First 9 days at Site

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Well I’ve completed 1 week at site and now I have 99 to go. Lol, that sounds very depressing and long when you put it that simply. In reality I have 99 weeks or so until I am completely done with my service in Senegal. Those 99 weeks will contain 7 weeks of vacation time, another 13 weeks at barest minimum away from site to go to the regional house, do admin stuff at the office in Dakar, etc. Plus I am convinced I live in paradise so the other 70 something weeks I spend in Sokone aren’t exactly going to be a hardship.

Yes, Sokone is amazing. I live a 3 minute walk from the delta and the mangroves. I could swim at the closest point but I would be gawked at by everyone because it’s right near the market. I’ve been told that there is a better place up a bit further that has deeper water so the Senegalese don’t go there because they can’t swim. The water is salt and very nice to stick your feet into. The streets are mainly all sand except for a couple that are paved but they too are being threatened to be covered by the sand. There are massive trees all over the place that dwarf all buildings and provide wonderful shade. Sokone spreads out on either side of the road from Kaolack to Banjul, The Gambia. The western side of the town curves around the inlets of the delta. Sokone used to be one of the loading places for the peanut harvests but the delta has silted up too much so the ships can’t come in but the old warehouses are still there, some which have been converted to homes and others which have been left to decay and have long since lost their roofs. They are quite picturesque. One little thing that I’ve noticed that thrills me about this town is that wherever you would find gravel or small stones used in the U.S. or any other part of the world, i.e. for driveways, in cement foundations etc., they use shells here. It looks really cool. Can you imagine the drive way of the police station in a town in the U.S. filled with white shells?

My house, yes I have my own house, has three nicely sized rooms and a bathroom. A kitchen, living room and a bedroom, I decided to measure the square footage of the house because I was curious so I got out my ruler and my calculator. It’s about 515 sq. ft. And there is my porch. It runs the length of my house. I think it’s about 40 by 6 ft long. And it has a hammock. Well I’ve had to replace the one that was here but it’s is going to be the most marvelous thing to have. I’ve had to spend a lot of time cleaning everything over the past week too. No one lived here for more than a month so everything accumulates so much dirt and dust. I’ve also scheduled to have the entire inside painted. That is supposed to happen Dec. 6th. After that I’ve plans to do all sorts of little things to make it homier. My home is sort of like a second regional house. There are 8 other volunteers who use my post office and Sokone is also just a nice place to come take a vacation in-country. Particularly because you can swim here and I do have the room. I figure if someone wants to sleep in the hammock, I can put up 6 people in total besides myself without too much trouble. I mainly need to get a hold of some more bedding.

It’s definitely hotter here in Sokone that it was up in Thiès but it is farther south and breezier. It’s been very cool in the mornings though and I’ve had to put a light blanket on my bed.

I will admit I’ve mainly taken these first days to recover from the intensity of training. I can get by with the little French I learnt in training so learning Wolof isn’t quite immediate necessity I thought it was going to be. My conversations at the moment tend to be about what my name is, that I don’t know Pulaar or Wolof and that I’m working for the Corps de la Paix. Pulaar is one of the other main languages of Senegal that is mainly spoken in the southern regions. My Senegalese name is Pulaar though so the Pulaar people in Sokone want me to know Pulaar too. There aren’t many of them even though I know my host mother is one. Pulaar is one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa.

Oh, a couple of the PCVs in my stage came by to visit on Monday and pick up mail and while we were hanging out at my house we heard a helicopter. All of a sudden it got really close and we looked outside and it was literally above my house, not by more then 40 meters. It wobbled around and then finally landed in a small empty lot about 100 meters from my house. It was very strange. All these Senegalese kids came running out. After a bit we went over and talked to the people standing by it and they said they worked for a helicopter charter company and they were flying around some politician around the country. It certainly isn’t a cheap way to travel but it only takes them 12 minutes to cover 40km/ 25 miles so it’s certainly more convenient!

I’ll be heading up to Kaolack for Thanksgiving with the other people from my region as well as a few from other regions who wanted to spend it our house. The day after is my 23rd birthday. I remember as a kid wondering where I was going to spend my golden birthday (23 on the 23rd) and I know I would never have guessed Senegal. I’ve had such great birthdays the past two years that this one isn’t going to rate very well comparatively. I’ll do something next year. Maybe have a party here in Sokone. This year’s is just so awkwardly timed being the day after Thanksgiving and only two weeks after leaving Thiès. I really don’t have the energy.

Well I’ll leave the rest until next time. There is so much to say and this will just be too long of a posting if I continue. I should be getting back to Kaolack around the first couple days of December. Ciao.

On my way to Sokone

I am now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!! On Friday, November 9th, 39 trainees were sworn-in at the Ambassador’s residence in Dakar. All of our language and technical trainers as well as all the Peace Corps Staff were there. There were also some currently serving PCVs there including Laura, whom I demysted with back when I first arrived in September. It was really nice to see her because there was so much to say and so much to relate but of course there was too little time and we barely got to chat. After the ceremony, which was about 45 minutes long, there was a lovely reception afterwards with amazing food. We all got back in the SUVs and buses and headed back to Thiès for a big Fête after. A member of each of our Thiès host families came and we had a big meal, Senegalese music and dancing. By 11PM, all the Senegalese families had left and it was just us trainees and a couple trainers and we kept dancing until 1AM. It was so much fun to just be able to goof off and have fun after such an intense 8 weeks of training. We’ve gotten to know each other so well by now that we are very comfortable. If you can spend the amount of time that we have talking about the crazy health problems you get here in Senegal and how often you’ve been running to the bathroom because of your latest case of the runs, you have no problem dancing in front of these same people.

A bunch of us ended up staying at the center overnight which made it certainly easier to dance till 1AM but primarily because early the next morning about 8 people left for their sites down in the southern regions of Senegal that are south of The Gambia and we wanted to say goodbye. They had to leave on Saturday because it can take up to two days to get there because some of the roads they have to take basically have no right to be called roads. The most infamous is the road between Kaolack and Tambacounda (we just called it Tamba) which is so bad it takes 6-10 hours depending on if its dry or wet season and it is no more than 150 miles. My site is on the “right side” of that road. The rest of us left Sunday for our various regions of the country.

It was sad and surreal to say goodbye to them and then also to the others that I said goodbye to on Sunday who aren’t living in my region. If I think of it realistically, I had no idea of who most of these people were 9 weeks ago. Sure I knew who a couple of them were through the PC Senegal Facebook group but that was still just a web page with a picture and some random information that really in no way defines a person in any real terms of accuracy. But at the same time, I’ve been getting to know some of these people really well and feel like I’ve just barely been able to get to enjoy their company and off they go. Despite the fact that you usually get along with everyone else in your stage, there are always those who you’ve gotten to know better or seem to laugh a bit more with and it seems like most of those people have gone really far for me. I know that I’ll get to know the other volunteers well in my area too but I’ll still miss the others. I’ll see them all again in exactly 11 weeks when we come back for another three weeks of training in late January.

I left Thies early yesterday morning (Sunday) with two other new PCVs for Koalack. Koalack is the second/third largest city in Senegal. No one really seems to know if Thies or Koalack is really bigger. It is the cross-roads of Senegal as you have to go through it to get to Dakar or Saint Louis from any of the southern regions. It has the second largest covered market in Africa, and I can attest that it is very easy to get lost in!! We managed to get all our baggage as well as our three PC provided bikes as well as us and our driver into what is best described as something like a station-wagon. They are called sept-places (say it with a French accent… SET-PLAS) because it can usually fit 7 people because of additional row that has been added in the back. These vehicles are extremely rickety. The one I took to Dakar a couple weeks ago did not have any of the dashboard working so you didn’t actually know how fast you were going.

Koalack is where my regional house is located. The Peace Corps splits up the country into regions and each region, for the most part, has its own regional house that is basically a rest/guest house for that region’s PCVs. My region is actually called Fatick but our regional house is combined with Koalack because it easier for most of us to get to Koalack than the actual city of Fatick because of the delta. The house serves 40 PCVs so I hear it can get pretty crazy when everyone comes into town for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Koalack is also where I’ll access internet. I can hook up my laptop at the cyber cafés there which is much easier than trying to tackle the French keyboards. It also keeps me from getting to many viruses which can happen if you are using a flashdrive to transfer files from a personal computer to the café computers.

Well I am being installed in my site tomorrow, Tuesday. I am really excited. There are so many people in the Kaolack regional house at the moment. There are 18 people from my training group who are in this house. Plus all their baggage. It’s really a crazy mess and I am very exhausted and stressed right now because of all of it. There are people everywhere so alone time is not existent!!!

Beach and Dakar

It has been almost two weeks since I last updated this blog, life has gotten itself into a routine so there weren’t too many different things happening. The weekends are what have changed because now we are allowed to leave Thiès. We weren’t allowed to leave for the first three weeks in Thiès because they wanted us to get to know the town and our host families instead of running off to have fun in other cities or at the beach.

That weekend after Korite, all of us trainees went to the beach together. It so beautiful there. The beach is called Popenguine and it is one of the less touristy beaches. It also helps that the tourist season hasn’t quite started. Tourist season in Senegal is usually Nov-Mar when the weather is cooler (still warm compared to most of the Northern Hemisphere… in the upper 70s or so) and dryer which is essential for making the roads in the southern regions passable. It is also when the birds migrate south from Europe. In Northern Senegal, near the coast, there is the Parc National des Oiseaux du Djoudj (Djoudj National Bird Park) which is the first major freshwater stop over for birds flying south for the winter. It gets visited by hundreds of species of birds. The most spectacular are probably the pelicans that come in huge numbers and all gather on this one little island. January is also when the Paris-Dakar Rally is… that’s the huge car, truck and motorcycle race from Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal. It goes through France, Spain, Morocco and all through the Sahara region and then final ends at the Lac Rose which is right outside of Senegal’s capital. My dad says he wants to come watch the last stage while I’m here.

Anyways, the beach was a great respite from Thiès, which is a great place but we had been in the town continually for over three weeks and in class almost everyday of those three weeks. We still were only at the beach for a day and a half but it was very refreshing. We rented a huge house on the beach and people ended up sleeping with mattresses all over the place. The water was nice and warm and the waves big enough for a bit of body surfing. Its also nice being on the west coast of the continent because then you actually get to see the sunset.

Last weekend I finally visited Dakar. It was so nice to be back in a huge city in a developing country. They have this certain feel that I am so comfortable with. I think it has something to do with the heat, the noise, the differences in wealth, and the energy you feel. After living in Manila and also visiting the family in Jakarta every winter break for my first three years of college, it is almost first nature to me. I went with about 14 other trainees and we stayed at place that is very much like a youth hostel in Europe except you get don’t have to share you room with strangers. It is not too expensive… With four people in a room you pay about $8 and with two people in a room you would pay about $10 per person. We had dinner at a little ramshackle seafood place on the western most point of Africa which is on the Dakar peninsual, its called Pointe des Almadies. While we were there, I was given a necklace for free from a souvenir vendor because I think he thought I was the wife of this other trainee who had been talking to him in Wolof and had the same Senegalese last name as him. They like giving little gifts in this culture too.

This past week was also the counterpart workshop. Our future work counterparts and our supervisors came to Thies for it. My supervisor is also going to be my host mother in Sokone. She is very sweet but doesn’t speak much French. Her children do so we should be able to cope during my first few weeks while my Wolof is very, very basic. My counterpart does speak French and very clearly too which is very important. Some people have very thick accents here and I have a very hard time understanding. I am really excited now about getting to site and getting to know people. It is such a wonderful thought to think I’m not going to have to move all my stuff for two years. In college you move so much and it’s really exhausting and unsettling. Moving three or more times a year is too much!!!

Oh I’ve forgotten to mention my Senegalese names. In Senegal, we are given a Senegalese name. During my demystification my name was Aïda Ndieye. In Thies my name was Ndoumbe Sall and in Sokone my name will be Adema Diallo. In Thies I was named after my host mother’s sister and in Sokone I am named after my host mother’s grandmother. It can all be quite confusing. You do get used to be called that name but the hard thing will be after I’m used to being called Adema to switch back to Ndoumbe during Inservice Training (IST) when we go back to Thies for three weeks in Jan/Feb. This custom also becomes confusing when you don’t know other volunteers’ Senegalese names so when you try to talk about them to a Senegalese national, they don’t always know who you are talking about even if you know they know them. For instance, when I was talking to my host mother from Sokone, I was trying to tell her which volunteers I’d already met whom she knew and I was having to describe what they looked like because she didn’t know their American names and I didn’t know their Senegalese names.