A smattering of highlights from my high times in the bush. This is a long one, so brace yourselves.
*Here in the lovely peanut basin, my first month of residence was largely comprised of peanut based activities. massive bags of harvested peanuts are stashed all over the village, and pretty much every woman and child spends all day processing them, and it is quite the process. First you shell all of the peanuts by hand, or occasionally mouth. Then you have to shake all of the peanut shells out of the pile of peanuts. Then you sift all the the peanuts to separate the larger ones from the smaller ones. This gets repeated again to shake out the fragments and halves from the small sized peanuts. Then you spread the peanuts all out on a pan, and individually pick out all the bad ones, rotten, discolored, etc. One 100kg bag of peanuts takes about 4-5 days to complete all of these steps, and as I mentioned, there seems to be an endless supply of peanuts to process. I swear every woman in that village is knee deep in peanuts all day every day.
* I eat alot of mangoes. Like, a LOT of them. I honestly don't know how many more I can take. Luckily, papaya season is right around the corner.
*The night of the first real rain storm here I honestly thought the world was ending. It was about one am in the morning when the rain woke me, so I was rather disoriented, clawing around in my mosquito net looking for a flashlight to investigate. My hut has a tin roof, which magnified the sound – I feel like any description would fall short, but the rain pounding on the tin seemed to me to have the water pressure of a fire hose, if you can picture that, and the cement walls amplified the effect, making the sound reverberate loudly around the room. The timbers in the ceiling were vibrating, causing a slight shower of sawdust to rain down all around me, and when I woke in the morning I found a chunk of cement that had loosed itself from the ceiling sitting pretty in the middle of my room. Like I said, I though the world was coming to an end! It just rained again the other day, so it seems that rainy season really has arrived, and I am only just beginning to understand how it is going to affect my life. For instance, the road into my village is going to become a river of mud, quite literally. I really don't even think the persistent donkey cart could make it through, and certainly not my shiny new Peace Corps bike. That leaves walking. In the mud. In flip flops...so I may be in village for alot of the coming months. Kaolack, my regional city, and Thies, where I will be for training in July, are also going to be FILTHY after the rains, which will make getting around just that much more of an adventure. Think rivers of sewage where streets should be. I have a feeling that I will be investing in some rain boots. Apparently the rains also bring and abundance of infections and bugs, in addition to the suffocating humidity. And while this all sounds, well rather horrible actually, I am super excited about rainy season. First of all, I love rain storms, and thunder and lightening, and the gales here put a late-summer New England hurricane to shame. With the rain also comes the green - the sparse savannah that I am currently surrounded with is going to explode with vegetation, and after four months of nothing but sand and bush, I could really go for some flora right now. And while the humidity leading up to a storm is, like I said, suffocating, the brief cool that follows it is phenomenal! In my mind, that makes it all, the mud, the gook, the nasty staph infections, the bugs every where, the humidity that makes my hair stand on end, all worth it, just for those few hours of respite from the heat.
*I have read seven or eight books in my several weeks at site. I have a bit of free time here, if you haven’t guessed. I feel like the sudden void of English in my life has given me a great new appreciation for the written word, and I am constantly craving something new to read. I have loved each and every book that I have read so far, so if you need any recommendations, look to the side, and if you have any recommendations for me, send them along!
*I returned home one evening after spending the day out of village to find a little surprise waiting for me on my bed - one of the friendly household chickens had decided to lay an egg on my pillow. I was at first bewildered, then confused and really just curious as could be about how exactly this egg had landed smack dab in the middle of my pillow. I went outside with what must have been a look of surprise, confusion and amusement to show my family the unexpected egg. They were unimpressed. This is how the conversation with my father went:
Me: "Look at what I found on my bed!"
Dad: "It's an egg."
Me: "Yes, I know its an egg, but it was on my bed!"
Dad: "Do you know chicken eggs? Does America have chicken eggs?"
Me: "Yes! I know chicken eggs, America has chicken eggs. I know eggs. I do not know why the egg is on my bed?"
Dad: "A chicken was in your room."
Me: "Yes, I know, but why?"
Dad: "I don't know."
This went on for like 15 minutes. I have pretty limited serere when it comes to ask interrogative questions about chickens. The family all sort of just gave that smile and shake of the head, which I have taken to mean, "Oh, our silly little toubab!" The next morning I was sweeping my room out a bit, and had the door open, and this rather persistent chicken kept trying to sneak in. It took me a minute, but I realized that this must have been the momma chicken looking for her egg - which, by the way, I had eaten for breakfast...tasty. She kept running into my hut, and I eventually had to shut the door to keep her out, and she made quite the ruckus outside banging against my tin door. When I finished cleaning, I ducked my head out, and she was gone, so I went outside to sit with the family for a while. A few hours later, when I went back to my room, there she was, sitting on the pillow again. I grabbed one of my sisters, and we got the chicken, who had laid two more eggs. This time, everyone though it was pretty funny. I mean really, a chicken laying eggs on my pillow! The told me sort of jokingly that we could kill it if it came back again, and I'm not gonna lie, I could really go for some chicken right about now, but I feel like wishing a chicken dead is just bad karma, especially since I keep eating all of her eggs. The most curious thing is, no one can figure out how she is getting into the room. I leave my back door open, but my backyard is entirely walled off, and connected to another backyard that is also walled off. So this chicken must have some sort of super bionic power to be seeking out my lil corner of the compound. I guess on the bright side, breakfast has been better!
*Saw my first scorpion. They are small, and scary, and I do not like them.
*There are these two turkeys that live in the compound across the way from me, the only turkeys that I have seen in Senegal thus far; makes me miss Thanksgiving terribly! This one day, as I was sitting under a tree with some of the ladies shelling peanuts, we saw one of the turkeys blaze past us, shortly followed by a pack of boys, there must have been at least thirty of them. I'm not sure what set this fowl incident off (HA), but those boys were determined to catch that bird, and unfortunately for them, this turkey seemed smarter than most. I was told by the "peanut gallery," if you will, that turkeys are very, very dumb. We proceeded to watch the boys and the bird streak across the village, through every bush or tree, over and under every fence, and stumbling over a few village elders as well. This went on for a good half an hour as me and the peanut gallery (yep, I'm stickin with that one), watched in amusement. Alas, the children were unsuccessful, and the the crafty bird escaped to live another day - but hopefully not too many more days, because turkey sounds spectacularly delicious right now!
*People here, well mothers really, love to hand me their babies, which always puts me a little on edge because I seem to have missed the life lesson where they teach the proper way to hold a baby, especially important to know, I would think, when the child in question is like three days old. To make it that much better, the babies are almost always crying hysterically because I scare the living daylights out of them. They don't know what I am exactly, but they know that they don't like me holding them! This practice came to a close, however, after a particularly displeased baby decided to pee on me. I have since decided to respectfully decline and invitations to hold the babies of my village.
*One of the greatest perks of living in the middle of nowhere with no electricity are the stars. I can see more of the stars than I could ever dream of seeing at home. Seriously, someone needs to send me a constellation map. The big dipper sits comfortable right on top of the main house in my compound, and it makes me quite nostalgic for home, as a would always gaze up at the big dipper as I drove up my drive way. I love that the stars follow you wherever you go. I have also seen more shooting stars than I can count, which adds up to a lot of wishes! Laying on a mat and gazing up at the stars is definitely the best way to end your day.
