My future revealed

So I guess I lied when I said I would be getting to internet more frequantly. It takes a while to get into a routine here and while I have not been working per say I have been busy hanging out in the village which is kind of my job for the first couple of months. It is also hard asserting my self as an independent being as someone in my family or my counterpart tends to accompany me where ever I go and my first solo trip into town earlier this week was a bust because the power was out. I am posting an entry I typed up a couple of weeks ago below.

Since then I have been doing much of the same of trying to get to know my village a speak some Pulaar but I did have one interesting day this week when I visited a private health care facility outside of my village. The previous volunteer at my site was a health volunteer and she spent some time at this man's disponsaire helping take blood pressure, so last Tuesday I decided to spend the day there helping out and getting to know him and some of the people in the area a little better. His name is Daude Fall and everyone refers to him as the doctor but Im not sure what his actual medical background is. He does both Western and traditional medicine and is pretty well known for his herbal medicine (he has been invited to do a seminar in California next year). In between patients he informed me that he reads fortunes and so he did mine. I will apparently live to the age of 82, get married between the age of 25 and 26 and have four children, two girls and two boys. I will be marrying some with the initial of either M, D, or S because those are the only men who do not lie to me and if I am not careful I will have problems with blood pressure and sugar around the age of 45. Also everyone Monday I am supposed to give out milk until I am 24 or 25 and if I do this I will get a good job. He also does fortunes over the phone so let me know if you want his number or if you are in need of any herbal remedies because I believe he ships his medicine internationally.

Also one of my host sisters had a baby on Monday. Names here are really important and children tend to be named after someone, when I got my name in the village I was named after one of my sisters. Well the family has decided to name the new baby after my father, so he will be called Baaba Joe (they will also give him a Senegalese name). One of my other sisters had a son when the previous volunteer was here and he was named after her father so now there is a Baaba Steve and a Baaba Joe in the village. Baaba Joe is having his baptism this weekend so I will try and take some pictures and update about that at some point in the future.

I'm going to leave this post with a riddle of sorts. Well it sounds like it could be a riddle if it wasn't an actual problem I was facing: How do you keep monkeys from eating a garden?

Two Weeks In

Its hard to determine where I should start trying to describe the last two weeks in my village but I guess it makes sense to start from my install. I arrived in my village to the entire school gathered in the courtyard singing, which has to go down as one of the most surreal and overwhelming experiences I have ever had. After a few brief speeches in one of the classrooms we proceeded to my family's compound in the form of a mini parade. Again surreal and overwhelming. I am living in the compound of the village chief and it was he who gave me my new name (Mariame Niang) on arrival to the compound. My hut is pretty big by my standards (ie bigger than either of my rooms in Montreal) and came furnished with a double stick bed, a trunk and a shelf courtesy of the previous volunteer. My bathroom is attached to my hut and while my village is lacking in foliage I have a large neem tree growing out of the wall of my bathroom.

I've spent most of my time in the village trying to get to know my new family which has about 20 members, spending time at the school, and hanging out with my counterpart and his family. What this translates to is a lot of sitting around on a mat, drinking tea and eating a lot of rice and couscous. Throw in some time spent swimming in the river and a couple of afternoon naps and you have accounted for about 95% of my activities here. While it can get frustrating sitting around talking about how hot it is (ina wuli jaw is my most used pulaar phase next to mi faamani (I don't understand)) I have actually gotten out and gone to a wedding (which required a canoe and a horse cart to get to) and spent a night in my nearest town with the teachers when they were proctoring an exam. I have also started thinking about some projects I could work on and learning about the problems my village is having and yesterday I started my tree nursery with the help of some of the kids in the village.

I think I am going to leave this post with a few of my favorite things seen and heard in the village:

Favorite article of clothing: While the guy who was wearing a Texas t-shirt, a pair of pants with the French flag on them, and a pair of sandals with the Union Jack comes in a close second the winner of this has to be my counterpart's 8 year old son who was wearing a pair of jeans with a picture of Ahmandihijad on them. When I asked my counterpart if who knew who that was he responded by saying, "yeah, the terrorist."

Favorite reason for wanting to go to America: the winner of this one goes to the 20 year old guy who hangs out at my house. I have a really hard time understanding what he says normally (I have a hard time understanding what anyone says) but I was glad I caught this. He would like me to take him to America so that he can go to 50 Cent's house (who apparently lives in Washington) where they will eat meat and drink milk.

Favorite thing seen: Donkey Jail. On a walk to go see the fields I noticed a chain link cage containing a donkey. Now donkeys are everywhere in my village so what was more shocking was the chain link fence which seemed like a bit of an extravagance. Since fencing in all the fields is not really an option, people are responsible for keeping their animals out of other people's fields and if you catch an animal in your field you can bring it to the cage where the owner comes to bail it out and if no one bails it out it is sent to the regional capital.

New life, new address

I have been at site for about two weeks and everything is going great so far. I am currently in the town nearest to my village where there is actually an internet cafe. I believe the cafe owner said that I can bring my laptop and use it, so I am going to try and do that within the next week and write a real post about my life. Right now one of my brothers is waiting for me on the horse cart outside the cyber and the french keyboard is driving me crazy so I m going to leave you guys with my new address:
BP 16
Medina Ndiatebe
Sengeal

Oh and in answer to Katies comment you buy buckets for a hut, that is all

Intermediate Low

I passed my language exam which means that tomorrow I will be swearing in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer. On Sunday I will be heading up to the Fouta to start buying things for my hut and then on Wednesday I will move to my village. Its pretty crazy that its finally happening. PST was a whirlwind of emotions and while I'm sad to be saying goodbye to some of my friends heading to other parts of the country, I am excited to finally go to my site and start working. I know I should write more, but at lot is going on right now. I will try and upload some more photos on Saturday if I have some free time.

Foutafied

I survived the Fouta! For the last ten days I was living with a current volunteer named Caitlin seeing what her life is like and working on my Pulaar. If you want to get a good idea of what my life will be like up north you can check out her blog: http://caitlininsenegal.blogspot.com/ its a lot more in depth than my blog plus she has posted a lot of pictures. Speaking of pics, I uploaded a couple from the beach and training (http://flickr.com/photos/24553479@N08/) but I don't have my camera with me to upload the ones I took last week but I will try to upload them at some point.

Anyways, the north. Well it was hot thats for sure. It got up to 137 F (53 C) one day, that means that you do not do anything between the hours of 11 and 5. We would have class or do an activity in the morning and then spend the rest of the day sitting in a puddle of own sweat. But its really not as bad as it sounds. I stayed hydrated by drinking a good 8-10 litres of water a day and by the end of the week the heat did not bother me nearly as much. Its going to be an adjustment but its possible. While we there I met someone who had worked on development projects in my village, which got me excited about the work possibilities. We also visited a garden in her town and I got to see that stuff actual grew in the north and that is another area of work I could venture into. Caitlin is a health volunteer so she taught a class at the elementary school about germs and the importance of hand washing and we got to observe a class at the middle school to get a better idea of what the Senegalese school system is like. Other than that most of our time was spent in her family compound or visiting her fiends in town. Everyone was so welcoming and patient with us trying to speak Pulaar and accomplish the tasks we had to do during the week. Oh and I got my hair braided into corn rows. It looks pretty ridiculous but is so much easier to manage. Pictures may or may not surface at some point in the future.

Training is almost over, swear in is May 9th (that is if I pass my language test, so far no one in my class has reached the level but hopefully that will change during the next two weeks). The last bit of training is packed with a trip to Dakar and workshop with our counterparts who shall becoming to Thies from each of our sites to meet us and learn about the work that we will are supposed to do at site.

Lastly I have to mention plastic bags. Before I came to Senegal I was on campaign against plastic bags. I would bring my own bags when I went shopping and would pester everyone I knew to do the same. Well now I am in the country of plastic bags. Everything from water, oil, peanut butter to plastic bags themselves come in plastic bags. And since there is no waste management system here these bags just line the streets. I know that as a Peace Corps Volunteer it is out of my means to tackle this problem on the scale I would like, it is something that I will try to work on on some level. But the next time you go shopping just think of me drowning in a sea of plastic bags and bring a reusable one with you. Thanks!

sites and stuff

Time continues to pass quickly here, as I now find myself in the middle of week five in Senegal. A lot has happened in the last week and a half here. Last Friday we all found out our sites for the next two years. At the training center there is a basketball court with a map of Senegal painted on it, so our trainers had al of us close our eyes and they positioned us on the map approximately where our sites are, so when we all opened our eyes we would not only see where we would be living and working during the next two years but also who our closest neighbors would be. My site is in the north of Senegal on the river, its a village of about 2000 people located about 5k from the river. Tomorrow my language class is heading to a town in the north to spend ten days of training with a current volunteer in her village, so I will be able to get a better idea of what life up north is like. Up to now I have yet to have a conversation with anyone about the north without the other person mentioning how hot it is there. Apparently evenings there currently drop to a nice and chilly 95 degrees F (33 C), but at least I will have the river running by my village for me to swim in (and get schistosomiasis from).
Other than site placements the other exciting thing to happen was my trip to the beach last weekend. It was the first weekend that my training group was allowed to the Thies area,s o we made the most of it by renting a couple houses on the beach Saturday night and spending 24 hours hanging out, swimming and relaxing. It was a much needed break from the hectic training schedual.

Today is Senegal's Independence Day and I have the day off from class, so I am currently sitting in a cafe with free wi-fi where I just ate a crepe with icecream. Yeah my life is sweet. The training staff let us stay at the center last night rather than at our homestays, so I have had some time to hang out with the other trainees and decompress a little bit. I typed up another entry but apparently only saved it to my usb key and not my harddrive so I will try to summerize it the best I can.
Two weeks ago I moved into my homestay, I am living with a family in a town about 20k out of Thies. My family consists of my mother and father, an aunt, two brothers who are in their late 20s, a sister who I believe is younger than me and then two more brothers who are about and 13. There are more people in the family who live in other parts of the country as well. My brothers speak french which is nice since they are able to help translate for me, since my parents only speak Pulaar. Our house is pretty nice, it has two buildings with bedrooms in them, but most of our time is spent outside in the courtyard area. there's electricity and a faucet in the compound for water and we have a tv that we watch outside at night under the stars.

Week three in Senegal is almost over and I have found myself in a nice routine. i've begun to accept my language shortcomings and have settled into my home stay. Its hard to think of what to say since my daily life now seems almost monotonous now, so I am going to take a cope out and just explain what a typical day in training is like.

6:30: I wake up, get dressed, brush my teeth and head out to the main road to wait for the Peace Corps land cruiser to pick me and the other volunteers in my town up.

7:30 Arrive at the training center in Thies were I shower and eat my breakfast of baguettes and nescafe.

8:15 Class begins. We tend to have language classes in the morning, so this means that I stumble through pulaar with the five other people in my class while trying to wake up

10:15 Coffee break

10:45 more class, usually another language class, more stumbling attempts to speak pulaar. I now know how to conjugate to classes of verbs in the past tense but am still waiting to learn the present tense.

12:30 lunch, we eat family style around large bowels with spoons, at some point soon we are only going to be allowed to speak the language we are learning during lunch which will mean more stumbling through pulaar and lots of awkward silences.

2:15 first afternoon class, this tends to be anything from health, safety cross cultural or tech. We started our tree nurseries in my EE tech class the other day, I am supposed to keep 80% of it alive, I will let you know how that turns out.

4ish tea break

4:15 second afternoon class which tends to be another tech or cross cultural but sometimes they through another language class at us. Those days are not fun.

5:30 the land cruiser takes me home

6:30 arrive home, greet the family and attempt to study some pulaar before it gets too dark.

7:30 "Au Cour du Peche" a brazillian soap opera dubbed into french, otherwise known as my favorite part of my night

8:15 dinner time. We eat around a large bowel, some with spoons and others with their right hand. I prefer a spoon. Dinner tends to be rice and either fish or beans, its pretty tast\y. I sit next to my father who spends most of dinner telling me to eat more. I try to oblige his urgings the best I can, but dinner usually ends with me repeating mi haarii, mi haarri (I'm full) my most used Pulaar phrase.
After dinner Malick my younger brother makes attaya. Attaya is a type of tea that is served in shot glasses and consists of three rounds, with each round getting progressively sweeter. The whole process takes a while so I tend to only stay up through the second round.

9:30 bed time!

Im here and happy and hot

I am going to keep this short and write a longer update later on my laptop so I dont have to deal with the french keyboard. Anyways, I am in Senegal and life is pretty sweet. Since we have arrived our group has been staying at the training center. They started us off with a little survival wolof, since wolof is the most prominent language in the countrythen on Monday we were placed in language classes for the language that they speak at our site. I am learning Pulaar du Nord, which means I will most likely be heading to the north of the country, but the dialect is spoken in other parts of Senegal as well, so I will not know for sure until we get our site placements in a few weeks. They have changed training so that trainees live in villages and small towns outside of Thies in order to better prepare them for village life after training, most people moved in with their host families yesterday but myself and a couple of other trainees aren't moving until after class tomorrow. I am going to be living less than 20k away from Thies and Peace Corps will pick us up each morning and bring us to the center. I am sure I will have some intersting stories after I move in with my family. Right now time is ticking away and I have too much pulaar running through my head so I am going to leave it there.

Packing List

Even though I am leaving tomorrow and have not finished packing, I figured I would type out my list. Maybe it will help me remember things that I would have other wise forgotten about.

Clothing:
3 plain t-shirts
3 other t-shirts
1 polo
1 button up
1 long sleeve t-shirt
1 hoodie
4 tank tops
1 pair of jeans
1 pair of tech khakis
1 pair linen pants
2 long skirts
2 below the knee dresses
1 bathing suit
3 pairs of socks
all the bras and underwear that I own
1 pair of chacos
1 pair of reef flip flops
1 pair of sneakers
1 pair of black slides for staging

Other:
toiletries
books
sheet set
towels
sleeping bag liner
flash light
head lamp
digital camera
ipod
laptop
shortwave radio
flash drives

There is probably other stuff scattered around my room that I is slipping my mind at the moment, but thats the gist of it. Now I just have to pack it all (1 book bag, 1 medium sized backpacking bag and 1 medium size duffel).

Now after last minute changes, I will be taking a train down to Philly tomorrow and then flying out of JFK on Weds to Brussels and finally landing in Dakar Thursday night. Maybe I should get on that packing now...

Two Weeks

Its hard to comprehend that I will be leaving for staging in two weeks. I imagined that the two plus months between finishing my degree at McGill and leaving for Senegal would drag on, but between a trip to Montreal to see the Spice Girls (and my friends) and my latest jaunt to Chicago and DC as well as a little bit of work and a lot of Project Runway reruns on Bravo!, I am simply two weeks away from leaving.

The night before I left for Chicago/DC, I went on a mad shopping spree at Amazon.com and upon arrival home today I was greeted with a shower of boxes. It was like Christmas morning expect for the fact that I paid for everything. Only time will tell how useful everything is. I am not entirely sure why I bought a fleece sleep sack but I am assuming that the new digital camera will come in handy. There are a few more little things that I need to buy before I leave. I may attempt to write up my packing list since I have found lists from current and past PCVs to be helpful. Although I am a notorious last minute packer (as my friends Jenny and Rina can attest to since they were at my house to 5 am the night I left for university helping me pack up my bags and the car) , I am attempting to me more prepared for this little jaunt.

While it still hasn't entirely hit me that I am leaving so quickly, I am still slightly stressed out thinking about all things I want to do "one last time" before I leave. Another day snowboarding ( while I am unsure of a lot of things in Senegal, I am pretty positive I will not be able to snowboard in the Sahel), a trip into NYC to see one last musical, time with family and oh yeah those pesky little GREs that I decided would be a good idea to sign up for two weeks before taking them. We will see what gets accomplished. Tomorrow I have a meeting with a teacher at my old elementary school in order to set up a correspondence program through the World Wise Schools Program which could be a great opportunity to spread the Third Goal of the Peace Corps.
Since I have yet to mention them, the three goals of the Peace Corps are:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans (www.peacecorps.gov).

March 10th

I received my invitation to Senegal at the end of September, which gave me the last four or five months to prepare my expectations, but still no concrete date of when I would be leaving, that is until this morning. I finally received my staging packet informing me that I have to be at a hotel in Atlanta by 1:30pm on March 10th. I started the whole application about a year ago and now in less than a month, I will actually be on my way. In fact, once I get back from my Chicago and DC trips I will only have two weeks left at home. Now I have to really get serious about shopping, packing and organizing all of the paperwork. Craziness!

Lets get this show on the road

Next month I shall be heading to Senegal to work in the sector of environmental education with the Peace Corps. Hopefully this blog will get more interesting once I get there, since I currently spend my days yelling at contestants on the Price is Right. Anyways, (side note- despite that degree that McGill is apparently granting me, I have little to no understanding of syntax, grammar and proper spelling, so I use commas at random and unless internet cafes in Senegal use the version of Mozilla with spell check, correct spelling of the most basic of words will go out the proverbial window once I get there) I figure I will start this thing off with some basic info about what I know so far (most of it gathered from my obsessive stalking of current volunteers blogs during the past year) about what my time in Senegal shall consist of.

Within the next week I should be receiving information on when I will actually be leaving for staging. Staging is orientation to the Peace Corps and it consists of all the volunteers in my group meeting in a city in the US for a few days before flying out to Senegal together. Upon arrival in Senegal my stage will be spending the first two months in Thies (the third largest city in Senegal, I believe) where we will live with a host family and spend our days in class attempting to learn a local language and receive training in regards to the work we will be trying to do, as well as info on Senegalese culture and customs. Upon successful completion of training our group will be sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) and then its time to head to site.

As an Environmental Education (EE) volunteer, I will most likely be placed in a rural village, meaning no electricity or running water, which I am pretty excited about. As for what I shall be doing, a lot of that depends on the needs and wants of the community I will be living in. But in general I should be promoting environmental awareness in both the school system and the community at large. In addition to my primary assignment in EE, I have the opportunity to work on secondary projects that can focus on issues not necessarily related to the environment. I am interested in gender and development (GAD) issues, so hopefully I can incorporate some women empowerment work into my service. This will all get more specific once I get to Senegal and learn more about the community I will live in and the resources that I have available to me.

As globalization rears its mighty head communication becomes a lot easier. I will probably buy a cell phone when I get there and internet cafes seem exist in most cities in Senegal. But if you feel like writing to me the old fashioned ways my address during training (I will be there through May and then get a new address when I am at my permanent site) here's my address:
PCT Sarah Gilleski
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 299
Thiès, Senegal
West Africa