One Year Later...

One Year to the date (5/1/12) I flew out of Leopold Sedar Senghor Airport and left Senegal, the country I called home for my 27 months of Peace Corps service.

If you kept up with my blog during my service I was notorious for late posts...well these couple were really late, a full year late. I have a bunch of new albums up on my Picasa Album and I finally wrote the two final posts for this blog that summed up my last adventures in Senegal (they're back-dated to be closer to the dates after those events). Some of the fun stuff I got to do while COS-ing in Senegal and my COS Trip to Sierra Leone, as well as my full day layover in Dubai, which I'm claiming as a mini-vacation because I got my passport stamped and was there cramming in all the sights for 22 hours.

Either way, I wish I had written these posts earlier, I kind of left the blog hanging. I'd like to blame being busy readjusting to life in Amerik, which I don't think I'll ever be able to look at some things the same as before. Also I'd like to blame being busy with starting and now being 3 weeks out from completing my first year in medical school, an entirely different challenge, with less waterfalls, no reading endless novels in my hammock, and no adventures in an amazing foreign culture.

But as upset at myself as I was for leaving the blog unfinished for so long, I'm really happy I got to do it now. I was able to finally review all those photos I took during my last several weeks and was able to remember and reflect on all the memories and details of each trip. If I should be celebrating 1 year out from my service, I think this was a great way for me to reminisce.

My COS Trip to Sierra Leone and a Day Trip to Dubai

A day after we all became RPCVs, Amanda, Meera, Leah and took a flight on Arik Air to Sierra Leone for a 7 day trip. We landed at the Lungi airport which is situated on another peninsula away from the main Freetown Peninsula (where we spent the entire trip). While waiting for a ferry to take us from Tagrin to the Kissy Ferry terminal in Freetown (the capital of Sierra Leone, or Salone as they call it there), we got to experience the best of street chicken, fried plantains and assorted odd cans of beer that we had never encountered in Senegal.

Our ferry friend, my bag, Leah, Amanda and Meera, all with beer, of course

After a few days in Freetown visiting the Peace Corps HQ/House/Fortress, enjoying the Lumley Beach and trying to figure out how to get enough money out of the ATMs for our trip (you could only take out $40 at a time and almost none of the ATMs would accept an American bank card) we hired a taxi to take us to the town of Kent on the southern tip of the Freetown Peninsula.

me, Leah, Amanda and Meera, this is basically how we got around all of our trip, except for boats

beautiful countryside views throughout the entire drive

some of the beach at Kent, the fishing village and where we caught the boat to Banana Island

In Kent we got a boat ride over to Banana Island where we spent a couple days at the most relaxing quest house. There was a private beach, tons of places to go snorkeling, a cute village nearby and most importantly double punch rum for afternoon cocktails.

our guesthouse's beach on Banana Island

the main area of the guesthouse, with a second floor sitting canopy

Double Punch Rum, literally a kickass and cheap packet of rum perfect for afternoon cocktails with FreshUp a sprite knockoff

back in Kent we saw these hammerhead sharks that the fishermen had just brought in

After a few days we took the boat back to Kent, ate some more amazing street chicken and fried plantains while waiting to hire another car to drive us northward, up the Atlantic coast to a beach called Tokeh. We arrived in Tokeh without any place to stay and had trouble at first trying to find a hotel or guest house that was reasonably priced. Finally we me a teenage boy in the market who called himself the Oyster Man. He said he had a place for us to stay on the beach, and it was cheap. Turns out the two shacks that he readied up for us were probably where his family was living but I’m sure they had extended family to stay with while we rented their waterfront shacks for a few nights. The best thing about Tokeh and the Oyster Man was the seafood and Savannas that he’d bring us whenever we ordered some. Savannas are this cider that Leah had seen before in South Africa but they were plentiful in Sierra Leone, delicious and alcoholic; so they were perfect for the beach! We had fresh oysters, lobster, crab and fish for our meals and it was amazing.

our beachfront shacks

Amanda holding one of our dinner lobsters and all the oysters we had for an afternoon snack

lobster and capitaine fish dinner with a nice ice cold Savanna cider, that's the best

Going into town in Tokeh was a lot of fun too. I was obsessed with this other street dish that would only come out in the late afternoon. I think it was called Acheki (or something like that) and it consists of spaghetti, mashed cassava root, a hunk of grilled fish, beans, an egg and a huge glob of mayonnaise and ketchup…seriously that stuff is the best! When going to find some snacks on one of my first trips into the market in Tokeh I began to speak Pulaar and someone there actually knew what I was saying and directed me towards the maybe 5 Pulaar speakers in the market and their little shops. It was amazing seeing everyone’s reaction to this, I think they had never seen a white person speak Pulaar there before, but because I did I was family and we got way more food than I was paying for.

Leah, Meera, Amanda and I on a walk down the white sand Tokeh Beach

Amanda, Me and Meera saying goodbye to the Oyster Man (middle and shirtless) and his brother or cousin...who was also holding a bottle of extremely strong locally fermented Palm Wine

After several days relaxing on the white sand beaches in Tokeh we hired a car back to Freetown. Unfortunately along that ride I got violently ill, probably one of the worst food poisonings that I encountered during my entire service. Luckily I was able to keep it all in (everything in my body wanted out, and from all ends, I’ll leave it at that) by the time we arrived at our hotel. The girls went out for our last night in Sierra Leone while I stayed in hugging the toilet until I was comfortable enough to try and curl up into a ball on one of the beds. I didn't mind it too much though since we had gone out and enjoyed the nightlife in Freetown and that neighborhood called Lumley at the beginning of our trip. Leah and I woke up early to catch our flight back to Senegal and Amanda and Meera continued back towards Kedougou by land on an intense Guinean journey.

When Leah and I finally got back to Dakar I had a few more days to relax with other COSing volunteers before my flight home. I was actually supposed to leave a day earlier but Emirates bumped my flight back a day. I took one of those days to take the bus back to Sangalkam, my training village, back where it all started. That visit to see my first host family was one of the nicest moments of my entire goodbyes. I definitely had a close connection with that family since I was their first volunteer and they were my first host family. My camera died when I made it to their compound but just before it did I was able to snatch one last photo in Sangalkam. It was of the mural my training group had painted there two years earlier, and you might remember it from the blog. Here’s the before and after.

Before: April 2010

After: April 2012

On May 1^st, 2012 I flew out of Dakar officially ending my time in Senegal as a Peace Corps Volunteer. To drown out the sadness I quickly enjoyed a number of the inflight drinks, since I was one of the few non-Muslims on the plane I was probably given more tiny bottles of gin and red wine than I needed. I probably should have slept more on the plane considering I had a 22 hour layover in Dubai. I pulled myself together with some coffee and took an open top, hop-on hop-off, big bus tour of Dubai, which was a ridiculous spectacle to say the least. At the end of the day I took a trip up the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world (at some point it was) and then relaxed in the Dubai Mall until it was time to head back to the airport for my flight home. Go to my Picasa album for the Dubai photos, there’s really no way to explain it with words, it’s just a bunch of construction gone mad in the middle of the desert.

me from the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa

The Burj Khalifa before sunset

COS: Close Of Service

About a week into April I said goodbye to my family and friends for two years, packed up my hut, gave my last gifts, handed my key to my Baba and I biked out of Pellel Kindessa. It was a sad experience, and the short ride to Dindefelo alone was bittersweet, I know I’ll go back again to visit sometime, I hope that it is sooner than later.

I didn’t leave Kedougou right away though. I spent the next week traveling around Segou, Dindefelo and Dande with some PCV friends from the Gambia who I had met at WAIST a few months earlier. It was nice to do the touristy thing one last time, even though the touristy thing for us volunteers was always way more rugged and backwoods. I had said goodbye to my counterparts, family and neighbors in Pellel, and now I got a chance to say goodbye to the waterfalls and hiking trails that I had loved so much during my two years there. At the end of that week I said goodbye to everyone I knew in Dindefelo (my market town). Saying goodbye to Badji (the ICP or head of the poste de santé) and his nurses Wori and Hawaa was the hardest part. Of course I had forgotten my camera that week and couldn’t get a photo with them but I think Badji got one on his camera.

Earlier that week when hiking out to the Dindefelo waterfall for one of the last times, I finally saw the chimpanzees! I had gone out en brousse with Lili so many times and spend so much time hiking and walking around in the woods around Dindefelo, but after two years I had always managed to miss them, finally I got to see the whole group in person just near the falls; I thought that was a fitting moment for one of my last trips there as a PCV. I also said goodbye to Lili’s family, Yaya, Diba and their mother Toure, and finally to Lili, which was sad, having her as my closest neighbor during my service was a huge joy whenever I needed it. Luckily I got to see her a few weeks later back in the States in NYC.

Packing up at the Kedougou house was sad. I had to say goodbye to my beloved cat Joseph, so I fed him one last egg. We all got together to take a photo with Mary-Christine and her son.

Joseph, the most bad-ass amazing cat I will have ever had, eating the last hard boiled egg I gave him

My Peace Corps issued items, all packed up, labeled and ready to head back to Dakar

Me, Mary-Christine, Meera, David, Leah and Marek in front of our Kedougou house kitchen hut

One of the first stops on my Senegal portion of my COS mini-trips was Warang to visit the Liquors de Warang place. Jennie, Eduardo from the Gambia, Eric and Jessica all joined and it was a ton of fun, and I bought 6 bottles of that delicious liquor to bring back with me to the US.

Jessica and I, the lost Toubab tourists, help us, call SOS Toubabs...

Jennie and Eduardo

Me and Eric sipping our Warang tastings (we probably each had over a quarter of a bottle)

Eduardo and I took a side trip to see Popenguine for one last time and I finally got to climb the mountain of the south end of the beach. It was beautiful as always.

I finally climbed that mountain/hill/cliff, beautiful Popenguine Beach behind me

Back in Dakar I finally made a trip to see Goree Island, the area where most of the slave trade of Senegal was operated through back in colonial times. And I followed that up with a quick last visit to the Monument for the African Renaissance and got a last photo with that ridiculous statue as I finished up my seemingly never ending paperwork for COSing. After I finally got my ‘R’ and became an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) a few of us took a week-long trip to Sierra Leone (see the next blog post for that).

me on a street in Goree with the beautifully painted colonial architecture all around

a beautiful side street in Goree

The African Renaissance Monument

1 month to go and a trip to Ethiolo

Well today marks 1 month until my COS date (Close of Service), that’s April 20^th, when I’ll officially become an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, or as we’re called Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV).  And on the 20^th I’m flying to Sierra Leone with some fellow COSers to celebrate the end of our service with cheap lobster on the beautiful beaches! But like I said before, more on that when we get to it.

Over the weekend I traveled out to Salemata (about 80km west of Kedougou) to meet up with Meera and Tatiana and to make a visit to Tatiana’s village, Ethiolo (pronounced etch-o-lo). We met up in the district capital Salemata, had lunch there and then toured the local medieval castle….yeah that’s right there’s a medieval castle in Salemata. A few years ago Bob, a French pedophile who lives in Salemata, started constructing a castle. I’ve heard about it for the last two years and now I finally got to take the grand tour, didn’t meet Bob though, luckily. It’s supposed to serve as a Dance Club / Meeting Hall, whatever it might be it’s certainly out-of-place but amazing nonetheless.

Bob's Castle in Salemata, not sure if those are traditional Medieval colors...

We biked the 10km further out to Tatiana’s village.  Ethiolo is a Bassari village, so they are predominantly Animist and Christian, which also means they have a lot of fun culture.  We made this trip because there was supposed to be a party starting Saturday night through Sunday.  In fact the party didn’t start until Sunday, so Saturday night we just bought some locally made Honey Wine and went to bed early.  The next morning I decided to drink the honey wine all day long as we toured the village.  This was great because it’s delicious, and only got me a little tipsy, that is until we bought a different batch that afternoon.  Before lunch we met with Joseph, a local artisan who makes Bassari masks, I’ve bought 2 through Tatiana in the past and I wanted to buy some more, I got 3 this time…drunk shopping is the best!

Me and Joseph the Bassari Mask artisan of Ethiolo, and the 3 masks I bought  in between us

Just before dinner and after a failed sexual health discussion we were hoping to conduct at the town’s middle school, we bought a second batch of honey wine, this stuff a bit stronger.  Actually it was a lot stronger, I passed out before I could eat dinner, and I wound up missing the party Sunday night (the girls said it was kind of low-key and boring and they left early anyway), Tatiana’s family thought me sleeping next to the dinner bowl was the funniest thing.  Now I know this may sound slightly pathetic, or that I was being dumb and irresponsible, but drinking honey wine like that earned me a ton of respect with her family, oh how cultures work.  Either way the next morning we packed up, me and my 3 masks and my hangover and biked back out to Salemata, where Meera and I waited 9 hours for a ride back to Kedougou.  If my little drinking problem the day before earned me any bad karma, it was definitely served out during that boring 9 hour wait.

Meera, Balingo (Tatiana's hilarious village father) and I. check out those bags under my eyes, those honey wine hangovers will get you! even though I was still a little drunk when we took this photo the next morning...

Latrine Project is Finished!

Well congrats the hard working mason Thierno from Kukuji, all those who dug their holes, and my village father Alpha Mamadou who carted the sand and gravel to each site; We completed the 15 latrines that I got the grant for a month ago.That’s 15 families who will now be able to stop pooping in the bush, which means less diarrhea for everyone! Too bad I didn’t have more time and money to get some more done.

Thierno starting work on one of the cement covers

one of the 15 finished vented latrines in Pelel

I was actually really surprised how quickly this project went. As soon as I got the money from Appropriate Projects, we informed the people of Pelel to start digging their holes, bought the cement, rebar, PVC pipe and wire and it was all said and done in about 3 weeks! I thought I’d maybe be cutting it close before my last days at site in Pelel, but everyone was really enthusiastic about getting this project done, so bravo to us! Especially to Thierno, that man is a beast of a mason, he can knock out 2 or 3 per day (thanks to my ancienne volunteer Kay who got him trained so well during her latrine project back before I got to Senegal). Check out the photos below (more to come on Picasa) and thanks to my friend Lucy in the UK who helped fund the project along with other donors through Appropriate Projects (a great organization if I haven’t mentioned that enough already, consider donating to another clean water project through them if you’d like).

Moussa Yero, who lives in Pelu (a quartier of Pelel), with his newly finished latrine! he's one happy customer, now he just needs to build a little fence for some privacy...

2 Year Anniversary and Full Moon Midnight Bike Ride

Today is my 2 year anniversary here in Senegal. Two years, wow they went so fast! And now there’s just about a month left in Pelel and then some administrative stuff in Dakar, a COS trip to Sierra Leone (more about that in a future post) and then I fly home on May 1^st.

I’d love to reminisce about the last two years here, but it would be a terrible rambling tangent train with no end in sight, and then I’d definitely lose the last couple of loyal readers that I still have; so I won’t… But looking back, I’m proud and happy about my service, it’s been truly amazing and I wouldn’t have traded this experience for anything else.

Enough of that, I still have some time left here and let me tell you, it’s a super busy schedule for which I’m really excited and looking forward too, it’s also going to fly by ridiculously fast. As you all know I just got the funding for my latrine project (yes, it’s smaller than I had wanted to do, but it’s the perfect size for this last month). Since the beginning of March I got the budget finalized, found out that we can squeeze out 15 new latrines for the community. We decided to allocate a certain number to each of the quartiers (neighborhoods) of Pelel. Nearly ten families have already dug their holes and paid the 5,000 cfa ($10) contribution, so earlier this week Dabi, my counterpart, and I came into Kedougou to buy the cement and other materials. It should have been a 1 morning trip but due to the 40+ year old transport that we had contracted, it actually took three days we included me having to walk about 7km at night to get home while we waited for the mechanic to come out to Dindefelo.

our 40+ year old car rapide transport, spent 2.5hours pushing it up and down hills with the others to get it started...

Either way the materials finally made it out to Pelel and the work should be getting started extremely soon, if it hasn’t already started.

To celebrate the full moon on Thursday night we decided to do a midnight bike ride from Saraya to Kedougou, which is 60km. We started around 10pm and it was awesome because the moon was so bright, and the air was nice and cool, it was like biking in a dream-world.

Meera and the kilometer marker in Saraya the afternoon before the big ride

the group on the road, this was after we had "Shirts-off-o'clock" somewhere around the 45km mark. Me, Frank, Ian, Meera, Leah, Ben, CJ, and Marielle (Jess took the photo and kept her shirt on because it was cold...)

Oh and in other good news, remember how the back wall of Pelel’s health hut fell down during the last rainy season? Well Dabi finally got it fixed! So March is already shaping up to be a pretty awesome month and I think it’ll be a nice close to my service.

The new wall on the back of the health hut, much better construction this time around, I have no idea why they didn't build the walls this way last time, but this is Senegal and that's how planning works here...

Latrines!!!

Ok all you lovely readers have probably been wondering over the last couple of months, ‘is Eric actually doing any work anymore or is he just traveling around and living it up in Senegal and West Africa?’ well…yes and no…but we won’t delve into that because with just a little over one month left at site before I’m done with my service, WORK!!! It has finally happened; the latrine project that I’ve been trying to get off the ground since November is finally happening. Thanks to the wonderful people over at Appropriate Projects (the Peace Corps partner that funds clean water projects for PCVs around the world and which also funded my well for the women’s group garden last year) has given me some money (several other local NGOs failed to come through, hence the several months of waiting). So it’s only $500, which will hopefully build about 10-15 latrines and the list of people who want latrines in Pelel is much more, but it’s a start!

The other great part about Appropriate Projects is that they pre-fund all the grants for Peace Corps Volunteers, so that way we can get started immediately without having to wait months to gather funding. This is where the cool part comes in for all of you; you can donate now while I’m already getting the work started and the project is underway in village. So if you’re interested and feeling charitable and want to donate towards a cause that prevent people from pooping in the woods and the spread of diarrhea, check out my project page! Click Here!

When in Mali

The second week in February my friend Jennie and I traveled to Mali, this is the tale. So we left Kedougou and made it all the way to Bamako in the same day (it’s a pretty far trip and we only managed it thanks to a lucky hitchhike from some Moroccans working near the Senegal-Mali border town of Kenieba, which our guidebook described as ‘the dog’s breakfast’ whatever the hell that means).

me hitchhiking in Kenieba with the beautiful escarpments in the background

We spent the next day buying our next bus tickets and roaming around Bamako, the national capital. We couldn’t really find anything that amazing in Bamako except for a ridiculous amount of public gardens (both ornamental and vegetable) and a disturbing lack of bars (we eventually found one, alhamdulillah).

this garden even had a train which I couldn't resist taking a photo with

 We also found the Peace Corps house and some volunteers who helped us plan some of the logistics for the rest of our trip. The next morning we left on an 9-hour bus ride to Mopti, a nice little town on the banks of the Bani and Niger rivers, which also boasts a pretty fantastic looking mosque built in the Sudanese style (out of mud, no cement), which is the basis for a lot of the local architecture throughout Mali and especially the Dogon Country.

the Great Mopti Mosque

Oh yeah and there were brochettes de capitaine, or fish skewers, soooo delicious! The next day we took a shared taxi about 12km away to Severe where we met our Dogon Country guide Hassimi. Hassimi is the best; he’s really awesome, extremely knowledgeable about the Dogon region and its’ peoples (because he is one himself), very funny, and oh yeah speaks English too. We left Severe that same afternoon, just Jennie, me and Hassimi in his car, and drove through Bandiagara to the beginning of the Dogon Country. 

an onion field on the road into Dogon Country

the same landscape literally 100 meters down the road from that onion field, amazing what one can accomplish with proper watering during dry-season gardening!

It’s an area in Central-South-Eastern Mali, near Burkina Faso (that description was terribly confusing, so if you are indeed still confused, that’s why god gave us the google, bismillah). The area consists of a high rocky plateau that extends for about 150km, South of it is a wide sandy plain that extends into Burkina Faso (seriously if you’re still that interested google it!). Either way, the Dogon people are (or mostly were) Animist which means they have a pretty cool culture, and to protect it from the incoming Fulani (ancestors of my ethnic group here in Senegal) who were spreading their new-found Islamic faith fast and hard. The Dogon people fled to this region and made their towns high up in the rock face of the edge of the plateau.

the cliff town of Teli

beautiful, nestled into the rock face

these tall structures are the graineries where the Dogon people store their grains, most usually millet

me and some graineries, and that's a Dogon ladder behind me

They were actually taking after an earlier group called the Tellem who made their mud huts even higher up (you can see them as the smaller, more ridiculously higher up structures on the rock face), but I digress and you’re not here for a history lesson…so back to our trip. We spent 3 days and 2 nights and trekked starting from Teli, slept in Ende, through Bagrou, had lunch in Yabatalou, through a local market in Doundouru, climbed up the rock escarpment (our word of the trip!) where we encountered this amazing green valley of onion fields (the Malians seem to have taken 1^st place on their ability to dry-season garden, whereas the Senegalese like their tea, aka they’re a bit lazier…)

it was like stepping into a valley-garden of eden

We then spent the night in the town of Begnimato on the edge of the rock plateau, with an extremely beautiful sunset. The next morning we met a local hunter there where I just had to get a photo…

me and a Dogon hunter, he actually sold Hassimi the roasted pig leg that we ate for dinner the night before

We continued along the edge of the plateau through Indelu where we finally climbed down the rock face through a crack, literally through a crack.

Jennie using a Dogon ladder as we began our descent down the crack (she's not wearing any shoes because she didn't want her boutique flip-flops to break, Hassimi thought she was crazy, she kind of is)

And back out to our guide Hassimi’s car. Sorry for all the details of towns’ names, etc. it’s mostly so I don’t forget it. I also picked up this pretty neat Malian lock that they put on their grainerie doors. At first I thought it was a simple wood slide but it actually has an ingenious little locking mechanism on the back that requires a key to open it. I discovered this after being locked out of our room the first morning for 15 minutes before Hassimi came over chuckling and told me there was a key (of course you fool). After all that I just had to buy one.

the Dogon door lock that I bought in Yabatalou

the key slides in behind the wooden slide (here the key is coming in from the top, blogger won't let me flip this photo) and where you see the 3 metal pins on the key, they push up 3 corresponding metal pins that drop down and lock the slide when it's lined up

After Dogon Country we spent a night back in Severe at Hassimi’s house complete with a dinner of capitaine fish and fried plantains. (Jennie and I must have consumed at least a kilo each of fried plantains during the trip; they just don’t exist in Senegal…) We continued on to the city of Segou which was in the midst of hosting the 8^th annual Festival Sur Le Niger, or the West African Music Festival on the Niger River. We stayed with some of our new Malian Peace Corps friends (a big thanks to Devon and Jason again) and wound up watching that night’s performances from the seats of a lifeboat upon a larger cruise boat that was moored next to the stage which was also on a barge…confusing to explain yes, but it was totally awesome and we got to watch the show for free (sorry no photos of this).

The next day we traveled back to Bamako and slept until the day after that when we marathoned it all the way back to Kedougou. Overall it was an amazing trip. Mali is definitely a cool country; unfortunately we couldn’t go to Timbuktu in Northern Mali because of the recent Tuareg rebellions (see here) I hope it all calms down soon, it’s too nice of a country for it to fall into turmoil.