The first two months of your service is supposed to be aimed at building language and learning the people and culture of your village. You do some small projects but you are encouraged to just hangout with people and learn the ways. Although this sounds easy, it is easier for me to use a shovel all day than it is to try and speak Pulaar all day. At the end of those initial months the Peace Corps gathers everyone in your stage back up for purely technical training, for us that was agriculture. But before the training there would be WAST, or the West African Softball Tournament.
So a few days before training was supposed to start me and 5 other people from the Linguere region piled into sept place and headed to Dakar where we would stay with American families living in Dakar and we would play softball and meet embassy folks and we relax and take showers with hot water and use toilet paper and sleep on mattresses with springs and speak English and wash our clothes with machines and sit on couches. Me and 3 other folks stayed with the Wood family. Randy and his wife Ericka fed us crepes and pizza and burritos and Belgium beer and cake and lots of coffee, their children Diego and Valentina talked to us in fluent English and talked to their mother in fluent Spanish and talked to themselves in fluent French, and we all talked about the Peace Corps life and development and life in our different worlds. Randy works for the Millennium Project in Dakar, is an author, and a RPCV, or Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Nicaragua. The Wood Family was very gracious and we were very appreciative of the change of pace. In some small payment for our stay we shared pictures and stories from life outside Dakar in a village setting.
We stayed in Dakar for 2 nights. We played softball dressed up as lumberjacks and jills; come to find out the Peace Corps does not select volunteers based on their softball skill. Apart from softball the gathering gave me a chance to meet the three quarters of volunteers who are not part of my stage but who might be very close in proximity or mentality as I. I met health volunteers that lived right down the road in a manner of speaking and I talked to the agriculture stage before us about what they had done in their sites and what they were planning for the next year but mainly we didn't talk to much about work and stuck to topics of relaxation.
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| Linguere Lumberjacks 2015 |
After two days of luxury and over priced food and drink, I returned to Thies exhausted for the remainder of our training. Most of us in the stage had seen each other in Dakar for long enough to say hi, but the next 2 weeks in Thies we had plenty of chances to learn more about peoples different living situations and learn for the most part that many people were going through the same triumphs and struggles as I had. Initially, the time in Thies was a nice break; we spoke English, we ate much richer food than we had, we had access to beer and ice cream and restaurants in the evening, we had electricity and internet (kinda), and we had mattresses with springs. What many of us found out was that we had integrated quite a bit already and the schedule of events of the Thies Training Center was exhausting. Village can be completely exhausting because every time you want to communicate you have to actively think about what is being said or what you are saying, but in village I had become accustomed to taking a good 2 hours at lunch and then sitting around and drinking attaya until the sun had dropped low enough to want to go back out. In Thies there was a schedule. You got 90 minutes for lunch and napping and then you went back to the classroom or to the garden until 5 or 6 in the evening. I think by the end there were many of us ready to return to village, I know I was.
Now I think that there is a pattern forming if not already formed on this blog where most of my stories, at least the memorable ones, come from travel. Well I hate to disappoint. At the end of training I needed to get to Linguere from Thies. I had two options: backtrack to Dakar and take a direct car to Linguere or take a car to Touba and then a car to Louga and then a car to Linguere, which could take forever. With neither option seeming very attractive many of us pulled together to find other options. We learned of a car that goes from Dakar through Linguere in route to Ourossogui. So we got the ride set up, woke up at 4, and took off at 4:30AM walking through dark streets in Thies towards a gas station that I was not familiar with. Still dark, we arrived waited for about ten minutes and then a van pulled in threw our bags on top and I was dropped off in Linguere before noon. The trip seemed to be full of potential problems but turned out to be painless. The next day I went back to site.
The last stay I spent around 2 1/2 weeks in village and when I had returned the moon had died and the heat had definitely come. At the master farm we are transitioning out of lettuce and cabbage and beginning to think about 120 degree temperatures that will be coming soon. Now there is absolutely nothing that usually happens during the middle of the day between 1 and 5, and the whole pace of village is slower due to many people who have taken their animals and moved south due to lack of feed around Diagaly. In my compound, the heat means we don't go inside our huts until late night or early morning because the huts heat up so much that you can't sleep in them.
As for myself in village, the last stay followed a pattern that I am beginning to see form; when I first arrive back at site my language and attitude is really good but after about a week I become completely exhausted and my attitude and my language suffer. During this stay I took two half days for mental health and recharging after a week and a half and I immediately felt better.
Looking back on this post it looks to be a random assortment of thoughts compiled over a pretty large period of time. I think this is half my last month and half my current state of mind and half the degradation of my English but that is all you are going to get. Take Care everyone
LOVE HEARING ABOUT YOUR LIFE
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