24 Hour Bus Rides

Before I talk about my amazing bus trip, some random updates.

There is a new fashion in Thiewal Lao now that it is “cold.” Sometimes villagers wear the hood from a winter jacket. Not the jacket, just the hood, you know the zip off removable kind.

One of the 3 women’s groups I am working with started their project, which is the production of ceramine, an enriched porridge that can help prevent malnutrition in kids. Making ceramine is a nerve wracking experience. I walked next to Mymuna (the women’s group president) while she carried about 10 kilos of ceramine flour on her head with no hands in an open container. I was nervous walking next to her because I thought I might somehow trip, causing her to fall as well. This was a foolish fear, women here are so good at what they do that she could probably trip and fall without a drop of the powder falling from her head.

The idea with ceramine is that eventually they will sell it to pharmacies and medical centers, but that is a long way off. For now I am just excited that they sold their first trial batch in 1 day! People here call it medicine and now the adults tell me that it cures chest pain (it is nothing but flour made from a variety of grains). It is supposed to be for the kids but hey, at least my village women are making money! The porridge is made from rice, millet, peanut butter, beans and corn, all of which are grown locally. The women also add sugar and moringa (the miracle leaf – since it is loaded with vitamins and grows like a weed) to boost the nutritional value and make it taste better. The woman made a second batch which they sold on their own and a third, larger batch that I sold during the Kolda “Donkey Rally,” a 100k donkey back ride across Kolda to educate villagers about nutrition and moringa. Due to all the luggage we had to carry I had to wear the same outfit for 5 days straight. I also slept outside a few nights with no mosquito net to keep the bugs out. On the last night I woke up with a big frog chilling on the back of my knees. Gross. While the donkey riders did causeries about nutrition I walked around selling ceramine. When a white person sells it goes a LOT faster. I was pretty much mobbed on the second day of the ride and sold about 100 bags in 10 minutes. People were shoving money at me, which is unheard of in this country! Hopefully they will like it and continue to buy when new women’s groups start marketing the ceramine. My friend Wilma magically showed up to help me while I was under attack. We decided there is definitely a market for ceramine so we are going to train a bunch of women’s groups to make it sometime early September!

Ceramine has also made me realize (again) how much we take our amazing education for granted. Basic skills here, like counting money or keeping a balance of your funds are beyond the skill and understanding of most villagers. Simple addition and even recording numbers is impossible for all but one person in the women’s group I am working with. The other group in my village has to ask one of the male teachers to keep track of their funds. And even then, teaching them to act as treasurers is extremely difficult. After 4 batches I still need to do most of the book keeping even though it only involves simple addition and subtraction. When counting our profit it took 3 women counting together about 5 minutes to total up about 20 dollars worth of funds. This is the kind of thing most of you can do it your heads in 20 seconds. So the point of this is just to express how ridiculously happy I am that America makes us go to school. Here school is not mandatory and even if you want to go to school, if you fall behind you might not be allowed to. Even those who finish school don’t get an education comparable to what most Americans get.

Thiewal Lao did have its first “adult class” though. The village adults asked for a weekly class where they could learn to read and write. So far the class only goes down if I teach it, but I’m hoping that will change. My counterpart is supposed to teach this week and he is pretty reliable so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Word on the street (or more like the dirt path) is that my health post is opening TODAY! I am going back to village and there is supposed to be a big welcoming party for the nurse that will run the post! So exciting. I believe the idea for this health post started all the way back in 2004. The volunteer before me spent her whole 2 years working to see this post completed and she did an awesome job. For the past year we have just been waiting for the nurse to finish up school!

I had my first small fight with my Senegalese family and it was mainly due to my frustration with the women’s unwillingness to stand up for themselves. I am so glad to have grown up in a society where women stood up for their rights before I came along. I believe it took an incredible amount of courage for those first women to challenge gender roles and I’m really glad they did. I just wish there was a way to get the women in village to start challenging their own roles. They are really held back by gender roles and it is sometimes extremely frustrating to see the struggle. On this particular occasion all of the women in my family were angry about a decision made solely by the village men. They were talking about it but refused to do anything. The men made the decision and even though the women didn’t like it they didn’t challenge it. It’s a situation I can’t do much to change unless the women themselves will work with me and when they refused to it was hard to take. I know it’s hard, and it’s something I never had to deal with but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

I did bring a Cosmo into village to read and I read it with my moms (they just checked out the pictures). This was hilarious because this particular Cosmo happened to have an illustrated sex position guide… Not the kind of thing Senegalese Muslim village women are used to seeing! I tried to balance out their new perception of America with a Smithsonian a little later on.

Kindii has picked up a new cow herding hobby. Yes Kindii is still a puppy (aka just about ready to start fighting goats) and yes, cows here are the same size as American cows…she is ‘cruisin for a bruising’ as my Mom would say. She has also kept me entertained by picking up about 10 mango fly bites. These lovely parasites lay their eggs under your skin and then the larvae mature in your skin, or Kindii’s skin in this case. Then I get to experience the joy of popping 2-4 cm long larvae out of Kindii’s skin. It is delightful. She also picks up an insane number of ticks, I have pulled at least 30 off of her in the last 2 weeks. I have escaped the mango flies and ticks so far!

Now for the bus ride….o so amazing…not. 24 hours total (this would take half a day in America), 3 break downs, 2 buses, 1.5 liters of vomit, boom. So this is how it went down. It started out like any normal sub-par Senegalese bus ride. We had pretty good seats next to the door (there is no AC so being next to the door is important). It also means you get more leg room. A Senegalese bus is basically a really old greyhound with no AC and no bathroom and no TVs. The isle is filled with fold down seats so once everyone is on you are stuck in your seat. When the bus started we were in pretty nice seats. My knees weren’t jammed into the seat in front of me and I was sitting with all my volunteer friends. We had food and computers to watch movies on…all looked good. About halfway into our ride, as it was starting to get dark, our bus pulled over. It was broken. We sat on the side of the road in the dark and on rocks, for about 7 hours, till around 1 in the morning, when a new bus came to pick us up. When the new bus arrived there was a crazy mob of people trying to make sure they got a place on the new bus. It was kill or be killed. Somehow we all got seats (no thanks to me) although now we were no longer all together. The new bus had approximately zero leg room. My knees projected about 6 inches into the seat in front of me, regardless of how that runs in the face of known physics principles. The new bus had gas line problems. The gas line was directly below my seat. We had to stop and fix that twice while I stood in the lap of the Senegalese person nearest to me. Then, my friend next to me stated to feel sick, but she was directly in the middle of the moving bus. So when she vomited, it was into the first thing she could find, a plastic bag with holes in the bottom. A good 1.5ish liters of vomit later, and the bus is still moving and she is still stuck in the middle. She did the only natural thing to do, which was to pass the bag to her neighbors and have them drop it out the window.

That was our bus trip to Dakar for WAIST, the West African Invitational Softball Tournament, aka WAISTed. Try and guess which we do more of, drink or play softball? All the teams dress up ridiculously, there were cops and robbers, German lederhosen, ballerinas and a variety of other costumes. Kolda (my region) was Space Corps. Clearly our costumes were the best. We pretty much just danced for 4 straight days.

Once I got back to village one of my moms informed me that someone had died. Only what she was really saying was that the wife of someone named “Died” (the Pulaar word for die is actually his name) had a baby. And actually two babies had been born in that household. I offered my deepest sympathies since I seemed to think that a mother had twins and then died right after giving birth. My mom looked at me quizzically and then left. About an hour later I figured out what really happened. Clearly my Pulaar is still a little rocky.

Someone actually did die in my village though. It was actually a distantly related family member (I actually didn’t know her) but she lived in my compound. She was an old lady who had been sick enough to travel to a large hospital in a different region of Senegal. She died there and they brought her body back for the funeral. This was my first funeral, not even just my first Senegalese funeral, but my first funeral anywhere. It was an interesting affair. Everyone was generally upbeat in the beginning, just enjoying getting together after so long. Kindii regaled everyone with her amazing tennis ball fetching skills for a good amount of the afternoon. We at oily rice thrice a day for a good 3 days (uuugggg). But when the body arrived at night the whole atmosphere changed. As soon as the car pulled in everyone rushed up and tried to help remove the casket from the roof while wailing loudly. When you enter the hut where the body lays you start wailing extremely loudly as well. Maybe I just don’t understand, or maybe letting out that sound is therapeutic in some way but the overall effect is very fake. You can tell there are some people who are really upset but mostly it just seems like an act. I have heard this from other volunteers, but maybe it is just cultural confusion on our part. The grief did seem real when they all sang though. It was late in the night after I had gone to bed, but I heard their eerie chant and could appreciate how they felt. The coolest part was that when I woke up the next morning, a baby girl had been born in our compound. It felt kind of magical. It also reaffirmed the impressiveness of Senegalese women. Dabu had the baby and she wasn’t in labor when I went to sleep. When I woke up the baby was clean and wrapped and sleeping. Dabu was sitting calmly in the same outfit she was wearing the day before (typical here) and looked as if nothing had happened. She had probably made breakfast that morning (no easy task here). All of the women were dressed up and sitting in the hut with her. Everyone who visits gets to hold the hours old baby. My last experience with a newborn in America was never. And the last American Mom I knew with a young baby made everyone wash with hand sanitizer before touching the baby, and that baby was a few weeks old I think. The people holding the Senegalese new born had definitely not washed with soap before touching.

More concerning babies. I mentioned before they are always on their Mom’s backs. But I am really impressed by the way the Moms never hit the babies’ heads on the huts while going in and out. I smack my own head on my low hanging roof approximately 2x a day so the fact that the infants heads stay safe when the mothers don’t appear to be paying a drop of attention is amazing to me.

And the last random closing statement is regarding injuries here. I am learning that my cuts take at least five times longer to heal here than in America. I guess malnutrition is messing with my blood…interesting.