Saturday, August 27, 2011

Two stories

Here is one of two stories I alluded to two blog posts ago.

Poetic Experiences

When volunteers in my March '11 cohort arrived, we were placed in our community-based training sites within four days. It was a complete shock to the system, dropped off in the courtyard of someone else's family compound with a very limited amount of formal language training. The first 10 minutes were the scariest and most surreal 10 minutes of my life; imagine being seated in a plastic chair with a circle of kids around trying to hold your hand, a man who is now your new father trying to communicate with you and an entire family telling you their names and laughing at you. Your father is also trying to hold your hand by the way, men holding hands in this culture being one of the differences that added up to too much for that first moment.

I soon managed to get over it by trying to take hold of the situation. I took out a pen and paper and started asking for everyone's name, writing little descriptions next to the name. I then asked my host father to show me around the village. This got me out of the plastic throne they had put me in and made me feel better. I soon started to feel more like a master of the universe, a whole new town in a whole new part of the world. I applied a trivial trick to calm me down and make me feel more in control: remember that everyone in this world is crazy, myself included. It's like the trick "imagine everyone is wearing underwear", but for real life not just the stage.

I gradually became more comfortable. Language which first presented itself as a hurdle became a fun and challenging puzzle. I'd never been fully immersed in a language and let me say it is a most exciting experience. Using intuition, skills of observation and body language one can solve pieces of the puzzle. And just like solving a piece of any puzzle, you get a jolt of confidence and thrill! I ended up literally jumping up and down sometimes I finally understood something, while everyone would just nod their heads and say to me the local equivalent of, DUH!

I began to excel at Pulaar Fulakunda, my language, but there were times when I didn't have enough skill to explain myself as well as I would've liked. Us volunteers would be shipped between Thies Training Center and our host family's compound just about every week. One day I came back to my family after doing some formal training in Thies and one of my three mothers was having health problems. She said she wasn't sleeping well for four days, and she was wearing some ridiculously huge cloth head wrap. She told me her ear hurt too much to sleep, and I asked her to take off the head wrap. She had cotton stuffed in one of her ear canals, and the cotton looked like it was soaked with iodine or some chemical, or more likely a traditional medication derived from an herb or flower. I became really scared, I love this woman Fatou, the funniest of my three mothers. We once went marching around town selling bread and singing "I have strength, I have muscles, I'm carrying a sack!". Her humor came out best though through great presentations of what a word or phrase meant:

we are walking down a road and it's getting really dark
Fatou: Reno, laawol ngol motyani ga, Ablai.
Me: Mi Faamaani. (I dont understand)
Fatou: Awa. Lar.
Fatou starts walking ahead of me and pretends to trip. She cries out and kicks the road for it's insolence. Then she gets in front of me and says RENO! RENO! I quickly move to the side.
Me: Ohhhhhh! I get it! Wooooo! The road is bad!
Fatou: Ahhhhhh!
Me: Reno Fatou! Reno!
Fatou leaps to one side with a smile, looking back at the road to see if a snake is on it or something.

So Fatou is sick, and she needs to go to the doctor. I'm guessing she has an ear infection. If she didn't have one before, she sure does now that there is a black cotton ball stuffed in her ear. She tells me she can't go to the doctor because she doesn't have the money. Can't her husband give her the money? It doesn't matter to me really, she means so much to me and I'd never given money to any Senegalese person before, perhaps I should start with my favorite. So I gave her four dollars.

It may have been my imagination, but for the rest of the day my family looked and treated me differently. Mostly the women. My family numbered around 30 people: 4 men, 9 or 10 women and a bunch of kids. The women had switched from beginner Pulaar to phrases I wouldn't have been able to understand. I would ask what they meant and they would laugh. They were mocking me. I went to my room to take a nap but I couldn't get to sleep, everyone was screaming and fighting outside. I knew it was about me. Notorious BIG was right! Money equals problems! Why did I give her anything? What should I do?

I had to get out of my room, out of my house. I excused myself, barely saying anything, and I walked to my friend's compound. On the way, as I usually did, I stopped at a neighbor's house to greet. A man I'd never met before was there with the kids of the house and the matron. I greeted them and he asked where I was from: 

Stranger: America?!
Me: Eeyi.
Him: I am so happy to have met you! An American learning Pulaar, this is very important! You make me so happy!
Me: Really? I'm happy too! I'm happy you're happy!

I tell him I'm happy but I have to go, I'm visiting a friend. The stranger, Amadu, asks me to stop by on the way back from my friends house. There is something he wants to give me. I leave and come back. He has written me a poem. The poem is in English on one side of the paper, Pulaar on the flip side. It's called Money isn't Everything or Kallis wonaa Fof, and goes something like this:

You can buy a clock, but you can't buy time.
You can buy blood, but you can't buy life.
You can buy a girl, but you can't buy love.
You can buy a book, but you can't buy knowledge.

And on and on it went. I'm floored. This man, whom I just met, proved to me that it's no big deal, money isn't everything. If someone think's it is then they are wrong and should chill out. It was such apt timing, and this coming from a Pulaar, so poetic in itself. I went home with a smile and hung out with my family. We ate and ignored the elephant. The next morning I read the poem to my family. I couldn't gauge their reaction but it didn't really matter, we are all crazy and our reactions to problems and complex situations can bring out such insanity.

In the end, giving money to my family was the wrong choice. It was my first and last handout, something that local NGOs here love to do. But my reaction to the wrong choice was doubly wrong. If I care about someone and let them have some money, why do I have to be sad and scared? By happy! They need the money, I would have just bought Coca Cola and cookies but maybe she will actually go to the doctor now. The next morning she did, and I was happy.

There is another story of someone speaking English to me at just the right time, but I'll save that for another time. Bye for now!

Love you,
Costa

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Sustainability

Sustainability. The word inspires, motivates, disheartens and haunts, all at the same time. Thinking about the short-term and long-term impacts your projects will have on the people you are trying to assist -- essentially the ability of these impacts to endure and replicate -- is a substantial portion of project planning here in the Peace Corps. Projects we design start as small ideas and blossom into complex tasks full of data collection and analysis, decision making, budgeting and the hefty job of implementation, followed closely by repetition. And through every minute of planning and implementation, sustainability is considered.

I believe that we all have different standards for sustainability. There are some absolutes on the large scale, but the small becomes more relative. Helping people learn to read is sustainable, but building a library and buying all the books may not be sustainable enough for some volunteers. Other volunteers and I have had countless discussions on the sustainability of projects, and I've found that my standards are quite restricting. It's possibly because I'm only 1/5 of the way into my service and thus still over-idealistic, but I often find it hard to decide whether or not to do something because it doesn't reach my standards.

There are a few main goals I believe I should try to reach in my village:
  1. Improve the quality of education provided by our elementary school, specifically in health education, environmental education, and English (if truly desired by teachers, students and parents)
  2. Increase the per-capita income of residents
  3. Increase the amount of educated adults in village
  4. Increase the utilization of water purification techniques
  5. Increase the overall health and hygiene of residents
My entrepreneurial spirit comes out when planning projects. The Peace Corps is exactly where I should be right now. And although maintaining the sustainability of one's projects can be difficult, it is a difficulty that I and my fellow volunteers embrace! Woah, 3am... I should be asleep!

Love,
Costa


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

65 Days Later...

Finally another blog post! It's been a while, the last one was in the beginning of July.

July and August were crazy, hectic months of training, travel and get togethers. After finishing all of that and arriving back in my village, I was greeted by... Ramadan! What is Ramadan? Every good Muslim wakes at 5 in the morning and eats a rice pudding like substance with fresh liquid yogurt poured all over it, drinks a liter or so of water, then go back to sleep. They again wake up and start fasting until the sun goes down at 7:30pm: not eating, drinking, smoking or chewing sticks (very popular here). I have chosen to try to not eat anything during the day but the water thing is just silly. I tried not drinking a few times to see what it felt like, and you just get dizzy and have less energy. Not for me! Haha.

What am I doin' in my vill? When I got back from my month long tracation (training and vacation! I just made that up!) I weeded my garden beds and my back yard. I've made a bunch more polypots (tree nursery sacks) from the loads of cow poop I had collected before the tracation. I still have a lot more manure, enough to make about 200 polypots. I've been trying to get my host father to let me borrow his donkey cart but he keeps ducking me. I'll ask if I can use his chartette puccu and he will, like, pretend he doesn't hear me? Or he doesn't understand. It's a very straight forward sentance:

Me: Can I use your donkey cart tomorrow?
H-Dad: Huh?
Me: I want to get sand tomorrow, but it's too heavy, I need your donkey cart. Can you let me borrow your donkey cart?
H-Dad: Bismillah, Bismillah!

Which means something specific in Arabic but contextually in this situation means "Yes I and god allow it to happen, go ahead!"

So he ducked me a few times, saying he had to go watch his cows or go to the fields. Then he sent one of my cousins to find the cart, and he came back saying "The cart wasn't there, I didn't find it."

Creating these polypots is part of my grand action plan. And here it is, abbreviated for your pleasure:

Create 250 polypots of different species of trees: My villagers and I will be creating polypots and seeding mostly cashews, Moringa (a sort of superfood), and other native fruit species. I've got an avocado tree growing in one of the pots! These trees will be outplanted around our village elementary school, Health Hut and the Hut of the Children, which are all adjacent to each other. Others will be planted in households, family gardens, and perhaps be used to create a community orchard. Fencing for either the whole school or for individual trees or orchard will be built, the choice depending on possible budgetary restrictions.

The Hut of the Children: An older, unused building that my village and I will beautify, paint educational murals in and post educational posters/pictures. I've already officially requested a Case des Tout Petits, or a Hut for Toddlers, be installed in this building. If this request is granted, space in the Hut will be used as the classroom and work areas necessary. The rest of the space in this building will be used as a sort of community meeting place. I will conduct my health/nutrition/enviro-oriented causeries (non-formal educational talks) in this building. There is a group of women in my village that have formed a commission for the nutrition of children, and they will be cooking around the Hut and storing foodstuffs inside.

Turning the school into an Eco School: Eco School is a name the UN thought up of for a school that meets certain credentials. To name a few, the school must have a fenced garden, a wall or fence surrounding the compound, a hand washing station, a system for trash management (burning, burying or carting off, unless you can think of something better), and the list goes on and on. Between October and November I will be submitting a grant application for the capital to help our school become an Eco School. The school director and I are currently drawing up the plans for what the school grounds will become. Both he and I are writing seperate grants, mine to Peace Corps and his to the Government of Senegal as well as to another NGO, World Vision.

September nutrition causeries: Another volunteer, my health counterpart and I are conducting causeries in my village showing women, mothers and expecting mothers how to make nutritious baby weaning food as well as nutritional porridge made from beans, bananas, peanut butter, Moringa leaves and powder, and whatever else is available.

There are a lot of other facets to this grand scheme, such as implementing and demonstrating appropriate agricultural techniques within the school compound (nursery management, gardening, live fencing, composting, double digging, etc.) and on crop fields owned by villagers who are willing to experiment with techniques like alley cropping, windbreaks or live fencing. Then there is gathering a group of kids into an English Club, and perhaps having them as the primary caretakers  of the school gardens. And on and on and on, the possibility for work is endless.
***

As of right now, I have started my baseline survey, going from compound to compound asking questions and collecting data about family size, health and hygiene practices, water and sanitation practices, among other subdivisions of health and environmental education/resource management. There are about 40 compounds in my village, so by the time I've finished I'll be able to send in my grant application in the end of October and already have outplanted a number of trees, maybe started painting the interior of the Children's Hut and done the nutrition causeries.
***

I've been reading a lot in my hut when I'm not surveying or taking care of my garden, or dreaming up plans or talking to villagers. I'm almost done with my second book by Tom Wolfe. This guy is so funny, so clever, he is now one of my favorite writers. I'm also continuing to try to understand quantum physics, astrophysics, metaphysics and the universe in general. That quest started years ago when I realized how strange and intangible consciousness is. I thought it so strange at the time that I started banging my head against the wall in frustration! If anyone has any book recommendations please give them to me, we have so many books in our libraries at each regional house, I'm bound to find the book.

***

I wanted to recount two stories of lovely and much welcomed encounters that I've experienced so far, but I think I'm going to save those for my next post.

Until next time!

Love,
Costa