Month: August 2006

Freshly detached wheels my sept-place had to swerve around on the road to Dakar while following a small bus: 1

Fingers our Dakar-to-Tamba sept-place driver had on each hand: 6

Rumored cost of boat passage from Senegal to the Canary Islands, in CFA: 600,000

Approximate equivalent in dollars: 1,200

Holes I dug for transplanting trees: 97

Meters of rope bought for pulling water at the new well: 160

Fine set by the village chief for placing a bucket on the edge of the well (where it might fall in), in American cents: 40

Square meters of my bean field I weeded by hand during four hours spread over three days: 270

Square meters left to weed: 585

Times Kumba Bah has given birth: 11

Auto travel in Senegal… The good news is, so far everyone I know has had a 100% success rate in not being squished in any number of potential head-on, side, rear, or livestock-related collisions. The bad news: there’s always next time.

The live fence is planted, protected by the garden’s dead fence, which encloses 225 square meters of prime vegetable growing space, which can be watered using the water basin, which is connected to the new well, where water is pulled with four brand new sets of pulleys, ropes, and buckets. It’s nice to see it completed after all this time, ready for the next volunteer to assist with gardening.

Out in the fields hacking away at grass, I feel like Derek Zoolander in his miner’s outfit: a farce. Village farming requires a level of sweat that I can barely even begin to comprehend—the nine-year-olds do more fieldwork in a week than I’ll have done in my entire two years.

It’s a difference in magnitude kinda like how Kumba has had more kids than… well, than I ever plan to.

My group’s Close of Service conference is week after next—once I get back, I’ll have just a little over a month in the village before I pack up and head to Dakar on my way back to the States. Good news: soon I’ll be an RPCV. Bad news: I’ve reached the care package cut-off point, where packages (and letters, too, soon enough) sent now might not reach me before I leave Tamba 😉

Right now, I’m excited to finish up projects and then go home.

Mr. August:

But there’s more! I uploaded a veritable assload of donkey pictures today.

One of the many little-known perks of Peace Corps Volunteerhood is the sporadic receipt of Newsweek International. Random issues of this weekly publication, clearly designed for the world business traveler trying to decide which Wimbledon-endorsed Rolex is right for his lifestyle, arrive every month or two in our mailboxes, fresh from the overstock pile courtesy what I can only assume is a small but friendly tax write-off.

While these magazines make impressive stacks at regional houses, they’re also good for vaguely educational village entertainment. In my compound a shiny Newsweek, with its full color photos and tasteful amounts of text, always draws a crowd of all ages. The other day I brought out one that had the usual series of war report/disaster update/European political drama/luxury goods feature. A few of my moms gathered to look at the pictures and sound out the occasional headline.

As we flipped through (back to front), the women asked me questions about the photos: where is this? what are they doing? This is our standard routine, but their questions can still take me aback. One image showed several soldiers lying on their stomachs on a dusty hill, facing away from the camera to watch a helicopter land. Madame asked me if they were dead—it was clear to me from their posture and the context of the photograph that they weren’t, but she couldn’t tell. Another story had a picture of oil derricks in a snowfield; they wanted to know if the scene was land or water.

For me those questions were a vivid reminder of one of the many basic abilities I take for granted: visual literacy. The sheer volume of images Americans are exposed to, from childhood onwards, is staggering. Media saturation is criticized for promoting materialism and consumerism above critical thinking, but I think it’s pretty amazing to consider the amount of people, places, animals, and objects that I can recognize without ever having seen them in person.

We discussed this in Peace Corps training in the context of presentations and trainings—symbols and representations we as Americans wouldn’t think twice about are completely indecipherable to many villagers. Recognizing that a line drawing of a cow indicates the living thing you milk every morning is not as obvious as it might seem. And if that’s not obvious, how much more complicated must it be to understand a balance sheet or a flow chart? They’re cut off from a whole world of ideas and information, and that figurative divide ensures the continuation of a very real physical and economic divide.

Apparently, I should learn how to use TrackBack… Thanks, Matty, for the heads-up on a mention of my blog by the Austinist.

An interesting time of it, indeed!

I normally hate having to be in Dakar. It’s hectic, aggressive, and expensive as all get-out. However, at this particular moment I’m in an air conditioned cafe, sitting next to a tank full of massive orange goldfish and surfing the internet over a wireless connection. I just finished a club sandwich and my photos are uploading at a blazing 26 kb/s, over twice the speed I get in Tamba. In a little while I’m going to order a pastry. Or perhaps some chocolate cake.

Dakar ain’t so bad today.

It wasn’t so bad yesterday, either—despite the fact that I was at the Peace Corps office for almost ten hours. Eleven of us traveled from our sites during prime work season for a special Volunteer Advisory Council meeting regarding relations between volunteers and the PC/Senegal Country Director and administration.

They’ve been bad for a lot of people. Really bad. Kinda abysmal, really.

Yesterday’s meeting came about through a complex series of events that don’t need to be detailed here; suffice it to say that the mood in parts of the Peace Corps community had degenerated to the point where paranoia and rumor had taken over. The meeting was an attempt to remedy the situation by giving the volunteers an opportunity to voice their concerns, the staff theirs, and then proposing ways to repair the lines of communication.

Everyone kept a calm, positive tone throughout, and we ended up with a long list of possible solutions to the various problems we identified. It was a very satisfying, reassuring example of progress being made—and effort and worry paying off.