What's the hardest part of being here?

The easy, gut response answer has little to do with development, which is what this blog is supposed to be about (sorry for not posting as often as I thought I could by the way, it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought); but I’ll go into that a little anyway for the honest answer.

The Fam.

I miss things in the States - food, family, friends, and the overall ease of just existing. In America the customer is always right, it is easy to take for granted just how much you expect that treatment. That concept has quite made it to Senegal yet and can be frustrating – there are no lines, you need to barge through the crowd and get up to that counter. Once there you might have to put up a fight to get the right price, or to get any kind of service at all. Be sure to greet everyone or you might wind up losing any bartering power you might have had.

It gets tiresome needing to plan your trips to the market based on what money you have on you, don’t expect change for that 10 mille bill to be at just any boutique you go to. If you want fruit or any kind of food really you should be sure to have very close to correct change… but not too close, they might not have the smaller coins either.

On a more personal end, I’ve reached the one-year mark in Senegal a week or so ago and miss seeing the faces I was so used to seeing before coming here. Pictures, Facebook, and Skype can only do so much – It’s been a year since I’ve hugged my parents, just sat with my best friend and went over all our problems. It’s shocking how much those late night talks can be missed.

Some Friends from home

My parents love to work in the garden; I want to see what they’ve done. Did my dad finish off the basement yet? My cousin’s children are growing up fast and there are two new ones that I have yet to meet. It goes the other way to, there are a few faces I’m never going to see again. Moving away from that train of thought, friends have been getting engaged and married… or even just finding a new boy/girlfriend… but these are all sacrifices I knew I was making when I signed up for this and the bottom line is that I do not regret it.

Moving into now what I think was more the point of the question – As I said, I was prepared to make sacrifices when I signed up for the Peace Corps. I was expecting to be in a small village with no electricity or running water. I’m not going to lie; I was hoping to live in a thatched roof hut. I didn’t expect to have the cell phone service that came to my village in October either.

Squat toilets have been a fun new experience – and can be their own adventure when it comes to the public variety. Sorry it it’s too much information, but toilet paper is a thing of the past unless it’s a western toilet. Once you get the system down a bucket bath (a misnomer, it’s really more of a ‘cup shower’) it pretty enjoyable. Heck, leave your bucket out in the sun for a while and you’ve even got hot water, be careful though because it can get too hot.

My hut has definitely become my home base here in Senegal. I’ve made an agreement with the ants who live in the walls, but am having a turf war with those living in my latrine. I’ve gotten used to the farm animals that hang around the family compound – I have my favorite goats and the ones I chase away on sight.

All that said, for me right now, the most difficult thing about living here is transportation. More often than not I choose to bike the 85km between my village and the regional capitol of Kédougou. Cars make the trip most days, leaving my village in the morning and coming back in the afternoons. The thing is there is no set time and depending on the car you might be stopping at every village along the way. The ride from Kédougou has taken under two hours and more than three and a half. The car has left anywhere between 3 and 7 PM, sometimes not leaving at all after sitting any waiting for it for four hours. Now that the rains have been gone for a while the dust is back so everyone is getting off the cars a shade more red than when they got on. I won’t go into details on the effect of that dust on the inside of your nose.

Cars will usually not go unless they are full – meaning each person is packed in as tightly as possible. Think about being crowded by your current standards, then add a couple more people. Also, I’ve ridden next to a man holding three live chickens. Sorry PETA, but I’ve never seen anyone hesitate to stick a sheep into a rice sack (all but its head so it can breathe) then strap it to the top of the car. In those cases you need to be careful next to the open windows in case the animal has to use the bathroom.

For the longer rides, where you have to move across country – to the capitol, Dakar, for example – it is much the same story. For those trips we fill up 7-Places, station wagons from the 60s or 70s that not surprisingly hold 7 passengers. We’re lucky in Senegal, I’ve heard they are called 8 or 9-Places in other countries. Pretty soon they are all going to just fall apart beyond repair and the public transportation system will crumble. Luckily though each driver is a pretty decent mechanic so when the car stops he can usually get it started again – oftentimes just pouring some water on something. It’s not out of the realm of possibility though for your driver to call someone else to come take you the rest of the way if he can’t fix the car fast enough. It’s convenient, but there can be a lot of waiting.

The conclusion here is that public transportation is never comfortable, you always wind up waiting for something, and it is relatively expensive. Despite your overpaying though most cars are still falling apart. I avoid it when I can, but I’ll always need to take it from time to time – I’m learning to turn off the part of me that cares about all this stuff in an effort to keep my blood pressure at a reasonable place.