The final post – finally.

The final post – finally.

I just talked to Samale and Ablaye. I try to give them a call once a month or so. It’s really great just to talk to them again. These are guys that I spent two years working and living with. Whether or not the ecolodge succeeds depends entirely on them and Boubacar, the third co-owner. Unfortunately I don’t have the figures on how much money it has taken in since I have been gone. They have never had the accounting sheet in front of them when I call. They do remember at the beginning of the tourist season last year they were taking in $200 in profit a month. That’s not a heck of a lot to be sure, but it’s a solid amount for a new ecolodge of their size. So long as Senegal doesn’t pull a Mali (let a coup happen in a country with a relatively stable government) in the aftermath of the upcoming elections they have a secure tourist market. The work that the Jane Goodall Institute of Spain is doing on chimpanzee based tourism in the area will potentially turn the trickle of low budget tourists into a horde of people willing to spend money. The Segou Ecolodge is well positioned to take advantage of that as well. Even with the perspective gained from being out of the Peace Corps for a while, I am still just as proud of the work my counterpart’s have achieved and its potential to continue to change lives. After putting my heart, sweat, and tears on a daily basis for two years knowing that is a wonderful feeling.

But wait, what actually happened in the end? I know, I know… I never posted the final blog. I’ll get to that. The last few months in Senegal were crazy for me. I never intended to have the ecolodge entirely finished. I was worried that if I left them with something they didn’t have to touch for years they wouldn’t have the motivation to save up the money they needed for upkeep and improvements. Still I was scrambling to get many aspects of the ecolodge closer to completion. At the same time, I was also busy enjoying my last few months in Senegal. Over the course of three years I had grown to be very comfortable there. I loved the lifestyle, my work, and my friends there. If it weren’t for all the family and friends I hadn’t seen in nearly four years I could have stayed over much longer. Once I finally did leave, I embarked on what I dubbed “the trip of everything awesome.” That trip included a month and a half in a 12^th century castle in south of France, participating in La Tomatina – the tomato throwing festival in Spain where 40,000 people gather to throw 250,000 pounds of tomatoes, Oktoberfest in Munich, visiting friends in Belgium, a couple of weeks in at a cheese farm up in the Alps on the French-Swiss border, a short tour of Morocco, sailing from the Canaries to Cape Verde, exploring Cape Verde, sailing across the Atlantic to Grenada, hanging there till Christmas, and then a two month long bus tour up the east coast and out west visiting family and friends. Last week I settled here in Boulder, Colorado and finally have some time to capture the events of my final months in Senegal.

In my last post I had just dropped my Dad off at the airport in Dakar at the end of May. The next day I set up for the SeneGambia yearly tourism fair. All of the ecotourism volunteers worked together on Peace Corps booth. For my part I built a foldable display on the ecolodge and printed out several hundred brochures I had made. It was really cool to see my work in a professional setting. Our new rock star boss spent the day hunting big wigs down and getting them to check out our work. Both the vice president of Senegal and the director of the World Tourism Organization stopped by for a visit. Unfortunately my counterparts were not able to attend the event, which is really too bad because it would have been a great educational experience for them. I will see if I can arrange for them to go this year.

One really positive outcome of the conference is that we were able to convince a group of tour guides to come down to the Kedougou region to see the ecolodges we work with. It was great having them in the restaurant of the Segou Ecolodge looking at our brochures. The real highlight was watching Samale show them around the lodge and explain their work, just a really awesome accomplishment to get to that point with them.

After that it was a mad scramble to put some of the finishing touches on. I was biking between Segou and Kedougou a couple of times each week. Another milestone was putting in the first local pottery sink in the bathrooms in the huts. This was one of my ideas that the guys were skeptical about and they came out great. No one else in the area has these. It was so great to see all of my plans and ideas coming to life. Some of the stuff I had been thinking about for two years. However, we didn’t accomplish everything that I had hoped in that last mad scramble before I left. The generous funding that we received was enough to purchase a small clean burning rocket stove and I had designs on building a larger industrial version. I had been nagging my counterparts to fire some bricks for the stove for months and they finally did. However when we hit a stumbling block on the construction in the final days we didn’t have time to figure it out and scrapped the idea. The same was true for the treadle pump that we wanted to use to pump water up from the lower well. I rushed it down from Dakar but apparently we bought the wrong size pipe. I have my doubts about how if it would have really worked with the right sized pipe, but I never had the chance to find out.

Aside from those minor failures, I feel really good about the situation I left the ecolodge in. When we started it was just a patch of burnt hillside. Thanks to a lot of hard work from my counterparts, the villagers, and generous donations from folks back home we ended up with an open air ten meter long restaurant and bar area, a four meter square kitchen with a pantry, four six meter wide huts with internal sinks and showers each with a capacity of five, public restrooms, and solar panels to power a freezer and lights. Not many Peace Corps Volunteers get to leave something so concrete behind and I am grateful for the project, my counterparts, and all the people who helped make it a reality.

Before.

After.

I was also fortunate to have such a great sendoff. A week before I left we called a community meeting to officially inaugurate the ecolodge. These sendoff events can be real hit or miss for PCVs. For the volunteer it’s the validation of everything they did for their two years, for the villages it’s just another meeting, hopefully with some good food. They often miss the significance of it. Not the case for me. Despite that everyone was late, I’ll admit I was getting nervous, we had a great turnout. Most of the village elders showed up in addition to the local police representative and the president of the Communaute Rurale de Dindefello, the local governance organization. Some fellow PCVs also came out to do some last minute work and take part in the inauguration. We started off the meeting by having my counterparts explain the whole process of the project and how the village was going to benefit from it. Then I talked about my perspective on the same topics. After that it became a bit of a gush fest about how much they appreciated my work and how much I appreciated getting to be a part of their lives and this project. The president of the CRD gave me some gifts on behalf of my counterparts and the village and I turned over the keys to them. It was quite a high.

After that I took care of some final details in the village and tore myself away from doing more work on the ecolodge. I literally had to forbid myself from going back there, there was always this last little detail that I was sure I could take care of in an hour or two. By my last day in village I still had some stuff to go over with my counterparts and we agreed to meet up in Kedougou the next week to finish it all up. Before I started saying my goodbyes I went up to the ecolodge just to let them know that I was leaving. The moment I said, “ok, I’m leaving” they burst into sobbing tears. It was so unexpected that it took a minute before I started doing the same thing. I told them that we were going to see each other next week but they said it didn’t matter, I was still leaving the village. So here we were, a bunch of grown men crying so hard we couldn’t look at each other. Eventually we got ourselves under control and hugged it out. As I walked away from the ecolodge I realized that I now had to go through with the rest of my goodbyes. Everyone else I said goodbye to I walked up to already crying. People in Senegal do NOT cry in public. They do cry but just not in public because it disturbs the social harmony. When I went to say goodbye to the village chief he wouldn’t leave his hut because he didn’t want to be seen crying in public. My host brother walked me down to the center of town, another cultural practice, but had to turn back halfway because he was crying. It was a couple of kilometers on the bike before I finally got myself under control again. What away to leave the village! I definitely miss everyone there.

I spent a week in Kedougou for the big blowout Fourth of July party and then headed to Dakar. A month after leaving my village I was in a castle in France. I still can’t really reflect on my service in its entirety. How do you mentally summarize the three most challenging, rewarding, difficult, fun, and meaningful years of your life? I don’t think you do.

There are however certain things that are clear to me. First, my life is permanently better from this experience. Part of it is a bit of perspective on how much of the world lives. There are soooo many things that just can’t bother me now because by comparison they are obviously trivial. Anything that can be categorized as “a first world problem” isn’t worth a second thought. More than that though, I feel like I have a better understanding on how to live a good life. Living a good life here in the states is ridiculously easy for most of us. In a general, we are in a situation of such security and comfort that whether or not you really enjoy your life all depends on your mental state and the choices you make. However I learned that the same is true in Senegal. Earning a $350 monthly stipend, I was solidly middle class, and had a great time despite all of the challenges. Nothing is truer than your experience of life is what you make it. Another lesson that I took away is the value business can have to solve multiple issues at the same time. The ecolodge was built with very little impact on the environment (to be fair, the whole village of Segou was built that way, that’s just how they build), it provides employment, gives back to the village, and helps protect the chimpanzee reserve. I loved making that direct impact and am currently pursuing a career in the enviro-business field. The third bold take-away is the combination of a zest for life/confidence/why not?ness. Doing what we do, PCVs get the sense that we can do just about anything or go just about anywhere. We spend years living in uncertain, difficult, and confusing situations. By comparison, everything else seems either on par or a breeze. I found the Peace Corps forces you to stop holding yourself back, you’ll just be miserable otherwise. Now thanks to that experience, everything else I do is another welcome adventure. (*Disclaimer: Results of the PC experience may vary.)

So what’s next for the ecolodge? Well, like I said, they are doing fairly well without any real additional effort but they could do a lot more. That’s exactly the position I wanted to leave them in. If they are going to make further efforts to really turn it into a powerhouse, that’s entirely up to them. If they weren’t going to do it anyway, then I shouldn’t have done it for them. There is currently another volunteer in Segou but thus far he has not worked directly with the ecolodge. That was by design. I was worried that my counterparts would become complacent with having volunteer labor and brainpower around. Instead Kyle is an agroforestry volunteer who has been doing a lot of work with Bassirou in that garden that I loved so much and finding his feet. Talking to both him and my counterparts it sounds like they are going start doing some work together, including supervising their accounting meetings. I don’t expect there to be problems but it would be nice to know that someone is keeping them on track. We didn’t get to practice the accounting system we created very much. I also just asked Samale to give the monthly reports to Kyle so he can forward them to me. I can’t totally leave the ecolodge behind, nor would I want to. J At the end of Kyle’s service we’ll evaluate how they are doing. If they need more help we’ll send another ecotourism volunteer to Segou. I don’t think that will happen though. They are great guys and Segou is a great village I am lucky to have been able to live and work with them.

Some photos of the evolution of the ecolodge:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113136050526920496407/SegouEcolodge?authuser=0&feat=directlink