On water storers

I thought owning a fleet of buckets would increase the seating capacity of our hut. These 5-gallon buckets manufactured in Dakar resemble any 5-gallon paint/utility bucket in the states but they lack the earnest rigidity of the buckets I grew up with. Sitting on these things with their soft rubber tops is unnerving, like sitting on a wicker chair with only a few wicker strands left spanning the seat. And because buckets are expensive (relative to our incomes of $10/day) and are not sold in our town combined with the fact that our hauling and storing of water depends on them, sitting on 'em is just not the done thing at the home of Ibrahima Cissokho Jr. and Sadjoe Tigana Jr.

When we bought these buckets in Kedougou-meme (the city of Kedougou), I envisaged the previously mentioned purposes of multi-bucket ownership. But it was only tonight, more than a month since we arrived in town and a few days after we cooked chili for our host family—more than 20 people ate that meal with beans aplenty leftover to share with my counterpart, Moussa—that I glimpsed a bit of how our household spending is different from our host family's. The Cissokhos own some sheep, goats, guinea hens, some nice huts, a TV and a freezer. They have invested for the long term and our money has gone toward smaller-ticket purchases. But, we have shiny new green buckets and theirs are older and in another life contained palm oil and a few may have carried gasoline from time to time.

The story goes, we cooked the meat and onions for the chili at our place but hauled a full bucket of already soaked beans to our host family's compound some distance away because the fam cooks over a wood fire, which is cheaper than gas which we cook with, and the beans had to simmer for six hours. Well, the meal was great and went by quickly; some people were puzzled at the absence of a thick layer of oil on the sauce but they dug in anyway, and our host brother Soba went kind of crazy over the Sriracha we brought.

When we went home that night we forgot our bucket and it wasn't until this afternoon that we realized the bucket cluster was diminished by one. At first, I thought my count was off. So I recounted our four remaining buckets, several times. Perhaps the bucket was just out of place, perched somewhere out of sight in our one door, two window round hut with no cabinets, counters or surfaces generally other than roof, wall and floor? I glanced around once, twice...and still no bucket. Then it dawned on me. One of the rowdy party of kids who helped us weed yesterday must have run off with the water bucket we set out for them. I am sure I did see two kindergarten-agers take with them the hoe-head they unearthed—is a lone bucket so different? Yes, it is, and my suspicions were soon proved ridiculous. Anne remembered that we'd moved those beans with it and it must still be at Cissokho kunda, our host family's compound. When Anne was over there she asked about it and was told, “yes, it was here but our sister Djionkounda took it to town with her” (town is really just the cluster of five or ten buildings at the cross-roads of the Bamako and Bembou roads). Turns out, the bucket was there all along, sitting washed and ready in Djionkounda's bedroom.

We live at a funny intersection (not just the Bamako-Bembo roads crossing) in society. Our community is developed enough to have pavement running through it, almost two hundred meters of sidewalk, electricity (for two chunks of time each day) and two public water faucets of running water (running in the morning) and a hardware store but it is so underdeveloped in other ways. Trash is either thrown to the wind or thrown in the fire, farmers plow their fields with a short-handled hoe, the school doesn't have working sanitation for the students (but it does for the teachers) and utility goods like lidded five-gallon buckets are not for sale. So, people sporting new buckets must have recently been to the city and in their leisure had nothing better to buy and lug back in a car with ten other people in it than buckets.

Don't let me exaggerate, good buckets with tops are not exactly rare or expensive, but they do cost about four dollars each—though unskilled labor here is only worth about five dollars for a long day's work. So, in purchasing power parity terms, a bucket is almost as valuable as the labor of a well-digger or fence builder, even if you can't really sit on it when you eat breakfast or type a blog entry.

Since my last post, life here has been a flurry of Jaxanke/Malinke practice, Community Based Training host family goodbyes, Peace Corps language proficiency tests, swearing-in, goodbyes with fellow stagieres as newly minted volunteers began to take-off for far-flung, donkey-cart or mountain bike accessible villages. Life has brought moving, many learning sessions, and the eating of much sometimes delicious rice and bitter tomatoes and other foods I am beginning to enjoy.

Yesterday, the day after my 27th birthday!, brought something new. We woke early and drove for 11 hours across one of the hotter regions of the continent of Africa on one of the hottest days of the year and after trying to sleep and trying to read and trying to cool off by pouring hot water out of my nalgene on my shirt and hat and bandana I took time to just sit and try not to think or study or plan and instead just be with the heat. The process of being with heat was natural, almost inexorable, but it was a good time and I think I realized something I had not understood about the language I have been learning. In the Jaxanke culture people greet each other thoroughly and eventually the greeter asks about the state and the condition of the greetee's life by asking if they are with certain things.

For instance, a typical greeting begins thus:

Kor tanante (are you not with the evil? Or, are you in/with peace?)
Tanante (I am not with evil)
Heera siita (Are you with peace?)
Heera doron (I am with peace only)

Greetings continue apace until the state of the family, the community and environmental conditions are inquired after. This lengthy set-piece conversation has seemed perfectly perfunctory and impersonal to me but it is not. The Senegalese style of greeting is an effective method to keep relationship ties intact and it is an intentional act of neighborliness. And the realization I had was that with its emphasis on the immediate state of the greetee, mindfulness ala Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, dominates the discussion in Senegal. For all the hand-wringing we hear about young men spending all their afternoons making attaya, at least these guys know what they are doing with their time and they accept the fact. This realization is a little liberating because I usually feel guilty about how worthless I am during the hot part of the day. But now I know a little better how to be with the heat and hopefully the next five-weeks until I can return to Kedougou-meme and drink cold water will be more chill, if not cool.

To sum up, during my torrid trip moving south to Kedougou, after Peace Corps classroom cultural and technical training had ended and I had passed my language proficiency assessment with a (semi)acceptable score my purpose for living in Senegal finally seemed clear as I sat on that old, sprung seat and I felt (momentarily) comfortable and almost grateful for the varied sensations of life. And then, I felt really hot and sweaty again and wished I could go swimming or drink ice water.
Well, heera doron.

Curious Images

After we unloaded from the Coaster bus on our first day in Senegal this oil drum caught my eye. Sitting between the huge training center generators, the garden and the clothesline, this OiLibia drum was probably empty before Libya's revolution. Its situation signifies several differences between the US and Senegal. Waste removal here is complicated and recycling does not occur, to my knowledge; generators are necessary, located anywhere people have money and they are thirsty for petrol; and, finally, that oil is not just measured in barrels, it also arrives in barrels.

 This tire-topped cinder block cairn is actually a goat fence for a mango tree. Goats in Senegal wander unfettered in the streets and anyone with plans to garden or raise a tree must take strong precautions.

This nighttime rainstorm in Mbour caught our host family by surprise. April is the halfway point in the hot, dry season but things have been unseasonable this year. Hopefully, this indicates an early wet season--for the sake of the farmers whose wet season last year arrived late and ended early--but also for the sake of volunteers living in Kedougou not far from Mali, one of the hotter corners of Africa.



This picture is of the back of an Alhamdoulilahi bus, or Alham in PCV-speak. These buses, their associated sept-place long-range taxis and many freight and dump trucks are run by the Wolof-majority Mouride Brotherhood and their typical age must be near 30 years.

 This picture shows someone's forgotten British Berkefeld 7-liter water purifier standing at full height. These fixtures of volunteers' huts accomplish many a task: the top can serve as a mirror, a plate or a frisbee and the rest of it is useful against water-borne disease, so I'm told. Though I've used my purifier to clean all my water, I've still been sick three times. Maybe food is to blame.

A baobab tree, nature's very own shade-hut, Pepto-Bismol dispensary, and road-side stand sign. These trees seem abundant in western Senegal, maybe because they stand-out on the horizon and make landscape shots interesting (my blog background pic sports a few of these), but as with most plants and animals in these parts, they are probably not as abundant as they should be. Apart from their shade and beautification value, their fruit is delicious and effective at slowing diarrhea. During volunteer visit, I drank two large glasses of baobab fruit smoothie before learning about its stool-binding properties. I wasn't regular for a week. Small price to pay for one of the best fruits in the world.

Sub-saharan Africa: sand, heat...rivers and monkeys?

Returning from our volunteer visit experience in Kedougou we saw baboons, monkeys, a warthog and, surprisingly, rivers! Temperatures in southeastern Senegal are hot (130 degrees F. day after day in May!) so the proximity of our village to rivers and forests is reassuring.

The suburbs

Welcome to my blog! This is my first post but I have been living in Senegal for six weeks. Posts will not be chronological because I want to both describe events that are recent and I want to re-hash older experiences that seem relevant.

I am finishing my Volunteer Visit in a place that magically provides Wi-Fi but we just spent the preceding days in more rugged circumstances. Last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights Anne and I visited our home for the next two years in Senegal’s under-developed southeast. It is a town with between 3,000 and 6,000 residents. Cette ville is large by the standards of Kedougou and is expanding rapidly as gold miners and allied industries rush to the area. From it we can reach Dakar in a long day riding in a sept-place (long-range taxi) and, if not for their recent military coup, we could easily visit Bamako, capitol of Mali.

The discovery of gold in this area has ushered in pavement, lories, HIV and methyl-mercury pollution. Along with the few small government agency posts in town, there is a carpentry/metal shop, a couple boutiques (corner stores), a hardware store, some meat sellers, a restaurant or two (restaurant here means a hot 10’x10’ room stocked with Fanta, beans, eggs and village bread (a little like ciabatta), and two robinets (public faucets).  The town also has a few public wells, but these are sketchy deep pits filled sticks and trash. Lately, the town has had water shortages and as the hot season heats up I imagine life could become pretty dry. However, our ancien, Leah--who is just now finishing her service—has reassured us that water shortages do not last long. When the robinets dried-up a few weeks ago, the entire town protested, marching down the road drumming their empty benoirs.

During this trip we also met our counterparts, residents chosen by the community to facilitate our integration and support our projects. Anne has two counterparts, Monsieur Sy (a social worker) and Sira (a community health worker who is involved in the women’s group, speaks French and has worked with Tostan). Moussa, my counterpart, runs the community radio station, runs a restaurant and is everywhere in the town.
As for projects, I am interested in several local issues: methyl-mercury exposure among artisanal miners, the establishment of a community incinerator for burning plastic (residents burn tons of plastic bags and bottles in open fires…ugh!), and starting a Roots & Shoots program in the area. Roots & Shoots is a program created by the Jane Goodall Institute to foster awareness of and advocacy for conservation among young people. On the ground, other issues and projects may tie up my time but I am so excited to finish Peace Corps training (in five weeks) and give 'em a shot. On the other hand, leaving our family in Mbour will be tough. They have been great! But Mbour is a beach town and we will definitely visit over the next two years; so the parting should not be too sad.