All the Men, Women and Children…and the Americans too!

So I have talked a bit about how crazy Senegalese families are…but recently I thought of an outrageous way to explain family here. One women (her name is Djonfollo or Keba or Kajatu) in my compound (she is essentially one of my Mom’s but is really my brother’s wife) lives with her two mother in laws and her father in law. Her husband doesn’t even live with us – he only visits occasionally. On top of that he has a girlfriend in the town where he normally lives (I don’t think Keba actually knows this for sure). She raises their 18 month old daughter with the help of her mother in laws and rarely sees her own family as they live in another village. On top of that she does most of the cooking and cleaning for the whole family…talk about a raw deal! Try to picture your life in that situation…o and she also lives with one grandmother in law…

Remember that stuff called gak…or that green stuff every Nickelodeon contestant would inevitably be slimed with? Well I had that for lunch. It’s called Canye although I would argue it tasted more like sticky cucumber that pepper but regardless…it’s a slime green snot sauce you eat with rice…surprisingly edible. If you want a taste of something nasty try some laalo. This is the epitome of dark green nastinesses you put in health food shakes…or so I assume. The problem is that here they serve it over something like really dry cream of wheat…with more salt than you can imagine…for breakfast (in this state it is called Toure). The first time my family served it I ate as little as possible. It really is just dried up leaves pounded and then turned into a jellylike substance with boiling water. The second time it dawned on me that laalo is probably loaded with vitamins so in the interest of one of my fingernails (which is either riddled with fungus or falling off due to vitamin deficiency) I ate a whole bowl while being a good volunteer and repeating over and over again how good laalo is and how many vitamins it must have. Toure is still disgusting and my fingernail is still in a strange state…

On another food related note…Senegalese people just love spicy food…I like it every once in a while but I’m not particularly awesome at eating spiciness (although maybe after 2 years that will change). Moral of the story…the other night we had a little pre-dinner snack called lammi. Lammi is super duper extraordinarily hot wings without the wings. It makes your nose run and your eyes water but is actually good. Even my Senegalese family was coughing…we were like this is so cough, cough…good…cough, grunt, spasm. Also, Senegalese eat limes…just limes.

The Senegalese do something really cool called a kiile! All the women and men have either rice faros or fields. Usually they work them alone but on big days when they need help all the villagers go to one person’s field or faro to help out! Afterward they all come over and eat massive quantities of oily rice (ceeb – pronounced cheb). It was a cool example of helping out your neighbor with a little party tacked on! You also need an amusingly big pot to cook rice for 17 people.

I went out to milk the cows a few weeks ago – not fun! Gross - And this coming from a girl who would be unfazed by sleeping in a horses’ stall. Cow diarrhea everywhere and flies and nastiness. I even tried milking the cow but can’t say I was particularly fond of that task. Touching the cow udders was strange but was actually unpleasant because I felt as though I was sitting in poo while I milked Bessie…The upside of this was that I got fresh real milk later in the day. Also – I thought it was interesting to note that the word for milking in Pulaar is the “ing" form of the word milk as well.

A little insight into Senegalese housekeeping – A Senegalese Martha Stewart moment if you will. There are no trashcans really. If I have trash in my compound – a corn husk, peanut shells, spice wrappers, plastic bags, I just drop it where I am standing. So does everyone else…every morning one of my Moms or the kids sweep up the whole compound. Let me know how this housekeeping method works out for you in America…

Also – you might like to know that the day before the end of Ramadan – you should have cleaned ALL of the clothing and linens in your house. Imagine washing all the clothing and linens in your house…by hand. My Senegalese family pulled a lot of water that day.

Korite was a pretty cool experience…it is the celebration of the end of Ramadan which meant I had to try to learn a whole new set of Arabic phrases…Arabic is a crazy mouthful of syllables and I’m pretty sure I failed spectacularly at learning them!

In America holidays are highly food centric but in Senegal there is really nothing except the food to mark holiday time. And holidays aren’t so much parties as much as they are just normal days with abundant quantities of rice… To illustrate – on Korite Eve, the most exciting thing for the kids to do was watch me cook pre-dinner. Fascinating. I made a delicious potato/squash/noodle/onion dish fried in oil and Senegalese spices. And gave myself food poisoning…no one else, just me. That meal was in and out in under an hour. That was my first food poisoning in Senegal – go Kelly! Also, I am fairly certain my family enjoyed my cheap tomato soup packet more…probably because it was like eating milk and salt.

One night of Korite we also had spaghetti sandwiches (eating pasta without bread here is considered mostly crazy). They were delicious but eating oily spaghetti with your hands and a piece of bread is quite the challenge. That same night people kept showing up at our house with bowls of food. When I asked why my family was like on Korite you give food to the elders. So thanks to grandma Kande we had lots of eats! One thing was like millet with a watery sauce but somehow it tasted like a taco.

Another cool Korite tradition is greeting all your neighbors. Throughout the 2 day celebration everyone gets dressed up and then goes door to door around the village to shake hands.

I watched my grandma in Senegal spin cotton into thread! It is a crazy process and the cotton really looks like white cotton candy before it is spun. It looks very difficult and I have a video that will make its way to America eventually. They use the thread my grandmother spins to stitch broken gourd bowls together.

In preparation for the arrival of the nurse at the Thiewal Lao health post I have been spending some time shadowing other health post workers. I actually went with one of my relais to learn how to do malaria rapid tests so villagers don’t have to bike 18k to get medication when they have malaria. The amount of disturbing things that happened in the brief time I spent at the health post is disturbing.

· They bite the end of the needle to get the cap off (this is a tiny cap so you are almost guaranteed to get some of your spit on the needle

· Blood spilled on the floor – just a little but no one cleaned it up

· The used sharps get thrown in a mesh trashcan with everything else

· The testing supplies fell on the filthy floor multiple times – no worries, they just picked all the now unsterile stuff up and put it back in the bag

· They didn’t wear gloves, ever

· They didn’t wash their hands, EVER

· The nurse is actually the mid-wife

· The doctor is actually a nurse

· The doctor very rarely even touched the patient

· After my relais (who has no practical health training) watched the test performed once he did the rest of the tests for the day (including all the poor terrified sick little kids) which meant many people had to be stabbed multiple times

· No patient confidentiality

· The patients usually don’t even know what they have when they leave the office

· For each patient the doctor writes one 11” line of info, and that is it

· No medical history is available or consulted prior to the appointment

· No physical exam aside from temperature (all day I only saw maybe 3 physicals)

· They only have one thermometer – when it breaks they use the back of their hand

· Each patient has about 5 minutes with the doctor – this is not so much lack of time as that the doctor wants to spend the afternoon playing cards

· Every 3^rd or 4^th patient during rainy season has malaria (which is ridiculous since every Senegalese was given a mosquito net and most have more than they need)

· They give out medicine like candy (like we do as well - only it is worse since here it is often cheap ineffective medicine prescribed for an inadequately diagnosed disease and on top of that the patients can barely afford it. And the doctor doesn’t explain if the medicine is absolutely necessary or not. Nor does he explain how to take it – though I believe the pharmacist does

So…that’s awesome. I did see something funny at the doctor, although it had nothing to do with the doctor. Someone came on a motorcycle wearing chemistry lab goggles. If only I had thought to bring mine to Senegal! Could someone send them pronto so I could use them as a fashion slash motorcycle accessory J

On my own personal medical front – I went to the Peace Corps doctors complaining of an earache. The medical officer looked in my ear and was like yep – it’s all bloody back there. These words of comfort for some reason sent me reeling (I have never been a very calm patient – especially when there is no reason to freak out) and I had to leave her office mid appointment to avoid fainting. Very strange. So when I became unparanoid again I went back and got an appointment with a Senegalese ENT 2 days later. In the meantime I continued to feel like one half of me was on an airplane and to eat Tylenol like candy. The perks of this were getting to stay in the air-conditioned and couch furnished med-hut! The doctor turned out to be a cool guy. He was European but born in a Senegalese village – since he really only spoke French and Wolof I couldn’t really figure out why but that was still interesting. He was very nice and I could watch on a screen as he examined the inside of my ear – which was super cool. He said I had something white like cotton stuck in my ear drum so I got some codeine and ear drops! When I came back 5 days later he flushed my ear with water! This is a ridiculous experience and I advise you all to go get something stuck in your ear so you can have it washed out. I laughed so hard I cried because the sensation was so funny. I still don’t know for sure what it was although another volunteer said in his old village (this is his second time in Peace Corps – the newest stage here has someone on his 3^rd tour!) the women pounded grain in a separate area to avoid getting rice chaff in everyone’s ears. Since my women pound all day right in my compound maybe it was rice chaff?

On my way home from the doctor in Dakar I went to visit two of my friends in their villages which was very fun. Amanda lives in a Pulafuta village which is similar to my Fulakunda village (both are Pulaar dialects) so I could kind of speak with them. We played board games and generally had a lot of tickle fights with the little kids! She has an adorable pre-school in her village (which is really random especially because the pre-school may be better than some of the middle schools I have seen). Then I went to visit Spence to see his new puppy Koba. She can’t walk properly, possibly because she was kicked by the little kids, but she is getting better. Her name also derives from the fact that she can’t hold her butt up properly. Spence claims Koba means big butt in his language Jaxankey (Djahonk-a). Amanda and Spence’s names in village are Isatu Ba and Babanding something or other. Just in case you are thinking about adopting a Senegalese name.

I recently heard an awesome story about a current volunteer. When you buy bean sandwiches here they wrap the sandwiches in old paper. One volunteer got her bean sandwich only to find it was wrapped in her most recent gynecological results…hilarious and disturbing.

Returning to village was fun – the 18 month old basically cried her eyes out because she was scared of the white person. She is usually scared of me but the separation made her react much more violently! I got my siblings to run with me a bit. My younger brother went one day and even though it was really hard to make him finish after me I did it because he has a little attitude and I decided it was worth the effort to learn that a girl could beat him…I then proceeded to secretly collapse in my hut. My oldest sister also started running with me but she will be living in another village now that school is starting. She even did a full yoga practice with me – it is hard enough to lead yoga in English – try it in Pulaar! I also saw a bird that looked just like Zazoo from the Lion King! And I had allergies or malaria for about 2 days. Since I take malaria meds I can still get it but it would only be very mild. It felt like I had allergies but since at least 2 people in my family currently have malaria it seems quite possible that I actually had malaria.

A really big shot government official was supposed to come to the village next to mine to talk about my village (no idea why he wasn’t supposed to come to my village) so I went to that volunteer’s house for the day. I arrived all nasty and sweaty from biking only to find everyone in her village all dressed up and pretty so I borrowed Senegalese dress clothes from her and we hung out for the festivities. Of course there were INSANE amounts of oily rice and they even killed a cow for the occasion. It was 103 degrees outside but we went to stand and watch the festivities. The village won’t let the women sit so my neighbor refuses to sit even if they offer her a chair. She says she will only sit if the other women can sit as well which puts them in a predicament since they really want her to sit. But generally they won’t let the other women sit so we stood! They made a line of people wearing soccer jerseys for the official to walk through when he arrived and there were drums and whistles and dancing for hours. And for some reason a bunch of the women cross-dress and make crazy hats for ceremonies like this. So they were all dancing up a storm and we were watching and the guy (Becaye Diop) finally came although it wasn’t the guy…it was just his people. So that was a bit of a disappointment and we couldn’t hear him talking anyway so we have no idea what happened. All we heard was “look, all the men, women and children have come out today for this celebration…and even the Americans – with a gesture at the two white crazies in the crowd. Of course at this moment Amanda (my nearest neighbor – village name is Namoo, which is actually Pulaar for right hand) was doing something with her shoes since they were only speaking Pulaar and she is a Mandinka speaker, but I managed to get her attention so we could look cool for half a second.

On a totally different note, I went to visit a health post in a village about 20k from mine and didn’t have a place to eat lunch. I knew one of the kids who lives in the house behind mine was visiting family in the village I was at (Fafakurou) so I asked if anyone knew her family and they took me to their house where I ate lunch. Only in Senegal can you go to a complete stranger’s house and get invited to lunch! And this is far from the first time I’ve done this.

Back to my village. By super old great grandmother still works really hard in her rice farro so I try to help her out with stretches when she is sore. The other day I gave her a back massage and she was like no it hurts here. She kept moving my hand around until finally she pointed out the chest pain she had been having for a few days and asked me to essentially give her a breast massage. Clearly in my American way I was quite disturbed by this but I was like Kelly, if you want to be a doctor you better get over this so I did it. I was laughing a lot and when I tried to explain how strange this was to an American my whole Senegalese family was laughing too.

As I mentioned before – at least 2 people in my compound have malaria. They get it diagnosed by the “doctor,” a man named Mali Balde with NO practical knowledge or experience in medicine. He gives them meds which I suppose is good for now. I went to check out his hut and see the meds. Nothing was expired and his hut looked about as clean as one of the health huts near me so I decided to let him be until the Thiewal Lao doctor actually arrives. He was giving penicillin injections to villagers who were sore from field work…AWESOME. I tried to politely ask him not to do this and compromised by telling him when penicillin might be effective. No idea if he will listen, we shall have to see. Anyway – back to malaria, before the kids had medicine I suggested to my moms that the kids get under a net as soon as it gets dark. The mosquitoes that carry malaria only come out at night. It is advertised as being important to sleep under your net but that does not acknowledge the fact that Senegalese people often don’t sleep until early morning. So I explained that if the sick kids were bitten and then the same mosquito bit someone else then a new person would have malaria. My moms nodded and said ok. No one moved. So I explained this to my sick siblings, asking if they wanted to get someone else sick. They heartily said no, they didn’t want to make anyone else sick…they also continued to not move. Eventually I gave up. I understand why they don’t go under the nets as soon as it gets dark. They would have to change their whole daily schedule drastically and I am not pushing them to do that, but it would be nice if the sick kids at least lay under the nets. O well – just keep pushing little by little.

In another shining example of health and hygiene – I saw my older brother lick his daughter’s foot clean…lovely. Apparently she had spilled porridge on it. Literally – toes in his mouth.

I now have a Pulaar tutor in village. Souleyman Diallo. He is a relais at the health post and is a very helpful dedicated tutor. For 30 bucks a month he spends 2 hours with me 4 days a week practicing Pulaar. He is especially amusing however because he doesn’t understand that Pulaar is what I don’t understand. He seems to think I need a well rounded education – he asks me to practice my handwriting (something I usually refuse to do) and also my long division. I don’t remember how to do long division (at least it took me a few tries) and Souleyman is very adept at picking numbers which are all but impossible to divide in your head and generally have infinite decimal endings. I decided to let him keep quizzing my basic math skills because I figure it is good for my brain and sometimes he gives me Pulaar word problems which are really good for my market Pulaar!

As for projects! Solar panels are being installed at my health post without my help – which is awesome! And as for other projects my action plan will be evaluated in 2 days but I imagine I will be doing the following

· Train Relais and Health Committee on how to perform their jobs efficiently and effectively – I really want the relais to give awesome presentations so I will work with each relais on their own specialty presentation and hopefully help them start presenting on their own. The Health Committee has to learn how to run the health post well so I will probably be trying to help them observe other health posts

· Help the villagers to learn why certain practices are unhealthy and to initiate some behavior change

· Make some repairs and additions to the health hut – although the NGO that helped build the health post seems to be taking care of this

· Build a new women’s garden so they can supplement their own diets and sell vegetables to surrounding villages

· Making school more interesting so kids don’t drop out – Olympic Day, Science Day kind of stuff and Pen Pals with Michele’s class

· Adult Class – a once a week night class for village adults to learn to write Pulaar and read and write French and maybe a little English. I might also step in to do some biology education

· Gardening – helping my counterpart to act like a gardening relais – someone who can give gardening demonstrations to surrounding villages

· Animal Rights – I want to try to encourage better care of animals here

· Food security – maybe find a way to make the backbreaking rice farro work a little bit easier (possibly with better tools)

· AIDS Awareness – AIDS concert!

That’s all for now – sorry if I repeated anything from an earlier blog and you are a champ if you read all of this because it is 6 pages long…