Consider Me Demystified

After weeks of putting clues together and guessing, our permanent site for the next two years was finally revealed to us trainees by blindfolding us and placing on a map of Senegal painted on the training center basketball court.  We are heading to the southeastern region of Kedougou, to  a town very near the border with Mali.

Gou Crew

The day after finding out our placements, the 9 Kedougou trainees piled into a Peace Corps land cruiser for a 10 hour drive to go on what is known as "Demyst", a five day voyage into the life of a current volunteer (in our case, the volunteer we are replacing).  I think we finally have a sense of what the next two years will look like.

Kedougou is known for several things: heat, proximity to the national wild life preserve, being the poorest region in the country and also for being the only region in Senegal with any topography (namely mountains and waterfalls).  Non-Kedougou volunteers are typically jealous of this last feature.  Saraya, however, does not have mountains or waterfalls, which was a bit disappointing after all we had heard about the beauty of the region.  I felt better about this when one of the volunteers who demysted in the mountains had an incident with a python in his hut.  Also, I'm just dang excited about Saraya as a site, regardless of its flat and dusty nature.  

Saraya has a population of about 6,000 and is growing every day because of two factors: the discovery of gold in the area and the completion of what is known as the Mali road, which connects Bamako (the capital of Mali) to Dakar.  There are some very interesting parallels between this population explosion and what's going on in Eastern Montana/Western North Dakota. The BBC did an excellent photo essay on Senegal's gold rush that you can see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14837204

Leah, the volunteer we are replacing, thought that her hut would be too small for two people so she arranged for us to rent a large hut near her host family, but they will still take on the role of host family for us.  In my view, this is the best of both worlds.  We will have a family but also have a bit more privacy and freedom to cook our own meals for breakfast and dinner (lunch is the biggest meal of the day, which we will eat with our family).  Our hut is still being completed, so there are still a few unknowns, such as the source of our electricity (apparently the guy building it suggested to Leah that we could just steal electricity from another family's compound?).  

Here are some pictures of what will soon be home sweet home:

We will live in this hut longer than we've lived anywhere else together.

The beginnings of our latrine.

Our host family's compound.  Our mom, Sadio, is on the left, and another trainee, Chrissy, is on the right.

It was so exciting to finally be there, to finally meet the people we will be living and working with, and to finally speak the language we have been learning (which is referred to as Malinke in Saraya) with everyone we meet.  I had been planning on requesting to keep the name Fanta  because I really like it, but Leah informed me on the drive from Kedougou to Saraya that my host mom has been waiting for years to have a female volunteer that she could name after herself.  (Leah already had a name when she moved to Saraya from a neighboring village during her second year to replace the first volunteer there who had apparently been such an incredible volunteer that Peace Corps didn't think a new volunteer could keep up his momentum.  This makes it a little daunting to go there as a new volunteer, but I think that helps explain why they placed two people there.)  When we pulled up to the compound in the land cruiser, our mom came to us exclaiming, "Ntoxoma, ntoxoma, ntoxoma!" (My namesake).  I knew then that Fanta would have to be laid to rest.  My permanent Senegalese name will be Sadio (prounounced Sah-joe) Tigana.  Pat is named after our host dad: Iburahima Cissokho.  Our new family seems like they will be really great, but we are definitely dreading the day we will say goodbye to our training family in Mbour.

After meeting our family, we walked around and greeted people and got oriented to who the important people are (chief, women's group president, tastiest bean sandwich vendor) and who had been the most helpful to Leah during her year in Saraya.  We took a special trip to the hospital, where I will be working most of the time.  If anyone has ever read Cutting for Stone (and if you haven't, I highly recommend that you do), the hospital environment reminded me immensely of Missing Hospital.  The staff there are all part of what is called the "affecte" system, which sends people educated in Dakar to places like Saraya for five year terms of service.  They seem like quite the tight knit community.  One interesting thing is that they don't speak Malinke, so that's why they needed a French speaker for this placement.  Maybe I'll learn some Wolof too!  We met everyone and then were weighed by one of the nurses and informed that we will be weighed each month to make sure that we gain weight (I'm sure our host family in Mbour would do this too if they could).

That night was the hardest night of Peace Corps thus far.  We were sleeping in the twin bed owned by our future sitemate, an agroforestry volunteer named Frank.  It was way too hot to be so close to another body, and trying to move away only got you a face full of dusty mosquito net.  It may have resulted in minor panic attacks from both of us.  Since we will be arriving in Kedougou right in the middle of hot season, I hope that this won't be a trend.  I think it will be ok since we'll have a bed built for two people plus we will figure out a way to hang our mosquito nets outside during hot season.

The second day, we went with Leah in the ambulance to her last meeting of her Peace Corps service in one of the villages where the mining is actually happening.  It was a meeting to touch base with health workers who are working on HIV prevention.  This was very exciting to sit in on, since it was my first taste of actual work in the Peace Corps.  HIV is more prevalent in this region than in the rest of Senegal--the influx of miners has created an influx of sex workers.  The biggest shock of my time here so far was learning about the human trafficking that goes on to bring these women to the area.  Learning about the women who are trafficked from Nigeria felt like getting hit with a ton of bricks.  Sex trafficking is one of those horrible things that you hear about that is almost incomprehensible, and to find out that it is happening in our area was a huge wake up call to the reality of this atrocity. The hospital in Saraya works with them to prevent HIV, and since Nigeria is English-speaking, this work is a good place for Peace Corps to be involved.  I really pray that we will see an end to the trafficking during our two years there, but I'm still trying to feel out what our role in that process should be, since I still don't have a clear picture of the magnitude or of players involved in either the trafficking or any fight against trafficking.  

My other potential work potential work projects deal with malaria prevention, cervical cancer screening, and investigation into a higher than usual number of typhoid fever cases.  Since Patrick isn't directly replacing an Environmental Educaton volunteer, his trajectory is not as clear.  He is also really interested in pursuing projects that have to do with teaching safer practices to artesinal miners who use mercury to separate the gold from the ore, encouraging appropriate technologies such as incinerators that allow for safe burning of plastic, and something called Roots and Chutes that's done with the Jane Goodall Foundation that I really don't know much about. His counterpart in Saraya is the owner of the radio station, and the volunteers in the area have a weekly radio show, which I'm really excited about.

Passing the torch: Leah and I as we waited for the health workers in Sabodala to arrive 

After being demysted in Saraya, we went back to Kedougou to the Peace Corps regional house where we had a gathering with most of the volunteers in the region to welcome us.  Then we headed back for the remaining month of training in Thies and Mbour.  On the way, we took a potty break on the edge of the wildlife reserve.  Upon getting out of the car, we were swarmed by monkeys and a warthog.  One monkey is cute, but thirty monkeys are terrifying.  Several even climbed into the land cruiser and stole mangoes. I may or may not have screamed twice while I was going to the bathroom because in my nervousness I didn't realize there was a bathroom door so I had to try to poop while being stared at by monkeys.  Also, leaves kept falling on me, and since I have had two lizards fall out of trees onto me, I have become even more jumpy than I normally was.  Pat's blog has some great pictures of our monkey-filled pit stop.  http://pldispatch.blogspot.com/2012/04/sub-saharan-africa-sand-heatrivers-and.html

We returned to the training center with sore rear-ends from our ten hour drive, a much greater understanding of each other's embarrassing moments and knowledge of showtunes, and at least a glimpse of what is to come in the next two years.  We were demystified.