Guest blog from Mom

It was wonderful to be with Christine after a year and a half. I was smacked in the face by her ability to thrive in the harsh and isolated desert of Senegal. I will never worry about her again. I also appreciate her fellow volunteers, many of whom we met. They support each other immensely. Finally, I am happy that we could express our gratitude in person to Christine's most generous host families in Sintiou Garba and Thies.

It is hard to make sense of Senegal if you haven't traveled to a poor country. Cooking fires and sheep line the streets. In the city, sidewalks are narrow and uneven; walking is a balancing act between people selling things and cars coming up over the broken curbs. Concrete and mortar get hard wear, but construction continues and Western-style hotels provide A/C and croissants for breakfast. I was on red alert due to constant hustlers, but managed on our final day in Dakar to navigate the few blocks to the post office and back alone. Colleen and Christine impressed us with their French skills and Christine's "Pulaar street cred." My French got worse.

Weather was warm. A steady breeze kicked up enough dust and sand to obscure the sun on occasion, and we got in a couple of refreshing swims. The call to prayer was broadcast day and night. Mosques are the biggest and newest buildings in even the smallest of hamlets. We became accustomed to hearing little kids shout "toubab!" ("white person") as we walked by, announcing us to all their friends and giving the bravest a chance to reach out a hand in greeting.

We traveled to nature centers, museums and beachy resorts. Mike got in almost enough birding in several hot spots. We ferried to the island of Goree', where thousands of West Africans were once packed onto ships and sent into slavery. Sobering. Today, artists and their families live there.

At St. Louis, still holding historic French influences, we spent a festive Christmas Eve with several Peace Corps families, went to a drum-and-music-filled French Mass, and peered across the river to Mauritania.

Peugots, Renaults and Mercedes carried us from place to place. Both our longest trips featured fierce haggling and car breakdowns, but another car or spare part always turned up eventually. Cars are able to roll with barely enough bolts to hold them together. The Senegalese can calculate the exact number of threads in a frayed piece of rope it takes to keep a bleating sheep tied to the top of the bus. There appears to be no term in Pulaar for "overcrowded bus."

The purpose of our trip, of course, was to visit Christine's home in the Fouta, the northeast. Her family lives in a series of attached concrete rooms around an earth courtyard that contains the cooking fire, chicken coop, pens for sheep and horses, and a shady neem tree. Christine has a room next to the sheep pen, along with a small patio and open air bathroom. C's father, farmer and village chief, is a man with many responsibilities. He has three wives (one is the widow of his brother), many children, and countless other relatives to house, feed and clothe. We learned about the importance of greetings and picked up several useful Pulaar phrases for this ritual. We visited the dispensaire, schools, and a couple of impressive garden projects as well as the local market and the homes of several of C's family and friends.

We stayed mostly healthy with just a couple of tummyache delays, fortunately in places with good plumbing. Food varied from French crepes to Vietnamese stir-fry to rice and fish in the homes of the families we visited. Our hosts inevitably brought us Fanta orange soda. We are adopting this tradition. You can even have your own glass, but it is traditional to share the glassware.

Christine's city family in Thiess was a contrast with the country "cousins." She spent two months there learning Pulaar before going to her site. The girls watch music videos and go to university. I loved the mother instantly when she threw her arms around me in welcome. The father is a retired French teacher. I heard Christine's praises many times on the trip, but he said the thing that pleased me most: that Christine is the best of several PC volunteers that the family has hosted. How could I disagree? Despite their fancy living room, Western clothing, and makeup, we ate lunch on the floor picnic style out of one huge bowl, spoon optional. Even in town, you can have three sheep in the garage instead of two cars.

On Tabaski, a thanksgiving-type celebration involving the slaughter of sheep, we were staying at an eco-resort and shared a luncheon of mutton and lentils with the staff followed by drumming, singing and dancing-Mike and the girls did well on the dance floor.

This voyage was not your typical rush to see sights and wonders, novel activities, or R n R with a long, cool drink, although we enjoyed elements of all those things. Instead, it was a family visit, and now we have two new families, with the privilege of getting just a taste of the inside of real Senegalese life.

A typical day

7am- 9am.

• Get up. Take down mosquito net and move bed inside. (Those of you who know me will know it’s not my normal style to be an early riser, but I can only say it’s not easy to sleep in past sunrise when people start greeting you through your mosquito net when you’re still in bed).

• Greet family. At this time of day, this means grunting unintelligibly in Pulaar.

• Wait for my family to give me bread and then eat breakfast (bread and Nescafe. I know that might not sound that appealing, but I don’t really drink coffee, so my coffee is mostly milk, a little sugar, and barely enough coffee to deserve the name, and I like it).

• Sweep room (I’m also not the kind of person who would normally sweep their room every day, but, well, there’s a lot of sand).

• Get ready to greet the world.

9am-1pm.

• Run around village trying to create work for myself (some days I am more successful than others, but keeping myself occupied from 9 to 1 is always my goal). This can include going to the pre-school, the two elementary schools, and the junior high trying to get health lessons and club meetings organized, going to the health post to get help on writing/translating a health lesson into Pulaar, and meeting with leaders from the women’s group garden to talk about various ways we can appeal to local authorities to help supply tools, information, etc. Some days I actually manage to teach health lessons at the schools, or substitute as an English teacher at the junior high.

1-2pm.

• Go back to the house and practice the fine art of waiting for lunch. Stay out in the village too late and you might get sucked into eating lunch at somebody else’s house. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, and sometimes I bestow my presence at other people’s bowls, but I like eating at my house because we have good cooks, and my family is relatively well off so the food is usually better. Also if you stay for lunch, people like you to stay for tea, and if you stay for tea, people like you to stay for dinner… and if you stay for dinner people invite you to spend the night. But there is especially no concept of leaving after lunch, largely because people think you’re crazy if you try to go anywhere in the afternoon because it’s so hot. So sometimes I decline lunch invitations just because I don’t want to be committed to spending the entire afternoon at someone’s house.

2-2:30pm.

• No times are exact, but this is a basic average of when I usually eat lunch. My lunch partners have changed somewhat in the time I’ve been here, but currently I share my mid-day meal with two of my host sisters, one seven years old, the other four. I like this arrangement because our food preferences complement each other well (I like the vegetables, they like the bony fish), so everyone’s happy (although Mainouma and I are both greedy when it comes to folere, this leafy sauce with lime juice and hot pepper. This description does not even remotely capture it’s essence, but trust me, it’s delicious). On the downside, seven and four year olds squabbling over coveted bowl items tends to result in a lot of rice getting spilled in your room.

• Sweep again. See aforementioned note about rice spilling at lunch time.

2:30-5pm.

• This is my ‘me’ time. It’s generally absurdly hot, so pretty much everyone’s taking a siesta or just hanging out chatting, and I take this time to read, write, and just kind of hang out in my room without anyone bothering me. Basically, I consider this a sacrosanct time in which I do not have to speak Pulaar.

5-7pm.

• These are prime greeting hours, so if I’m feeling ambitious, I will go hang out at a friend’s house. Or if I’m feeling really ambitious, I might go running during this time. But only if I can face running in 100 degree heat with children shouting and following me, which doesn’t happen that often.

• After I’ve finished greeting or running, or in the event of not feeling ambitious, I proceed directly to take a shower. Well, I take a bucket bath. In the hot season, this is the high point of the day. In the cold season, this is the low point of the day.

• This period of time is also a good time to schedule things like club meetings or other meetings. If you schedule a meeting before four o clock, good luck getting anyone to show up at all, and even then, people usually show up an average of an hour late.

7-9pm.

• Somewhere during this time frame, I take a few of my favorite buckets, basins, or jugs out to the water tap and collect my water for the next day. The taps are only open during the evenings and sometimes the early morning due to a conviction that the machinery associated with the water tower will break if they are turned on during the day because it’s too hot. Getting water can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to over an hour because often all the women of the household are getting water at the same time and we have to take turns during the limited time the taps are open. I like it though, because it’s a nice time when a bunch of women can chat and be silly without any men around.

• Another important evening event is watching Barbarita, a Venezuelan soap opera that plays every day during the week. I am ashamed to admit that I am addicted to the ridiculous plot lines as much as the kids, neighbors, and grandmothers who all appear at 7:30 to watch it. In my defense, the only other thing to watch on TV is Senegalese ‘theatres,’ low budget productions in which mainly consist of people sitting around on mats talking to each other in Wolof or Pulaar, and frankly, I get enough of that during the normal course of my day to want to watch it for entertainment at night.

9pm.

• Dinner. Usually millet and milk (kind of like cold cream of wheat), or sometimes deep fried eggs or some other treat that involves a lot of oil. Occasionally I cook for myself, which almost always means pasta with tomato paste, onions, and eggplant. It’s better than it sounds.

9-10pm.

• Hang out with the family some more, especially six year old Molido and her mother, who are usually not around during the day because her mom cooks for the teachers at the elementary school. There is a lot of silliness during this time, usually involving Molida sitting on my legs and pretending I’m a boat, or making faces at each other.

10pm.

• Bedtime for me. I set up my bed and mosquito net and get made fun of for going to bed early by my family, but between the heat and the effort of speaking Pulaar all day, I usually can barely keep my eyes open at this point. I fall asleep quickly, and while I used to wake up because of donkeys wandering around the yard in the dead of night, a sheep standing two feet from my head, roosters crowing at any and all hours of the night, and last but certainly not least, the calls to prayer from the mosque next to my house at four in the morning, now I pretty much sleep like the dead until the sun comes to wake me up. Or, you know, if someone starts greeting me through my mosquito net again.