"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."

First of all, Mom. I'm going to take advantage of this moment to wish you a very happy Mother's Day right now, since I'll be in the village on the day itself and the network coverage is too unreliable for me to be able to promise to call. Thank you for everything, and thank you especially for everything you've done from afar in the past 14 months. I know it's hard to be a mother to someone who's so far from home, but you've been with me every day.

Secondly, don't worry Dad, your shout out will be coming up soon.

All right. I've been in Kaolack for a few days working with some friends of mine, trying to get the regional house all set for the installation of 6 new volunteers in our region. We built all sorts of shiny new toys, like a spice rack! And a kitchen table! And a shade structure! Well, mostly the others built the stuff. I pretty much just wandered around looking for food and getting in the way. But I share in the sense of accomplishment. And for those of you who laugh Kaolack off as the dirty region, the stinking Saloum cesspool, all I have to say is that our shade structure is a thing of beauty and dignity and there's not an open sewer within several yards of it. So there.

Anyway, I was poking through one of the nineteen notebooks I keep strewn about my hut when I found the beginning of something I wrote last year, maybe around the month of June or so. Reading my descriptions of the heat and life in the village, I got the same feeling I used to experience when I would run into my own marginalia in some of the books I've read the most carefully. I'm not really inclined to show many people the drivel that eighteen year-old Jessie scribbled in the pages of Plato's Phaedrus, truth be told. But I was in the mood to take what I found and re-work it a little bit and then finally to finish out the thought, which is one that's been bonking around in my brain for a while without ever fully taking shape. So just to be clear, the events in the first part of what follows happened last year. This year's water cuts are still to come. Ha.

My village's water supply comes from a deep-bore forage that sucks up water from hundreds of meters below the earth. Most of the compounds in Ndiago have rubinets (taps connected to the forage system) and there are a handful in public places as well. The whole system was built by the Belgians (?!) a couple of decades ago, and since then the wells in my vicinity have been covered and out of use. For the most part. I've seen water pulled from the well in Ndiago on one occasion, and it was hilarious. The men involved were very officious and proud of themselves for taking up this new task, but once they got started it was obvious they had no idea what they were doing. Luckily for all of us, the problem with the forage was fixed soon after.

But nothing is wholly reliable in the bush. A little while later, the water was out again. I was pulling water from the rubinet in our compound and chatting with my mother when the comfortable healthy rush of liquid started to slow. My mom made disapproving, clucking noises, and the other women of the compound gathered to watch as the water flow turned into a trickle, and then stopped entirely. This has happened a few times before, and I have a routine all set up. My priority is drinking water, so I filled up my filter with what I had managed to get and then accompanied my mom to the rubinet in the center of the village, where I hoped to get enough for a bucket bath in the evening.

When we got to the rubinet, it became obvious that the problem wasn't just in our compound. From every direction, women and children were coming with containers of all sorts. There was already a bit of a pile-up at the rubinet, so my mom and I took our place in it and joined the conversation. Some of the banter was pointed toward us, since my uncle is the manager of the forage. It got a little sharper in tone when the water dried up at the public rubinet, too, sending all of us in search for another one further from our compound. All in vain. We waited in line at every public rubinet in the village. One by one, as we waited and gossiped and watched the sun move across the sky, all the taps turned up short. The rubinets were dry in Ndiago for a couple days, and a handful of men made a killing by drawing water in the road town and carting it in to sell in the village. I did eventually get my evening bucket bath, but it wasn't as pleasant as usual.

As I watched the women of my village carry away massive basins of water, I remembered something I'd been meaning to mention since training. In Senegal, pulling water is almost always a team sport. Whether you've got a well or a rubinet, if you're using one of the very common humongous plastic basins to retrieve your water, you're going to need someone's help to get that thing up on your head. By now I've pretty much mastered the art of hoisting one of these basins up onto another woman's head, but the first couple of times were sploshy adventures. Not even women who have been pulling water and carrying it on their heads for decades can get those monstrosities up on their own.

I feel like we're used to a lot of independence in the States. We don't count on the presence of others for many things. But being alone in Senegal would mean being stranded. A task as simple as getting the day's water supply becomes infinitely more difficult. No one seeks isolation here. Being a part of a community is not just a convenience, it's a necessity. Extended families live in large compounds of fifteen, twenty, forty people. Traditional Senegalese food is served in large bowls, which seven or eight people can share. People pass the time by sitting together and talking, in the family compound or in the center of the village or wherever they happen to find themselves. People even nap outside, surrounded by others. The only Senegalese people I've seen seek “alone time” are the very elderly, who sometimes withdraw inside their rooms to concentrate on prayer and reflection. Even sick people sometimes prefer being outside, surrounded by visitors and family members.

The Senegalese family is more of a unit in many ways that anything I'm used to. Parents are economically dependent on their children, who go out to the fields to help with the work. Wives are dependent on their husbands. Husbands rely on brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. So in a small village like mine, where all the families seem to be connected, it's easy to get the impression that every single person in the village is contributing to and benefiting from a social structure that's centered in a very small plot of land, but that extends through family links to villages all over our region, to Kaolack and Dakar and beyond.

For example, many people in the village eat bread every morning for breakfast. It's my father who makes the nightly run to the roadtown, where he buys bread early each morning and is home before dawn. He brings the bread to his sister, who sells it in the village. There aren't delivery trucks here, there aren't licensed and registered service providers. There's your uncle Abdu, who has a horse cart and is usually good for a ride from Guinguineo back into the village in the late afternoons. There's your neighbor, who knows a guy who knows a guy who sets people up with cheap used cell phones. The first time I needed some new clothes made, I went to the tailor my host sister goes to. When I started buying vegetables every week at the market, my aunt was the one who told me how much to pay for a kilo of onions. When the women in my compound have finished making dinner, they put together a small bowl and send it over to our neighbors, my uncle's family. In return, my uncle's wives send my grandma a bowl of whatever they're eating that night.

I have occasionally been a part of communities like this before. St. John's College felt a little like this, because it was so small and because we all read and cared about the same things. Common Ground, some people I worked with in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, felt like that too (at least, in its early days); but I think that was just because we all figured we were pretty much screwed if we didn't stick together.

But what I'm experiencing now is different. I'm surrounded by a community, but I'm not a part of it. I mean, I am to a certain degree: if I had a problem or an emergency in my village, the people I live with would take care of me. But I just don't fit in. The ties I have to my host family and my friends in the village are utterly different than the ties they have to their actual family members, to their real friends. No one relies on me, and I don't rely on anyone. I honestly think that if I got on a plane to the States tonight and never went back to Ndiago, as long as the Peace Corps replaced me with another volunteer there would be no appreciable change for any of the men, women, or children of the village. After a year in the village, I still get called Maguette, which was the Senegalese name of the volunteer I replaced. Ndiago is a place where the people are so closely connected, so intimately known, that each of them has deep and functional ties all over the village, ties that are constantly celebrated and reaffirmed day after day. They are, obviously, irreplaceable. But I am interchangeable with any other white man or woman who happens to walk in.

Maybe that's why I sometimes feel as if I am not treated like a human being here: I'm not an individual, not the way we think about it in the States. That type of strong self-identification, that push to make yourself stand out from the crowd, just does not exist here. People define themselves based on how they relate to others, to their community. And it's a community I cannot authentically be a part of. It's obvious the minute they set their eyes on me, the minute they see my white skin and blond hair and hazel eyes: I am not the way people are, for them. I am not a person.

It's upsetting. I do feel like some of the connections I have with Senegalese people are deep and honest and meaningful, and I know volunteers who have romantic, loving relationships with Senegalese partners. But I can never be a part of the group, which means I can never be a part of the family. When someone asks me who my parents are and where I live, I say my dad is Osseynou Gningue and my mom is Aissatou Diop, in Ndiago. And nine out of ten times, those people laugh at me -- the white girl has Senegalese parents? Ha! But if I say my parents are Kathy Gosnell and Michael Seiler, and that my hometown in Los Angeles, and that for God's sake my name is Jessie, not Aissa, I cut myself off entirely from the world around me. Even if this is a big charade we're all taking part in, it's still one with a certain amount of very superficial meaning and relevance.

And this, if you're wondering, is why I miss you. I'm happy here and I love my work, and I'm seriously considering staying for an extra year or six months to continue it. But this is why Senegal is not and will not be my home, not ever. This is why I'm coming back some day.

Love and guts,

Jessie

The forecast calls for 110 degree heat and blowing sand.

This brief post is pretty much exclusively about food. Look, I'm hungry a lot of the time in the village. I spend a lot of my private time thinking about food, like what combinations of foods might go well in burritos. Chocolate cake and buttery mashed potatoes, for example, with some cheddar cheese and strawberry jelly in there too. I have long, long mental lists of such combinations. But I won't subject you well-fed friends and family members to them. Instead, fruit!

The hot season has hit us early this year, or at least earlier than I was prepared for. By the middle of March, daily highs were spiking up around 110, a temperature you haven't properly experienced if you've never been without the stupefying relief of fans and air conditioning, or even the refreshment of refridgerated water. Everything here in Senegal is hot: the stifling dry air, the wind that brings no chill relief. The traditional heavily-sugared tea called attaya is served in tiny cups at a mouth-scorching boil. All the food is cooked and served immediately, also too hot for comfort. Even the water coming out of the rubinets or my filter never gets below the ambient temperature.

This season has its consolations, though. As I approached the center of Guinguineo's big weekly market a month or so ago, I was hit by a weak, unplaceable memory of delight. I looked around at the now-familiar offerings, the million stimuli of the crowded market: the gleaming polished cooking pots, the stacks of vegetables and bags of spices, the beautiful varieties of fabric available for sale, the man hawking radios, sunglasses, and black market medicines for everything from malaria to impotence. Something here was jumping up and down, demanding my full attention, smacking my senses around and registering as a weirdly emotional triumph. I had lost something and, I was being warned, I was about to find it again. The warning turned out to be a smell, and it was coming from a humongous moist pile of red and yellow cashew fruits just a few feet away. It was a smell I associate with my first days in Senegal, when my stage-mates and I first began to wander the streets and markets of Thies by ourselves, buying sacks of strange new fruits and fried street delicacies, tasting for the first time the sad stuff that passes for beer in this country, and beginning to realize that this place, Senegal, was turning into a new home.

Some would take this as a sign that being in Senegal has addled my brain, but I truly believe that the United States is a more backward and less happy place because it lacks cashew fruits. I guess we don't grow cashews over there, and the temperamental fruit wouldn't survive the trans-Atlantic voyage. It's a shame. To be perfectly honest, I can't be very specific about what cashew fruits taste like. When you bite into one, the juices completely overwhelm your taste buds and change the pH balance of your entire mouth for several minutes. You're not left with much sense of how the fruit actually tastes, except for a general impression of yumminess. You might be swallowing a quarter-cup of liquid when you eat one, but the cashew fruit experience will leave you deliciously thirsty, under the strange impression that it's sucked all the liquid from your mouth. Why I find these so addictive, I can't really know. But I can buy enough to make myself a little queasy with about 30 cents, and I often do.

If that doesn't sound tantalizing, then you can always opt for mangoes. The first ones came in around the middle of March this year. Even if I hadn't noticed their arrival, I would have suspected something was up: the ambient happy level just felt a little higher than it normally does around here. A dollar will buy you a little over 4 pounds of mangoes, enough to make your entire Senegalese host family happy, or to make yourself gut-wrenchingly ill. It's worth the pain, though. When I came home from the market in Guinguineo with the first sack of mangoes, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch my host mom dole out the goods. With her face half-covered in pulpy smeared fruit, Fama, my favorite four year old in the world, cried, "Aissa! The mangoes are delicious! God will help you for bringing us these mangoes -- He'll give you a good husband very soon!" I don't know about that, but in a place where no one ever seems to be getting enough of the right things to eat, where nothing we eat on a daily basis is even remotely delicious, the mango season is an annual miracle.

Of course I'm thrilled on a very simple level that mangoes and cashews are back in season. But their presence reminds me of something else, something that I actually never really forgot in the first place: I've been here for a year now. When we first got off that plane, the mangoes and cashews were filling the markets. Every time I see a stack of mangoes or a basin of cashews in Guinguineo, I think back to those first days in Senegal more than a year ago, at the end of February of 2009.

One of the perks (or dull responsibilities?) of being a year-in volunteer is that you might be asked to come to Thies to train the new stage of health volunteers, who arrived in country three weeks ago or so. In a couple of days, that's exactly where I'm headed. I hope I'll have time to update this blog -- I want to write about the amazing progress of the Hygiene Committee's latrine project and the two days I spent tramping around the bush looking for children under 5 to vaccinate against polio, helping out in a nation-wide program, enjoying myself, collecting stories, and getting way way way too dehydrated. But besides that, I'm excited to meet the new stage. I bet they're excited to be here, and I bet that their excitement is contagious. So times are good now.

Hope all is well back in the States.

Love and guts,

Jessie

Not at Home

I want to preface this entry by saying that the drugs the med office put me on for stomach stuff make me feel like I'm dying of old age or something. So I'm a little fuzzy-headed at the moment. If there are bits of this post that maybe don't make a lot of sense, do the charitable thing and write it off to the medicine.

Ok.

I played softball for one year in middle school, though I can’t remember exactly why. The soccer season was over, and I guess I just didn’t have enough to do during my afternoons and evenings. In any case, I hated it. None of the other girls on my team seemed to be having any fun: during games, they were too busy heckling the other teams to even enjoy some of the field’s delicious spicy nachos. I wasn’t rabidly interested in winning or in making the girls on the other teams cry, so it looked to the others like I lacked team spirit, or maybe even some more fundamental quality like patriotism, seeing as how softball is pretty much as Americana as it gets. I finished out the season and didn’t sign up for the next year, and I returned happily to soccer and pick-up football games to fill the hours after school.

The annual West African Invitational Softball Tournament (yeah, we call it WAIST, and you better believe that it’s an appropriate acronym), held this weekend in Dakar, was therefore not initially very compelling to me. Teams of Peace Corps volunteers came from every region in Senegal, as well as from a few other West African countries. We were joined by a handful of teams of ex-pats from Dakar, mostly Americans who are living and working at the Embassy or with an NGO here in the city. Some of the teams are pretty competitive, but for the most part the volunteers think of WAIST as one long party. Each volunteer team even picks a theme for their clothing, and for many of us more energy goes into finding costume accoutrements than into batting practice. There’s a lot of delicious food, pools full of beer (not literally), and all the comforts of Dakar. The ex-pats bring their kids, and everyone sits around a big swimming pool (seriously, it’s just chlorinated water, I swear) eating cheeseburgers and swilling beer until it’s time to troop out to the field for another game.

Knowing already that I didn’t like softball, I wasn’t too thrilled about the competitive aspect of the weekend. I would, of course, be rooting for my regional team and showing up to cheer on my friends who had made the cut for the more competitive Senegalese national team, but I didn’t imagine I’d be getting too into it.

The problem started when we played our first ex-pat team. We couldn’t have made a more ridiculous contrast with our opponents. They were dressed in sports shorts and t-shirts. We were decked out in denim, plaid, and suspenders, since we had decided to all dress up as lumberjacks for WAIST. Our team manager had produced a sack of mitts and bats from the nether regions of the Kaolack house, and now that the games are over, they’ve been hidden until next year. Our opponents, on the other hands, probably play together once a week. Most of our team members drank while playing, and a few even brought their beers with them while fielding. In spite of all that, Kaolack’s got a pretty competitive team. We came to win, but damned if we didn’t feel entitled to a beer or two in the outfield.

The contempt began building up in my heart even before we were even losing the game to this ex-pat team. It was a combination of things: the bulky idiotic dog whose careless American owners let it scamper around the field, tripping up the players and generally being a nuisance; the balding man in his fifties wearing those absurd Nikes that you can pump air into for a good fit; the clean, healthy kids cheering on their dads from the sidelines. Suddenly, for no rational reason, I couldn’t stand it. All I could feel for these perfectly normal Americans abroad was hatred and disgust. As they put the elements of their lifestyle on display during that game, everything I saw – the hours spent in leisure, the easy access to food and other consumer goods, the cheerful good health and clean, new clothing – filled me with irrational anger. I wanted our team to win, not only because it would mean good things for Kaolack, but also so that those men and women would feel the sting of defeat and be shamed in front of their children.

Some of my reaction was in reference to what I had come to know in my village: these fat American kids were growing up, eating imported American food in bulk and attending private schools in Dakar, within hours of Ndiago and countless other villages just like it. The children and adults in my compound wear sandals that cost one dollar (when they wear shoes at all): I thought of them while watching the man with the fancy Nikes run around in his absurd gear.

I’m cutting the list short, though these things were just the beginning. The comparisons are cheap, obvious, and facile, the first of thousands that could be drawn, and the fact that I let them flame the fire of my anger embarrasses me. And of course I chose not to console myself with the thought that many of these ex-pats were working for organizations like USAID: even though they had dedicated a part of their lives to working for good here in Senegal, I couldn’t help but think of them as mired in the bad faith of their willfully ignorant Dakar-bound lifestyle. Aid workers they may be, but all I could see was the high wall they had put up between themselves and all of Senegal. It was as if they felt insecure in being so far from home, and so decided that the only path to security and assurance was in painting on the Americana so thickly that nothing of Senegal could get past it. The fields where our games were held were surrounded by such literal walls and topped with barbed wire. A metal detector was placed at the front entrance of the games’ main venue, and everyone submitted to a bag check upon entering. What were they looking for in my bag? What part of Senegal was I not allowed to carry with me when I entered this temporary America?

As I’m writing this today, about a week after the games ended, I’m still attempting to deal with my anger. It’s not fair to the people I met in Dakar to say these things about them. My disgust is misplaced. I don’t really know anything about these families, about what they gave up to come here and why. I have no right to pass judgment on any of them. But when I began to write all these things out and come to terms with what I was feeling, I realized that this is culture shock. Those few days in Dakar were as close as I’ve come to being at home in America in a year, and it completely spun me. If this was a preview of what I have waiting for me at home, I’m a little terrified. I don’t like the person I became in the face of it, I don’t like the things I thought and said in those days.

All this came at a strange time. After about a year into my service, I had recently started realizing how fundamentally comfortable I was with parts of American culture. In the States, once I became an adult, I knew the cultural mindset and vocabulary so well that I was able to navigate every situation myself. If someone was picking on me, flirting with me, ignoring me, or standing in my way, I had at the very least a vague sense of what combination of words and actions would change the situation. I don’t think I ever had a conception of how important a shared culture could be for communication: we don’t think of our daily context as vital until it’s gone, and we’re stuck looking for another way of functioning.

Before going to WAIST, I had been longing for the straightforwardness and ease of American daily life. I had, with some initial reluctance, begun to discover that some parts of me are really American in nature. But after seeing the exaggerated emphasis put on a shared culture during the softball games, after seeing so many people trying to hard to pretend that we were no longer in Senegal, I’m not sure anymore. Why should my own culture make me so deeply uncomfortable, even though I recognize the elements of it in myself that make me an outsider in Senegal?

Anyway, Sunday is the anniversary of our arrival in Senegal. I'm grateful for the experiences I've had, the friends I've made, and the lessons learned in that time. So far, so good.

Love and guts,

Jessie

We're Building Latrines!

So, shockingly enough, I've been here for almost a year. I'm gonna shy away from that abyss for a minute to tell you about this latrine project that's taking up so much of my attention these days. I've talked about it with some of you already, but I'm excited about it and my mind is filled with its details. So I'm gonna go ahead and share.

Most of the few jokes I heard about the Peace Corps while growing up were based on the premise that an ignorant and oblivious volunteer, filled with the best of intentions and befuddled by massive amounts of marijuana, was dropped head first into a village and immediately began the construction of several latrines. When he left, people stopped using and cleaning them and went back to pooping in the bushes. The latrines just didn't fit in with their lives. This was a cautionary tale, a warning against the way most people thought development workers (and Peace Corps volunteers specifically, I suppose) went about their work. Anyway, the message sunk in.

I've known for a while that the volunteer I had replaced had written a grant requesting money for several villages, including Ndiago, to build latrines. The money came through a while ago. So for months now, I've been thinking about that story. I won't say the memory of it made me hesitate to start the work, but I did smart a little each time I thought of making a beginning. But I'm headed back to the village with the money in a day or two, and at the moment, the men and women of 12 compounds in Ndiago are digging pits and preparing to begin construction. Here's what we've done so far, and what we're going to be doing next.

I started talking up latrines a little bit and trying to gauge the level of interest. Mostly, this involved visiting with the families and heads of household and drinking the tiny sweet cups of tea that are an afternoon tradition in Senegal. It turns out that of the 26 compounds in the village, each with maybe 10 to 20 people living in them, 11 already had latrines. That's pretty good coverage, compared to a lot of places, so everyone had heard of latrines and was familiar with the purported health benefits that went along with using them. Nobody's a fan of pooping in the bush, so naturally, interest was pretty high.

One afternoon, after the hottest part of the day had passed, I sat down at a meeting in the village center with the heads of most of the compounds and several of the most prominent women. My counterparts, the two villagers who work with me most closely and answer all my awkward questions about the Wolof language and Senegalese culture, were also there. Fama, one of the little girls who lives in my compound and who usually accompanies me on all work-related errands, also was in attendance; but she was shooed from her usual station on my lap once the meeting got started.

With some help from my counterparts, I explained to the men and women where the money was coming from, how much was available, and what it could be used for. The money covers materials for construction only: each household will have to contribute a small in-kind amount and also cover the cost of labor. And while 15 compounds in the village lacked latrines, we only had enough money now for 12. I explained that I thought that if we did a good job, I would be writing another small grant to cover the costs of the remaining latrines.

But for now, I wanted to form a Hygiene Committee. Two men would be in charge of overseeing construction, working with the mason, and going in to the road town and bringing back the cement and other materials. Two women would be responsible for collecting the money and overseeing various educational aspects. After some training with me, they'd be going from compound to compound teaching about latrine maintenance, what types of dangerous trash should be put into the latrines instead of allowed to sit around (batteries, old pesticides, etc.), and the importance of washing your hands with soap and water after using the latrine. The village chief and another local leader would both have representatives on the committee as well. It would be better, I thought, if this group of people could help the people of Ndiago to bring latrines to themselves. If it worked, I would help this group of people get the training they need on how to write grant requests. My hope is that the group is able to build a wall around the elementary school in Ndiago at some point in the near future. I was trying to communicate the concept of sustainable development: when I go home, the village can do small construction projects for itself, from the first step to the last. That's the idea, anyway.

Everyone took to the idea pretty well. The group immediately took over the meeting, and I spent most of the rest of it in silence, waiting and listening. First they talked about who the men on the committee should be: who knew enough about building latrines? Who knew suppliers in the roadtown? And then they turned the conversation over to the women present: which women had been educated enough to be able to turn a position like this into a good opportunity for themselves? Who would be good at going from house to house, patiently explaining the same material over and over again? All this went fairly smoothly, and whenever they agreed on a name I wrote it down happily.

Then the part I had been a little apprehensive about came around. There just wasn't enough money to cover latrines for everyone. So who would be left out? The men and women quickly came up with a list of the compounds lacking latrines. There were lots of questions that I wouldn't have been able to answer myself: was the Thiare household a separate entity, or was it really attached to the Gningue compound? The conversation was long, and obviously a little uncomfortable for some people present. But they considered the distances between neighboring compounds, the number of children living in each house, and other factors until they came up with a list of 12 households. Not everyone directly benefited from the results of the discussion, but when we all went home, I think everyone felt satisfied with the way things had been decided. All in all, people are excited about the project and interested in pursuing it in this slightly unusual way.

For my part, I was ecstatic. From this moment, the very first step in bringing latrines to Ndiago, the community had taken responsibility for the work very seriously. My input and guidance was helpful on some matters, and that will perhaps continue to be the case. But this village is changing itself for the better. These days, I'm feeling privileged and excited to be along for the ride.

There's a big religious festival this week, and most people have cleared out for a few days to attend. And I'll be heading up to Dakar soon for a conference and the West African Invitational Softball Tournament (no, really), so besides the pits being dug, work is on hold for a couple weeks. But that's the way it is in Senegal. Everyone stops what they're doing five times a day to pray, and when there's a baptism or a wedding or a funeral in Ndiago or the neighboring villages, we all take the afternoon off and get dressed up to go help our neighbors celebrate life in style. This rhythm of life has been frustrating to me in the past, but I think I'm coming around to it now. And a couple of months from today, if all the latrines get built and we talk enough about washing your hands with soap and water, I'm thinking that we're going to see something impressive in Ndiago.

So yeah, these are good days.

Love and guts,

Jessie

More Whining About Development Work

I’ll just come right out and say it: I’m probably not qualified to talk about development work. So I’d like to apologize in advance to anyone who’s offended by any inaccuracies or generalities in what follows. But that’s part of what having a public forum like a blog is about, right? Those who are less well-informed (I never studied development, don’t know much about it) and less experienced (I’m writing this with less than a year under my belt in Senegal) can get their questions out in the open. I’m writing this because I need to hear an argument, a line of reasoning, that makes me feel better about the work I and my friends are doing as Peace Corps Volunteers. It’s not that I want to go home; I just need to believe in what we’re doing here, and that’s pretty difficult sometimes.

I've been uncomfortable for a while now. Initially, when I realized that something was bothering me, I thought it was the amoebas. And it was, for a few days. But I took the meds , stopped pooping water, and started eating solid foods again, and the feeling didn’t go away. When I was finally able to pin it down, it came to look something like this: there seem to be at least three very different ideas of what good development work looks like, all of which are present in our lives and competing for our energy and resources. The first is the Peace Corps model of sustainable development, based on the transfer of skills and knowledge. The second is the perception villagers have of what our role should be. The third is the one that compels me the most, and I’m not sure where it comes from or what it’s based on. All I can say now, by way of introduction, is that it doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with either other model.

The Peace Corps Model

You may be sick of my disclaimers by this point, but it's probably important to say it again: I'm not an expert on development work. I'm not even an expert on Peace Corps development philosophy. All I have is what every volunteer has: a couple months of training and a year or so (at this point) of experience. But that's pretty much all any of us has to work with, as far as I can tell.

In the Peace Corps development as I was taught it here in Senegal, the emphasis is on the transfer of skills and knowledge to the Senegalese. Techniques in anything from making neem lotion to grafting fruit trees are passed from the Senegalese trainers in Thies to the new American volunteers. These volunteers pick up enough technical knowledge and ability to communicate in local languages to be able to pass on that knowledge to the people of their villages. That's part of what, in theory, should make our work sustainable: we're not just handing out mosquito nets and improved seed varieties, we're teaching people how to use them properly and telling them how they can put their hands on these things by themselves. The backbone of being a good Peace Corps volunteer (or even, I suspect, of being a good national Peace Corps program) is therefore the attempt to put yourself out of a job. If a string of volunteers has done well in a village or sub-region, they have eliminated the need for any other volunteer to follow in their footsteps.

Another cornerstone of the Peace Corps philosophy I've been exposed to is the importance of being able to quantify results. The Peace Corps community in Senegal as a whole has a plan of action, with goals and criteria for success based on numbers. How many school gardens are being established or improved? How many farmers are being trained in advanced permaculture techniques? How close are we to 100% mosquito net coverage? The regions and sub-regions have similarly outlined documents. And finally, each volunteer is expected to report on their activities every quarter using a format that emphasizes this type of statistic. At least in the health sector, we all have numerical goals to meet. I mention this because it might come as a surprise to some people: after all, the pop culture image of a Peace Corps volunteer is probably a lot closer to a pot-smoking, guitar-playing, lazy Americana-drop-out than is quite accurate. My work objectives as a volunteer are in fact clearer than they were as a college student.

The more I think about and experience this vision of development, the less comfortable I am with it. But for now, it's enough to say that the Peace Corps model of development work doesn't look anything like the average villager's vision.

The Village Model

One of the first steps in community-based development work is finding out what your community wants and needs. What are the perceived difficulties of daily life as they pertain, in my case, to health issues? What are the most common diseases or health problems in the village? What do people think causes something like malaria? Often, the next step in community-based development seems to be correcting peoples' answers to these questions. We have to talk people out of their more ambitious goals and correct their notions of the causes of health problems. All health volunteers are primarily educators, not healers. But say we're actually lucky enough to get down to some work.

Here's an example of the way some people in my village envision the role of their Peace Corps volunteer.

The volunteer I replaced had a lot of success with neem lotion, a plant-based insect repellent that is produced with the leaves of a tree found all over my village. She collected money from everyone in Ndiago to cover the expense of the soap that's also a main ingredient of the lotion, made a million and a half bags of the stuff, and distributed it. I thought I’d build on her success by pushing to make it a community-driven progress. Now that it’s widely recognized that they can reduce their risk of contracting malaria, I thought, surely the people of the village will be eager to learn to make neem lotion themselves. It would be a way for women to make money in the rainy season, and the technique is so simple that it can be passed from person to person without a whole lot of fuss. I was excited, because it seemed like I had an opportunity to teach a skill rather than give a hand-out.

So we got together, talked about it, and I taught about 30 women how to make the lotion. A few women took it up, made batches themselves, and sold it. But after a while, their work came to a standstill. When I came back from a mandatory three-week training in a city a few hours away from Ndiago and asked around, it didn’t seem like neem lotion was widely available. Many people in my village thought that neem lotion made by the Senegalese women would not be as effective as the stuff I could make for them. My white-person-from-prosperous-America-juice was the missing ingredient. Many women said they had trouble getting the money together themselves for making a batch even one small enough for their families alone. One of these women lives in my compound. The day after she claimed that she couldn't raise the 400CFA needed to make another batch of lotion (about one American dollar, by the way), I watched as she bought earrings for 500CFA in the market. The money was there, but it was there for something else.

I was upset. After all, I reasoned with people, I would be going home after a couple of years. Ndiago will probably have one more health volunteer, but in even the best case scenario the village would be on its own for rainy seasons after 2013. If no one in the village had practice and expertise with making neem lotion, what would happen once the magical white people stopped showing up? Shrugs all around. I left the conversation after making it clear repeatedly to pretty much anyone in the village who would listen to me that I would not be making and passing out neem lotion myself. It was up the village now. A couple women picked up the project and I'm hoping to expand it next year. But still, what went wrong? Why did the village's picture of what their volunteer could and should be doing differ so much from my own? Given the difference in opinion, what should my next step be?

I don't feel that I have the tools to really answer those questions. I don't know anything about anthropology or development theory, as I said before. But my gut sense is that the problem revolves around education. Few adults in my village are literate. Few have had anything but the basics of primary school education. Teachers and health post workers don't come from the village: they grow up in Dakar and Thies and Kaolack and other cities, where they're raised and educated in urban environments of privilege. These guys don't count. They have enough money to buy mosquito coils and DEET products and other deterrents. The people I needed to convince to make their own neem lotion, the poor majority of the village, were the people least likely to understand why neem lotion was important, why they were capable of making it themselves, how it was that the white girl wasn't using America magic to make the stuff.

What's a village volunteer to do? Try again next year, spending a lot more time talking and teaching. That's fine, I'm willing to do it. Of course. And I'm definitely not saying I should have caved and made everyone neem lotion. But what I can't get over is the daily message I got during the rainy season, both implicitly and explicitly: I had failed Ndiago. I had not met the village's expectations. I wasn't their Aissa , their very own white girl with magic and resources and clever, easy solutions. I was a foreigner, with a foreign agenda, with goals and criteria for success that didn't look anything like theirs. And of course, I'm the only person in the village on malaria prophylaxis. Malaria doesn't threaten me or my kin or loved ones in the States. If it did, would I be able to embrace the Peace Corps' model of development work, or would I also be afraid that neem lotion wasn't enough, that I couldn't make it well enough to keep the people I love alive?

As with every country with volunteers in it, the Peace Corps was invited to Senegal. Americans and Senegalese worked together to design a program that addressed Senegal's specific needs and development goals: for example, we have more agricultural volunteers than some other West African countries, and no volunteers working in teacher training. Communities in Senegal invited volunteers to their sites through a lengthy and thoughtful selection process. Because of all this, I feel like I have a constituency: primarily the 200-odd people living in Ndiago, secondarily the 1,000 or so people living within the cluster of villages of which Ndiago is the center. The Peace Corps is not my constituency. In my heart, I am not accountable to anyone in the office in Dakar, or anyone in the office in Washington, D.C.

And Now For Something Completely Different

So what am I left with?

I think the role I envision for myself as a volunteer is a combination of the Peace Corps philosophy with a strong punch in the face of social justice added to it. The emphasis would still be on transferring skills and knowledge, but instead of pushing things like neem lotion and pit latrines as sustainable development measures, I want to talk about them as temporary compromises. They're all right for now, because realistically speaking this country just doesn't have the political clout to lobby for affordable and safe anti-malarial medicines for children living in endemic areas, or the infrastructure to bring sanitary facilities to villages with no source of running water. But when we accept things like neem lotion as solutions to problems that are rooted in the unequal distribution of wealth or the total failure of the Senegalese government to abide by the social contract, then we're cheating the people we're here to help.

The real goal of development work might look like this: not only can one person in every compound in Ndiago make neem lotion well, but also that every person in Ndiago can imagine the day when their risk of dying from malaria is the same as it would be if they had been born in the United States. I would never ask my family in the U.S. to use a pit latrine or accept an unreliable source of water which would need to be filtered and treated before being totally safe to drink. So why should I ask my host family in Senegal to do these things? All we can do as Peace Corps volunteers is encourage the people we work with to take baby steps. But I think it's also important to say that certain things about daily life as I encounter it in a village in Senegal are utterly unacceptable. Compromises are short-term solutions, stop-gaps, band-aids. They're not truly long-term sustainable development options. Say Peace Corps and all the other aid agencies in the country just went crazy and built latrines in every compound in Senegal. That would be an incredible solution right now, at the beginning of 2010. We could be proud of ourselves for that. But if the people are still using latrines 20 years from now, if no one is crying out for plumbing and hygienic facilities and waste treatment programs, then the program will have been a failure. And every Peace Corps volunteer, every aid worker who built a latrine or raised money for them or did a health talk on latrine maintenance, every single one us us; we are all implicated in that failure.

Furthermore, I fear that the emphasis on sustainability in development work is making us lose sight of the forest for the trees. In the end, if there is no solution to a problem that meets the criteria for sustainability, it is preferable to enact a non-sustainable solution than to walk away from the problem entirely.

To me, these points are axiomatic. They either are or rest upon the principles and opinions that led me to want to be a Peace Corps volunteer in the first place. Almost a year after arriving in Senegal, I'm beginning to find that they are not compatible with the way Peace Corps itself functions. They're not fully contradictory with the established institutional philosophy of development, but they certainly aren't comfortably reconcilable. At least, I haven't figured it out yet.

I was warned recently about making the perfect the enemy of the good. That is, about despairing of achieving perfection to the point where I’m incapable of working for anything less. But how do we ever honestly decide what it is to be be “good enough”? How far short of perfection should we set our sights? How will we ever improve ourselves, learn anything, feel worthy, if we don’t first acknowledge that our reach exceeds our grasp, and then work to extend both?

When I first came to Senegal, none of this bothered me. I honestly believed that we didn’t have to think about the big picture. Someone else had picked out this village for me, these 200 people. Someone else taught me everything I know about being a health volunteer. I tried to be a tool, a conduit, a machine that went on monthly baby-weighing tourneys, distributed mosquito nets, seeded pepinieres, taught the women to make neem lotion. I thought I could do the job in front of me and find peace of mind on this small scale. But it’s not working that way right now.

Love and guts.

Look at my hut from SPACE!

No, really. Look at my hut from space.

Strictly speaking, you're looking at my village. I'm not sure if I can annotate the map to point out to you all which hut is mine, though it does appear here. But I thought some of you might think this was cool.

Happy 2010, everyone! Substantive blog update on the way. Maybe.

Love and guts,

Jessie

The Waiting Room

When I visit Ndiago's health post, a miracle staffed by able and educated men and women, I usually spend some time in the waiting room. Three tiled benches built out of the walls line three sides of the room; doors lead outside and into the doctor's office, a few examining rooms, and a pharmacy. For an American traveling abroad who might be forced by accident or illness to look for medical help, this place might be a reassuring sight. But the people in my village don't see it that way. My host mother, for example, let a pus-dripping open sore fester for two weeks before finally coming in, though I had been pleading with her to go since the first signs of infection. Furthermore, the cachement area for this health post covers around twenty villages, many of which are far away enough to be tough trips for the seriously ill. But despite this difficulty and the enormous reluctant to make the trip, the waiting room is often packed by mid-morning. After all, there aren't a whole lot of doctors to go around in Senegal, about one for every 10,000 people.

Ndiago is a pretty small village, and though it's not too remote it's still pretty far off the beaten track on the national highway. Most people come and go by horse-drawn carts. So the village might not immediately strike the mind as a place where two worlds are meeting and trying to become comfortable with one another, in spite of some considerable differences. Here, little bits of my world are easily assimilated into Senegalese daily life. I'm the only one who things "Houston" brand cigarettes in red and white Marlboro-esque packages are funny. Girls wear traditional printed skirts and ragged t-shirts with HOLLYWOOD emblazoned across the chest in silver sequins without a trace of irony. Almost every public transit auto sports colorful stickers of Madonna's face, Barack Obama's name, and the Mercedes logo. And all of this with no sense of absurdity, no interest in the ideas behind the images, and no discomfort at all.


But one place where such collisions between two cultures seem to sit less easily on the Senegalese soul is this waiting room. The idea of a waiting room itself doesn't translate too readily. In the States, when you want to see your doctor, you call up and make an appointment. The waiting room is where you get stuck if you're early, or if your doctor's running a bit behind schedule.

Ndiago has about 275 people living in it, and out of those perhaps ten of us could be absolutely depended upon at any point to know exactly what the time is, exactly what day of the month or week it is. Someone will occasionally ask me what day of the "white person month" it is (for example, the 31st of October) but I've never seen that information put to any use. Time, for most people in the village, is figured differently. The call to prayer comes five times a day. If you want to leave the village, you catch a horse cart between sun-up and the beginning of the hot part of the day, or you wait until the heat breaks in the afternoon. The big market in our road town is every Wednesday. Every Friday, the men of the village go to the mosque to do the first afternoon prayer together. Muslim holidays are announced by the moon's phase and ratified by the authority of the marabouts, whose dictum mainly spreads by radio and word of mouth. When I call a meeting, plan an event, or set up a time to talk with someone, I do so by making reference to the prayers.

The system of calling to make an appointment just wouldn't work here. Instead, people walk or ride in to Ndiago in the early morning, even before the post is open. They take their seats in the benches and wait. As each person walks in, perhaps with a child slung across her back or guiding an elderly relative, he or she pauses to greet those who are already seated. Each newcomer greets, asks after the health of common friends or relatives in neighboring villages, finds a place to sit. The greeting ritual is so highly formalized that someone who is seriously ill will, when asked about his or her health, respond that everything's in perfect shape. Nobody is a stranger here. The men and women talk about recent events in the villages: last week's baptisms, the soccer matches between the young men, the peanut harvest. In doctor's offices across America, patients awkwardly sit with at least one empty seat between them and their unknown temporary neighbors. No conversation, no eye contact, no greetings. There's no physical room for avoidance in this waiting room, no way to stay out of contact with the people seated next to you.

All this is true, of course, in a lot of public places in Senegal: schools, for example, and public transit. You're squished together with a lot of strangers, so you might as well make conversation. If the physical reality of the situation is such that it's impossible to feel the peace of solitude, you may as well give up denying that you're not alone. But here in this waiting room, where people come with sometimes terrifying illnesses, the crowd seems invasive. If you're scared for yourself, your child, or your parent, maybe the greeting ritual and patter of conversation grates at your nerves. If something you don't understand is making you sick, maybe what you want is a little bit of solitude and quiet to think it through. You're dealing with apprehension, fear, pain, and a whole host of other emotions. It could be difficult to sort those things out while diligently taking part in a description of all the gifts given on the occasion of a recent wedding.

But this is where Senegalese and American culture clash, and this is where the waiting room, which at first struck me as a bizarrely and inappropriately transferred Western-ism, starts to look like a perfectly designed space for the role it has to play. No one in Senegal seeks out solitude, unless they're very elderly and choose to spend most of their time in prayer and preparation for death. No one chooses to strike off into the wilderness all by himself, far from family and friends. I used to see solitude in Senegal as something to be avoided for practical reasons: the community of the village supports and sustains all the individuals within it, and no individual could survive for long without its framework. But maybe such a closeness is also an emotional necessity for the Senegalese. To be alone is to accept that your death is coming, or to seek it out prematurely. In a time of sickness, a close-packed waiting room where you sit elbow to elbow with neighbors and acquaintances would be reassuring, when you look at it this way. All those people squished in next to you are your life, your way of continuing to live. The doctor and his medications might provide some help and comfort, but I think there's a way in which a return to health and well-being starts here, in this waiting room, where it's impossible to be alone, and so perhaps impossible to die.

Love and guts,

Jessie