Occupy Khossanto*

I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. My breakfast porridge is coming later, now that cold season has kicked in nobody wants to get out of bed, even to make breakfast.  It’s SO cold - like all the way down into the 60s.  I get to snuggle up under all my sheets and blankets (Thanks Jay this is the only time of year I can use it), and I’ve always liked being under the covers.  It’s a welcome change to sleeping with no sheets and starfishing so that no part of my body is touching another.

Breakfast came nonetheless and I was forced to start my day, which was in fact a fairly rough start.  Roughness aside there certainly was a lot more noise than usual coming from the Case des Tous Petits (think pre-school then take away all the money) than the toddlers usually make.  That’s when I noticed host siblings had an urgency in them that usually isn’t there when they said they were going with the other students.

Turns out they went on strike!  I was annoyed at first because there are already so many reasons that the students don’t get enough time in school – teacher strikes, holidays, the whole affecté thing where teachers are not necessarily from anywhere nearby – but I had nothing better to do since everyone I work with was either taking part in the strikes or trying to resolve the situation so I went to check it out… from a safe distance.

I’m not going to lie and say I’m super informed about all of the Occupy Place demonstrations, but much like the “Arab Spring” the name seems apropos.  As I asked around to get the reason for the strike, that’s the word they used… well the French word, I got a few nonsense answers like because there’s no fence around the school.  I think that her dad was just talking about having to go cut bamboo for the school fence so she had it in her head. What the real reason the students took to the street was because of the dust. Give me a second, I’ll explain.

The road through Khossanto is just a dirt road, but it is heavily trafficked by transport heading to and from the gold mines.  Many of the vehicles seem fairly oblivious to the fact that they are going through a village and speed right through, even going so far as to swerve around the speed bumps.  Not only is this dangerous, I’ve been informed that someone was killed last month biking just outside of the village, but it also kicks up a lot of dust which gets everywhere – even when I have my hut all closed up an amazing amount of dust still makes its way in.  Another concern is the status of our lungs thanks to all the red dust in the air with all the schools (primary, middle, and aforementioned pre) are along that road… as is most of the village honestly.

By the time I got out there the students had stopped three tanker-trucks heading towards the mines and 3 pick-ups heading to Kedougou.  By the end of everything there were a few more bits of public transport and mine cars caught in the line.  I had seen a group of older students head to the meeting place with the PCR (local government official) so I decided to find somewhere high to get a good view of the street. Right when I got into position is when the Gendarme (police) showed up… with their riot gear.

I’m all about better safe than sorry, and the Gendarmes were definitely peaceful, as were the students, but I was worried their jumping into riot gear might scare the students into making a stupid mistake and throwing one of those stones they had used to build their road blocks.  They didn’t – everyone was very civil.  The students would yell and make noise ever so often, but it all seemed good-natured.  Villagers were let through the line if they needed, I heard one woman offer up an “Allah mu al deema,” “May God help you all.” That’s not in our sarcastic context but an honest wishing that the students be helped.

As I asked around everyone seemed to agree that the dust was an issue and that with this much traffic the road should be paved.  It would change Khossanto a lot – it’s just unclear how the project would be funded.  I’m fairly positive it’s not on the government’s short list of roads to pave.  Although the mines would benefit from the road it’s my opinion that if they were willing to pay for it the work would already be done.  Who knows what’s going to happen though, as the crowd dispersed I asked a friend if it was finished, “It’s not done yet, next Monday.”

Taa Bota!!*

There are two events in village that always send me into an emotional reaction that I don’t quite know what to do with. The first of those is a death - particularly the way women react. There is an almost ghostly wail they will go into, fairly often they are able to work themselves into such a frenzy that they will start to shake uncontrollably. I can’t help but feel for them in this display and for the loss of this individual as a whole. It is consoling that everyone knows that death is a pert of everyday life and that the wailing is, to a certain extent, what you are supposed to do. Everything just builds, like crying at a funeral; it’s almost impossible not to, even if you hardly know the person.

The second, for me at least, is infinitely more terrifying in its unpredictability and the palpable fear in the air. If you understand Malinké you may have already guessed this one thanks to the title – it’s fire. Khossanto just put one out and I decided to start writing this post as a way to calm me down.

In America, nine times out of ten, by the time you know there is a fire somewhere the fire trucks have beat you there (or in some cases led you there). You can watch in awe knowing everything is under control simply hoping that everyone is okay… and even that can be stressful. The village has no fire department, no running water so no fire hydrants. What Khossanto does have are wells around or past the 100ft mark and buckets or tubs like what I do laundry in to carry the water.

Anyway, today is Tabaski – the best descriptor I’ve heard is that it’s sort of like a Muslim Christmas here in Senegal. The Family killed a nice big ram and we will be eating most of it today for lunch. So everyone has their shiny new clothes on and we just got back from prayer service. One of my host sisters is getting her hair finished up at the last minute when another host sister comes rushing into the compound. We’ve all already felt the energy go up nearby and started hearing people yelling by the time she gives the call to arms, “Taa Bota!” (literally: Fire Left!).

This seems to happen every couple months in Khossanto, so unfortunately the feeling is familiar. Everyone rushes to their water and hoofs it over to wherever the fire is. I never keep enough water to actually do anything and I never want to get in the way so unfortunately spend too much time just pacing around my compound looking for a way to help. I’ve found a good spot for me to help is by lifting the large tubs onto people’s heads (if I were to do this I’d spill more water than would make it to the fire to be honest), the next step I’d want is to get a rope and bucket and be at the well pulling water for everyone. Usually the fire is out before anyone needs to go pulling from the well, but this one was by far the worst fire I’ve seen in village and smoke was still billowing when all the water was out.

Luckily there is a well in my family compound so all of the panic just comes rushing right into where I live. People are yelling in search of more water, there is the general din of people yelling where the fire is, my host dad is yelling commands to do things people are already doing, everyone’s trying to make sure all the kids in the compound are accounted for – among all that panic people also realize that the fire could spread. This is kind of a big deal since everyone has thatched roofs, fortunately this is actually a fairly easy task as long as you have around 10 people. The thatch is supported by a lattice of bamboo, which in most cases are simply sitting on top of the walls of the hut. Somewhere in my host dad’s yelling of commands he decided it was time to move the roof of the little hut we have in the corner for the goats so I pitched in with that real quick. Thankfully that turned out to be unnecessary.

One reassuring thing is that once the fire is out, which always seems to happen so suddenly, is that EVERYONE is talking about what happened… learning from their mistakes. In this case there are 2 stories that I heard. The less popular theory, which came from a seemingly more reliable source, is that someone took the coals from making tea and tossed them into their corn. Rainy season has been over for a little bit now so all the corn is pretty dry, so supposedly the corn started on fire then it spread to the roof of the hut in question. The more popular belief is that some kids were preparing tea with a big propane tank between to closely placed huts and turned the gas up too high. Either way it led to a huge fire.

That already seems like it happened so long ago today; life is back to normal here… well, as normal as it can be on Tabaski. Soon everyone will eat sheep until we pass out, then wake back up get dressed up in the fancy party clothes and greet everyone we know.

 Happy Tabaski!

Quick Pic Post 6

Bonus Photo: The key is that "thi" makes a "ch" sound.

Get it?!  Make sure you read the whole sign.

Camp de Jeunesse

Some time ago, not nearly as long ago as I should have, I put out a plea to a lot of people I know to donate to the Kédougou Youth Camp (Camp de Jeunesse). I asked for a TON of money and wound up getting a lot more than I expected so I just want to through out a thank you to everyone who donated or helped to spread the word (I still haven’t gotten to see a list of donators who said I could know who they are, so a more formal thank you to you all will be coming).

Here’s the spiel.

About a month and a half ago I found myself needing to move into Kédougou full time to help make sure this camp would be a success. I had been doing a lot of running around and coming back and fourth from site to take care of things last minute or do some damage control. I was stressing out far to much and feeling guilty about not being at site enough (site guilt) so I made the call to headquarters to get permission to turn my focus on the huge project that is camp. They said it was okay and I had successfully gotten rid of the stress of getting the panicked “do it now” phone calls because I’ve been at site. I have every confidence that it was a very worthwhile move.

Once in Kédougou full time I was able to work on my computer to get everything organized thanks to having a relatively steady power source. The house also had wireless internet, emails with attachments are glorious… that is until the router gets struck by lightning. All of the house electronics are dead now thanks to rainy season storms, I think they are actually going to pay to get the electric in the house grounded properly now that EVERYTHING got fried.

I digress (surprise?)

What was all that time in the big village spent doing? One thing I tried really had to do was get some kind of lesson plans put together for the different activities we would be doing then getting minions to translate them to French. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t do all that much work putting together the actual plans, just coordinated their creation then collected them onto my computer. My end goal here is to put together two binders, one in French and one in English so that we can be on the same page with the Senegalese group we work with to put on the camp (The Association for the Sustainable Development of Kédougou or ADDK). I was explaining this plan to one of the counselors during the camp and he got all excited and said that he’d send me information on the activities they do so I can just have everything in one place. I hope he follows through with that, Magic Painting is pretty awesome but I really want those songs written down. There were also countless planning meetings, discussions about what to do with our lacking funds, contacting all the applicants we accepted (we wound up with 76 campers and contacted a lot more people for confirmation.

I wound up working with Baba Touré a lot in the weeks leading up to camp. He’s a great kid, he had been a camper the past 3 years and stepped up to play a pretty major role in the planning of camp this year. In fact he invited me over to his place for Korité, the big holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. I wanted to go back to Khossanto to spend the holiday with my host family, but that would have meant not being around for the few days leading up to camp, not really an option. Very glad I decided to head to his house during the day, it was great to be surrounded by Malinké again instead of Pulaar, the majority in Kédougou, or French which I’m still not horribly comfortable in.

A few days after Korité the students started showing up from all over the region and staying with family or friends in Kédougou. This is when it all started to get real for me… summer camp is actually going to happen! We were all pretty much set, except one big problem, we never really finished the schedule. I had Peace Corps’ activities scheduled for some time, but I’d been trying to meet with the ADDK guy in charge of programming for days but our schedules never lined up. So the night before everyone got on the bus to Dindefello I stayed up and quick filled in the blanks with items from the random list of activities I was told ADDK could do. This wound up not getting set until the second day of camp, and thanks to not having the foresight and buying their materials ahead of time the first day of camp had to get changed around a lot. Peace Corps volunteers were the only ones prepared for their activities the morning of the first day, so the group of 9 volunteers helping out at the start of camp were kind of put through the ringer right off the bat. Once the schedule was finished and approved things settled down a lot, but you have to appreciate the flexibility of everyone involved.

Backtracking a bit, I mentioned there was a bus ride to take everyone from Kédougou to the campement in Dindefello where we were having the camp. Thankfully after last rainy season the laterite road to Dindefello was regraded, meaning the parts of the road that last year were absolutely terrifying to watch cars of kids go over were now just really bad sections. However, most of the kids and volunteers were loaded into an old charter bus. Being on the bus with all those excited campers singing songs I recognized from last year was amazing, you could literally feel their energy. In my opinion it was the perfect way to drop all the other volunteers into the camp spirit, if not force it on them. We almost made it, and then in a pretty good-looking section of road we got stuck. What happened is that when the put the new laterite down they didn’t really do anything to what was under it, and in this particular place in the road what was under it amounted to pudding. It was just waiting for something heavy enough to come along and hit it in just the right place and we were that lucky. Everyone sat and waited for a while, the girls were released first, after about an hour, to hike the remaining couple kilometers to Dindefello. The boys were kept behind to help with the excavation to get the bus out. After another couple hours all hope was lost and the boys were sent to hike those last couple K as well. All baggage was left behind and we contacted another car to pick that up and bring it to us later that day - an auspicious start to camp.

During camp we had the Challenge Course run by Patrick this year (I did it last year) and it was the same situation were he needed a translator to help him with the French, which most of the time was Little Jess. Patrick has had a lot of experience running camp and did an amazing job, unluckily for him though challenge course was scheduled for nearly every activity period. Art was headed up by our resident artist Sully, he did camp two years ago but had to miss it last year, thanks to his hard work the kids were ready to go when it came to creative thinking. Plus we had some beautiful artwork hung all around the campement, just heartwarming. LaRocha saved the day with neem lotion and nutritional porridges for the first and second year campers respectively. Their wares were then sold at the weekly market thanks to marketing lessons from Tatiana and Little Jess. First aid sessions were once again run by Eric who seemed to have a lot better luck getting his message across – tourniquets are not the first thing to do when someone is bleeding. Rachel, Meaghan, and Big Jess did a bunch of work with gardening and tree nurseries with our favorite Trees For the Future guy Karumba. Mike and Frank were the sports masters, who knew ultimate Frisbee would go over so well and that they’d get the rules so quickly? Ian took the Creative Writing lesson plan Hannah wrote up and did a great job on that with limited materials. Spanish tourists were in and out of Dindefello throughout the camp to see the waterfall, one group in particular sat and listened to a bunch of their creative writings and were a great audience for them. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone or something – a highlight of the second week, for me anyway, was the Sexual Health talks Meera led – I never got a chance to sit in on a full one and did want to do too much popping in and out because of the sensitive nature of the topic but I heard great things and the kids got a lot out of it, including ONE wristbands which were in high demand. I’ve listed certain people doing certain activities but it should be known that everyone kind of did everything (teamwork makes the dream work).

ADDK’s counselors lead a bunch of activities as well as all kinds of song and dances. The last day of camp wrapped up with the Olympics, all of camp broke up into 4 groups and the games began. ADDK took care of all of the planning and running of that so it was nice for me and the other volunteers still around to get the day to kind of relax, be with the campers, and act as crowd control. With that camp was done, we held an awkward middle school dance party at the campement, people were lifted into the air, I was gifted a new shirt that my head can barely fit through, everyone was happy, girls cried to be leaving their new friends, and no cars got stuck. It’s kind of hard to believe it’s all over.

PS: Happy Birthday Mom and Seamus & Happy Wedding Lisa and Dereck

PPS: Here's a link to one of the ADDK Counselor's blog.  He has a few posts about camp with some videos, lots of pictures, but words are in French.  Kédougou Avenir

For more pictures check out the Facebook Album

Crème Cassia*

I could waste a bunch of time explaining why I haven’t updated in a while and apologizing and all that… M buŋ, I refuse. I was busy / lazy / who cares. Here’s a fun thing that happened recently.

Mandinkas go patriotic

The 4th of July means party times in Kédougou. Lots of good food (said first because I and a new volunteer were in charge of it), a “4k” run with the community and volunteers, friends coming down from all over the country, and of course Fireworks (thanks to volunteers around Dakar). The fireworks this year included something akin to the “Saturn Missile” and on the bigger end, for those in the know, more on par with the Fisk fireworks of my childhood.

If all that wasn’t enough of a scene most people also dressed up to a certain extent. Kédougou region volunteers tried to stick to a trailer park theme since the hotel of choice in Gou was closed for repairs. The goal was mesh tank tops and jean shorts, the market was tricky to work with, but we managed. My favorites though had to be the Kolda girls as the patriotic Disney princesses. It’s amazing what you can get a Senegalese tailor to do.

Once the festivities were over I found myself helping out with a Neem Lotion Tourney, which did not allow me time to head back to my village first. I wound up spending a couple extra days in Kédougou (It has come to my attention that I might not have provided pronunciation: Kay-Do-Gu) working on things for Summer Camp. In fact it was a surprise camp meeting the day I planed to leave that sent me into a state of confusion that caused me to stay an extra night in Gou (short for Kédougou). The next morning, after a farewell smoothly, I caught a car to Saraya (Sar-ee-uh / Sa-rye-ah depending on who you want to make fun of, I tend to stick with the former). The change in departure for me wound up convincing another volunteer, Kate, to join in on the tourney; which, by the way, was headed by Leah (the one and only, part of the Mandinka Trio of yore). After lunch at Kate’s place we hopped on out bikes and met up with Leah and Ian at his village, Missira Dantila, for a neem lotion (Crème Cassia) demonstration:

“Do you all know the Palu?" (Malaria is Paludisme in French)
“Yeah! You get all hot, and your body gets all sore. You get very sick, it’s not good.”
“Can you do any work?”
“No!”
“So your men can’t farm, women can’t cook, and your children can’t go to school. It’s not good.”
“It’s not good a lot.”
“So how do you get it?”
“When the rains come, and the mosquitoes come and one with malaria bites you.”
“Right, so how can you prevent it?”
“Sleep under a mosquito net!” (Mosquito nets have been drilled into people for years as THE way to end Malaria).
“But what about before you go to bed? During dinner and while you are sitting and chatting, do mosquitoes bite you then?”
“Yeah! It’s not good, we can still get Malaria… in fact that kid has it right now.” (For now the government provides free malaria meds; I wouldn’t worry about her, she was getting treatment and didn't look bad enough to be worried.)
“Well here’s how you can make your very own mosquito medicine:”

One of these girls has Malaria...
it's the one in the middle.

1. Boil two handfuls of neem tree leaves until the water turns green.
2. Cut one big bar of soap into the smallest pieces you can into a tub.
3. Strain the leaves out of the green water and add the hot water to the tub of soap pieces.
4. Stir it really really hard until all the soap is gone.
5. Add 100cfa (about a shot glass / tea glass) of oil and stir.
6. Once cooled, apply to skin as a lotion.

The mob moves in on the fence

This is when we hand out samples of the lotion we just demonstrated, which can get tricky, we kind of started a riot in Missira Dantila… Elbows were thrown, free samples stolen, mothers covered in green foam… My personal favorite though was the woman who stole the bucket with about half of the sample in it and proceded to run through a hut and climb over a fence to get away from the mob. Once there she tried to vend the samples to other women from the opposite side of the fence. Her plan worked well until some of the other women realized they also could climb the fence and get to the bucket directly.  This wound up being a good opportunity to discuss the marketability of Neem Lotion in the village... once all the lotion was gone and we came out of hiding.

After Missira we spent the next few days doing the demo in other villages. I helped out with Samecouta, Nafadji, Baitilai, Faraba, and Kondokho. There was a plan to do it in my village, Khossanto, as well; God did not agree and after waiting all afternoon for a car to take us there we headed back to Kédougou. I had wanted to just bike the remainder of the way back to Khossanto by myself, but once again camp issues came up and I found myself needing to return to Gou.

On a more permanent scale, in each village we did a demo we also left our tag - A spray paint stencil of how to make Neem lotion in 6 easy steps (see picture from earlier with Malaria girl). Four colors to each step, it’s pretty ingenious in my opinion… idea by Kellen, execution by Sully, fun for all ages.

Because it's been a while... Baby in a tux!

Quick Pic Post 5

Collecting blood on the magic wand

For the Malaria rapid test

Hello

I was coming into Kédougou yesterday and I passed 2 women on my bike so I greeted them:

Me - "I niŋ che" (Malinké)
Younger Woman - "Bonjour" (French)
Older Woman - "A jaramma" (Pulaar)

I laughed about this for a bit, but I think it gives a good peak into just how complicated the language situation is here.

Also...

Look what we found!