Chickens, Chili and more...

Korite marked the end of Ramadan. Everyone in my family spent the week leading up to it getting ready. My host dad and I went fabric shopping and then to the tailor together. I spent most of my allowance on a fantastically embroidered matching wrap skirt, shirt, and head scarf.

Dark blue eyebrows for Ramadan

Throughout the rest of the week, perfumes, make up, new curtains, and a mirror also showed up at the house, which my host "mom" happily showed off. She even tried to pull out my eyebrows and paint them back navy blue with her new eye pencil... not a good look! My mom and cousin spent an entire night getting their weave done and went back for touch ups in the morning. Finally the night arrived when we could see the silver of the new moon to mark the new month. (Islamic calendar is lunar.) My cousins and "mom" were so excited about the feast day, they started jumping and singing; happy times had by all.

Korite itself was actually much less exciting. I spent the morning helping around the house: cleaning everything,  catching and slaughtering two chickens with my cousin, cleaning the chickens and chopping potatoes and onions for lunch. Needless to say, I was not wearing my beautiful new outfit. Lunch cooked for hours and wasn't ready until almost 4... kind of like Thanksgiving in the States, but with neighbors involved. Everyone goes house to house and crashes each others lunches, which were all pretty much the same. Only the men dress up during the day to go to mosque.
At 5pm, my "mom" decided that we were done with house work for the day and she, my female cousin, and I could finally shower and dress up. The two of them spent a good hour putting on make up and taking it all off again. We were not ready to go show off to the rest of the neighborhood until 7, nearly sunset when it's dark and no one can see your gorgeous new complet anyway.

All dressed up for Korite

Most underwhelming part, when we did go visiting, we only walked down the block to my uncle's house, where we spend a good portion of most days anyway. But everyone was really fancy and we took a ton of photos. I got special permission to go and greet the families of other Peace Corps trainees in the neighborhood, but only briefly because my "mom" is overprotective and hates me being out of the house after sunset. When I got home the new clothes were already put away... just don't quite get it.

After Ramadan, the food at my homestay house become rather meager: rice and leaf sauce everyday, and maybe a fish or two (split nine-ways). The big meal is lunch and we set aside leftovers for dinner, usually not served until 9 or 10pm. On a bad day, dinner is not reheated and my "mom" has already eaten a good portion of the leftovers.

Cooking for our host families

So I decided to intervene and introduce my family to American cuisine, namely Chili & French Toast. I made a giant pot of chili with two other trainees for dinner one night. It was an adventure to get all the ingredients and it was met with mixed reviews by my family and neighbors. (The corn we added never fully cooked through even though we left the pot boiling for over an hour; we didn't think this would be a problem since corn roasted over coals is a common though rather crunchy Senegalese snack.) However, that was the first night I have felt genuinely and contently full in a while, so the Americans and a couple Senegalese went to sleep happy.
French Toast was much easier and well received. My host father even went out to buy more ingredients so that I could teach him how to make it and he could have more to share with my uncle down the street. French Toast will definitely be making an early appearance at my permanent site.

Which brings me to the end of this post: I now know and have visited the village where I will be working for the next two years! I am going to Goundaga! For those of you who will actually take time to look this up, it is a small village (only 400 people) located near Kounkane in the Kolda region of Senegal, formerly part of the Casamance. And it is beautiful! I have a cozy hut with a couple papaya and a guava tree in the backyard; and a bunch of little brothers and sisters running under the mango trees in the compound. My host and counterpart, Demba Balde, seems very sweet and intelligent, and I look forward to working with him.
Goundaga is on river, which means fresh fish and swimming! While Goundaga does not have any running water, electricity, or cellphone reception (yet), it also happily lacks the garbage and disease-infested puddles that plague the towns and cities of Senegal. But once I am settled in, I will find ways to communicate and update the blog from the nearest town, Kounkane. Goundaga is about 7km from Kounkane, mostly on narrow bush paths that work nicely for biking - and I now have my Peace Corps issued bike. And there are tons of colorful birds in the fields and forest along the bush paths. Sadly, I've seen some of my little brothers and sisters catching some of these beautiful birds with the other village kids, tying string to the birds' legs, and then "playing" (read plucking off their feathers and swinging around) until they die. Maybe these kids are jaded by all the beauty that surrounds them, maybe it's just cultural differences, or both. Anyhow, everything about Goundaga looks like it is going to be a fantastic experience and I will have friendly Peace Volunteers in nearby villages and towns to collaborate with.

View of the river near Goundaga

Two more weeks of training! Cannot wait for install!

Rainy Season

Beach in Mbour

Life is good in Senegal, especially when it is rainy season and there is a breeze to make the heat and flies a lot more manageable. I goosebumps on Saturday! which if you know me, you know that doesnt take much.. 80 degrees? A couple of trainees decided to meet up by the beach (because that is what Mbour, my training site, is known for) and a giant storm just happened to descend upon us as we were enjoying a lunch that did not include rice. Still, we were determined to go to the beach, so we ended up soaking wet with the wind blowing off the Atlantic, it was actually a bit chilly.
Fortunately the water is real warm, like bath water. You just have to ignore the bits of trash floating about, not any worse than the Long Island Sound.

Getting home however was a nightmare. My neighborhood is not close to the beach; it is really close to anything of interest in Mbour for that matter, or at least not that I know of. Its hard to get a taxi to my neighborhood, worse when it is raining, still worse when its almost sundown and everyone wants to be home to break the fast. The driver we did find was great though, did not even charge us the Toubab price.
(Toubab is what the call white and/or Western oriented people hear; not sure if it is supposed to be offensive or not, but it sure is annoying when a group of 50 kids see you walking from 2 blocks and just chant Toubab Toubab until you have passed them and gone another 2 blocks.)

Liberte (my hood in Mbour) when the skies clear.

We didnt make it quite home though; all the roads were flooded or just washed completely out. So we had to get out and walk, a fine idea until someone decided to remind us of the health lecture we had about all the parasites that could be in the standing water. And the fact the flood waters were full with whatever came up from everyones holes that they use as the toilet in that section of town. At first we avoided all puddles at all cost, but the sun was quickly setting and we were just getting further from where we needed to be. So we took a deep breath and walked quickly through the puddles back home. After greeting everyone on the block and my family, I bolted for our own bathroom/shower hole to scrub myself clean.

It was only the next morning I learned that our septic/cistern/toilet thing had also flooded our entire compound, sadly washing away our cactus, the only plant after my dad gave up on our mango sapling last week. (The chickens got to it...)

Two Weeks in Senegal

I cannot believe it is already two weeks: sometimes it feels like of just left, but mostly it feels like I've been here for months already. The first week of training was relatively uneventful: tons of training sessions and vaccinations, and I don't do well with long bouts of sitting. Worse still, we were not supposed to leave the the training center for the first four days... cabin fever. And all I wanted was to go out and get some street food! We only got to explore the city of Thies the day before we left for homestays, when Ramadan had already started so the market and street food scene was a little bit down key.

Homestay has been an awesome experience! I am learning Fulakunda, a dialect of Pulaar spoken in the Kolda region of Senegal, which I'm super happy about because dialects of Pulaar are spoken throughout West African. I'm staying in the city of Mbour, which is apparently on the Atlantic Ocean, but I'm on the outskirts and the only hint of beach are the seashells and the sand that are the roads and the yards. We are making a garden at the local elementary school; I'm not sure how that's going to work in the sand, but we'll give it a try. My family is on the small side: mom, dad, five-year-old brother, an uncle, and two cousins visiting from the south, but I have a ton of aunts and uncles that are neighbors. I have electricity but no running water: we collect rainwater or have to go to the well.

There are four other volunteers staying in the same neighborhood. Saturday we finally felt comfortable to go visiting each others families and introduce ourselves. Mostly we wanted to go to the Mballo household, where one trainee has been enjoying a "limonade" every night to break the fast that is supposed to be divine. So we asked his mom about it, and she sent a sister to take us to the boutique down the street to buy some. But of course when we got to the store the girl had no clue what we wanted to buy and we didn't have enough Pulaar to explain it very well - just confused her more. After searching in two boutiques we decided to buy a pineapple soda, mostly because it was the coldest drink we could find. Since its Ramadan and just about everyone is fasting, we hide it in my bag and sneaked back to Mutaaru's room, where we secretively passed the bottle of soda around and called to his younger brothers and sisters to come have some too secretly. It was just soda, but we felt pretty cool.

Mom wasn't too happy that I came back home for lunch. My mom is into tough love; I think she likes me, at least she said she'd miss me when I left Sunday, but a lot gets lost in translation and she isn't very patient. I'm the only trainee that has set chores at home, dishes mostly; she just tries to give me commands and I guess what she wants me to do. It beats sitting around staring at the wall though. And I'm learning how to cook Senegalese style. My dad has a different strategy: we go over the Pulaar textbook for an hour every night when he gets home from work. I'm not sure (language barrier) but I think he has made a bet among the other host families that I will speak the best Pulaar among the other trainees. Gotta back Baaba proud!

Well, that's two weeks in a nutshell...

Pulaar is coming slowly, unfortunately I was finally starting to understand the day we had to come back to the center for more training.

Hello! and goodbye...

So I'm going to take a stab at blogging as a means of staying in touch. Well, at least you'll get occasional updates about what I'm up to. And maybe I'll throw in some pictures too.
That's all really; packing isn't part of the adventure.

O, note on the blog's title [lots of pressure naming a blog], "teranga" is a Wolof word roughly translated to "hospitality," a characteristic that Senegalese people take pride in expressing. So don't worry about me; Senegal sounds like a friendly place!