Last Week's Lost Post

(Written for June 16)

Ndungu (the rainy season) has now arrived in the Kolda region! The first real rain came Tuesday night. It was a big loud thunderstorm that I could feel reverberating in my stomach just as I was laying down to sleep. I didn’t mind it one bit. Every once in a while I miss a good thunderstorm, and I was reminded of the summer storms that spin out of the Atlantic during hurricane season in North Carolina. Think big fat drops falling like they’re trying to win a race to the ground, wind that whistles a little as it blows around the door frame, and claps of thunder that shake the walls a little when it sounds right above you. So powerful! It has rained more or less every other day since then and the humidity is ever present.

The rains mean the beginning of planting and so, Wednesday morning most of the village was out plowing their freshly softened fields. But not this little toubab… I bought the paint that I thought I wanted on Monday and my brother and I started painting my room on Tuesday. It turns out the paint I got was not water-based, so we couldn’t thin it (or clean it up with any success) and it turned into a kind of fiasco, leaving my room half done. So I needed more paint and some paint thinner to try and clean the brush. I biked into Velingara early Wednesday and bought the paint, returning in the middle of the day to make it home before lunch. That was not one of my brighter ideas, because as anyone in Senegal will be able to tell you, even in the rainy season, the sun is HOT! Having lost my sunscreen when I went to Tamba, my arms were fried crispy from the hour and half bike ride back to my village. Good thing I remembered to bring lotion with me. I nearly finished painting my room Thursday (it went a lot slower without the help of my brother) and finished the blue (a little more electric than I had hoped, but pretty nice looking in the end) and painted myself a large chalkboard Friday morning. All that remains now are a few touch-ups and I’ll have a happy little home.

Emotionally, it was a rough week. I dealt with a lot of feeling like I’m not doing a very good job getting to know my village (because even though there are only about 20 names in various combinations, I have a hard time remembering even 25%) and feeling frustrated about the fact that I haven’t done anything work related because the teachers have been on strike the entire time I’ve been here and even though the strike ended Thursday, the classes still aren’t going on because the school year ends this week. The only class in session is still the one class of candidates for the elementary school exit exam. I went into Kolda this weekend for my friend Cameron’s birthday and it was good for me to get away from the village a little, talk to other volunteers who are also struggling with similar issues, and realize that I am actually doing work right now, even if it feels like I’m just providing entertainment to the villagers. “Work” is just so intangible at this point. It’s relationship building and information gathering in a very unsystematic way. Doing things like playing hopscotch for an hour with a group of kids (if you thought hopscotch wasn’t a spectator sport, think again… there was a crowd of at least 20 kids totally captivated by the game between myself and one little girl) actually counts as good work because these kids are the ones I’ll be looking to next year when I want to start an environmental club at the school or want to start a tree nursery to help combat deforestation in the BEAUTIFUL woods surrounding our village.

Things in my compound have calmed down to some kind of normal and one of the kids who cries every time I see her has stopped crying and will even shake my hand without cringing (although asking her to speak to me is still out of the question and direct eye-contact is beyond her nerve). She is about 4 years old, the daughter of the school director and she LOVES to dance. The thing that eventually ended the crying run-and-hide when I come by was when she saw me dance in our small impromptu dance party. I spent a day in their compound and the young girls were gathered outside the hut staring and giggling until one of the teachers called them in and said, sing and dance for Aminata (here I’m Aminata Camara… I’m not sure I mentioned my new last name). They went through a variety of songs from the English and French songs they sing at World Vision’s youth club on Wednesdays to traditional pulaar dance songs and took turns showing me different ways of dancing like a pullo. Then I took my turn and impressed them all with my ability to bust-a-move. Little Aisha (the cryer) was finally able to look at me after that and I hope that one day we might even be friends.

This weekend also made the One Month in Village mark. IST seems just around the corner and I’m excited to go home and start writing on my new chalkboard my plan of action for completing my “environmental assessment” that I’ll need to present at IST. In other news, this weekend’s major success (aside from a happy birthday celebration for Cameron) was the home-made in a bag ice cream. We tried several flavors using drink mix and found that not only could we make ice cream in Senegal, we could probably recreate the experience in village. This is some of the best news I’ve heard here. If you didn’t already know, food is very important to me and ice cream is one of the great loves of my life, so the possibility of my favorite comfort food where it seemed utterly out of reach… priceless. Now remains the task of making it on a large-scale for the 4th of July party, at a compound with no electricity and limited resources. Fingers crossed.