Address Update

Thank you for all the address requests! Now I have updated my address which I will have for the remainder of my service. It can be found on the sidebar or also in this post. I was stupid and told many people my address while forgetting an essential bit… SENEGAL. Yes, that is the country where I live. So if I told you the address without this little important tidbit, it is unlikely that what you sent me will get there. I am very sorry for this– and here is the real address!

PCV Whitney Jenkins

BP 157

Velingara, Kolda

Senegal, West Africa

And You Thought I wasn’t Working…

Hello again!

I am writing to you now from Kedagou, the region in the very Southeastern corner of Senegal where the wilderness men go and there are waterfalls to be bathed in, mountains to climb, and chimpanzees to befriend. I am amazed how much the geography can change in just a short 5 hours. I am not here just for fun, though I am lucky to have been assigned the region of Kedagou for my language seminar. Ruth and I traveled here to take a 3 day language class where I have been able to ask all the questions I couldn’t figure out in village about my new language (which are many I can assure you) and practice Puulaar with Houssey, my very talented and patient Pulafuta teacher. As you might imagine, we also manage to have some fun as well with our Kedagou friends that we don’t get to regularly see. Last night for example, we made homemade pizza and baked them in the outdoor pizza oven a previous volunteer constructed out of clay! It was so much fun, especially since we had extra visitors– our Gambian Peace Corps neighbors who had come down to see what this part of Senegal was all about.  I am going to be down here for a week because I figured as long as I was in Kedagou I would also hang out with my good friend Kyle who happened to get one of the most coveted sites in Peace Corps Senegal. In a couple of days we will be hiking around, hopefully seeing tons of monkeys and standing under the biggest waterfall in Senegal. I promise to put up some pictures!

Last time I wrote you I was about to begin my regional strategy meeting in Kolda. I am happy to say that the regional strategy meeting and this language seminar in Kedagou have given me a huge boost of spirits and a reinvigorated motivation to work hard here for the next two years on the multitude and variety of projects that I have access to as well as put all my efforts into learning this very beautiful, if also very difficult language. Rereading this sentence, it sort of sounds like I have been discouraged, which isn’t completely the truth. I wouldn’t say I have been discouraged, but I have just been taking each day as a completely new experience which hasn’t given me very much time to think of my time here in the Peace Corps in the broader scheme of things. The thing is, you might not expect it, but moving to an African village is like learning how to walk again. I had to learn the basics of living like I never have before. Daily activities like brushing my teeth, bathing, and getting food for myself are all tasks I had to adjust too and honestly, they took up a lot of my time and effort. At this point, I have been in village for about a month and people are getting used to me at least, and may I be so bold as to say, might even have started to like and accept me as part of their community?

The strategy meeting gave me a good view as to what other volunteers have been doing in my region, and after being in my village for a month I also have a better idea about what the villagers want, need, and are motivated to work on. Now I have a lot of project ideas and alot of room to work, but as my Puulaar gets better I hope to gain a better understanding of what people are willing to do. For now, let me give you a brief overview of a couple of projects at the top of my list.

1. Moringa Propagation: Moringa: Gods gift to earth according to Chris Hendrick, our country director, as well as most agfo’s here in Senegal. For all of you not familiar with Moringa (like me before coming to Senegal), it is a tree that grows rapidly, has the ability to live through heat and fairly harsh growing conditions, is a nitrogen fixer, and produces leaves with high nutritional value for humans and animals. I have found that not only is the soil in my villagers fields in poor condition because of increased peanut production and the absence of crop rotation, but that people are grossly malnourished, especially the children.

When I looked around at my village, I saw that there was not a moringa tree to be seen. Tons of mangos. Tons of baobabs. No Moringa. Next week, one of the volunteers who specializes in moringa is coming to my village and bringing me lots of moringa seeds! From there I intend to start an intensive moringa bed in my backyard and in my compound. I have been spreading the good word about the benefits of moringa every time I go to someone’s cotton field to help them harvest (which is every morning), every time I go to visit a family for afternoon Attaya (which is every afternoon), and every time I talk to my family in the evenings around the fire. I want to get enough interest to plant at least one moringa tree in every compound in my village. I also want to convince them to set aside a hectare in their village owned pasture to plant and maintain a moringa pepinaire that they can use to for seeds to plant in their fields as nitrogen fixers. I also want to teach the women to make moringa powder which they can put in every single meal to make sure their entire family is getting a better nutritional intake every day. The great thing about moringa, is that it is virtually tasteless and you really can put it into anything!

2. As I mentioned previously, the people of Sinthian Samba Foula are the proud owners of a 12 hectare piece of land which they divide and farm amongst themselves. They have built a fence around the entire pasture, but as people know, especially if your from where I’m from, fences have to be maintained and are often expensive to fix and rebuild. The great thing about Africa is that vegetation can last all year long because of the warm temperatures. My counterpart seems particularly keen on beginning a live fence around the Sithian acreage. Luckily, Kyle, my friend I am visiting now, has tons of seeds used for live fencing. I hope to organize my town so that a certain number of people are responsible for planting and maintaining a section of the perimeter around the pasture.

3. It seems that people in my town are extremely interested in English lessons! Once again, I feel so blessed because this is right down my alley. There is a nice school a minutes walk from my compound, with a school director and teachers who are eager to lend me the keys for weekend English classes. I told the people that after I got a little better hold on my Puulaar I would begin teaching. I plan to teach an adult class on Saturday and a children’s class on Sunday. From there we will see if they keep coming or if there is more of a demand so that I have to add more classes.

4. Some of us in the region are also interested in looking into the costs and benefits of building a fruit dehydrator and creating a market for small businesses that women could run in our communities. Much more research needed… stay posted for further developments.

5. A couple of other projects I plan on getting involved with on a regional level are becoming a regular contributor to our Peace Corps monthly newsletter and maybe even taking over as editor once the editor now completes her service in April and a Senegad position which works on gender issues and relationships between men and women in Senegal.

So now you know what I could be getting myself into for the next two years and this is just scraping the surface! I feel like I have revealed too much already as all of these are just in their very first stages of development.

On a language level, I have realized that I am not going to get better at Puulaar if I don’t study my butt off! Yeah sure I can sit around and say small sentences all day long, but if I don’t take the time to sit down and broaden my vocabulary, I’m going to progress very slowly. Its taken me awhile, but I feel like I get it now and am ready to work hard on my language. I have also discovered that my fascination with communication that is so prevalent within my English degree carries over to the study of another language. I enjoy unlocking the mysteries of speaking in another language, which in turn changes the way I formulate thoughts based on the language itself. I love it!

Well now I here some Girl Talk blasting from the kitchen and I think they might be making cookies. As much as I love writing to you all, I can’t skip out on the opportunity of a dance party while baking. Until next time.

 

A Whole Lot of Some Kind of Change… Thanksgiving, The Bike Ride, and The Meeting

Ready or not, here life comes and you better be more ready than not out here in Africa because otherwise its going to hurt. This is what I’ve found to be true emotionally and physically and I can literally feel my body and brain scrambling to compensate for my inadequacy to be ready fully for certain challenges. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking I am being too hard on myself, or that I actually have gotten myself into something that is too hard too handle. Before I left I had the idea of “difficult and challenging” I just hadn’t quite felt it yet. Now I feel it daily and as I just wrote and explained in a letter to a good friend I feel like our old friend, the cliché of the butterfly going through metamorphosis. But let me put a new thought into the cliché, at least new for me, and something I can apply very realistically to my life right now. I pose this question to readers without further explanation and go without ado into my blog post. Do you think the caterpillar inside her chrysalis feels pain when her new butterfly wings come ripping through flesh? Whether she does or not, I have concluded that yes—in the metaphor pertaining to my life—it must hurt because it has too.

 

Thanksgiving

 

In my last post I promised an account of my Thanksgiving in Senegal. Thanksgiving was all up and downs for me. It was nice to see all my friends in my regional house whom I hadn’t seen since being in village. Everyone was in high Thanksgiving spirits, including me, in my case trying to drown out the memories of family Thanksgivings and the knowledge that my family was all together without me in the United States. This worked most of the time for me. I threw myself into Thanksgiving, volunteering to brave the markets of Kolda to collect cooking supplies. I will never take a grocery store for granted again, but I think I will miss the confusion and bargaining and vibrancy of the vendors in tight alleys packed with their products. Luckily I went with a seasoned Peace Corps veteran, a tough college volleyball player taller than me and quick to turn on the men harassing us with her quick Puulaar wit. We made it back to Kolda house with kilos of potatoes, onions, beans, and a sack full of bread. It had all the makings of a feast and it was. Everyone pitched in either in cooking or cleaning or entertaining. Although I missed my family and friends back home, these are thirty people I don’t mind spending my holidays with. I was particularly happy to see Tucker and Adrian again, my language group I have grown so close too, and was happy to hear that all was well in their villages. Adrian and I made a delightful sweet potato dish that everyone ate but not without suspicious looks and questions pertaining to its odd coloring. You see, sweet potatoes here are not orange, they are white. Adrian, after seeing I was quite put out by this, suggested that we use the red food coloring conveniently available in the cupboard. Brilliant! And so everyone enjoyed bright red sweet potatoes.

 

Everything technically went well except for my irst serious bout of homesickness ever in my whole life. I think I would have given almost anything to be home in that moment. Alas—I will be stronger now and not so floored by the emotion next time it rolls around hopefully.

 

Bike Trip from Hell

 

After Thanksgiving I said my goodbyes and left Kolda. Ruth and I had decided it would be smart to leave my bike at her house when we left even though it is about 18 km away from my own dear hut. Complications began immediately when I realized my tire had gone flat before even leaving her compound. This wouldn’t have been a problem normally except that I have never mended a tire in my life, I still had 18 km to ride and the sun was disappearing rapidly. The great thing about this story is that now I feel self reliant and a more capable human because as it turns out I can indeed mend a bike tire. Its not nearly as difficult as I had imagined it to be. In fact, this bike tirp showed me many things that I can and cannot do. For example, I still cannot find my way out of a wet paper bag. Or a bush path in Africa that I have only taken twice. Turns out miraculously that I am still hopelessly directionally challenged. I pedaled faster and faster towards where I thought was my village as time passed and I watched the sun slip behind the horizon, not a hut in sight.

 

Now for the cans. What I can do is pedal a bike barefoot along an African bush path in the dark without getting killed. My skill must be obvious to you though now. Shortly afer the sun went down, my flip flop broke mid pedal. Cursing, I put it on the back of the bike and pedaled on at a rate I thought might be able to outpace any wild animal lurking in the darkness. “So this is where Africa wins,” I said to myself as I pedaled and listened to the creatures of the night begin to come out. I finally made a turn that I thought would at least take me back to the main highway and  some kind of civilization. Turns out this was one of my smarter decisions in the night and I came upon a village and almost crying with relief asked them where the hell Sithian Samba Foula was. They told me it was right down “this path” as I guzzled half a gallon of unfiltered, yet deliciously cold well water. I was skeptical of this path they soke of, but having no choice, I took off. Along the way I managed to hit rock and skin the top half of my barefoot toe off. That did much to heighten my cheery spirits, as did the old blind man carrying an axe over his shoulder. Thankfully the axe man was actually right when he told me Sithian was 2 km down the road. I finally limped into my compound exhausted and scared, trying not to show it with great staging of Puulaar good humor about the whole experience as to why I didn’t have a shoe and my toe was gushing blood. I have never been so happy to be home.

 

The Meeting

 

The next morning, when I felt like the last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed, Ibrahima told me to hurry and get ready becvasue very important men were coming right now and we were having a huge meeting. I scrambled to make myself presentable and by the time I came out of my hut people were already showing up. This meeting was not important to me because I met the District president and the medicine man and the President of the Water Beureau who would be important to my projects in the future (well this was important too) but because I truly realized the motivation and unique will power of people in my village to cooperate, pay their dues, and make where they live and their lives better. I was uncomfortable because they made me sit at the head table even though I tried to sit on a back bench with the rest of the women. They forced me to come to the front and this something that bothers me quite a bit about Africa. Because I’m white and even more so because I am American, I gain privledge to be treated important, even though most of the time I am far from deserving. After the meeting, I was invited to dine with these same important men in the chiefs own room where we were served amost delicious meal of goat meat, vegetables, and sauces over rice. After straight white rice I was gobbling up every morsel.

 

I am able to say that I was proud I got the gist of the meeting in the Puulaar I can understand at this point in my service and it was such a motivator to my own moral that the people in my village are so enthusiastic about taking the lead on the projects in their own village.

 

Back to the Present

 

Now I am back in Kolda at a regional strategy meeting that we just finished. It was exciting to talk about our plans for the coming year and once again hang out and have a great time with my new work colleagues, friends, and family. Thank you for thinking about me, once again everybody. I think of you often.

 

I would also like to note that I am excited that I have got quite the interest in poetry going on in Peace Corps Kolda. If my beloved poetry group is reading this, I have started a new peace corps poetry group and our first meeting is tonight! I am very excited, but miss you terribly. J Talk to you soon, si Allah jabi.