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.

Harmattan Winds

The weather has been very strange here this year, the rainy season was dismal and the cold season seems to have just ended, barely. It’s still cold some nights…by the first week in January last year I was sleeping outside of my hut on my stick bed because it was so hot whereas last night I was still wrapped up in a sleeping bag (then again I'm not really complaining about that). Along with this bizarre weather has been a terrible case of the Harmattan winds. I didn't even notice them last year, but take a look at this photo below that I took two weeks ago during the worst of it. We had endless dust for nearly two weeks; it was pretty terrible for breathing and biking.

this is the view of the hills in my village, I took this photo around midday, mind you the humidity was probably near  nothing, so that's not fog or clouds you see

a photo of the same hill from my village during regular weather (granted yes this was during rainy season but still...)

A Big Fat Senegalese-American Wedding

On February 2^nd, 2012 one of my best friends here in the Peace Corps, Jessica, got ‘married’ to her American boyfriend who was visiting on vacation. About 30 of us Peace Corps Volunteers traveled across the country to her village of Keur Madiabel in the region of Kaolack. Of course the wedding had to be done right, so we all donned our finest of Senegalese apparel and with typical Senegalese wedding gifts in hand: 2 chickens, a duck, and a set of nesting bowls filled with rice, onions and bouillon cubes (the bowls were my gift, she swore she’d kill me if I ever bought her nesting bowls, so of course I did), we took an Alhum from the regional capital out to Jessica’s village to share in the celebration. We danced and drank attayah (Senegalese tea) for hours. The lunch was ridiculously delicious thanks to Jessica who sprang for the high-end 50,000 fCFA (or about $100) sheep, and the women in her family who helped cook and prepare all the food. Keeping with the 2^nd Peace Corps Goal of sharing American traditions with our host country nationals and in keeping with the Jewish tradition of Jessica’s family (she’s half-Jewish) we had her boyfriend Armand perform the “Breaking of the Glass,” followed by a terrible rendition “Hava Nagila” while hosting Jessica up and down in the air in the chair she was sitting in. It was pretty amazing and hilarious, and it confused the hell out of all the Senegalese guests (check out a video of it here).

the ladies of Jessica's family preparing the food

there's the blushing bride in the background

Jessica had her make-up done up in true Senegalese-Wolof Wedding fashion (think Drag Queen...) oh and she got a weave too

the Bride and Groom, Jessica and Armand

the dance party that ensued for hours

Armand, Me and Jessica

Me and Ari & Jennie, two of the Bridesmaids, just look at their amazing Chiquita Banana inspired dresses!