My fingernails are soft and peeling from lack of protein. I smell like sour milk. My bedding and clothes smell like mildew. My nerves are shot. It's been a year, and it doesn't seem to get any easier.
Or maybe it will. Surely now that we've been indoctrinated we'll be able to spend the rest of our time here focusing on the goals we've set for ourselves. Me, I want to get the bathroom built at Tawa Fall Elementary School, in the village next to mine. Can you imagine being at school all day with no bathroom other than the weeds? I want to find some help for my little brother, Ahmet, who's deaf. He's five, beautiful, capable, and intelligent. I want to learn French. Now that I know what I'm doing, I want to put on another Girls Camp, and teach at one more Access English camp. I want to see more trees planted in my village. By the kids! I want to...well, I have a long list. Mostly, I want to survive this 27 month test that is Peace Corp Senegal; to go home proud and with a sense of accomplishment.
Time is speeding up, though, as our calendars bulge. September flew by. Here's a bit from a recent letter home.
Hello Loved Ones!
It's been a busy month. September started out with Girls Camp, which was a mighty effort. In addition to attending all the activities, I was assigned blog duty, breakfast duty (TWO sugar cubes only girls, not six! Take only ONE egg, please, or there won't be enough), and on two nights, lights out duty. Except for my village girls, most refused to go to bed when told. Please. At least get in bed, under the mosquito net, turn off the light, then talk all you want. They just look at you, and continue doing what they're doing.
Some of the Senegalese counselors assisting us were headstrong too. We'd have to go fetch them for class. When you hear the drum, that means CLASS IS STARTING RIGHT NOW. That was 10 minutes ago! Please be a good example for the girls. They just stare. Anarchy reigns here. My village girls, on the other hand, were consistently well-behaved. Not a trace of that big town arrogance among them. They're intensely Islam-oriented, conservative, and authority-conscious.The Islam practiced here is peace-oriented and gentle, by the way.
On the last day of camp, some genius decided to let the girls make their own sandwiches, and put the table with all the food in a corner of the dining room. Sheer chaos ensued. The Senegalese don't know the concept of a line, or taking turns. They take in stride the crush of bodies. (At the Toubab grocery store all the white people stand in line while the locals crowd around the register, blatantly ignoring us as we huff and puff with indignity.)
Our girls descend upon the table of food like starving dogs. Not a pretty sight. Kathleen, who is tiny, got a fat lip trying to get her sandwich. They ignored the male counselor who was trying to get them to form a line, at my request. I was so jostled, crushed and appalled, I flung my bread at the wall, left the room, and ate no lunch.
But mostly things were fine. We saw the girls evolve. We opened minds.We fell in love with their beauty and personalities and potential. Here's a link to my blog. http://campsenegirl.wordpress.com
So...after a couple of days to wash clothes and unwind after camp, I'm on my way to Dakar. I stay at Liberty Six, the "regional house" for traveling volunteers. This rented house, with its full-time guard, has four bedrooms full of bunk beds, bugs (seen and unseen. Something bit me a hundred times - bedbugs?), two bathrooms, a badly-equipped but functioning kitchen, half-working washing machine, and a patio where laundry is hung, and lots of beer drinking transpires in the evening.
Depending on the noise level, as you can hear everything from everywhere in this house, one might get some sleep. For a couple of days I work at the Peace Corps office up at the top of the peninsula that is Dakar. I re-submit the Tawa Fall Elementary School bathroom grant that was not funded earlier because they ran out of money. I pick up my meds from the medical wing. (We put in monthly orders for stuff we need -- baby powder, dental floss, and routine prescriptions like our malaria pills. I get doxycycline, which gives you weird dreams and sun-blindness, but the alternative prescription is worse.)
I also do some research into the Dakar school for the deaf, Centre Verbo-Tonal, and a specialist, to see if I can get an appointment for my Ahmet. (I have a health sector director trying to contact the school, as they only speak French. They seem to be on vacation. School starts here in late October.) If my brother is a hearing-aide or ear surgery candidate, I'd like to try and raise the money required. If not, or either way, he should learn sign-language, and this school has a decent reputation. His father is amenable to whatever I have planned, or at least so far he is.Yesterday he told me Ahmet should be starting first grade. "But he can't. He's deaf," he said.
I really love my family, as noisy and at times objectionable in terms of personal habits they may be. (Projectile spitting, projectile burping, blowing nose into sand mid-conversation, finger digging in nose mid-conversation, nearly zero use of soap, zero mopping of full upper lip of snot off children's faces, eating from bowl on floor, licking hand during meal, screaming all day long, ignoring crying children, hitting children, banging metal bowls on concrete all day, moving at the speed of molasses while shuffling feet, obliviousness to the concept of being quiet when someone's asleep, the mosque loud speaker screeching all hours of the day and night, the men not helping the women with heavy loads, or anything at all, actually...I could go on!) Three of my youngest Senegalese siblings: Mady, Issa and Ahmet, happen to have beautiful faces. All are vibrant, intelligent individuals with beautiful smiles.
I'm forever bringing them found clothes and shoes, toothbrushes and paste, as they have so little. They're always shivering in cold season. They have no blankets or warm clothes.
On Friday in Dakar, I attend an all-day meeting for this week's English Camp, where I am the money-dispenser and lead volunteer. Our English Camp just ended yesterday. I put up a few pictures from it on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/karen.chaffraix
English Camps are part of U.S. State Department outreach via American embassies around the world. The Public Affairs officer who came to the meeting (I can see doing that job one day) said that the U.S. government believes that English is the international language of the future, and seeks to help teach it worldwide. The elite are already equipping themselves with it, but the ACCESS program reaches the poor. Chosen teachers in junior high schools all over Senegal identify motivated students at the lower economic end of the spectrum who are already showing promise speaking English, and they get to come to a one-week, all-paid camp: 700+ Senegalese students this year. Peace Corps volunteers man the camps (in Thies: myself, Clintandra, and Hannah B.) with three local teachers assisting: Ndoumba, Lissa, and Bishar.
English Camp was more hard work. But by the end of the week we had fallen in love with these kids too, and there was lots of email and phone number exchanging during our party. My team, The Warriors, won the week's Olympics. Each team had chosen a motto, a flag and a song. (The other teams were the Best and the Eagle-Lions. "We are the Eagle-Lions because the eagle is the mascot of America. And the lion is the mascot of Senegal.")
(One of the groups at Girls Camp named itself Tears of the Sun. "We in Senegal do not cry anymore. The sun is so hot, it dries our tears before they reach our cheeks.")
The Senegalese have a habit of yelling out whatever crosses their mind at the moment, like evangelists in church, and of having simultaneous side conversations during presentations, but aside from trying to get the kids to be quiet and listen, we had a good time. By Friday I almost felt like a real teacher. And when an embassy official came to visit on our last day, he said our camp was the most fun he'd visited this year. (I know John because Kathleen and I had gone to the embassy one day to stamp and mail ten boxes of English teaching magazines. He bought us lunch in the embassy cafeteria. As he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine ten years ago, we'd had a lot to talk about.)
I got news this week from the our country director after a year of nudging him/them to let me find a less stressful place to live. Expenses commuting to Thies and cooking for myself eat up most of my allowance, which is supposed to be adequate, but is not. I want to be able to write every day. To read email. To listen to NPR. But as much as that, I want to go help my fellow volunteers at their sites, to attend SeneGad meetings, and help out with various camps and stuff. All that costs food and transportation money, which they say our allowances are big enough to cover. Ha!
I wrote a friend an email about what the director said:
Only this week, after sending an email with the subject line: None Of You Answer Email, But Here's Hoping You Read It, did [the director] finally send me an answer. "No, we won't be moving you." But, "If you can provide medical documentation of a condition that precludes you from riding your bike to Thies, and from eating your family's food, we may be able to raise your allowance."
I think Year Two, to the extent that I think I'll make it all the way through Year Two, will go by fast. The ongoing disappointments, discomfort, disasters and delusions will take a back seat to getting to the finish line. Now that we've been through a year's worth of calamities, appalling social customs, abuse by the snide and unsophisticated, animal-slaughter-as-party-time-ritual, inedible food, etc...
Yes, now that we have seen it all at least once, and now that we are quasi-conversant in Wolof, if not in French as well, accomplishing the goals we've set for ourselves will become full focus. Before we know it, we tell ourselves, we'll all be in Dakar for our close-of-service conference. We'll be talking like old-timer ex-pats, nostalgic for all things Senegalese.
By the way, the friend to whom I sent that email is in Colorado. This peace corps volunteer had written to tell me that he would not be returning to Senegal. Medical sent him home for a month of rest and doctor visits. "They say I needed a lot more counseling," he wrote. "They don't think it would be a good idea for me to come back and try to finish my service. It's just too stressful." M is 60. He'd gotten bone-thin. He started getting numbness of the arms, and had begun to cry a lot.
This guy is the 5th of our "stage" to return early. Two left the first month. One went home recently for depression, another because of an untreatable internal parasite, another was kicked out for sleeping with one too many married Senegalese men in her village. There's always talk about who's next, and why. What makes me nervous is that my stage had three people older than me. THEY ARE NOW ALL GONE. I'm now the oldest volunteer in our stage. Am I next?
On October 1st, Kathleen and I oversee another Master Farm demonstration. I'm the financier for this, as the grant money went into my bank account. Demonstrations are a big, expensive ordeal as Peace Corps insists the farmer rent chairs, a tent, and feed both breakfast and lunch to 100 people. As they explain it: "In Senegal, if there is no breakfast, no one will come, and if they come, they will leave early unless you provide lunch." I've already done one of these. You tell folks to come at 9 a.m. and they straggle in by 11, maybe. Then the lunch ladies don't bring the food (a train of women, each carrying a massive bowl on their head) until about 3:30. By then everyone is nearly faint with hunger, and some have already gone home. If lucky, some have actually listened to the poor farmer describing what worked this year, and what didn't. That's if they can hear anything over the scads of kids who've shown up for free food.
On October 5th, I get picked up in Thies by an air-conditioned, clean van and dropped off at a 5-star hotel on a Petite Cote beach, about one hour south of Dakar. Three nights, three meals a day, and three spa visits.
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