I survived 2 sandstorms and a worm-infested river

and we will get to those a little bit later once you scroll down to the pictures.

just some random thoughts:

1. i swear, if another fly lands on me again, i will go crazy. and hence going crazy. i dont know which is worse for me, mosquitos or flies these days. it's quite the tolerance and patience test which i will sooner or later fail. little do i know that being in the desert, i have it pretty good compared to the luscious dirty south.

2. eating on the ground has it's advantages. anything that falls in the sand, you dont really have to clean up because well, it's in the sand. and it's just more comfortable to sprawl out on the floor (even though you dont really get to sprawl when theres 15 people around a bowl) but at least you dont get butt cramps from sitting on a hard wooden chair. the disadvantage, though, is that when it's real windy, you get sand in your food. and i guess it's fine, the crunchiness and all. sand has never given me any stomach issues, yet. oh the other hand...

3. the other day, i had eggs. bad eggs. and like i said in the past, they dont keep eggs in fridges and i never really understood how that's possible. what's wrong with our american eggs that they need to be refrigerated whereas in india and senegal and everywhere else, the eggs seem to keep forever? well, maybe they dont keep forever. at some point, they start to spoil and i guess there's a fine line for when that happens. i had some bad eggs which results in peeing through my butthole. diarrhea is one thing but it's a totally new experience to urinate out of a body part that normally doesnt urinate. anyway... it then becomes such a momentous occasion when your excrements turn solid. celebration anyway?

4. my first pseudo sandstorm (which later i found out was nothing compared to the actual sandstorm a few days later) was on a bush taxi ride back to my village. sitting on top of a pickup truck when wind and sand is blowing in your face is quite unpleasant. add that to the fact that you have to keep your eyes open because you need to duck away from branches and spines and thorny trees, makes sand in your eyes a sucky position. then compound this with it being night time in the "forest" with no lights except for the car headlights shining some 10 feet in front only. it was quite the wild wild west adventure. and people live here! we passed villages that i didnt even realize we were passing until i saw the faint glow of remnants of their late dinner fire, lightly flickering in the distance. how unbelievably hard it is to live a nomad life. i appreciate so much more. at this point, i appreciate everything more.

5. wolof is a terrible language to give directions in. when you ask where something is, people usually say it's over there. over where? and then they just point and say, over there again. there is no concept of giving directions, nor is this language sufficient to give directions in. theres just never been the need to say, "well turn right at the next building, walk 2 minutes and find the white door". streets have no names here to begin with, if there even is a street. the good thing though, is that everyone knows everyone, so getting lost will be quite difficult, i hope.

6. the universality of life is beautiful. kids in my village were playing tick tack toe with different colored pebbles and drawing in the sand. there were many other variations of simple board games easily playable by drawing the board in the sand that were quite similar to games we've played when we were kids. even language is sort of universal, similar idioms and whatnot. the other day, i learned a wolof tongue twisters: fokki bokki guddi fokki bokki becceg bokki mbokk bunt bunt ben begam. the translation goes something along the lines of 10 hyenas at night, 10 hyenas during the day, the hyenas share eyes, eyes, teeth, something. lol. humans are universal.

7. the teenage girls here play a game where they take a tennis ball and peg each other in the crotch until someone drops the ball, and then the the that threw it runs and the girl that dropped the ball has to peg the girl running away. if the girl gets to a post some distance away, she is safe. otherwise, she has to continue to peg with other people. there are other members of each team that distract or whatnot. i really dont understand the game. it falls into some form of tag team dodge ball but i just dont get it.

8. my family hired a herder to help since now it is the raining season, and their attention has turned towards the fields - growing peanuts, millet, beans... i plan on tagging along one day and herding with him.

9. I HAVE HAD WARTHOG SANDWICHES. WARTHOG IS DELICIOUS!

10. brands of senegal are quite interesting / intriguing. they have saddam hussein attaya (tea), osama bin laden lighters, and obama rice and underwear. anyone interested in advertising? look at all the fun you'll have in senegal!

now some pictures...

i finally found where the village bread is being made! this is what a real oven looks like.

it's quite the process, and when i learned that there's really only flour, water, salt and sugar in the village bread, i thought "hmm... how simple"

here the balls are being rolled into the long bread.

french braid anyone? the kids take the left over scraps and add an elephant ton of sugar to the dough. older volunteers keep telling me to make friends with the baker so that i can sneak cinnamon and raisins into mine. anyone want to ship me cinnamon and raisins? haha, cant get those here...

and the final product. it's actually quite tasty. so much village love is put into it.
the world cup is terrible for senegal, at least for those that can afford electricity. people do nothing but watch futbol games all day. productivity has gone out the door. but i guess it's fun and quite alright. why did i not watch this in 2002 and 2006? totally was missing out. everyone's always curious which team foreigners support. of course i would have to say brasil... duh!
my brother killed a goat. we then ate it. technically, the meat here is all organic and the animals treated much better than in the states so i should be able to eat this more. but im just really turned off my meat here. it's... chewy and skinnier. which makes me think, "how processed is our meat?" chicken here is skinny. chicken from KFC is ridiculously meaty. it's quite sad to think about how the chickens got that way, getting fat and all. when you realize where your food comes from, watching it being killed and skinned and cut up, you just dont want it anymore...
a group of nomadic pulaars i met in the desert... their home is coming up.
just 2 small huts... with no one else around around a 2 kilometers radius. pulaar families live separately from other pulaar families so you just find these small families dotted across the desert.
even farther out. plastic is amazing. and yet it's just so terrible. i cant imagine living the solitude life. what would my world be like?
every time my garden fails, i remember that i am gardening in the middle of the desert. how bad-ass is that?! if nothing is growing, i just look around to my surrounding fields and see that nothing is growing really anywhere so it's ok that i dont succeed everytime. but when things do grow, i just feel so accomplished (haha). below is a moringa seedling/leafling.
my tree pepiniere that i have shielded away from the world. the mosquito net protects from birds and flying insects and frogs and whatnot. the wood ash and niim leaves that i sprinkled around and underneath the pepiniere protect from other burrowing insects and beedles.
i gave my brother some tomato and eggplant seeds. i wonder what those things poking out are...
so below is a watermelon seedling/leafling. i hope with all my heart that it will survive. things keep eating my watermelon and moringa. my mint all died or got eaten, and the lettuce and hot peppers just wont sprout (after 1 week). this may be a project that i will work on - large scale organic pesticides that are cheap or free and readily available. all the farmers in my village complain of insects and birds and other roaming animals destroying their crops and decreasing their yield. i want to fix this. i have some methods that i will try next month... LIVE MY WATERMELON! til then...
i think this is baobab tree. or papaya... surprise!
another shot of my moringa...
and lastly... some unknown plant that i will discover months from now... a flowering one? maybe this one is papaya? we shall find out...
my brother was playing with my camera so he took a picture of my even younger siblings. cute...
now this is the exciting part! so the other day, i got out of my afternoon shower and the sky was getting mighty dark and orange. i thought, yay rain is finally here! so i quickly changed and got out my camera to take pictures of the dark and mysterious sky. it looked like a tornado in the distance so i attempted to capture it on camera (it doesnt come out very well but you can vaguely see maybe if you look carefully or i pointed it out to you)... and then...
my dad runs out of the family compound and yells along the lines of "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?! LOCK YOUR DOOR AND GET INSIDE NOW!" i still had no idea what was coming, but the urgency in his voice made me follow his instructions. as i finished locking up the door, i realized why. the sky got intensely more orange and the wind picked up tremendously (but not enough, just yet). i realized that maybe this is going to be a sandstorm, as i would imagine since i was in the middle of a desert. i began to run to the family compound and just as i entered it, the worst came. it was terrifying hearing the wind howl and sand blowing through every crevice and hole of the room. it grew pitch black. at one point, being the unafraid american foreigner that i was, i decided to open the door and take a quick picture. it was pretty darn dark and my camera was immediately whipped by sand. (i finally knew why none of my electronics would last the 2 years). i forgot to close my window in my own room so lesson learned... later i found a massive layer of dust and sand over everything... EVERYTHING. but anyway...
as the sandstorm died down only a slight bit, i went out and snapped away like any tourist would. the eerie orange that set upon the village is quite what i would imagine mars to look like.
the wind was strong enough to tear down small fences, as you can see in this picture. usually you can see very far if you were standing there facing that angle, but this is as far as you can see in the lesser sand storm.
what followed was a massive rainstorm. there was lightning almost every second that it looked like bombs going off in the distance and surrounding. or at least how hollywood depicts bombs and war scenes. surprisingly there was no thunder. because of my curiosity throughout the ordeal, my family thinks i'm fearless... except for horse scorpions... ::shudders:: the next day, i went around and surveyed the village - the sandstorm wreaked havoc. let the rebuilding (or upgrading) begin...
my garden fence also could not withstand the horrible wind. sad.
a human's view on the bush taxi. it wobbles so you're on an amusement park ride.
usually there are 500 sheep and goats below our feet. i was lucky this day not to have to step on livestock.
decorating your public transportation vehicle in senegal with american christmas tree wrapping and chinese new year lanterns. how... odd.

and then we went to the south for july 4th. WHAT a contrast going from desert to forest. so much green everywhere! this was the river we swam in and let the current drag us from tree branch to tree branch. i most likely caught schisto (schistosomiasis) so i will keep you posted on whether or not i start peeing blood. but aside from that, there were definitely little worms in the water that i, unfortunately, noticed and started picking off my body. i wonder what they were... definitely swallowed a couple of mouth fulls of river water but as of yet, no major intestinal issues.

the "route" to get to and from the river. there was no route. we freehanded the hike. it was beautiful.
i grew slightly jealous that this might have been my sight. comparably, this is much more beautiful. but then i remember that i am more hardcore. and also, there arent as many mosquitos in the desert. i probably got 1000 mosquito bites in the course of 3 days...
what i believe kenya looks like. but still the dirty south...
freehand hiking through the forest
celebrating the fourth of july with a ton of volunteers throughout senegal.
in retrospect, it was quite the hippie meets white trash party. (LOVE IT!) welcome to america, senegal!
and to end with i heart africa... cola. haha

oh and some videos!

my brother rapping. i will translate it for yall someday...

and another of just a video of my brothers dancing... sort of.

in a few days time, i will be exploring dakar since i have to go there for a regional meeting anyway. afterwards is a short 2 week training session in Thies to give our initial observation reports and to learn more in-depth gardening and health skills and training. we will develop our 2 year project plan and begin what we came here for. hurray!

yenni ma = help me take this off my head

hi guys! yup, still alive! and where to begin! so begins the 3rd chapter of my life (the first being my pre-college days, the 2nd being college itself) and there are so many stories and updates but i dont even know how to mention it all. guess i'll just start typing...

sidenote: mosques are beautiful.

so about 3.5 weeks ago, i was dropped off in my lovely village of yang yang and thrown into a world with a beautiful mixture of solitude and a new definition of what it means to be part of a family and a community. like i said, my nearest volunteer currently lives 55 km away from me and the regional office is about 75 km, which is around 50 something miles. normally that would take less than an hour to drive but here, traveling 75 km requires a good 4 hours or so. it's such an interesting way of traveling but i will get to it later. anyway, so my first couple of days in the village entailed setting up my living quarters for the next 2 years, decorating my room, meeting and greeting the family, the community, the school, and most importantly, getting familiarized with the health post. the village was kind of excited for a new volunteer but at the same time, it's old news for them because they had another volunteer there 5 years ago or something like that and they were reminiscing about that volunteer. i took a short clip of my room a couple of days in so it's a little more set up now but roughly the same i'd say. still no table or bookshelf... when will that happen? haha

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

not gonna lie, it's a bit tough being thrown into a foreign situation all by yourself. my language is pretty good for only having learned it for 2 months but it's still not amazing. i can converse with people but its so hard to grasp entire paragraphs and even harder adjusting to the local accent and vocabulary. a good analogy would be a native of london who learned british english, going to the dirty south and conversing with hill billys (well that is an immense exaggeration but you get the idea). the language is coming along though and although i feel like i havent been making progress, im starting to pick up things easier and ideas are starting to get across. my family in yang yang is very nice (although the kids are slightly bratted and spoiled rotten and arent very well-behaved for that matter - tolerable to some extent) but they are really different than my family back in tassette. for one, the tassette family was just full of jokers and it was so much more lively and fun. but as a whole, yang yang is much more laidback - i am truly living in the countryside. things are just slower and quieter - which is nice, but maybe doesnt suit part of my personality very well. nonetheless, it is a posh situation in the barren dessert - there's electricity (most of the time) and cell phone reception (most of the time), there's water (although it tastes funny) and my family has variety on meals (which is a huge step up). ive also been here only 3 weeks and i knew my other family for 8 so i gotta give my new family time - make some connections whatnot.

so what have i been up to? there's been a lot of setting up and establishing myself in my room, village, and surrounding. i painted blackboards in my room and right outside my room for writing down new words that i learn or keeping a calendar/schedule reminder. i think it's so cool that you can paint a blackboard onto a wall (in actuality, it probably is just regular black paint but there's just something about it that makes it look special and different and blackboard-ish)

ive also been working on my personal garden. it's quite an accomplishment really. a small 6 by 7 meters or so block of space takes a lot of time to turn into a decent looking garden; and even then, you dont know if things will grow out of it. i did end up using the space right next to my bathroom / shower but it also involved restructuring the millet stalk fence to enclose my garden on the other side and open it up on my end for an entrance. here's a picture of the starting plot of land.

i started my tree pepinieres, filling little sacs with a mixture of soil (sand and clay) and cow manure. it doesnt look like a tedious task but it took 3ish mornings to complete. it's too hot to work during the daytime and even the mornings, the rising temperature makes any manual labor slightly uncomfortable. from digging the pit and finding niim leaves and wood ash for natural insect repellent, to finding and carrying manure in large amounts, to fetching water to make the mixture, and then individually stuffing little sacs is quite time consuming. i made 95 in the span of 3 mornings (aka like a couple of hours) - totally lost 5 bags by accident to the wind, haha. i plan on doing definitely 50 more in the future but maybe a lot more since i spoke with eaux et forets (water and forest group) and they want me to help them with reforestation of the area. the video i posted really gives you a clear idea that there arent that many trees and it really is a desert and trees are just amazing. they provide shade amongst many other things!

the next step involved double digging three 1x3ish meter plots and another 1x1 meter plot. it was definitely tiring but what a workout, look at these arm muscles, haha! i used a mixture of cow and goat and sheep manure this time - the sifting took forever and all my clothes smelled of manure for quite some time. i laughed out loud one morning to myself at the thought of me having played with poop all day for quite some days.

the final garden - voila! it's quite a cozy garden if i may say so myself. the fence in the back is patched up and one of my younger siblings decided to take the liberty upon himself to create his own little plots in my garden, without asking of course - which kind of messed up the perfect spacing and orderliness of the garden but it adds character - and it's kinda cool to see what he's going to do with them. though i foresee him asking me for seeds to plant. right now, the plots are seedless but watered daily, letting the weeds grow so that i may de-weed before planting actual seeds - like cabbage, eggplant, carrot, hot peppers, bitter tomatoes, bissap, watermelon, tomatoes, and moringa. this should be super exciting and disappointing. i dont expect anything to grow this first time around since my lack of experience in gardening and farming will probably contribute to the death or growth-less-ness of my plots. but we shall see; enshallah, i will have a garden that actually works. Oh and I will also plant mint and attempt apple tree seeds. Most likely it will fail but gotta try right? I do want to start a garden when I get back to the states, some form of urban garden on rooftops using spare tires and whatnot. I saw such a garden and it was just a fantastic idea.

i've been doing some talking with families trying to find out what my future projects could be and just from observation and dialogues, it really seems like yang yang is well off. They’re pretty well off for a rural community out in the middle of nowhere – there’s electricity and running water, some families even have tvs and fridges. Of course if you compare them to urban folk, they are considerably poorer, but much more well off compared to some villages I’ve seen. The community pretty much wants to become a road town so that theres more traffic and business and commerce through the area, but it is kind of out of my control. In my opinion, the area where the village is placed is so out of the way that I don’t really think it’s possible unless they can start some major attraction, like a beautiful lake or something. They also want more cars to pass through so that it’s easier to travel to and from the village but I have no control over that either. I’d say daily, there are 2 cars that leave and 2 cars that return – so 4 cars pass through the village each day – yeah it’s quite bad. Hmm…

I’ve also been talking and hanging out at the health post which they call a hospital because of the multiple rooms. I could do some malaria prevention causeries and such but otherwise, it’s just the regular skin infections, arthritis, and head and body aches. But definitely causeries on the importance of prenatal and postnatal visits is in order, as well as AIDS/HIV and other STI talks, and birth control and family planning – ahh, I have a tough time ahead. A problem I have encountered is that the majority of people that visit the health post don’t live in yang yang but the surrounding villages and out in the forest. With people so spread out, what kind of projects can I do? Traveling is not easy either so I have to figure that out.

What was really cool though were the vaccination days. We got to travel out into the forest to give out vaccinations. The car ride to find these villages (and I use the word village here loosely because it was more like 5 huts and that’s it – maybe families is more accurate) was super fun because beyond my village, there are no roads, just tire tracks in the sand – and they cross this way, split every so often and just didn’t seem to be very useful because sometimes the tiretracks end and then we’re just driving on sand. So I was super amazed that we found anything and we weren’t lost even though sometimes, we had to ask for directions – and by directions I mean have the villagers point the direction to the next village. But wow, do they live in the middle of nowhere. The words civilization and isolation are given a new meaning! The closest villages to my village looked like villages but as we progressed farther and farther into the bus, people’s huts looked shabbier and toward the end, there weren’t huts at all. It became just some luggage and maybe a cot and floor mat underneath a tree. When I came to Africa, I thought of living a minimalistic lifestyle so I only brought the bare minimum (or what I thought is bare minimum) of stuff; but minimalistic lifestyle now has a new definition. They really have close to nothing but the most essential of essentials. But vaccinations were amazing. We gave out polio vaccines as well as vitamin supplements and anti-helminthes. With the ‘forest’ being so vast, I hope we covered everyone!

Traveling to and from my village is quite a journey – as well as all other travels for that matter. So imagine a pickup truck of regular size. Then put a metal grill around the perimeter of the trunk to tie things on. Then put some wood planks across for seating. There you basically have my transportation. We sit on the wooden blanks, all 30 of us (remember this is only your average sized pickup truck) and beneath our dangling feet, there are 20 or so sheep and goats, baggage of all shapes and sizes, and chicken tied to the sides of the truck. It’s such a fiasco (no that’s not the right word, maybe a circus show? Haha) of a car ride but it was so much fun. I felt like I was on an amusement park ride because we had to duck from getting hit my spiky tree branches and the car slowly wobbled and swayed toward our destination.

Normally it takes 30 minutes to get from my village to the road town of Dahra, where the weekly markets are, but our transport picks up people and livestock along the way in the bush so the ride actually becomes like 2 and a half hours long. Once in Dahra, if I wanted to get to Linguere where my regional house is, I would have to go to the garage and wait for a minivan to fill up to twice or 3 times its capacity, which on a good day takes about an hour (ive waited close to 5 hours once for a car to fill up) and then it’s just another hour to Linguere. So total travel time for 75 km (like 50 something miles) = ~4 hours. A lot of the traveling also occurs very early in the morning so I have to get up at 4:30 or 5:30 at times. It’s so serene out though, almost doesn’t look any different than the states!

Just some pictures of bugs…

This one is more interesting. One night as I was going home, I heard a crunching side as I was opening my door. Shining your light in the dark at a bizarre sound is never a good idea, just word of advice. I see this massive bug eating one of the large beetles that inhabit my area. These beetles are already quite large to begin with so imagine seeing an even larger bug, that is quite ugly if I may say so myself. I find out much later that it’s called a horse scorpion, or as wiki likes it to be called, the wind scorpion or camel spider. they're... quite fast.

and i read a lot. which is good because i never had that pleasure or leisure to read books back home and i was missing out on so many great books (thank you mepham for giving me shantaram minutes before my departure from india - one of the best books i have ever read and i definitely recommend it to all of you). music wise, i have to thank ratatat and owl city and la roux and silversun pickups for carrying me through the days. without these 4 great artists, village life would just be a little less unpleasant.

But on to a more serious note. Ive realized that I can do a lot of projects outside my village and that a lot of you can get involved. There’s so much more that this place needs and we are fortunate enough to be able to contribute to the cause. If youre interested, do a google search on talibes. Theyre children that go to koranic schools and in doing so, they leave their family and live in, a form of poverty, in a way. They don’t own many clothes, if not just the clothes on their backs, and they beg for alms for food. Many of them don’t own shoes so they walk around barefoot, which is quite dangerous not only because there could be broken glass or whatnot, but also the worms and other parasites that can dig into your skin and embed themselves (look up creeping eruption for one example lol). Shoe donations, shoe drives, or just companies sponsoring a massive purchase of used shoes or whatnot would do amazing things for the lives of these children. And any of you looking for ways to help financially or know connections to other organizations, those are always welcome. I guess what my area needs is an economy, a means for making a living actually. Since a lot of them are farmers, if I could just set them up with a large corporation, say exporting peanuts to make American peanut butter, just imagine the possibilities. Of course im getting ahead of myself so gotta still study the inner workings of my community and the surrounding communities that work with mine. Once I understand the culture and tradition and people better will I be able to do a better job.

Here’s a progress of my hair, lol. Opinions? haha

I will blog more in a month when I can say for sure what my actual project is. Pretty much just observing life and looking for opportunities and making connections now. Theres another training session in about a month so that’s when everything will be more solidified. And I leave yall with this lovely image… I found Reqles! Lol… I thought it was a magical alcoholic beverage the way people were describing it but in essence, it’s just a minty Bacardi 151 if you think about it. Strong and minty… quite deadly.