Village Food

Ajaaraama!

I've been maintaining this blog for over a year, but I haven't posted much about Senegalese food yet, and that is probably the most frequent question I get.  So, hopefully this will rectify the situation.

 BREAKFAST:

I always buy my own breakfast from a vendor on the main road in my town.  This 1) gives me a chance to pump some money into the local economy and 2) lets me set my own schedule for the day - I can eat at 7 if I'm feeling ambitious and want to crank out some projects before the sun gets too hot, or I can eat at 10 if I'm feeling lazier.  I usually buy breakfast from my aunt, also named Kadiatou Sabaly.  She has bean sandwiches and café touba, which is like nescafe with cloves and other spices added.

 

Kadiatou with her bag of bread and bowl of beans.  I offered to retake it since her eyes were closed, but she insisted it was a good picture and she looked great.




A neighbor kid, Moussa, eating his breakfast sandwich.

If I don't feel like beans, I get mooni, which is little balls of millet in a thin sauce.  It's really good if you add sugar and milk to it.

Asi selling mooni, with her happy customers.

My mooni bowl, with sugar and kosam (fermented milk)

LUNCH:

 

I almost always eat lunch with my host family.  I share a bowl with my brother, Tidiane, and his son Mawdo.  Lunch is always corn, rice, or millet, with different sauces.  It's repetitive, but there's enough variety that I don't get too sick of anything.
 

Ceeb (fried rice) with bitter tomato and cabbage.

Rice with maafe domida (a tomato-based sauce).

Kodde (coarsely pounded steamed corn) with maafe girte (peanut sauce) and untu (fish balls - fish balls are also called "bara bara," which is endlessly amusing to my family since it means my English name, Barbara, is "fish ball.")

Sometimes you get lucky and get a fish head instead of a fish ball.

Rice and follere (a sauce made from hibiscus leaves)

Futi (coarsely pounded corn, steamed with okra and palm oil)

Ñankatan, the dish I named my dog after.  It's coarsely pounded peanuts mixed in with rice and onions, with some spice called oji added.  I have no idea what oji is but it's pretty good.  The vegetable is a bitter tomato.  They're not good but they're high in iron so I try to convince my family to buy/eat them.

Kodde follere

Rice and a palm-oil based sauce

Rice, some kind of meat, follere, and a piece of carrot

 

DINNER:

 

Dinner has less variety than lunch - it's always either lecciri or gosse, both of which are shown below.  I loved lecciri at first, then grew sick of it, then loved it again.  Currently I love it.  Every day around 4pm I get happy because I remember I get to eat lecciri in just a few hours.

 

Lecciri (finely pounded steamed corn or millet) with a watery sauce, called jammbo.  Usually the sauce has finely pounded peanuts in it to thicken it up and sometimes there are beans or leaves in it too.  The sauce is poured over the lecciri, which sucks it up like a sponge.  It's really good.

 

Gosse (rice cooked in too much water for too long, so it's like a thin porridge.  Salt or sugar is added to taste.  I sometimes add cinnamon, too, but my family thinks that does not taste good.

 SNACKS:

A handful of times, my brother Oussamon has come back from the woods with a bucket full of honeycomb.  It's wonderful.

Before the mangoes were ripe, people would make this concoction - pounded mangoes, salt, hot peppers, and MSG seasoning powder.  It sounds weird, but it was really good.  It reminded me of gardettoes.

 

I'm still averaging three mangoes a day.  They won't run out for about a month yet.

That's it!  Any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Love, Kadiatou.

Hercules, in Baby Pulaar

I’m back safe in stifling sweaty Senegal.  It was great to return “home” after my long American vacation.  I came back to a barrage of handclapping, dancing, and children and adults all running to me screaming “Kadiatou’s back!  Kadiatou’s back!” America was really hard to leave, as I expected…but after a village homecoming like that, I was happy to be back here.  Plus, the mangoes are ripe.

After I came back, one of the first things I did with my family was watch Hercules (the 90s animated film, not the Kevin Sorbo masterpiece, regrettably.  If anyone could send me files of Kevin Sorbo or Lucy Lawless, I’m down.)  I was able to explain most of the film using my baby Pulaar…sort of.

I’m far more comfortable speaking than I used to be, but my language is still laughably bad.  It’s like every day I’m working on a 1000-piece puzzle, but I only have 200 pieces.  I’m able to put together pieces that my village can recognize as coherent thought, but sometimes my paltry vocabulary and terrible grammar just doesn’t cut it.  However, even though there are many, many things I don’t know how to say, I’m getting much better at stringing together words I do know to explain myself, so if I have a sympathetic listener, one who is patient enough to work through the puzzle with me, I can get a lot across.

As you read through this, imagine that everything Kadiatou (me, the foreigner) says is in a very strong accent that makes her nearly impossible to understand, and that every 4^th word or so has some grammar mistakes.

CHARACTERS:

Kadiatou, The Foreigner, Yours Truly.

Alpha: My 12-year old brother with a heart of gold.
Psydu: A teenaged neighbor boy who didn’t make much of an impression on me at first, but now that I can understand him, he’s hilarious.
Fatou: 14ish sister who is sassy but sweet.

*Credits Roll and Opening Song Plays*

Alpha:  “Kadiatou – is this film scary?”
Kadiatou: “No.  It is a film for children.”
Alpha: “Are there dinosaurs?”
Kadiatou: “No dinosaurs.”
Alpha: “I still see dinosaurs when I try to sleep at night.  The dinosaur film was too scary.”
*general exclamations of agreement, discussion of Jurassic Park*

Fatou: “Kadiatou, who is that?”
Kadiatou: “That young man?  He is called Hercules.  His father is Allah.  But there are many Allahs.  Those animals stole him.  Hercules drank the ‘magic’ drink.”(I stumbled on the word “magic.”  When I don’t know how to say something in Pulaar, I usually just say it in English with a French accent.  More often than not, this actually works.)
Fatou: “Le boisson magic?”  (Yesssss, worked again!)
Kadiatou: “Voila, le boisson magic.  But he did not drink it all.  Now, he is between man and Allah.  His mind is man but his body is Allah.”

*Hercules goes to Zeus's temple*

Kadiatou: “This is the mosque.  That is Hercules’s father, Allah.  He said that Hercules must get the personality and body of Allah.  Then he can come home.”

*Pegasus enters the screen*

Alpha: “Kadiatou, what’s that?”
Kadiatou: “Umm…puccusonndu.” (“horsebird,” literally).

Alpha (confused): “Puccusonndu?”

*rumbled sounds of disagreement and confusion.*

Fatou: “Oh!  I see!  Puccusonndu!”

*general happy grunts of agreement*

Alpha: “Kadiatou, what is that?”
Kadiatou: (hesitates for a minute...how do you say "satyr" in Pulaar?  Decides to let them answer this one on their own.) "You see.”
Fatou: “Mbeewagorko.” (“goatman,” literally.)
Alpha: “Kadiatou, is that an mbeewagorko?”
Kadiatou: “Yes.  His head is man.  His body is goat.  He is a teacher of fighting.  Now Hercules will learn fighting.  Now he has the body of Allah, but he cannot go home yet, because he does not have the personality of Allah.”

*first scene with Megara*

Psydu: “Who is that little girl?”
Kadiatou: “She is a woman.  Is she pretty?”
Psydu: “She has no body.  She needs to eat more mangoes.”

*Megara goes to Hades*

Kadiatou: “Now the woman is going to her boss.  You see, her boss is not good.  Now the woman loves Hercules.  And Hercules loves her.  Hercules gives his power.  Now Hercules does not have power."
Psydu (quietly, as if to himself): “When she goes to the doctor, he tells her to go weigh herself at the boutique instead.  She is less than 5 kilos!”

*The titans start attacking*

Alpha: “Kadiatou, turn the film off, it’s too scary.”

Kadiatou: “Just wait.  It is a film for children.  Everything is at peace.”
Alpha: “But Hercules does not have power. He will die.”
Kadiatou: “Just wait.”

*Pillar falls on Megara and she dies*

Kadiatou: “Now the woman died.”
Everyone: “She DIED?!”
Kadiatou: “Now Hercules has his power.”
Psydu: “Oh!  Because the girl was a witch!”
Kadiatou: “She was not a witch.”
Psydu: “Yes, she died, and now he has his power.  She was a witch.”
*Everyone agrees with Psydu, so I shrug and drop it.*

*Hercules dives in the pool of souls in Hell and rescues Megara’s soul and returns it to her body, which apparently was easy for everyone to understand because everyone happily narrated it to each other as it was happening.*

Kadiatou: “Hercules wanted to help his friend.  He did not think of only himself.  Now he has the personality of Allah.  Now Hercules can go home.  But the woman is only a person.  She cannot go to Allah’s house.”
Psydu: “She can’t go in because she is a witch.”
Kadiatou: “She is not a witch.  But now.  You see?  Hercules loves her so he wants to live with her on Earth.”

Psydu: “Until the wind comes.  Then she will blow away.”


I checked my cell phone clock incredulously as the credits rolled. 

 

12:06 AM. 

 

Whoops. 

Stomping out Malaria!

In 2011, Peace Corps Senegal joined with other Peace Corps countries in Africa to form the initiative “Stomp Out Malaria in Africa.”  This program means that the ~3,000 volunteers across the continent (including the 250 or so in Senegal) are working together with NGOs and local governments to bring malaria deaths down to zero by 2020.  Here in Senegal, volunteers have been hard at work painting murals, doing radio shows, leading bed-net repair and care sessions, and talking to school groups about malaria prevention and treatment.  In my region of Kolda, volunteers planned a community block party to help spread the word about malaria prevention (I did not attend because I was at a different block party, in Minnesota, celebrating the joining of houses Brock and Michel). 

Why is all this malaria prevention work a big deal?  Well, malaria is the leading cause of death in Senegal.  Due to mosquito biology, it is more prevalent in the rainier south (where my site is) than it is in the drier north.  According to the World Health Organization, 345,889 people in Senegal got clinically treated for malaria last year, but there were almost certainly many more people infected than that.  I don’t have local statistics, but I can tell you that last rainy season, three people in my village of 1,000 died of malaria…at least, three people that I know of.  It could have been more. 

Trying to wrap my head around these deaths has been one of the hardest parts of my service.  A cure for malaria has existed for hundreds of years, everyone in my village was given a free bed net two years ago, and the Senegalese government subsidizes all malaria testing supplies and medication, so they’re free for everyone.  Why do people continue to die? A much better writer than me attempts to answer that question here.

It’s worth your time to read the above article, because it’s great, but if you didn’t, this paragraph sums up the problem nicely:
Part of the issue is cultural – in many parts of the world, malaria is considered akin to the flu, and even in the US the flu vaccine is woefully underutilized. Part of it is distrust in the system – despite truly heroic efforts on the part of many Ministries of Health, supply chain management remains a stubborn, persistent problem, and in many places stock-outs are still common.

As an additional barrier, although the treatments for malaria are free, transportation is not.  If families have the choice of paying to go to the hospital to get medicine to feel better, or just waiting until they feel better on their own, they sometimes make the choice not to go in.  Every CFA counts.

To hopefully solve the care-seeking gap problem, a new malaria treatment model is starting up in my region this rainy season.  Under the new model (called ProAct in the above article, but more frequently called PECADOM+ here) instead of waiting at a health structure for sick people to come to them, now health workers, armed with backpacks full of testing supplies and treatment medication, are actively going out into villages to hunt down the malaria where it lives, giving sick people treatment, free of cost, right at their homes.  The program was successful last year in the region of Kedougou, and I’m excited to be involved in it this year in my region of Kolda.

I don’t yet know what my involvement will look like – whether I will actually be accompanying the volunteer health workers into the villages and distributing medication, or whether I’m be involved more in the data analysis, or whether I’ll just continue to coach people in my village on good malaria prevention practices, but regardless of what I do, I'm looking forward to making a difference. 

America is nice.

Greetings from Minnesota!  My sister Becky (real sister, not host sister) is gettin’ hitched this weekend, so I came home for the nuptials.  It is wonderful to be back.  Although I enjoy my village most of the time, I was ready for a vacation.  Village was wearing at me and I could feel myself starting to snap.  Three weeks in America is just what I need to recalibrate and prepare my mind and body for my second year in Senegal.

I’ve been listening to Spotify, eating poptarts, watching Hulu and Netflix, drinking beer, and going for walks with my grandma.  It’s springtime, green and gorgeous.  There’s unlimited delicious food to eat, everyone has electricity, and I can take a hot shower anytime I want.  My little sister has taken to shoving me and rolling her eyes every time I say, “America is nice”…but I can’t stop saying it.  It’s true.  America is nice!

I was nervous about coming back here.  I thought I’d have some reverse culture shock, since I’ve changed since I left a year ago.  I thought I might have trouble talking to people.  After all, I don’t know any current events from the past year, and I’m aware that typical Americans don’t have a frame of reference for my work in Senegal, so they tune out quickly when I try talking about it.  I was worried about being able to make conversation. Luckily, I haven’t had any problems.  It’s like I never left.  I’m so happy here.  America is nice.

A few months ago, I asked a PCV who went home for the holidays what the hardest part of being back home for her vacation was.  She said, “Coming back here” (to Senegal).  I thought it was a little melodramatic.  I love Senegal, and I didn’t think it was hard to leave America last March, when my service began.  Now, however, I totally see where she was coming from.  I don’t want to go back.  I still have two weeks left here, but I know I’ll be crying at the airport on May 7^th. America is just so nice.

I thought it might be helpful to FutureBarb, crying at the airport, to start thinking now about things I really love about Teyel.  America is nice, but Senegal is nice, too, and I have another year left there.  This blog is dedicated to the good things about my village home.

So, without further ado, here are four things I love about Teyel:

 1) Forgiveness.  Oddly enough, my 2-years in Senegal is the longest I’ve spent in one place since I graduated college.  For the past several years I’ve been a tumbleweed, rambling from place to place.  When friends screwed me over, when family disappointed me, when I broke up with boys, it was easy to break ties.  In cities, there are always new people to hang out with.  That is not the case in my vil.  In Teyel, you can get into a screaming fight with the neighbor that annoys the crap out of you, then you can either a) get over it or b) hold a grudge and still see her several times a day until forever.  Since (b) is not a real option, you’re stuck with (a).  The first time I lost my temper in village, I was mortified.  The next day, I didn’t want to leave my hut.  “This is it,” I thought.  “I’ve ruined my service.  It’s over.  No one will want to work with me anymore, no one will talk to me now, my family’s going to hate me, it’s done.”  Instead, when I finally got up the courage to leave my hut, no one said a word other than “good morning.”  

There’s a flip side.  When it’s me that screws up, I love that everyone forgives me.  However, when others screw up, I hate being expected to shrug and pretend it never happened.  A couple weeks ago, one of my sisters said that her friend in a nearby village was going to name her baby after me.  My sister said that I had to buy a new complet to wear to the dennabo and that I had to buy the baby a big gift.  When I showed up to the dennabo, new complet and all, the baby was named Ngillane, not Kadiatou, and definitely not Barbara.  I was livid – not because I really wanted another tokara, but because I hated being lied to.  I found that I couldn’t get over it without a formal apology.  I had to ask for an apology several times before I finally got one, and until I got it, I couldn’t control my anger.  I looked at my lying sister and my blood boiled.

Now, a month later, I’m over it, and I’m not mad at all.  If I wouldn’t have gotten my apology, I still would have gotten over it by now.  Getting mad about the past does not change the present.  Telling people I’m mad at them just burns important bridges that I can’t traverse the village without.  I only have a handful of people I can work with here, and if I write off all of them, I’m out of a job. In year two, I’m going to make more of an effort to truly forgive and forget.  If I do get mad, I’m going to have to control my temper and fake it until I make it. Real people are messy, and if you want to have a relationship with a messy person, you have to accept them as they are.  You can either allow them to be fallible humans, or you can expect the perfection that will never come.

2) Truly green living.  I love that nothing (nothing) is wasted in village.  Those that know me well know how frugal I am, even in America – I’m the type that cuts the moldy bit off a piece of cheese and eats the rest regardless – so it’s no surprise that I love village frugality.  No food is ever thrown away here.  Leftovers (if there are any) are eaten by children as an afternoon snack, or, if all the kids are full, are eaten by a goat…or a dog…or a donkey.  All “garbage” here is recycled.  A discarded flip flop gets cut up to make wheels for a homemade racecar toy.  A plastic coke bottle is refilled with juice, which is sold, drank, and given back to the juice maker endlessly.  Breakfast sandwiches come wrapped in old Arabic newspapers, bought by the bundle in a nearby market.  Eggshells from the hard-boiled eggs sold by breakfast vendors are gobbled up by grateful goats.  Some volunteers throw their garbage in their latrines because it bothers them seeing their garbage show up all over village – not I, not I.  I love seeing my garbage get recycled. It sounds bad to say that kids play with garbage here, but they do, and it’s actually not bad.  Kids will have fun with anything they’re given. 

3) Disappointment is handled really well.  Every time someone talks about the future in my village, they say inchallah or si Allah jabbi – both mean “if God agrees”.  When I say I’ll do something, but then don’t actually do it, it’s not a problem.  If I say I’m going to be back in village on Tuesday, but then I hit some travel snags and can’t actually get back until Wednesday, no one gets mad at me.  If I tell a farmer that I’d love to help him with a live fencing project, but then get sidetracked by other work and never actually follow up on it, that’s fine.  Everyone understands that the future is uncertain and that sometimes things don’t work out.  I’m not blamed for being late to a meeting or for not calling when I said I would.  There’s a flip side, though.  When I drop the ball, I love that no one blames me.  When others drop the ball, however, it’s infuriating that they explain it away with a shrug.  I have had people ditch meetings that they promised they’d come to, then later I find out that they were just sitting drinking tea in their family’s compound all afternoon.  I’m getting better at differentiating between the “yes” that actually means “yes” and the “yes” that means “I have no intention of actually doing that, but I’m agreeing with you to end this conversation,” but I still get fooled every now and then.

4) Everything is jam tan.  I like that this culture doesn’t sweat the small stuff.  As long as you’re alive, everything is jam tan (Peace Only.)  No one stays mad for long, and everyone seems happy and grateful for what they have.  There’s a flipside to this one, too.  I called my brother yesterday for the first time since I left on vacation. 

“Hello!”
“Hello!”
“How is Teyel?”
“Peace only.”
“How is the family?”
“Peace only.”
“How is the heat?”
“Peace only.”
“How is Ñankatan?”
“Peace only.”
*pause*
“Ñankatan died.”
“He died?”
“Yes.  He died.”
“Oh.”
*pause*
"How is America?"
"Peace only."
 

My American brain would have liked my brother to call me immediately after my dog passed, to mourn with me and to say that he was very sad, to allow me to cry and feel my feelings – but the culture is to instead move on and insist that everything’s fine.  It sucks that my dog died…it REALLY sucks…but at least my family’s still OK.  The well still has water and everyone is still clothed and fed.  If you insist several times that you’re jam tan, if you actively count your blessings instead of your curses, you might start to believe you really are fortunate.

Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to everyone who has taken the time to hang out with me during my vacation.  I'm having a great time!

Love, Kadiatou

Maps and Pen Pals

A fellow Koldan (Koldaite? Kalabandit?) who is fascinated with maps recently did a tourney of over a dozen schools in our region.  At each location, he painted a map of Africa (done with a really nifty stencil and spray paint) then supplied the teachers at the school with a curriculum guide to incorporate the map into their lessons.  I chose to paint my Africa map in Dinguira, right next to the Senegal map I did there back in December.

In progress

Labeling 

Gasi!

Unfortunately (fortunately), Jim's map was so great it made my Senegal map look pretty crappy by comparison, so my friend Lauren came over and we added a lot of detail to Senegal - roads, rivers, cities, and a legend.

All of the teachers said they wanted to use the maps in their lessons, but there was only one who invited me to watch the lesson take place.  Mr Sadio technically only has 24 students in his class, but is apparently lenient about not sending kids home who haven't paid the inscription fees yet, since on the day I came in there were almost double that number present.

After explaining what a map was and how they were used, Mr. Sadio showed his students where Dinguira, Kolda, and Senegal were located, then asked students to point out key features of both maps.
  

After that, he moved into the classroom and wrote information about Senegal's geography on the chalkboard for the kids to copy into their notebooks.  A notebook, a pen, and a chalkboard slab are the only learning materials available for students at the Dinguira school, so that is how they study - copying the board and then studying their notebooks.  There are no textbooks or copy-machined articles.

Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, I delivered the next batch of Pen Pal letters to the students of Teyel.  The students read their letters aloud, laughing excitedly, then passed them around to their friends and immediately began drafting their responses.  If everything goes as planned, I'll be able to deliver the next letters from Teyel to St. Paul when I go home on vacation in a couple weeks.

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.