Dad's Visit

From May 11^th to the 27^th I had to the pleasure to host my Dad here in Senegal. It was a really great (he would add hot) trip for both of us.

True to Swank family tradition, his first day in Senegal we visited five different hardware stores picking up parts that I needed for the campement. Our first photo together in Senegal was in a hardware store. You can take the Swanks to Senegal but you can’t take the swank out of them.

Leaving Dakar, we made it down to Kedougou in one day. This involves 12 hours of sitting in a busted “sept place” which is a station wagon that they fit seven grown adults into. Fortunately, the sept place did not almost lose a tire (like when Mom visited) or catch on fire (like when Groff visited). So I considered it a successful trip.

Once we reconnoitered in Kedougou, we headed out to Segou. Dad struggled with the heat, as any visitor young or old would. He accurately described the way I felt when I first got into Mauritania. Looking around, you can tell that everyone else is able to have coherent thoughts and process information but your brain is too overheated to do so and you have no idea how they are capable of it. It takes about three months of acclimation or the cool season to come to make that go away.

Out in Segou we took a trip out the waterfalls and cooled our brains for a day. At the campement he helped me install the solar panels, which was a huge accomplishment for the campement. The actual installation went smoothly but leading up to it we did a lot of hemming and hawing about how DC circuits work and whether or not they should be installed in parallel or they should absolutely NOT be installed in parallel. We were both relying on our fifth grade science classes and decided that call in a lifeline since getting it wrong would mean frying several thousand dollars worth of equipment. As always these days, the internet solved it. (In parallel is the answer.) It wasn’t until late in the day that we hooked all the wires up so we had to wait for the next day’s sunshine to fire up the freezer. By the evening we had bottles of ice. Having spent two years in Segou with no power or access to a refrigerator, sitting in my hut holding a liter and a half block of ice fairly blew my mind. If you stop and think about it, electricity is pretty miraculous. So are solar panels and refrigerators. However, it’s not till you install a solar energy system in a place where you are used to not having electricity that the fact that any of it works blows your mind. I kept staring at the system and tracing the path of the electrons in my mind: Sunlight hits the panels and knocks some electrons loose. The wires that crisscross the panels pick these electrons up. They then travel down the wire like all good electrons. The regulator packs them in the batteries for safe keeping and the transformer bumps up their voltage to 220 V AC. The freezer then performs its own magic of the flow of electrons to compress and release gas in order to make cold. Sunlight to cold in just a few “simple” steps! I still haven’t gotten over the magic of this system. Especially since another PCV came out and helped me wire up the lights. We made a control box for all of the outlets and lights in the bar so the campement owners can make sure that no power is being wasted. So far I have been using it like a little kid: flicking switches on and off and being amazed at the response. As if all of that wasn’t enough, we also have a bio-air-conditioner that runs off of the solar panels.

Back to my Dad’s trip though. After leaving Kedougou we stopped by the Niokolo Koba National Park to see what there was to see and to check up on a biogas digester I helped some German researchers install there. Fifty years ago the park used to be a huge tourist destination but all of the big, interesting wildlife has slowly disappeared over the years due to environmental factors and poaching. To me the fact that the park as been abandoned by wild animals and tourists alike gives it it’s own unusual appeal. After entering the park and driving for two hours down a typical rutted road you arrive at the Simenti Hotel. If Motel 6 had a chain of safari lodges then the Simenti hotel would fit right in. The weird thing is that it was build to house and dine hundreds of people, but my Dad and I were the only ones staying there and the nights preceding and following our visit it was empty. At the restaurant, a big open air affair that can seat a couple hundred people, we ate in amongst a sea of empty tables. The place is starting to fall into disrepair and will probably never be refurbished to its former glory, further adding to the ghost town atmosphere. Having already been to all of the other places we went, staying at the deserted hotel was oddly a highlight for me.

After the park we headed back to Dakar the remaining days of my Dad’s trip and so I could start to prep for a big tourism expo that happened at the end of last month. (More on that later.) Showing visitors around Senegal and showing off my work is something I really enjoy doing but the best part of having people over here is knowing that when I go back to the state’s we will share a mutual understanding of what “Senegal” means, who so and so is, and what my work looks like. For that and many other reasons I am very grateful of my Dad’s visit.

Random notes:

As usually happens when people encounter other races for the first time many Senegalese, particularly in small villages where they don’t get a lot of foreigners, think that all white people look alike. It’s common that another volunteer will visit me in Segou and my neighbors will remark, “Oh! You must be brothers!” Nope. “Cousins at least then?” Still nope. I’ve even thought about asking another volunteer with a similar hair cut to try passing as me in Segou. Just to see if it would work. However they got it right with my dad, which isn’t too hard to guess anyway. If there was no age difference I’m sure my Dad and I could pass as identical twins. Often people would not even finish the greetings before saying, “Hidon naandindiri!” (You look alike!) In fact we heard this phrase so often I think it might be the only Pulsar phrase my Dad picked up during his time here.

One of the unfortunate aspects of traveling in areas infested with PCVs is that locals expect that any person they see with a PCV to also be a PCV and therefore speak the local language. I’d say 90% of the time they are right. In my Dad’s case I had to do a lot of explaining to my neighbors that he doesn’t speak Pulaar. To which they responded “Well what about French?” Nope. “He doesn’t speak Pulaar or French??? How weird!” When we first went to visit the Paradise garden, Bassirrou started greeting him in Pulaar, saw that he didn’t understand, switched to French, which didn’t work either, and then switched to another local language, Mandinka, which definitely didn’t work. I had to laugh.