"Home is Wherever There is You..."

So I’m not gonna pull any punches here-- I am pretty excited about getting on a plane tomorrow morning! I miss Nathan like crazy and the second my eyes land on anything resembling vegetables said items will be quickly devoured. My flight leaves at 4am Saturday, so I am taking a private taxi to Dakar at 7pm today, which will leave a four hour wait sitting in the airport before my flight.

I am having weird feelings of nostalgia or something because I keep feeling waves of sadness about leaving. I look at all my stuff in the closet here and I don’t know where to start packing… I think in my head I know that I am leaving today so I can suddenly allow myself to be emotional about it all. I am also having recurring, vivid sensations of being in the airport in New York and eating a hamburger. Anyway, I should probably be on meds for hallucinations or something but I think that I am just really, really excited to get on that plane!

The other volunteers I have met have actually been really great people. We all have our own stories as to how we came to be here in Senegal but really at the core of it we all wanted to help contribute to the global community. I do genuinely feel kind of sad that I will likely never see any of them again, save for creeping them on Facebook, but, c’est la vie du voyageur! And my new roommate Soleine seems like a cool chick. It has been nice to practice French with her for the last few days, and share some insights with her on living with a massive Senegalese family.

Otherwise, I have truly enjoyed blogging about it all and sharing it with my people back home. I appreciate that I have had so many people thinking about me whilst I’ve been away, dropping me a line, and sending me photos and even an Oprah magazine in the mail. In Particular, I have to get mushy about Nathan in order to thank him immensely for all his love and support during my journey to Senegal and back again.

Thanks also to everyone who has followed along with the blog. It has been a pleasure to do some writing and I want to say genuinely, thanks for reading!

Anyhow, I think its safe to say that the Senegal chapter in my book is closed!

See you all soon,

Ashley

Here's a Few Names...

I have met a lot of really interesting people along the way and I thought I would describe a few of them to answer some of the question of “who does this sort of thing anyway”.

Sally: Sally has been a real chum of mine. Sally is 40ish and British. She’s sporty and smokes and likes beer, so pretty much other than the smoking she’s my kind of cat. Sally is an RN who, back home, works in a clinic that caters to the homeless population of London. The clinic she works in treats some very difficult cases on a daily basis for a section of the population that is usually ignored when they go to hospital. Her story begins sometime last year when a few of her close friends died way too young, two died of cancer. For Sally, it was a wakeup call to have lost three close friends in such rapid succession so she decided to take advantage of the time she has on this earth and get out there and do something that would help others. Here in St Louis she has been working some with the Red Cross, some with the Talibe center and some at the hospital on the island.

Alex: Alex came to St Louis two weeks ago. She is 22 and Australian. She is a history geek and plays soccer at her university and has crazy big curly hair. She looks like she should be on classic Saturday Night Live with her big blue eyes and no word of a lie she is way more sarcastic than I could ever be. Back home Alex is working on creating a master’s thesis that has something to do with how France allowed Senegalese people to vote in their elections back before independence. That is what brought her here but more specifically the soccer program is what brought her to St Louis. She felt it was a good fit to come here, check out the library and historical resources and also do some volunteering and cultural exchange along the way.

Tamara: Tamara came last Friday. She is 27 and Australian but lives in Switzerland. Back home Tam works as a bartender because it’s really great money and her employers pay for her housing and food and she can go snowboarding every day in the winter. She is also tall and looks like Angelina Jolie somewhat but that is neither here nor there. Tamara had to leave the country for a spell because of employment insurance and typically she says she travels whenever she has enough money anyway. She was thinking of going to Morocco but changed her mind and came here instead when she realized that she could take French lessons and bum around in 35C weather for a month. She’s been pretty cool to hang out with over this last week.
Martin: Martin was here for 2 months and left last week for travel. He is 30ish and Irish but is moving the London for work. Back home Martin works as a lawyer in some giant firm but also takes on pro bono cases every year for his firm. He came to Senegal because he was transitioning to another job in London and decided to check out something different that has to do with development issues. Whilst in Senegal Martin’s project was to visit villages and talk to women who work to raise awareness and help the cause of domestic violence against women.

Otherwise there are scads of 17-20 year olds who have come for a gap year, and several other professionals who either quit their jobs to get out and try something different, or have taken a sabbatical like my new roommate Soleine who is on sabbatical for 1 month from her job as a psychologist. For myself, this has been one of the best parts of the experience. I’ve had some really interesting conversations with people about their thoughts on development issues and I have really learned a lot from their placements and experiences here.

A Night for the Talibes

The other night there was a benefit concert of sorts to raise money for Daara Vision which is one of the centers that offers some food and basic part time medical care for the talibé boys. One of the volunteers Dan organized the night and he had several acts sing including the very excellent and very popular Mame Szaabo (sp?) and even our very own Katie, a volunteer from Ireland. The backup band had two guitars, keyboards, drums and djembé drums and they were really good as well. As a side note I inquired about the meaning of talibé and discovered it means ‘disciple’ as the boys are studying the Koran. I have often seen it painted on the sides of buses and taxis so I assume it is a common enough thing to think of oneself as, if one were a devout follower of the Koran.

One of the interim acts before Mame Szaabo was a local guy named Bashir, who is attending university in Dakar for math, and is dating one of the volunteers who has decided to stay on and work full time, also in Dakar. He ‘slammed’ which is a style that is popular with younger Senegalese people. Slamming is basically spoken word with some major punch to it. The idea is to pick a topic and just start making up lyrics that sound good, or rhyme, or tell a story. It’s hard to describe his performance but he basically picked up the beat, spilled out some rhymes, and then hung out for a spell dancing and getting the crowd to clap and really get into what he was saying. His lyrics got louder and angrier though as he went into the part about the talibé boys. He described how we walk by them every day in the streets and how we think we’re being nice by tossing them a few coins into their plastic dishes but really there’s a much larger issue to address than just giving them money. He was asking everyone to really stop think about why they are there and in the state that they are in and man alive, was he ever passionate.

I was talking to my friend Hanne yesterday about how she started working at the talibé center as a means to learn more about the lives of the talibé boys. She was feeling like she has become accustomed to seeing disheveled homeless boys wandering around in the streets begging for money, so she decided to help herself have a closer experience with them by visiting the Daara center every day. I must say I have had the same experience myself where I am no longer shocked to see the boys lingering around outside the house waiting for leftovers, or seeing the boys running around the streets at all hours of the day with nothing else to do but play and beg. It’s not to say that I ignore them though. I give them my left over breakfast if there is any and also cookies and drinks if I am out and have something to share, I smile and say a friendly word, but I still never give money, and I still don’t really don’t know what else to do but raise some awareness around this issue.

There is one French Canadian lady who started with PA and has since left the program to do her own thing. She is always talking about how much money she pours into the Daara Center and I don’t mean to be too critical but I question the sustainability of what she is doing. Certainly she can’t have endless piles of money, and since she hasn’t been working for 8 months she will inevitably have to go back home to earn more money leaving the center without that income. I can only hope that all her efforts working with the locals will allow her to continue to move upwards in the system and eventually garner a position where she is able to solicit for more funding. Seemingly the government here in Senegal is taking a rather soft stance on the issue of the talibés.

For myself, I think I am spending more energy mentally than I am aware of every time I leave the house because there is so much to filter: the piles of rotten garbage everywhere; young undernourished boys, shoeless, digging through rotten garbage for something to eat; the old woman with no eyeballs begging every day on the bridge; the scene with an adult male man-handling a talibé boy because he thinks he stole something; the dogs with the fly eaten ears. It’s difficult because if I really start to think about each of these scenarios the situations descend almost into despair and I feel helpless, I feel powerless, I feel deeply sad, I feel like screaming! So, it is necessary to tuck that away somewhere in your head, so you can tap into it in order to stay in touch with your humanity, but more so to keep it from impeding you from doing what you do every day: tread lightly, and impart a little bit of what you're made of onto the people you meet every day.

Rolling Along...

I was pleased to hear from Abdulaye the director of the school, that there will be other volunteers taking over for us after we leave. He asked us to fill into a book the lessons we covered off so far so that the new people can continue where we stopped.

It's hard to say how much the kids will really learn in the short class times we were given. Overall when I meet kids in the street, they are excited to share what little French they have learned with me as the foreigner as a means to connect with a stranger. Perhaps the same will go for English. This is especially true since Abdualye feels rather strongly about the kids having as much opportunity to communicate with people from other English speaking countries as possible. Perhaps that means some of the English we teach them will stick with them and even inspire them to want to learn more. For this reason, I really wanted to teach the kids things they could use right away, rather than bogging them down with too much grammar and vocabulary without the payoff of being able to share information about themselves and exchange greetings properly. I have a few of my students as neighbours as well. One little girl was over last week and she made sure to tell me that she went over her notes a few times after class and proceeded to recite what she had learned for me. It was quite endearing to see her so excited!

I think it's also worth mentionting that I am not an English Snob in that I believe everyone needs to learn English because of some mysterious superior qualities it holds. I truly believe that the more means one has to communicate with other people, the better off the whole world really is. At this time in history, it happens to be English that many businesses and so forth communicate in, so it feels good that I can help spread the common ground around.

Excursion Bird Park: Djoudj and Beyond

Sunday I organized a trip for four of us to go to the big bird reserve called Djoudj. It is supposedly the third most celebrated bird park in the world, and though I am not sure what that means, it was certainly large and impressive.
Our guide was Babacar, a very lively and colourfully dressed chap who is no less than 6 feet tall and of a rather thin build. He kept us entertained all day with stories and facts about the surrounding areas that we were driving through. We took a private taxi to the park driving first on the paved main road to get out of St Louis with the bulk of the trip being driven on the deeply rutted dirt roads. The old beater taxi sure got a work out and made several painful crunching noises, but nevertheless got us there and back in one piece!

Along the way we saw many Brahman cattle and even a few warthogs. At the very site of the warthog’s dark, bristly skin I really felt like I was in Africa. There is a hotel at Djoudj which is rather dilapidated and I question why anyone would want to stay there really. There’s nothing to do as the park itself is just a big outdoor nature reserve, and with all the swampy water lying around, I imagine the mosquitoes are horrific. Anyhow, we were just there for the morning.

Once we got into the park and purchased the park entrance license, we disembarked in a low lying pirogue. There were about 20 of us total in the boat, but once the boat got moving there was enough to look at that you really don’t notice anyone else around you! As per usual, it was a sunny day (in fact since I’ve been here, there have only been two cloudy days) and there were quite a few birds out and about, a few cows and even a couple of crocodiles. Given that all the talk about the birds was in French, I am sure some of the bird’s names were common to the area, but the ones that impressed the most and were easiest to remember were the giant pelicans. There is a huge, flat piece of rock about 40 minutes into the boat ride where they all congregate. There were literally thousands of them coming and going, flying so low overhead you could hear the dry rattle of feather on feather… it was truly amazing!

After we arrived back on land, we were promised the opportunity to buy an egg sandwich, but St. Louis and all the meals of sheep have severely depleted stocks of bread available to the sandwich lady. I was hoping that the tea and biscuits in the Poule village would be as nice as it sounded.

The village by definition was one family of 28 people. Much like my house here, there was a set of grandparents, and their offspring with married partners coming into the mix to add to the village population. It was explained to us that all these small ethnic villages are civil, but not friendly, because each head of the village wishes it to remain head of the village without fear of competition. Babacar the guide is half Poule because his parents met at university (on a rare occasion inter-ethnic marriages occur, but otherwise they are arranged by the families usually within the same ethnic group) so he was able to speak the same language as the people of the village. Otherwise, they didn’t seem to speak too much French though the 2 older boys spoke some. We were told the school was too far away for the rest of the kids to attend on a regular basis.

We had two rounds of tea. Tea here is made very, very sweet, and usually comes in rounds of three. During the tea making, Babacar sent for a large tin bowl which he used as a drum so he could sing. As soon as he struck up the first note, two of the little kids started dancing African style and were really flailing their arms and smiling great big smiles. There was something really sweet about sitting on a mat under a big tree with all sorts of people sharing tea, singing, clapping and truly feeling like this was what I was here for. It brought tears to my eyes (tears which I quickly squeezed back in because there’s no crying in Senegal).

After we finished tea and biscuits, we were invited to go look at a few of the huts. I was excited because I had seen many such huts but had never been in one. The first hut was maybe 15 by 15 feet and belonged to one lady and her kids. It was very plain but very tidy and clean. The floors were linoleum, the mosquito net was hanging neatly from the roof, and there was an interesting arrangement of tin bowls and platters on top of a small dresser. Babacar explained that the arrangement was what represented the families’ wealth. If the president of Senegal came over, he would not be served from these dishes because they are far too dear to the family.

A few other things that struck me had to do with the poor quality of the road (especially during rainy season), and the relative distance to the town and hospital. My friend Sally who is a nurse had a dead child brought in to the hospital a few weeks back. The mother came from a small village way outside St. Louis. She said when the girl fell ill, they tried traditional healing at first and after that (likely caused more damage than good) she made the long trek to St Louis, stayed the night, and brought her deceased child in first thing Monday morning hoping she could be revived. While it is an abominable story, it is somewhat understandable given that the likelihood of a taxi driving by their village is slim, the cost of said taxi probably quite a lot of money for the family, and the cost of a consultation (300CFA) and any treatments far too much for the family to afford. That also leaves the mom away from the household and the kids and husband then left to fend for themselves. It was easy to understand from visiting the village, the immense efforts it would take to go to all the way to the hospital, versus buying into the hope that the traditional healer’s promises of healing the child would do some good.

School Daze

Teaching at Cidi Ndiaye has been pretty fun overall. Last Monday was particularly excellent because only half the kids showed up as it was the day before, the day before Tabaski (makes sense, right?). The class sizes are usually around 50, so between my teaching partner Krista and I, one usually does crowd control while the other teaches. With half the kids, I was able to go around and actually converse with individuals, and not just a mass of kids. It was great! They were trying really hard to do the "Hello My Name is..." and "I am ten years old" and whenever someone faltered, the kid next to them would usually try and coach them along.

We teach 2 age groups: 8 year olds and 9-11 year olds. The classes are mostly divided up by age but some older kids are put in younger classes because they are struggling academically. Our two classes of 8 year old are usually a complete gong show. The first week, during the first class, the teacher stepped out for the entire class and pretty much we had kids swinging from the rafters and screaming like animals. All Krista and I could do was laugh at each other and at how wrong the situation was. When the teacher came back in, she marched over to me with a rubber strap and said something to the effect of "this is how you keep order in the class room". Now, this may be true for her, but not so much for me. I don't think the teachers out and out beat the kids with the strap, but every class room has one, and the teachers use them to hit the desks, and their hands to hit the kids, as I have seen on a couple of occasions. We even had it where these 3 boys were being so bad all throughout the class, and after we were reprimanding him he said "No, you have to hit us to get us to behave!"

I always think back to the lady from the kindergarden who kept order with 50 little 4year olds at the mere drop of a line. "Mes amis, mes amis!" My friends, my friends! Somehow she has figured out how to keep everyone focused without so much intimidation. Even in my own house the kids get smacked if they do something wrong. Then watching the kids later, they hit each other like crazy. Even the babies will try to smack someone when they get frustrated. In the classroom there are posters about proper mosquito net use for malaria prevention, abuse against women posters, and even one poster to the effect of "Let students learn without getting the beats". Its a good message really.

I have heard many stories from other volunteers about kids in their houses getting whipped, kids in hospital getting hit for crying too much, talibe boys showing up with major whip marks from the maribouts... it's really hard to know what to do about it. I know for myself merely saying (to the rubber strap) "Oh I would really prefer not to use that I don't think it's a good thing" seems trite, but one can only hope that by taking a stance against something, others will at least consider that there's another, less harsh way of doing things.

Otherwise another highlight for teaching in a classroom that is on the first floor is being able to buy coffee through the window. The other day, this tall man came up to the window and stood there staring at us while we were reviewing colours. The teacher took notice and I was sure she was going to yell at him or give him the beats with her plastic pipe, but no, she starting talking nicely in Wolof and went over to her purse. "Tu veux du cafe?" she asked us. The guy was going around the building selling Touba coffee to the teachers! Sadly I find Touba coffee to be really, really sweet and un coffee-like so I passed.

Silence of the Lambs

Hello Again, Sorry for the delay in the post. Everything was closed Wednesday and Thursday for Tabaski.

I also haven't been able to post pictures the last couple of times but it seems to be working again which is great!

Tabaski came to a slow start. I got up at 8am to make sure I was available to help with whatever may need to be done, but at that time the ladies were all lounging around. There was no breakfast, so I went up and read my book for a while, and ate cookies from my secret stash. Supper the night before was lack, a sort of rice pudding but made with some kind of baked grains and vanilla yogurt all over it. It was nice, but not as nice as the cheeseburger I am going to eat at the JFK airport will be in a week’s time.

So by about 11 someone came up to my room to ask why I wasn’t watching the killing of the sheep… luckily I missed the actual throat slash (the gash in the neck was quite substantial!) but came in just in time to watch the sheep cleaner begin hacking away at the carcass with a machete. The process of cleaning 5 sheep was actually rather civilized (aside from a very muscular and sweaty man literally hacking at the carcasses). It took place in the sandy courtyard between our house and the next underneath a little tree. The kids were running around, boys were helping separate the guts from the good stuff, and one little girl even delighted in playing with the severed sheep`s head.

The meat-man would hack off major sections, and the ladies went through and separated out massive chunks of fat (still leaving behind a ton of fat though) from meat and bones. The guts were buried in a deep hole in the soccer field. The liver was bbq`d first as a sort of late breakfast (which I passed on) and the rest of the lunch meat was seasoned and bbq`d. By the end of the sheep killing, there were literally buckets and buckets of meat. It all seemed a bit strange because 1 sheep can feed a family for about a month… I was expecting a serious meal after all their work, but lunch was a disappointing spread of onions, stringy over bbq’d meat and french fries. I heard other people say their Tabaski was a let-down as well, and yet others said they felt eating all the food they were offered was as big an accomplishment as climbing Mt Fuji.

Anyway, after all that I went for a car ride to the University where Awa`s (scarily dilapidated) restaurant was to put bags and bags of sheep into the freezer. It was neat to see the university. They have 1500 students there and offer a full spread of courses apparently. I could see that the university was well planned and comparable to something you would find at home, with the exception that everything was in a state of serious neglect.

Getting out in the car was nice because we could drive around and see the apparent lacking in sheep, and the excess of sheeps hydes piled here and there. A pile of such hydes began collecting early on in the day by our house. A few boys were incharge of piling them neatly, and by the end, the pile was almost as tall as one of them. Then a "car rapide" (colourful bus, cheap mode of transport for people) came along and they hauled all the skins into the bus. No bags. No apparent care for where they landed. I can't say where they were going but I am certainly going to look out for where I sit next time I take a care rapide!

So then Tabaski Part II started a few hours later which involved everyone dressing up and… what? I have been wondering about that for weeks since I have never been aware of this major Muslim holiday and there was a lot of hype leading up to the days of tabaski. The ’and what’ ended up being everyone dressing up really nice, spending at least an hour putting on make-up and arranging their weaves, and dressing up the kids and… drum roll please… sitting on the couch! So we sat on the couch and a procession of neighbours stopped by to say hello. This lasted for the entire evening, and there was a round II on Thursday as all the ladies had a second outfit and another round of visits the next evening.

There was a reverse trick or treat element to Tabaski as well because some of the idea behind having all that meat is to share 1/3 with a neighbour and 1/3 with the poor. So all around our neighbourhood kids were seen carrying bags of meat to their neighbours. At the end one would expect an even balance of meat given and received but that’s no matter I suppose.

By about 8pm I was ready to head out with the other volunteers. Every Wednesday we have Quiz Night at this bar called Taverne so the proprietor, a Moroccan lady and excellent cook, treated us to a mouton of our own. She served it on couscous with this nice sweet onion sauce. The meat was soft and juicy and completely delicious.

All in all Tabaski wasn’t quite the big hoopla I was expecting, although I suppose if it was in my neighbourhood where I knew everyone and everything then I would have been a lot more fun. It was fun to have had a dress made up for the occasion. Most of the vcolunteer girls had a dress made up and a couple of guys wore Boubous which is the outfit men wear on fridays to go to Mosque.

So that's what I know today!