Barack Obama, Dinner & a Show

I don't know why...but one of my Senegalese moms absolutely cannot say the name Barack Obama enough. At least once a day I happen upon her, holding the 1 year Mariama and chanting Barack Obama, Barack Obama like a strange lullaby. The reason is mysterious...maybe she wants Mariama's first words to be the name of the American president?

Regarding biking in the world of Senegalese...it’s quite a hilarious experience. I think we all know I'm a tid bit competitive...which is why I find biking in the country amusing...maybe? The men here (most of the other people on bikes) seem to take it as a personal insult if I pass them on my bike. I will just be cruising along and surprise, some dude starts pedaling like crazy to try and win the unspoken competition. I like to work hard enough just to keep them hanging...try to wear them down a little. Mind you this is not really fair...the bikes here are pretty terrible (not Peace Corps bikes but the bikes owned by the Senegalese). If the wheels are fortunate enough to be located in the same vertical plane, then the chain is certain to be useless...my brother has to pedal backward as much as he does forward to keep the chain from falling off. Also...Senegalese people have no concept of pushing onself to the physical limit for no reason (ie my Senegalese brother getting changed into work out clothes...doing 5 push-ups...and then changing back to regular clothes and drinking some tea). They live extremely hard lives but there is a difference between working hard to survive and working hard to compete...you have a choice when you're competing...not so much when you are trying to live. Anyway...while riding into my road town last week and having one of these amusing Senegalese man versus Kelly battles I was informed by my brother that I am a good racer. He said the guy I was racing was very tired. Again, amusing since I bike at a snail’s pace compared to most biking Americans :) ooo...and their bikes also don't have breaks...unless you count using your feet in a Fred Flintstone-like manner

Rainy season is coming! Little did I know there was more nastiness in store than expected (I should be used to this by now). Now I have been wondering why on earth we eat dinner around 9 PM…it seems like since it’s pretty hard to see and batteries are expensive eating earlier would be logical. It would seem far more logical if Americans ate at 9 and Senegalese ate at 6 but I decided to stop pondering the question, until the first day after my first real Thunderstorm. The storm itself was quite the experience...massive lightning is cool and all...when you aren’t in a hut with a grass roof. And insane wind can also be an adventure…when there is something holding your roof onto the rest of your house/hut…since I have an unrestrained grass roof this new kind of raging Senegalese Thunderstorm was not exactly a calming experience…o and the rain pounding on the roof knocks the earwigs out of the roof so they can crawl between your toes or on your face. This has not happened to me yet...though it happened to the girl who lives 6k away from me, and I did have the lovely experience of reaching for an itch last night in the dark only to close my hand on a grasshopper…crawl in the dark into another room to find my flashlight…examine my bedsheet and find 2 grasshopppers! O joy ;) Anyway, back to dinner…the day after the storm the bug population exploded. At dinner time we opened the bowl and turned on our flashlight and it was dinner AND a show! I say a show because there were at least 10 winged bugs crawling among the couscous and another 5 more floating dead in the dinner sauce…we fished them out and moved indoors…but indoors here is about the equivalent of a screened in porch with large holes in the screening. Let’s just say I didn’t chew my dinner and instead swallowed mouthfuls whole. Again I ask…why not eat when it’s not necessary to attract the bugs with light?

On a less buggy note, I planted somewhere between 500 and 1,000 trees last week with the help of 2 teachers, my counterpart and a million screaming children. It was hardddddd work but it feels pretty good to be able to say I planted that many trees J We will have to see how they grow up as they are safe in their little tree nursery right now!

Food Fantasies

So….official village life! I was supposed to stay in village for 5 weeks but had to come to Kolda and stay at the regional house so I could get my money from the bank…very amusing as I needed help figuring out how to write a check.

Anyway, the day you first go to village is called install. Basically we get dragged around to meet a bunch of pseudo official government reps…boring BUT they all have air conditioning!!!

I am starting to settle into a routine…kind of. I generally wake up around 6 or 7 but lie in bed and read for an hour or 2. Go for a run or walk. Then go to the well, which is in the compound next to mine, 3 or 4 times, carrying the water on my head!!! Eat breakfast with the family – usually a kind of millet porridge or peanut porridge, salty and not amazing but edible. Currently I am starting to garden so I do a little work digging or something and alternate with reading breaks cause it’s really too hot to work consistently. I walk around and talk to the people in my village to try to see what my project for the next 2 years will be. Around 2:30 its lunch time and its usually village rice (which is like unfluffy half grains of rice) or millet (sand-like) with a peanut butter or leaf sauce on top…and always a few rocks or crunchy unknown ingredients… Continue doing whatever I was doing before. Around 6 I take a bucket bath (not that bad actually minus being attacked by flies and the occasional fear of a neighbor climbing the tree overlooking my douche looking for leaves for dinner) and then usually watch my moms prepare dinner and end up laying on the shade structure until 9ish when we have dinner…at which point I promptly go to bed. I slept SO MUCH here, I don’t know if it’s the heat or my immune system doing overtime but I’m constantly tired! It’s getting old.

Regarding what I’m supposed to be doing here…which I find more and more is just encouraging behavior change with a vengeance. It’s difficult because almost immediately after telling you they can’t afford soap to wash their hands and wounds with they will buy cigarettes. Even my grandma (she’s a traditional medicine healer) chews snuff…she claims it’s for her health…as it keeps her teeth from hurting… But to be fair, we do it in America too…I worked with a guy who owned every gaming system on the planet but had no health insurance…seems kind of ridiculous to me…but I guess we all do stuff no one else understands.

Also, it’s hard to change behavior when you can’t offer a good alternative. Kids in America have clean places to keep clean toys and when they are teething it’s relatively easy to give them a healthy teething option. Here, people can’t afford teething toys and they can’t keep them clean. So how can I tell a mom to tell her child to stop chewing on that rusty old knife that was just lying on the ground being splattered with cow poo? She doesn’t have the time or resources to dedicate to an alternative and when I take away the knife people usually just laugh and pick something else off the ground to give the child…mind boggling.

They also can’t afford diapers…which means when the baby sitting on the shade structure poos, Mom just picks her up and walks away. 10 seconds later a group of kids plays cards literally on top of the spot where the baby was. In other words the remaining poo is being rubbed onto the cards and touched by everyone… and no one thinks to clean it up unless it’s a very obvious mess.

I went to a “stay in school” talk organized by one of the volunteers. The woman leading the talk asked the elementary school age (this is a wide age range here as ages are a little fuzzy here) kids who in the class was married. I thought she was joking until 4 girls in a class of maybe 40 raised their hands. Two 12 yr olds and two 13 year olds, MARRIED! It’s horrifying but it’s culture. Many girls, women , and even men don’t want things like this happening but no one stands up for the girls when the time comes and the marriages continue…makes it pretty hard to stay in school. One volunteer tells me her counterpart loves talking about what a wonderful idea family planning is but he has the biggest family in his village and shows no signs of slowing.

So…that was some negative stuff but I promise this culture is also amazing in so many ways. Just last week someone in my family got married! This means eating a ton! Corn porridge for breakfast along with warm condensed sugar milk and a small piece of bread to dunk in it. Corn porridge is what corn pops would be if they became porridge! We typically had 2 lunches and 2 dinners and one day we even had 3 dinners…this lasts for 3 days! They also have huge dance parties every night…unfortunately I had some pretty nice sun sickness (complete with rash and fever) and felt too tired to dance for the whole 3 days…not cool L

People here like to ask you if you are having fun. They say “Ana noosa?” While this literally translates to are you having fun, what they really mean is are you eating your money? They love asking white people this…apparently having fun can only be done if you are throwing away your money. I just tell them I have no money…which really is not such a big lie.

I saw kids with a bike wheel rim and a stick running around rolling the wheel with the stick…I thought that only happened in Colonial Williamsburg?

And now…Food Crushes, I no longer think about finding a boyfriend…no no, I’m far busier trying to decide what food I am most desperately craving at any given moment. Two weeks of village food and I’ve lost it…I spent 45 minutes the other night staring at the sky thinking about food only to realize that 45 minutes had just passed…its absurd. The thing is…I eat large quantities of food…there is just a lack of nutrition. You know how your stomach doesn’t feel full until you’ve ingested all the nutrients you are craving…well my stomach can be visibly protruding and still be saying “Kelly, I’m HUNGRY. Aren’t you forgetting something…I don’t know, protein? Dairy? VEGETABLES!?” Thus the weight gain that will inevitably happen since I must eat massive quantities of rice in order to double cross my stomach. As of now I’ve lost weight…this is because I no longer have any muscle mass. I sit and stare at my legs and wonder who they belong to.