only.

Get used to being out of your comfort zone

Whether you hate being onstage, you can't handle bugs, you hate kids, you don't take well to boredom, or you feel the need to have direction or clarity or answers, something in your daily Peace Corps life will be a constant challenge. Some things will be more on the discomfort side of things, like being dirty or having bed bugs or getting constant staph infections. For me, these were the easiest things to get over but for others they were daily plagues that bothered them their entire service. Other things will push you mentally, and I think these are the harder things to deal with. I hate being in front of people and talking, and while my job is really to act as the behind-the-scenes motivator of my counterparts, just being different put me 'on a stage' in an uncomfortable way. I have spent 19 months forcing myself to be in the limelight, where my village needed me, far outside my comfort zone. It is incredibly exhausting to live this way. For you the "out of comfort zone" experience may be the persistent doubts that haunt every PCV. It may be homesickness. It may be lack of support from Peace Corps staff, PCVs, your host community, or all three. There will be something in your service that plagues you. Be prepared for this. It will be difficult, it will hurt, but as long as you are prepared and grow to be resilient, you will be okay.

Embrace the cultural exchange

I am going to flat-out say it: if you want to join Peace Corps to do American-style productive work, don't. Just don't. You will be disappointed. Yes, I have had inspiring moments. Yes, I think I have made at least some difference in my community. But securing lasting change is something that takes time, far more time than the two years you have here. The only impact I can be totally sure of is that my community has met a kind American who made an effort to know them and their culture. All other work you do may succeed or may fail, but you will not know going in whether will be successful and you may not know even when you leave. If that is not enough for you, if you will feel defeated if cultural exchange is the only product of your service, do not join.

Learn how to be happy

This job is not easy, and sometimes long stretches of it can be very difficult. The best thing you can do for yourself is to make the decision to be happy. It is absolutely a conscious decision. This includes having a sense of humor about things, making the best of situations, and enjoying the little things while not sweating the small stuff. You will get better at this as you go along. Car breakdowns will be a chance for a nice conversation with your fellow passengers instead of ruining your day. Constant sweat will be you releasing toxins. Sunrises and sunsets and stars will mean more to you than ever, and screaming voices will roll off you more than ever. But it is a choice to go in this direction, to learn in this way. Not everyone makes this choice, not everyone realizes it is a choice or is capable of making it. If you can do it, if you can make every day beautiful in some way, it is one of the greatest skills you will learn here.

At one point, this post in my mind had a list of things that you should be- outgoing, personable, decent with languages, etc. But I don't think I believe in that anymore. I believe successful (however you gauge that) Peace Corps volunteers come in all shapes and sizes, with all backgrounds, skill sets, and reasons for being here. As much as the Peace Corps volunteer can be stereotyped, everyone here is totally unique and even those that are similar will fare differently in their PC experience. If you are totally prepared to forget everything you thought you knew, get used to being out of your comfort zone, embrace the cultural exchange, and learn how to be happy, you will be okay as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It can be a lot harder than it sounds, but it is totally worth it.

Brief Update

Hello Everyone! I feel like if I don't post a small update now I'm bound to get way too far behind in what I am up to, so here it is:

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to America on vacation for the entirety of Ramadan. When I got back to Senegal I was planning on going to Katote right in time for the end of Ramadan celebration, called "Julde Korka" in Pulaar. My plans were tight though, and ended up falling apart. I had only one day where I could have made it back to Matam and there were inexplicably no cars running that day. I was so upset to miss this holiday with my family, but sometimes you have to just accept what the transportation gods give you.

The reason my plans were so tight was because I was asked to be a trainer for the IST or "in service training" for the most recent health stage at Peace Corps' training center in Thies. New health volunteers, coupled with a handful of CED (Community Economic Development) volunteers, come to Senegal in March then finish their PST (Pre-Service Training) in May and are sworn in as full volunteers (the same schedule as I had). Their second training is 2 weeks in August dedicated to more technical first-goal work. It was this that I was asked to help with. Typically volunteers that have completed their 2 year service extend to be PCVLs (Peace Corps Volunteer Leaders- getting sick of the acronyms yet?) and they guide new stages through the training progression. Their jobs are to organize all of the sessions, keep records from past years and for present years, organize the logistics of sessions, bring in guest trainers, preview all sessions, monitor sessions as they are happening, and monitor the overall flow and content of the training, especially putting in a volunteer's perspective. They work with the APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director) and the PTAs (I don't even know what these stand for at this point) as well as the the Director of Programming and Training to put together the training series. The only problem here is that no one from the last group of health volunteers extended their service to stay on as PCVL. APCDs and PTAs are undoubtedly involved with a great deal of training, but with our propensity to organize and our connection to the volunteer experience, much of the work, especially day-to-day as the training happens, is in the hands of the PCVL. For this training, I was "acting PCVL" taking on the duties of a PCVL temporarily. The responsibilities may not sound like all that much, but it kept me working from 7am to 11pm or 1am for 16 days straight. It was a blast. I loved being able to talk to the new volunteers, sharing my experiences and being invigorated through their optimism. I loved speaking English and feeling proficient at something for once. I have always loved the training center, which has been cultivated beautifully by the Agricultural PCVLs and their counterparts and feels like such a beautiful marriage of Senegalese and American culture to me. It was also a nice transition from vacation for me. I went from all the comforts of America to a few days in Dakar, where we have hot showers and most any food you could want, to the training center, which sometimes has warm showers and the best and healthiest Senegalese food. Then I was ready to go back to site, with my bucket showers and rice bowls.

From the Thies training center I went back to my Senegalese home and started on my Malaria tourney with Anna. I'll report on that fully when we're all done. We worked on the first phase for the entire month of September and will do our follow-up in November.

At the end of September I had the fortune of attending our second ever Northern Summit, a two-day event that brought together volunteers from the northernmost 3 regions of Senegal- Matam, St Louis and Louga. The culture and climate of this area is often drastically different than that of the south, where most of our volunteers are placed. The general training we get from Peace Corps can often be south-leaning because of this, or simply not specific enough to our northern needs. The summit sought to address this, encourage information sharing, and highlight the current work of volunteers in the area. It was a great success and I think everyone got a lot out of it. It didn't hurt that it was at a beautiful campement in St Louis.

After that, there was a three day transportation strike (transportation will be the end of me here) and the SeneGAD meeting I had planned to be in Dakar had to be pushed back and condensed. As always it was wonderful to see my fellow board members and the regional representatives, they really are a great group. We only have about 5 months left on the board and have a lot we want to get done before then! Keep your eyes out for a new website, hopefully at the new address of senegad.com, and an exciting International Day of the Girl social media campaign we will be running for the month of October.

In between the Northern Summit and SeneGAD meeting, I applied for a WorldConnect grant for the revitalization of my Health Hut, something I have been working on my entire service. Everything I have been doing up until now has been organizational and based on capacity building, and then in June I wrote a grant for some structural help for my Health Hut, including a shade structure, a wall and paints for murals. The funding source I applied for in June wasn't right for my grant type, but then WorldConnect opened up funding again and I reapplied to their program, staying up half the night for two nights to complete the lengthy application. Cross your fingers that I get the grant!

We also got to slip out to the beach for a day to celebrate Hannah's birthday, a wonderful break from the non-stop work I had been doing since I stepped back into the country.

I headed back to site right in time for Tabaski, the biggest celebration of the year. I can't wait to post about the festivities and give you all the recipe for the Tabaski lunch meal.

Okay, that wasn't exactly brief, sorry.

America the Beautiful

This is a very late post and will have to be a quick one, but I wanted to just thank everyone I got to see and everyone I talked to while I was home. I spent all of Ramadan (end of May to end of June) at home going to New York City, Boston, Sudbury, St Louis, Rochester NY, and Long Beach Island NJ. Some volunteers have a hard time going back to America. The transition can be jarring, the abundance or lifestyle of Americans can be overwhelming. Sometimes people in America can be insensitive to your experience or even rude about the people and places that have become so dear to you. I am so thankful to have kind, sensitive, supportive, intelligent friends and family who have truly taken the time to read what I write here, follow my experience on Facebook, do their own research on Senegal, and ask me great, kind questions. They also listened to my culture shock as I came home ("the streets of Brooklyn are so clean! Oh my goodness, your air conditioning is so fancy!"), went on all the excursions I was set on doing (special thank you to Sarah, my constant partner in crime), were patient through my rambling stories, and took time out of their busy lives to be with me. I truly appreciate the community I have at home, and the love and support I felt from everyone while I was there was overwhelming. It was incredibly hard to leave. This time next year I will be home though, so I needed to come back and make the most of the year (or less) that I have left.

"Write About Your Peace Corps Experience"

The last two months have been a complete whirlwind. I am in the process of writing a detailed post about everything I've been up to lately but until then I thought I'd share a little piece I wrote recently. I was in the middle of teaching for PST2 (the second training for volunteers that arrived this past March) and my supervisor asked me to write something about my Peace Corps service. Summing up an experience that spans years, every emotion I possess, and a pretty wild series of events is not the easiest thing, but it was actually nice to sit down amid the chaos of training and say a little something about what Peace Corps means to me. I hope you enjoy it. (Some of the stories or imagery may be recycled from other posts I've written, sorry to be repetitive.)

My name is Emily and I am a Peace Corps volunteer living in almost exactly what you might picture the Peace Corps to be. My village is a tiny, beautiful cluster of mud and cement houses in the middle of the desert. Around the village, you can see for miles along the hard packed sand and shimmers of heat. We have no electricity, no running water, no cars, no paved roads, a small mosque, and one elementary school. We wear brightly colored clothes, pull water from a well, and carry babies on our backs. Men drink tea in the passing shade of buildings and women cook over open fires. At night, we sleep outside together under the stars. 

This looks like a Peace Corps poster. I look like a Peace Corps volunteer- fairly dirty, smiling, tan from the African sun. But what does that Peace Corps picture mean, actually? When I sit in village, I do have the presence of mind to appreciate all of the wonderful things in my community. On days when I struggle with the language, on days when my projects look like they are going to fail, on days when I am hot and hungry and lonely, I still see the beauty of a child smiling on my lap or listening to my grandmother tell stories. There are hard parts of this job, and the challenges we face here are not to be taken lightly. You become resilient here or you don’t make it. More than anything else, though, the hardest part of Peace Corps is sitting in village, falling in love with it, and asking yourself, what am I doing here? Am I doing everything I can? Does anything I do make a difference? Am I capable of any of this? I have never cared more about anything and failed so much. The truth is that creating successful, sustainable projects is incredibly difficult and much of a volunteer’s work will not have the desired results. Even if it does work the way it is supposed to, many of those initially successful projects will not outlast the volunteer’s time of service. It is a special form of torture, I believe. To care so much, to try so hard, to fail so often. This is the essence of why being a Peace Corps volunteer is so difficult. 

Sometimes though, you get it right. You find the right counterpart and the two of you go after something you are passionate about to the fullest extent of your capabilities. And with a small miracle, it works. And when something works, it really works. It is worth all the tears, the anxieties, the sleepless nights for this one project, this one moment. 

“Enen njogi dole! Enen njogi dole!” This was the sound of success, this was the sound of change, of capacity building, of making a difference. This- “we have strength! we have strength!”- is what 25 girls chanted and danced to at the end of one of my Girls Skillz* sessions this past May. The memory of it makes me emotional and I hope it always will. It was not an easy road to get to this point. I live in the north of Senegal, a largely rural, very conservative Muslim area. Most young girls don’t make it past middle school or even elementary school and in their parents’ generation many women never attended school at all. Many of them know almost nothing about reproductive or sexual health. Early marriage is very prevalent, with brides as young as 12 or 13 married to over 30 year old men. When my counterpart, Ramata, and I started this project, no one came to our village meeting. Not a single person. We were going to talk about sensitive issues and people were wary of what that meant. The fact that girls were going to play soccer in our program at all was highly unusual, and then we wanted to talk about early marriage, HIV/AIDS, STIs, and women’s empowerment on top of it. Undeterred, we went house to house inviting people and talking to their parents, gaining their trust in the program.

At our first meeting, we had 10 girls show up over an hour late when we had invited 30. The girls were so shy that no one talked and they pulled their scarves over their faces. They smiled at my dance-based activities but only barely participated, giggling nervously at the idea of dancing and chanting in a formal classroom. They didn’t have any suggestions for a team name. I left that first day feeling like Sisyphus. All the work we had put into the curriculum, all the time spent training, and it just was not working. All I could hope was that maybe they secretly enjoyed it and just didn’t show it. Was it me? Had I not put in enough energy, enough preparation? I knew that what we were teaching them was so important and that the program could offer them so much. No one had ever asked these girls what they wanted to be when they grew up. No one had every asked them to consider what makes a good partner. No one had ever told them that they were beautiful inside and out. No one had ever told them that they were strong, that they were smart, that they deserved to be educated and make choices about their lives. 

Ramata and I started preparing for the next session, feeling that even if we only taught one girl it would make a difference and be worth the work. Several days before the next session, girls or their mothers started coming up to me in village. They wanted to be included, they said. They wanted to be part of this special group I had where people were having so much fun and talking about such interesting things. I was shocked but delighted. An hour before our next session was supposed to start, I had five girls come to my house because they wanted to start early. When I got to the classroom, 30 smiling girls were awaiting me and Ramata. They were still shy and still nervous to talk, but they danced wholeheartedly with me and laughed big, happy, beautiful laughs. As Ramata went through the session I could see comprehension dawning in their eyes. They were taking time to think about themselves, about their lives, about respecting their minds and their bodies. They were answering the questions that no one had ever asked them before. By the end of the session, the girls were all snapping their fingers to add their comments and we made up songs about the strength of women. “Enen njogi dole! Enen njogi dole!” It was everything I could have imagined. My face hurt from smiling so much. We had created a space where they could be creative, lively, 13 year old girls. They weren’t brides, they weren’t caretakers, they weren’t burdened by cooking, pulling water, sweeping, washing, or any of the other chores they are constantly tasked with. Over six weeks, what we were doing continued to astound me. The girls were learning about themselves, growing, exploring the possibilities in front of them. I am sure that they won’t forget the things we did and I know for a fact I never will. 

Being a volunteer is not easy. Every single day here is a challenge for me both mentally and physically. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. No matter what I am giving up to be here, it is nothing compared to what I am doing and what I am getting. When I sit in village, I question myself and my role as a volunteer, but I know that this is the most worthwhile thing I have ever done and may ever do. I’m a lucky volunteer living in a tiny, beautiful cluster of mud and cement houses in the middle of the desert.


*a Grassroot Soccer program

Better Than the Movies

On June 27th I was flying home to America for my Ramadan vacation and I had a strange sort of experience. I had a comfy seat, good food and a variety of movies to choose from all in front of me. What more could a Peace Corps volunteer want? The odd thing was, I could barely make it through a single movie. I was honestly just bored by them all, which is not a common occurrence for me. And then I realized, it was because my life is actually better than a movie right now. My life is better than a movie. I sound like a total asshat (my new favorite word, courtesy of Azar) for saying that, I know, but it's actually true. And it's the coolest thing. I am at a point in my life where I am really happy- I have great friends, I have adventures, my work is fulfilling and challenging, and I am growing as a person. I am the person I want to be. A person my kid self and my future self could both be proud of. It's a perfect storm of wonderfulness. Life goes in waves and I've certainly had some downs here, but I am on a serious up-swing now and I'm enjoying every minute.

I've done a lot of very cool work-related things recently that I will get into when they are completed, but I've also had the fortune to take on some social and cultural adventures in the past couple months. It's the merging of hard work and exploration that has made me so happy, so here are some of the more colorful (and luxurious) things I've done.

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This June was the annual St. Louis Jazz festival. It was one of the best trips I've taken while in Senegal, which is saying something because I've gone to some great places here. I've always loved St. Louis for a variety of reasons. It's a relatively small city and the touristy section I usually keep to is especially small, just one island. Unlike Dakar, enough people speak Pulaar around St. Louis that I can get around fairly easily without having to do the French-Wolof struggle. Mostly though, it is just really beautiful.

Originally the French capital of Senegal, vestiges of French architecture have remained in St Louis but Senegalese style and culture has grown into the bones left behind. The mix of the two is beautiful and vibrant; just the perfect place to have a jazz festival. Throw in the cool ocean breezes, real coffee, crepes to die for and my favorite ever clothing store (http://www.ramadiawfashion.com/about/) and it's a wonder I ever left. My friends and I got rooms in an auberge a little off the island by the ocean, shopped and ate by day and went to the events at night. It was a rare and special occasion for us all to take hot showers, put on a little makeup and act like real people.

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Before I left for America, I left site a tiny bit early to attend Fashion Week in Dakar with my friends Faith and Emily. Although events were going on all week, I made it in just for the Friday night runway finale.

I have been fascinated by Senegalese and West African fashion since I arrived here, buying way too much fabric and making fun clothes for myself and my friends and family. This, of course, was on another level. We shabby Peace Corps volunteers, dressed to our best, were far outmatched by the gorgeous crowd that came to this event, not to mention the models and collections. At the amazing Hotel des Almadies (which, fun fact, owns the beach that is the westernmost part of Africa) the Dakar fashion elite gathered and we watched collections from all over Africa parade down the runway. Coming straight from village that morning made the event that much more stunning, in all senses of the word. Dakar is truly a different world than the rest of Senegal. As much as part of me lamented that this event, this lifestyle, was unreachable to the vast majority of Senegalese people, I was impressed by the creativity and hard work of the designers and models. Overall, it was a mesmerizing event that I am happy I had the fortune to attend.


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After the fashion show, I visited my friend Lindsay's site and we headed back to Dakar together to go on our vacations, her to Israel and me to America. Before we left, we got to watch some World Cup games, attend a pop-up warehouse party, meet other expats in Dakar, go to brunches, and take more hot showers.

And then I found myself on a plane to America. Smiling, fulfilled, and a little bored by the movies.

My Life in an Oven

I haven't come up with a unified complete blog post for a while so here are a series of scattered thoughts.


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Hot season in the Fuuta is upon us, which means scorching sun with an even hotter wind. Its like when you're baking a cake and you open the oven door to pull it out and get that rush of 350° air. Except imagine you also get a face full of blinding sun. And the other air around you is 115-120°. And you can't shut the oven.

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I've become proud of my sense of smell here. Its a big part of my life, really. You're sitting in your compound, on a horse cart (a charette or saret), or walking to the market. There isn't always all that much to see here in the desert but there is always some smell to identify. I can tell at quite a distance the difference between human poop and animal poop, which is very different from your diarrhea, which is again distinct from a baby's diarrhea. Then there is the more watery smell of sewage, when you're in a place that actually has a sewage system (of sorts). The age of it matters too, as manure is completely different from any of the above smells and so too is the fresh smell of a horse pooping in front of you while it is pulling your charette. But it's not all about poop, not always. There are smells of a freshly powdered baby, mud oven bread baking in the early morning, the lilac-y scent of the bushes surrounding my village when they bloom in February and March. The house-based smells of laundry drying in the sun or simmering beans in my favorite tomato sauce. I can identify the type of wood we are using to cook or the amount of dung tossed into the fire by the smell. An over-perfumed man, often wearing a distinctly feminine scent, can actually be nice to walk by. Anyone who lives here knows the humid, dusty and slightly sweaty scent of an alhum (small bus) full of people. Some smells I can't describe, you'll have to find a better writer. I know the smell of meat in a market or the smell of fish and then dried fish as you turn the corner. A scent that is fairly distinct to the Fuuta is the smell of a dead animal, the strong, acrid, vomit-y smell of its carcass baking in the sun. Garbage fires, with its sickening burnt plastic overtone mixed with a heavier rancid aroma is a standby here. Garbage in Senegal lacks the sickening rotting sweetness of American garbage, probably due to the lack of milk and fruit. There are seasonal smells like ripening mangos or flowering neem. There are weirder smells that you only get to know after a while, like the oddly sweet smell of a person's sweat when they have had a lot of kosam (soured milk drink) recently. The smell of old well water when you've left it in your bucket too long- musty and plastic-y. The dusty smell of my mattress after a windy night outside.

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You know you're part of the family when your little sister picks your nose for you.

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I love breakfast stands here. It's like heading to an airport in the states. A heady sense of excitement concealing your underlying tiredness from an early rise; you're going somewhere. Whether it's a 15 hour sept place ride to Kedougou or a plane to California, you are on a trip, and treating yourself to expertly mixed café e meew or Starbucks and a muffin is the beautiful beginning to your journey. You banter with the breakfast lady and the other customers, you people-watch everyone on the automated sidewalk. Now, if you get breakfast from a stand every day or you are at the airport all the time it loses its magic. It stops being the horizon to a new adventure, loses its place as the daybreak oasis between leaving and arriving. If you're lucky though, you realize it for what it is. Breathe, sip, savor, smile.

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After being in Senegal for over a year, I am dirty. So dirty. Somehow, there is a film of dirt on me that just doesn't come off anymore. I'm being completely serious, honestly not exaggerating and romanticizing the dirty Peace Corps volunteer thing at all here. There is a distinct difference between the new volunteers and old ones. A year of transportation- alhum rides, bush taxis, charettes, walking- plus the constant sweating and a season of dust storms must have something to do with it. From between my toes to the crevices of my ears, I am dirty. And thats just the outside of me. On the inside it's just as bad. I eat almost exclusively refined white sugar, white flour bread, rice and copious amounts of oil. A little fish, some vegetables. Mostly carbs, sugar and oil though. It has got to be rotting me from the inside out, I'm sure. The only thing that has a chance of getting cleaner while I'm a Peace Corps volunteer is my soul I guess.

Oh That Ring There? My Husband Gave It To Me...

So, after I posted this picture of my hands all raw from pulling water at the well last week, I got some questions about the ring on my left hand.

No, I am not engaged or married. At least not in the legal or terribly real sense. I do however have a fake husband, and everyone who knows me in Senegal aside from Peace Corps staff and volunteers believes this to be absolutely true.

My husband and I have been married for three years. We met at University and lived together in Boston in an apartment for a little less than a year, and the rent in our apartment was $200 per month (if you didn't know this was fantasy up until now, that certainly gave it away). He is half black, half white, and most times I let people believe he is half Senegalese. He lives in Linguere and he is very busy, which is why he hasn't visited my village yet. We see each other every couple months when we go to Peace Corps meetings, and once we went on vacation to St. Louis. He is very kind and he doesn't hit children. I don't want him to get a second wife and we talked about it and he doesn't want one either because he loves only me. He misses me very much and calls me almost every night. He buys the phone credit, and if he is in America he calls from a computer. We are waiting to have children because right now we want to work and have babies later when we are ready. Right now he is in America because his mother is just a little sick and she misses him. We spent some of Christmas together and some with our own families and he gave me my ring for Christmas this year. I think in the next month or so he is going to break his leg so that he can't come back to Senegal at all and thus won't have to visit my village.

As you can see, it has become a rather elaborate lie so that I can satisfactorily answer all of the questions people have for me. I admit, sometimes it can be fun to make up stories like this. Overall I've tried hard to create a man who is virtually immune to comments from Senegalese. Whats that, kind sir on the bus? I need a black man who can do me better? Well he is half, so that should be enough for me. A lot of times it can be very instructive- I can talk about birth control with women or spousal communication. Most of the time though I hate that I have to lie to my village and I hate that I have to pretend to be someone I'm not.

Ultimately though, making up a fake husband has been one of the best decisions I could have made here. Quite literally all day long every day I am proposed to, cat-called, and harassed. Sometimes its innocent, sometimes it is extremely vulgar, but it is always constant. The only option that gives me a little relief is to pretend that I have a man who I belong to. Its not that the men harassing me stop because they care about my marriage. They stop because I am someone else's property, much as you wouldn't brand another man's cow.

This isn't about me though. I chose to be here and after another year I will go home. There, I will be subjected to slightly less overt sexism but at least it will be in my own language and people won't expect me to be married after age 16. I wrote this post not so that you would feel bad for me, but that maybe it would get you thinking about how sexism operates in your own society. There are so many things I could write about this topic, but this video says so much more than I ever could. PLEASE watch it, I promise it will change how you think about your life

http://happyplace.someecards.com/29141/oppressed-majority-a-french-short-film-that-reverses-gender-roles

You Know You've Been In Village Too Long When...

• You start using Pulaar word order and phrasing with English words: 

"If tomorrow comes, I'll go. If God wills it"  

"Rain came!"     

"Where shoes your are?"

• Your hair falls out in chunks, which doesn't help support your claim that its not a weave or a wig: "really- look, I can't take it off, its attached to my head- oh, well, not that piece..."

• A volunteer says they are looking up how to do an exorcism in order to fix the jinn (genie spirit thing) in the regional house computer and you think its a great idea

• You crave sweet, hot tea every day at 4pm every day (even if it is over 110°)

• You have no idea what legs even look like anymore

• You associate the smell of burning plastic and dung-fueled fires with home

• You sleep through the 5 am call to prayer and the numerous yells of goats, sheep, roosters, and donkeys but wake up from coma-like sleep if you hear anything related to water

• You think you'd look good in cornrows

• Anything- tin can, book, rock, stick- can be your pillow for a midday nap

Probably only people from my region will understand this, but I think its a decent representation of the random things that are important in my life these days. 

In other news, I'll be spending a month in America starting June 27th! Clearly I've been spending a lot of time being integrated to village life and I think I deserve a good dose of America. And as much as I appreciated Ramadan last year and had a great experience, I'm going to bow out this year. 

Well, so...

I've been wanting to use that clip on my blog forever. I think it captures the ambiguity involved in Peace Corps work. I know you have all thought at one time or another, "ohh, so she's a Peace Corps volunteer! So, uh, that means..." And I have definitely thought to myself, "wait, what is it that I do here?" over the past year. Before I got here, I really really didn't know what I was getting myself into going to do here.

It's taken me a while to write this post because I've been waiting to have a marginally substantial answer. I've written a bit about nutrition work in this sappy post and talked about Peace Corps goals 2 and 3 in this post, but I haven't really said much about what kind of work (goal 1 work, that is) a Health Extension Volunteer does.

Naturally, the work you do here varies by person, by site, and by country. Peace Corps is, by nature and design, both a top down and bottom up organization. Its essence is grassroots on-site work with Peace Corps Volunteers identifying and filling needs, mostly through building the capacity of host country nationals. After all, Peace Corps goal 1 is "to help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women." But Peace Corps is also (increasingly, I believe) working as a top-down organization. We are trained in specific areas and assessed in our completion of tasks. I am a health extension volunteer, so I am given a framework with three goals relating to malaria, maternal and child health, and water and sanitation. A total of 31 indicators mark and track my progress towards completion of these framework goals. Some people love the rigidity of the top down aspect, some people hate it. As a pre-med who majored in Gender and Sexuality Studies, I'm fairly used to sometimes contradictory forms of experience expression or the often messy intersections of quantitative and qualitative data. I guess I'd say I enjoy the way Peace Corps is structured these days. Tangential trajectories aside, this is the situation a Peace Corps volunteer starts with.

Then you are dropped in the middle of nowhere with a village of very nice complete strangers and you go from there.

These are things I have done or am working on right now:

Case de Sante (also called a Health Hut)

Getting the Case de Sante* up and running is my primary work in village. I took a long time to start this because I wanted to feel out my village's commitment and make sure the project would live on far beyond my time here. Up until now I've been working with the health workers (called relais) on their duties, just without a functioning central structure. Luckily, I have a wonderful village and great relais and we are finally really ready to get the Case open. I will be posting a "before" picture soon, hopefully followed by an "after" in a few months. Materially, we need furniture, paint, basic medications,and  trees and an outdoor structure for shade. Functionally, we need the relais to come to work every day and we need the village to be aware of us as a reliable resource. (Opening day party? I think so.)

Causeries, Weighings, and a Hearth Model

As I mentioned above, I have been working with the relais on the usual Case duties even though we don't have a functioning Case. The biggest part of this was getting the Health Committee in my village to communicate with each other and the village, an ever ongoing project. Information transmission seems to be extremely difficult in Senegalese culture, and it's not just me or because my language is bad. I can't tell you how many times people have complained to me about not hearing about things. "O tinani kam" ("s/he didn't inform me") is one of the most common phrases in my host mom's vocabulary. So, one of the first things we started was monthly meetings for the Health Committee to plan all of the monthly activities together. It has worked fairly well, but is still a struggle to keep it regular and we are still working on the best way to inform the village about activities. Hopefully having a working structure where we can base our efforts will help those problems in the future.

Once we do have a schedule set, things go fairly smoothly. We have about two causeries each month on topics like exclusive breastfeeding, diarrhea, family planning and nutrition. We have monthly baby weighings  and every three months we go house to house for arm band measurements. We schedule in regional and national events like vaccinations and bed net distributions. We are struggling on the consultation side and many women go to our Poste de Sante for birth control instead of talking to our relais, again something that should hopefully improve with an open Case.

SeneGAD

I am pleased to announce that I have recently been elected as the Senegal Gender and Development Board (SeneGAD) President! The elections occurred at SeneGAD's 6th annual West African Gender and Development Conference coupled with the quarterly SeneGAD meeting, both held in Thies. See, you thought that majoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies would never come in handy! Far from it! I have found a position amazingly, beautifully, fantastically tailored to my interests and experiences and I couldn't be happier.

For more on SeneGAD, visit http://senegad.wordpress.com/

So far as president I organized a radio broadcast of Senegalese Peace Corps staff talking about women's issues for International Women's Day. The spot was recorded in three different languages and sent out to PCVs for use on their local radio. Here is me and SeneGAD Communications Coordinator Juliana at our radio in Ourossogui.

It was sunny out

Next up is the April Quarterly Meeting, a GrassrootSoccer partnership training, the Michele Sylvester Scholarships and a whole bunch of other things I'll save for another post.

Girls Camp

March 27th-31st is the Matam region's annual Girls Camp! All of the Matam volunteers invite girls from our villages to a five day camp in Ogo where we talk about staying in school, goal setting, reproductive health, domestic violence, and life skills. We also do fun stuff like making collages and friendship bracelets, doing dance routines, and watching movies. These are topics that girls here almost never get to explore or learn about and it is a favorite Peace Corps experience for many volunteers. I am co-coordinator this year and I can't wait for it to happen. Stay tuned for a blog post about this special event.

Malaria Tourney

Before I know it, its going to be June with Ramadan and after that July with rainy season. A fellow PCV and I are currently writing a grant to visit up to 10 villages to talk to people about bed nets, rapid diagnostic tests, signs of simple and grave malaria, and precautions to take when you are pregnant.

Trees

If you have seen any pictures of my village or of Northeast Senegal in general, you know that there are few to no trees. I started a moringa intensive bed at my Case de Sante and will be working on a 400 tree pepiniere for the Case and the elementary school soon. Getting trees to grow in the desert is a serious undertaking so this is a pretty big project for me.

Well Project

I have talked to some people about a well project in my village and as eager as I am to improve water sanitation and village hygiene practices, this one is going on the back burner for now. I may return to it next winter depending on how everything else goes, or I may leave it for my replacement.

Books

I read a LOT in village. When I am at my busiest, my work includes house to house tourneys, village meetings, and travel here and there for supplies. It can be exhausting, but some days it can really only take a few hours... for example, if I have a big meeting in village it is a big deal and can mean a lot of progress, but that only happens every couple months and it only really takes 3-4 hours. I have 20-21 more hours to kill that day. I do other village-y things like pull water, water my plants, and sew blankets but I also do a lot of reading. My book count since May is around 40.


Whew. Well, this list will probably change (and hopefully grow) as I go on, but hopefully it gave you a taste for the kinds of things a health volunteer can do in Peace Corps Senegal. Back to village now to keep working!




*The Case de Sante is a fixture of the health system that works on the village level. Larger towns and cities have hospitals that can do surgeries, have more complex equipment and have trained doctors. The next rung down is the Poste de Sante, present in towns and usually overseeing a large local area (my local Poste is 4km away and covers 11 other villages around us) and is staffed by what we would consider a nurse. They organize vaccination tourneys, treat minor wounds, have consultations, have a maternity ward staffed by a trained midwife, prescribe medications and have an attached pharmacy. The Health Hut/Case de Sante is the lowest health structure present in some villages (but not all) and staffed by volunteers trained in basic health issues. The Case is supposed to diagnose and treat the most common ailments found in village, such as diarrhea or malaria, do baby weighings and monitor malnutrition, consult on family planning, and give health demonstrations (causeries). I say that a Case is "supposed" to do these things because while the model makes sense, getting everything actually functioning can be a challenge. There are breakdowns in the system at every level (don't even get me started about the medication distribution clusterfuck) but especially when the entire structure relies on volunteers like a Case does, reliable work can be tricky. 

Wait, what am I doing here?

I haven’t written in a long time, I know, I’m sorry. I have a million ideas for posts building up in my head, but for starters, I wanted to update everyone on what I have been up to recently.

Now, Peace Corps has three goals that summarize the mission of the organization and the work of volunteers all over the world. Impressively, these goals have remained unchanged for the entirety of Peace Corps’ existence, which speaks to the purity and long-term utility of the goals. They are:

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served 

3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans

I am going to have to be a bit more organized in order to write a blog of my work towards goal number one. This is what is typically considered the ‘work’ portion of my service, in the most literal American sense. I talked a little bit about the hearth project I did in my last post, but I promise a more extensive account will be coming soon.

Apologies and excuses aside, I wanted to write a bit about the work I have been doing towards goals two and three recently. The cultural and diplomatic exchange that is embodied in these goals often gets overlooked. We are Americans, and work with billable hours and quantifiable outputs is typically the only currency of productiveness that we accept. Even within Peace Corps we have to twist to turn our experiences into numbers so that Washington can understand our value and work as volunteers. (If this sounds a bit ridiculous to you, it should. If it doesn't, please read my last post and let me know how to best express that in numbers.)  

My service thus far has gone a long way to change my views on this, to say the least. A large portion of my job is earning the trust and support of my community, which is completely necessary and sounds great, but in reality it translates to a lot of sitting, a lot of drinking tea, a lot of simple conversations. At first, like most any American, this drove me crazy. Where was my desk? My checklist for the day? My papers, my completed reports and activities? What was I doing? But then, slowly, I learned the value of sitting with my family by the fire, of holding babies, and making fun of the middle school boys with the middle school girls. I've embraced goals two and three whole-heartedly recently, and I've had an amazing time doing it. I've accepted at this point in my service (almost a year in!) the truth that my village will give me far more than I will give them.

I still hope, however, that even if my more tangible projects fail I will have been a  positive representation of America and Americans. With foreign wars, cultural ignorance and misguided giving, there are a lot of things going against the American image these days. Every country immediately surrounding Senegal has been closed to Peace Corps volunteers because it is no longer safe for Americans to be there. My village is in a corner of Senegal bordered by Mauritania and Mali, and when groups from those countries come to Senegal looking for supporters, I want people in my area to remember me. I want them not to remember me for a well I built or money I gave for scholarships, but for kindness and for the fact that I cared to get to know them and learn their ways. And I want to help people back home learn a bit of what I have been so fortunate to learn so far. I am already a changed person because of this country and my work here, and I want to share as much as I possibly can of the wonderful or even the awful parts of my service and my experiences here. Thus, the cultural exchange portion of my service will probably be the most important thing I do here. Whenever I feel alone, or like I'm not getting through to people, or projects are moving slowly or not at all, when I ask myself "wait, what am I doing here?" this is the answer. 

The things I do each day and each week are small. They don't seem like much and to the busy people reading this they probably seem even smaller. But everything I do adds up to the person I am and the person my village gets to know. This week to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans and to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served I:

Learned how to draw water from the well

 Got way better at balancing water on my head

Learned a complicated sewing stitch from my aunt

Finished sewing a mobula, which is used to carry a baby on your back, and I am sending it to my cousins in America for their new baby. I don't exactly expect them to use it that way, but it totally still counts as cultural exchange. 

In addition, I do have to also report that I went on a rather heavenly vacation in St. John in the USVI with my family for Christmas. To bring bits of Senegal to them, I gave my family Senegalese gifts for Christmas- Pulaar knives carried by herders (called gaynaakos) for the boys, a purse woven by artisans in St Louis for my sister, a skirt-scarf for my mother, a blanket for my grandparents. In addition, I had American-style clothes made out of Senegalese fabric (in this case, it was actually from Cote d'Ivoire) for the whole family

And then I made one of my favorite traditional meals for my family, maafe gerte (with way more meat than I would ever get in village)

Which my family enthusiastically ate with their hands, kneeling on the ground. 

It was a pretty great success of cultural exchange. I hope you all enjoyed this quick update on some things I've been doing and why it matters. If you have any ideas on how else I can accomplish goals two and three or you want to participate with me somehow, let me know!