Some Lessons Learned, or Just One Important One

Last week I left Tamba for the first time since my installation. I traveled down to Kolda, a city near the Guinea-Bissau border and attended an agricultural conference. The conference was informative, and the heat in Kolda a little less oppressive. My least favorite session consisted of a three hour explanation of the dreaded Volunteer Reporting Form (VRF), which I won’t be writing this time around considering...I have nothing to report. I guess I could talk about how my cat got stuck on the roof last night and I spent four hours climbing the rusted battlements trying to get it down. Yes, Peace Corps, that is how I spend my time!

The conference in general was great but as expected, travel was a major issue. On the ride down I was folded into a backseat of a station wagon in which my head didn’t clear the ceiling and my knees touched my forehead. You see, when I say folded, I mean folded. This wouldn’t have mattered if the ride didn’t last five hours. I began to lose sensation in multiple appendages. When I arrived at the garage in Kolda, finally able to free my pretzel-ed body from the car, I realized I was missing 30,000 CFA. That amounts to about sixty dollars, a pretty hefty amount in Senegal. Peace Corps recommends you start screaming the Wolof word for “thief” as loudly as possible and shame people in helping you locate your money. I wasn’t really up for it. Afterwards, the driver refused to give me my change from my ticket payment and I was so fed up I pathetically told him he was a “bad person.” That’s about as aggressive as I get!

The ride back from Kolda, the car broke down several times, once when the wheel fell off and once when the transmission fell out. I’m surprised the engine didn’t just drop out too. If your car is your entire livelihood, wouldn’t you take better care of it? But we made it back.

Another frustrating aspect of living in Tamba is the wretched mail system. I haven’t heard of any of my letters arriving in the States, even ones I sent in the beginning of February. However, the letter I sent to my friend in China arrived after only two weeks. Go figure. I guess based on past record in which my Nigerien letters arrive after four months, I might still be ahead of the game. Let me know if you get one so I can feel a bit better about paying exorbitant postage rates.

Our current projects are coming along fairly well; my volunteer work partner/slave driver (just kidding, Austin) wrote a fantastic grant for a school garden and we received the money yesterday. This morning we biked around to several hardware stores and bought grillage and metal posts for the fence, put in an order to have a metal door made, bought cement and sand for the water basin and tools for the labor. (I sometimes think of Austin as a slave driver only because no sane person bikes around Tamba at noon in hot season, and forces others to accompany them. Sigh.)

  

After buying the materials we returned to the school to see the garden. We had planted some trees at the end of March, and the gardener called yesterday to complain that nothing had grown. This was strange, because the species we planted should have started sprouting at least. So we biked out there, with our materials following in a horse-drawn buggy, and found our tree-bed overtaken by a thousand weeds. Not sure why someone would call to say nothing had grown, when clearly the opposite was in fact true. The tiny tree sprouts were hidden by a mass of grass. Three hours later, the bed was de-weeded and the trees left in peace to grow. Lesson learned: always budget in several hours more than you anticipate spending on any project.

In other news, our carefully selected and recommended pilot farmer was accepted into the Peace Corps Master Farmer program, meaning we will now entirely fund his farm and teach him improved techniques. That’s pretty exciting – he’s been waiting almost a year to be approved by administration. As a result I’ll be leaving Tamba again at the end of April for a Master Farmer training in Kaolack, a city on the road towards Dakar.

The Talibe (Koranic students) garden project is also flourishing. The project exists to provide local talibes with some garden experience and frankly, to give them something to do besides beg. They will also receive the crops to supplement their meager diet.   

I visited the site about a week ago to take pictures for the conference in Kolda, and the owner of the garden greeted me enthusiastically. He was bare-chested and out of breath from working in the heat of the day, but as soon as he saw me taking pictures he ran inside and put on a fancy Senegalese robe. What followed can only be called a photo-shoot. He started by calling in all his staff from the field, and making them stand behind the water basin. He then handed each of them a piece of corn or a watering can, and told them to pose. Finally, he turned on the hose so water cascaded poetically into the basin and told me gravely “we’re ready.” I ended up taking almost a hundred pictures of him in different parts of the garden. He kept saying “take one with me and this corn section. Did you get the corn? How do I look? Now take one with me and this lettuce. No, that doesn’t look good. Take another.” I mean, really, I just needed a few snapshots to show my peers at the Kolda conference. Lesson learned for a second time: always budget in several hours more than you anticipate spending on any project.

That’s all for now – me and Muus the cat (in Wolof, Cat the cat) are here and braving the heat as best we can. Would love to hear how everybody is doing in other parts of the world, and as always, love from Senegal.

<3 Phoebe

The Usual Routine (With Some Variation)

It's morning, and I awaken to a high pitch noise and a notion that I am strangely wet. As I become more aware, I remember that the cat is hungry (and making it known) and once again, I’ve managed to sweat through the sheets.  After groggily getting to my feet, becoming entangled in my mosquito net, struggling bitterly for five minutes, I emerge ready to start the day.

First order of business is to dunk a bucket of water on my head and stand in front of the fan.  This morning step is crucial if I am expected to function.  Gradually I dress in a dirty tee shirt and torn pants to work in the garden, kicking the cat around in the process. It has an unfortunate habit of climbing my leg like a tree trunk. This makes it hard to put on pants. It’s low heat, only about ninety degrees farenheight. 

I grab my bike from the courtyard, evading my host mom as she judges my appearance with a disgusted eye. I think one day I'm going to wear a fancy, embroidered Senegalese outfit to work in the garden and watch her face as I come home covered in mud and manure. Maybe she'll stop heckling me then...of course I'm dirty, I work almost exclusively with dirt, woman. 

I meet my work partner at our garden, where a few beds await digging. This process entails heaving a giant pick at the hard earth until it is broken up enough to be shoveled out. Since I have been here, we’ve created twenty wheelbarrows worth of rocks after sifting through the minimal soil. And we’re nowhere near done! I resign myself to another morning of digging, shoveling, and learning. Today I might learn how a squash plant is pollinated, or why sage cannot be layered upon itself. Odds are it will be another day of realizing just how useless my degree in religious studies is.

Around noon, the sun is burning and even my motivated, vastly-stronger-than-me work partner can’t take the heat. I trudge home, feebly waving to kids who yell my name and ask me for money. 

When I arrive my host mom skips the greetings and waves me enthusiastically into the shower, imploring me to “stop being so dirty.” I go willingly and prepare myself for a lazy afternoon of dozing in the heat, reading, and drinking tea with the numerous ladies who visit my house.

In the evening, I return to the garden to spray for pesticides or transplant perhaps lettuce, fruit trees, or lemongrass. The rest of my day consists of socializing with my family and an early retreat to my room for sleep, armed with six bottles of cold water and the fan placed strategically at the corner of my bed.

--There have been certain variations to this day, but in general, I’ve been grateful for the stability. No more evacuations please - I've had enough excitement! Some deviations include the following:

Biking to the vet with my cat in a basket on the handlebars, exciting pure confusion and contempt on the part of the Senegalese

Arriving at the vet surrounded by old men with their sick goats and cows, trying to be taken seriously with my hot pink cat basket and pleas for vaccinations

Doing laundry with my host mom, only to realize she wasn’t washing her own clothes but merely following me and washing mine twice

Inviting a man and his young daughter to a girls’ leadership conference and dealing with the question “Uh…why?”

Wheelbarrowing a large pile of manure for compost…”What is that for? Why are you wheeling around a giant pile of cow poop? Is that for your cat? Does your cat eat cow poop?”

Attending a Senegalese wedding and being called into the center of a large, intimidating dance circle…I did my best

Hearing my cat’s distress calls and rushing out to find my young host sister force feeding it sand, consequently snatching the cat and saying in an angry huff “No! Bad! You…are bad!”

Realizing I need to study Wolof so I can politely say "Please, don't feed the cat sand, it will die, thank you so much."

Until I write again, you know where to find me!

<3 Phoebe