I just finished 5 weeks at site. The PC tries to get PCVs to stay at site their first 5 weeks to work through hardships they might face and develop resiliency. My first 5 weeks were really slow and really fast, they were really easy and extremely hard, and they were completely exhausting. I have been back at the regional house for two days now and I am just starting to get recharged.
So my village: Diagaly-
My town is a Pulaar and Wolof village. Some of the Pulaar people are semi nomadic and move with the availability of livestock feed. This might mean that the whole family leaves or just the men. This could also mean they move 200 km or 30 km. Right now I see sarets (or horse/donkey drawn carriages) and sometimes pickup trucks completely loaded down with supplies and people moving south. There are a lot of people that also go out and collect dried grass with rakes and pile it on their sarets about 5 ft high and bring it back. I want to get you farmers some pictures of this. You will want to call up the manufacturer of your baler and thank them.
The population of my village is completely unknown it seems. The two previous 2 year volunteers didn't quite know at the end of 2 years. I was told that it is probably in between 1,000 and 2,000 depending on the amount of feed for livestock. There is no electricity at my site, there is not a refrigerator, but we have a TV on a solar panel. If we eat meat it was butchered that day or the day before; if we eat fish it was brought in homemade coolers. The people of my village are very nice and welcoming. Most are patient with my language and weird American ways, some are not.
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| Cows coming and leaving mbalka (trough) |
My House and Host Family-
So my compound/galle/house is a main concrete building with 5 rooms surrounded by 5 concrete buildings with thatch roofs and a concrete building used as a kitchen. I have one of the concrete huts with a thatch roof. Right now I am sleeping on the ground because the diwrey(stick bed) is not finished for me. I have a small desk and that is it. Behind my hut there is my bucket shower bathroom and my bathroom bathroom. My bathroom bathroom is 4 walls with a hole in the floor. I am currently building a garden in the back of my hut but other than that is pretty much just sand everywhere.
As for my family, they are small. There is my dad, Cheiku Dia, my mother Mariatta Diallo, grandmother Koumba Diallo, aunt Fatimata Dia, uncle Dawda Dia, brother Omar Dia, and sister Aissata Dia. They are kind and warm hearted. My father is a french teachers at the elementary school and my aunt works at the health post. There is an extended family that lives 3 km in the bush north and another extended family that lives 4 km to the south that come often to the compound. One of them is my uncle and my tokaro, or namesake. His name is Gibi Dia, which is also my name. He is considered by many to be either crazy and/or very ugly, I am unsure why they choose him to be my namesake.
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| My Bucket Shower Bathroom |
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| My Hut |
My Work-
So you are not supposed to start any big projects in your first 2 months at site because you are supposed to just focus on language and meeting people, but I have found that you can do both. And if you try to speak Pulaar or any new language all day you brain turns to Jello. So I usually go to the master farm in Diagaly in the morning and work and listen to Pulaar and then sit with people in the afternoon. A master farm is a program that PC developed to invest in a hectare of land to demonstrate alternative ag techniques. The man in charge Guyloode Dia is one of my work partners. We are kind of figuring each other out right now. I think we are both a bit stubborn and both a bit stuck in our ways and so there has been some friction at times. That being said he is a good man and we are building our personal and working relationship and I think it will work well.
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| Master Farmers Compound |
