So I have plans to break a record this week. I have yet to stay in Bambey for over a week without leaving the city limits… and I will be here for a total of 9 nights, inshallah. Do I say that now just like they do, as to not jinx myself? Like our expression, knock on wood? I guess so... I just haven’t planned to go to Ndem or go fishing or visit anyone else’s sites. I think it is a very good thing that I can stay here, comfortably for 10 days. Maybe I am making progress!
I have been taking a few baby steps to boost my confidence, friend circles and work partners. I am trying a whole new point of view and am getting good at saying how I feel. For example, one of my friends, Souliman (who admitted to me that God put him on this earth to love me) introduced me to a nice group of women my age working at a small organization. Ever since I met them all, they have supposedly been asking about me and gave Souliman their numbers so that he could then give them to me. Well, I went to CDEPS, where they all work, and ran into him and my soon-to-be best girl friends! So excited they won’t hit on me… anyways! I was sitting chatting with everyone and they asked why I hadn’t called. Well! I got on my friends case after he had asked me for a gift since I went to Gamou, the religious pilgrimage site. (By the way, its completely normal for people to demand gifts when ever I leave, so I usually buy a bag of oranges and whomever I see first gets them…) So when Souliman was asking for his gift, I simply laughed and him and said that he wasn’t nice, since I saw him in town just the other day and he didn’t give me my friends numbers. HA! It felt good to knock him down a bit. His ego will only suffer for a little while, but I was very happy with myself!
What else? I drank tea with both a tailor and an artist this week. I got them talking about the possibility of working together to sell products in more touristy areas. Hopefully Matar can get nice clothes designed and Dijibi can paint on them to make them unique. As volunteers, we are going to try to get a website to network artisans with eco-tourism sites. It is in such the early stages now, that it is hard to get artisans to really work since there are no immediate results. But it was a nice tea session!
I still haven’t started the girls’ scholarships for the middle schools yet, and when I think about it, I get stressed out. The MS scholarship is available for girls with good grades and motivation and also with limited financial resources to keep them in schools. I have three middle schools here in Bambey, and at each school, we interview 12 girls and their teachers, have them write an essay about their future and also, I will visit all of their homes. Do the math: I have to visit 36 families, read 36 essays and 36 recommendation letters. All of this needs to be done by June 1 so I can send my top 4 girls from each school! I have my work cut out for me whenever the schools quit striking and celebrating holidays… I sure hope that one girl from each school will get the scholarship. That is, if we have the funds! Want to help out? Send a check to:
Friends of Senegal and The Gambia
ATTN.: Daniel Theisen, SeneGAD
428 Bowleys Quarters Road
Baltimore, MD 21220
Volunteers all over Senegal do these scholarships and every year it is getting bigger. I know I will be throwing in 30,000cfa ($50) to support a girl; you should do the same!
My fish salesman came to visit me this morning. He says that all the women in the villages ask about me so I will be planning another day out soon enough. I also met with my supervisor and counterpart about finding women’s groups that actually want to work with me. I have started translating the IFAT application form for Ndem. They may think that I am going to do the whole thing for them since it’s all in English but that’s not the case. I will email them and tell them my change of opinion and see if they are serious enough to answer the questions I translated. I have had trouble wondering if they really want my help so that’s why I haven’t gone to visit in 3 weeks. If they want me to come, they will ask for me. It’s tough since they have such a huge opportunity in the world market and I love going there, but I feel used and useless, depending. We’ll see what happens. Life in Bambey is chill… not temperature wise, but it’s growing on me.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Off-roading in the bush
Happy Birthday Mom! Hope you have a terrific day today! Go out for sushi, or Italian, or Red Lobster… or any meal that has a delicious bottle of red wine next to it. Enjoy for me! Love and miss you!
So it’s been a while since I have last written. I have been busy getting used to being frustrated. I have studied and been told thousands of times that when living abroad you go through different stages. Early on is the honeymoon stage when everything is wonderful and you think you never want to leave. Then that all disappears and you realize that life is better in America. I hope I move on soon to the stage that life becomes more comfortable. I’ll just say I have hit a few roadblocks of people not wanting to work with me or others saying they are in love with me and “there is nothing I can do about it since God made him that way”. Hmm. So I took a little break and I am back in Bambey ready to start again, but this time I am going to try and fit in less and be myself more. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My little break started with another Muslim holiday. Have I mentioned before that these holidays just aren’t the same? And other holidays in America are better (that’s the end of the honeymoon stage talking, sorry). So I went with my family in a rented van to the Tidiane pilgrimage site. I happen to have a friend that lives there so I was quite easily talked into going since I could spend the holiday with him and another friend that came in. Although I was told the van would be ready to pick us up at 7, that’s when I got up, took my time getting ready and packed, and it left after 10. It took a while finding the house, but we got there and without greeting anyone, we went in the house. The first thing weird about this celebration, was that we went to lie down in a back bedroom. Yes, like 10 of us women and kids in one bed and a few chairs to rest rather than socialize. After like 45 minutes, we were invited to breakfast at noon. After, we went up to the roof where a large shade structure was put up with lots of pillows and mattresses. There, we waited for lunch while people prayed. Lunch was great, but after I was rather excited to get out of there and speak some English; not to mention people watch. The city has 50,000 habitants, but it attracts over 1 million people. I bought some coconut and pineapple on the street and actually ran into someone from my Thies family.
After all these great celebrations, my friend and I decided to go to Dakar the next morn. The problem is that everyone wants to leave at that time so traffic just sits. I had 2 books with me and planned on reading them both and hopefully get to Dakar by sunset. Well! We lucked out, if you can call it that! After taking the last 2 seats of the 7-place car, excellent timing, it took us an hour just to get out of the garage. But that’s when the fun began! Our driver seems to have done this before. He followed a sand path into the bush, very quickly! A lot of sand acts like snow and I really thought we were going to fishtail into a few trees, people, and other vehicles. I say people since there were MANY people out pushing and digging sand out from under cars. Also, there were the manioc farmers running around with machetes threatening drivers that didn’t stay on the deep sandy path, which was impossible. Men were all in fancy clothing pushing and women were either in the cars (where I was :-) or in the shade breastfeeding kids and having to run after the cars after they became unstuck. It was hilarious and really dangerous, but most the whole way we could see the national road and traffic simply didn’t move. We weaved in and out of fields, cars and villages to make it almost the whole way to Thies, over 20k away! Somehow we made it to Dakar in about 5 and half hours, when usually it takes about 2 and half or 3. I only made it halfway through one of my books!
So it’s been a while since I have last written. I have been busy getting used to being frustrated. I have studied and been told thousands of times that when living abroad you go through different stages. Early on is the honeymoon stage when everything is wonderful and you think you never want to leave. Then that all disappears and you realize that life is better in America. I hope I move on soon to the stage that life becomes more comfortable. I’ll just say I have hit a few roadblocks of people not wanting to work with me or others saying they are in love with me and “there is nothing I can do about it since God made him that way”. Hmm. So I took a little break and I am back in Bambey ready to start again, but this time I am going to try and fit in less and be myself more. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My little break started with another Muslim holiday. Have I mentioned before that these holidays just aren’t the same? And other holidays in America are better (that’s the end of the honeymoon stage talking, sorry). So I went with my family in a rented van to the Tidiane pilgrimage site. I happen to have a friend that lives there so I was quite easily talked into going since I could spend the holiday with him and another friend that came in. Although I was told the van would be ready to pick us up at 7, that’s when I got up, took my time getting ready and packed, and it left after 10. It took a while finding the house, but we got there and without greeting anyone, we went in the house. The first thing weird about this celebration, was that we went to lie down in a back bedroom. Yes, like 10 of us women and kids in one bed and a few chairs to rest rather than socialize. After like 45 minutes, we were invited to breakfast at noon. After, we went up to the roof where a large shade structure was put up with lots of pillows and mattresses. There, we waited for lunch while people prayed. Lunch was great, but after I was rather excited to get out of there and speak some English; not to mention people watch. The city has 50,000 habitants, but it attracts over 1 million people. I bought some coconut and pineapple on the street and actually ran into someone from my Thies family.
After all these great celebrations, my friend and I decided to go to Dakar the next morn. The problem is that everyone wants to leave at that time so traffic just sits. I had 2 books with me and planned on reading them both and hopefully get to Dakar by sunset. Well! We lucked out, if you can call it that! After taking the last 2 seats of the 7-place car, excellent timing, it took us an hour just to get out of the garage. But that’s when the fun began! Our driver seems to have done this before. He followed a sand path into the bush, very quickly! A lot of sand acts like snow and I really thought we were going to fishtail into a few trees, people, and other vehicles. I say people since there were MANY people out pushing and digging sand out from under cars. Also, there were the manioc farmers running around with machetes threatening drivers that didn’t stay on the deep sandy path, which was impossible. Men were all in fancy clothing pushing and women were either in the cars (where I was :-) or in the shade breastfeeding kids and having to run after the cars after they became unstuck. It was hilarious and really dangerous, but most the whole way we could see the national road and traffic simply didn’t move. We weaved in and out of fields, cars and villages to make it almost the whole way to Thies, over 20k away! Somehow we made it to Dakar in about 5 and half hours, when usually it takes about 2 and half or 3. I only made it halfway through one of my books!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Gone Fishing
Lamine is Moussa’s dad, one of the guys I work with in Ndem. Moussa once worked for his dad but has left his work for his younger brothers now since he has his own job in the office in Ndem. Lamine is an extremely hard working, smart, caring businessman. He has been selling fish to women in small villages for the last 20 years whom would otherwise have to access to it. So here is my story.
Woke up unhappily at 4:25 to mice eating something in my armoire. After I scared them off, my alarm went off just minutes later and didn’t really know if I could snooze since Lamine said he would be here “by 5, inshallah”, to pick me up. So I got ready and waited until almost 6 before he arrived (should have snoozed) and we left: Lamine, his sons, Pape Diop and Babacar and I. At this point, I thought we were headed all the way to the ocean to buy fish but since the truck isn’t reliable, they bought 4 cases of fish in Bambey at midnight. The pickup truck is small, smelly and unreliable with headlights that can only see a few meters in front of the car. Good thing Lamine knows the way well enough to downshift even before I could see the turn. The first few villages we sold to we did in the dark with a flashlight after waking up clients.
A little about the truck: it doesn’t start with a key, he hotwires it. Instead of antifreeze coolant, (like we have to worry about it freezing) they probably put over 40 liters of water in the radiator throughout the day since it goes through it so quickly. The breaks failed 2 or 3 times but good thing Babacar dropped out of school when he was 7 or 8 to become a mechanic. I couldn’t really figure out why Lamine brought along 2 sons rather than just one to help sell until we kept getting stuck in the sand… that’s why. Lamine would love to have a truck reliable enough to drive out to the ocean in the middle of the night and drive back through nearly 50 villages every day. Fish is unfairly marked up depending on the size of the catch and the middlemen who sell from refrigerated trucks in Bambey. He has rented a truck to see the possibilities and found out that fish could be sold as cheaply as 300 CFA/case. He purchased the 4 cases for 6500 CFA each in Bambey.
We drove far into the bush, as it is rightly called, on sandy paths worn down by Lamine’s truck and horse drawn carts. He knows everyone in these villages and works with women who sell the fish in their small markets. In some villages, when he started this, he had to train the women how to work. These women have such respect for him and what he is doing since he doesn’t only bring them nutrition, but he brings them income. There is no one else besides his kids and other fish sellers that he has trained that sell fish to these villagers. Weekly markets available to these villages are hard to get to several kilometers away and they can’t really stock up when they do manage to get there since they don’t have electricity for fridges and would love Lamine to sell fish to them every day.
So we passed through 16-18 villages, selling 3-40 fish to over 30 women, on credit. Sometimes they pay him from previous days and somehow he just knows who owes him however much. Most of the villages looked the same to me and I only went to like 16… he knows of over 50 with women in every one. He enters the center of a village and blows a whistle and women and kids come running with large bowls or buckets. They are rather picky about the fish he gives them so each woman is given their 40 fish plus 2 or 3 damaged ones as gifts. He passed by one grass hut in the middle of nowhere and just gave the woman 3 fish. I doubt she will pay since she is obviously a herder and hasn’t been there long, by the looks of her family’s hut. Can Lamine really afford to just give these fish away?
So we drive further and further in, selling to more and more villages. I questioned, what if you don’t sell all the fish? He looked at me, puzzled, “well you just have to go to another village”. It was probably 10:30 when we sold all the fish and we took a coffee break at a friend’s house. This is when he showed me his notebook. He writes down the name of the village and how much was collected or owed. After today’s sales, he should have made 44,800 but the only money collected so far was from paying back previous debts. So when we were done with breakfast, we passed back through different villages to pick up yesterday’s money. It was hard to see these women disappointed that he was out of fish already but when we sat down to talk with one woman he has been working with for all of the previous 20 years, she was so happy that I was going to be working with him and actually gave me a gift of 4 eggs that her hen laid that morning. Do you realize these people don’t have enough protein in their diets and she is giving me the eggs?
We passed through villages from the morning, picking up money all the way back. We also purchased 15 sacs of charcoal for 1500CFA that can be sold in Bambey for 2500CFA. He also bought feed for his chickens and goats.
So when we got back, technically Lamine should have (4x6500=26,000) +gas8000 =34000. Sales44800 - costs34000= 10,800. Ten thousand, my friend, is about $20. We left before 6 am and got home for lunch in Bambey after 4. And that is if everyone pays sometime in the next few days. He trusts his clients and has only had trouble getting his money back if he waits to revisit them over 4 or 5 days. So with that 10,800, he sets aside 7000, as depreciation for the truck. When I asked what he does with this, he said puts it into his bank account. But really, he invests it in other ways, like by buying a new sheep or more chickens. They provide more of an investment than the unreliable banks. So really, he made about 3,800CFA (about $7). Such a hard working family; hopefully I can help them out by finding either a loan big enough or funding for a new truck.
Woke up unhappily at 4:25 to mice eating something in my armoire. After I scared them off, my alarm went off just minutes later and didn’t really know if I could snooze since Lamine said he would be here “by 5, inshallah”, to pick me up. So I got ready and waited until almost 6 before he arrived (should have snoozed) and we left: Lamine, his sons, Pape Diop and Babacar and I. At this point, I thought we were headed all the way to the ocean to buy fish but since the truck isn’t reliable, they bought 4 cases of fish in Bambey at midnight. The pickup truck is small, smelly and unreliable with headlights that can only see a few meters in front of the car. Good thing Lamine knows the way well enough to downshift even before I could see the turn. The first few villages we sold to we did in the dark with a flashlight after waking up clients.
A little about the truck: it doesn’t start with a key, he hotwires it. Instead of antifreeze coolant, (like we have to worry about it freezing) they probably put over 40 liters of water in the radiator throughout the day since it goes through it so quickly. The breaks failed 2 or 3 times but good thing Babacar dropped out of school when he was 7 or 8 to become a mechanic. I couldn’t really figure out why Lamine brought along 2 sons rather than just one to help sell until we kept getting stuck in the sand… that’s why. Lamine would love to have a truck reliable enough to drive out to the ocean in the middle of the night and drive back through nearly 50 villages every day. Fish is unfairly marked up depending on the size of the catch and the middlemen who sell from refrigerated trucks in Bambey. He has rented a truck to see the possibilities and found out that fish could be sold as cheaply as 300 CFA/case. He purchased the 4 cases for 6500 CFA each in Bambey.
We drove far into the bush, as it is rightly called, on sandy paths worn down by Lamine’s truck and horse drawn carts. He knows everyone in these villages and works with women who sell the fish in their small markets. In some villages, when he started this, he had to train the women how to work. These women have such respect for him and what he is doing since he doesn’t only bring them nutrition, but he brings them income. There is no one else besides his kids and other fish sellers that he has trained that sell fish to these villagers. Weekly markets available to these villages are hard to get to several kilometers away and they can’t really stock up when they do manage to get there since they don’t have electricity for fridges and would love Lamine to sell fish to them every day.
So we passed through 16-18 villages, selling 3-40 fish to over 30 women, on credit. Sometimes they pay him from previous days and somehow he just knows who owes him however much. Most of the villages looked the same to me and I only went to like 16… he knows of over 50 with women in every one. He enters the center of a village and blows a whistle and women and kids come running with large bowls or buckets. They are rather picky about the fish he gives them so each woman is given their 40 fish plus 2 or 3 damaged ones as gifts. He passed by one grass hut in the middle of nowhere and just gave the woman 3 fish. I doubt she will pay since she is obviously a herder and hasn’t been there long, by the looks of her family’s hut. Can Lamine really afford to just give these fish away?
So we drive further and further in, selling to more and more villages. I questioned, what if you don’t sell all the fish? He looked at me, puzzled, “well you just have to go to another village”. It was probably 10:30 when we sold all the fish and we took a coffee break at a friend’s house. This is when he showed me his notebook. He writes down the name of the village and how much was collected or owed. After today’s sales, he should have made 44,800 but the only money collected so far was from paying back previous debts. So when we were done with breakfast, we passed back through different villages to pick up yesterday’s money. It was hard to see these women disappointed that he was out of fish already but when we sat down to talk with one woman he has been working with for all of the previous 20 years, she was so happy that I was going to be working with him and actually gave me a gift of 4 eggs that her hen laid that morning. Do you realize these people don’t have enough protein in their diets and she is giving me the eggs?
We passed through villages from the morning, picking up money all the way back. We also purchased 15 sacs of charcoal for 1500CFA that can be sold in Bambey for 2500CFA. He also bought feed for his chickens and goats.
So when we got back, technically Lamine should have (4x6500=26,000) +gas8000 =34000. Sales44800 - costs34000= 10,800. Ten thousand, my friend, is about $20. We left before 6 am and got home for lunch in Bambey after 4. And that is if everyone pays sometime in the next few days. He trusts his clients and has only had trouble getting his money back if he waits to revisit them over 4 or 5 days. So with that 10,800, he sets aside 7000, as depreciation for the truck. When I asked what he does with this, he said puts it into his bank account. But really, he invests it in other ways, like by buying a new sheep or more chickens. They provide more of an investment than the unreliable banks. So really, he made about 3,800CFA (about $7). Such a hard working family; hopefully I can help them out by finding either a loan big enough or funding for a new truck.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Every excuse in the book
So I lived a bit of the village life this past week. I stayed over in Ndem and worked a bit figuring out what to do in the next few months. I am having a bit of trouble getting integrated since I just don’t spend as much time there as I do in Bambey. I am trying so hard to gain their respect and trust but I can’t really do that until I do something significant and I can’t get assignments or permission with out that respect and trust. Do you see the problem? I’ve heard of similar problems in the “real world”: can’t get the job without the experience, can’t get the experience without the job. Patience and will power… hope to get the IFAT application finished and perfect before I go to Ndem next time. If they can afford to apply to be fair trade certified, I will be on the right track. There are still a lot of ifs, but let’s hope everything works out to plan eventually.
So I am starting to call Ndem a black hole. Once you get in, it’s rather difficult to leave! Even Senegalese from other places consider this true. The previous time I went, I took a bus in but had to wait over an hour by the side of the road for a bus to pass. While I waited, so did 3 others who were very impatient and they were even tempted to pay double to get a taxi sent out! So this last time I biked in (after fixing a flat all by myself, thank you!) and then met up with Pete, another volunteer who works a lot with artisans. Since he took public transport in, we took it back to his site and left my bike in Ndem.
It was just like being on a safari! He and I rode on top of what we call a bush taxi. It’s more or less a pickup truck with a cover and a rack on top for luggage… or in this case, Pete and I! Since the road is so bumpy, the driver went off the road onto the sand rather quickly. Kind of frightening! This taxi was headed in our direction, so we got on without asking questions. Turns out, it needed to drop off a barrel of gas for a water tower in a village about 10k off the road, down another sand path. So every small village we passed, kids would run after the car shouting “Toubab! Toubab!” On the way out of the village, the driver took a short cut to meet up with the road rather than taking the same road back… well there were a lot of low, thorny branches! Pete actually ripped his shirt and I got a few scraps on my back. All we did see were goats, sheep and cows. Hopefully the next safari has less thorns, scary hairpin turns around trees, and getting stuck in the sand and more giraffes!
After our 5 hours of transport in the hottest part of the day, we made it back to Pete’s site, which is incredibly famous for all their sandals (ppssst: if you want some let me know!). The next day, we went to visit 3 of the 5 villages that are working on a huge order for baskets to be sent to America. People in the villages are wonderfully friendly, which is a good thing since they don’t often make it out of grade school meaning I can’t rely on my backup French.
Village life is a bit more difficult for the toubab woman than it is for the man. I have a lot of respect for my friends that are in tiny villages like this. Men don’t exactly want to shake my hand and expect me to curtsey to show respect, which I rarely do. I spent lunch around a bowl with Pete and Daniel and about 5 other Senegalese men. Right there I am crossing a gender barrier since I was eating with the men. Not to mention, conversation for the next hour was about how I needed a husband. Honestly, I am perfectly happy being a single 23 year old since I know for sure, if I did marry one of these men, I would be cooking and doing their laundry and answering to their beck and call. How appealing?! My excuses didn’t appease them and they all want me back to visit soon. My response: Inshallah.
So I am starting to call Ndem a black hole. Once you get in, it’s rather difficult to leave! Even Senegalese from other places consider this true. The previous time I went, I took a bus in but had to wait over an hour by the side of the road for a bus to pass. While I waited, so did 3 others who were very impatient and they were even tempted to pay double to get a taxi sent out! So this last time I biked in (after fixing a flat all by myself, thank you!) and then met up with Pete, another volunteer who works a lot with artisans. Since he took public transport in, we took it back to his site and left my bike in Ndem.
It was just like being on a safari! He and I rode on top of what we call a bush taxi. It’s more or less a pickup truck with a cover and a rack on top for luggage… or in this case, Pete and I! Since the road is so bumpy, the driver went off the road onto the sand rather quickly. Kind of frightening! This taxi was headed in our direction, so we got on without asking questions. Turns out, it needed to drop off a barrel of gas for a water tower in a village about 10k off the road, down another sand path. So every small village we passed, kids would run after the car shouting “Toubab! Toubab!” On the way out of the village, the driver took a short cut to meet up with the road rather than taking the same road back… well there were a lot of low, thorny branches! Pete actually ripped his shirt and I got a few scraps on my back. All we did see were goats, sheep and cows. Hopefully the next safari has less thorns, scary hairpin turns around trees, and getting stuck in the sand and more giraffes!
After our 5 hours of transport in the hottest part of the day, we made it back to Pete’s site, which is incredibly famous for all their sandals (ppssst: if you want some let me know!). The next day, we went to visit 3 of the 5 villages that are working on a huge order for baskets to be sent to America. People in the villages are wonderfully friendly, which is a good thing since they don’t often make it out of grade school meaning I can’t rely on my backup French.
Village life is a bit more difficult for the toubab woman than it is for the man. I have a lot of respect for my friends that are in tiny villages like this. Men don’t exactly want to shake my hand and expect me to curtsey to show respect, which I rarely do. I spent lunch around a bowl with Pete and Daniel and about 5 other Senegalese men. Right there I am crossing a gender barrier since I was eating with the men. Not to mention, conversation for the next hour was about how I needed a husband. Honestly, I am perfectly happy being a single 23 year old since I know for sure, if I did marry one of these men, I would be cooking and doing their laundry and answering to their beck and call. How appealing?! My excuses didn’t appease them and they all want me back to visit soon. My response: Inshallah.
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