Camp à la Senegalaise

The voyage from Dakar to Kedougou is very long and even more uncomfortable.  Twelve hours is the minimum amount of time, and that's if you take a night bus direct Kedougou, which we are discouraged from doing for safety reasons but do it anyway to avoid the even more cramped and hot sept-place ride that necessarily involves a stop in Tambacounda and an unsure connection.  Why then, you ask, would   I undertake that voyage to only be at site for 6 days after In-Service Training and turning right back around for Malaria Boot Camp?  One reason only: summer camp.

This summer, USAID sponsored a "Camp de Vacances" in Saraya that brought over 100 middle school kids to the school for a) remedial lessons in French and Math, and, b) fun!  The Senegalese school system does not often encourage things like creativity or learning through doing (it's all memorization and repetition), so this was an incredible opportunity for the kids.  Originally there was supposed to be a small fee for participation (like $2), but they ended up making it free so that everyone could come.  They also got t-shirts, which is pretty much the most exciting thing that can happen around these parts.  Some kids walked every day from neighboring villages, and more and more showed up each day.

2012 Camp de Vacances participants!

Check out their t-shirts!

We met with the principal, who is absolutely fantastic and in charge of overseeing the camp, the the day before everything started, and he basically told us that if there was anything we wanted to do with the kids, we were welcome to do it.  In training, when learning about all these issues and getting ideas for lesson plans, etc., a concern I always had was how to get a captive audience.  It turns out, getting the green light from the principal to do whatever you want with 100 middle schoolers is a very easy way to get that captive audience.

Having worked for three summers at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp, aka the best place on earth, I came to USAID camp full of ideas for fun games and activities.  It was so interesting to see what concepts of game playing were easier or harder for the kids to grasp.  Simple tag games are not so simple if you didn't grow up playing them.  Each game took a while to get used to, but fun was had nonetheless.  For any FLBC-ers reading this, we started with Senegalese Flag. (This was, of course, adapted from American Flag, a tag game where you call out categories of people to run across the field, and if they are touched, they become a star on the flag.  Fortunately, the Senegalese flag also has a star.  The funniest part was the differences in categories between Senegalese kids and American kids.  There is not very much variety in last names, so when "Les Danfakhas" was called out, about half of the kids ran across the field.)  We also played Lion, Monkey, Mosquito (a variation of Montana's own Grizzly, Trout, Mosquito, a glorified, full-body tag version of Rock, Paper,Scissors), Blob Tag (which I chose because I thought it would be easier than the first two...not the case), and had some good old-fashioned relays.  It was so incredibly fun to see these kids play!

Relay!!

Pat sounding the djembe to start a game

  We also did health talks on handwashing, which is absolutely neglected most of the time because of the lack of water at the school.  Fortunately, for camp, water was brought in, and since I had talked to the principal beforehand about doing the demonstration, he said, "Well I guess we better get some soap!"  Something as basic as handwashing is so important in a place that people eat with their hands!  I don't care about the left/right hand designations.  After the demonstration, Pat said, "I feel like such a Peace Corps volunteer."

On one afternoon of camp, I led a discussion about gender equality in education and gender stereotypes.  It ended up being a really good conversation with students and teachers, boys and girls.  I started out defining gender, equality, and stereotype and then had them do an activity that showed the disparities in educational attainment by using ten male and ten female volunteers that each represented ten percent of the population (we also had to define percent).  For example, “59% of boys in Senegal  are literate, and 41% of girls are literate.  Is that equality?  How about 24% of boys starting secondary school and 18% of girls?”  They all seemed to agree that these percentages did not look like equality.  Why do these inequalities exist, I asked.  Silence.  Then one boy timidly raised his hand.  I expected a two or three word answer, but out came a flood.  “Parents are busy working and they need the girls to stay home and help.  They think that if the girls go to school, bad things will happen.  Like early pregnancy.  They think that girls don’t need to go to school to do their work in the home.”  Around him, everyone nodded.  It led in perfectly to a discussion about gender stereotypes, where they made hand motions to represent the continuum of agreement to disagreement with statements I read.  I explained that there were no right or wrong answers, but we needed to know what we thought in order to start to think about why we might think it.  “It is easier to be a man than a woman.”  “Women are better parents than men.”  “Men are stronger than women.”  Good conversation was had, despite the inevitable giggles and battle of the sexes that emerged.  Critical thinking isn’t a much-engaged in activity, and I just hope the wheels got turning.

Got my facilitator hat on.

Visual representations of gender inequality in education

 As we were sitting with a group of the teachers during a session of singing and dancing led by the "monitor" (basically someone who gets camp-counselor like training), one of the teachers asked, "Doesn't Peace Corps have some kind of cream that keeps mosquitoes away?"  So the next day we made neem cream, a natural mosquito repellent made from leaves from the neem tree that possess a natural insect repellant and are also great for keeping flies out of your latrine, water, soap and oil.  No one can afford store-bought insect repellent, so this is a great way to protect yourself, especially at between dusk and going to bed (where hopefully you have a bednet!), when the malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are biting.

We had to make a lot of neem cream so we could give out samples, so we  enlisted help from the teachers.

So ended my four days of camp before Pat and I went to the waterfalls to celebrate our anniversary and I got back on a bus to come to Malaria Boot Camp, an intensive malaria training for volunteers across Africa that I'll write about soon.  I was so invigorated to be a part of it, and it made me even more excited for the Peace Corps sponsored camp that will be coming up in March.  USAID only funded camps for two schools in the region of Kedougou, so lots of kids don't get to have this experience.  Peace Corps volunteers around the region are coming together to put on a region-wide leadership camp for the best and brightest middle schoolers.  I have been part of the planning team for the camp, and cannot wait, especially after last week reminded me of my love of camps.  We will be doing classic team-building, life skills, environmental education, career talks, health education, and just having fun with kids selected from their schools during their spring break.  It should be excellent.  One of the things that doesn't come to mind automatically when thinking of the privileged life I was born into in America was the ability to do something like go to camp, or really even to have my childhood level of fun thought about.  This realization makes it even more exciting to give kids this opportunity.  We are funding this camp through what's called a Peace Corps partnership grant, which involves a contribution from the community and then volunteers fundraising the rest of the money.  If you're interested in helping out, check out the link:

https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-224

Thanks!

The Married Couple

Today marks two years that Patrick and I have been married, although the last six months feel like they should count for two years just in themselves.  We have experienced so much, and thus learned so much about ourselves, each other and our relationship that marriage in the Peace Corps kind of feels like a time warp. 

In honor of this anniversary, I want to share my reflections on doing Peace Corps as a couple.  On the Peace Corps website, it says that 9% of volunteers are married, and I think that the experience is wholly different than that of the majority of our fellow volunteers.   Also in honor of this anniversary, Pat and I finally went to see the waterfalls our region is known for.  

smallest waterfall we saw, but technical difficulties currently prevent  pictures of bigger ones from being shown here

Happy Anniversary!

I have mad respect for the majority of volunteers who have a more traditional experience and take on Peace Corps, their community integration, and their work all by themselves.  I have done a stint of about a week on my own, and Pat is doing about two weeks by himself right now, and it is rough!  It took us two and a half years from the time we hit ‘submit’ on our application (so not including the time writing it, which was something I worked on intermittently for about a year) to when our plane left for Senegal.  Two and a half years is longer than our Peace Corps service.  Despite the many hoops we had to jump through and the pressure that applying to the Peace Corps put on our relationship status (you have to be engaged to apply together and married for a year to serve together), I just have two words to say: WORTH IT. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I lack many skills that most adults frankly should have.  Since part of doing Peace Corps seems to resemble the show Survivor (in the aspect that you have to survive in trying conditions and not in the aspect where you could get voted off the island), it has been really great to have a partner who is really good at finding solutions to the challenges of daily life in Africa and takes delight in finding creative ways to make a trying situation much easier.  I, on the other hand, have a hard time just folding things, for example, which makes things like fixing a bike, building a cinder block oven or stringing up a hammock from the beams of our thatched roof into insurmountable challenges.  When I catch Pat daydreaming, he is often imagining something like a cool way to make a bookshelf out of wood from the bush.  I’ll admit it, I need him.

And he needs me too, which is one reason why we are a good team.  While I may not be good at practical things essential for survival in the hut, I do happen to be really good at picking up languages, which is essential for survival in the community.  We have come to depend on each other much more than we have ever needed to before, which in turn has brought us much closer.

As a couple, we do not experience the isolation faced by other volunteers.  We can air and share concerns and triumphs at any time with the persons whose advice or co-celebration we most need.  I expect that this will be huge in a year and a half when we finish our service.  I can’t imagine having accumulated all of these cultural jokes, hysterical or heart breaking memories, dear friends and crazy acquaintances, and returning to America and having no one from my former life who can understand.  I am confident that having gone through Peace Corps together will make coming back from Peace Corps a much gentler process.

When we received our invitations to serve in Senegal, I was invited to serve in the Health Sector, and Pat was invited to the Environmental Education (EE) Sector.  I looked forward to being able to work in different sectors and develop our own specific projects but to be able to collaborate when we wanted to.  Right about the time we got here, however, Peace Corps HQ decided to phase out the EE program and combine both programs into a new community health project framework.  That means that we are both under the same project, which has both benefits and challenges.    We can work together, bounce ideas off of each other, and funnel our teamwork into work projects, which is excellent.  I am a big fan of collaboration.  However, I think it might have been healthier to only be life partners and not be constant work partners.  We spend about 24 hours a day together most days, and while there is still no one’s company I prefer more, I think it might be a healthier system to work on different things and then come together to improve them.  As we get our feet on the ground and figure out where we each really want to take our service and our projects, however, I think this will happen more.  The first three months we were really just trying to integrate into our community (in theory anyway…we actually did a lot of work), so that was good to do together.

Other challenges include living in a one room hut.  If you need some space…too bad.  The only place you can really go is the concrete slab that covers the hole in the ground that is our toilet.  Peace Corps can bring about many stressful situations, and it can be hard not to take out your stress on the person you share a small space with.  We have recognized tendencies to do this and are actively trying to work on it, but it’s definitely an issue.   However, working together to normalize the day to day of hut life has proved to be a great joy. 

Coming into the experience of Peace Corps in West Africa as a couple, former female volunteers from the region had warned me that it might be frustrated as the female part of the team because people would always go to the man first, so I had tried to mentally prepare myself for this.  I haven’t really experienced this too much at all.  Maybe because I have an easier time with language this gets evened out?  Regardless, it has been a nice surprise.  Female volunteers are also pretty consistently barraged with marriage proposals and the like, and I still get that, but MUCH less than single volunteers, and only from randos who don’t know Pat and I. One thing that I hadn’t been prepared for with West African culture and our coupleness is the constant tendency to compare.  Volunteers often feel compared to the volunteer who came before them, but we are constantly compared to each other.  “Sadio has learned Malinke better than Ibrahima.”  “Ibrahima is better at biking than Sadio.”  This can be very frustrating, because they are so blunt and constant with their bluntness. 

Before we left for Senegal, the idea of Peace Corps service was so intangible that I didn’t get nervous about the big things like “will I successfully integrate into my community?”  Instead, I was nervous that our stage-mates wouldn’t want to be friends with us because we were “the married couple.”  During Pre-Service Training,  I really struggled with not feeling as close with my fellow trainees as I hoped too.  As I cried that friend groups seemed to be developing around me but not including me, Pat consoled me that I had a deeper friendship amongst the group of trainees that anyone else could hope for.  Friendships have come with time, but it has felt hard to not feel sought out, especially during large group get-togethers and trainings.  I try to not take it personally…I really do feel like people assume that we have each other and they don’t need to seek us out because we’ll never truly be left out.  It  help matters that whenever we are at the training center, they always stick us in a room way far away from everyone else, so we are totally isolated.

It has been interesting to hear from our volunteer cohort their observations on us, their married couple. People were really impressed that we always sat with other people at training, which is funny to me because we are just being social, nothing too impressive.  I overheard someone say that she wanted us to adopt her.  Another person has told me that she never saw herself getting married until becoming friends with us, and now she does.  These last two statements I count amongst some of the better compliments I have ever received.

They say that Peace Corps changes you, and I’m sure it does.  It has already.  It’s a blessing to be able to change together, to witness each other’s growth, and to grow together through the challenges.  Plus, let’s be honest, I don’t know if I could do this without him.  Two years of marriage have passed so quickly, and two years of Peace Corps will be a whirlwind too.  I’m so glad to have my best friend and team mate for life to whirl with.

Inshallah

nsh’allah.  God willing.  Or in Malinke, Nin Allah sonta.  If God accepts.  Small phrases packed with significance in Senegal.  I first learned this word in a high school Spanish class during a lesson about the subjunctive mood, and how the word “ojalá” that is used to express hope and volition had been taken from the Ararabic “Inshallah” during the period of conviviencia, when the Moorish Arabs lived in (and greatly influenced) Spain in the 1400s.  Native English speakers tend to really struggle with the subjunctive, and I remember an explanation offered that Hispanic cultures don’t see everything that is hoped for as certain to happen, thus the need for a parallel way of expressing what one hopes will happen versus what will happen.  I’m not sure if I buy this logic entirely, but it brings up a question I find fascinating: does language influence how one sees the world, or does how one sees the world influence language?

In Senegal, the word Inshallah has allowed me to express a new way of understanding the world, and more distinctly, my ability to control my world.  It first made its way into my day to day parlance as a funny way of saying “hopefully” during English conversation with fellow volunteers.  Little by little, I came to understand that Inshallah is not just a group of letters that can be exchanged for an English adverb.  It reflects your place and limited power in this world of uncertainty. 

During my first month at site, one particular interaction made this all clear to me.  I had gone into Kedougou, the regional capital, for a planning meeting and to do some-officey work that just isn’t possible in my hut.  I wanted to make it back in one day because we were undergoing what is known as the “five-week challenge”, where Peace Corps challenges new volunteers to go the first five weeks without staying the night at the regional house.  A team from the district health center at my site was also going into Kedougou, and it was my goal to get everything done in time to make it back with them and avoid the headache of public transportation.  It didn’t happen, and at that point, I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to make it in time to take a public car back to site either.  When talking to the nurse who had called me to let me know the team was leaving, I ended the conversation with “A demain,” letting him know I would have to see him the next day.  He replied, almost as if correcting me, “A demain, Inshallah.”  I distinctly remember scoffing to myself, thinking, “No, I will be back tomorrow.”  God, it turns out, did not accept.  That night I came down with a violent stomach virus and was in no shape to travel the next day.  As I lay in bed, miserably fading in and out of consciousness, I remembered my exchange with Daoda and realized how little control I have over my daily life here in Africa.

Who is to say what will happen, ever?  The car to Kedougou may or may not come (and may or may not fill up in a timeframe that gets you there with anything resembling timeliness—a friend of mine waited 12 hours for a car to fill up and leave once), the rain may stop up everything, the cell phone network might go down for months, the road might get washed away.  The person you hire to do a survey may turn out not to be all that literate, another may come down with Typhoid, another may get in a motorcycle accident and another may just decide not to do the work.  So much of life and work is waiting and hoping that God will just will something to go your way.

The mindset of Inshallah can make things quite difficult for a Peace Corps volunteer in the health sector trying to work on behavior change.  If you think that you will get sick no matter what if God wills that you get sick, you may be less likely to sleep under a mosquito net.  But how to get people to feel like they can be in control of their lives (and their health) when in so many ways they are not?  It’s not like they want to be malnourished.  Malinke does not have a subjunctive mood, but often things are expressed in ways that, when carefully examined, might show a lesser notion of human control than we see in English.  There is no way to really express that you “hope” something will happen.  The two ways that have been suggested to either say “nxamira” (I think) or “nxasikha” (I don’t trust).   

It is an exercise in humility to actively attempt to understand Inshallah.   As an American, I naturally assume that I can do whatever I want to, whenever I want to.  But this is not the human experience  many places, where the resources do not exist to counteract what happens naturally, or according to what is understood to be God’s will.  This disparity is not lost on the Senegalese.  For a while, I thought I had found a tricky way to counter requests to be taken to America by saying, “Nin Allah sonta.”  I was humbled in a different way when someone responded, “If you accept, God has accepted.” 

For now, I just try to ease myself into the mindset of Inshallah.  It’s less stressful if you have the expectation from the get go that things probably will not go the way you think or hope they will.  Everyone else is experiencing the same difficulties and inconveniences, so you just have to ride the wave and maybe dare to hope that God’s will and your own match up.