Atypical day

23,25 Mar 12

The roosters call becomes more consistent, donkey’s bray, and then, as if a megaphone was in my ear on full volume, I hear call to prayer on and off from 5am to 6am. I feel as if I’m coming back from thousands of miles away where I had just been visiting places that had seasons including snow and fall leaves and/or vegetation and/or running water as brooks and streams and rivers. I feel exhausted when I come to as I recall where I actually am amidst my mosquito net palace on the sunken foam mattress on the rickety wooden bed, in a small room, in a compound shared with ten others, in a dusty small town outside of Thies in Senegal, West Africa. I lay around for another hour or so listening to the orchestra that is a Nakawaka morning (name made up for safety and security). After 8am I’m finally ready to stir myself. I help out with morning chores when and where appropriate and ready myself for the day.

Ndekki or breakfast is a little bit less than a forearms length of French bread like bread (I don’t think it would be appropriate to say it actually is French bread but it looks like it) dabbed with some butter and served with my own personal little pot of café toubab. Café toubab is the closest thing to coffee they have here. I don’t think it has much caffeine as it doesn’t do a thing for me. I get my own pot so that I can add my own sugar because they drink an almost 1:1 coffee sugar mix or close to it. And toubab is what you call a European typically or someone that’s educated or has lots of money. It’s commonly thought of as derogatory as it wouldn’t be used for another African however our culture trainers inform us that sometimes it can be used to describe African people if they are educated and punctual etc. etc. But that’s the official name of the coffee so there’s no point in whining about the name. I do get called toubab all the time and sometimes if I feel like it I correct them with my Senegal name to let the neighboring kids know that I live here and that I wish to be called my name and not toubab. But for when they don’t know me, toubab is all they know what to say so it’s fine, I let it go.

Lately for breakfast I’ve also been adding some protein powder to my coffee to get me through until lunch. I tell my family it’s my garab which means tree or also medicine as medicine traditionally came from the trees in the bush. I’m a bit nervous to have such a special breakfast but the bread and butter just isn’t enough and I feel like the protein powder is easier than asking for porridge or rice which would take a lot of time. Hopefully if my language improves between now and the next ten days or so, I can talk about nutrition with my family. But bread and butter probably really is the cheapest and easiest breakfast for a family of this size so I’m not sure what alternatives I can easily sell them on.

After breakfast I stroll down the sandy roads to my LCF’s house where we go over language lessons in the morning and do gardening stuff in the afternoon. It’s about a five minutes’ walk and I run into very few people as this is a very quiet and calm village. It’s maybe a good couple of stone throws in all directions, from a professional outfielder in the MLB. For the people I see, I greet them as best I can but often have to end it by me saying “janga Oolof, ndanka ndanka”= “I’m learning Wolof, slowly slowly” as they speak so fast and are so curious I just can’t keep up after asking how they are, how the morning is, and how the night was (all with appropriate answers of ‘I am here only, the morning is here only, and the night was spent in peace, only). We conduct our Wolof language classes in an abandoned house next door to his homestay. His host family owns the property and to-be house. The three of us, me, another PCT, and our LCF, sit comfortably in what’s going to be a bedroom with a small stand up white board and go over Wolof lessons.

Lunch and dinner are prepared on a wood fire under a cooking hut out back. The smoke stings my eyes and clouds my lungs. But it’s at least a somewhat open fire where the fumes don’t pollute the house (although it often comes into my room through the open window but isn’t much).

I’ve been trying to get at least the younger kids into the habit of hand washing before we eat. All but the father, older brothers, and I use their hands to eat (and are quite good at it. I got my family a hand washing station (for $4US) to encourage hand washing post me leaving. This beautiful pristine plastic gift includes a draining bowl with a draining lid with holes for the water and cut outs at the top to hold soap and the plastic water kettle. The lid is key as it discourages and disables you from rinsing your hands in the dirty grey water which is the common practice. Apparently this “technology” comes from Mauritania and is slowly working its way down south to The Gambia as it really is a nice and convenient way to wash when indoor plumbing isn’t available.

Lunch is the grandest of the meals with fresher looking fish and vegetables served on a bed of tasty rice. It often comes with a tasty sauce as well. I love lunch. I can easily eat the veggies I want and avoid the fish and get a decent fill. Dinner is most commonly a blander rice mixed with pounded dry fish so that you can’t help but get fish in every few bites because it’s all mixed together.

Sometimes, as I may have mentioned earlier, my mom or my wife (my brother’s wife is my wife… it’s just the way with Senegal family nomenclature, my sisters kids are my kids as well...) will make delicious salads to accompany dinner which is fantastic but it doesn’t happen much. My mom sells vegetables at the daily market in town that she gets from Thies (less than a 30 min drive away) but I think it must be expensive to incorporate veggies often if you aren’t growing them and it’s so water and time intensive to grow them yourself unless you were super motivated (which I’ll be once I get to my permanent site).

Around 5pm, my fellow PCT and I work on our TDA’s (training directed activities) which include preparing a garden by amending the soil (sand) and starting a tree nursery, vegetable garden, and transplanting some trees and crops into our garden beds. We started our beds on the property where we do our language classes. The space is too small to have all the beds they wanted us to have but the soil was the best and this spot is very near a water source which makes it a more sustainable project. The garden that the previous trainees started failed because it’s much too far for anyone to care to haul water too. We were able to take some of their compost though for our beds. In addition we used charcoal and wood ash for amendments to our double dug plots. Double digging here refers to removing the top soil, amending the sub surface with compost (and ideally manure) and the surface with the above mentioned nutrients and top soil of the neighboring bed and so on and so forth until the top soil from the first bed goes onto the last one. As these beds continue to be worked on by other volunteers, the nutrients will be able to be amended deeper and deeper improving the soil over time versus depleting it. We use flat sunken beds with raised berms to catch the water in the rainy season. The sunken beds with the berms help reduce erosion for when the rains are strong. But there is such a small window for the rainy season that erosion isn’t as much of a problem. Also there is a strong encouragement to adopt and expand agroforestry techniques at least in The Gambia where trees can do much to help keep the soil stable by not allowing as much runoff to occur.

After digging and planting and being swarmed by so many children, it’s time to come home and wash and prepare for supper. As Gambian volunteers training in The Senegal we only have enough time to prepare these beds but not time to see them through so we hope that the family whose property it is will keep up with the watering which the boys are likely to do as the water is near and as they’ve been intent on helping us with much of the work. That’s one way to ensure a sustainable project is to make sure you aren’t the only one doing it, that it’s not my garden or the Peace Corps garden but this is our garden or your garden that we’re helping you start.

Down time are the times between training and meals. I try to hang out with the family as often as possible. The women do amazing embroidery work which I’ve started to join with my own needle and thread to add designs to my travel pillow (a tradition I started in Armenia visiting a friend in the PC there). It’s cute that they think what I do is nice compared to what they are doing but I’ll take it. For times when there just aren’t enough words in my vocabulary to keep up or if I just need some down time, it’s nice to retreat to my bedroom where I might sneak a snack or two to tide me over until the next meal.

Overall the days are quite nice. At first it was a bit difficult to try to figure out how to fill those times of the day that used to be filled by email and facebook (let’s be honest) and whatever other nonsense on the internet (blogging…) but once I started to establish a bit more of a routine here I can honestly say that I love the slow place and the low key ins and outs of the day. I think it’s also easier for me to say that as I can easily see an end point here before another adventure starts (going back to Thies to see all the PCT’s before going to Gambie!). It wouldn’t be as easy to appreciate the day to day I’m sure if I didn’t know there was going to be something else for a while.

I have to admit too that this second time around at CBT site with my laptop makes a huge difference. I’m glad that I gave the first week a go without any technology save for a Senegal cell phone and hand radio. But for practical reasons it’s been nice to have a word processor and music in a language I know well, even though the folk makes my heart ache for a place as far from here as one can imagine (Feeding Frenzy, Brandon Reid, and Saturated Sugar Strings, and more, your music has come to Africa! Could you have ever imagined such a thing?!).