Flying Solo

As I mentioned in a previous post, the SED PCVs in the Kaolack region do a business-related radio show every first Monday of the month. Usually, Lindsay and Daniel, who are both in their second year of service, handle the programming. However, when the January show rolled around, they were both unavailable, which meant either the show wouldn’t get done or some first years would have to take charge. So Kenny, Mollie (two other PCVs from my stage) and I decided to put our awesome language skills to the test and give flying solo a try.

The show was January 4, so once we all got back to Kaolack from New Year’s we got started on preparing for the show. First, Kenny took a section from one of our training manuals, specifically related to finding a business idea, and turned it into a script. Then the three of us got together and worked on perfecting the script and translating it into French for the show.

So what does teaching a Senegalese person how to find a business idea entail? Well, things like this may seem intuitive to most of you, but here, one can never assume. We started with Kenny (who was the program host) and myself (the “business expert”) discussing some basic principles, such as what to do before opening a business, steps to follow, etc. Then, Mollie joined the mix, playing a Senegalese woman wishing to open a business and seeking my advice on how to go about finding a good idea. Through the role-play we demonstrated that first you need to look at what already exists in your area and what there might be a need for. Then compare these observations with your own personal skills and…voila! You are on your way to a solid business idea. Again, I know this sounds incredibly basic, but you’d be shocked by the number of women you find sitting in a one block radius selling the EXACT same thing everyday. So, with all of this in mind, we headed over to the radio station in Kaolack and gave it our best shot…

Verdict: moderate success. For our first time on our own, it went reasonably smoothly and I think we covered an important concept. With radio, its hard to know if anyone even tuned in, let alone took anything away from what you said. Still, I think we gave it a solid a try. So, why call it a “moderate” successs? Well, the show didn’t exactly go off without a hitch… funny moments:

1) We show up, feeling a bit nervous, but determined and sit down in the booth to wait for the show before ours to finish. We were patiently waiting, when the guy running the board tells us he’s going to play one more song and then he’ll play “the music.” “The music” is what he puts on every time immediately before the Peace Corps show. Apparently, as soon as this music is played, all the listeners know that the Americans are up next! So what is the “alert-the-world-the-Americans-are-next” music? Why, Michael Jackson, of course! Awesome!

2) Let me preface this next moment by saying that pretty much everyone in our region is obsessed with the show Glee. I mean, how could you not be? It is SO GREAT! Well, I had brought my iPod along to play some music during breaks in our radio show. Obviously, said iPod has both Glee soundtracks on it. So, with the full support of Mollie and Kenny, we decided to use our musical breaks to introduce Senegal to a magical mix of all things Glee. Amazing idea, right? Right! What wasn’t so brilliant of me though was when “Bust a Move” was playing and, in trying to queue up the next song, I accidentally started it over when the song was already about a minute in. Whoops. Clearly, I was not meant for a career as a DJ…

3) Another stellar moment in our show? The first part of the show went reasonably well minus the music snafoo. But, when it was time for Mollie to come in playing the Senegalese entrepreneur seeking advice, things went a bit down hill. We came back from a music break and Kenny and I made a few quick comments before he introduced Mollie. Well, Mollie got a couple of words into her first line and started to giggle. Which of course led me to start giggling and then Kenny too. So there we were, in the midst of claiming to be serious business people and we all end up dissolving into laughter in the middle of our show. Amateur hour for sure.

4) And the final funny/awesome moment…just our super cool music playlist. As I already mentioned, we featured numerous selections from Glee, received with varying degrees of love from the two Senegalese women running the board for our show. And to round out our educational show on both business and awesome music, we ended with a couple of all-time greats. First, “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. And finally, it was only appropriate (especially in light of funny moment #1) to end with a little “Thriller” by the late, great Michael Jackson. Which was made all the more awesome by the fact that our time ended immediately following one of the creepy voiceovers in the song. Senegal, your welcome.

So…now you probably see why we categorized the effort as a “moderate success.” But we had a good time and hopefully a few people were listening. Maybe they even took something away from our “lesson.”

Christmas/New Year's 2009

2009 was definitely a year of firsts…first time in Africa, longest I’ve ever gone without seeing my family, and first Christmas on my own (to name just a few). Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday, but this year I mostly tried not to think about it too much. I heard from a lot of the year-in PCVs that no matter what your plans are, it just won’t feel like Christmas over here. Frankly, they were right. However, despite the lack of traditional Christmas festivities, we still had a good holiday…

Christmas came a little bit over 2 months after I first got to Nioro. So, my four closest friends here (Alyssa, Jackie, Katherine and Tamar) and I decided to plan a nice break from site in honor of the holiday. The idea was to spend Christmas and the following days at the PC regional house in Dakar, and then head north to Saint-Louis for New Year’s.

I arrived in Dakar on Christmas Eve and joined Tamar and Katherine for a nice Italian dinner (yay pizza!). Afterwards, we headed back to the house and marathoned some Christmas favorites…Love Actually, White Christmas, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Good stuff. The next morning, Alyssa and Jackie arrived and, in a time honored Christmas tradition, we spent the rest of the day lying around. I also talked to family back home for a while, which was great, albeit a little bittersweet. I powered through the day though, pretending I wasn’t missing anything or anyone back home. [Denial is a very powerful weapon in the battle against homesickness.] Then we rounded out the day with a tradition followed by many Jewish families on Christmas…going to a Chinese restaurant for dinner! Overall, it was a nice relaxing day.

The girls and I spent the next few days exploring Dakar and getting our fill of delicious food. We took a trip out to Goree Island (a small island off the coast of Dakar used during the slave trade), shopped at the used clothes market (fukku jaay in Wolof), and hiked up to the lighthouse. We also checked out all of the restaurants we’d been dreaming of after several solid months of fish and rice everyday… Italian, the French Cultural Center, Indian, ice cream (yes, it counts as a meal), even fried chicken!! There was also a lot of movie watching and putting our (in my case limited) cooking skills to use at the regional house. Courtesy of Casino (the amazing, almost Western-quality supermarket in Dakar) and our lovely families in America we pulled together some spectacular feasts. We had a big pancake breakfast with real syrup, courtesy of my Mom (yay!). Made some delicious stovetop lasagna and green bean casserole (again, thanks Mom!). We even pulled off a Mexican feast with actual taco shells and salsa courtesy of Alyssa’s Mom. [Sorry if this is uninteresting, but as you can probably tell by now…Christmas for us this year was all about the food.]

After several days of seeing Dakar and eating way too much food, we packed our backpacks and hopped in a hot, crowded sept place for the trip to Saint-Louis. We arrived at the garage in Saint-Louis early afternoon and made our way to the hotel. We stayed at a cozy little hotel on the ocean a little ways outside of town where a bunch of people from our stage were already staying. After dropping our bags and changing out of our dusty travel clothes, we headed down the beach to a hotel with a pool to meet up with everyone else.

We spent the rest of the evening and most of the day on New Year’s Eve catching up with people and exploring Saint-Louis. During the French colonial period, Saint-Louis was the capital of Senegal. Now, the colonial architecture is beginning to crumble, but the city still has some of that sedate, old world feel and is beautifully situated right on the Atlantic Ocean. So we enjoyed ourselves wandering around the city, watched a street festival, and, in spite of the chilly 80º weather, got in some beach time. [No joke, 80º is borderline sweater weather for me these days.]

Later, in honor of New Year’s Eve, the girls and I got together with everyone else to prepare a barbeque feast. We had shrimp and beef kebabs, fish steaks, good cheese and lots of other delicious food. Kudos to all the people who helped cook! (My mediocre skills and I helped by staying out of everyone else’s way, haha) Then, we rang in a new year and a new decade standing on the beach, looking out at the Atlantic (cheesy, but picturesque) and celebrated by dancing until the early morning!

On New Year’s Day, the party was over and it was time to head out. So the other Kaolack-ers and I said our goodbye’s and headed home.

Sorry for the lateness of the update, I really am the world’s worst (or best?) procrastinator, haha. Happy belated 2010 to all of you on the other side of the Atlantic!!

Radio Show and a Visit to Fatick

(This post refers to events during the week of December 6-12. I'm less than 2 months behind now...slowly but surely getting this blogging thing down, haha.)

Once the excitement of Tabaski was over, things in Nioro settled down considerably and I went back to my usual routine. Otherwise known as Wolof lessons, meeting people, looking for projects and generally wandering around town greeting people to fill up time.

As exciting as daily life in Nioro is, when the opportunity came up in early December to do some work/visit another volunteer, I jumped at the chance. First up, participating in Peace Corps' radio broadcast in Kaolack. Every Monday from 5-6, PCVs in the Kaolack area host a radio show on one of the local stations. These shows are done in Wolof, and cover a variety of different topics from business practices to cultural issues to health. Every first Monday of the month its the SED kids turn to host the radio show, so I figured I'd come in and check it out.

Lindsay and Daniel, two SED volunteers who are a year into their service, usually take charge of the monthly SED broadcast. For the December show, they invited all the new SED-ers to introduce themselves and see how things work. So Kenny, Mollie and I, along with Lindsay and Daniel, headed over to the radio station and commenced with dispensing our wealth of business knowledge to the listening masses. And by dispensing my business knowledge I mean, I introduced myself and then sat back and listened. Lindsay and Daniel did most of the talking since their Wolof skills are infinitely more developed. Basically, the theme of that day's show was teaching people how to properly invest in order to grow a business. For example, just because you want to sell bread in a neighboring town, you shouldn't run right out and buy yourself a car. Find a more cost effective solution so that you don't put yourself deep into debt over an expansion that might not pan out. Its these and lots of other basic business concepts that seem like common sense to most Americans, but can take Senegalese people a while to grasp.

Anywho, it was interesting to see how the whole PC radio show thing usually works so I'd consider it a successful first attempt. Immediately after the show, Daniel and I packed up our things and headed to his site, Fatick. We arrived at the garage just in time to watch a sept place fill up and leave for Fatick. Sad. So we paid our passes and hunkered down in the car for an hour or so waiting for it to fill up. Unfortunately, by the time 5 other people also wanting to go to Fatick showed up, the sun was setting. Let me tell you...if transportation over here sounds scary during the day, DO NOT try it at night. One, we had possibly the most broken down sept place of all time. The sound coming from the gear box every time our driver tried to change gears was practically deafening. Add to that the fact that the road between Fatick and Kaolack is littered with potholes big enough to swallow a car whole. What does this mean? Well essentially imagine watching a game of Mario Kart...cars swerving all over the road regardless of which lane of traffic they were meant to be traveling in. Add to this the fact that it was dark, there were semis, and I was seriously concerned that the transmission of our sept place might drop out at any second. Yeah, it was a little scary. Thankfully though, we arrived in Fatick in one piece, did a little "HURRAH, we made it!" dance, and continued on to Daniel's house.

The following morning we were up bright and early and headed across town. Daniel had planned a 4-day long formation (training in French) with local teenagers on how to start your own business. Daniel and his Senegalese counterpart were teaching it, and I came along to check things out and "help." The first day, Daniel focused on teaching the kids what makes a good idea for a business and how to go about finding one. Unsurprisingly given that he was working with a group of 17-20 year olds, trying to get them to participate was like pulling teeth. But eventually they started to answer some questions and I think Daniel did a great job of getting his point across. So after a long day, we retired to Daniel’s house to indulge in some delicious Kraft Mac & Cheese (so good, especially since we spent the entire lunch break talking about American food we missed) and watch the first three episodes of GLEE!! (Being theater nerds, we were both instantly obsessed and took it upon ourselves to extend that obsession to the entire Kaolack region.)

The next day, we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed out early for another full day of imparting wisdom. This time, it was Daniel’s counterpart’s turn to give teaching a go. He was slightly more successful at getting the students to pay attention and participate, but that comes as no great shocker…he’s older and Senegalese after all. Overall the biggest take away from that day was how much I don’t miss high school. People who teach high school students must have the patience of a saint! So if you are one of them, kudos to you because I definitely don’t think I could do it.

The following morning, Daniel headed back off to the formation, but I felt it was time to get back to site. I stopped for the night in Kaolack to get in some Skype chatting with my Mom and download a little more GLEE (best. show. ever.). Then it was back to Nioro, the fam and all the excitement that is daily life in my little town.

Next time: Christmas!

Photos Galore!

I just uploaded a bazillion (or thirty some) new photos to Picassa. Enjoy: Life of a PCV!!

Food Poisoning to the Extreme

I’m sure you’re all getting sick and tired of me saying, “I swear, I swear I’ll get the blog caught up to the present soon!” but I’m afraid I have to say it one more time. Yet again, a brush with some unknown and rather unpleasant illness has thwarted my attempts at productivity. This time, I am told that it’s a nasty bout of food poisoning that has put me out of commission for the last five days. Well I don’t know if I buy a case of food poisoning lasting for that long, but OK. Either way, it’s been another “my body is vehemently protesting living here” kind of week, so I apologize for the lack of new updates.

In an attempt to bribe you/slash spruce things up a bit though, I have given the blog a bit of a face lift, which I’m enjoying immensely. In addition to the sweet new background, I also updated the package list a bit and added some links. The links go to the blogs of four of my closest friends here in Senegal, each of whom is infinitely less of a procrastinator than I am. Therefore, their blogs are much more current if you care to check them out. Also, if you click on the map of Africa on the right-hand side, it will take you to the lovely PC Senegal website. From there you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Peace Corps Senegal and what we’re up to over here.

So here’s hoping that food will start being my friend again super quickly because February is a busy month. And don’t worry, new posts will be right at the top of my to do list when my body gets back in line.

Adventures in Foreign Cusine

[Warning: There’s a chance that reading this post could put you off your dinner. So either toughen up and read on or come back after you’ve eaten :) ]

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, after Tabaski, every Muslim family in Senegal eats meat for the next week at least. What I failed to point out when describing the butchering process though is that they do not throw ANYTHING away. Seriously…I think maybe one or two organs didn’t make the cut, but that’s it. That bucket of meat I mentioned my Mom sorting through? It contained everything from plain old meat on the bones to the liver, kidneys, intestines, testicles, etc. With this information in mind, I think you’ll all understand why I stuck to the vegetables and rice and avoided meat in the days following Tabaski.

Well about a week after Tabaski, I figured we had to be nearly done with the sheep and started to ease up on my cautious eating habits… mistake. We sat down for dinner that Thursday night and I was excited to see that dinner was rice and beans and NO meat! There was a weird stick-like thing wrapped in what looked like thick string sitting in the middle of the bowl, but I was tired and hungry and I didn’t think much of it. So I’m sitting there eating my fill and listening to my family jabber away in Wolof when something that they said made me take a second look at that stick in the bowl.

So I leaned forward and again tried to figure what the heck that thing was doing in my dinner. Unable to figure it out (or perhaps just in denial), I pointed at the stick and asked my Dad what it was. His response: “C’est les intestin, quoi.” Well even though I imagine most of you probably don’t speak French, that sentence doesn’t require much translation. Yeah, that “thick string” wrapped around the burnt piece of wood? Sheep’s intestines.

Cue me having a flashback to the day of Tabaski and watching our Mauritanian butcher-friend holding the intestines over a bucket and squeezing out their contents. YEAH… I tried to be cool and calm about it, but my family knows me better than that. So when I followed this revelation by immediately putting down my spoon and declaring I was full, they all burst into laughter and a lot of, “Oh Amy!”s. And though I was rather grossed out, I had to join them, thinking to myself, “Oh Africa!”

The following night, it was time for dinner and I sat down at the bowl again, feeling slightly apprehensive, but determined to forget the intestines-incident. The cover was lifted off the bowl to reveal a delicious smelling meat stew type dish and I thought to myself, “Yes!” So I grabbed my spoon and proceeded to dig in.

Well I was sitting there enjoying the delicious food and half-listening to my family’s conversation when my attention was once again drawn to the meat in the center of the bowl. It was clearly on some type of bone, which I found reassuring, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly it could be. I was just about to ask, when I heard my Mom mention something about “soup” and it reminded me of a story my LCF told us during training…
Back when PC Senegal used to put people with families in Thies instead of villages for training, there was one girl who went to her home stay on the first night and her family had really wanted to make her feel welcome by preparing an especially nice dinner. So they made soup. Sounds harmless enough, right? Wrong. This girl proceeds to sit down at the bowl, on what was probably only her fourth night in country, and the cover is lifted off to reveal…a sheep’s head sitting smack dab in the middle of the soup. Apparently the girl was so freaked out that she called Peace Corps and made them come get her and take her back to the center for the night.

Well you can probably imagine my reaction…in what was I’m sure extremely comical fashion, I stop with my spoon halfway to my mouth for another bite, have an internal “OH CRAP!” moment, point at the meat and say, “Soup?! Is that the…the head?!” Well my family, who were probably waiting the whole meal for me to figure it out, starts laughing and my Mom, ever so helpfully, turns the “meat” around so that I can see the EYE, which is still in the socket. She then proceeds to grab the eye with her hand, pull it out, and deposit it on the ground next to the bowl.

This time I didn’t even try to pretend like I could be cool with it…I immediately dropped the spoon and shoved my chair back from the bowl. This of course prompted my family to laugh even harder, some of them to the point of tears. I, while admittedly super grossed out, had to join in. I don’t think I’ll ever look at soup in the same way again…

These incidents, particularly the one with the head soup, have pretty much become a running joke around the Mane household. Usually at least once a week at dinner, my Dad and I have the following conversation:

Baay: Oh Amy, I was thinking we’d get a head to prepare for dinner sometime this week.
Me: Really? Shoot, I have to go to Kaolack this week.
Baay: Oh don’t worry, we won’t have it on the day you’re gone. What day do you have to go to Kaolack?
Me: Whatever day you plan on having head for dinner.
[Cue laughter and “Oh Amy!”s from the rest of the family.]

So there you have it….fun adventures in foreign cuisine. I hope you’re not too grossed out, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you. (And at least you didn’t eat the stuff!)

Tabaski 2009

On the morning of Tabaski, everyone was up early to start preparing all the food for the day. I asked what I could do to help and was given a huge bowl of onions to dice. (Onions are a major ingredient in a lot of Senegalese dishes.)

I’ve never claimed to be much of a culinary genius, but before arriving in Senegal I’d say I was fairly confident in my abilities to at least cut up onions. Not so much here. The women here don’t use cutting boards, or even sharp knives. Rather they take a (usually) dull knife, place the onion in the palm of their hands, and proceed to dice it up in their hand. In the past when I’d offered to cut up the onions, no one let me…I think they were worried I’d hurt myself. I wasn’t quite confident I could do it either, but I decided to give it a go. Well I made it thru about ½ an onion before my eyes started watering so badly that I nearly cut my finger off. Needless to say, they promptle took that job away from me. I’m pretty sure they’ll never let me near onions again, but at least we all got a good laugh out of it.

Still trying to make myself useful, I volunteered to pound the pepper instead. My Mom and sisters looked at me skeptically for a minute, but then they seemed to decide that was a task I could handle without injuring myself. So I sat myself down in front of the big mortar and pestle and started pounding away.

About an hour and an absurd amount of ground pepper later, my arms were starting to get rather sore. [You don’t even realize what a blessing pepper mills (or pre-ground pepper for that matter) are!] At this point my Dad walks out and announces that its time to kill the sheep… and I took that as my cue to escape for a shower. Watching them slit the sheep’s throat? No thank you!

After showering and donning my new, slightly clown-like dress, I headed back into the courtyard. Thankfully, the killing part was over, but the sheep was still laying in the sand, bleeding into a hole. Once it had bled out completely, what did they do with said hole and all the blood? Cover it up with some sand and move on with the day. Yep, super sanitary.

And then the fun really began… the Mauritanian guy showed up to butcher the sheep. In our yard. (Usually the head of the family does it, but my Dad hired this guy instead.) I would have gladly excused myself at this point, but there was no way my family was letting me out of watching. So, I grabbed my camera instead and prepared to observe from a safe distance.

I’ve already posted pictures of some of the butchering process here, but allow me to tell you about my favorite part… The first thing that had to be done was to get the skin off. In order to do this, the guy cut a whole in the skin on the sheep’s leg and literally proceeded to blow the animal up like a balloon. Yep, that’s right…a sheep-shaped balloon. But the real kicker? While I’ve heard from other PCVs that their Dads used bike pumps, etc. to accomplish this task, our guy used his MOUTH! I was a bit dumbfounded. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see the guy with his mouth on the sheep’s leg as the animal gradually inflated. Yuck.

Well after that shocker, the butchering proceeded as you’d imagine it would. My family certainly enjoyed themselves laughing at how uncomfortable I was while watching the whole process. It was especially fun when the butcher started advancing towards me holding the sheep’s recently decapitated head in front of his face like a mask. This experience just confirmed for me that I infinitely prefer the American way of doing things…aka the meat arrives at the supermarket in neat little packages and bears almost no resemblance to the animal/animal parts that it came from.

Once the butchering part was finished, my Mom and sisters took over again. First, they grabbed the liver and threw it on the fire. Then they took the laundry basin full of everything else and started dividing it up. Some we’d eat later that day, some went in the freezer, and some we gave away.

Next up? A mid-morning snack of liver fried with onions and potatoes, yum! Thankfully, they gave my Dad and I a separate plate and, since he pays much less attention to what I eat than my Mom and sisters, I was able to eat around the liver without getting any grief. I’ve tried more new foods than I can count since getting to Senegal, but I don’t really feel like liver needs to be one of them.

Well after all the excitement of the morning, the day definitely settled down. We ate another meat-tastic lunch, took our post-lunch naps and then everyone got decked out in their new outfits. (I, being far too cheap/poor to buy a second new outfit for the day, put on my complet from Swear-in again.)

A big part of Tabaski celebrations is going around to visit people and asking their pardon for any faults you might have committed against them over the past year. Also, all the kids run around from house to house showing off their new clothes. It’s kind of like trick-or-treating, but people give out coins instead of candy. So, after all the kids in my family took off, Yaay, Baay (Dad) and I piled into my Dad’s ancient Peugeot to make our rounds.

And that was pretty much it for the big day. After visiting 6 or 7 houses, we headed back home, ate some more meat, and I passed out. Over the next couple of days, visitors continued to come and go from the house to ask my family’s pardon. We also ate a ridiculous amount of sheep and all I can say is thank goodness my family can afford refrigeration! Regardless of whether a family has a refrigerator, they continue to eat meat for days after Tabaski, and I’m sure I would’ve gotten a major case of food poisoning.

And on that lovely note…ba bennen!