Busy and Happy

Written the 12 of February

If every day was like today, I wouldn’t have a single complaint in Senegal. Well, maybe the heat, but it was easily escape-able in the shade of a tree! Yesterday and today have been my two most productive days, I think. And maybe the day before… let me start from the beginning.

After writing that last post, I started collecting money from houses that needed to pay for their poubelles (garbage can in French). Asking for money is a weird thing. Children do it all the time, even adults have been asking me for money, but it’s almost understood that they won’t get it. It’s worth a try I guess, since, we all know, white skin=money. Quick example, today when I asked Djebaye if he needed anything else to build a fence, he said, “Why yes, I need money so I can afford my pass to Touba for Magal”. Sorry dude. Anyways, we collected a few houses’ money and obviously don’t have enough for me to go back to Dakar and purchase more poubelles so I recommended to the group to build a fence so that we actually have compost, rather than simply centralizing the location of the pigs’ food.

After a long couple days of door-to-door greetings, sitting in houses, waiting for the money, I went to Dakar. Softball was a blast. We played the Dakar Academy (private school of toubabs) JV team. There were probably 20 chairs of cheering parents on one side and maybe 1 or 2 extras on our side. We let them win out of pity. You know, since we didn’t want all their work of practicing daily go to waste, along with their matching uniforms and cleats. I was barefoot. They were playing a bunch of hippy PCVs. So like I said, we let them win, otherwise who knows how upset they would have been!

Tuesday we did the waste sort in Mbour. It was a long day of bending over, an arm’s length from garbage, sorting everything in to piles to be weighed. We had a soda break at one-ish and lunch at 5. I got to talk technical with Curt which made the whole day worthwhile. I really hope I can duplicate, in a small way at least, the project. They admit they had everything going for them in order to make their project a success. We may arrange a meeting between our 2 mayor’s offices to see what collaboration is possible. My first step in that direction was my goal to meet with people of the mayor’s office Wednesday. I made a beautiful Power Point and was ready at 4, as we all planned. But only 1 guy showed up. Thank you for your support, mayor’s office... But since he is the Chef de Quartier (Chief of the Neighborhood), I wanted to fill him in anyways, and he was very interested in my project. Great! So next week he and I will go around door-to-door getting more people to give their advances so we can buy more poubelles. Although I still don’t have the support of my mayor’s office, I am moving right along.

I met with Djebaye yesterday and gave him money to buy “trees”. I guess that’s how we get enough branches to make a fence. 1 tree for 1,500cfa ($3). It doesn’t kill the tree, don’t worry, it just makes them shorter. So today we met out at the site and started fencing in the site. We worked all morning with the help of his and Astou Kan’s kids, invited the Chef and my counterpart even showed up by chance. I am very happy with how it is turning out. It’s about half done so I gave Djebaye another 3,000cfa to buy more trees and hopefully, cross your fingers, when I get back to site after WAIST, we will have a complete structure – PIG PROOF!!

So this weekend is WAIST and also Magal. Magal is the biggest pilgrimage in Senegal to Touba, about 60k east of Bambey. About 3 million people will be there Saturday. Thank goodness I will be in Dakar! It’s perfect timing since there will be nothing for me to do here in Bambey until Tuesday or Wednesday anyways. I am looking forward to the weekend at WAIST. At least 4 softball games, nearly all Senegal PCVs, and the PCVs from Mali, Mauritania, Gambia and Guinea will be there. Togo even had a team last year, not to mention all the other expats here. It will be a great time! As long as Erin and I have time to bake ourselves a cake! Her birthday is Monday.

Have a happy Valentine’s Day!