This Senegalese Life

When I think back on how drastically different everything seemed to me when I first came to Senegal, it is hard to believe how normal everything has become.  My moments of “Holy cow, I live in Africa…this is my life” are much diminished.  Though I do make an effort to maintain a sense of wonder, I have adapted to this new normal.  Patterns of a typical day have emerged.  Welcome to a day in the life of Annē Linn.

I am a huge fan of sleeping in, however, despite my talent for it before joining the Peace Corps, I typically wake up around 6:30.  We sleep outside whenever possible because of the heat, so it’s usually a combination of sunrise and the noise that wakes me up.  What noise, you ask?  Mostly goats.  I had no idea how crazy goats were before coming to Senegal. People don’t tether their livestock, so they are free to roam about making their ridiculous sounds that have inspired many a game of “Goat or Child”.  This Youtube video provides a very, very accurate rendition of my daily alarm clock. 

Upon getting out of bed, the number one priority is to get water.  This is not as simple as it may seem.  Our site has serious water issues (they basically chose the worst village possible to transform into a Departmental Capital—rapid population increase+very limited groundwater=very bad situation).  At the height of the dry season, water from the water tower only came on in the town’s outdoor taps for about a half an hour each day, if at all.  There are huge crowds of women at every tap—thankfully they usually let us cut to the front because we fill just fill up our small buckets.  It’s not the carrying the water on my head part that’s difficult (at this point anyway—at first it was incredibly hard), it’s calculating when the water will come on and where to get it that can get tricky.  We pay 25 CFA (about 5 cents) per bucket, but that water is worth more than the gold that has brought thousands of people to an area without the geology or infrastructure to support them.

Waiting for the water to turn on--got their before the crowd this particular morning

The next morning calculation is when the fresh bread will come in from the Pulaar bakers on the outskirts of town in a cardboard box on the back of a bike that is not capable of going in a straight line .  Sometimes this coordinates well with the water timing, sometimes not.  Breakfast is the only meal we do on our own, and I have come to really cherish it.  Sometimes we buy bread and take it back to our hut, sometimes we go to the little breakfast shack next to our family’s compound.  I don’t have much of an appetite later in the day when it’s so hot, so I really try to have a big breakfast.

Ousman preparing breakfast for the miners waiting for cars to  Kharakhena, the most recent gold mining boom town

Other morning activities include brining our bedding and mosquito net inside—it’s annoying to do every day, but totally worth it to sleep outside.

Mosquito nets...they protect against a lot more creepy crawlies than just mosquitoes

I usually give myself until 9 am to enjoy the cool mornings.  We brought a French press from home and get coffee sent from Amerik (thank you, loved ones), and I have really come to appreciate these small reminders of home.  Pat and I usually take this time to read individually or together, from the Economist (which, since Pat had a subscription in the US, we get delivered to Kedougou in an incredibly timely manner compared to the rest of our mail and for now extra charge), New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, Guerillas of Grace, or the Book of Common Prayer.  It is this time of quiet that prepares me for the day and whatever challenges (work-related, cultural, or physical) the day may bring.

Then, it’s off to the office.  Since we really don’t have set work hours, I made it a priority to try to work outside of our hut.  That way, our hut feels more like home and I don’t have to feel like I should be working if I’m there (I don’t always succeed at not feeling that way).  The shade structure outside a building known as the Colonial Room that the health district uses for meetings and trainings has everything we need: electrical outlets (electricity is on in the morning from 8 to 12), shade, a table, and a collection of broken chairs that we can stack in order to make two functional chairs.

Where the magic happens

I had noooooo idea how much of my Peace Corps service would be spent on my computer.  In fact, Pat and I were only going to bring one computer between the two of us,  but then, my father-in-law gave me the amazing going away present of my own lap top.  Good thing he had more insight into how much screen time my service would entail.  I spend the mornings preparing and revising budgets, creating training outlines, writing grants or project reports, endlessly editing study protocols, emailing district or regional health staff or Peace Corps administration, scheduling (and rescheduling every time) different components of projects.  And blogging every once and a while, of course.

We work until about 1:00, when we head home, drop off our computers and grab spoons, and head over to our host family’s house for lunch.  Waiting for lunch is prime playing with kids time.  Lunch is usually rice with a leaf or (if we’re lucky) peanut butter sauce.  The family gathers around three different food bowls.  We are with the young adult crowd, while the grandparents/grandchildren and students from outlying villages that lodge with our family each have their own bowls.

Around the foodbowl (this is a way fancy meal with veggies and meat in honor of my parents' visit--not typical)

After lunch, it’s time to figure out how to get through the hot part of the day.  This is the time of the day when we do most of our sitting around with our family and neighbors, usually drinking tea or shelling peanuts.  Lots of people take naps, but I have lost my napping ability as well as my sleeping-in ability–-I just can’t get my mind to turn off.  Afternoons are the hardest part of the day for me.  I think that as integrated as I’d like to think I am, I can’t get deny some of my American ways of thinking.  I want to do work-ish things from during the day and have the evenings off.  So then, during the afternoons, it’s hard to really relax, and I find myself thinking constantly about productive activities I can be doing to fill the time instead of just sitting around, which is what everyone does.  It’s also just really hot, which doesn’t make anything easier.

Sample afternoon activity: our neighbor Bintou teaching us how to make a tasty snack out of Baobab fruit

In the late afternoon, I like to hang out around the hospital.  The hospital staff congregates under their shade structure then (their timeline is different than the Malinkes—they are all from cities and therefore tend to eat lunch much later) and I can usually count on tracking down the people I need to talk to about different things at that time.  I have recently started learning Wolof in earnest (mostly so I can understand the conversations flying around me under this very shade structure), and the hospital staff is a group of very enthusiastic teachers.  

It starts to cool off around 6.  And that means basketball time.  There is a great group of teenage boys and a few health staff that play every night, and I have started playing with them whenever I have time in the evening.  It is such a blast—gotta love team sports.  The rules for half court are a bit different on this side of the Atlantic, so it took me a while to understand what was going on every time the ball was taken out (or not), but I’ve got the hang of it.

After basketball, I take a bucket bath and head to my host family’s compound for dinner.  This used to be a race in order to get there in time to watch “A Castle for Two”, a ridiculous(ly good) Colombian telenovela dubbed into French that everyone was super into, whether they spoke French or not.  That show ended, though, and was replaced by one I haven’t been able to get into, which is ok since now the days are longer so basketball doesn’t before the time slot anyway.

Dinner is usually varying combinations of rice, peanut powder and oil.  One person holds a flashlight as the meal is shoveled down.  People retreat from the food bowl to their evening sitting positions—the students in front of the TV, waiting impatiently for the news to end so that they can switch it to music videos, the kids falling asleep in their clothes on the stick beds.

We sit for a bit and then return to our hut, despite the protests to stay and “xa sumun” (to stay up late talking).  Evening is a time we try to take for ourselves, reading or watching a show for a quick escape back to America.  We set up our outdoors sleeping set up and collapse under the mosquito net.

This progression of days is the backdrop to most other posts I’ve written.  Here, as in anywhere, days go by slowly and months speed by.  I have grown to find comfort in the daily routine, knowing a little bit of what comes next in a place that, no matter how adapted or integrated I am, can always manage to surprise me.