JT's Adventures

i'm coming home...

2012-02-10T02:38:00.001+05:30

im a terrible blogger. i blog inconsistently. i barely write anything ever. but i guess that's ok. words are boring to read. the pictures and videos capture it all. winding down my last 3 months in senegal... oh but i forgot to say! i have officially confirmed my last day of service, which is ::drumroll:: april 30th! which means may 1st (or 2nd), i will be finally home. oh home sweet home... how i miss you...

WAIST! i dont know if you remember my waist blog post last year but it's an annual all volunteer softball tournament. it's fun. lots of dancing and partying. and you get to dress up as a region! our theme was SUIT UP! yes, i am literally wearing a velvet / silk suit. awesome.

i think taking part in the garden project was the best idea ive had in senegal. it's just a feel good project. i dont have to do anything and the women are still completely motivated! look at all the semi shade protection as well as protection from aerial pests aka those stupid birds that eat everything you grow.

and theyve managed to grow lettuce! i seriously suck. i should never be allowed to garden ever. i fail at life - or just successfully growing lettuce...

carrots!

granted yes the child is totally stepping on the soil which isnt so great because it's packing down the soil when we want airy soil but hey, baby steps. they manured! and mixed the soil! and added neem leaves and ash as natural pesticides! and there was charcoal for water absorption! pretty much, +1000 for senegal. they actually listened to our lovely agriculture volunteer's advice!

the freshest air in all of senegal. what a beautiful cliff/island...

is this... america?! i thought senegal was considered a third world developing country. and yet you find these glamorous hotels that charge $300-600 US dollars a night smack in the middle of dakar. excuse me. your carpet is too soft. i may just sleep in the corner of your elevator if you dont mind.

it was kinda like paradise. unreal. 200 miles away, you have children in dirty rags eating plain rice, some salt and a few beans. and here, it's royal treatment. i really dont think dakar is a part of senegal.

ahh the senegalese presidential elections! coming in february. things are heating up and looking exciting. riots, protests, demonstrations. granted it's also not so good. destruction of property. deaths. it's getting dangerous... but we'll be ok.

i kinda fail at life again. 23 months in senegal and i finally discover the hip hop underground dancing scene?! shame on me. where have i been the last 2 years?! where have you guys been the last 2 years?! i wish i found this earlier. im starting to really fall in love with dakar...

we're always taught that senegal is very conservative, very religious. boys cant have long hair. boys cant wear earrings. girls cant wear shorts. boys and girls cant touch... and yet... this is everything that is opposite of conservative or religious. it feels so... (sorry for not being pc) normal.

the graffiti at this place was beautiful. the dancers, all talented. i felt at ease. i felt at home. i miss dancing...

senegal has been having some weird weather lately. global warming? perhaps. just super windy, super sandy. it's like a permanent sand storm. my eyes hurt. my nose hurts. i dont want to go outside. im just drugged up on antihistamines.

cha ching! BANK! each of those stacks are 100,000 cfa. or about $200. multiply this by... many stacks. and all of this is only half of what i had in my bank account... i wonder what final project im trying to finish up in the next month... stay tuned.

oh and lastly, my friend goza got "married". well it was a fake wedding but it was super fun! her village will never be the same ever again!

almost done...

2011-12-27T18:58:00.001+05:30

another month of busy busy. but first some celebrations! host dad went to mecca and came back. that's kinda cool. he now gets to put el hadj in front of his name. and he brought back holy water and gifts for everyone. he looks saudi arabian. or what i imagine saudi arabians to look like.

the missionaries (who are awesome) invited us over for thanksgiving dinner. it was super awesome. but the interesting part was the turkey. we had to first buy a turkey. a living turkey. that we had to kill ourselves. and pluck ourselves. and clean and prep ourselves. yeah, fiasco is the perfect word to describe what happened. the turkey murdering that is. dont have any pictures (i think my friend does though, gotta find it) but just imagine blood squirting everywhere and everyone screaming.

anyway, it really felt like america. turkey, and mashed potatoes, and baked chicken, and creamed spinach, and creamed corn and a lot of other delicious goodies...

and homemade pumpkin pie with homemade whip cream! who knew you could cook all these things in africa...

started up the health talks project again. this time we're talking about hiv testing and convincing people to get tested. i had videos to show them and we gave good arguments and hopefully, the women and men are convinced and we can get testing started early next year. we'll see... they thought the laptop was cool though.

this lady is a gem. shes one of the women im working with. shes the one that gives the health talks in her own village. and she gave me a chicken!!

here is my chicken. notice that it's sitting on water containers. notice the little birds in the background all staring intently at the chicken sitting on the water containers. theyre all thirsty but my chicken is not being nice. my chicken is a tough little guy. maybe we'll eat it before i leave this country... (oh god, eating my own pet chicken...)

the women at the garden are literally awesome. the day after the fence went up, they already started working the soil and seeding things.

and then after just one week, things started sprouting.
the fruits of my labor!! (well theirs... but still!!)

so the following week, i invited a fellow agriculture peace corps volunteer (abby) to come do a quick training on double digging beds and amending them with manure, ash, and neem leaves.

she also taught them mulching to save water and protect the beds, as well as how to make homemade inexpensive pesticides. i hope the women put all these new techniques and technologies to use.

the little girls decided to braid my hair. never let a million different girls braid at once. they all come out different sizes and different in general. it looked... lovely.

most adorable child ever...

so after the health talks and gardening stuff, we took a little break to celebrate good ol' american christmas. on the beach of course! beautiful...

the weather was perfect. not too hot, it was pretty much paradise. yeah, life is good...

oh and next year, we want to do a marathon (and invite oprah and/or ellen out) to raise money for girl's education. my friends made this awesome cute video... check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia8xgXyXBo4&feature=share

so yeah, merry christmas and happy hanukkah everyone! i'll see you all in 2012.

finally feeling somewhat accomplished...

2011-11-24T13:55:00.001+05:30

the month of november was not only busy because of holidays or surgeries and translating. my garden project was also in full swing and i was aiming to finish everything within the month. this particular village was extremely awesome in that they were completely motivated and hardworking and on board with all aspects of the project. everything ran smoothly and rather seamlessly. which never happens in senegal. so i got really lucky.

this village really isnt my village. it's about 3k (1-2 miles) away from mine though, so really close. they heard of other peace corps volunteers bringing gardens and one day last may, when they saw me biking by their village, they stopped me and said "hey, come look at our garden space". it was really a dilapidated garden space. the fence was pretty much non-existent because there were goats and sheep getting inside. it needed work.

so i wrote a grant sometime last june. and after months of peace corps bureaucracy, the grant finally came through in october. and we began work in november. before tabaski actually.

first we had to acquire all the materials from our road town. this included bags of cement, the chain link fence, fence posts, wiring, hoses, watering cans, etc.

the fence posts had to be cut. holes needed to be made for the wiring. and the corner posts needed 90 degree reinforcement melding.

we then needed to transport all this material 20 miles. cement and metal. things are heavy.

first, we began with construction of a water basin. it's a relatively large garden space, some 45 meters squared for 20 women. one water faucet is not sufficient to water this garden so we needed a water container where multiple women can access ready water simultaneously. a 4 meters cubed water basin is sufficient.

the cement brick making process for the water basin...

then i went away for 2 days for a regional meeting. when i came back, it was pretty much done. GOOD JOB GUYS!!

then i had to go away again for the cleft lip surgeries. but when i came back, they already put the fence posts in the ground.

with cement too!!!

functioning water basin = check!

finally, 2 days ago, we assembled the chain link fence. many of the village came out to help.

other women were cleaning their future garden space and getting rid of the weeds.

more photos of the fence construction. 180 meters of fencing is a lot of fencing to put up.

the corners looked so good!

and the very last of the fence. all that remains is a door and then the garden will be fully functional. thinking about purchasing some seeds for them...

i didnt have to do anything. they did everything. and that's what makes these kinds of projects pseudo sustainable. yes i did bring 75% of the financing but they also had to contribute monetarily as well as labor-wise. i just sat around and watched, directed, supervised. the men wanted to show me their hands when they were done. blistery. cracked. working-man hands.

they did a good job.

dear medical schools, accept me please

2011-11-20T13:23:00.000+05:30

forwarning: the images of surgery in this blog post are not that graphic so i think you'll be ok. but you are warned nonetheless..

the other day, i had such a wonderful/unique/extraordinary opportunity to work with a group of american plastic surgeons who came to senegal as part of the Global Smile Foundation and Smile Train. they fixed 30 cleft lips in just 4 short days, all pro bono. it was such a pleasure to be able to take part in their work and really in the end, i have to thank them for this unforgettable experience.

cleft lips are a problem especially for babies because the gap making breast feeding very difficult. it's even more difficult if the child has a cleft palate as well. but even for cosmetic reasons, children with cleft lips get ostracized and made fun and stared at and get rocks thrown at them. this culture particularly does not like different things, weird things, non-"normal" things. so fixing cleft lips and palates is quite life changing.

we were invited because the doctors needed translators. the patients dont speak english. the doctors dont speak wolof or french or pulaar. so we were their intermediary. it was awesome.

the female surgeon on the right is 1 of 4 plastic surgeons in all of west africa. and we're talking muslim backwards-for-women countries. a female plastic surgeon... if only i could bring her to my village to have a talk with all the young girls. marriage isnt the end all be all. you can get out of this village. there is a better life in senegal.

this is abdu. he is one of the greatest most optimistic, cheerful, wonderful kids i know. he has what is known as a bilateral cleft lip. that means two slits instead of one.

i dont have a better shot but this is abdu post surgery. you can see that his lip looks much much MUCH more normal now. watching the surgeries were miraculous.

one of the best parts was that we got to scrub in and actually watch the surgery! not only that but i got to help prep the operating rooms as well as help with simple, menial tasks like cutting sutures. but how cool is that?! i actually got to assist during the surgery! life couldnt be any better

some more surgery pictures...

she looks so good...

the group photo at the end with all 30 patients...

and the doctors that changed lives...

so dear medical schools, this is what i really want to do. i dont know how else to put it except that im ready. really...

sheep mass murder day!

2011-11-18T13:11:00.000+05:30

i sincerely apologize for not posting more. really limited internet access these days. but it's ok because you guys probably dont even notice anyway. but november has been a pretty busy month. i think i'll be writing 2-4 blog posts at once so i'll let pictures do most of the talking.

forewarning: there are some gruesome images in this blog post. killed sheep. sheep guts. body parts. scroll ahead if you dare.

tabaski!

what a lovely holiday. i think i wrote about it last year but here's just another reminder. (plus, my camera was broken this time last year so finally some pictures!) muslims celebrate tabaski in commemoration of god asking abraham to sacrifice his son and right before abraham fully commits, god substitutes a sheep for his son. abraham has done his part showing his devotion and obedience. so now once a year, millions of sheep around the world synchronize their massive death. and really, i mean millions. google it.

the family has been feeding this guy and keeping it pseudo immobile for the past 9 months now.

children (and adults) walk around throughout the day greeting each other. asking each other for forgiveness. and asking god to keep the world going so that they can celebrate tabaski again next year. and the year after. and on and on.

last minute, my sister decides 1 sheep is not enough so she brings out another. we're killing 2. which i really think is excessive. there are only 14 people in my compound. 2 full sheep?! death...

my sister is frying up some potatoes to get ready for breakfast... at 12pm

everyone dresses up for tabaski in their new clothes. they look good. and since everything is so new, the material is super stiff so it sounds like a garbage bag when you walk.

the kill...

you then dip your finger in the fresh blood and give yourself (sorry for not being pc) something that looks to me like a hindu dot. it's supposed to bring good luck.

and now the sheep are being prepared to become eatable meat. it's quite interesting to watch your food being processed. it brings a new meaning to "fresh" meat for one. but two, to see where everything you eat comes from, to watch it being killed, to watch it being dissected... it's fascinating but i dont know, got kinda turned off by red meat. (i was definitely so by the end of the day... more on that later)

post skinning...

removal of innards and separating out the edible parts and the nonedible parts. liver and kidneys and heart... yummm (sarcasm)

the fat is also all saved. it's grilled later on and i must say... grilled pure fat is kinda tasty. weird

squeezing out shit from the intestines. cleaning the intestines later. sausage anyone?

my brother is grilling a testicle. he says they are delicious.

pre-breakfast grilled meat = 1pm (the day starts much later as you can obviously see. everyone has fasted since morning while preparing the food.)

breakfast of more meat = 2pm. i added the touch of pickles and olives. made the meal more special.

every part gets eaten. nothing gets wasted. a great facet of this culture. the head is... not as bad as i thought it would be. but the way they prepared it wasnt so great. luckily it was dark that night so i didnt see much of what i was eating. otherwise, maybe i wouldnt have eaten it at all.

lunch of... oh look! more meat! = 5pm

im extremely impressed by the amount of meat people can consecutively consume here. 2 full sheep. that's a lot of meat. we were eating it for the next 2 weeks actually. think 14 consecutive lunches and dinners all with sheep meat. and that's why in retrospect, i hate tabaski. too much protein overload.

my sisters looking pretty.

this was the outfit i donned that day. (i borrowed it haha). eating dinner at 9pm. surprise! you know what i had for dinner...

so that was the holiday...

women's empowerment!

2011-10-06T06:07:00.000+05:30

ah, the Michele Sylvester Scholarship Girl's Camp. i thought it was a huge success, granted it took every mental and physical fiber in my body, as well as all the other volunteers to pull it off. by the end, i was too tired to even want to speak any more wolof but that is a good thing i suppose.

a little back ground of what is michele sylvester scholarship. peace corps has this annual scholarship program for junior high school girls that are studious and excellent students, but may come from relatively unstable financial backgrounds. their home village could be way far into the bush and their parents are sending them to study in the larger towns but maybe the girls might not be able to continue next year. so the scholarship helps pay for their annual school registration fees. and three big winners from each school get additional money for school supplies and such. it's really encouragement and showing the community that they should care about their daughters more too.

as is our linguere region tradition, we usually have a days worth of activities in addition to the scholarship ceremony. activities cover a broad range of topics and this year, we went far and beyond and pulled off a two day girl's camp. 5 junior high schools participated in the scholarship program, which meant we worked with 45 students, 9 from each school. so what did we do?

as part of an introduction to get the girls out of their shells, we started with an arts and crafts activity. school curriculum here never has anything arts related. students cannot express their creativity or individuality in classes so here was an opportunity to have fun and do something not typical.

the girls made small, decorated flower pots that we put manured soil in as well as a flower seed. they drew pictures and used stickers and glued different strings and fabrics together.

next we had a session about career planning and why girls should worry about their futures. they can escape the early marriages. they can escape the life of a housewife. anything is possible, so long as they work hard. we showed them a french film about women with different jobs and what their advice for young girls are. we also invited Awa, a Peace Corps gender development worker who specifically works with adolescent girls. she spoke of her work and her opportunities and planted wonderful ideas and dreams into their heads.

we also invited a panel of local working women to answer any questions that the girls had. on the panel there was a teacher, a doctor, a government official who specializes in women's group financing, as well as a university student who is a pharmacist-in-training. the women were all inspirational and they even thanked us in the end for giving them the opportunity to reach out to youths. there is such a lack of knowledge when it comes to careers. girls dont know what is available out there and they definitely dont know what they need to do to achieve something and go somewhere.

in the afternoon, we focused on sexual health. maybe the culture wants to turn a blind eye to teenage sexual activity but it's out there and the chances of sexually transmitted diseases are high, especially due to lack of knowledge. Awa talked to the girls about feminine hygiene as well as sexual activity and teenage pregnancies. we cant solely rely on the men to provide protection. women must take their own bodies in their own hands. Awa talked to the girls about prevention and protecting their bodies - condoms to stop STDs, especially HIV.

we then showed them a series of clips in the local language about abstinence and condoms and the realities of HIV/AIDS. the skits even covered peer pressure and getting tested. our copy of scenarios from africa is probably our greatest asset in terms of HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.

at night, we showed bend it like beckham in french. a great film showing the breaking down of gender roles, the realities of women's empowerment and its effects on family, and women in sports. the girls actually did love it.

then on the second day, the parents are invited, mainly for the awards ceremony, but also for the parent sessions that we had planned. the first session involved open communication between mother/father and daughter. parents are unaware that their daughters of minds of their own, their own opinions and ideas, their aspirations, their dreams. Awa made it very clear that these girls are great girls who have great potential and parents need to talk to their kids, get to know them beyond "go clean this, go cook this, go take care of your brother." daughters should be able to say "so there's this boy..."

our last session involves Awa taking the parents aside and talking to them specifically. the group discussions covered extremely sensitive topics such as rape, incest, pedophilia, and female genital mutilation but they were extremely receptive. as much as the blind eye is turned, people are aware that these things do happen, and sometimes quite often. if nothing is changed immediately, at least this session gets people to start talking about it. to start becoming more aware. it shouldnt be taboo. and maybe one day, things can be changed. and bad things can be stopped.

while the adults were in their discussions, we took the girls aside and gave them prompts to act out. in some ways, it was our greatest achievement. girls that were extremely shy in the begin were outspoken and acted with a passion. the skits showed us all that the girls have learned, how they would address peer pressure in the future, how they now have a new social network with girls that can support each other, how they will deal with situations such as early marriages and job opportunities taken away from them, how they will deal with sexual advances and protect themselves. i am beyond proud of the girls and i really think we've accomplished something and have left a lasting impression on these young, eager minds.

(the only photo i have of our cooking crew. they worked hard, even though they saved a bunch of food for themselves, when they shouldnt have. cooking for over 100 people is quite a tiring task...)

in the afternoon, we finally concluded with the michele sylvester scholarship ceremony. it's not a lot of money that we're giving them. but it's an incentive. it's encouragement. it's proof to the parents that their daughters are excellent and deserve better.

and i will end with the scholarship girls that i personally worked with at the junior high school of Mbeuleukhe.

women's empowerment... yeah

my life is like the oregon trail...

2011-10-04T06:06:00.000+05:30

yes it was very likely that justin died. hence why he has not written a blog post in almost two months. haha but sorry. it's just been hectic, bad timing, lack of internet, a series of interesting maladies. with ramadan come and gone, it is back to my normal village life in the midst of rainy season number 2. the rains have been extremely late, tricking many farmers into seeding too early. i hope crop yield will be ok this year. otherwise, more sitting around for men. how exciting...

so what has been going on in my life? nothing special. just living the quiet village life. sometimes my cell phone reception goes out. and theres no electricity. so im completely cut off from the rest of the world. it's scary. this bubble. makes me feel forgotten... makes it feel as though time has stopped and im stuck, in an interesting era...

but it also got me thinking how much my life now resembles that computer game, the oregon trail. i start off with the occupation of a peace corps volunteer and have all these things that i have purchased and brought with me. we start on our journey, and sometimes, come across rivers that we have to forge...

the water is... not the cleanest. hence the weird skin infections and what not.
then there are the sicknesses:
justin loses one day to pink eye (actually it was more like 4 days...)
justin loses one day to bed bugs. you cant really see it, but it's that think shiny white/pearl looking thing. they were everywhere. explained the occasional body itches... (gross)

justin loses a few days to amoebas. im thinking it's happened again. the stomach cramps are a definite indication that something is going on...
justin loses a few more days to allergies. you know, the usual.
there's more but i'll leave those stories for when i get back. a bar with a wooden table, some beers, a man can dream...

lose another day to storms...

rainy season is kinda sucky because the people that own the well dont turn on the pump everyday like they do during the dry season. so it becomes a matter of which family owns the most water-holding containers and can last the longest? the losers end up bringing large empty jugs to neighboring villages some 3 or so miles away just to get water. but then you can also collect rain water. which tastes funky, being that it's run off from tin roofs. rusty tin roofs. the water tastes metallic, but i guess im used to it. any health issues i need to worry about? lol

but really what solidified this idea of traversing the wild wild west were the horses and charrettes. inter-village football competitions have started and how else do you travel from village to village except on horse back or horse carts? football season is fun. makes you proud of your village. gives you something to look forward to.

but like i said, it's the traveling that makes me think im a live action figure in the oregon trail. kinda like sims, wild wild west style.

we're on a prarie! we're nomads!

work has pseudo stalled because people would rather be working in the fields than sitting down listening to random discussions about vaccinations and whatnot. but once the fields are cleared, i want to start HIV/AIDS work and hopefully get region-wide testing going. plus, my grant money came in for the garden so look forward to some garden transformations in the next few months...

that mural that i made did something funny. i didn't buy brown paint because i was being too cheap so i just mixed red and green, which works perfectly well, usually. except for some reason, it seemed as if the red just evaporated away. leaving all my human figures green! so i had to go back to buy brown paint to redo them. and also to give them faces this time...

so the final product looks pretty decent now. informative. vibrant. i think the message gets across:

breastfeed!

weigh babies!

sleep under a mosquito net!

get vaccinations!

visit the health post...

also other lesson: now that i've given up on gardening, things just grow! the less i take care of things, the better they look. like my moringa bed for example. look how lush that is. my sister took all the leaves off and cooked a delicious millet and sauce meal. things just taste fresh.

but yeah, so i spend the majority of my time, hanging out... with children and such. they're fun and cute and great. really wanna bring some kiddies back...

also transplanting trees, you know, some actual work...

but lately, there have been puppies galore in my village. and it's terrible because the children beat and torture them, no matter how many times i tell them not to. the puppies all scream when i initially approach thinking that i am another fellow human being ready to beat them but they learn that im really nice and all i want to do is pet them and play. they now wag their tails when they see me. i really want to take some to our regional house but we already have two dogs and it's much more than we can handle.

we have however acquired a new kitty. it's growing to be a tough cat. maybe it can deal with our mice problems some day...

so that's been life, pretty much. living day to day, wondering what new surprises and illnesses await me the next day...

When the word ends in 2012...

2011-08-26T13:13:00.005+05:30

i do not want to be in a predominantly muslim country. i know what the apocalypse will sound like here and really, ive never wanted to stab babies or drown puppies as much before, but this was bad...

There are so many good things about Senegal. I can make lists about the vibrant culture, the people, the country, but that would be digressing. There are, however, not so great things about Senegal. One, being a predominantly muslim country. i have nothing against islam. as i said in my last blog, islam is an extremely impressive religion, and people's devotions are awe-inspiring. but yesterday, i wanted to slit my wrists.

the background (us):

i live in a village with no internet. so when i want internet, i have to come into a road town called linguere, where our 'regional office' (though not officially) is located. linguere is about 50 miles away and takes 4 hours to travel by public transportation. i usually come into linguere to check my email, write a blog post, work on anything peace corps related, peruse facebook, the usual stuff. nothing fancy because the internet is so slow. i came down yesterday to update myself on my medical school application process and to finalize this peace corps grant that ive been working on. i came down to buy gifts to bring back for the holiday at the end of the month of fasting called korite. but more so, i came down because my friend is sick and i had to help bring her down and bring her into linguere to rest because her host family was smothering her. they dont know how to take care of their sick. they believe sick people must be kept in stuffy rooms and must be fed the greasiest foods to get better. being sick in this country also sucks because having a high fever when the temperature outside is also over 100 degrees makes you want to die. but anyway, we brought her down to rest and recuperate. we also had a graduate student visiting as a guest, finishing up her research on moringa and nutrition.

the background (muslim culture here):

across the street from our regional office lives this one family who occasionally, like two or three times every month, blasts religious yelling for a couple of hours. they're not a mosque and i dont know if theyre affiliated with any religious leaders but they blast this noise a lot. my mosque sings at 5am every morning but that's tolerable because it's singing, not screaming. this, however, is screaming - screaming bloody mary, just loud noises. it sucks, and im sure ive complained to some of you back home, but we deal with it. it's part of the culture, this happens in village too, and elsewhere, so that is how things are. it's usually for only for a couple of hours only so we can handle it. put in headphones, watch a movie or two and you're good. and especially since this is the month of ramadan, it's extra understandable. go be religious, go fast, yay.

the timeline (you will need sound to view the videos for their full effect):

10am - arrive in linguere, get sick friend settled, start some work

11am - the wailing begins

12pm - we are miserable. put in a movie and headphones

1pm - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlhdw8dVZX8

2pm - barricade office with foam mattresses and closing all windows and shutters. it created a hot, stuffy office but it dampened the noise only just a little

5pm - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kouQG7sr39w

6pm - our visiting graduate student used to be a peace corps volunteer in mauritania. mauritania!! a deeply muslim country. and she said it was never like this. she has never experienced anything quite like it. mauritania!!

7pm - we go over there and ask nicely for them to turn it down. not off, down. we explain as sympathetically as possible how there are people sick, there are people working, there really is no reason for it to be this loud and if they could just turn it down a little, it would do wonders. they laugh in our faces and say no. actually, they said if allah wills it, they will turn it even louder. we asked them when it would end and they said tomorrow morning around 6am. he smirks.

8pm - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01RSo7WADcg

9pm - we head over to our local police station. the station is on the other side of town maybe half a kilometer away, and you can still hear the yelling, screaming, wailing. we explain to them our conundrum. by them, we were starting to go a little crazy. it's been 10 hours already, my nerves are a little shaky. i feel on the verge of breaking down in tears, pulling out my hair, strangling a living creature. the police folks are sympathetic. they dont really enjoy the screaming either. they notice our distress, our stress, our frantic plea. they make a few phone calls and head over there. he explains that if this religious 'learning session' is not authorized by the city's mayor, he can shut it down. we told him that we dont want him to shut it down. just tell them to lower the volume. he talks to the men folk for a long time. if an authorization actually existed, it would take 2 seconds. here's my authorization, now fuck off and leave us alone. but they talk for a good 5 minutes. he comes back and says they are authorized, says they will turn it down a little, and then leaves. we really believe he was paid off, but what can we even do... it's a lose-lose situation. they never turned it down at all. as i trudged back home, people came up to me and asked if the policeman told them to turn it down. i said no and he looked sad and went back to his inaudible tv set. people all had the same sentiments. a few hours and it's ok. but almost 12 hours now and even more to come? that's unacceptable. people need to rest. people need to sleep. it's the month of fasting. everyone's tired, mentally, emotionally, physically. but no one can do anything about it. because it's their religion. they would be infidels...

10pm - our prayers are answered! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HBNUsU6ybo

11pm - they bought a generator!! those $#%#$^$@#$@$

12am-5am - my body was tired. my brain was tired. as much as my headphones can cancel noise, i try to pass out. the town of linguere is completely blacked out and noiseless... except for the inconsiderate folks across the street. the electricity comes back on at some point. the loud noises never stop until about 5 in the morning. groggy sleep. turning sleep. bad sleep.

8am (now) - tired. exhausted. hating life.

but that's life here. instead of spending money on building classrooms or health centers or even installing a water pump to make women's lives easier, they build grand mosques. instead of spending money to buy a fridge to keep foods fresh, or shoes for the children, they buy a generator and loudspeakers and bull horns to blast religious 'music'. priorities? i never want to hear people complain how they are poor. they just cant allocate money correctly.

i also miss america for it's noise ordinances.

literally. the. worst.

the sword in the stone

2011-08-19T16:03:00.008+05:30

during the lovely month of fasting, we decided to make better use of time devoted to general inactivity by traveling to all of our villages and giving a talk about malaria. there are 13 volunteers in the region. so we visited 13 villages in 4 days. the villagers spanned a total distance 140 kilometers or almost 90 miles.

each talk included skits and performances debunking the myths of malaria contraction. people believe you can contract malaria by eating unripe mangoes, or walking in the sun, or drinking too much milk/yogurt, or dancing excessively, or even that spirits give you malaria. we explained in numerous ways the only way you can contract malaria (mosquitoes), via skits, puppets, songs, and slogans. we talked about the symptoms of malaria and how there are free malaria rapid tests and free drugs for malaria at every health post. but most importantly, we talked about prevention.

(my village turnout was, eh ok. they just love to be fashionably late. seriously, it's a terrible habit of theirs. but that's yang yang for ya...)

we talked about proper use and care of mosquito nets. we talked about mosquito population control via destruction of their breeding grounds and habitats. we also introduced how to make inexpensive insect repellent - neem lotion - using local ingredients. purchased ingredients cost no more than 60 cents for a batch of insect repellent that can last for a month. pretty good indeed.

for the 4 days, we had a total turn out of around 1400 people. not bad. now hopefully, people will actually make the insect repellent themselves. combined with mosquito nets that they already own, it's really possible to eradicate malaria from the area. once mosquitoes with the parasite are completely prevented from biting people, they will eventually die off and leave a remainder of mosquitoes that are malaria free. it's doable. but it'll be tough.

just some pictures to sum up our work days...

interesting discovery: if you wrap yourself up in a mosquito net, people think you're a mosquito. intriguing...

in the end though, we really have to thank peace corps for their local support. our 4 day event could not have been done successfully without a car for transportation and a local counterpart to reiterate and enhance our talks. no matter how great our language is, it still sucks. our sentence structures are choppy, we dont use idioms or metaphors correctly. basically, we're speaking as if we were 4 years old. so having a local peace corps worker with us really made our points clear and further drilled in the facts. it was also helpful that he was multi-lingual. our villages are largely comprised of two different ethnic groups so his ability to speak both wolof and pulaar was a great asset. no one was left out of our talks and everyone understood everything in the end. hurray!

but peace corps aside, this ramadan has been less active than the last. last year, i at least could have gone to work in the fields but this year, the rains have been late. nothings growing, everythings dying. it's been bad... but not for long! the rains have finally come. theyre about a month or two late but it's here at last!

storm clouds are really pretty... never noticed them in america.

details details details.

i think if nothing else, peace corps has taught me to observe the now, observe the details. in america, we're constantly thinking about the future, about 5, 10, 15 years from now. when am i getting married? how many kids will i have? where will i be, professionally in a few years? will i own a house? what colleges should my kids go to? we're looking at life as a big picture. but now im learning to slow down and look at the details. back then, a mound of sand was always just a mound of sand. there can be patterns and footprints in them but it didnt mean much to me. but now as i watch mothers track where their children have gone by simply looking at their footprints, distinguishing a particular track out of the many overlapping layers, it's extremely impressive.

life, in many ways, is more beautiful now. (sorry, that sounds super sappy. blahh)

with rain comes water activities. such as a makeshift slip and slide. dangerous, actually. but lots of fun.

rain is great. it turns things green. the weather is cooler. but there are also many downsides. there is a massive proliferation of mosquitoes and flies and bugs in general. not fun. and with this proliferation in bugs, there is a proliferation of toads - noisy and destructive. they burrow right in your garden, the holes destroying roots and killing my vegetables. death... the humidity that follows is also not that pleasant. living on a farm surrounded by the animal droppings of cattle, horse, donkeys, sheep, goats, and chicken, the humidity brings out this... earthly fresh stench. it's very... organic but not a smell i appreciate. the droppings also become softer, aka messier to deal with.

other not so great rain issues:

because it's raining, the well pump people have decided to turn off the well pump most days, which means it's a race to see who has the largest water storage system in their family compound. once water is depleted, people have to travel around 3 miles for another water source. but with the rains, we've been just using rain water. which has it's negatives. the rain collects on the tin roofs. the water tastes kinda... rusty, metallic. i always wonder if this is bad for your health... we also store the water in plastic containers that, thanks to the sun, have made the insides coated with algae. the water that i shower with has algae particles in it and is generally green in color. does that make showering purposeful? i guess im still removing dirt... eh

but more of a conundrum is my room. it leaks... everywhere. i am constantly reminded of that cartoon the sword in the stone, when arthur, merlin, and archimedes are in the tower and there's a huge rain storm and everything is leaking and getting soaked and they use tea kettles and umbrellas and buckets to catch the water. i've been finding random containers to catch the water in too. otherwise, things will get moldy again like last year. dont want that...

thought:

islam is an impressive religion. it's all about submission and obedience. people pray 5 times a day, as early as 530am in the morning. you're not allowed to drink booze or eat pork. there are rules upon rules. the really religious dont even listen to music. and people are convinced to fast for a full month. if you can convince a group of people not to eat, drink, smoke, engage in sexual activities, or have any fun within daylight hours for a full month, that's intense.

but the fasting does make you appreciate every drop of water, every grain of rice. the hunger sucks but is manageable. the thirst is really what gets you.

anyway, just hanging out in village with kids and attending baptisms and stuff. still waiting for peace corps to approve of my garden project. cant wait for the trip to dakar right after this month of fasting. gonna eat til i burst!

maybe just a tad bit jaded...

2011-08-04T14:57:00.012+05:30

swamped! well not really. applying to medical school from africa is quite stressful at times. the internet is too slow and then things dont load properly. or the electricity goes out and you lose all your information. or the electricity goes out and you can't submit something. cant call the admissions office to ask questions because international calls are just too expensive. so many more factors that you have to worry about on top of making medical schools love you and not forget about you in their applicant pools. but it's almost over... (still waiting from uc san francisco, crosses fingers...)

a thought that ran through my head the other night:

i am spoiled. i am spoiled because i sleep under the stars every night. there are no cities nearby and my village (unbelievably, astonishingly, speechlessly) has 4 street lamps only so it's dark. very dark when it's a new moon. the night sky is crystal clear. i get to breathe (relatively) fresh desert air. yup, i dont know how i will ever return to sleeping in a room, with a solid roof over my head.

a thought that ran through my head as i hung out with the village kids:

up until africa, i hated sand. especially wet sand when it's not directly touching ocean water. i liked beaches but i really didnt like the sand. i hate bathrooms near the beach because theres always that gross, wet sand trail on the floor everywhere. it's disgusting. and then i moved to senegal. if i gain nothing else from my two years, i have learned to live with sand. i can roll around in it and it doesnt bother me anymore.

another thought as i watched the news about the drought in east africa:

the rains are either extremely late this year or they're extremely scarce. i can't say we have a drought because it rained (or rather drizzled) a couple of times already. but it's not enough for the farmers to seed their crops. i dont know if theyre nervous or not but im nervous for them. i wonder if i can learn a rain dance off of youtube...

ok, so i've been a bit jaded lately. i think it's just a short depression spell in village so in the end, things will be ok. the last two weeks have been tough. instead of the usual talks with women groups that ive been holding, i've been informally talking to individuals as the occasions arise. behavior change is so... frustrating. let me give a couple of examples:

1. 6-month old baby is malnourished - distended belly, really thin arms and legs. mother is not giving breast milk, only powdered milk. i sit her down and explain to her how powdered milk, although it says it has vitamins and calcium on the packet, actually has no nutritional value compared to breast milk. if she was using those milk formulas that we have in america, that's a different story. but no, this is ordinary milk in a powder form. i tell her that her baby needs breast milk and if she cant provide that, at least go to the health center because they have plumpy'nut there and that could suffice. i could teach her a nutritious porridge too since her baby is of weaning age. she agrees with everything i say but continues to give it regular powdered milk. even when the doctor gives her plumpy'nut, she does not give it to her baby. why? no explanation.

2. mother brings teenage boy in to health center. teenage boy is constantly tired, never has any energy. the doctor presses down on the nails and lets go. they stay white instead of returning immediately to pink. doctor says they're anemic. need more iron in their blood. oh! that's easy! i tell the mother that she could give her son meat and beans and veggies and then he wont be sick anymore. she laughs in front of my face and says "what meat?" i give her this dumbfounded expression and i told her to look outside. outside, there are herds and herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. each family has hundreds and hundreds of livestock and these animals breed like crazy. all im saying is if the family could kill one animal maybe once a month, the meat would help with the anemia. she laughs and says "that meat is not for eating. it is for selling only." you're joking right? your son is sick and i just told you how to make him not sick. and once you sell your livestock, what do you do with the money? you buy food do you not? she says "no it is different. give him the iron injections." then eat nuts and beans and vegetables. stop eating plain rice. they cant. it's their diet. she stops responding.

3. old man comes in very weak. the doctor pulls on his skin and instead of immediately snapping back like normal, hydrated skin would, it sticks pulled out. dehydrated! drink water. but no, he says, he cannot drink water because he doesnt like the taste of it. "how about tea?" he asks. absolutely not! for one, their tea is not water, it's mostly sugar. no no no! he asks "cant the doctor just give him an iv?" i walk away.

4. a woman is fasting for ramadan. she has a 3-month of baby so she's breastfeeding. i tell her "you know, if youre breastfeeding, you actually dont need to fast. it's in the qur'an. and plus you really shouldnt. your baby needs you to be healthy and well nourished so it can be healthy and well nourished." she obviously doesnt listen and goes on fasting. she gets sick, a headache, starts vomiting. i tell her to drink water and eat something and she pushes everything away. she's too proud. i call it idiocy.

my friend annmarie told me an idiom: you can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink.

what can i even do?!!

no one listens. i feel unaccomplished.

sometimes i do feel bad for the kids here. my heart hurts a little everything my brother dumps out his toy chest onto the sand. there are planks of wood, and old torn headphone wires, a dust pan with no handle, pieces of paper and cardboard, a handle for a pot, empty used containers, a teethless comb. these are toys. they have nothing. and i want to give them everything. i want to shower them with toy race cars and GI joe figures and barbie dolls and playsets. i want to give them board games and all those cool toys we played with when we were young. but i cant...

because they're so destructive. their toys end up looking the way they do because they have made it so. they dont know how to take care of things. and explaining and showing them slowly, repeatedly has changed nothing. this adidas soccer ball that i brought back from america has a label that says the shell and stitching are guaranteed to last for at least 2 years. in less than 6 months, this is what the ball looks like. (how did you even manage to do that?! they love soccer here!)

ah, the Balla Gaye Versus Tyson wrestling match. senegalese television and radio and pretty much everything have been building this up for half a year. people talk and speculate about it constantly, to the point of boring. then on the day of, the pre-show is 5 and a half hours. that's 5 and a half hours of agonizing waiting as they build up the anticipation just to watch these 2 men wrestle. and then the match. it lasts 36 seconds.

36. seconds.

not even a full minute.

waste. of. life.

i cant even begin to describe the utter chaos, the pandemonium that ensues. the supporters of the loser cry (cry is an understatement. they scream bloody murder). they thrash around, throwing themselves onto the floor, banging their heads on things, rolling around in the fetal position. generally acting possessed. think of those revival church spirits lord has gotten into you type things. that's them. completely overdramatic. it's painful to watch.

this is my pulaar neighbor. isnt he adorable?

but he's a terribly messy eater...

so it's that time of year again. ramadan - or ramadeath / ramadumb as some people have coined it. ramadan, the religiously sanctioned month of decreased activity, stunted productive, and glorified putzing around. i admire their devotion and their religious faith, but i question the stupidity of not drinking water in a hot desert. my case and point? go to the health centers. daily cases of dehydration. daily need for ivs. it's a month of boosted income for the doctors because people think fasting and not drinking water in 130 degree weather is smart.

i have no idea how i did it for 15 days last year. unfathomable. ive only done one day so far this year and already im over it. the not eating is whatevers. it's not really not eating. you're still eating, perhaps even more than usual. it's the timing that's different. breakfast is at 5am. breaking of fast is at 7:30pm. lunch is at 10pm. second lunch is at 11pm. if anything, i eat more and better during ramadan than usual. but the timing screws up my body. my metabolism is all out of wack. the decreased water intake has also made me quite constipated. i am all around just one big mess. i think the worst part is the thirst. you can't even binge drink during breakfast because you just urinate it all out.

so what do people do all day during ramadan? they play board games, or should i say sand games? this one is kinda like checkers, but not really.

but mostly, people dont do anything. they just lie around all day because they're too tired, thirsty, hungry, exhausted, cranky (from the caffeine and sugar withdrawal). fun, eh? for me, ramadan = book reading club!

i have this weird skin rash on my hand. i dont know where it came from. nothing bit me i dont think. it's blistery and pus-y and painful. hmm...

OHHH!!! SHOUTOUT TO DR. TIFFANY SOU!! she sent me a package with lots of goodies!!! love you! come doctor in senegal. they could surely use it.

STORY:

i have really damaged hair. the tips are all white. my hair is soo not black anymore. it's mostly dark brown. kinda lighter brown toward the tips. and almost white at the tips. im more brunette than black.

and it is too long... see my point?

so my friend annmarie cut it.

and now i feel a lot better!

because my head feels lighter!

The End.

Anyway, so back to ramadan i guess. hungry thirsty tired. i cant wait to go to dakar and eat my heart out when this month is all over. in the mean time, doing a regional project with all the other volunteers here. we're gonna be going around talking about malaria and how to make neem lotion (insect repellent). yayy!!

are you sure we're still in the same country?

2011-07-08T04:27:00.016+05:30

sorry it's been a while since i've written a post. an eventful month has passed...

a month ago, i celebrated my 24th birthday in country and my friends threw me a bah mitzvah. no crazy camels got involved but then we went to st. louis for the jazz festival. st. louis was beautiful. the people are more laid back, less conservative, overall more care free. if only the rest of senegal is like this as well. we listened to a little jazz but i guess in the end, it was just another peace corps gathering - which are always a lot of fun. that and some beach time and food!

we always find these crazy shirts for $3. the real question is where was that shirt made? it was clearly imported from somewhere and made with intention. a dress with marilyn monroe's face on it (in sequins too!) is absolutely a purchase must. there was also another one with jennifer anniston's face and one with madonna. fashion is so ridiculous and i love it.

we got to eat real vietnamese food and real moraccan food which was a treat.

this restaurant was named after our region. except nothing about it represents linguere at all. we have nothing that's on the menu.

i think another part of the draw of st. louis is the architecture. didnt get to take too many pictures of colonial french streets and sidewalks but it was a really pretty island. though it was sad to hear some of the older folk say that they never shouldve kicked the french out. was it really better then than it is now?

ocean sunsets are just so beautiful. you dont get that in new york. maybe i really should move to the west coast...

when i went back home, i discovered that my drivers actually put up the gifts i gave them! they love obama here. so how appropriate it was to get an obama bobble head doll (thanks cat for the find!) and place it in these abominations that they call vehicles (take note of the windshield... yeah pretty much says it all). i used to think bush transportation was fun but now i'm kinda getting sick of it. it's a terribly uncomfortable 3 hours each trip and it just sucks the life force out of me.

finishing up the last couple of round 2 causeries. my work is so vague and random but at the same time, unique and not quite quantifiable. it's gonna get a little vulgar here so skip this paragraph if you dont want to hear about unsanitary health practices. in the last couple of conversations, i've been learning a lot about... customs. things that really arent talked about but really should be. during training, we heard whispers that women sometimes put soap "in there" as lubricant but i never thought it would be brought up during my work. they also put a lot of other things up there. like mint candy, or honey, or a little bit of hot pepper, or tiger balm. i guess these things are all natural but still, im pretty sure there are complications for putting things that dont belong in there, in there. they like the sensation, it's a little bizarre. but if you really think about it, we also have westernized equivalents - condoms with warming sensations or minty condoms that give your love life that extra kick. there are so many parallels in our lives, so many universals albeit slightly different methods of carrying things out. then it's just pounding it in over and over again how women should stop cutting umbilical cords themselves, let alone with unsterile blades. you risk infections and blood loss. so many complications.

there have been multiple times now where older women would get up and leave the talks because they feel uncomfortable with the topics. one village insisted that HIV/AIDS and other STDs absolutely do not exist in their village and therefore we should not talk about it. encountering resistance was expected but i'm still taken aback sometimes.

my friend Kim came up and helped out at a few of the talks, since a lot of the villages im working with are pulaar and she actually speaks pulaar. we did female and male condom demonstrations and a lot of the things that we thought were obvious and general knowledge, are actually not. women asked if they could wash them out and reuse them. others wanted to know if wearing 3 or 4 or more would protect you even better than just wearing one. disseminating knowledge, that encapsulates what we do. kinda...

my village went through a really hectic phase with all these obnoxiously large bags of peanuts. apparently the government is selling to the villagers peanuts and there's a rush to get them because they're not that pricey. what i dont understand is 1. my village farms peanuts. at the end of the harvest season, everyone is selling their peanuts. now they are rebuying peanuts. why not store some for seeding every year? are you telling me that these government peanuts are a hell lot cheaper and thus you're actually making a profit? has any even tested the germination rates of these peanuts? my family tells me that at the end of this next harvest season, the government will buy back the peanuts at a higher price. but that's if they even come out at all. host dad says these peanuts suck. maybe people are getting jipped.

i have new pulaar neighbors. the little boy, samba, is cute. his 1 month old brother gave me a fright the other night. around 1am or so, i am woken up by this horrible sounding stream of coughing. mind you, ive become pretty good at blocking out loud noises at night, but the hacking was horrendous. i do a little research and i really thought the baby had all the symptoms of pertussis, or whooping cough. there are occasional cases in this region so it's all quite possible. the mother was dumping oil down the baby's throat to "soothe the coughing" but i dragged them all to the health post and woke the doctor. turns out the doctor just thinks it's a regular cough that dad (who's been coughing for months now) gave him. so that was that. the obnoxious coughing continued for a few days but then it went away (the baby got some antibiotics). guess we'll never know if the doctor had been right or not...

the government agents that work with water and forestation management all carry large rifles. very peculiar... there's nothing to shoot out here. just people...

work wise, 1 more village to have a talk in. then it's rest for the rainy / harvest season. we'll continue again once people are less busy. the michele sylvester scholarship is complete, interviews done and whatnot. submitted a project request for the women's garden - waiting to hear back from admin. all that's left is building that health hut, and bringing an ambulance. sigh. big, hard things...

anyway, so that's how the month of june came and went. then we went on an epic bike trip going all the way down from linguere to kedougou. did a few site visits for potential volunteer extensions and also visited our friends down south. all in all the trip was around 500k or roughly 300 miles in mixed terrains. we were averaging 45 miles a day or so. take note of the landscape and as you continue to scroll down, observe the transformation - greener and greener.

we pooped in the wild, ate in the wild, slept in the wild... it was actually an extremely liberating experience. i feel like i can do/tolerate a lot of things now...

we came across this village called velingara, about 50k (30 miles) from any road, and about 100k or 60 miles from a big town like linguere. in a village that generally has no electricity and problems with water, we come across this USAID-built school with... laboratories. there are so many things wrong with this picture - i'll try not to be too critical about this organization that helps people. 1. do these people even know what they're building and who they're building for? the senegalese education curriculum has no room for hands-on experiments. what are they even going to do with this classroom? and with a water issue, those faucets are a complete waste. there are sidewalks linking classrooms and a main administration building with holes in the walls cut out for air-conditioning placement. 2. this village barely has electricity. what are they possibly going to do with air-conditioning? they dont even have a paved road to get to the village! somewhere along the lines there, the priorities are completely mixed up. 3. this makes my work really sad. it's decently hard and it takes so long to request money from usaid to fund my projects that i know the community needs because i actually live in a community whereas, here usaid just comes in and vomits money and builds a school with facilities completely oblivious to the village condition/situation. what is even the point of putting us out in the field then? it really shouldnt be that difficult to spend a few dollars on a women's garden that can improve nutrition for the community as well as generate income for the women. really if youre going to vomit money, at least throw a little this way guys...

anyway, done with ranting. more bush riding!

and sleeping in scorpion pits. we were bombarded by insects the first night. amateur placement of fire and sleeping mat and eating area. my soul died a little that night after being attacked by hundreds of camel spiders.

in the morning, we found even more scorpions nudged into crevices and corners in our sleeping space. crevices like the arch of your back. or annmarie's. shudder...

the women have really hard lives. these wells were soo deep. like somewhere between 50 and 100 meters. thats like 150 to 300 feet. imagine pulling water by hand. sometimes this country makes me really sad and frustrated. you come across this image so often. a well with women working hard pulling water. 50 feet away, the men sit idly under a shade tree, drinking tea, not doing anything. no electricity or paved road or health structure. but a beautiful mosque right behind, another 100 feet away. so beautiful, it could fit somewhere in america. where's the justice? where's the logic and reasoning? there's no money to feed the people but there's money to build mosques. there's no money to pave roads and make remote bush villages more accessible. but there's money to build a questionable monument in the capital city. perhaps i am being a bit harsh on this culture. don't get me wrong, there are so many positive qualities to counteract the negative backwards logic. the hospitality that we received in all the villages along the way was unbelievable, speechless. people would open their homes, share their meager meals with complete strangers. they are some of the best people, and i just have to remember that in the end, all the negative things ive experienced are caused by prior generations of negative western influences and unwanted extreme radical religious influences. we are where we are today because someone, somewhere in the past has altered it so.

ok no more ranting, lol. beautiful scenery! baobob trees really are magnificent.

i got my hair braided for the first time in my friend, anna's village. not quite what i was expecting but pretty cool i guess. hair braiding hurts. and my hair is not fit for braiding. the braids come right out without rubber bands.

maybe parenting fail? that child is like 3 years old. probably shouldnt be on that horse...

when we finally made it to koumpentoum, that concluded our bush road biking. from there on out, paved roads through lush jungles...

we stopped in another friend, amanda's village, which was super beautiful and quaint. a little of my soul also died around there. my body was completely exhausted from all the biking...

but it was so green! kinda reminds me of countryside roads...

this sign was funny. in the national park, there are animals. savage animals....

this is where i physically died. with only 93k (58 miles) left to go, i really didnt think i could bike anymore. the hills were killing me, but i guess in the end, i pulled through.

we saw baboons! they bark like dogs. it was scary.

warthogs are probably one of the ugliest creatures known to man.

we also woke up to monkeys crawling on top of our mosquito net and playing with things tied to our bikes.

they were cute but mischievous. they stole our breakfast!

the lost oatmeal...

and then it got really gorgeous. having been in a desert for so long, i forgot what real trees look like and how a green scenario can make you happy. i couldnt stop smiling... it also crossed my mind that other volunteers actually live here. someone else is actually volunteering in a place that looks like this. talk about cruelty and unfair. i just want some water! or trees! lol

after 7 days and 500 kilometers, we finally made it to kedougou to celebrate the 4th of july.

my friend emily has even more (and better photos) of the bike trip so check out her blog here.

but first, some visiting of waterfalls and lazily tubing down a river, with questionable things floating everywhere. it was really ghetto but hey, we're in peace corps. obviously there werent real tubes to float in. so we found large empty containers in the trash and just floated on them. +1 for creativity. no pictures, sorry!

heading to the waterfalls was magical

another reason why you should visit justin...

and then there was 4th of july. sweet outfits...

pork! we kill everything ourselves, clean them process them, cook them without stoves or gas. yeah... life is awesome

game - nails stuck in tree stump. swing hammer in air and catch it, and without aiming, quickly bang other people's nails. once one nail is completely in, person with longest nail out wins. this game is so (insert adjective)

'merikah! fuck yeah!

we even had fireworks...

anyway, so that's that. working on med school secondaries now. rainy season has started so it'll get pretty here soon. ramadan is also fast approaching. not looking forward to that. i wonder if i'll get to go to the fields and pick beans and peanuts again like last year...

wait, you forgot the tuubab?!

2011-06-05T22:51:00.003+05:30

that was really funny. my village no longer considers me a white person/foreigner. they'll forget about me when i try to take the car sometimes, early in the morning. how can you forget the white person?! "oops, we forgot..."

anyway, short entry...

the mural is "finished" as in if i dont have to do faces, then it's done. we'll see...

i think the village likes it. the main image in the middle is of a woman bringing her baby to the health post. it's surrounded by 4 circles - one of a mother breastfeeding her baby, one of a baby being weighed, one of a baby being vaccinated, and one of a mother and a baby sleeping under a mosquito net. i think the message is getting across...

sidenote: i'm terrified of funerals. i actually havent been to one. i've only watched from afar. people act as if theyre possessed and throw themselves against walls and the ground and wail. the wailing is what gets me. it's such a scary sound...

round 2 of causeries have begun. they are really interesting. my counterpart is talking about a couple of STDs and UTIs and how to properly wash menstrual cloth (there are no disposable pads or tampons here) and the women just giggle.

USAID has board games that teach women about proper solutions for different problems.

during the causeries, there's also a debunking myths section, sort of a "lets throw out those old superstitions type thing". my counterpart tries to correct any misconceptions that have to do with reproductive health. the talks are a hoot!

yeah, that's pretty much what i occupy my time with these days - holding causeries. and finishing up the michele sylvester scholarship. im taking up a women's garden project next month and then gotta build a health hut. then i think my peace corps service would be complete. in the mean time, gotta get that med school application rolling... (yikes)

sidenote2: my friend wrote 'development accomplished' on her wall... yeah if they forget the tuubab, we've sensitized enough and done our job...

going to st. louis in a few days for the st. louis (in senegal) jazz festival. get to eat some food!!

the outside world seems so far away...

exhaust face

2011-05-14T12:11:00.005+05:30

yay! no TB! no cavities! healthy as a clifbar (well, minus the whole worm in tummy thing...)

anyway, quick post with lots of pics again.

after returning from the wonderful city of dakar, i arrive in a village overrun with human beings. my tiny village of 200 easily swelled to over 1500. the gamou has arrived and busloads and truckloads of family members are pouring in for the religious awakening event of yang yang. my family tried introducing me to people but it just didnt work and got exhaustive. this is the wife of your grandfather's brother's grandson, on your mom's side. but it was kinda cool to get to meet the entire extended family. i've never been to a family reunion before (my family doesnt have one) so it was entertaining to watch. annmarie and abby also came up to enjoy the festivities.

the kitchen was constantly packed and busy, what with all the cooking and feeding of hundreds of mouths. the family had to slaughter 2 cows. TWO COWS!! jeez...

people came in from dakar and thies and touba and louga and st louis and linguere and dahra. some even as far as kaolack and tamba.

my brothers also invited a bunch of their friends. it was just children galore. throughout the whole ordeal, i really did miss peaceful yang yang. there were simply just too many people. overrun is an understatement. and guests are dirty! the state of my bathroom was abysmal.

and as i now sit typing this blog post, i once again have some minor GI issues. probably due to the fact that my food had passed through a million hands and clearly someone didnt wash their hands after using the bathroom. but it's fine. riding this one out - piece of cake.

it could also have been the gross meat we kept eating. im thinking the family didnt do a very good job cleaning the remnants of cow shit off the the beef (i witnessed) and maybe that's what did it.

you can seriously cook babies in pots this size. witch's brew 101 anyone?

the girls all got pretty, got their hairs did. this is my sister with her cool ass braids...

of course with the massive increase in vehicles moving into sandy yang yang, a few cars are bound to get stuck in my desert. here, teenage boys pushing a car to safe haven aka rocks.

first outfit of the day. really my swearing in outfit from last year, also used at korite and all baptisms last year.

abby and annmarie in their beautiful gamou getups

as a gift for the event, i bought the family 18 bottles of soda (which is a huge amount of boisson). of course with an event this size, it wasnt enough but luckily all the other guests brought gifts too so it was soda soda time 24/7. cant drink booze so gotta substitute with sugar and caffeine right? lol

this is my 2nd outfit that i did make for the gamou. i look like a clown but the pants are sweet. im wearing 'em in america. look at the white people all dressed up!

then when night fell, i wore my last outfit (the one i made for tabaski last year). remember the garbage bag? haha, it's some serious shit. but seriously, i kinda dig these flowly things down. lots of room to breathe. i also had on these white pointed slip-ons.

we didnt actually get to the gamou until 2am. i cant stand senegalese events. start earlier! this is painful! by 3, i had to leave because i was just too mentally and physically exhausted to stay any longer. (i also didnt feel very spiritual at the time)

my new homie (or as they say here, friend of one nose). he's learning english in dakar right now and he's taking his bac soon. he wants to go to canada. we're gonna be besties.

the gamou is over, the guests start leaving (slowly) and eventually yang yang returns to its famous tranquility. but there is no rest. i have work to do.

a small pulaar village that i was supposed to be working with but dropped because they never showed up, suddenly took interest and took initiative to invite me out there with my counterpart to include them in our causeries. that was kinda cool. so right now, im working with 5 pulaar villages and 3 wolof villages (the last pulaar village is MIA and uninterested)

next week, allah willing, we will start our 2nd round of talks - this time about the importance of post birthing visits that include vaccinations and baby weighing and proper nutrition. hopefully we'll talk about family planning and spacing out births as well.

abby and i have also started (almost finished, maybe next wednesday it will be done) a mural at the health post about child health.

the main picture is of a woman bringing her baby to the health post surrounded by 4 images: a mother breast feeding her baby, a baby being weighed, a baby being vaccinated, and a mother and baby sleeping under a mosquito net. i think it'll get the message across and it'll be beautiful.

im also chugging along with the Michele Sylvester Scholarship - not sure how im going to do the home visits in the 7 villages that the girls are from though.

and after speaking to my boss, we've decided that i should go ahead and build a health hut for the village of Ndala. it's the farthest pulaar village (farthest overall) from yang yang so it would make sense for them to get closer medical facilities (i use this term extremely loosely). that means when i finish writing up the project, get ready for email and facebook and personal message spams for DONATIONS! i just need to raise around USD1500 so that's not too bad right?!

the new kids of the region will be here in a couple of hours. in less than a week, i really will have neighbors!

busy, busy

camels, and scorpions, and people oh my!

2011-04-30T04:40:00.005+05:30

sorry i havent blogged in over a month. it's been a busy 5 weeks. and i think it's time to take a little break right about now...

a few side thoughts before i run through my eventful month:

1. the justin beiber phenomenom. there are 4 foreign artists that are HUGE here. akon, for obvious reasons. rihanna, for obvious reasons. celine dion, because her last name is senegalese if you pronounce it the way they pronounce it here. and justin beiber. they love justin beiber here. i am completely dumbfounded as to why. there have been cases where the kids have mistaken his voice for that of a girls but still, no explanation. it's the justin beiber phenomenon. they're simply in love with him.

2. when i have kids, i am sending them to senegal. they will be the toughest kids ever. babies here are constantly in training. heat, for example. it's already 130 degrees out but instead of letting their babies hang loose in their birthday suits, mothers still wrap their babies up in tons of blankets. no wonder hot aint too hot and warm is actually pretty freezing. babies get training in sleeping through everything as well. mothers bring their babies along to nighttime soirees and other events instead of the usual 'hiring a babysitter when the grownups want to go out'. even with the loud blaring music, the babies sleep peacefully. impressive. what's also impressive is their pain tolerance training. as children, they run around on the 150 degree sand barefoot. and this isnt just sand like on the beach. there are thorns and pricks and spiny spiky things everywhere. talk about developing thick skin or serious pain tolerance.

3. water shortages are painful. my friend lived 2 weeks in her village once without water. she had to ration what existing water she had for drinking. showers were forfeited. gardens died. i dont know how she did it. yang yang had 2 well pump breaks recently, due to the hot weather damaging something. it was not fun. when you sweat all day everyday for 2, 3 days and cannot shower after, it is no good at all.

4. our thought process is changing. when i see trees, i immediately look for seeds to collect. when i see water being thrown around on tv, i think of how wasteful it is and how precious it is. when i use money, i try to hoard change because theyre so hard to come by.

5. my malnourishment has taken on the form of really thin skin. my skin breaks from simple scratches. i really do think i have a worm. i may find out next week when i do my midservice medical and dental exam. we shall see...

hot season is here. we left a thermometer out in the sun a while back. this was around noon, not even the hottest which is 2-3pm. it read 53 degrees celsius. aka 130 degrees for you folks. of course i dont usually just stand out in the sun for no good reason so under a shade tree, it isnt too terrible.

the entire region went to barkedji, annmarie's village, to help out at her HIV/AIDS awareness day event. we started with a sort of battle of the sexes where the kids had activities that demonstrated that girls were just as capable as boys. then there were dicussions and we showed short movies about different aspects on protecting yourself from HIV. it was a pretty cool event and i think the kids got the message. just some pictures of her siblings...

after that, we celebrated annmarie's birthday, in style, with a camel! it was a huge fiasco (will tell this story at dinners when i return) but i rode my first camel and annmarie had a blast turning 25.

we may or may not have had an argument with a couple of mauritanians living/working in senegal. the news of the white people riding camels also may or may not have traveled throughout the region. it quite possibly might turn into an urban legend.

just an awesome blur shot... the balloon makes the day.

then i returned to yang yang where the kids were throwing a culture fair - a 2 day event that included village cleanup, amateur wrestling matches, dancing, a comedy show, a theater piece, trivia, and a soiree. intense right?

the village cleanup was what really got me. on their own accord, they started sweeping the community. keep in mind, sweeping sand is not an easy task, and with the amount of farm animals around, it could ultimately be a futile attempt but still, they made an awesome effort.

all the children helped out. even the really young ones, which was super adorable.

my brother - the one in charge of organizing the event. kinda cool huh?

then at night, there were amateur wrestling matches. village kids were paired up based on size (there were 7 matches in all) and they all had to do the traditional dancing and speeches involved pre-match. the older kids were super exciting to watch. it was almost like a professional wrestling match. the wrestling started around midnight and with the amount of dust and sand in the air, i couldnt really get good shots.

my brother was in one of the matches . he lost but he put up a good fight.

the theater piece, comedy show, trivia, and dancing drew out the entire village as well as kids from surrounding villages. it couldve also been the prepared lunch too. but im super proud of the older kids being able to put together this culture fair. things arent easily accomplished here and they were able to do something on a large scale. maybe it's just because im not senegalese... lol

i killed my first scorpion(s)! the first one was huge! like 4 inches! it ran by my foot - couldve stung me. didnt. alhumdulilah.

the second one was tiny so im not sure if it wouldve even done me any harm. it was crawling around something i was carrying so it couldve easily slipped under my shirt or somewhere. see if you can see it on the rice sack.

the tomato plants have finally given their last fruits and now are on their way out. in their stead, i have bitter tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and lettuce (!!!) coming up. how wonderful it is to have vegetables in your life...

my 2nd improved mud stove is looking pretty good. the family has started using it again. it has a couple of cracks here and there which im not too pleased about though. i think it's the clay that im using. i also learned that the improved mud stove has been improved even further. there's a lighter version that works just as effectively. it's smaller so easier to carry/move around, and it uses less material. ooh the wonders of technology and improvement.

i had 2 more causeries both in pulaar villages. they turned out pretty well. good content, pretty good turnout. it just really sucks that i cant understand a lot of what is being said. my counterpart does translate for me sometimes, but it would be awesome to be able to hear the discussion firsthand, unabbreviated.

im starting to see small minor changes in my counterpart and i think this is a good thing. in the beginning, he was extremely lazy and super reluctant to do this project because he felt that he wasnt making any money at all but i think he's starting to realize how important his work is and what an impact he's making. the discussions are getting longer and his content coverage is pretty thorough. it's easier to get him to get on a charrette and go out to these villages now and this i am glad about.

my 2nd pulaar causerie had a guest audience - my new neighbors!

Fae (right) will be living in Mbeuleukhe, 10k (6 miles) away. Jenn (left) will be living in Mboula, 20k (12 miles) away. a year ago, my nearest white person was 34 miles away. 6 months ago, the nearest was 22 miles away. this is way better!

the newbies came to visit the region so i took them bike riding in the desert, camel riding, and other adventures galore. at one point, there was a hand down a poop hole. and by a hand, i mean my hand retrieving a dropped phone. im at a new level of what i find absolutely disgusting and what i find occasionally tolerable.

my neighbors will be moving up here in 2 and a half weeks so, yeah, im excited!

dad and friend (henry) also came to visit me in senegal! yang yang has had a busy april...

i think we spent about $250 per person for 7 days ($35 a day - not bad). this included all eating, sleeping, traveling, and touristy expenses. not too shabby ehh? granted, it was a lot of public transportation but that's part of the fun of being in this country.

i took them to the sand dunes where at night, we camped out, basking in the glow of the starry night sky at night. it's one of the most peaceful places ive ever been. a vast expanse of sand, Adele on your ipod, a couple of good american magazines. this is the life...

took them on their first camel rides too...!

and of course, i got to sandboard - which was awesome!! (video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_yxmuhP3fA)

the beautiful, majestic desert

we also spent easter with my language teacher, regina's family and friends, as well as reuniting with our old language group, myself, annmarie, and jillian. the booze was flowing, the food was plenty, dancing, music, laughter, fun.

and now i am in thies, tired after helping out at the new kids' counterpart workshop. intently listening and speaking wolof for 3 days straight is quite tasking. the day after tomorrow, i will be in dakar doing my mid-service medical and dental exams. then it's rushing back up for the gammu (religious awakening?) of my village. i also need to continue with the Michele Sylvester Scholarship as well as start the 2nd rounds of my causerie series. and the new kids are coming so we have to help them settle in! busy busy busy... they did say the 2nd year is when things really do pick up and time flies even faster...

well, until next time (around the 14th of may perhaps?)

i hear america isnt in good shape these days... what with the loss of federal funding for planned parenthood and abortion clinics, the millions of tornadoes, the rise of china's rmb and the fall of the dollar, sarah palin, and the burning of korans... not good at all

why hello there, blow dryer in my face

2011-03-28T00:40:00.010+05:30

some randoms:

1. the blow dryer heat has returned but this time i am ready for it. 120 aint got nothing on me.

2. shout out to Costa in the new stage!

3. shout out to funktion and encore! awesome job at dance mix!! (for videos, type into youtube funktion encore dance mix michigan 2011)

4. for the past couple of months, there have been riots and protests throughout senegal for all the power outages that occur almost every day. but in the last couple of days, there have been virtually no power cuts. at first, we thought it was because there was an official protest on march 19th and the government, trying to avert the uprisings that have been so common in other islamic countries throughout northern africa and the middle east , has upped the electricity output. later, after talking to some other folks who have access to news, it appears that america has gifted senegal with electricity and more is on the way. so, thank you america and american tax payers for the electricity!

5. i read this quote in a book and i thought it summarized where i live pretty perfectly:

"donkeys stand motionless in the middle of the road, as though stunned into imbecility by the heat and sheer unfairness of being expected to graze off an expanse of rubble"

6. we think the senegalese are weird. but americans are just as weird. i have a hard time explaining how milk is not just milk in america. there's whole milk, 2% reduced fat milk, 1% low fat milk, skim milk, soy milk, lactose-free milk, amongst others. we have organizations that adamantly protect the rights of animals (PETA) when animals are abused all the time here by evil children. there are shows like the bachelorette where 1 woman gets to frolic and choose amongst dozens of men to be her mate (absolutely impossible in this country because woman have no rights here). there are conventions for star wars fanatics. oh and jersey shore. you get the point.

the other day, i posted pictures that i submitted for a photo contest and many people were appalled by the ugly baby category. the ugly baby phenomenon is actually quite interesting - half the time, i dont know whether im insulting the parents or actually complimenting them. so embedded in senegalese culture are certain well-defined answers to typical questions. for example: "how are you?" the response is "i am fine" even if you're not fine. it just has to be that way. the same applies to babies. when asked the question "is my baby pretty?" the response is "no it is ugly". it's actually an inverse. the uglier you say the baby is, the cuter it is in reality. so when you see a really cute baby, you have to tell it's mother that it is so ugly it makes your eyes hurt. interesting huh?

some realizations never should be made. like the sump epiphany i had the other day. (if poop grosses you out, i suggest skipping this paragraph). so there's a particular "fruit" that grows on the spiny/thorny trees so prevalent in this region and people collect these sump fruits to make oil out of them and cook with the oil. every morning, my mother and some of my younger siblings are squatting in the goat/sheep pen picking out the sump. there's no sump tree overhead but i never really gave it another thought about where they were coming from. they just magically appeared. ... and then it occurred to me. the sheep and goats are finding the sump in the desert when they go out grazing and then they come home every night to shit them out!! im eating something that's been cooked in a substance that was made from something that's been shitted out by another animal!! i guess when looking at my life as a whole, it shouldnt make a difference. i play with cow and goat shit when i make tree pepinieres and my village is windy so it flies into my eyes and mouth all the time. ehh, tis life right?

one of our side projects as american peace corps volunteers is gender and development work - basically promoting gender equality. and it's really not something that's visible like building a school wall or planting trees. it's behavior change and it's slow and hard and you encounter a lot of resistance. changing behavior is essentially changing a part of their culture, their tradition. it aint easy but when something positive comes out of it, it makes you smile. like my brother washing his own clothes. boys dont really do chores around the house. if a family has a son and a daughter, most likely the daughter will be cooking and cleaning and washing at home, while the son in the meantime is out playing soccer or whatnot. completely unfair. ive always washed my own clothes and my sisters try to hide me in the back of the house so that neighbors dont see because maybe they'll think that my family is mistreating their guest but slowly over time, after repeatedly telling them about equality and what life is like in the states, my brothers have started doing their own laundry and my sisters can sit back and relax. success! next up, 1 man 1 wife and not 1 man 4 wives... haha

phase 2 of my causerie project has started and ive gotten mixed results. cant expect perfection right? but anyway, the first one was in a small pulaar village of roughly 90 people. the villagers speak pulaar, wolof as a secondary language, aka not really at all. i largely relied on my counterpart even though his pulaar wasnt so great except mine is practically nonexistent so what else can i do? i just hope his explanations of maternal health were clear in a language he doesnt use at all.

men came to the causerie and this was actually an unexpected good result because they said that the men want to feel included and they expressed that they actually are concerned with the health of their wives. whether this is true or not is to be determined... but at least they can verbalize this thought?

my next causerie was in a wolof village of about 360 and i thought it went superbly. poster child causerie? my counterparts talked about spacing out birth and using contraceptives and family planning. women even asked personal questions and my doctor even gave his medical opinions that contradicted islamic law. if only the village wasnt so far away and so inaccessible by bike. i would love to go to that village every day.

the poster child photo for my causerie project. a pregnant woman and a mother with a young child listening intently. win!

i really like this village. everyone's so motivated! sigh...

then there was the causerie in my village. the turnout was great (i mean, it had to be, or else i wouldve killed my village - though no one in my family showed up, which was super depressing) but they were just too roudy and i feel like we didnt get to cover much. so goes the home village...

my last causerie (to date) was in another wolof village of about 500. the turnout was only decent but it was because i had to switch the time - my counterpart was too lazy and i had to figure out other travel accommodations last minute and had to push up the causerie. it was good though. the village health workers did most of the talking and they even brought up the dangers of cutting the umbilical cord yourselves and danger signs like swollen hands and feet. i guess my project is doing some good...

after that, i had to take a little break from the busy and stressful 2 weeks ive had in village. i dont do much but planning these talks and scheduling them and making sure things happen on time takes a lot of effort - more stress than i would like during the hot season. but anyway, we went to dakar for April's bday as well as a little rest. Dakar is such a bizarre place the longer we stay in the rural countryside of this country. it's like visiting a whole new world, a world where teenagers go to the mall and spend pocket money on random snacks and things at supermarkets. a world where kids can dress up in nice clothes and hipster shoes, go skateboarding, visit the ice cream parlor. villages kids seriously have nothing. these kids live in paradise.

look at that house on the cliff overlooking the ocean. i wish that were my house... the beaches are beautiful. the ocean is beautiful. the sunset is breathtaking.

the city folk know who the country folk are. they dress less nice. like us peace corps volunteers for example. we wear shirts with holes and stains, shirts that have been over worn. we seriously look like hobos lol. but then it's even more interesting watching the country folk in super nice places, like the mall. theyre terrified of escalators and it's just so curious and shocking. to have never seen or been on an escalator... what kind of world do we live in that has so many different facades?

for April's bday, we had a picnic in a park. it was magical with wine and real cheeses and french gourmet breads and meats and veggies and fruits.

ice cream is so good. us americans are spoiled... i miss ben and jerrys. coldstone. haagen daz (sp?)

the lady that takes care of us and our region. shes awesome. she wins!

and coming up:

got a couple more causeries to do in some pulaar villages.

also starting the michelle sylvester scholarship for junior high school female students - a scholarship designed for girls doing well in school but the family might not have enough money to keep the girls in school

my mother cracked my mud stove so i built another one (that is wayyyy better). we'll see how it is in about 2 weeks...

the new kids of this region are also coming to visit in about 2 weeks so that will be super exciting.

and my dad is coming!! during the hot season.... death!

st louis international jazz festival?!

friends back home, i miss you all dearly. 13 more months... right?

it's been a year already? another one to go...

2011-03-11T00:32:00.005+05:30

so senegal has a bunch of random animals and none of those that one would immediately think of when one thinks of africa (ie lions, giraffes, rhinoceros, etc). like the hedge hog for example. what an extremely cute animal.

when it feels threatened, it curls itself into a ball so that it's completely thorns out. ingenious!

we totally want to keep one as a pet but our dogs will probably harass it all day every day.

anyway, on to more important things... like work! my causerie series project has to do with maternal health so i thought, hmm maybe i should buy that book what to expect when you're expecting. turned out to be a not so helpful book. it talked about blood tests and ultrasounds - none of which you can get done here - and tons of lifestyle advice that is completely irrelevant to my village. sometimes, the book is so ridiculous, or rather the questions that other people ask are so absurd. there was one where the woman says, "i dont like it when my co-workers keep touching my swollen belly. what do i do?" TELL THEM TO STOP. duh. idiots.

the other day, the gendarms (local police) pulled over our bush car for being "too full". i couldnt stop laughing. when has any vehicle in this country been deemed too full?! ive ridden cars where multiple cows are tucked underneath my feet. a "too full" car just cannot be. a bench can usually sit 4-5 people. being senegal, a lot of the times, it becomes 6. we were at 7... 8 if you count the child sitting on a woman's lap. i had half a butt cheek on the seat, and was just clinging on for dear life at the end of the bench. there were people standing where feet dangling space shouldve been. babies were arbitrarily crammed into any available crevice. the back of the car couldnt have been more hilarious. things were literally 2 inches off the ground. everytime we hit a hole, things scraped the ground. yeah, i guess the gendarms were right. the car really was too full...

fresh vegetables is when your sister walks into your garden at 11am, picks a couple of tomatoes, and you eat it for lunch around 1:30pm. that's called fresh. they were delicious. satisfaction of having eaten something grown by my own two hands - achieved.

random thought: why wont USAID come work in my village? they have so much money! but i guess my village is not ready. the health post is dysfunctional. and im starting to think a large part has to do with the doctor. the other day, he prescribed someone both ibuprofen and paracetamol, which are essentially the same drug- fever reducers and pain relievers. when i asked him why he did that, he mumbled something, said i was wrong, and walked away. pressing the matter is useless. we've had this kind of interaction many times and he just avoids confrontation... how senegalese. but maybe it's not entirely his fault. i also blame the system. the doctor's salary is covered by the government but the salaries of all the other health workers are not. the matrone (midwife), the health agent, the drug dispenser, etc etc etc. - all their salaries come from the money the health post makes, some from consultations but mostly from the amount of drugs sold. and since there arent many patients to begin with, there's a lot of pressure to prescribe as many drugs as possible.

sometimes, it makes sense though. when a patient comes in complaining of diarrhea, the doctor has no way of knowing what has caused this diarrhea since he cant submit stool samples and get lab results. it could be a bacteria, a virus, amoebas, giardia, worms, or something else. so he just treats for all because hey, one of the drugs is bound to work right? the patient will get ibuprofen for pain, cipro for possibly bacteria, metronidazole/mebendazole for giardia or amoebas or worms, and maybe another dewormer. i guess it's also a way for the health post to make money from a simple case like this. this system is terrible.

happy note: my family finally tried using the mud stove i built and they like it! granted, they jam the opening with a million sticks so it's not really saving any wood like it's supposed to but hey, baby steps. in the beginning, there was a huge conundrum with the one wood policy. i couldnt get the wood to stay lit and i felt like a terrible eagle scout. but the lone piece of wood had no companion! it was just burning by itself. i just couldnt get it to stay lit long enough to boil water. my sister somehow was able to make things work better - granted she used smaller sticks and many of them.

it's really cool watching the fire get sucked up because of the air current and physics and all those other factors that go into why this mud stove is better than an open flame.

i do have a small problem with it cracking in varies places but ive decided that i will build another one because the first one was just a practice run. i didnt pay too much attention in breaking down the clay or picking out the pieces of random wood from the millet chauf, or letting the stove dry fully. this time, i will pay much more attention. it will be a beautiful stove that will not crack.

causerie #1 (out of 6 or 7) has finally come and gone. my main project for my village has begun and boy is it stressful. you would think getting 18 people from the surrounding villages to come to my village would not be so hard, especially with some money as incentive! but no. nothing is ever easy. if something were actually easy and worked out smoothly, id get nervous and feel weird about it. there was also (or i had) a lot of hatred for the government pre-causerie because the couple of days before my scheduled event, the power decides to just not come on all day. and when there's no power, there's no cell phone reception. and that is especially true out in the pulaar villages in the middle of nowhere. i couldnt make phone calls or remind people when to come. luckily i had a decent showing. 7 of the 9 villages were present, which is... quite good.

phase 2 of the project will be harder. my counterpart and myself will now be visiting each village in the coming 5 weeks to make sure that the health workers are talking with their villages and relaying the message/causerie. this first one was on the importance of prenatal and postnatal consultations and why women should deliver in a health structure and not their own huts.

i wonder what it's going to be like when we get to STDs, and HIV/AIDS and family planning, ie. condoms and other contraceptives. these are such sensitive subjects... it will be exciting!

now in town for some internet usage even though the electricity is out all day and im forced to be nocturnal and work during the night when the electricity comes back on. we made ourselves chicken salad and garlic fries with local ingredients. it was actually really delicious. but hot season is slowly upon us and that means less and less availability of vegetables and choices in the market. this will not be good. bye bye tomatoes. bye bye cucumbers. bye bye lettuce. sigh...

oh, and i have now been in africa for a year (just about). march 2010 doesnt seem that long ago but so much of my life has changed. what an unreal year it has been, stuck in this twilight zone across the atlantic. but this also means the new kids are here! they have just arrived and are now in thies learning about the culture and beginning to study languages. how surreal...

I'm a millionaire and WAIST'd

2011-02-25T20:14:00.009+05:30

definitely not in chronological order but tons of photos so i'll let them do the talking...

there was a photo contest and i submitted a ton of photos. the prize was to have your photo hung up in the office for the year. none of my photos won because my camera is the shitty point and shoot kind but some made it into the semi-finals so that's cool! anyway here are the ones i submitted...

category: artsy

category: animal

category: architecture

category: culture

category: group photo

category: integration

category: nature

category: ugly baby

category: portrait

category: portrait (submitted under a friend's name since i couldnt submit more than 1 per category but these were all soo good)

category: portrait (again)

so i went to the bank and this is what my account balance read - over a million dollars!!! ok, cfa dollars but still! granted half of it isnt even mine; it's the money for my causerie project so in reality, i am still insanely poor after paying my regional dues, monthly rent, and other expenses (aka WAIST). anyway, now that the money came in, i can begin my project. let's see how smoothly this will go...

dave glovsky came to visit me in yang yang. this was our attempt at leaving it. sitting on the side of an empty road for almost 4 hours. the world could explode and i would not hear of it. terrifying...

and then there was WAIST... the acronym for West African International Softball Tournament (or something along the lines of that). it's such a great spin off the word waste (or wasted) because... well maybe i cant physically write it all down but you can imagine. (think 96 hours of perma-consuming debuachery). volunteers from all over west africa came - cape verde, mali, niger, guinea, etc etc... then there were embassy families and other ex pats, and missionaries, and even some local senegalese. just think of 400 or so americans - deprived, starved, ready for some good ol' american fun. there was softball, there was beach, and pool parties, and parties, and lots of ethanol. because your tax dollars cannot pay for hotels, we ended up boarding with ex pats and families in the embassy and boy do they have nice houses! america is wonderful. anyway, i'll let the pictures do the talking (maybe i'll annotate a couple)

(this is what all of us looked like. my body is literally rejecting life right now. every fiber in my is hating my brain for making the decisions it did).

a huge necessity for every trip to dakar - ice cream...

if you notice the times on the phones, they are all different. time does not matter in senegal.

other photos are not fit to post, haha.

and that is all...

i climb trees in my spare time; what do you do?

2011-02-11T15:37:00.012+05:30

i live on a farm. there are goats and sheep and chicken and horses and donkeys and cats and dogs and cows (and the occasional camels that pass through, but no pigs because we're muslim) everywhere. you know that customs form that you have to fill out every time you re-enter the states, the one where you normally check no for a list of boxes that ask random questions like are you smuggling shit (literally) into the country or have you been doing naughty things abroad? well, back in december when i went home, i paused for a second on the question that asked if ive been anywhere near a farm. i wasnt sure how familiar customs agents are with the lives of peace corps volunteers (my passport has a huge sign on the cover (and in back) saying "hey, im in fucking peace corps bitch!") so i guess i finally had to check yes for something. wasnt too much of a hassle. i did the right thing by not bringing the footwear that i wore on the farm back into the states. i mean, i only step in poop all the time!

goats have pretty much destroyed everything in my garden. it looks like world war three - a battle between plants struggling for life, already in an inhospitable environment such as this desert, versus demon goats that eat everything. and i mean everything. the teeth marks along even my small moringa trees (yes, they are no longer little shrubs anymore but small trees now) are disheartening. it seems that some of the moringa trees, the "neverdies", are dead. again.

(a picture of remains of a struggling eggplant plant (?) after being bombarded by goats. i think it'll make it. who knew that by surrounding things with pieces of someone's collapsed cement house, it could look so artistic!)

dad once said that there are 3 things destroying senegal: goats, donkeys, and children.

the other day, dad built me a new fence to keep the goats out of my garden. i helped out minimally because dad thinks i'm incompetent in just about everything. which, to some extent, is true. at least when it comes to manual labor and farm work. my holes are never dug correctly, or deep enough, or fast enough, or at the right angle. i cant even rake the sand correctly. africa is teaching me how to become a real man.

a military cargo plane was flying very low over my village and some of the little kids were screaming in horror, running away and crying, afraid of this massive creature in the sky. how cute. a mother laughs and says it's only an airplane. are airplanes so foreign an object as to elicit a response of bewilderment and terror? amazing. where do i live again?

sometimes i fail to understand this country at all. when i got back from my regional meeting the other day, i saw that my aunt had a staph infection on her arm the size of a baseball. it was oozying and pus-ing. i asked her why she didnt go to the health center and she said it's because no one was there. apparently, the doctor has gone away for a couple of days. my counterpart. he does this a lot. when he's out, people arent treated. the other day, i asked my 12 year old brother what he learned in school and he showed me his school notes. chicken scratch looks more legible. i asked him to read me his lesson and he just stared at me and said he couldn't read it. in a school system that teaches based on rote memorization, straight copying and repeating, no wonder kids here dont learn or absorb anything. whats the point of education then? and some days the teachers go on strike. unlike america, there are no substitute teachers. a teacher strike means no school. and then when the teachers end their strike, the students go on strike protesting the strike of the teachers. aka, no school. how outrageous is that?

ive been reading books like mountains beyond mountains and three cups of tea. people like Greg Mortenson and Paul Farmer make me feel ashamed and inadequate as a human being. how am i contributing to this world? are my two years here in senegal just a complete waste of time? i built mud stoves, taught some people how to make mosquito repellent, and supplemented my family's diet with an occasional extra vegetable. that's it? feeling useless and unaccomplished is an understatement. i guess on a positive note, my grant money has finally come through and i hope to be starting the maternal health causeries soon, inshallah.

in the mean time, i play with kids. we climb trees, we play soccer barefoot in a field of thorns, we draw pictures in the sand, we race, we wrestle senegal style (i wouldnt call it wrestling. it's more like me lifting kids in the air since they cant knock me over). i get petted because i have a lot of body hair (comparatively. im only asian. imagine the amount of petting caucasian males get). the kids are greatly and funny.

this is a homemade toy gun or slingshot. pretty ingenious if you ask me. and it's completely environmentally friendly - recycled, made from a random piece of wood on the group, some used rubber, used nails, and random things are pellets.

(the little one, if you havent noticed, is quite the character.)

riddle: how many senegalese children can a medium sized niim tree hold?

answer: at least 10. we couldve packed it like a sept-place but then, i would feel sad for the tree.)

took another bike trip the other day (my knee is so f'ed up). 25 miles from any paved road, one can find beautiful mosques such as this one. i wonder where the money came from to build such a massive (use the trees as comparison of size) structure in the middle of nowhere and why waste it on a mosque when roads are shitty, children dont have enough to eat, health care is practically non-existent, and the school system is abysmal.

BUT... at least the camels have returned to the region!

my first mud stove is almost ready. it takes forever to dry. i was impatient so i tried to flip it and ended up cracking the rim. luckily, the expert, michael, says the bottom 12-15 cms are what really matters so i can just chip the top away to make it look more aesthetically pleasing. i hope it works? im getting bad feelings...

oh and miraculously, i was able to shrink these videos and the internet was kind enough to let me upload them over night so here they are!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiafOFa91Bo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHZ_OGdIwbs

happy valentines day everyone. (irony in africa?)

i kinda feel like jesus christ

2011-01-31T14:51:00.003+05:30

ok maybe he's not quite the right person to compare myself to. actually this will be a terrible comparison and i will probably go to hell for it. but you know how when he was crucified and all, he was in all that pain with every step he took, you know, because he got lashed and all? well my situation is not exactly like his but pain with every step wouldnt be a huge over-exaggeration. the amount of thorns and spikes and needle like seeds/rocks in the sand in my area is beyond bordering excessive. pretty much every couple of steps i take, i have to pause to remove a spike from my feet or a thorn that has pierced through my flip flops and is sticking into me. i'd like to think of myself as becoming more weathered, more rugged, maturing physically. and there are more cases to attest to this physical abuse my body has to withstand.

the other day, i was riding a bus car back to my village, you know the ones where i sit on top and the cars drive too close to trees. well, i guess i wasnt paying attention for a split second and WHAM! i get smacked by an acacia thorn tree. for a second, i thought my eye was leaking. turns out there was a cut/scratch on my eyelid right where my eyelashes were... aka way too close to my eyeball for my comfort.

the cuts arent deep but thats not the point. in this country, there's just too much sand and dust and shit in the air. im totally going to scar. but hey, i got scratched by a lion whilst i was in africa... right?

as i await the arrival of funding for my causerie project, ive decided to build "improved mud rocket stoves". ideally, they cut down wood consumption, speed up cooking time, as well as decrease the prevalence of upper respiratory infections due to smoke irriation from the cooking fire. that's if i built everything right, in terms of dimensions, raw material ratios, whatnot. well, now i gotta wait 3ish weeks for the stove to dry til we can try it out. that means 3 weeks of kids not breaking it or goats not breaking it, an impossible feat really, but if allah willing...

the building of the mudstove also hurt. i didnt sift the millet chauf (clearly completely my fault) well enough and now i have splinters and scratches all over my hands from working the clay with my hands.

my friend kim's mom had a baby so i went to its baptism. kim lives in an ethnically pulaar village (mine is wolof) so new traditions, new experiences? ive never been to a pulaar baptism.

turned out to be a ton of fun. the food was amazing, the music was great, the dancing was fun to watch, and the people were just nicer and smilier. if the stupid pulaar men in my area would stop harassing me, pulaars would be just awesome.

oh and i think i sprained my knee on the bike trip to kim's village. my 2 months of bike inactivity which included 1 month in america being idle and gluttonous wasnt very good on my body. it is dying.

in about 5 weeks, i will have been in senegal for a year... wow

and 10 months have passed...

2011-01-20T21:03:00.006+05:30

notice anything different?! yes ive started posting pictures again. the girl was never able to fix my camera so i had to buy a new one when i was in america. i have ventured away from canon (sadface) but this new discovery is not really a downgrade. welcome panasonic lumix into my life. it is waterproof, dustproof, sandproof, shockproof, and freezeproof (uhh what do i possibly need that for here?!)... pretty much indestructible, which is perfect for this country. we will put this camera to the ultimate test - can it last until the end of my service in this country that is not very friendly to electronics? we shall see...

(thanks varun for your suggestions and help though. after much consideration and research, i decided to go with this one but +1 for looking out)

anyway, whilst in dakar for new years, we went to the beach. yes it was 80 degrees. ive never been in warm weather around winter time so this was quiet exciting. i may go to warm places from now on when the snow starts to settle in nyc. miami anyone for new years in the future?

the sunset was beautiful. of course we climbed a mountain of garbage just to get to the lighthouse on top. didnt really realize that there was a road wrapping the otherside of the massive hill.

my camera has a ton of cool features and this is one of them. the quality is actually amazing for a camera that doesnt have a lens that can extend or retract. +1 for awesome purchase.

after returning to village and hanging out with my siblings for 2 weeks straight, i dont think i really ever want to have kids. they are just so misbehaving and naughty! but i guess cute nonetheless. i gained a new little sister (see below)

so this is what yang yang looks like now...
remember when it used to look like this?!

the non-rainy season versus the rainy season of this desert is such a ridiculous contrast. im loving the cold season and kinda scared of the hot season that is slowly, slowly creeping up on us...

the mango tree i planted last august or so is looking pretty good. it's grown at least...

however the state of my garden is abysmal. dad and mom say that the eggplants were soo beautiful and then goats got in again and destroyed everything. dad and i are currently in the process of extending and reinforcing the barrier around the garden to make it impenetrable.

is that... a baby lettuce?! why yes! i have pepiniere'd lettuce but this photo was taken before the chicken and rats got into the garden and obliterated the pepiniere. i no longer have any lettuce or hot peppers... sad face

the ONLY exciting news about the state of my garden is that the tomatoes have all been left alone and now they are starting to turn red aka soon we will have tomatoes to eat... yay!

my causerie project has been approved so now i just sit and wait for the funding to arrive. in the mean time, let's build some mud rocket stoves (i'll take pictures) and read a ton!

til next time... maybe around valentines day?

introduction to some foods of senegal...

2011-01-19T20:57:00.001+05:30

ahh the foods of senegal, how i really dont miss you but i do crave you, thanks to your abundance of MSG in every bite. people have asked me what the food is like here so i thought id give an introduction to the cuisine that predominates senegal.

the very basic and most popular (shall we say national dish?) is ceebujen. literally translated, it means rice and (of) fish. it's basically fish and vegetables and rice. the rice is seasoned and can be white or red depending on the sauce you use (the red comes from the tomato paste, white without). vegetables depend on the season though in richer households, there will be an abundance and variation - though always thoroughly boiled to the point where nothing retains its nutritional value. fish can be fresh or as not fresh depending on where you live and your access to fish. the fish is also stuffed with spices.

there can be many variations on the ceebujen. sometimes there's lemon. sometimes there's bissap sauce. and sometimes theres an onion tomato sauce with the occasional fish ball drizzled on the rice. this variation is called ceebucaga (literally rice of prostitute).

then the other very popular and traditionally senegalese dish is called yassa. yassa is pretty much an onion sauce over white rice. there are occasional vegetables like carrot and potatoes but otherwise, not as plentiful as the fish and rice dish. yassa can come with meat (yassa yapp), fish balls (yassa boulette), or chicken (yassa ginaar). the picture is of yassa boulette.

then there are the heavy and rich sauces on top of white rice. below we have maafe gerte yapp - a peanut sauce over white rice with some meat. variations can be substituting the meat with fish. i dont have a picture of another dish called domada but it's also a thick and rich sauce that is more tomato based and usually with fish balls.

this is a variation of fasi which is a tomato onion sauce over white rice with vegetables and some form of protein. depending where in the country you are, they cook it differently so it may not look like this anywhere else.

one dish that is not very high in my book is called ceebuyapp which is just rice and meat. it's only because the meat in this country just isnt that great and a lot of the time, it's different organs and body parts. the senegalese really prize the liver and intestines, etc. although the good thing about this dish is that the rice is usually very flavorful (aka MSG saturated) and it's usually served with a very spicy mustard/hot pepper sauce.

most of these plates are generally found at lunch. lunch is probably the more exciting meal out of all the meals. dinner is usually not very fun so i havent really taken any pictures but dinner for me is usually rice with beans and dried fish (baxal nebe) or rice with peanuts and dried fish (baxal gerte) or one of the above where the rice is very soggy (daxin bopp). i generally enjoy dinner though because it's plain and simple and there are different variations that we wont get into but are quite good (ie baxal goorjigeen, baxal peuhl, laxubissap)

aside from rice, millet (cherri) is extremely popular. millet is pounded into a fine grain so it's like couscous, only more of a sandy texture. millet, however, is more nutritious than rice. theres a bean sauce, and leaf sauce, and a tomato sauce. sometimes post meal, milk is added to the millet as a dessert (though not a very fulfilling one at that).

the millet can be worked into little balls and then mixed with yogurt (lax ak sew) which is a very delicious sweet dish.

of course senegalese food has also adopted some western ideas and especially in larger cities where people are wealthier, dishes like the one below are more affordable and perhaps more common (?). you have a grilled chicken stuffed with spices, french fries, with a side of peas and an onion sauce.

since it's a predominantly muslim country, there isnt a lot of pork consumed here. but if you go to a sereer ethnic town (there arent any where i live) where many sereers are catholic, you can find plates like this - grilled pork with french fries and tomatoes on top of a bed of lettuce.

and there you have it. a basic introduction to senegalese food.

appreciation, the return, 2011

2011-01-02T17:08:00.005+05:30

i have returned home to africa - yay!

america and shanghai were amazing.

there are many things and people i would like to thank in this post. let's break it down by categories

1. i would like to thank america for being as wonderful as it is. you are simply amazing, with your abundance of, literally, everything - the copious varieties and options as i walked down the aisles of target, the bountiful cuisines (even choices on menus) readily accessible at all hours of every day, the unlimited supply of water (cold AND hot), heat, gas, electricity, internet and phone service, the extensive availability of technology and electronics at my fingertips, such as a washing machine, or a drier, an oven, a car, or a flat screen tv with crystal clear quality, displaying the millions of channels of cable that immediately broadcast news, or soap operas, or movies, or reality shows into my temperature-controlled living room with comfortable couches and comforters and pillows. thank you america, for your bars and clubs and lounges, your free thinking, and acceptance of different opinions, for your highways without potholes and your seemly public transportation, your toilets that dont have a swarm of flies above them, your movie theaters with popcorn and nachos, your ethnic foods and beverages. thank you america for your seasons, your supermarkets and delis, your smart phones, your time schedules and promptness. thank you america, for everything, and i will see you when i get back.

2. i would like to thank all my friends in america (and shanghai) for still being friends with me (haha). no matter how dirty i've become, in physical appearance, in behavior, or the stories and experiences i tell, you are there, holding in the vomit that my life stories do induce. you sat with me through my gluttonous vacation, we danced, we ate, we drank. i will see you all in 16 months... not a very long time at all.

3. i would like to thank my family, for allowing me to see the world, allowing me to be different than the usual mold, allowing me to be me.

4. i would like to thank all the musicians, that have gotten me through all those wonderful times in senegal. just to name a few: owl city, la roux, bruno mars, mike posner, katy perry, girl talk, kill paradise, silversun pickups, david guetta, taio cruz, far east movement, lady gaga, jay sean, and the members of the glee cast.

5. and last but not least, i would like to thank my senegal friends (namely my linguere family) who put up with me, my quirks, my uselessness, my neediness, and my shit. without you guys, i am nothing...

just some pictures to sum up my trip...

went to visit vivi in shanghai! look how dark i am haha

this is what shanghai looks like these days... kinda like nyc

one of the most tasty chicken wings ive ever had, courtesy of jess' bday and the sunburnt cow

another view of shanghai from the park - beautiful, clean modernity

nothing like these in senegal

countryside shanghai and it snowed!

now back in senegal and spent new years in dakar. it was... interesting. ended up not going to the akon concert in st louis because big crowds give me anxiety these days and akon isnt so great anyway... so we hung around in dakar and ate, drank, and danced. but because local people dont drink here, instead, they shoot fireworks at each other. at first it was kinda pretty, albeit ridiculously loud. then it was kind of crazy, idiotic, dangerous. our group (since everyone was white and thus stood out) was targeted many times and i actually got hit twice. we had to run into bars to avoid the danger outside for most of the night. why would you ever shoot fireworks AT each other? and at close range? and the children were doing it too. thank you allah for not making me lose an eye or two that night haha...

hello 2011! new years resolution: keep at it.

anyway, heading back to village tomorrow. have a new camera so will take pics and post again in 2 weeks or so!!

god bless america and an unlimited supply and variety of food

2010-12-05T04:25:00.000+05:30

vacation!

New York City 12/5 - 12/8

Shanghai 12/9 - 12/18

New York City 12/18 - 12/25

let's put on some weight...

sleepless desert nights...

2010-11-19T16:23:00.004+05:30

senegalese weddings should be on everyone's bucket list. well no, technically i didn't attend one. the pre-wedding bride sendoff should be on everyone's bucket list. within my young 23 years of life, this has been one of the most beautiful, most poetic, most touching ceremonies i've ever witnessed. part of me regrets not having a camera for this once in a lifetime occasion but i'm also glad i didn't. pictures cannot capture nor do justice to the 30 hours of energy and love, the closeness of each and every member of a village, the farewell and words exchanged. to experience it was the only way. in the end, watching my sister be taken away by the groom's uncle was heart wrenching.

i've always dreaded senegalese holidays or events. they're quite dreary to say the least - a lot of dressing up for no reason, a lot of sitting around, a lot of drinking tea, a whole lot of nothing. so when i heard my sister was getting married, i secretly dreaded the event. i knew there would be loud music all night that would keep me from sleeping and i knew there would be a lot of sitting around the next day, shaking hands with every single person, eating food that's been touched by numerous hands, washing my hands in a washbowl that has been beyond thoroughly used but cannot be helped because there's no clean water left, drinking out of a communal cup that's been slobbered over by strangers - all of this increasing my chances of getting an amoeba again (my last amoeba extravaganza directly followed a wedding i attended so i associate large gatherings such as this with really poor sanitation and hygiene).

but the dreary part was derived from attending baptisms and weddings and religious holidays. never had i ever attended a bride sendoff. it turned out to be quite the contrary to dreary.

i didn't find out that it really wasn't a wedding until the very last 6 hours. i blame this on wolof's inadequacy when it comes to vocabulary. for weeks my family has been announcing this event as a sey, a wedding. but the word sey, i finally realized, can represent all things related to the wedding, like the pre-wedding bride sendoff. such an event is still within the realm of sey, and thus my confusion. furthermore, i blame my fellow family members for not correcting my grammar. for days, i've been asking, "so the groom has not come yet?" their response has always been, "no, the groom has not come yet." what they should've said was, "no, the groom will not come, ever." that would've made everything clear.

the first night, the women of the village got together and cooked. 2 dinners. there was more food served than during the breaking fast of ramadan. i haven't felt this full in a long time. we ate and then we danced. experience had thus far proven that people don't really dance but just sit in chairs, in a circle, staring at each other. this time though, it was different. the young, the old, and all those in between, everybody danced. granted it took the teenage boys a lot longer to gather their nerves and get started but in the end, no one (or at least very few) remained in their chairs. it was such a beautiful mix of tradition and modernity that i couldn't help but smile. a pole was stuck in the sand and on top, a single light bulb hung to illuminate the proceedings. we danced under the stars and moonlight to the thumping of gourds and hand claps, songs perfectly arranged by the DJ and his sound system. women in beautiful wraps stomp away at the sand, kicking up a hazy cloud of dust that engulfs the surrounding. shadows dance across the walls, echoing across the hills. i am actually in africa - this is so surreal.

after only a few hours of sleep, the second day begins. day 2 began with my sisters invading my room because there were too many guests everywhere and they needed some privacy to get ready and prepare for the festivities. the hair braiding took a good 3 hours, then the make up took another hour, and then putting on the outfit and adjusting it and wearing the tons of jewelry took another hour. 5 hours... damn. it's really a bit sad though. my sister is naturally very beautiful but thanks to senegalese customs and traditions, dressing up for a wedding means wearing copious amounts of makeup until you, quite frankly, start resembling a clown. i don't understand where this idea of beauty originates - though im thinking the french had some influence, all with their haute couture and whatnot. but i guess she managed to pull it off in the end. there was more eating, and more dancing, and my sister changed for her second outfit.

as the sun began to set, my sister retreated to her room, followed by a couple of family members, and began the process of packing. a group of women, unmarried, ranging from teenage to early womanhood, sat in a circle outside of the room, banging pots and clapping hands to an intricate beat, singing songs that i could not understand. the older married women were sitting a little farther away watching the younger generations sing their farewells. at this point, men weren't around yet, but being a foreigner, i was allowed to observe, sitting with the grandmothers a little farther away. the men of the village finally showed up 2 hours later. the groom's uncle, along with other family members of the other party, then arrived on a car. dinner was served. my sister, up until this point, had remained in the room, and no one but close family members has seen her.

once everyone in the village had been fed, an eerie silence engulfed the gathering. the uncle of the groom stepped forward and announced that he must take the bride-to-be with him to the village of the groom. at this point, a group of local young bachelors, ran to block his path to the bedroom, demanding a payment for passage. the uncle discussed the payment with the other family members and ended up paying the bachelors off. then my sister's uncle stood up and demanded a dowry, a lump sum of 30,000 cfa or the equivalent of $60. this may not sound like much at all but here, that's a lot of money in bulk. a typical senegalese salary is way below 20,000 cfa a month, and that's if he doesnt spend any money or owe anyone anything. the groom's uncle had a long discussion with the other family members and my sister's uncle, growing impatient, walked away. my other sisters, as well as the groom's uncle, had to run after my sister's uncle, and after some more discussion, the groom's uncle paid up. finally my sister walked out, entirely veiled under a white blanket and there was a little girl following her very closely, also entirely veiled under the white blanket. they both sat down in the middle of the procession. according to a grandmother i was sitting next to, the little girl's job was to convince my sister to get married saying things like 'you are beautiful' and 'you are a good muslim' and 'the husband will be nice to you'. no one could hear any of this except my sister. all the while, the villagers began a group discussion slash blessing and words of advice. in the end, a prayer was said and my sister got up and walked toward the car. the women of the village began singing again; my sisters and brothers were all crying. we watched the car drive away under the moonlight. it was midnight already.

it's a very heart wrenching departure because in some ways, she will never see the village ever again. once you are married, it's like you belong to your husband's family - you celebrate holidays with your husband's family, you dont get to go on vacations when you feel like it. your job is in his home and leaving rarely is a possibility. mobility for women in this country is difficult and unless there's a wedding or baptism in yang yang, she probably wont see her family for prolonged periods of time. it's lonely. and it sucks if she's the second or third or even fourth wife. but luckily, the younger kids that are going to school in the other village will be able to visit her so maybe she wont be so lonely after all.

following the two days of pre-wedding festivities was tabaski. tabaski is a holy holiday where every family (that is capable) sacrifices a sheep to commemorate abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to god. according to this book i read, there was a survey back in 2003 that said 5 million sheep were killed in senegal, alone, on tabaski. think of the population increase since then and then think of all the muslim countries in the world. how many sheep are slaughtered within the span of a few hours on the morning of tabaski?

our family slaughtered 2 sheep and i helped skin them and clean out the innards. i definitely lost my appetite the rest of the day. watching your food decapitated, skinned, chopped up, i should really become a vegetarian. then for many following days, sheep meat was all we ate. i watched my family tear through the skull of one.

otherwise, tabaski was uneventful as all other senegalese (religious) holidays are. we wore traditional outfits and walked around the village greeting everyone and that was about it. i guess the only other interesting thing was my outfit that i had made - i asked the tailor for red stitch work and he gave me hot pink.

go figure senegal...

hypothermia in senegal?

2010-11-10T00:01:00.000+05:30

totally possible.

it's been dropping to 60 degrees every night

which requires me to wear sweat pants and a hoodie and sleep wrapped in a decently cold-proof comforter

oh, still under a beautiful star studded sky of course...

maybe my body has acclimated too well to the desert heat

or i dropped too much weight from ramadan and the amoebas, though im working on it

it is actually cold in senegal. northface anyone?

ps - 25 days until my new york city and shanghai recuperation.

this roller coaster is fun but it's no six flags or cedar point

2010-11-02T22:22:00.000+05:30

still no camera. i think visual aids will resume january 2011 (when i come back from the land of plenty after my little vacation/recharge and have bought a new sand/dust proof camera). life in senegal is like one long roller coaster ride. some days are up days and others are down days. other times, you can have ups and downs all within one day, or even both by 8:30 in the morning. anyway, things ive done in the last 3 weeks and thoughts that have crossed my head...

1. i drank from a bottle that used to contain car break fluid. my breath smelled of sulfur. something i shouldve been worried about?

2. harvesting peanuts is awesome. i legitimately feel like a farmer. it gets monotonous after a while but i brought my speakers and ipod into the field and it was just fun working right beside my family listening to great american music (i listen to enough senegalese music to deserve these breaks). but it got me wondering... being here has made me think of things i never would've thought of back in the states. like picking peanuts for example. there's so much man labor required to pick peanuts and then weed out the bad ones. how do we do it back in the states in such large proportions? it seems almost impossible. i know machines do a lot of the work but how do they separate the bad peanuts? how do the machines differentiate? and then i thought of where the stuff we no longer use anymore - where they go. giant billboard posters for example. answer: they end up here as someones tent or someones roof or covering for trucks loaded with wood. "a diamond is forever", "the fast and the furious 3", "burger king" - a reminder of america and things that weve taken for granted.

3. riding a horse without a saddle or anything is harder than it looks. but fun! next time, i'll use a pillow.

4. i used to think - if i am only allowed to eat what i can successfully grow by myself here, i wouldve starved to death a long time ago. which is absolutely a true statement. but finally my garden is pseudo blossoming. i wish i could take pictures but allah has not granted me a working fixed camera yet. but, i have finally tasted the fruits of my labor! well not fruit, vegetable. okra, to be more specific. and moringa from my moringa bed. my sister made it into a sauce to eat with millet. my moringa was delicious. the millet, still not. fresh vegetables is such a luxury - to be able to pick it and cook and eat it, all within 2 hours. delicious. so i have a decent amount of okra growing. the eggplants and tomato plants are massive but haven't fruited yet. the mint are carrying on as usual. and now in addition, i have a massive plot of bissap (roselle) that will eventually grow to be used in food, and also to make a deliciously sweet beverage. awesome!

5 for a time, i thought the amoebas were back. or something else entirely, like giardia. my symptoms relapsed. it was really depressing - the disappointment at my body. the staph also came back from a while. but now everything is gone (i hope) and all is well. still trying to fatten up. im doing my best but it just isnt working.

6. we went to the local bar at 10am to return a couple of beer bottles and lo and behold, people are already wasted with empty gin bottles lying about. i wonder what alcohol means to people here and what they see as its purpose... curious.

7. here a free range chicken is shared amongst 10 people. in america, a factory raised chicken (and therefore 4x the size, 4x the meat of a senegalese free-range chicken) is shared amongst maybe 3 people. the gluttony that is america is appauling but i miss it so very much. sometimes my body craves protein so bad that when i have access to eggs, i consume 7 or 8 of them in a single sitting. rice is just a space filler - im starving all the time. i wont even mention cassava which has zero nutritional value whatsoever. my family is starving me. instead of buying vegetables and more nutritious items, they waste their money on new clothes. my family is relaively well off - if you only just look around the community and compare it to others. but it is definitely poor by Amereican standards. so stop wasting money. stop malnourishing yourselves. stop starving me.

8. sometimes i think america is destroying their culture. middle of nowhere rural desert africa is no place for american rapper inspired baggy jeans, tasteless profane tshirts, and rocked flat-billed caps.

9. the ny minute vs waiting - i have always been a fast paced kind of person. this slow paced lifestyle and work ethic is killing me. sitting around gives me more stress than working with stressful people. this snail crawl is so hard to live with...

10. i walked around (and sorta got lost) in the desert, by myself. it's quite a feeling, being so alone. i was visiting a village about 5k away that had no water, no electricity, no health facilities - basically a village i want to work with. it required forging a stagnant stream which was really gross (i feel like definitely caught something new) and following a barely visible tire track in the sand that criss crossed and diverged and converged every so often. it was cool though. i'll never be able to do this again in my life so gonna enjoy the isolation.

11. my project will fail. my boss (well sorta, not really) finally came up to hold a meeting with all the important members of my project and for the last 3 weeks, that was what i was doing - getting people to come to this meeting. i wanted 2 representatives from the 9 villages, preferably matrones and ASCs but if they dont exist, i set up potential relais, women with motivation that want to help their village. i also invited my chief of village, my ICP, my counterpart, the president of the health committee, treasurer of the health committee, a USAID - plan NGO worker in the district, and my sous-prefet of my arrondissement. i continuously had trouble getting charette rides or car rides. and when i met these people, they always told me "enshallah" meaning allah willing, meaning maybe - the worst response you can get when you really want definite answers. up until the morning of, i really thought no one was going to show up. and they didnt for the first hour and a half. of course it's senegal and when i say a meeting starts at 9am, it means show up at 11:20am. i literally had people showing up 3 hours late, but i guess they eventually did come which is what really matters. it's a slow progress and most likely my project will fail because it's so timeline based but i will try my best. i also realized i failed at language acquisition. my wolof still sucks. it's unfortunate.

went to halloween. tamba is a magical place. our region is really deprived. we live without anything in life.

so this is what death feels like!

2010-10-10T19:32:00.006+05:30

Usually the Yang (short name for my village) is great - peaceful, calm, serene - an escape from constant harassment from people who dont know you and all the worries associated with larger towns and traveling in this country. the last 2 weeks however, have been... quite an adventure. never have so many things gone wrong in such a short time span. i dont want to rant for an entire entry but since my camera is (still) broken, i can only hope to document my life in a pseudo-interesting and painless light. where to begin:

thursday - the culprit of my subsequent misfortune came in the form of, potentially, a gritty concoction of millet, yogurt, and sand sold at a local street-food stand

friday - problems of my gastrointestinal (GI) tract begin - trying to spare yall details (hah)

saturday - GI problems worsen

sunday - made the horrible (in retrospect, absolutely regretted) mistake of biking back to my village. usually it's a 6 hour bike ride. this time it took 10. many factors contributed to this abysmal biking time: because of my GI problems for the past 2 days, i havent really eaten anything substantial, nor have i been sleeping well. this overall weakened state of my body along with exhaustion, some dehydration, and the heat ended up with me riding into the Yang looking as if i died a couple of times that day. and indeed i probably almost did... i wasnt fully over my GI problems but i decided against common sense and biked anyway. luckily no "accidents" occurred on the bike trip, but i thoroughly destroyed my body

monday - this day was probably rock bottom #1. i have chest pains and back aches from the bad posture my body was in during the horrible bike ride on the previous day. i then discover that there is mold everywhere in my room, covering all my clothes and sheets and bed stuff. the electricity has been out for the last 2 days and since our forage runs on an electric motor (the village didnt think this one through) and there arent any wells, the family was running on dwindling water supplies so couldnt wash anything. then i discover that a few days ago, goats got into my garden and wreaked havoc on all my trees and moringa and crops. some okra, tomatoes, eggplant, and watermelon survived but the entire tree pepiniere as well as moringa bed were destroyed. in addition, there seemed to be an influx of mosquitoes in my village - and 2 of my brothers had malaria

tuesday - body is still recovering from physical stress but i was able to go over to the health post and discuss different prerequisites for my project with my ICP. i intended on visiting all the other health huts in the coming days, as well as acquainting myself with each village's matrone and ASC. supposedly a couple of matrones were coming in on wednesday so i was advised to wait around and meet them tomorrow. electricity, water, and cell phone service still out.

wednesday - the matrones never found a charette to bring themselves into the Yang. i waited around all day for nothing. i decided then to start my visits on my own the following day. electricity, water, and cell phone service still out. my siblings are starting to disappoint me. theyve always been intrigued by my book reading habits and when they found my learning-french books, they were all very excited. so i brought back le petit prince for them to read. my sister read 10 pages, got bored, and put it down. they are not interested in reading. nor movies with any depth or meaning - they just want action sequences where no dialogue is needed. they dont want to learn any card games - the 2 they know is just plenty. they detest my classical music and would rather sit silently all day than listen to it. they are so set in their ways that it leaves me wondering: am i imposing my culture? am i forcing smiles in pictures? where's the cultural exchange and learning? ive accepted theirs but they dont really like mine...

thursday - the sous-prefet is still in dakar so no car is available to me. my counterpart's charette is in the fields. our family has a charette but my brother still has malaria so once again, my life is controlled by transportation. i cannot bike because these villages are only accessible via paths with beach-like sand. electricity came back on for a few hours which allowed us to stock up on water again and i was finally able to do some laundry to wash the mold out of my clothes. i probably will have respiratory problems due to the mold, years from now. on top of it, i've had pretty much only had beans for the last 4 days. it's bread with beans for breakfast, rice with beans and dried fish for lunch, steamed beans with afternoon tea, and then rice with beans and dried fish again for dinner. i am terrified of the harvest season now because of the ridiculous amount of beans we are eating. on the bright side, i attended a football match in the middle of the desert. this was a real lifter in a crappy week. picture little boys running around chasing each other near the field. the older boys who arent playing in the football game are sitting in clicks, fooling around, gossiping. the girls are sitting separately and slightly further away, sometimes carrying or surrounded by younger siblings. they are giggling and gossiping as well, of course. i obviously value comfort a lot so i brought my mat with me and the instant, i put my mat down, it is swarmed with children and their caretakers. wow, i am in rural africa. im fitting in, being accepted, just hanging out with the youths of my village. sometimes, i feel like im in the village too long. when i go to the cities, i find myself staring at other white people. it's just weird seeing white people around. sometimes i forget im not black.

friday - once again i cannot visit any health huts because there is a wedding in my village and i got tricked into going to it. haha, it's not that i wasnt happy going - attending events in the village is an important part of being in with the community - it's just that weddings and baptisms are so... unexciting for me. there's a lot of sitting around, drinking tea, and eating greasy rice - 3 things i dont particularly look forward to doing for an entire day. and i still couldnt do anything for my project. i decided to transplant some eggplant in my garden.

saturday - as luck would have it, there is a baptism that i had to attend in the morning - so another day lost. but it wouldve been lost anyway because i was starting to have GI problems again... oh and the electricity, water, and cell phone service is out, again...

sunday - i did not sleep much saturday night because my GI problems took a turn for the worse and i was having pretty severe abdominal cramping and pain. it got a little better sunday morning but then came back in full force. sunday was probably rock bottom day #2. i decided to call it in and was advised to start some drugs and also took a sample of my stools to bring into dakar for lab results. all of sunday and sunday night was spent pretty much in a fetal position, teeth grinding from the pain, unable to eat and barely being able to take in liquids - even though it was extremely important, my body was unbelievably dehydrated from all the...

monday - i left for dakar. it was not a fun day. traveling when you have GI issues requires a lot of physical and mental restrain. i had to take a couple of imodium's to stop it up a bit. thankfully, i did not have any "accidents". however the ride was somewhat terrible. for some reason, people here dont understand common courtesy when traveling in public transportation. this kid threw up. but instead of throwing up in a bag or out the window, it was right onto the floor of the bus. this has happened numerous times to me already. i think people just dont understand taking care of things, even if it's theirs. and then there were also sheep tied onto the roof. i guess the sheep needed to urinate, so it did. and it came in through the windows as a mist/drip. sheep piss has a pungent smell - i smelled like it for another 24 hours...

tuesday - turned in my results. had soup for the first time in 7 months. the pain has lessened but still... pee-ing from a place where it doesnt normally come out of.

wednesday - the results are in. i have amoebas!

so now i am on amoeba-killing medication which in total is a 13 day process and hopefully in the next couple of days, i will feel better and my body will return to normal, enshallah.

lessoned learned: amoebas, or any GI parasites, are absolutely no fun - so be careful

so maybe the last 2 weeks weren't that bad - they were just disappointing. my body failed me a couple of times, and i feel terribly stalled because i wasnt able to do very much for my project, but i have learned a lot from this experience.

to be able to work and do something well, in this country or i guess anywhere else in life, especially in terms of aid work, i must fit into their schedule. i cant expect them to fit into mine. im sure that in the next year and a half, i will come across plenty of situations where the schedules will not align up and i will feel frustrated, like im completely wasting time, but really im not. the community is accepting me more, feeling more comfortable with my presence, getting used to the idea of a foreigner just hanging around all the time. once i can get the ball rolling, whenever that happens, it'll just continue to roll and things will fall into place. if i fit into their schedule, they'll be more eager and more cooperative.

i can do this.

well... let's get better first, haha.

half anniversary in-country post ramadan, some staph infections, and a camera tragedy...

2010-09-18T21:02:00.001+05:30

a week ago was our 6 months mark. it really doesnt feel like i've been here that long. but thinking back to the life i had 6 months ago and comparing it to now, i cant help but smile. i think i've become somewhat of a dirty hippie. i was thinking the other day, how hard it is to truly describe the life here. one can only live it to fully understand the absurdities of such things as riding in cars that swerve continually for hours upon hours dodging potholes every feet or so, or biking through mud and sand to villages where children have never seen a foreigner, or being ok with not having electricity for days at a time, or living paycheck to paycheck to the point where you only have 1 US dollars worth left in your pocket. public transportation is predictably unpredictable. having skin problems during the rainy season is so commonplace - the combination of the humidity and moistness in the air with undernourishment, as well as constant flies wreaking havoc on your open wounds made from mosquito bites, makes me look like i have leprosy or the bubonic plague or herpes or gangrene all over my legs. i have spared yall the pictures of my pus-ing open wounds but the doc claims they are all staph infections since they havent healed after months. getting meds for them now so hopefully they'll look better soon. i digress... but anyway, ramadan, the month of fasting, has finally ended in the culmination of a holiday called korite, which wasnt as exciting as everyone made it out to be, except for the fact that now i can now resume eating breakfast and lunch at somewhat proper hours. i have survived my very first ramadan! (and gained lots of street credit as a result)... so i fasted for 15 days out of the 29, which included not drinking water. the rest was spent talking to my counterparts and figuring out details about my project, reading 5 books, and doing a ton of bush biking around my village, which added up to around 320k or close to 200 miles. pretty sweet if i may say so myself... although i've lost close to 15 pounds. any protein that i eat goes straight to my thighs/calves, thanks to biking.

we got a new dog and dubbed her helen keller (go figure)... though she is a serious needle in all our asses so we may have to part with her soon, enshallah.

i decided to go herding with my brother one day (crossing this one of the things to do list before i die!). herding... is like taking a dog for a stroll in the park. except its a herd of sheep. and you're in the middle of nowhere. it's a very solitary life and i feel slightly saddened that people have to do it. i, for one, cannot herd as an occupation - it's just too lonely.

there's no one to talk to, not even fellow herders because you dont want to get your animals mixed together, so you stay apart from other people. and then it's a lot of sitting or standing around watching them eat, rest, frolic, fornicate with the occasional moving to the next patch of fresh greeneries... quite the life huh? haha, it's overrated but cool nonetheless. the isolation and beauty of the open wilderness is breathtaking.

on one of my bike trips, my friends came up to visit me in the Yang and we decided to do a back bush tour all the way through the forest/desert back to our regional house in the Ling, some 50 odd kilometers away. the night before, it rained an ungodly amount - which in the long run we are thankful for because it packed the sand, that would have been unbikeable through, had it been dry and too sandy - but as it occurred, sucked because my roof leaked (yeah it was raining that hard) and i felt like archimedes, the owl, in the sword in the stone cartoon in merlin's tower putting teapots underneath leaks. the morning of, and i guess throughout the day, we had a ton of bike problems but all in all, it was quite an interesting bike ride. we had to bike through puddles that were a little under knee deep - the puddles were... probably filled with animal feces. at some point, there were no roads, just barely visible tracks on the ground that criss-crossed and split off. we had to ask random pulaar compounds the direction toward the next random pulaar compound in hopes that we would come across something. but wow, is it beautiful out there. untouched by civilization, no electricity or telephone poles, no planes flying overhead. it was as if we werent living in 2010, where across a small ocean is a booming metropolis called new york city.

an unfortunate sight, the upside down bike - during repair...

covered in mud toward the end of the day...

my tomatoes and eggplant and okra pepinieres grew pretty well that i had to expand my garden, pretty much doubling it's size for space to outplant. it required a ton of weeding, but my garden is starting to look like a real garden...

a shot of my entire plot...

dont be deceived by the over-green-ness of my garden. there are a ton of weeds so actually my garden is less productive than it looks...
mint is growing well...
my random tree pepinieres are coming up... i have no idea what trees they are. although some are leucena, and i like those...
when my friend said dont plant watermelon too close to other things, she wasnt kidding. the watermelon are spreading like weeds, overrunning an entire section of my plot!
a shot of the prosperous eggplants...
a shot of the tomatoes...
my brother planted SO MANY OKRA... firstly you dont pepiniere okra. you plant them individually and apart from each other and let them grow big. you cant move them. they are so going to die after my transplanting...
my moringa trees are getting pretty massive...
now would you look at that... is that a... baby watermelon?!
i found this rascal hiding behind a ton of leaves... umm so my garden is actually somewhat productive and things are actually growing... who knew i could grow stuff in the desert...
i found a baby scorpion outside my room... i wonder if it's stinger can cause pain already...

now this is... a life experience. so, ok we get milk and yogurt in the middle of no where, where refrigerators dont exist. ive accepted this fact. but the other day i had a substance called diiw u noor that my family bought from pulaars. at first, i compared its taste to that cringing expression when you enter a locker room after a football game. repulsive? diiw u noor is yogurt that has been left out, and when the top of the yogurt turns yellow (im assuming from going bad), they scrape it off and boil it and turn it back into an oil. unappetizing i know. but the 2nd time, my sister made it, and it wasnt so bad (?)... the flavor is close to saganaki cheese. like if oil was saganaki cheese flavored, youd have what i tasted. (saganaki cheese is that cheese you light on fire in greek restaurants, fyi). and actually, i think that's how you make saganaki cheese. after the oil boiling process, there's some residue at the bottom of the pot and i tasted it and it was pretty close to cheese... curious...

ps - segue is spelled s-e-g-u-e, lol. um, there was one morning when i woke up to it raining outside and there were goats on my porch area, just like 2 yards from my face. it was... entertaining. i put on my ipod and sang my heart out to numerous songs. the goats looked at me as if i were crazy. later that day, i showered in the rain because all my brothers were doing it. it was cold.

thank you sasha for this AWESOME backpack. i literally go everywhere with it now! it's tougher than my jansport so it totally gets me through all the mud and bush car rides. plus, i look hipster.

i have finally made my room more friendly by putting up pictures! im sure some of you will recognize your silly faces. i have tons of photos in a photo album too so that i wont forget you guys. and thanks cat for the subway map... helps me remember my roots and gives my siblings something to look at when they hang out in my room. it's fun explaining a subway system to them - cars that are underneath the earth that carry people to very far places... i should also thank kidd for the tshirt sent from taiwan, yuping for a postcard from taiwan, and vivi from when she was in america for her care package of goodies too. everyone is awesome!

i wasnt kidding about thorns on the ground, in the sand. everytime i take a short walk, i have to stop after awhile to scrape off the thorns that jam into my flip flops. one needs a good pair of flip flops (or really thick skin) to survive here. they hurt...

just some other thoughts...

1. who thought tin/zinc roofs was a good idea? it couldnt be louder when it rains. you cant sleep through a war like that...

2. the MSG is literally killing me here. everything has MSG in it, and in turn, i crave everything. my body is slowly dying i tell ya.

3. most nights, i sleep under the stars. i forget how serene and awesome it is.

4. i think my gender equality work is working. my actions are actually rubbing off on other people. you always do a double take when you see men in this country do laundry. the other day, i saw my brothers washing their own clothes and the girls just sitting around. TASK COMPLETE! this happened too toward the end in my training village. my insistence that i do my own laundry has made the women realize that men are capable of doing their own share of work around the house. maybe i am making a difference around here...

5. some aspects of this culture are just simply awesome. i love seeing adults stick out their heads from their compounds, psst over a random kid from the street and order then to run to the boutique to buy something and bring it back. complete strangers! the way this society is run where any adult can order around anyone younger than them is phenom... the obedience and patience is phenom too.

6. sometimes, i think it's us americans in the peace corps that's keeping cultures surviving (big head syndrome). wolof is an unwritten language so it's passed down orally from generation to generation. especially in a country where the official national language is french and people are starting to use french more to work on the global market, i feel like people are moving away from wolof. you can tell how even now, french words are invading the wolof language. very few people speak pure wolof. i speak purer wolof than most people in my village. it's almost like a dying language. the other day after a rain and the sun came out, i asked everyone how to say rainbow in wolof and only dad knew. sad...

7. one evening, i spit a beetle out of my mouth. it was crawling around in the food and i guess i spooned it up.

went to dakar for some office work, to get meds for my staph infections, to take a break from village life, and to eat since ramadan has seriously starved me. i appreciate food more and more each day. my camera stopped working one morning. i will see if i can fix it. otherwise, it will be terribly depressing.

til next time!

ramadan - fiji water sounds amazing right about now...

2010-08-21T21:13:00.007+05:30

ramadan has only just begun - not more than a week and a half ago - and already i am tired of it. literally. physically exhausted. it's not really a fast but more like changing your eating schedule and habits. every morning, i would wake up around 5am and have either leftovers from dinner last night (which is usually something rice based, no surprise there), or this millet porridge with yogurt (which is quite good if i may say so myself), and tons of water. let me go back to the yogurt. so you're probably wondering how i have yogurt in the middle of a desert. well, 2 factors: one, being that it's rainy season right now and it actually does rain here, the rains have seriously changed the landscape of my area.

it looks more like a golf course than anything else. i got home after training and didnt recognize it at all. it could almost be country side america, no?

going along with the first factor, there's plenty of vegetation (i cant say grass because it aint grass - it's more like spiky weeds) so the cows or eating well and producing lots of milk. so how do the pulaars turn this milk into yogurt? i honestly dont think they buy yeast cultures. what more likely happens is they just leave the milk out a few days until it goes sour and voila! yogurt! add some sugar and chill it a bit... pretty much the same... right? haha, anyway back to drinking water. all eating and drinking stops at 5:45ish and then it's back to sleep. i'll wake up around 7:30 or 8 because im used to it by now, water my garden, and then go back to bed, to get up around 930 or so. then my long day begins of no eating or drinking until 7:35pm at night. surprisingly i dont get that hungry, and im thirsty, but not that thirsty. but this, i think, is largely due to the fact that i dont do much all day. i mean, how could i? everyone else isnt doing anything, except feeling miserable, and no one has the energy to do anything. everyone just sits around, takes naps, chats with each other, plays homemade board games or cards, or if lucky and there's electricity, watches tv. tempers are shorter; i find even myself snapping a little at kids who are being too loud or obnoxious. i went to my health post a couple of times and the doctor was just sitting with his kids watching tv or taking naps. ramadan really isnt the month to start projects. what bad timing for us... on the bright side, farming has to continue so sometimes i go with my dad out into his fields to weed or repair the live fencing. we work slower and dont really exert ourselves because we know we cant drink water or eat so we shouldnt overly tire ourselves out.

the field is amazing. it's massive and things are actually growing wonderfully. no wonder people laugh at my garden and my incompetencies. theyve been doing this their whole lives. i never saw myself living on a farm, which is kind of really where i am. there's livestock everywhere and fields of crops... im in farm country. weird...

anyway, back to ramadan. since i dont do much all day, i spend it all, mostly reading or hanging out with the family or someone else in the village. just from a week and a half, ive done a ton of reading on gardening and also literature relevant to my project - but ive also done a lot of leisure reading as well. when you have like 12 hours to kill everyday, that's a lot of books after a while. currently im blasting through anna karenina. by 5pm, i start feeling the effects of thirst. i cannot tell you how much more i appreciate drinking. even warm, not so great tasting water (think of evian but much much worse). some 2 and a half hours of waiting around later, which is occupied we finally break fast, and for the first few days, i couldnt stop smiling at this time. it is such a magical experience to quench thirst and satisfy your hunger after a whole day of abstaining. we break fast with a cup of coffee, some dates, a cup of bissap juice, and bread with some spread inside (onion sauce, homemade mayo, butter, or if lucky, this onions meat french fries thing). then sometimes around 8:15, we'll have pre-dinner, which is usually some sort of pasta - but this doesnt always happen. then we get dinner around 9:30/10 which is usually rice with other things. once done, you repeat... for 30 days. i eat slightly less than pre-ramadan but theres no significant difference in intake (although my sister says i will get really skinny after this month, which i dont know how that's possible but im starting to see the effects... i am getting skinnier, if that's even possible). it's just the timing of intake as well as my sleep wake cycle that's throwing everything off and making me so tired and exhausted and energy-less all day everyday. my body is dying... i already dont sleep well with my malaria meds, and now ramadan. just great. i seriously look forward to my first peaceful, wakeless night of sleep in america 20 months from now. it will be glorious!

my garden was practically non-existent when i came home - except for my tree pepinieres, and even so, not so great. apparently there must have been numerous sand storms while i was away because my garden looked pretty flat. the moringa aka nebedaay (or cleverly coined "never dies" because apparently they dont) were massive and the roots were extending into the ground so i had to move the tree sacks. 2 days later, i realized that moving them this late, and breaking the roots, i killed them. i killed my never dies. how pathetic. well, ok maybe not killed them completely. they just got really weak and lost all their leaves but some of them are growing back now, yay! those mystery seeds that i planted were flamboyants - really beautiful trees. much needed in this area though i dont know how well they'll grow in deserts. i also brought back a mango and papaya tree to plant on my family compound. the papaya didnt survive the journey but the mango is doing pretty well. in a couple of years, maybe my family will have mangoes and think of me.

so i re-did my garden, planting tomatoes, lettuce, bitter tomatoes, eggplant, hot peppers, more moringa, watermelon, sunflowers, flamboyants, and other random tree seeds that will be a surprise in a month or so. i also transplanted some mint. i left some weeds to create a more natural habitat and to distract the insects from eating my crops. enshallah, my garden will do decently well this time. ive attracted some natural pest controls - there are frogs and spiders and wasps and birds in my garden. the other day, i even saw a praying mantis! all these great pest control agents!

my mint is doing pretty well as of now...

the eggplant are growing and hopefully will survive much longer than they did last time...

just a shot of the baby flamboyants...

watermelon... (if i ever eat the fruit of my labor, i will die happy)

never dies... hopefully ready for harvest and eating in a few weeks

and my random tree seeds...

some random thoughts that ive had in the last couple of weeks:

1. im sorry i didnt take pictures of these but this may be the most amazing thing about senegal and how our world works in general. you know those old tshirts you donate to good will or the red cross? tshirts from childhood like ps 143 class of 1997, or springfield baseball, or johnson's family reunion, or riverdale elementary school math league? you get the idea. you know where they end up? i will tell you. they end up in senegalese markets in large piles. people pick through them, bargain a small price for these second hand tshirts, and wear em. it's so beautiful. if i ever run into a shirt i know, or even a shirt that ive owned, i dont know what i will do... life works in mysteries ways, you never know...

2. thanks to ramadan, all i think about is food that im missing back in the states. perogies from that one eastern european late night afterclub diner? chicken pot pie? lobster dipped in butter, crab cakes with tartar sauce, ginger ale, spinach and artichoke dip, soupy dumplings, dim sum, budejigae... the list can go on forever. sometimes during the long hours of the day, i get cravings. they are terrible.

3. it hit me why i would crave senegalese food sometimes. weird huh? i should be sick of it by now, the lack of variety, the same greasy oily rice base. but i figured it out. theres MSG in everything. EVERYTHING! they dont know how to cook without it and by now, it's so built into their culture (with commercials advertising its use) that i cant think of a good way to get rid of it (telling my family that it's bad for their health doesnt do any good). no wonder i get cravings sometimes... mmm maafe...

4. flies are unrelenting as always. and thanks to the rainy season, theyre out in full force. my mosquito bites from july 4th never fully healed. theyre open wounds now and thanks to the flies landing on them, they became infected and are now pus-ing. quite pleasant really...

5. the senegalese idea of a good movie baffles me. it doesnt have to be in french, it can be in any language really (it dawned on me that their french isnt all that great and its senegalese french so real french dubbed in movies is quite different - think of brazilian portuguese and you get the idea). if it's a series or tv show, it doesnt even have to start from the beginning. all they care about are fight scenes and the occasional gag humor scene. my brother somehow found a copy of prison break season 3 in french or something and they didnt even start from episode 1. they just started on episode 6 and scrolled to all the fight scenes. what a bizarre taste. i thought bringing pixar movies was a good idea because i'll be with kids and all... NOPE. they only want movies with fighting in it. anything else and they lose interest. the other day when i got tired of reading, i gave in and watched a few episodes of mad men season 3 on my laptop. my siblings came in and asked if it was good. i said it was really good. they asked me if there was fighting. i said no. they looked shocked. they asked me what it did have. i said lots of dialogue and talking. they lost interest and walked away... how did senegalese culture become so obsessed with violence? theyre not a very violent people, but this obsession (they love watching senegalese wrestling) is inexplicable.

6. already i am running into problems with my project. apparently when i was away, my doctor trained a couple of relais in surrounding villages... maybe i'll just collaborate with him and see what he's training them on and extend the training program to more villages and more topic areas.

7. about two weeks ago, i was able to bike 90k (roughly 55 miles) in one day. of course my body died the next day but it's doable. i plan on doing a lot more biking from now on... during the next 4 days or so, i plan on biking about 200k so we'll see how this goes...

8. dont believe people when they say the camel spiders are harmless. i was rudely awoken one night to this sharp pain in my toe and low and behold, a baby camel spider as big as my thumb pinched me hard. theyre just so ugly and scary looking, no matter how small or big...

well i'll write again in a few weeks... i really want to go to shanghai to visit vivi for xmas and new years. i hope i can make it happen. need serious big city therapy...

my grandiose 2-year idea that will probably fail

2010-08-04T15:41:00.009+05:30

hi all! i didnt take that many pictures this month so it's gonna be a wordy entry. since july 4th, i've visited Dakar and gone to 2nd rounds of training - both deserve separate entries but this'll have to do for now.

Dakar was... amazing. it felt like being a little kid in a candy shop. perhaps Dakar is no different and not more special than other large cities but i guess i just forgot what it's like on the other side of the atlantic. i forgot what being in civilization feels like - my small village of 300 in the middle of a desert doesnt quite resemble anything back home. i forgot that tall buildings actually exist, that electricity can be had consistently, that water actually runs and you can choose hot or cold, that people actually own air conditioners and nice cars, that people dress up and go out. i forgot what its like to have choices in what you eat, not even just cuisine but what specific meals you want. i forgot what its like to be able to grab a cold refreshing beer, or ice cream, or even fresh fruit. i forgot what supermarkets and cafes looked like. it's these small, almost insignificant experiences of life that really make me appreciate what being an american and living in america really means. there were many a times when i didnt understand just how prosperous our country is and how lucky we all are to have the freedoms and opportunities, things that weve took for granted. it takes experiences like these to really comprehend why americans really do have it all. finally after 4 months, i have had real chinese food. real... chinese... food. food made by people from china who couldnt really speak french, definitely didnt speak any of the local languages, and the only way to communicate was in chinese. how bizarre is it to find a group of americans in a chinese restaurant that only speaks chinese... in the middle of senegal? case and point. so what do a group of deprived americans do when theyve been in rural villages for 2 months? they go wild and eat everything! lol, we had chinese, american, italian, french, thai... next time we're doing indian and korean. there were even pastry shops and gourmet chocolate! you dont realize what youre missing until it's gone.

ive never had desperados beer before even though people say you can find it in the states. it's like a corona-y beer, with tequila. pretty good actually.

hanging out with our teacher and her friends during a christian holiday (celebration of st anne?)

ill skip the telling about training part because theres not much to tell. except that we learned all these cool new gardening techniques and ive decided that im going to convert my desert patch into a lush permaculture. and also what my overall project goals and plans are for the next 2 years of my life. but anyway, after training ended, we went to the beach for one last time before heading back to our desert (the complete opposite).

the ocean is just so beautiful. and the sunset. and even better! that night, the power was out so everything was super dark and there were dinoflagellates (word courtesy of jess lee!!) in the water so our bodies glistened with fluorescent plankton. we couldnt get pictures because of how dark it was and the flash not being able to catch anything but it was amazing. it was like glow in the dark body glitter!

now, back in my regional house, as i type this in our hot, HOT (like feels like 115), and humid weather, i plan on going back to my village in a couple of days after i finish a few last minute errands. what will i be doing in my next 2 years you may be wondering. thus far, ive really done nothing except for acclimate and assimilate. which i guess is an important aspect because you need to gain the trust and confidence of your community before you can actually do anything. and find motivated people to work with (lack of motivation is a killer here). now after my 2nd round of training, i have a better idea of the project i want to do...

circumstances:

1. my village counterparts want me to give causeries, in general to everyone about HIV/AIDS, and to women about the importance of pre- and post-natal consultations.

2. after visiting a few surrounding villages, as well as going through the village doctor's consultations book to see where people are coming from and with what ailments, i have noticed a lack of accessibility to medical care as well as to general knowledge on certain prevalent problems of the region.

proposed project:

because my village health post is in charge of roughly 15-20 villages (probably more... 30?), i want to do a 2 year series of training of relais. relais are the name given to community health workers. they are unpaid, and therefore volunteers, and work out of the goodness of their hearts. i will be going to each village to find the existing relais (who probably hasnt been trained in a very long time) or set up new ones, and each month, one relais from each village will come to my health post, where we will cover a variety of subjects ranging from simple first aid, to hygiene, from how to deal with dehydration, to malaria (and also malaria net distributions after these talks and proper handling and care of the nets), from pre- and post- pregnancy health of mother and child, to child nutrition and vaccinations, from STDs and HIV/AIDS, to family planning. i will leave the HIV/AIDS and family planning and other sensitive subjects toward the end of my service when the relais and myself are more comfortable with each other and the sensitive subjects can be breached. after each session, each relais will go back to their village and find a group of suitable villagers to talk to and we will schedule an in-village causerie to do, on the subject we just talked about. the relais will be doing most of the causerie and im just there to help out. if i teach the relais how to make niim lotion to protect from mosquito bites and prevent malaria, the relais will demonstrate to villages how to do the exact same. in this way, when i leave, the knowledge will be passed down and hopefully people will continue without my presence, or any aid group's presence for that matter. peace corps philosophy emphasizes sustainability and this is the only sustainable solution i can come up with. of course this is just a project idea in the making - thinking about all the details, it will be a logistical nightmare scheduling all these causeries and transporting the relais to and from my village. transportation is already such a huge problem in my area and the concept of planning ahead and making schedules doesnt exist here. how will i carry out my project? this is what i have to figure out.

but in the mean time, i have to prepare for ramadan, the month of no pleasure between sun up and sun down. no one can drink, or eat, or smoke, or doing anything fun or pleasure related during the day. the senegalese value their coffee and tea, both of which are extremely caffeinated and sweet - so imagine the caffeine and sugar withdrawal. compound that to smokers who will have nicotine withdrawal and everyone just being hungry and hot and dehydrated. tempers will flare. bon chance to me...