Immersion (9 Oct 2013)

       My apologies on not starting this blog earlier, but my first week in Senegal was insanely busy with classes and living with over seventy other Peace Corps Trainees and Volunteers in the training center, and
I spent my last week in my host village where there’s barely electricity and no internet.  As those I’ve been in contact with know, the training center-week was a whirlwind of classes, introductions, new people and I loved every second of it.  One would think that having almost every second planned out and no time to yourself would lead to resentment, but I’ve bonded more quickly with this group than anyone else before.  Being thrown together and continually pushing our boundaries leads to fast bonding!  A prime example of this was that I’ve begun cutting my fellow trainees’ hair (a skill I didn’t even know that I had!), perhaps I’ve inadvertently found a fall back career if my current plans don’t work out!
        After our initial week of training, we trainees were split into language classes and each class was sent to a host community to learn our languages the right way- through total immersion.

KERR SADARO

My host village, Kerr Sadaro, is a small collection of farmers situated on either side of one of the nicest paved roads I've seen in Senegal.  The population is probably under 400 people, with children comprising of 60%-70% of the population.  Families live in compounds, a collection of 2-5 buildings surrounded by a wall with animals in pens or roaming and children constantly underfoot.  My family's compound has two finished buildings, a whole set of unfinished buildings (which seems to be fairly frequent in the areas I've seen), a pen for the horse and sheep to stay in at night, two donkeys that hang out behind the house, chickens and turkeys always underfoot, an outhouse with a Turkish toilet, a three sided outdoor bathing area where I've learned to very much enjoy my showers under the stars, a kitchen hut, a dirt courtyard, and a front yard area with a concrete bench and two large trees that provide wonderful shade on the terribly hot days.  My family's compound is next door to the mosque, so I've begun to rely on the calls to prayer to keep track of time. 

                My first introduction to Kerr Sadaro was a mixture of incredibly welcoming and incredibly awkward.  After stepping out of the Peace Corps Land Rover, a swarm of children and women surrounded us.  One lady took my hand, gave my cumbersome water filter to one of the many children, took my hand, and led me home.  Once I dropped my backpack off in my new room, I was plopped down in a plastic chair with my new family sitting all around me.  My host father, a very kind man with a round face, introduced me to everyone in the family and told me that my Senegalese name is "Seneba Thiow."  It was a difficult afternoon (well, the first three days were actually difficult) as I only spoke three phrases in Wolof.  After exhausting the topic of "Peace be with you," "My name is...," and "I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer" I sat in silence with the family jabbering at and around me.  One of the many observations I made during that first afternoon is that last names are important.  Everytime anyone was introduced to me, the last name was stressed and when I repeated my new name as just "Seneba" the family would start chirping "Thiow,Thiow, Thiow" until I repeated that as well. 

IMMERSION DEPRESSION

                The first three days were the most difficult I've ever experienced for three reasons. 

1) I hadn't had time to be homesick since arriving as my time had been filled with classes and new friends.  But as I found myself sitting for hours on end in a strange new place with literally nothing to do but to listen to the language... I realized that I was missing my friends and family far more than I would have imagined possible.  It hit me how hard it is going to be to live in an area with little communication (though I can always receive phone calls from the states, so CALL me!) from the people I care about for two years.  I'm going to miss a lot of things in my family's life, and it's tough.  On one hand, I think the Peace Corps is incredibly selfless and on the other it is incredibly selfish just in the fact that I packed up and moved across the world with little regard to how it would limit my interaction with family. 

2) While I've lived abroad before, living in a true third-world country was so radically different from even the normal daily tasks that I normally do that I was at a lost how to do simple things.  Like eating.  You sit at a large bowl, use only your right hand, scoop greasy rice into it, ball it into a mushy mash and try to get it in your mouth.  Oh yeah, and you're sitting on the ground and wearing a skirt... so you're supposed to have it arranged a certain way.  And, and, and.  I also wasn't sure how/ where to hand wash my clothes, take a bucket bath, throw out trash (just on the side of the street, in case you were wondering).  In a nutshell, I was making innumerous mistakes and I wasn't able to communicate enough to even know what those mistakes were at first.  Needless to say, I was pretty overwhelmed and began to fantasize about living in an area where I knew how to perform basic functions without even thinking about it. 

3)  With such limited language skills, I was largely unable to communicate my basic questions or figure out what I was doing wrong.  My language has grown exponentially, but I still struggled with feeling like the 2 year old who also had words repeated for her over and over until she repeated them.  My favorite interactions were when my host family would ask me something, I would say I didn't understand, then multiple people would repeat it faster and throw in new words to try to explain.   At one point, I was unable to communicate (aside from gestures and smiles) and thought 'I have a college degree and can speak three languages and yet I can't communicate with you!'   It was unbelievably frustrating and, in a way, belittling.

So I was feeling pretty depressed at first, the culmination of the above factors making me miss home and everyone in it.  I had a lot of down time, so some of you may receive depressed letters that I wrote then.  Luckily, I started to adjust and am starting to integrate into my family and understand more every day.  I still feel sad when thinking about my family, but I'm much happier than I was last Friday!

LANGUAGE LEARNING

I have never learned so much, so quickly in my whole life!  We four students father at my teacher's host family's house.  Plop ourselves under a tree (I've never appreciated the shade of trees until moving to Africa) and struggle through a four hour language class.  At home, the children have taken it upon themselves to teach me Wolof and surround me with new words.  I learned the Wolof version of 'head, shoulders, knees, and toes'- which I perform for almost everyone in the village whenever they stop by.  Over the first four days, all of the children slowly warmed to me (even the angsty teenager) to the extent that we sit in a circle and review what I've learned in class and then my host father quizes me on it that night.  It's Wolof language, all the time.  And it's difficult- my brain feels fried almost all the time.  I guess I can cross that off my bucket list though, I'm officially learning a language the hard/ right way. 

BATTLE STORIES

Let me preface these by stating that I have the best medical team in Peace Corps, so if anything happens to me, they will take wonderful care of me! 

a)  I saw my first scorpion the second night in Kerr Sadaro!

b) Small children in my village cry when they see me and try to rub my skin

c) I've had three blisters from blister beetles (they're healing, don't worry)

d) I've endured heat rash all across my back for the first time from sweating constantly (not only is it hot, but there is no air-conditioning anywhere) 

e) I've survived two small sand storms

f) On the bright side, I've had no sunburn as of yet!

AMUSEMENT IN KERR SADARO

As a Peace Corps Trainee in a small village, my standards for entertainment have drastically reduced.  Television?  Books?  Visiting friends? Music?  I don't any of it!  I've adapted to a new version of amusement. 

A treasured past time for my host family is to spend entire afternoons and evenings sitting under the shade trees in the front yard.  Sprawled on the plastic mats in the sand, one can watch the one road that goes through the village.  Cars drive by at a rate of one per ten minutes during slow hours and two per ten minutes during 'rush hour.'  The most exciting part of this entertainment is that there's a speed bump(!!!) almost directly in front of my house.  Cars, overfilled buses, horse-drawn charettes, runners, and motorcycles actually drive OVER the speed bump.  Variations of this can be my family calling out to the people we know, or waving.  

If you think that speed-bump watching comprises of most of my day and that I shouldn't need any further entertainment, you are (almost) completely correct.  However, I've begun to enjoy working in our demonstration garden for entertainment purposes.  On the stone wall along the fence, anywhere from 10-50 boys will sit there and watch me every time I turn the compost pile.  It's like I have my own personal audience.  We've been convincing the kids to help us, and it's pretty hilarious to see the confusion cross their face when we try to teach them to 'high five.'  It's better than an evening out in NYC!

Even eating can be entertaining!  After several days of Senegalese food, the four of us decided that we'd get together for a coordinated shack time.  We stopped at the one, small store in town and bought a liter sized refrigerated Fanta.  Piling into one of our rooms and sitting on the floor, we passed around a bag of pretzels and took turns sipping from our liter or cold Fanta.  It was (in all actuality), the most entertaining part of the week! The four of us practically swooned from the fizzy, cold drink when we hadn't had anything refrigerated or been in air conditioning in over a week.  Pretzels and Fanta, what else could a girl need?

Another entertaining, though also frustrating, part of my life in Kerr Sadaro is the constant, strategic battle of meal time.  My host mother seems to think that I need to eat three times of my body weight in rice and fish.  Greasy rice and fish.  With my hands.  Obvious gastronomical and skill difficulties aside, it's a lot of food.  A typical meal goes as follows;  I eat until I'm almost full and then say 'I'm full' (something I learned to say on the first day) and my mother quite forcefully telling me that I'm not full and making me sit back down and eat another 10-100 (probably just 2) pounds of rice.  Various methods I've tried to win this war include me eating slowly (then the rest of the bowl is empty and I've been caught with my side still full of rice) or eating quickly (then I still end up eating more since they won't let me leave).  It's become a strategic battle at mealtime.  My host mother flicks food at me from across the bowl and I start to deflect it when I'm full and then we all laugh.  My mother found a recent method to make me eat more- the old 'shut her in her room until all the food is gone' technique. 

This happens most often at breakfast, where I am handed a 16" loaf of bread with margarine.  Have you ever tried to eat a whole 16" loaf of bread when you first wake up?  It is simply impossible!  The first day I managed to slip about half of it to a younger sibling since I didn't want to waste food.  My mother glared at me, but I had thwarted her.  She's parried since then by making me eat alone in my room so I can't slip the food to anyone else.  I struggled through the bread for two days before hiding 1/3 of my bread in my backpack and dropping it off at the compost pile in our demonstration garden every morning.  At first I felt guilty, but on Sunday I found the other PCTs doing the same!  It's rather amusing, since even though I eat more than I have in my entire life, my mother always looks after me worriedly when I leave the compound as though she fears I may grow faint from lack of food.   

The most amusing aspect of my life in Kerr Sadaro is my hair.  All the girls in my family are obsessed with my hair (oh, and everyone in my family thinks that my freckles are mosquito bites).  A major festival is coming up next week where all the women will have tight braids in their hair.  Unbeknownst to me, the girls in my family talked about my hair for a solid three days, trying to decide how to braid it and what I must have done to make it so straight.  So I found myself sat down on an upended bucket and six pairs of hands attacked my hair.  "Oh, rafetna!" (beautiful) they all were saying, but all I could think was that I hadn't washed my hair in three days.  Also, as my mom can attest, I have a very sensitive skin on my head.  Pretty soon, my hair was being roughly pulled in six different directions.  A braid would be completed and then one of the older sisters would decide it wasn't up to scratch, tear it out, and braid it tighter.  My host brothers kept walking by on various pretexts, but really just to see if my sisters could tame my hair.  We all laughed and laughed.  

                I looked so silly with my sisters clucking and pulling on my hair, then even my 3 year old sister Awa, whom I've nicknamed Empress Awa, giggled and talked to me for the first time!  I've been informed to buy elastics and they'll try to braid my hair again next week in a proper hair session.  I can't even fathom what a 'proper hair' session will be like!     

               

So, after a week at training and a week with my host family, many impromptu language lessons, several added layers of dirt, my first scorpion sighting, and a head of partially braided hair- I'm signing off!