Frustrating, Lovely, Mysterious.

I've had a couple of people who know me here read my blog and come up to me and say “Gee, Sheila. I read your blog and it's amazing (of course!) but you really butter up your time here to make it sound so, well, beautiful. Why didn't you talk about all that crap you were going through in your village or how you've been so frustrated at people these past couple months?”
And my reply is all simple. This blog is public. While there are plenty of frustrations and problems and obstacles, those are mine to work through, and through all of those frustrations I am still accomplishing things, and you guys usually end up getting the end product, which is usually quite wonderful.
The truth is, sometimes it's easy to be grouchy in your village. I could probably admit that if you talked to people that know me in my village they would say that “Careful when going up to her, these days her tongue has been on fire!”
But why? Why be frustrated with your life and work in your village and in turn with the people in your village? The answer is easy! It's life! You are an American, alone in a village coming from a completely different background and you are trying to live and get things done at the same time, and sometimes, doing both of that can be hard! And it's well known for Peace Corps agroforestry volunteers that you can aim for 100% and work your butt off and only get a 10% success rate. Just imagine those constant letdowns in your daily life and add people walking up to you every day and asking for a present. ROOOAR!!! Sometimes you just gotta put that foot down. Haha.
Here's an example. This farmer guy, a guy who really talks up his desire, made a mango pepeniere. It's time to plant. Doesn't planting trees sound lovely? Ok, so you go to his house and set up a plant date and he stands you up five times, telling you each day to come back the next day. Then you finally catch him and he hasn't prepared a damn thing and you end up carrying all the trees he planted and the digging tools to his field for him. And then he plants a couple of trees and leaves the rest to his assistant while he goes and does other things. Then you find out that all the mangoes he planted are seeds from grafted mangoes, which you aren't supposed to plant. Everything you say to him about how far to plant tree from each other and why you should plant local seeds instead of grafted seeds goes in one ear, past his smiling, nodding head, and straight out the other ear. You ask him to repeat what you said and he says something in the realms of “you had porridge for breakfast.”


Ok, enough of that. Lots of cool stuff going on. Lets talk about my success! I guess I could add a few frustrations, just to add the yang to the yin, yaknow.
Trees are planted! We planted about 20 in the post de sante.
I planted (tried for 5 days to organize students to help me but failed) 25 trees in the school yard. My 6 year old brother helped, and my 2 year old sister and 3 and 5 year old neighbor boys came as well, so it was more like babysitting.

Lots of mango pepenieres were planted, which I will still need to follow up on. I ended up with a lot of extra trees and not much time left to plant so I tied a big bucket on the back of my bike, filled it with baby trees and circled the village several times giving trees out. It turns out that that is a great way to get trees planted. I gave about 30 nebadie trees (healthy leaves) to the womens group. I gave flamboyants (a perdy tree non-existant in my vill) out to people who live by the main road, and lots of other trees to random people. And I'm relatively sure these people are planting these trees. It's so easy to plant one or two at your house or field and take care of it. Then you get to tell everyone that you got a tree from Jenaba Jallo (me!)

I love my best farmer. His name is Numusara. He is like a grandpa to me. He always offers me things and never asks for a thing. Every time I show up at his house or field he is so happy. If my dog tags along and gets into ruckus and I try to control him tells me that my dog is fine (like eating his food, chewing on one of his baby trees.
On the professional side, it's nice having that ultimate farmer. The one that if you're feelin frustrated you can just go to and realize that you have a purpose! All you have to do it go to his field and he will lead you around and show you all the trees he has planted along his fence, and the papayas he has transplanted, or where he is going to plant next, etc. he goes on and on talking about the work he wants to do, and it's all great! Instead of you telling him what he could do with his field, he says, "just wait until the next time you come! I'll have cleared this whole section of the 10ft tall straw and have planted corn and 20 more papaya trees and manioc!" Anyway, I got a photo shoot with this guy. There was this time when he was leading me through some nasty grasses and my flip flop kept breaking and he tried to get me to use his shoes. Awe aint that sweet. And one great thing about now, is that my farmer is really happy! He has a lot of new grafted mango trees, and the grafted on brenches are sprouting!

So I brought my camera to Numusara's field yet again and realized that I didn't have a good pic of him and or course he welcomed my request to take pics, and even posed. Here is him beside one of his grafted mango trees (his baby!), and his thriving banans, which he is the only one in my village with bananas!

Lalala. Bleh. I don't feel like writing a blog so I'm just going to talk about nonsense .

It's Ramadan. That month where people fast. They don't eat or drink while the sun is out. If you want to know the insane reasoning behind it, or how it effects people's work and mood and strength and attitudes on life, give my cell phone a call and we will have a several hour conversation.
I'm trying to fast while I'm in my village but it's hard. I did it for two days successfully but on the third day I got in my hut after 3 hours of plantin peanuts and was real thirsty. I was alone in the household, alone in my hut, tired, sweaty, and starting me smack dab in the middle of my face was a bottle of water. Just me and it. I drank and felt guilty. It was over.

Um. yeah I've been talking a lot about farming and farming is still happening. It's my favorite spare time activity. Dalanda, my sis has her own corn and peanut field and I've franchised 50% of it. It's half mine. Well she gets all the goods but I get to do 50% of the labor. Yay! So I'm bent over planting or weeding several hours a day. I love it. It's a great work out and I love all the blisters I get on my hands and the insane rashes I get on my arms and endless ant-bites I get from working bare-footed. But all sarcasm aside, going to the fields is my favorite part of the day. It's peaceful, it's a great workout and you don't feel like you are living such a different life from them locals.
I'm trying to find different ways to approach working with the womens group so I went and worked with them on their funyo field for 4 hours. I got to hear them talking about they way they work without them smiling and nodding at me.

I told my sister, Dalanda I'd give her 2,000cfa (4 dollars) if she caught a bird with her bare hand. So she did. Then she tied it to a string, pulled out it's flight feathers and gave it to her son to play with. I sat and watched the whole “caught a bird” culture and watched the bird die a rather terrible death. Such is the way I have been learning culture these days. Which, by the way, cultural learning just don't stop, no matter how long you stay in a place. No more dares like that for me! Those birds are kinda like pests though. She caught it while it was stealing her corn she had set out to dry.

Now for the mysterious. One of my sisters that lives in my village has had a strange yet serious illness for the past months. I've always known her as the 25 year old sister that lives about 10 compounds down who comes over every day. She has a great husband and 4 kids. I see her every day in my life in the vill.
Here is her illness and her situation. Keep in mind that I'm do doctor! At the time I had the village bystandards perspective!
She had a kid that was stillborn. She went back to work the day after, recovering normally. A week later she complained of a massive headache and stomache ache, and got sick. She laid down and didn't get back up. She stopped eating and stopped talking. Day by day she lost her brain. She layed there and moaned saying over and over “ohhhh, mom, whats happening to me?” (her mom never left her side, and still hasn't). Then she stopped talking all together. She stopped having any recognition in her eyes what so ever. She could no longer control her body. She couldn't sit up, she couldn't walk, she couldn't talk. She just laid and stared. And made faces of pain. Everyone in the village said she went crazy. Her mom and kids and husband would go into the room and ask if she knew them and she would grunt “no.” She could only lay down, roll over, and grip something, like a hand.
The village nurse refused treatment without money. After money was found he made a diagnosis and didn't tell anyone what it was, just put her on a bunch of meds. I asked my brother and he said she was put on anti malaria meds, glucose, antibiotics and something to increase the blood.
She is slowly recovering. I was worried. I watched my perfectly sane sister lose her sanity. She reminded me of a vegetable that can't to anything and knows nothing. Now she eats. Now she is getting some recognition in her eyes. Slowly. She still can't control her body and can't talk.
So I looked it up online after I got back to Kedougou and I know what it is. So now am I doctor? No! But I realize how much online medical information can change a life. No one in the village has a clue what she has, even my brother, who is the medical assistant! The nurse knew what it was and did the treatments then told the family to call in an Imam to get her brains back an Imam is a Muslim magical healing man, very popular in village illnesses, I've heard lots of stories of their magical healing abilities
according to Google my sister has Cerebral Malaria, a strain of malaria that occurs in 20-50% of malaria cases. In Cerebral Malaria something stops blood flow, and deprives the brain of oxygen. This can cause all kids of problems but only in rare cases does it cause “cerebellar ataxia,” which I looked up on Wikipedia, which is what my sister has. It basically puts you in brain vegetable state without being in a coma. It's like your brain is in a coma (can't do anything, move or think) but you don't lose consciousness. According to the website, the craziness last 4 weeks and goes away withing 1-2 weeks after treatment. So should she heal, which would be a miracle to these people and I know, would be credited to the Imam!
I was really scared for my sis. I watched her brain die, and hopefully will see it come back to life. I'm glad I looked that up!
Ok, enough for now. Keep livin!

Still Here

Ok so I just spent a bunch of time in my village and a whole lot of stuff happened. Actually, I wasn't planning on coming back to town for another couple of weeks but I was drawn here by electricity. In other words, I needed to charge my phone, upload my pictures and catch up on blogs!

I must announce, I got my new camera! I've been taking tons of pictures, of course, so expect me to post a lot! Here are some just for fun.

Farming

So I guess the themes of this two and a half weeks would be work and fun. It seems like it would be an easy thing to split work from fun. You know, when are you doing your job and when are you not doing anything? Even when you are wandering around your village doing nothing it still seems like you are doing something. Just having a two minute conversation on the road with someone can cause quite an exchange of culture, which is part of my job here. Then there are those days when I don't really leave the compound but end up working harder than most days. I've been helping out as much as I can in the house as well as in the fields in my spare time. In other words, I'm staying busy!
Ok, so I guess I'll talking Agroforestry stuff. That will be work.
Two things went on recently. August is here, so it's the month of tree planting, and also, on the 5th of August I had a grafting formation in my village. I'll start with the grafting formation. For those of you who don't know, mangos are big here in senegal. There are two kinds of mangos, local, small, sweet mangos that are everywhere, and then there are giant mangos. They ripen at different times, and the giant/grafted mangos make a lot more money for people than small mangos do. So, in order to get a good grafted mango tree you need to be able to do this very specific little technologocal thing called grafting. That is where you take one young local mango tree, a tree that is a year or two old, and you combine it with a grafted mango tree. This means that you combine two trees and get the best of both trees. Local mango trees have roots that better withstand the dry season, while the grafted mango trees give bigger fruits that ripen at a different time, keeping the flow of mangoes coming. If you learn this technology of combining two trees, which is just simple yet specific information that just about no villagers know, you can graft a tree really easily. So the formation was meant for a small number of people from several different villages. We ended up having about 12 people from 8 different villages. My sister made lunch for them all and throughout the whole formation I ended up biking back and forth regulating any technical problems, aka supplies. I thought the formation would be easy but boy was I wrong! finding all the people and explaining to the hundreds of other peo[people that they couldn't come was quite a task. There were some negative quirks on the day of the formation as well, like locals inviting themselves to the formation after I had already refused many people who had asked to come in my village. Argh!
Photos of the formation: Here we all are in a meeting talking about what grafting is. We got a local grafting expert to bethe formation teacher. It was Peace Corps who just organized it all.

Here they are learning how to graft a tree. First they watch and listen, then they do it themselves! Very hands on lessons.

Oh, and I did another hike to the mountain top villages. This time I was accompanied by my 15 year old brother, Soulaiman, and Phil. Here are some photos!


So, other than that, it's tree planting time! Along with that I feel I should introduce yet another group of French people that have come to give a helping hand to my village. This time there are five, and like before, it is great not being the only tubab in the village! This group's main focus was AIDS and education. They did causeries on AIDS, and spent a lot of time with the local youth of Thiabedji doing exchanges of cultures. I loved watching the eyes light up in the villagers when they learned something new, like how they dance in Paris! Anyway, one of the the first things I did with our visitors was plant some trees in the village health center. groforestry and

health come together! that was fun.

As for the rest of the tree planting, it is underway and I think I will talk about it more in my next blog.
So, what did I do for fun? Well the thing that comes to mind first probably wouldn't be considered fun, but it was! I farmed a lot. These days that consists of weeding acres and acres of land with a little tool called a keri, by hand.. Sometimes I did 4 hour stretches. It hurts your back a lot to bend over and you always end up drenched in sweat and covered in dirt. But it's great, really! There was a cultivating party at my house recently. A group of girls got together and weeded my family's field in exchange for a feast and a dance party that lasted until 4:00am! This has to have been one of my favorite days in Thiabedji! During the day I was going back and forth between watching the gals (and some guys as well) working and the field and back to home where there was a team of some great women preparing food for some 60 people! And it was all centered around my sister, Dalanda. My family explained to me that every year the girls pick a woman in the village who they love, and the work/food and party exchange takes place. Omar, my sisters wife, killed our only sheep for this party. It was big! Here are some of the happenings in the field:

And at home, the preparing of the meal.

Then the meal was taken to the field.

One of the French students had a birthday and as a surprise, they had rented a car that was to take them all to the famous waterfall in dindefello. Well, lucky me, I got invited to come along! In truth, I have been a bit ashamed that I haven't been to this waterfall yet. I feel like I am the only volunteer in my region that hasn't been there. Until now! We took a 2.5 hour ride on a really rought road to get there, walked 20 minutes to the waterfall, and then just relaxed, had a picnic, swam, and made tea m it was time to go. Haha. the tea at the waterfall was a bit of a stretch. Two locals friends of ours from the village were also invited and they brought a cot, a propane tank, and all the fixings to make ataaya (tea). It was hilarious to see all these white people there in their swimsuits with backpacks, sitting on rocks, and then there was, at the head of the river going away from the waterfall, my two buddies on their cot cookin up tea in their city clothes. I got a picture of this, which in my opinion, is priceless!
Waterfall pics as well :)

Lots of fun things happened, really. I got to show the French visitors some of my favoirite quaint mango orchards. We all farmed my sister's field together. There were soccer games and other nighttime parties. Most of all I've just been having a lot of fun spending time with my ssister and the French students, and all our friends!
Well, thats all for now. Until next time

People

I suppose this entry will be about the month of July because, well, I haven't written much about the month and now it's almost over. How time flies here when you're having fun! Heck, even if you're not having fun, you look back and realize how quickly it is all passing.

I have discovered that the 4th of July in Kedougou is quite well known throughout the country to all Senegal Peace Corps Volunteers. It's the party, and I must say, we had quite a party at our regional house. The planning started months in advance with budget planning, job designation and activity ideas. We anticipated about 80 people and lot and behold, about 80 people showed up,not including local friends that came. Kedougou is one of the more exotic regions in the country so volunteers often like to come here to get their "nature fix," by biking to waterfalls or going to a part of the Gambia river where there are hippos. Then there is your floating down the river to the local hotel to get your warthog sandwich, which is becoming a Kedougou norm. Anyway, a lot of region exploring went on but everyone was at the party for the day of the party. On the day of the party the Peace Corps had an activity that involved the locals, to help promote and educate the people about what the peace corps is and teach them a bit about our country. We did a 4k run around the city! The run was open to all and organized by two volunteers in Kedougou, Alan and Thomas. The radio advertised it, the pooliticians reglated it. There was a tent and Djs and American music, free cold water, chairs, registration, and for those not running, games with prizes. It was a blast! I think about 80 people ran, inclusing about 15 volunteers and the entire Kedougou police and Military forces. Holy crap those guys are in amazing shape. Anyway, the volunteer that got 1st place among volunteers got 18th place amongst the whole group. Which is still pretty darn fast considering that the 2nd place volunteer got like 32nd place.

The party was fun as well and included a lot of music, food, games and even fireworks! The African touch happenened just after it got dark when I line of traditionally dressed Basari warriors came parading through the back door in a straight line, doing their warrior dance and hooting and hollering. All the Americans gathered up to watch, and danced as well and we were delighted when the end of the line came around, to see an old lady about 5 feet tall taking up the tail end of the line, just dancing away.

Ok, on to the next thing. After the party I went back to my village, but not alone! I brought Phil with me. I know you must be asking yourself, "Who is Phil?" Well, Phil is Phil! Phil is a guy who is in Senegal doing research for the Fulbright institute on the politics of gold mining in Senegal. He lives in Dakar but travels all around talking to gold miners of all levels of gold mining, and organizations and companies and stuff. I guess that kind of explains it. Well Phil has been to my village before to look at the gold mining that it going on. I know I've written about it before. It's a really small scale, under the table artisan gold mine, and now that it's farming season, there are only about 5 miners working on the mountain. Phil is doing a lot of work with my gold miners and if I tried to explain what kind of work he was doing it would just confuse you all, so if you want to know about it just call my cell phone and be prepared for hours of super exciting and quite philosophical conversation. But really, what he is doing it pretty darn cool and I can't wait to see how all his research mixes together. The gold miners in my village definitely love him, thats for sure. Here is a picture taken by phil of Tuncara. This man not only gold mines, but he also farms, has a young orchard, and is our village's only baker. He is one of the best multi-taskers I've ever known, and he does all of his tasks well.

There are also, don't forget, 6 French people in my village. They were getting pretty settled, well, as settled as you can get on a three week stay in a relatively remote African village. There was daily play day still, and random adventures. They also did another malaria skit mixed with a dance party with music. It was basically the same play but this time it was bigger and better. This time they had a microphone, a much bigger crowd, and all the enders there to support them, they had several doctors to share their knowledge, and even personal testimonies from the locals! I did a project with the French people as well. We put some money and effort together to make a large batch of Neem Lotion. Neem lotion is a locally produced lotion made from the leaf of a local tree that naturally repels mosquitoes. Yay! We spent a long time circline the village and handing out the lotion and explaining its purpose to the locals. The locals loved the lotion and I've been trying to find a way to get the women's group to start making the lotion to sell, because people loved it.
Ok, so more stuff happened but lets move on

Phil went home, the French people went home, and then I went back to Kedougou to take part in a big project that was going on in Kedougou. The Kedougou volunteers had teamed up with an organization called Netlife, who was planning on distributing about 14,000 mosquito nets to every single bed in the region of Saaraya, which is a HUGE region just beside Kedougou. Netlife bought the nets and got them here but asked for our help in distributing them because of our experience in communicating with the locals and our knowledge of how to get around. Well, one of the volunteers took charge of organizing the whole thing. That is Matt. Boy did he work hard! Then he needed our help for three weeks in the actual distribution. Volunteers worked for from a few days to all three weeks. I worked for about 8 days.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for this! What an amazing experience! Both good and bad, fun and stressful, and it was all rapid fire and non stop adventure. I don't care to give all the details, but here are some experiences that just stand out.

A couple of fun crazy people. Crazy people are everywhere in ever culture, but these two I'm going to mention.
In Saaraya, the regional capital (it's a big village, not even a city), there is a young man who doesn't speak and spends all day walking around with a radio, walking up to people, and cracking their knuckles, both on fingers and toes. He just walks up to you, sticks his hand out like he wants to shake it, then takes your hand with both ofhis hands and cracks each one of your knuckles, then he takes the other hand and does it as well. If you are sitting, he will then move on to your feet and crack those too, but it's not as common because he usually encounters people who are standing. At first it's a bit strange but then you see him walk over tto a group of people who live in the city, and it seems as if they almost wait in line to get their knuckles cracked by him. Then there are those who simply refuse to give their hand to him when he puts his hand out, so he calmly moves on to the next person. So, Saaraya has its own knuckle cracking man. He came up to me twice and I only let him crack my knuckles once. I'm not really into that... haha.

Then there was the crazy guy of one of the villages we went to to distruibute. He was probably about 40 years old. Well I was in a room full of mosquito nets and he was excited to get his mosquito net so he kept coming into the room with the nets and doing little solo improv skits. He was a karate man, a bronco rider from a rodeo, a hunter in the forest, and someone who accidentally sat on a porcupine. He was very animated and loud with all his skits. He always gathered quite an audience and everyone always burst out laughing when he did a skit and he gave them all high-fives. The man who was helping me translate, who lived in the village said that this man was off his rocker, yet harmless.

Off-road adventuring! People in American pay loads of money to explore the wilderness in a 4x4. Imagine doing it for free with a local ambulance driver from dawn to dusk. And this off roading was nothing like... well, off roading. I guess it was. Sometimes we were driving on roads meant only for bikes. So basically we were trudging through 2-3ft tall grass and mud, weaving through trees and bushes, seeing only thick, dense, neon green forest from every angle, listening to the driver tell stories about what you should and shouldn't do when you come into contact with a lion. We passed so many river crossings that seemed unpassable at first that by the time we were done, we didn't even take a second glance at the seemingly unpassable parts. Our driver's name was Gouda, like the cheese. He was a, and I quote, "fucking badass." that man can drive!

Well, we did get stuck in the mud once. I was laying in the back of the vehicle, exhausted, on bags and bags of empty mosquito net bags with six live chickens tied up beside me protesting at every bump when suddenly I realized that we were no longer going forward and the tires under me were only spinning. Then we stopped and I hear those words you ever want to hear from your badass driver, the one who can drive through anything,. "Oo,o, c'est grave." or "This is not good." So what to do when stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere with no cars within probably 75 miles, no cell phone signal, and no tools to get the car unstuck? Is it the end of the world? Heck no! All we needed was man power, and we weren't too far from a village full of men made of pure muscle that we just gave a bunch of mosquito nets to. So we sent a message to the village via someone we found on a motorcycle, and about 10 men came running to the rescue, faster than any tow-truck would ever have gotten to someone broken down on an American highway. They looked at the situation, had a brief huddle, gave the words and every man scattered into the forest like lions! They scattered and disappeared amongst the trees. They all came back at the same time loaded with huge tree branches covered with leaves. They dug the excess mud out from under the car in a second, and put the branches in the tracks to give the tired something to grab. Then they did another huddle, and Hut, hut! They all, single file, walked briskly in a straight line, forward on the trail. Five minutes later they came back with rocks, and big ones. 3 or 4 piled on their heads or cupped in their shirts. They put the rocks under the tires to give the tires something to sit on. Then they all got behind the car and pushed as it tried to go forward. No luck but a bit of movement. They readjusted the rocks and sticks and this time told the car to go backwards as they pushed. And let me tell you, 10 African men can push hard. The car moved more, but didn't get unstuck. They adjusted the rocks one more time. Got behind the car, told it to go, and pushed. The car leaped out of the mud and went zooming on forward as the locals jumps in the air and clapped, hooting and hollering with joy. Then they thanked us for the nets and started walking back to their village, covered from head to toe with mud.

People. We dealt with lots of people who have a very, very different perspective than us, and a very different way of thinking than us. Sometimes, when your head is full of the technicallities of the job you are trying to do, it's hard to remember that the locals really have no idea what you are doing for them, other than giving them a present. We got so many "gimme, gimme, gimme!" attitudes. We had so many frustrated people amongst the excitement. It really was up to us to organize the people and teach them what we were actually doing for them. It took a few villages until we started knowing how to get the people into a mindset of what we were actually trying to do for them, other than give them a present. Each village was different. Some were big and some were absoutely tiny and completely isolated. I distributed alone in a village of 83 people, 6 households. Nobody in the entire village had every gone to school. There was no school in the village. Of all the people, one man spoke a little bit of Pular (in this region the language is Malinke, not Pular), and one man spoke a little bit of French that he learned because he picked it up by visiting the neighboring village. In other words, he is a genius that never went to school a day in his life. Many of the villages had absolutely no medicine of any kind. Luckily every village had a motorcycle though, and it could be used in case of emergency. Unless, of course, it rains a lot and that motorcycle can't cross the river, which tends to be the case a lot in the rainy season.
Well, I think this is long enough. Even though there was so much more!

Oh and all these pictures are borrowed. I should have my new camera soon though.
Until next time!