Wrap It Up

Check out my friend Dave's post about a sexual health event we did in his site last weekend. Condoms, birth control and theater - fun!

http://seneglove.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/wrapping-things-up/

When Cows Cry

In addition to the mourning cries of women, I heard another type of wailing for the first time this week. Cows. Apparently, when cows see an animal skin they “cry.” This uniquely disturbing noise started at about midnight as our herd caught sight of the drying skins from lunch. From the noise I was convinced a hyena was attacking our livestock, but no – just the mourning cries of cattle. Who knew.

Four Days and a Funeral

Day 1

A few days before I left for Christmas vacation my Senegalese host-Grandmother Nene Hawa - who in truth can’t be much older than my real mother – fell ill and was in the hospital. By the time I returned she was back home, but frail. For my mother’s visit she was named after this grandma - Hawa Kande (Omar’s mom) - but due to her weakened condition the two Hawa’s never met. For the last few months she seemed to be on the mend, with her younger sister and caretaker planning to return to Dakar any day.

Last Saturday, Nene Hawa’s condition took a turn and she was bed ridden once more. On Sunday afternoon we ate “sajaka” – a symbolic meal that is supposed to bring health to the ill. “When the rice is gone, she won’t be sick anymore,” I was told. That night the family sat as usual after dinner, but the mood was noticeably subdued. Monday afternoon, after an unusually productive morning of gardening, I heard sniffles coming from outside. It was obvious that Nene Hawa had passed away.

The truth is, I don’t know what to say when these situations happen in America, since “I’m sorry” always sounds wrong. In Pulaar, I only know one of the cliché mourning phrases, so I am literally at a loss for words. On a few occasions I just reverted to English condolences, concluding it's better to say something in the wrong language than nothing at all. To say I felt awkward is an understatement. For a while we sat under the mango tree, the men making phone calls and the women trickling into the compound. Then the wailing began. One woman – a sister in law – began the full bellied mourning call. Almost immediately, dozens of women joined in and swarmed together, engulfing me in spine tingling ululations. I can’t tell if there are words beneath the sobs, but the meaning behind them was intelligible to any ear.

Over the next hour or so, it seemed every woman in town came to sit, wail and offer words. The men sat stoically on their own mats under a nearby tree. Cell phones have revolutionized the news spreading process – calls are made to every surrounding village and relatives near and far.

I am often faced with situations in which I don’t know how to act, since "American polite" and "Senegalese polite" can be polar opposites. I wanted to stay out of the way, but it seemed rude to go to my room. Usually it’s easy enough to ask for an impromptu etiquette lesson, but it didn’t seem like an appropriate time.

Day Two

I’m not sure if anyone left Monday night. By the time I was up Tuesday morning, the courtyard of our compound was as packed as the night before. The day proceeded along the same lines: sitting, staring, small talk. While Monday I had recognized most of the people filing through to pay their respects, by mid-morning Tuesday it was a sea of unfamiliar faces. I passed a majority of the morning sitting with the women and taking breaks to hide in my douche (shower/bathroom) to read where no one could see me. Sitting on your bathroom floor to avoid detection is a new low in anti-social avoidance.

By noon I had donned my complet (full dress outfit) and reassumed my seat on the mats. The problem I have with small talking strangers – especially the elderly – is that their Pulaar is significantly more difficult to understand. Each village has its own vocabulary and idiomatic phrases of choice. My villagers mostly know what I know and help me out a little. Strangers don’t do this. Beyond being unable to speak coherently with most of our guests, those with whom I can converse generally pick one of four topics to discuss: 1. What happened to your dog? 2. Why don’t you have a husband? 3. Where’s Issa (Martin)? 4. Teach me English. There are only so many places I can go with each of these.

One of the many impressive skills of Senegalese women is the ability to cook for large numbers of people. It seems every female over the age of 15 knows how to cook in a 50 gallon caldron with a 4 foot mixing stick. Despite the huge amount of work that needed to be done I am 100% useless in this arena and stayed far away from the fire. While Monday was noticeably lacking in food, a grand feast was prepared for lunch Tuesday (and then again Wednesday and Thursday) – animal sacrifices included. After lunch (~3pm) all of the men gathered together for prayer. Post-prayer we ate a little more, including kolda nuts and chobal – a chalky ball of pounded rice, water and sugar that is eaten at baptisms. Finally by 5 the crowds thinned but a large cohort of out-of -towners stayed for the night and the socializing continued well into the night.

Days 3 and 4

For two more days we continued to sit, eat, drink tea and pray. I still don’t understand the physics of housing two dozen guests in our compound, but by the time I left Friday morning, mostly everyone had returned home.

While some aspects of the week were significantly different from an American funeral, many were similar. I’ve never sat shiva, but I imagine it is similar to what we did. Despite the lack of any actual activity, last week was one of the most exhausting I’ve had at site and while culturally interesting, not something I hope to repeat.

Food Fight

It is said that all good marriages are alike in that these couples argue about the same thing over and over, while all unhappy marriages are different because their fights are always about something new. According to this logic, I have been happily married to my host family for 10 months. Our marriage fight revolves around one topic only – food. More specifically, our fight focuses on the amount of food that I eat. The downside of replacing a 6’2” male volunteer is that no matter how hungry I get, my powers of ingestion will always pale in comparison to his. Like many cultures, your perceived enjoyment of a meal is directly related to how much you eat not how much you compliment. And it’s not only the women who are trying to fatten me up like a Tabaski ram – in every Pulaar there is a Jewish grandmother. Unfortunately, after a year of village cuisine the novelty of rice, rice and rice has worn off. There is a finite amount of white rice my body can consume in any one sitting, a limit which falls drastically short of my family’s expectations.

So this is what we fight about. “Koumba, eat.” “I’m full.” “Koumba, eat more.” “I’m really full.” Every. Single. Meal. The argument has taken many forms as my deflection tactics have evolved from the serious to the humorous to the silent. Until recently, the daily food fight was more annoying – and occasionally funny – than truly problematic. Last week though, it was decreed that the problem is that while everyone else inhales their portions I eat much too slowly and thus am denied my proper share. This is entirely false, I eat exactly how much I want. To solve the inequality, the men decided I should get my own bowl, alone in my room.

Objectively, this should be a good solution. I can eat at my own pace, stop when I want and not share my plate with germy little boys. But this is not a good solution. I don’t eat village food because it’s good, but because of that magical process of “integration” that happens over a shared meal (also, I’m too lazy to cook). If I am going to eat rice, rice and sandy couscous I better be with other people. If anything, the solo eating experience made me eat less since no one was there to guilt me into a few more bites.

Anyway, after only a few meals on my own my family recognized my discontentment and invited me back to the big bowl. Village meals may not be cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, but there’s still something satisfying about plain white rice when you’re sharing it with others – and if this is the only fight I have with my family, I’ll happily stay married to them for another year.

Meet Me In Tambacounda

Meetings in Senegal are comical. I recently spent a week in Tambacounda at a USAID training where I found myself continually amused at how it was being conducted. Here is what happens at the start of every meeting I have attended in the past year:

-Rules are established. The guidelines of meeting etiquette have not been fully adopted by the Senegalese, so they must be set down a new by each group. This often includes: don’t let your phone ring, be on time, respect one another. These may also have been the rules posted in my middle school cafeteria.

-Penalties are set. If you break a rule, there will be consequences, and they will usually constitute public humiliation. You’re the regional director of water and sanitation? Doesn’t matter, you were late and now you’ve got to dance. Professionalism is not defined the same way in Senegal.

-Reports will be made. Every day a participant is chosen as “the reporter.” At the start of each morning, the reporter from the previous day must present what happened – a reading of the minutes. This reading though, invariably goes into excessive detail of events that happened barely 18 hours prior and for the same group of people who lived through them the first time.

-Fancy dress will be worn. Senegalese professional attire falls into two categories – western and traditional. Both are quite fancy and would make me feel underdressed on a good day. PCV professional attire also falls into two categories – clean and dirty (or: what I wore yesterday and what I didn’t).

So there you have it. Meetings Senegalese style: well dressed and moving at a snail’s pace but always leaving time for a “pause café” and a post-lunch nap. This is where your tax dollars are going.

Castaway

As exciting as village life can be, there are time when the isolation from outside news leaves me feeling like a ship-wrecked Tom Hanks – making conversation with sports equipment (my bike is named Jack) and writing compulsively on my cave (hut) walls. It is a fact of volunteer life that we are removed from American culture and always feel a few weeks (or months) behind the trends. With the 24/7 news cycle, stories break, peak, fade and are completely forgotten between trips into town. This is not entirely unfortunate, since stories that last only 1 issue of US Weekly are probably better missed. There are times though, when it would be nice to know what’s happening in my natal land. I by no means want to know every detail of the 2012 election, but it’s nice to know who’s in the race. I didn’t watch the Oscars, but I still want to know who won (and what they were wearing).

Anyway, the real point of this post is not to blabber about my lack of current cultural awareness but to profess my love…for podcasts. I was a novice podcast listener before Peace Corps but have recently turned into a rabid downloader of all things NPR. I don’t know if podcasts have grown in popularity over the last 12 months or if I am only now discovering the deep subculture of radio on demand.

Here are some of my current favorites and sanity savers:

-I am a longtime lover of RadioLab and spend many hours on I-95 between New York and Virginia with Jad and Robert. My only complaint is that there aren’t enough of them, so I’ve been rediscovering the early years. If you know anyone at NPR, my life dream is to read the closing credits.

-Another yuppie favorite, This American Life, is great for biking – until the episode of scary stories when you find yourself alone in the woods. Thanks Ira.

-Two other NPR releases are Fresh Air and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me – which I imagine my mother listening to at the same time.

-My recent discoveries from Slate.com are their Gabfests, one on pop culture and the other on politics. Although I’ve rarely seen the movies they discuss and can’t watch a presidential debate, the hosts always seem to be having a great time and I invariably end up with a list of things to Google later on.

-TED talks are all the rage, and although the talks are less fun without the visuals they’re still good to hear.

-Keeping in line with my 2012 new year resolution to improve my French skills, I’ve been listening to Coffee Break French. I think it’s helping my language skills but may also be giving me a Scottish accent.

-For the public health nerd in me, there are tons of long and short episodes focused on current trends in global health released by universities and think tanks. I consider listening to these “work.”

When I just need to get away and listen to English for a little while, you can find me doing laundry or biking along with a podcast.