Pulaar Movie Nights

I got a free 8-inch tablet during staging (Nexus tablets, 1000 of them, were donated by Google to the National Peace Corps Association, and my training group was one of the lucky ones that received them).  I finally found a use for it when a fellow PCV announced that she figured out how to put movies on it.  Since the tablet was free, I won’t be devastated if Senegal kills it like it kills most electronics.  Since it has an incredible battery life (around 10 hours) we can bring it out most nights, put it on an upturned 5-gallon water jug, and let the whole neighborhood gather around. So far, watching movies has been one of my favorite things I’ve done here. 

My family has an endless attention span (after all, most of their days are spent sitting staring into empty space – when they actually have a screen to stare at, they are enthralled).  They’re curious, asking questions of me or of each other when they don’t understand something.  I think that movie nights have taught my family about American culture, but they’ve also taught me a lot.  By seeing how everyone reacts to the movies, I can see ways that they and I are the same – or ways that we’re different. 

Here are movies watched, in order, with my family’s impressions and comments about each one.  Maybe y’all will find this as interesting as I do.

Planet Earth – entire series.  I decided to start with this because since it’s a high-quality nature documentary, language is unnecessary, only an appreciation for cute critters.  No one knew what to think of a kangaroo.

 “Is it a rabbit or a horse?” asked my brother Oussaman.

 “Umm…Kangaroo,” I responded. 

“Kangado?!” (crazy person?!), he asked. 

“Umm…Kangaroo.”
“I think it’s a rabbit,” offered my other brother.
“Yes.  It is a rabbit,” Oussaman agreed.
Most other animals were determined to be some variation of rowandu ledde, dog of the forest (wolf, fox, dingo, coyote, jackal) puccu ledde, horse of the forest (antelope, zebra, deer, moose, buffalo) or lingu, fish (shark, seal, dolphin, whale, jellyfish, stingray).  I thought my family was really into Planet Earth, because everyone was attentive and engaged, but after we started watching other things I found they loved everything else even more.

How to Train Your Dragon – They didn’t believe me that Hiccup was a teenager, and instead believed that he was a small child, so the little unfolding romance was confusing.  Everyone wanted him to kill the dragon for the first half of the movie, but by the end agreed that riding on it would be a lot of fun.  I tried to make the point that if you’re nice to animals they’re nice to you, and that’s why I don’t hit my dog, but that message continues to fall on deaf ears.

Lion King – The songs were very popular, and everyone was hushed and sad when Mufasa died.  Favorite moment: during the animated song-and-dance sequence that is “I Just Can’t Wait to be King,” a neighbor turned to my sister and asked, “Is this real?”  My sister said, “I don’t know…ask Kadiatou.”  After the neighbor asked me and I said it wasn’t, she said, “I didn’t think it was real.  Animals can’t sing.”  Then she scoffed and walked away.

Titanic – Jack is a universal studmuffin.  The guy hitting the propeller as he falls off the boat at the end is universally funny to preteen boys.  Rose throwing the necklace overboard at the end instead of selling it is universally confusing. The naked painting scene, which I was sort of concerned about, was not awkward at all, possibly because everyone here sees dozens of boobs a day.  Everyone’s favorite scene was the 3^rd-class party, with the fiddle music and the dancing.  Since showing this, kids in my compound have screamed, “Jack! Jack!” “Rose!  Rose!” to each other while one is hiding, as a sort of Marco Polo game, which I think is hilarious.   Most teen and adult women said this was their favorite movie.

Human Planet - Deserts – This was weird.  Everything in the show was familiar to me and my family – mud huts, drawing water from wells with a pulley, herding cows – but the narrator was far too serious, making it sound like all the people profiled were suffering for having the lifestyle they did.  I was happy they couldn’t understand the narrator and slightly embarrassed by what he was saying.  Life can be hard here, but it’s not nearly as hard as the show made it look (at least not here). 

Up – Everyone thought that Kevin the bird was hilarious, and I had to replay the scene where Russell climbs up Mr. Fredrickson’s face four times because it was so funny.  When people asked me if American dogs could really fly planes, I said yes (of course).  Most younger kids said this was their favorite movie.

Aladdin – This one completely failed.  Everyone hated it.  Usually, we watch movies over two days, since I feel bad keeping kids up past 9pm on a ‘school night’ (even though few kids in my village actually go to school).  I usually have to insist that it’s time for bed while everyone whines that they want to watch more.  With Aladdin, it was the kids’ idea to turn it off.  No one thought the genie was funny at all, and I couldn’t explain any of his jokes, since they feed so heavily from American pop culture.  I wasn't able to explain the concept of a wish-granting genie, either. They said that Jafar looked like Scar from the Lion King, which I found incredibly perceptive.  The best part of Aladdin was during the magic carpet ride, when a kid said, “Jack! I’m flying!” in a perfect Kate Winslet Titanic impression.

Selena – Also a very popular choice.  They thought Selena was beautiful, both as a child and a young woman, and they loved the song “Como la Fleur.”  In the couple days after showing this there was a marked increase in preteen girl dancing and singing around the compound.  Every girl between the ages of 8 and 15 said this was their favorite movie, which I’m really happy about, since that means they’ll probably be into musicals, and I am too.

Jurrasic Park- I hadn’t watched this in years and barely remembered it, so I didn’t know what I was getting into.  The beginning of the movie was very slow, focusing more on conversations than on dinosaur attacks, and the copy of the film I had was missing an audio track for some reason, so I wasn’t able to explain what was going on.  Although people were bored by the movie at first, once I told them the dinosaurs were going to “start snacking on people”, everyone wanted to wait for that and would not let me turn it off, so we watched this until 11pm.  Luckily (unluckily?) the next day was a teacher strike so no one had anything to get up early for.  A neighbor kid who’s around 5 got too scared during the T. rex rampage and started crying, and his mom and sister yelled at him to be quiet and made him walk home in the dark alone because they didn’t want to stop watching it.  Finally, by the end of the movie, I had them using the word “dinosaur,” but the first few times they saw dinosaurs, they insisted that the plant-eaters were niiwa ledde, elephants of the forest, and the carnivores were donkonteri mawndi, big lizards.  I said many times that it was only a movie and that though dinosaurs used to live everywhere (even in Senegal) all of them are dead now, but then I kept overhearing them comment to each other that animals in America were very bad and they didn’t want to go there.  More dinosaur films are necessary, I’d say.  Most males over the age of 8 said this was their favorite movie.

A year in: still a manchild.

As I’m here longer and longer and I “integrate” more and more, there are nuances of being a foreigner in a village that are just starting to come to the surface.  I do consider myself a member of the community here.  I live with a family, I eat their food, I sleep in their compound, I play with their kids, and I am usually treated like one of the gang.  Sometimes, however, there are rude little reminders that inform me I’m really not one of the group at all…and the longer I’m here, the more I start to feel comfortably at home, the more painful and surprising it is for me to feel those reminders, like springs poking my skin when I settle into a favorite old recliner.

I've blogged about this before, saying that I felt like a "manchild" here - I'm a child because I can't speak or understand well and I make silly cultural mistakes, but I'm a man because I'm still seen as a patron, still expected to give people goods and knowledge, to save them from poverty.  Now I'm year in, and though many things have changed, I'm still a manchild.

The other day I didn’t have anything planned for the afternoon, so I just hung out with my sister and brother in my family’s compound.  Both of them are in their early 20s, left school early, and don’t have a whole lot going for them in life, besides eventually finding spouses.  My language is good enough now that we were able to rib on each other, just like siblings are supposed to do.  I was having fun – the dogs were playing, we were laughing, we were drinking tea with mint, and there was a cool breeze ruffling through the leaves of the mango trees.  I was feeling at home, at ease, content, wishing I had longer than a year left here, already dreading saying goodbye to this place and these people I love so much.  Then a visitor from another village (who had just arrived for a dennabo the following day) walked into the compound, did a double take when he saw me, and zeroed in. 

“Your name.”
“Kadiatou.”
“Oh! You know Pulaar!”
“A little.”
“Where is your husband?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“I am your husband.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Take me to America.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Haha!  You know Pulaar!”
“A little.”
“Are you having fun?”
“A little.”
“Haha!  You eat money!  You only have fun!  You don’t work!”
*awkward laugh*
“America is nice.  Take me to America.  I am your husband.”
*awkward laugh*
“You agree, my wife!  You will take me to America”….and so on, and so on.

Asu and Oussaman didn’t say anything to come to my defense…why would they?  I’m not really their sister.  I’m just a random white person that’s living with them for a while. They wouldn’t risk offending this middle aged man, someone whose opinion actually matters, by telling him he was making me uncomfortable. My “siblings” might like me more than other toubacos they’ve known, but I’m still just a toubaco, not a real person. I can understand much more here than I used to, but for everything I understand, there are a hundred things I don’t. 

I’m here because I had a vague intention of helping people, but even after a year of living with the family, I understand only a tiny percentage of what goes on around me.  Like a toddler, I can understand when people want me to understand, but normal adult conversations are over my head.  Normal Pulaar needs to be translated into Kadiatou Pulaar, slower and more carefully enunciated, before I can make sense of it.  Like a child, I’m a source of entertainment on slow days.  When I leave my family’s compound, people scream my name for no other reason than that it’s funny watching me respond to it.  When I’m sitting with a family and they don’t have anything else to talk about, talk inevitably turns to me – what I’m wearing, how my body looks different from theirs, what I said or did in the days previous.  I’m a fair subject because I’m not a person.  I’m a toubaco.

I’ve been helping my ASC (community health worker) dispense vitamin A and de-worming medications to the several tiny villages that are served by my village’s health hut.  This involves lots of biking on beautiful windy bush paths to villages that are far from the road, villages who rarely see foreigners.  The majority of children have burst out crying and tried to run away when they saw me, which is not great for my self-esteem, but even worse is hearing and, finally, understanding what the mothers say to their kids.  “If you don’t stop crying, the toubaco will cook you for dinner.”  “Behave or the toubaco will take you on her bike.” I came here to volunteer two years of my life to try to help people, and I’m being treated like a witch in a Disney story.  It doesn’t matter if it hurts my feelings.  I don’t have feelings.  I’m not a real person.  I’m a toubaco.

A representative from the district hospital came to my village the other day to ask my ASC about how things are going at his health hut.  Apparently the hospital rep didn’t know there was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the village, because he was confused by my being there and started speaking to me in French.  I told him I didn’t understand French, but he could talk to me in Pulaar.  He then tried to talk to me in Wolof.  I said I didn’t understand Wolof, either.  Then he spoke to me in rapid, fluent, confusing Pulaar, so turned to my ASC so he could translate the fluent Pulaar into the baby Pulaar I’m capable of understanding.  The hospital man was disgusted.  Through my ASC, I got the gist of what he was saying: “You can’t French, you can’t Pulaar, how do you work?  Where are your notebooks describing your work activities? What do you do here?  How many radio shows have you done?  How many causeries have you led? Why are you here? What kind of work are you doing?”  I didn’t know what to say.  I’m at peace, now, with doing very little, but it’s hard defending it to people that are clearly disappointed by my lack of productivity.

There was a random group of five Spanish people visiting a nearby village (Koulinto) last month. They all spoke French and some English, and they were doing a shadow-box theater sketch in several villages, with plans to make a documentary about their time here after they returned home to Spain.  No matter how many times I explained that I had never seen these people before, that we didn’t speak the same language, that I had never been to Spain, everyone kept asking me about how my relatives in Koulinto were doing.  Italy, Spain, France, USA…it’s all the same place to a person who’s never left her village, and my skin color means that THAT place is my home.  Not this place.  No matter how much I want to fit in here in village, no matter how comfortable I start to feel here, I don’t and won’t truly belong.

My friends and family from back home, the ones who speak the same language as me and know my culture through and through, who understand all the weird things I do…I have no idea what they’re up to. I left all of them to come here and hang out in a mud hut in 120 degree heat. 

Most days, I’m happy I’m here, and if I were to go back in time to 2012, I’d still fill out that Peace Corps application. I love my community here and I’m happy with my job, but the inevitable downer days are getting harder and harder to deal with.  When I didn’t understand what was happening around me when I was brand new at site, I told myself that this was temporary, that I’d pick up the language quickly and be able to converse with ease.  A year in, that hasn’t happened, and I’m starting to doubt that it ever will; baby Pulaar might be as good as it gets for me.  Plenty of people in my community are friendly, kind, and patient, but now that I can understand more of what people are saying, I’m picking up that not everyone is as positive and welcoming as I’d hoped they’d be.  Hopefully this struggle will resolve itself soon.

One year down, one to go...

I looked at my phone calendar the other day and was amazed that it’s almost March already.  I remember I left Minneapolis on March 3^rd – that was the last important date I’ve had to remember – so I’m fast approaching my one-year in-country mark, although it definitely doesn’t feel like it.  Permasummer has messed with my head.  Winter hasn’t come yet, so it couldn’t possibly be September 2014 yet, let alone after Christmas.  To commemorate my Senegal anniversary, I decided to make a list of ways that I’ve changed since I’ve come here.  Some are big, some are small, most are unimportant, but all are true.

• I can walk in a wrap skirt without tripping, and I can bike in it without flashing my ladybits at anybody. 
•  I have helped with every step of the peanut-butter-making process, from planting the seeds to roasting the nuts to tying the plastic bags for sale at the boutique.
•  I can litter nonchalantly without it breaking my heart at all anymore.  The ubiquitous piles of trash no longer bother me.  This is not a good change, and I hope it doesn’t carry over once I return home.  I used to loathe litterers.
• I learned that milk is not only edible after it goes sour, it’s delicious, especially if you mix a bunch of sugar in it (kosam Y)
• Before I came to Senegal I didn’t know what sound a donkey made.  Now I know all the sounds a donkey can make.  They’re all awful.
• I’m able to hold a deep squat for hours.  No chair? No problem.
•  If there is a chair, or even a hard bench, that’s also not a problem.  I can and do sit for long 10-15 hour stretches when travelling in a 7place or bus.  Sometimes I’m packed in so tightly I can’t adjust, so I just close my eyes and deal with it, wishing my flat Midwest butt provided more of a cushion.  I've also mastered the delicate art of drinking just enough water on these trips to avoid dehydration but not enough that I have to pee.
• I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the world.  I used to be on top of celebrity gossip, but here I only follow village gossip.  I haven’t heard of any songs or movies since last spring.  I assume Ke$ha and Pit Bull’s “Timber” is at the top of the charts, right where I left it…right? 
• I learned that babies can be picked up by one arm, thrown over a shoulder, and tied in place with a spare piece of cloth, all without waking the baby.  They’re not as fragile as I’d thought.
• I have happily adapted to a just-after-sunset bedtime, and I actually become quite cranky if expected to function after 8:30 PM.
• I have rethought “healthy” food for kids.  A year ago I probably would have said a salad full of broccoli and carrots and stuff. Now the healthiest foods I know are as caloric as possible, like a thick millet porridge full of oil, full-fat powdered milk, and peanut butter.  The more energy that can go into each bite, the better.
• I vaguely remember that I used to like children.  I hate children here, possibly because they’re always grabbing at me and screaming my name.  Being a celebrity is not as fun as it sounds.  The babies are tolerable until they learn to talk.
• My personal boundaries have collapsed.  To take just one example, when I first got here, it was weird to be greeted by someone calling in from outside when I was in my hut – then it was weird to have family members come in and lay down on my bed while I was sitting on it – then, the other day, someone yelled over my fence while I was pooping and asked if I was feeling OK.  Wasn’t weird at all.  Even if you're not interacting with the people around you here, there are always people around you.
• When I first got here I thought the baboons in the woods were amazingly exotic and I got annoyed when I saw them and didn’t have my camera with me, since it was such a gorgeous photo opportunity.  Now when I see them I just get annoyed because I have to stop and wait for the troop to move on before I can continue on my way.
• It’s hard for me to buy anything more expensive than $1 (500 CFA).  If there was a Dollar Store in village, everything in it would be too expensive for my community to afford.  My Peace Corps living allowance is generous, and I can buy everything I need without problem - but I still feel loads of toubab guilt when I do.
• My personal hygiene has…adapted.  I only wash my hair 1-2 times a month now, but my feet are scrubbed a few times a day (especially during rainy season, to keep pesky staph infections at bay).  I don’t own a mirror here, and I never wear makeup, do anything with my hair, or put my contacts in.  I haven’t shaved my legs or armpits in almost a year.  My eyebrows look like fuzzy caterpillars.  Getting ready in the mornings is a lot easier than it was in America.  Every time I go to the regional house, however, I have a sad reunion with the wrinkly, tired, sun-spotted cavewoman in the mirror and vow to start putting in more of an effort. Then I never actually do.
• I have accepted (though never embraced) permasweat.  When it’s too hot to move, you just don’t move.  I’m a lot lazier in general because of this.  “The sun is hot” is a perfectly good reason to stay right where you are.  No one expects anything of you from 1-4 PM.
• If anyone DOES expect anything of you, they will probably expect you to be at least 3 hours late.
• When I first got to site, I was terrified my hut might have spiders or other big bugs.  Now I know for a fact they're there, but it no longer bothers me.
• Somehow I’ve lost about 20 pounds in country, if the scale at my health post is accurate.  I’ve been trying to figure out why this is, because I don’t think my diet here is particularly healthy (most of the food is so oily it drips, and there is very little protein) and I don’t formally exercise nearly as much as I did in the USA.  I think the reason is that instead of working out here, I’ve just been working.  If I have something to do in a village 20k away, I have to bike to that village.  If I want to wash a few shirts, I have to pull and haul buckets of water from the well.  It’s also notable to mention that if I'm sort of hungry and want a snack, I have to walk to the nearest boutique followed by curious children, who will then scream at me to buy them a snack, too, and tell me I’m greedy and selfish…which I usually decide is not worth it.
• Addendum to the above bullet – skinny is ugly here.  My community regularly informs me that I was prettier when I first got to site, and when I come back from being out of site for a few days, they’ll tell me it looks like I’ve gained weight as a compliment.

There are probably dozens of other ways I’ve changed that I’m just not aware of yet.  I usually only go to electricity/internet a few times a month here, so I am more distant from American culture than I’ve ever been.  The only Americans I talk to on a regular basis are my Peace Corps friends, who are just as weird as me.  We pepper Pulaar into our conversations and talk about poop more than any humans should.  I don’t know yet whether Kadiatou, or at least parts of her, are here to stay, or whether Barbara will come back once I return to the states, but either way it's been a fun journey so far.  One year down, one to go!

Porridge Party!

The women I see in my village are incredible.  All household work is “women’s work” here, and there is no shortage of it.  Females work tirelessly, sunup to sundown.  My daily wake-up call is the pounding of a mortar and pestle as a portion of the family’s grain stores are turned into something edible (lecciri is finely pounded millet or corn, kodde is bigger particles of the same, and even rice needs to be pounded to remove the chaff and picked through to remove the rocks).  The work continues through the day, a neverending cycle of sweeping the compound (this is not just for aesthetics, as roaming livestock leave piles of “fertilizer” all over the ground, which is obviously a health hazard), drawing heavy buckets of water up from the well, washing clothes over a washboard, and cooking, all while keeping track of several children.  

In America, cooking is low-stakes.  You can try out a new recipe because you have disposable income, and if it’s not good, you can always just throw a pizza in the oven or head to a restaurant.  Here, if you screw up dinner, if you burn the rice, oversalt the mafe, forget to guard the kitchen and allow a marauding donkey to get into the bowl of grain, your family's meal is ruined, hours of hard work were wasted, and your family will not eat tonight.

Sometimes when I talk to my friends at home, they treat me with reverence.  “I can’t believe you’re living in an African village!” they say.  “With no electricity or running water!  For two years!  You’re amazing!”  This is simply not true.  I am not amazing.  I could never survive here if I didn’t have the women in my compound to help.  I don’t do any of the hard work of converting food that is grown into food that is eaten.  If it wasn't for the women, I probably would have starved to death a few months ago. 

All of this background is just to put the next sentence in perspective:  Women in my village have no creativity when it comes to cooking.  The same 4-5 dishes are repeated, identically, every day, and new foods are treated with suspicion.  This is usually fine, since those dishes are typically nutritious and filling, and the monotony doesn't bother people when it's all they know.

Breakfasts, however, can sometimes be lacking nutritionally. In my village, breakfasts are usually gosse (rice porridge), mooni (millet balls in sauce, with the consistency of the gelatin pieces on the bottom of a bubble tea), or ruit (millet, corn, or rice flour porridge).  If you’re a regular reader, you might remember the Complet Model of Nutrition, since I’ve talked about it here and here.  If you don’t remember, here’s my sitemate Lauren with an incredible visual aid she made.

A traditional Senegalese complet has three parts - headscarf, shirt, and skirt.  You would never go out without all three parts - you should never eat a meal without all three parts.  Headscarf is fruits and vegetables (they're on your head because they give you knowledge), shirt is protein sources (they're on your arms and back because they give you power to pound) and grains are on the skirt (on your legs because they give you energy to walk).

The breakfasts in village contain the skirt part of the Complet model, but don’t usually contain the rest.  I saw this as a good opportunity for a project…and since I’m me, I wanted it to be as fun as possible.  So, I looked at a list of the 16 women in my village whose babies were underweight at the last baby weighing and invited them and their kiddoes to a Porridge Party.

The premise was simple – each woman was asked to bring a cup or two of what their kid usually eats for breakfast, a small charcoal stove, a bowl, and a spoon.  I told them I would bring several healthful additives to increase both the taste and nutritional profile of their child's meal…or at least that’s what I wish I could have told them, but I think my baby Pulaar still got the point across.

Of the sixteen women I invited, only seven came, and of those seven, only four brought stoves, but, as the Pulaars frequently say, wiso wiso buri hokkere – a sprinkle’s better than a drought.  Some attendance was better than none.

We started with a review of the Complet model, then I laid down a picture of a woman in a complet, and, after asking the women where each of the porridge additives went, placed them on the sheet.  

Bananas, tomato paste (in the oatmeal can) and onions on the head scarf; beans, powdered milk, peanut butter, and dried fish on the shirt; oil (in a recycled liquor bottle) on the skirt.  Sugar and MSG cubes on the neck - those are the earrings of the Complet.  They're not nutritious, but they taste good.

I announced that we would make four different porridges today, one for each stove.  I told each group of women to grab one or two items from the shirt and from the headscarf of the woman, since the skirt was already taken care of by the porridge base they had brought.

This is where the Porridge Party shows “room for improvement,” to put it mildly.  I knew that Senegalese women were not creative cookers, but I underestimated the extent of it.  They simply had no concept of what tastes would be good together and which combinations were disgusting.  It reminded me of the time I was five and decided that cheese slices and chocolate sauce were both delicious so I’d make a sandwich with both of them.  One group put dried fish and bananas in their bowl before I saw what they were doing.  They did follow the “rules” of the porridge party – they just did so in a nauseating way.  I watched the other groups more carefully (ie I told them what to do) and their porridges were more successful.

From the front: dried fish, beans, tomato and MSG; powdered milk, banana, tomato, and sugar (I was skeptical about this one but it ended up being OK); peanut butter, banana, and sugar.

After the porridges were cooked, the moms gathered in a circle and had their babies try out the three successful porridges (we gave the gross dried fish and banana porridge to a grateful goat instead).

Did I start a revolution of healthy breakfasts in Teyel?  Probably not.  But I got the moms to try something new, and hopefully they got to thinking that improving the nutrition of breakfast does not have to be expensive or difficult.  It’s a start, and, after all, wiso wiso buri hokkere.

di satti, kii

I was livid.  I shot another accusing glance at the uniformed young man sitting on his comfortable chair outside the bank. “Fad seeda,” he said calmly.  Wait a little.  “Jooni jooni di wadtat.  Jooni jooni.”  Very soon it will be fixed.  Very soon.  He kept pouring his attaya from one glass to another with great flourish, building up the foam.  Attaya is the most Senegalese of Senegalese traditions – it is normally a 3-minute task to boil tea leaves and sugar in water, but enough ceremony is added here to stretch it into an hours-long afternoon activity that cannot be rushed.

I looked at the sun, uncomfortably close to the western horizon.  “Mi waawaa fadde nannde fuf!” I exclaimed haughtily. I can’t wait all day!  “Nannge fataata haygooto.  Mi foti hootde jooni jooni.  A wii’ii ‘jooni jooni’ wahktuji didi to baawo.  A rimi!”  The sun waits for no one.  I need to go home very soon.  You said “very soon” two hours ago.  You lied!

Eight months ago, I’d have never thought I’d chew out an innocent employee.  Polite Barbara is still a part of me, somewhere, but she’s obscured by an ever-thickening layer of Kadiatou, and Kadiatou’s a bitch.  The employee was unmoved by my tantrum.  “Wonaa lob,” he said.  Don’t be mad.  He kept pouring attaya, the expression on his face making it clear that he couldn’t care less whether I was mad or not.

Beside me, the bakery erupted in screams again.  Someone must have scored a goal in whatever Africa Cup match was currently going on.  The young man lifted his head, like a guard dog catching a scent, and dashed inside to investigate. The bakery next door was crowded with young men gathered around a 90s-era box TV whose screen couldn’t have been more than 12 inches.  I could barely make out the tiny figures dashing around the soccer field in the screen, but that didn’t seem to deter any of the spectators.

 In a few seconds, the uniformed man emerged and told me the new score.  “Haa,” I agreed, hoping the expression on my face made it clear that I didn’t care.  I’d heard a theory that the Africa Cup was behind the power outages that’d been afflicting Velingara the last few days.  During an important match, everyone turned on their TVs and radios at the same time, overwhelming the grid.  I didn’t know if there was any truth to it, but either way I was prepared to hold a grudge against soccer.  It was soccer’s fault the ATM had to be reset in the first place.  It was soccer’s fault I was waiting.

I stretched my legs in front of me and leaned over my knees, touching my toes, trying to alleviate the nagging pain in my butt.  My thighs had quickly adapted to my biking regiment here, building up muscle until my weekly 30K bike ride and from Velingara was no longer difficult, but my flat Midwestern behind still hurt after a few hours on a bike seat.  I took a couple deep, calming breaths, but that only made me madder, as the bakery next door was emitting sweet buttery pastry smells 300 CFA out of my reach.  I was hungry, I was tired, and it was looking like I still had to bike another 15K to get home, since I didn’t have 400 CFA for a car.

I had been penniless for about a week at this point.  The past few times I’d gone to Velingara the ATM had been broken, too, which didn’t bother me much, since I could just kept stretching the little money I had.  Now, however, I was alaa haymbuudu, flat broke, and it was really starting to hurt.  I could no longer afford my normal bean-and-mayonnaise breakfast sandwiches.  I had to go to a dennabo (naming ceremony) empty-handed, a major faux-pas for the rich toubab.  I couldn’t even pay the 100 CFA to charge my phone at the town’s solar charger, so I’d had to ration my usage to make the battery last.  Earlier that afternoon, Liz, one of the volunteers in Velingara, had been nice enough to check the bank to make sure the ATM was working before I wasted the hour and the energy biking into her town.  I must have gotten there mere minutes too late.  The uniformed man had told me to sit and wait, that he was sure the ATM would be working again soon.  “Miin poti la machine redemarrage, quoi," he had explained in a mix of bad French and good Pulaar.  I had imagined the restart process for my laptop – five minutes, max.  “Awa,” I had said cheerily. OK.  I could wait. I took a seat on the edge of what had probably formerly been a garden planter, but was now just another container for garbage.

As the next two hours passed, hanger and irritation set in.  Every 15-20 minutes, the uniformed man would encourage me it would just be a few more minutes.  Finally, I decided I could wait no more.  I calculated the amount of time needed to bike home vs. the amount of light left in the day and decided I needed to leave immediately.  Not only was the potholey road difficult to traverse by flashlight, but many cars here do not come equipped with headlights, and as it got darker it got more likely that we might crash.  There were also rumors of bandits that came out after dark, not to mention the hyenas and baboons.  I said a few more impolite words to the guard, told him he was lazy and a liar, and that I was very angry.  He laughed at my bad Pulaar and waved goodbye.  

I biked home as fast as I could, racing against the sun.  I finally pedaled into my village at late twilight, out of breath, tired, sweaty, hungrier than ever – and still broke.  

“Sabaly!” called a voice as I coasted by the middle school. I put down my feet to brake, Flintstones style, since I hadn’t had money to get my brakes repaired at the local mechanic. 
“Mballo,” I said, recognizing the speaker, a friendly old man who could usually be found under the shade tree by the middle school. 
“Sabaly,” he repeated. 
“Mballo,” I said, touching my right hand to my chest in an expression of respect.  This continued several more times, each of us stating the last name of the other.  Finally satisfied, he moved on.
 “Horo jahno-daa?” he asked.  Where were you?
“I went to Velingara,” I said in Pulaar.
“Oh! That is far!” he replied.  “How were the people of Velingara?  Were they in peace?”
“Sort of,” I answered.  He smiled again and tilted his head.  I was going off-script here.  I was supposed to say “Jam tan,” peace only, and move on.
“I don’t have any money,” I explained.  “And the machine at the bank was broken.”  He clicked his tongue in sympathy and nodded twice.  For some reason I continued, compelled by his kind body language and serene smile.  Before I knew it, I had vented all my frustrations of the whole awful afternoon at him. “And now it is dark and I’m tired and I’m hungry and I still don’t have any money and the guard lied to me!” I finished.

Mballo smiled.  “Di satti, kii,” he said.  It’s hard indeed.  “Life here is hard, Sabaly.  Don’t be mad.”

I wished I had more time to talk, but it was almost completely dark now, dark enough that I needed to walk my bike because it was no longer safe to ride it.

“It’s getting late,” I told Mballo.  I’m going home.  You should go home, too.” 
“Oh, no!  I will lay here tonight.” He waved his hand to indicate the space under the shade tree. 
I was flabbergasted.  “What?! Why?!” I asked, hoping that I had misunderstood.
“I guard the school,” he said.  They say they will pay me jooni jooni, but the money does not come.”  He shrugged, content.  “What can I do?  Life is hard.”

My white guilt, always at a low simmer here, erupted into a furious boil.  I looked at my friend’s clothes, realizing that they might be the only ones he had.  I looked at the smooth dry dirt underneath the tree, worn down by his sleeping there for months.  I noted his lack of a mosquito net – his lack of a blanket – he didn’t even have a plastic mat to sleep on.  I felt disgusted and ashamed of myself, self-conscious of the privilege I take for granted far too often.  How could he be so happy while I had felt so persecuted?  

I wished Mballo a good evening and walked the rest of the way home in a daze, reframing the day’s events as a Senegalese might have seen them.  True, I didn’t have any cash, but neither does anybody else here.  I have a good, kind family that gives me food for free – I have a working bike that brings me where I need to go – I have my health.  Even when I’m broke, I’m still incalculably rich.  I need to try harder to remember that.

Gonna get new shoes, come pickin' time....

My family here in Teyel has lots of fields.  The corn, rice, and millet are for eating, but the cotton is for selling.  For the last few months, my brother has been talking wistfully about all the luxuries he'll be able to afford when the cotton check comes in...things like eggs, meat, vegetables, and shoes for his kids.  Maybe even a new cow.

This year was my first experience as a cotton farmer.  It's a lot of work when you don't have machines to do any of it for you. I only went out to the fields a few times, whereas my aunts went every afternoon for weeks (after they had already finished an exhausting morning of pounding, cooking, sweeping, and washing).

It's a gorgeous 15-20 minute walk through the woods to get to the fields, but it is less gorgeous when you have to do the walk when the sun is hot and you're sweating profusely.  

My sister Asu, somehow looking like a model despite the beating sun.  Thankfully not pictured is me, a red sweaty mess of a toubab with flies all over her face.

After the soft pillowy cotton was picked, we put it in a bag, usually an old rice sack. When the rice sack was full, we shoved it down and fit more in, hoping we didn't inadvertently anger a blister beetle.  Cotton is sold by the kilo, so they try to fit as much of it into as little space as possible.  When the sack can't possibly hold any more cotton, they take it to a storage area, either in/near the field itself, like this:

Or in an extra hut in the family's compound, like this:

Unfortunately, there was an "accident" in Teyel a couple weeks ago, and all the cotton in one holding area got burned.  It was definitely arson, as nothing nearby was burned except the cotton, and it will probably always remain an unsolved mystery - the Law and Order: Teyel squad is not quite as efficient as their New York brethren.  The damage was not as bad as it could have been, because many people woke up during the commotion and pulled water from their wells, then ran over with buckets to drench the piles, so only the outside shell was ruined.  The cotton inside was still okay, though wet.

My neighbor Korka is one of those whose crop was burned.  He removed the damaged cotton, piece by piece, then carefully spread out the unburned remainder so it wouldn't mold.  All the others affected by the fire did the same.

Goofball.

The trucks came to weigh all the cotton just a couple days ago.  My family loaded up the donkey cart with this year's crop (it took several trips to get it all) and unloaded it at "Le Centre," where the cotton bigwigs were waiting with their scale and receipt books.

Since this is Senegal, the land of waiting, the process of weighing and loading Teyel's cotton took two full days to do.  Luckily, a huge pile of fluffy cotton makes a pretty comfortable chair while you're waiting for your turn at the scale, and attaya stoves are portable.  There were even a few enterprising teen boys selling popsicles they'd biked in in coolers from Velingara.

 

Some of my neighbors balancing their crop on the slide scale.

And just like that, the trucks drove away, the crop was gone, the work was over, and a check for an unfathomable amount of money ($600 US dollars) was in my brother's hand.

Success.

Cake!

I like parties.  Everyone likes parties.  The best thing about parties is that dancing and eating require no language skills.  Since I have spent most of the last year without language skills, I have thrown many parties here.  I reasoned that although I eventually wanted my service to be about more than parties, there was nothing wrong with making people like me. It is universally true that a good way to make people like you is to give them cake.

I told a couple other PCVs about making cakes in village and was met with either dumbfounded stares or enthusiastic badgering for how I did that.  It's really easy!

Acquire a gas burner, or fire and sticks, or a charcoal stove and charcoal.  I've only done this with my gas burner but I'm sure you can do it with other heating methods as well.  Heat is heat.  Put a thick sturdy pot with a lid on your heat source.

Put something in the bottom of the pot to prevent your cake pan from touching the hot burner, since if it got too close it could scorch the bottom.  I use either a flat metal plate (if I'm making muffins) or a small upside-down bowl (if I'm making cake).  Doing this effectively means that your batter will be surrounded entirely by hot air, and that's all an oven is.

Four muffin tins on a metal plate.

Turn the heat on low and keep it covered until they're cooked.  A 6-inch diameter cake will take about a half hour, these muffins take about 20 minutes.

mmmmmmm

That's it!

Suffee cutting up a round peanut butter cake

When you can make a middle aged woman dance without music, you know you're doing something right.

Recipes:

Muffins:  mix 3 cups flour (part of this can be millet or corn flour), 2 cups sugar, 1 tsp baking soda or powder (I know they're not the same - I think powder is better, but there's only soda at my local boutique and that tastes fine too), 1 tsp salt, and 1 tsp cinnamon (if you've got it).  In another bowl mix 4 eggs and 1.25 cups oil.  Stir the dry and wet ingredients together.  Throw in whatever additions you think might be delicious, especially vanilla if you've got it.  Cook in little metal cups - I bought them in Thies, they're probably in many markets if you look around.  You can cook muffin batter in a cake pan, too, to make a giant muffin-cake.

Peanut butter cake:  mix .75 c margarine (the Jadida they sell at boutiques works fine), .75 c peanut butter, 3 eggs, 2.25 c sugar, 2.25 c flour, 3 tsp baking soda or powder (like the muffins, i think powder is better but soda works too), .75 tsp salt, vanilla if you've got it, and a cup of milk (or Vitalait in water).

Coffee cake:  mix 1 c sugar, 1.75 c flour, and 2 t baking powder or soda, work in 4 T butter with a fork or your fingers, add 1 beaten egg and 0.5 c milk, sprinkle 1 tbsp sugar mixed with 1.5 tsp cinnamon on top.