Journal of a PCV parent cont.

Journal continues:
Arrived in Sangalkam, Zach’s training village and family. We had practiced the Pulaar greeting. This is a rough translation: After checking on the health of all relatives, and asking if you are in your skin, the message was, “We are all the same inside, we all live in and share this world, we all die (and by the way, Zach is a good boy!”) We were served the Senegalese National Dish, Cheboygan. It was delicious. Kajatu, one of Zach’s sisters, prepared the best I had. She made it because she knew if she did, Zach would stay longer! Aliou and Zach have a special relationship and Aliou’s tears could be heard through the whole village when we left☹. Waking up in our tents in the courtyard was a great intro to West African noises. We had fallen asleep under Orion’s Belt and woke to Roosters, donkeys, prayer call, increasing amounts of birds, goats and dogs. It is a wonderful cacophony! Bye for now. Sue and Dave

Journal of a PCV parent

Notes on a trip through West Africa with my son as guide:
Week 1 Journal Highlights
First day impressions… totally overwhelming, busy city, hot, street hustlers (Who are incredibly persistent!), very sub par transportation, all new colors, sites, smells and sounds. “Bus Garage” Picture junk yard, lots of people selling food carried in bowls and baskets on their heads, Tali Bay boys begging, men grabbing you shouting languages you don’t understand, but mostly saying “Lady, taxi? Come here” grabbing your bags, Zach negotiating, Dave and I being pick pocketed (We just lost a few carabineers), finally being stuffed into a Sept Place (7 seater) which is really a rusted out Peugeot that has to be push started after being loaded down by more people, baggage and sheep than you can imagine! However, pinch me, we are in Senegal, with Zach and having the time of our lives!
Sue and Dave

Feedback

I seem to have reached a point where I am mostly just describing what I have done in my blogs and I suppose that's not always the most interesting thing. If there is anything you are curious about or want me to write about post it in a comment and I'll be happy to do it.

Vacation

So now that training is over, what am I going to do? Go on vacation of course! Mom and Dave had bought plane tickets to come see me before they shut down the Peace Corps Mauritania and the timing worked out perfectly with the end of training so they kept them. They will be here in three days and I am EXTREMELY excited, its been over a year since I have seen any of my family. I can't even really picture what its going to be like to see them again. They'll be here for a month and we are going to do a tour of Senegal and I'll take them out to the Dogon too. They'll get to meet my family from training here, from my village in Mauritania, and they will spend my first week out at Segou with me. I am excited about how refreshing it will be to see West Africa through their eyes and I think it is going to be a lot of fun to play guide. Which reminds me, now that I am in a country that is actually a tourist destination, I want to invite you all to come visit. PCVs make excellent guides because we are sort of like tourists that just never leave and stay to help people instead. Also, cultural exchange are 2/3rds of my job here and the other 3rd is eco tourism so you would actually be helping me do my job by coming. ;) Round trip tickets are about $1,500 and budgeting 100 a day can be plenty.

Estage gasi

Hip-hip-hooray I am done with training again! It was a bit rough going through two months of training all over again, but my Pulaar really profited from it. I feel like I didn't really learn any more Pulaar over this past year that what I knew from training in Mauritania. I was much more interested in learning and using French. However, my new village is much smaller and there are a lot of folks that don't speak French, so I will probably end up using Pulaar more.

I am really looking forward to going out to my village, getting established there, and beginning to do something productive again. Its been three months since I had any work to do and I am itching for it. Although having spent those three months with Americans, its going to be a real adjustment to go back to village life, which is sort of funny because all of the other adjustments that I have had to make here in Senegal were getting used to things being nicer. Absolutely everything would be an example of that, and I am sure that the new Senegalese PCVs are tired of hearing it, but I'll just give one example. For our official swear in here in Senegal we had a Police escort to take us into Dakar so we didn't have to get stuck in traffic (I thought that this was a bit awkward since we weren't really doing anything that important and it seemed unfair to do just because we had the money for it, but I suppose it was more about not keeping the Ambassador waiting than us being a big deal). The swear in was held at the Ambassador's residence and it was attended by other Ambassadors and Senegalese government representatives. After there were fancy hors d'œuvres and we went to a bar with a pool. By contrast, for our swear in in Mauritania, we had to do it in one of the dorm rooms at our training center because there was sewage seeping through the floor of the room we would were supposed to have it in. No Mauritanian government representatives were there because the coup d'etat had just happened and the US hadn't decided how they were going to handle relations with the new government. After we had a party out behind a hotel outside of town because it was far enough away that we could drink without anyone seeing us and we danced like we had ants in our pants because the whole compound was infested with them. Things here are definitely nicer. Some one asked me the other day if anything was better in Mauritania, besides the people I knew there the only thing I could come up with was that the family I ate with cooked better a better lunch (rice and fish with a bunch of veggies and an amazing leaf sauce paste.)

Cassandras of Climate

This is important:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=2

Happily the beat goes on...

Nothing has been quite as rewarding as seeing some of the work that I started in Mauritania be carried on even though I left in the middle of it. When doing development work the ideal is always to have it be sustainable and in some of my early blogs I talked about how I wanted my presence in Mauritania to be a catalyst for development, a sort of Jujitsu development. Turns out I was able to do that, at least a little. Here are some of the ways:

- Woni, the amazing mother of my counterpart with whom I started a tree nursery, has planted another tree nursery of several hundred trees to sell. Given that you all know the saga of trying to get this project going, you can understand how happy it makes me.

- Samba, my tireless counterpart, is finishing the tree planting campaign that we talked about and that I dug forty holes for.

- Taban Lo, a random person who I met that has a rototiller, has followed my suggestion to rent out his machine to cooperatives and farmers and made half of the purchase cost of the rototiller back in the first week. Now another individual has bought a brand new rototiller just to be able to rent it out. This is a huge success.

- Last but most, I did not manage to send a Mauritanian Youth Delegation to the UN Climate Change Negotiations in Copenhagen, but I did get funding for one of them thanks to some volunteers and the Young Friends of the Earth in Germany. This is the success that really has me jumping out of my shorts. To this day, participating in the conference in 2007 was the most remarkable and life changing event I have experienced and I can only imagine it will be the same for a young Mauritanian. This is not a guaranteed deal yet, visas and other issues still need to be worked out, but the big problem, the money, is there. Still this is huge news and it is difficult for me to express the importance of this UN conference. It will be the most important event in the history of the fight against climate change as it will set the new international agreement until 2050, or not... It is imperative for the world that the negotiations go well. I encourage everyone to take a strong interest in following how the negotiations are going and supporting strong targets. A little sacrifice today is going to save the world a whole lot of trouble in the coming years.