Family.

Well, here I am, back in Senegal. It's been a wild few days. I spent about a week and a half in Los Angeles helping my mom move, eating Mexican food, and listening to Car Talk every morning. Not bad, I'd say. I'm a little zonked from unpacking and moving, but my mom had it much worse than I did.

I came back here just in time for the annual West African Invitational Softball Tournament, appropriately abbreviated to WAIST. If you missed my description of the tournament last year, you can find it here. Just be warned, I was going through this phase of not feeling happy with American comfort culture, and if you're an ex-pat living in Dakar, there's a good chance I will have accidentally insulted you in that post. I'm sorry.

Once WAIST was over, it was time for our Close of Service Conference. That's right, sports fans. The Spring Stage of 2009 has been here for two years, and it's time for some of us to go home. This conference was about making the transition back to American life, going to job interviews, stuff like that. Since I had already made the decision to stay in Senegal for a third year, I zoned out for parts of it. But being reunited with the group of people I came to country with two years ago was fun, and talking to them about their plans made me realize that the Peace Corps Volunteers I've met here are some of the most amazing individuals I know. If I don't get my act together, I'll probably be working for one of them some day. But you know what? That wouldn't be so bad.

Anyway, as usual, I started out by talking about something other than what I actually want to talk about.

I went home to LA to help out my mom. It wasn't an easy decision. There's a lot on my plate just now. On top of the work stuff, I'm also transitioning into my third-year role and saying goodbye to my village and host family, which is turning out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. But for some reason, it seemed like a decision I had to make. I was exactly where I had to be, doing exactly what I had to be doing.

What confused me, though, was that when another family situation came up at the very beginning of my time here in Senegal, I elected not to go home. Peace Corps would have put me on the first plane out, but I decided to stay. Just in case you're not already uncomfortable with how personal this blog post is getting, here's a post about that day. I felt at that time like I had to wake up every morning and make the commitment to Senegal and Peace Corps work again, and that every night I would go to bed not knowing whether I'd be ready to recommit the next morning. Now, I can commit to not just another day, but a whole year. In fact, I feel like these past two years and this next one have shaped the path I'll be taking for the rest of my life.

Something in me has changed these last two years. I guess I knew this much would happen when I signed up for this ridiculous adventure, but now I'm beginning to figure it out much more precisely. Two years ago, I stayed in Senegal when I should have gone home to my family. Two weeks ago, I went home to my family. I think I know why.

If you've read my blog before, you know I love the way family works here in Senegal. Everyone in my village is related to everyone else, usually literally, but at the very least through some sort of economic or social arrangement. There's no such thing as isolation, because to isolate yourself would be to die. We have so little here that everything must be shared. There is so much work to be done simply to keep us all alive that everyone must lend a hand. Every time, as is the custom here, you greet an acquaintance with their first and last names, every time you ask after their family members, every time you ask how their fields are doing, you are in fact affirming a vital connection with that person, and through them with an entire community that extends far beyond the borders of the village. I guess this is sort of a greatest hits type of post, because I want to point you to this post if you're interested in reading more about family and interconnectedness in Senegal. Ugh, when did I get so self-referential? But seriously, I don't know if I could say it better than I already did in that post.

After living here for two years, my concept of family has been redefined. I'm not even really talking about my family in particular here. It's not just about my mom and my dad. It's about who you need. It's about who you always have to say yes to, even if you don't feel ready or are scared about what saying yes means. It's about my fellow Volunteers -- the work, the parties, the shared experiences. It's about my friends back home, and how I used to wish I could carry pocket-sized versions of them around with me. It's about a network of people who, in spite of what I feared when I came here, I can never really lose.

I wish I had learned this years ago, but I'm thankful I get it now. And I'm pretty sure that coming all the way out here to this tiny village in Senegal was the only way I could figure it out. I left my family and came here to find a new one. I was looking for comrades, for people who cared about the same type of work that I did, people who wanted adventure and challenges and who never felt comfortable with Good Enough. Our reach may always exceed our grasp, but we will never, ever stop reaching. What I found was what my real family -- those related to me in the States, the people here in this village in Senegal whom I have come to love, and even my friends on both sides of the ocean -- means to me. It's everything.

The sentiment is the opposite of something Eve says to Adam in Book XII of Paradise Lost as they prepare to leave the Garden of Eden:

"...but now lead on;
In me is no delay; without thee here to stay,
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under Heaven, all places thou...."

It's lines 614 to 617, just in case you're one of those people.

She's saying to Adam, you, to me, are all places. Eve doesn't need Paradise, she needs Adam. For me, I guess it's the opposite. In all places, I find you, a family. My family. I just didn't know it until I came here. Which I guess means I'm home, and always will be, no matter where I find myself.

Love, and more love, and guts,

Jessie

Surprise trip home.

So I’m going to back in the States for a quick trip to help my mom out. She’s moving across the city. I don’t know for sure that I’m ready for a trip home, but this seems like one of those things you do for the people you love.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what is so terrifying about the prospect of being back over there. It is not the piles of guacamole and potato tacos I’m going to devour. It’s not the daily access to fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s not the constant access to hot showers and flush toilets and air conditioners and space heaters. It’s not the long flights, though I do hate flying and dread and begrudge every hour spent in the air. It isn’t the prospect of putting on socks for the first time in two years, and seeing my friends and family again.

America should be an appealing place to go, by any standard. Even though I can no longer tolerate dairy products or temperatures under 70 degrees with anything like comfort, this jaunt across an ocean and a continent should be something I look forward to.

Maybe I should take a step back. When I talk about America with my host family or other Senegalese people, lots of things surprise them or leave them thinking a little differently about the world. Yes, I explain, in response to the constant commentary on how wealthy all white people are. America does have a lot of money, it’s a very rich place. But there are affluent places and poor places in the States, just like we have here in Senegal: places like Dakar, places like the village. Places with plenty, places with nothing. People are often very curious (and sometimes rather abrasive) about the fact that at 24, I’m not married. Senegalese women of my age have three children and a fifth-grade education. Since I am invariably uninterested in the Senegalese men who approach me, and sometimes extremely rude in response to their advances, I’m something of an anomaly.

Another thing that surprises people here is my description of how people relate to each other in the States. No one makes eye contact or greets with strangers in the street? Families live hours and hours away from their “close” relations? Children leave the houses of their parents when they turn 18? The physical and emotional distances are unthinkable for Senegalese people.

Relate is one of those words that’s changed in meaning since I came here. The Wolof word bocc is both a noun and a verb, not unusually in this language. It is how you would describe your blood relations, your family, but it also means to share.

Both concepts, family and sharing, are more expansive here than they are in the States. Any man of my father’s generation in my village is also someone I could call my father or my uncle, and anyone as old as my Grandmother Bodey is my grandparent as well. There aren’t that many last names in Senegal, maybe fifty or so, but everyone with my last name is also my bocc. Crowing wealthy fat women in cars to Dakar are delighted to find out that their little sister and I have the same first name. It establishes something between us, even though it’s obvious that my name isn’t actually Aissa, even if the time in which we actually share a physical space is limited to five hours or so, and we never meet again after that.

Sharing in Senegal is different too. Every day before lunch, my compound and the family closely related to us next door switch plates of food. It doesn’t matter if the two dishes are different and one family is worse off for having swapped a plate of fish and vegetables for a bowl of plain, dry rice. The households always share and never begrudge anything. Anyone passing through or by the compound at lunch or dinnertime is called in to share the meal, even if it’s just a bite, even if they’re a stranger here. Children who come upon a piece of hard candy will split it with their back teeth and hand out tiny fragments to each of their friends, anyone who’s present. Can you imagine asking an American four-year old to split a Jolly Rancher with her friend? Wouldn’t happen.

I know I’ve commented on this before, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Life in Senegal, especially in rural areas, is a constant stream of reminders of how connected we are to the people around us, how vital others are to our own existence and happiness, and what our role and position is within the group. When two people meet and go through the greeting ritual, they will repeat each other’s last name over and over again. Even if they’re just saying good morning, it can go on for a while. Recognizing someone and saying their last name is a way of affirming for that person that she has a place here, that she has relationships in the village, that she’s connected to everyone. It’s how you say that you’re home, and that the person you’re speaking with belongs here too.

The same type of thing happens at events, too. Everyone in the village, and many people from nearby places, shows up for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. No matter how affluent the couple getting married or the family of the new mother, all the people coming to celebrate the occasion will bring some money, a length of fabric, or a new cooking pot as a gift. They know that on the occasion of a birth, death, or wedding in their house, all the same people will reciprocate. When I imagine all the property that changes hands, and especially when I think of how the money gets passed back and forth, I imagine a vast net that stretches all over Senegal, holding people close, leaving no one out.

It’s all something we miss out on in the States. There’s less need for a constant reminder that we are not alone, perhaps. We have cell phones and the Internet and a reliable postal service, after all. But there’s also less need for closeness and trust. Here, you buy vegetables from your aunt and bread from your dad and you go the carpenter that your family always goes to and you get your clothing made at the same tailor as all of your most stylish friends. In the States, we can trust that products and services are going to be of a certain quality, that doctors are trained well, that cars won’t just give out, that we’ll never be stuck on the side of the road, miles and miles from home. Here in Senegal, none of that is guaranteed. So if the car you’re in breaks down, it’s midnight, and you’re hours from a major city, it helps to know that you can walk into the nearest village, pick any compound, and find a family there. The family will offer you food and water, and probably you’ll be welcome to spend the night, and odds are they’ll know someone who’s going to be headed in your direction tomorrow: would you like a ride?

When I left the States, I left behind a lot of important relationships. I know they’re still there, at least for the most part. They’re more real, in many ways, than what I have here in Senegal. After all, sometimes people are nice to me because my skin is white. But there’s something so easy to trust here, something I know I can rely upon. I don’t have to work at relationships or try to build stronger ties. I can disappear and come back the next day, the next month, the next year, and the reaction from my family would be the same when I walked back into the compound: quiet happiness, fuss-free greetings, and a quick reintegration back into the fold, the daily life, the closeness and community. They can’t imagine that I could change in any significant way.

I can’t be sure that it’ll be so easy when I come home to the States. The family across the country, the friends I left two years ago with sadness; I’ll see some of them again soon, but then I’m leaving again for Senegal. Senegal is not a place I’m ready to leave, and the States is not a place I’m ready to live again. This trip will be a little bit of an experiment in coming home, and while I’m happy to do it, I’m more sure of what I’ll feel landing again in Dakar than touching down in Los Angeles.

Love and guts,

- Jessie

P.S. See you soon. Which is good news, really.

Happy (Holi)Days

I have never been much of a holiday person. Even when I was a little kid, I think a slightly arrogant precocious skepticism in me ruined Christmas for my mom. Not that I was one of those people who sensed the beginning of the holiday season with gloom, either. I just never got that attached to the various mythologies of the holidays.

In any case, I usually enjoy occasions. People bustling around being friendly, good food, etc. What’s not to love? There’s one type of holiday person who does manage to get very much on my nerves, however. She’s the one who organizes the parties and finds the decorations and bakes the 16 types of reindeer cookies. Generally people follow along and get excited with her, so she is rarely disappointed with the reception of her Christmas eve cocktail party, which is inevitably followed by her Christmas morning breakfast buffet, which finally culminates in her Christmas day feast.

On the other hand, if you’re someone like me, who doesn’t dislike Christmas so much as feels rather apathetic to the whole holiday thing in general, beware. This is the time of year to keep your mouth shut. Anyone who has the nerve to be less exuberant about the holiday season than this person, no matter the reason, is not simply allowed to do her own thing, go her own way, attend only the cocktail party and skip out on the buffet and feast the next morning. No, no. People like me are generally labeled the scrooge or grinch of the season.

In spite of my seasonal wariness of good cheer, I had three very nice holidays recently. Thanksgiving was spent with the other volunteers of the Kaolack region in our regional house. The kitchen is tiny and not particularly well founded in pots and pans and spices. Somehow, though, the volunteers doing the cooking put three turkeys on the table, a bunch of pies, and a forest of side dishes. In a country where real milk (not powdered) and butter (instead of margarine) are luxuries, and where you have to go all the way to the capital to find things like plums, celery, mushrooms, basil, and quality cheese, these guys put nothing short of a feast out there for us all. (And, I’ll say, they did it without being the type of people I described above.) Anyway, it was delicious.

Some friends and I were treated to another fine meal on Christmas eve. The parents of a good friend came out to visit, and they treated us all to dinner at one of the classiest places in Dakar. The meal was, of course, incredible. So was the people-watching. There aren’t that many Christians in Senegal, so I expected the restaurant to be mostly packed with the Lebanese and ex-pat population of Dakar. Not so. For every table of awkward Americans, there were two of three of Senegalese, plus the occasional Lebanese family, among others. When every table was seated and the place really got bustling, we began to hear the familiar beats of Senegalese music floating over from a big concert next door. More than just the beats, actually: we probably couldn’t have heard it any better had we paid for tickets instead of dinner. As the Christmas eve wine began to take hold, whole tables of young men and women leapt to the small center area of the restaurant, right in front of our table, and started dancing wildly. Beautiful flowing Senegalese fabrics, sharp leather dresses, brightly colored veils and scarves everywhere. They danced together, falling into something between what you would see in an American club and what I see in the village at baptisms and weddings. It was exuberant, unscheduled, unimposed merriment, and everyone in the restaurant shared it, no matter who they were, what they were, or what they thought they were celebrating. Merry Christmas, indeed. Or merry something, anyway. The merry part is enough for me, when it’s real. And it was, that night.

I had been in Dakar for a few days at this point, and since I’m at that point in my service where the end of my time in village is in sight, I hurried home to Ndiago for New Year’s. We had a beautiful, simple, delicious night at home on New Year’s Eve. I was actually surprised that anyone took much notice of the new year anyway, since Senegalese villagers have little need of the calendar we use in the States. Time is held together by Islamic holidays, planting and harvesting times, and the weekly communal prayer and market days. Days aren’t numbered or assigned to months unless you’re waiting for a remittance from your husband who’s working in Dakar. Nevertheless, the women cooked delicious holiday dinner dishes and made an incredibly sugary beverage with milk and tea and mint candies, and everyone stayed up talking and drinking until they were tired enough, even with all the excitement, to go to bed. That was when the old year passed, for them: when they were ready to sleep.

Holidays are a reminder of what we already know: that food is delicious, that we love our family and friends, that we can never get enough of counting our blessings. It’s not about something that happens once a year, but about what happens every day. What I love in this time of year is that we are given more opportunity to be thoughtful about all that. Christmas isn’t a single day, a blowout event, a thing that’s contained, and neither is Thanksgiving or New Year’s. The single big feast, the ceremonial lighting of the tree, the conviction that this day is special in any way all seems short-sighted to me, and perhaps that’s why the grinch label sticks. But to me, anyway, a holiday is whenever you’re merry, whenever you’re full of delicious food and surrounded by friends and the people you love.

Every Senegalese holiday has this feeling to it, and so does every baptism and wedding in the village. Every new life, every holy moment, every feast day is an opportunity to get together, eat until you can barely think, and then dance your brains out with your family and friends (which, in the Senegalese sense, are one and the same). No grinch am I, then. At least not in Senegal. It’s not that the holidays aren’t important to me; it’s just that every day has something holy to it. So happy Thanksgiving, merry Christmas, and happy new year to all of you. I hope you have a lovely January 4th as well.

Love and guts,

Jessie

Four Paragraphs.

It seems like a Peace Corps cliché to say that death is everywhere in Senegal: the smell of it, the sound and even sight of it. If they cannot be eaten, the carcasses of donkeys, horses, cows, goats, and sheep are dragged out to the empty fields just beyond the village, to the same place where it’s considered polite to dump your trash. For days afterward, people passing on foot and horse cart hold scraps of fabric to their mouths and noses, breathing shallowly or not at all as they go by. The sound of death is also a little mundane. It’s the sound of my cat pouncing on whatever he finds scurrying around my hut at night. Besides, this is not a place like the United States, where we are far from our food. On the holidays and rare occasions when we have meat, it’s slaughtered right there in the compound.

In villages further south, the death of a member of the community member is announced by the wailing of women, which begins among the bereaved and travels from compound to compound. In my village, it’s announced over the same loudspeaker that is used to sing out the call to prayer. When we hear the system switch on at a time we know is not set aside for a pause for devotion, everyone stops what they’re doing to listen. All conversation stops. Children are shushed and shoved aside. The man making the announcement greets the village and lists the names of the deceased’s closest relatives before saying his or her name. Though he begins to repeat the message, his voice is drowned out by the beginnings of shocked or grieved commentary. Deaths here are not always surprises, but it seems like they’re always shocking.

As the car I was in pulled out of the garage in Kaolack the other day, we passed the usual street vendors and travelers common in that corner of the city. This is my least-favorite place to walk in Senegal, this short stretch at the mouth of the garage: too many people, too many cars, and not enough space for everything that’s happening. I had a window seat, which almost never happens, and though I’ve seen it all a hundred times I still sat staring out at the passing foot traffic moving quickly between a lane of cars and a row of street vendors. Perhaps I stuck out to the man on the opposite side of the road because my skin, like his, is not black. For whatever reason, I caught the eye of this Lebanese or Moroccan man as the car passed him by, headed in the opposite direction. I have three freeze-frame memories of what happened here. The first is his face as we made eye contact, expressing a little surprise, perhaps, to see a young white woman traveling in the normal Senegalese way. The second is just a moment later, when the car I was in had almost reached him and the larger car behind him began, inexorably, somehow not stopping, to crush his body beneath it as it passed, moving in the direction opposite my car. In this moment his legs are bending, but backwards and not at the knee. His hands are briefly thrown up before they come rushing back down. The third is the aftermath, the last scene, the final frame this man will ever appear in to anybody. I tried to get my car to stop, less out of a thought that the first-aid training I received at the beginning of my service could be of any possible use, more out of a feeling that the man should not be left behind, that by witnessing and being present at his death, we were responsible in some way for what immediately followed. Or rather, that I was. It was panic, desperate and simple, and the others in the car could not share it because they had seen nothing. “He’s dead, probably,” they told me, when I had said what I saw. The car drove on.

I have this feeling, every time I hear of a death in my village or a death back home in the States, that to die is to be left behind by everyone and everything else. Even grieving is a way of continuing, by sorting through the pain and horror of the death of a loved one until you come out the other side of it. Of course, it would be impossible to stand still with those we love who have died, unthinkable to halt our progress forward in time, horrific to allow ourselves to live only in the past with our ghosts. I know, I know. But I can’t shake this feeling that we do the dead an injustice by leaving them back there, driving away with people who did not see, to meet people who will not know, to confront a life that we perhaps think continues, always and always.

Huzzah!

The library program we're starting up is getting to its feet! I'm working on a grant to rehabilitate the oldest classroom at the primary school and we're working on locating donors for books in French and English. For background and explanation of this project, please take a look at the previous blog post.

Anyway, one of the potential sources of books is this organization, International Book Project. They have worked with Peace Corps Volunteers in the past and I'm very excited to be making a connection with them. One of the best parts is that they'll be able to maintain a relationship with the primary school in Ndiago after the last Peace Corps volunteer here has gone home. From my contact with them so far, it seems like a really great group of people.

I'm writing about this project again (and probably not for the last time) because I would like to ask you to help me fund raise for books. When I first got to Ndiago and asked my family and friends to help me raise money for mosquito nets with Against Malaria, I was blown away by the response. The generosity I saw made me feel like I was a part of a team, being supported here by friends and family far away. This is a much smaller project, at least at this stage, but I still need your help.

Here is the form email that International Book Project sends out to people, helpfully edited to have the relevant information already inserted:

Greetings from the International Book Project! Jessie Seiler gave our organization your contact information as someone who might be willing to sponsor a shipment of English language books for her school library organization in Ndiago, Senegal.

The International Book Project is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit which collects new and used books and sends them to schools, libraries, and other nonprofit organizations in developing countries. You can learn more about our organization at our website www.internationalbookproject.org. The cost for shipping an m-bag (approximately 32 lbs) of books is $200.

You may donate by sending a check to:

International Book Project

1440 Delaware Avenue

Lexington, KY 40505.

You may also donate online via credit card by going to www.internationalbookproject.org and clicking on the “Donate” banner at the top of the page. Please indicate in the memo of the check or the notes section of the online giving screen that the donation is for Jessie Seiler, Peace Corps Volunteer. All donations are tax deductible.

Thank you for your support. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

They say it about as well as I could. Thank you for your support. I look forward to hearing from you, and even seeing you, very soon.

Love and guts,

Jessie

A Post About Work!

I never write about work. I suppose that writing is a kind of thoughtful vacation for me, and I spend too much time already stressing and obsessing about the details of the work I do in Ndiago to want to carry that over into the relaxing pensiveness of writing for this blog. But today is a little different.

This entry almost didn't happen. I was trying to get to the village this morning, but since Tabaski, a big old Muslim holiday, is just a couple of days away, about a bazillion people are traveling now and I missed my morning car to Guinguineo. I've been here too long to be frustrated by the workings and non-working of public transit, so I returned to the regional house and got back to work. I'll give it another shot in the afternoon.

Anyway, some variant of what I've written below might find its way into a grant request, so there's more background information here than you'll want if you read this blog a lot (weirdo) or if you talk to me regularly on the phone.

Here we go. The Ndiago Library Project.

Ndiago is a small village in the Kaolack region, 7 kilometers from Guinguineo. It is home to about 300 men, women, and children. Like most people living in rural areas in Kaolack, the villagers are primarily farmers living just above the subsistence level. Everyone farms, but some families have enough money to run small businesses as well. One woman sells soaps, another peddles lightly-used clothing and fabrics, and a couple of the wealthiest families have even established small boutiques, stores that sell very basic supplies such as powdered milk, cooking oil, eggs, and small sweet candies.

Another sign of the slight prosperity of Ndiago is the presence of the schools. The village is the Communite Rurale, the Senegalese version of the county seat, so we have the area's main schools. Together, these three small schools serve children roughly between the ages of 5 and eighteen. Kids attend from Ndiago and many of the surrounding vilages, including Sakhagne, where my neighbor PCV Andrew Oberstadt lives and works. Formal education is very highly valued in Ndiago and the surrounding area, and families will save and sacrifice to pay the enrollment fees and to purchase chalk, pencils, and notebooks for their young students. When a child receives a certificate of promotion to the next grade level, the mothers will proudly display the prized sheet of paper on the otherwise barren walls of their huts.

The experience of earning an education in Senegal is completely different from what my school life was like in the States. My parents never reluctantly pulled me out of class for a week because they needed my help bringing in the last of the peanut crop. I went to a series of good schools and was lucky to meet so many gifted and passionate teachers. Year after year, my teachers were thoughtful, excited about their work, and endlessly devoted to instilling a love of learning in me and my classmates. And when we graduated from college, some of the best and most intelligent people I know chose to become teachers. No surprise there, with the role models we had. We also never suffered from a crippling lack of school supplies. Back-to-school shopping was a yearly ritual, and maybe the only type of shopping I ever enjoyed. We had computers and educational software and endless supplies of pencils, binders, erasers, a million other things. Many of the administrator’s offices at my high school had bowls of M&Ms ready for casual visits by students.

And then, of course, we had books. We had school libraries and city libraries full of books on every subject imaginable, and since I grew up in Los Angeles, those books came in many different languages. I am a child of parents who love the written word, and so my love of reading came upon me early. I might be one of the only American 24 year-olds left who would prefer an hour with a book to an hour with the Internet.

When I got to Senegal, I quickly noticed that people here do not read for fun. Cramped into a ball on Senegalese public transit, barreling down horrific roads full of pot-holes and squished between smelly, coughing adults and screaming, puking infants, dodging the streams of goat urine trickling down from the roof of the decrepit vehicle (those goats up there must be terrified, they way they bleat and carry on), I pull out a book. In the 22 months I have lived here, I’ve never seen any Senegalese person even carrying a book around like that.

That’s one problem. But it’s not really what I’m concerned with. What makes me sad is that the students of Ndiago don’t have access to books. The only authority they have on any subject is their teachers. Sure, they can ask their parents questions, but their parents probably received even less of a basic education than they’re getting. There’s no Internet here, no textbooks that the kids have easy access to, no Encyclopedias, no dictionaries, nothing. Teachers write out a passage in French on the board, students copy it down and memorize it. No children in the village hear French spoken at home, very few adults understand it, and so it’s tough to imagine how the students could comprehend much of what they “learn.”

School opened back up recently, after the long rainy season break. The kids, even ones as young as 5 and 6, have been working in the fields with their parents and older siblings for months. Now, they return to the classrooms. They return to overcrowded rooms, to a lack of basic supplies, to teachers who are angry and frustrated and who sometimes go on strike because they haven’t been paid by the Senegalese government.

It’s tough to be very excited about these prospects, but this year, I am. The teachers at the primary school approached me with a plan. We are rehabilitating a large empty building on campus and turning it into a library, for the use of all the children in Ndiago and the surrounding communities. We are also going to incorporate time for reading and a basic literacy program into the curriculum. I can’t imagine a project that could be as rewarding to the community and as gratifying to myself, given the importance of education in Senegal and the deep love I have of reading.

Right now, we’re taking the preliminary steps. The village leadership has invited a mason to come evaluate the old classroom this weekend, so that we will know if we can fix up the space or if we should consider building a new one. I will soon be looking for some funding to build bookshelves and bring in seating and tables and perhaps electric lighting for the library building. And then, of course, we’re looking for books. Many organizations who specialize in sending lightly-used books to the developing world exist, so I’m not too worried. We’re looking primarily for books in French, since students don’t begin to learn English until a very late time in their schooling when many have already stopped attending. I’m talking with all the teachers about how they can incorporate more literacy and reading comprehension in their students’ days. All in all, there’s a lot of work to be done, and everyone involved is excited to get to it.

I’m also excited because this is a project that I can invite my friends and family back home to help me with. I might be doing some fundraising myself for the project instead of writing a grant, and of course at some point I might ask for donations of books. In another way, I’ve already received a lot of help from home. My parents and every teacher who ever put a book in my hands are all a little responsible for the fact that I’m undertaking this project so happily. Thank you to all of you.

Anyway, time for lunch and a second shot at getting out of here, back to Ndiago. Happy Thanksgiving.

Love and guts,

Jessie

Writing about falling asleep instead of falling asleep

The sudden and strong wind that usually brings rain starts before dawn this morning, and since I live in fear of my hut collapsing with every breeze, I wake up. With no real anxiety, I sleepily make a mental list of what to collect from the ruin, the rocks and mud: my wallet and cell phone, my Senegalese work permit, my two passports (Peace Corps kids are just that cool), a sweater. I curl my feet up away from the part of my bed that inevitably gets soaked in every downpour and poke my cat until he wakes up, not for any reason, just because he shouldn't get to be comfy if I'm not. My arm brushes against my mosquito net, which keeps out the bugs, the bad dreams, and the zombies. The cat does not agree with my assessment that he should be awake just now and falls back to sleep, after attempting to stretch out on my face.

Really, it is not as physically miserable as it sounds. If Senegal has given me anything, it's a comfort in waiting, something more than patience or acceptance; an ability to be suspended with good humor over unpredictable prospects, or even predictable disappointments.

The wind subsides and no rain comes, so I stay dry -- but awake. By this time, my cat Pierre is fully awake and demanding breakfast. Dawn is getting around to breaking through the remaining wisps of clouds from whatever storm has passed us by, and my host mom is up and about, pulling water and clucking back at the chickens. I give in, get up, and make slow oatmeal on my tiny gas stove. Slow oatmeal is just like normal oatmeal, but for one thing: you let it sit there after it's cooked and cool off, because the day is already too hot for a steaming breakfast. By seven o'clock, the two year old girl in our compound is banging on my door, demanding that I pick her up. I'm more than happy to oblige, and the days begins.

I greet my family and pull a couple buckets of water for bathing and drinking. After some other light chores and a mug of tea, I head out on today's errand: bothering people. As a health volunteer, bugging people about stuff is my most common activity. Wash your hands, eat your veggies, take your kid to the village health post at the first sign of high fever, etc. My bosses call it "education" or, even better, "sensitization." Today's subject is mosquito nets. I was curious how many people still had them from last year's distribution, how many people were sleeping under them every night, and what other measures people were taking to prevent malaria.

I ramble around the village until the early afternoon, going from compound to compound and asking people about their nets. The survey goes well, though more people have managed to lose, tear, or give away their nets than I would have imagined. But that's life. I dispense advice about neem lotion and malaria prevention, gossip a bit, and head home.

By the time I get back to my compound, it's time for lunch. My family and I sit down to a big, bland bowl together. The dish is called "mbaxal," and it's really just rice cooked with a handful of crushed peanuts, some spices, and a hint of dried fish. I feel hungrier with a stomach full of mbaxal than I do before I sit down to eat it, and I know it's worse for my family. My youngest host brother is six, and even he goes out to the fields every morning. Today, like most days, I have nothing to complain about.

After lunch, the afternoon routine: sitting. During some of the seasons, no matter how hot it is or how crappy lunch was, people have to go back to the fields. Today, though, everyone stays in. We all sit outside in the shade of a neem tree, roasting some of the early corn to snack on and trying not to move more than necessary. Our neighbors come to visit. Teenagers with fake-fancy cell phones play music and show off their ring-tones while the adults doze and gossip and the youngest kids are sent to bring them glasses of water from inside. The sun glares, since the early morning clouds are completely gone, but going inside means relinquishing the slight breeze. It's just too hot for that. So much for a cool, comfortable rainy season.

I settle down with a book until late afternoon, when I go see my counterpart to discuss the mosquito net information and some plans for next week. As the sun sets and the temperature and humidity finally drop, I take a bucket bath. The day is not far from an ending. We eat dinner and sit in the moonlight, in the silence, speaking softly: the electricity is out again, and for the thousandth time since I've come here I think how strange and beautiful it is that the stars actually twinkle.

As I lay on my back, drifting on a plastic mat on the sand, watching the moon and the stars and their shapes in the sky, thinking inevitably about geometry, Fama plops down next to me. Fama is almost five, and she is pretty sure that Allah put me on Earth to give her candy and piggie-back rides. As she wriggles beside me, still dancing while falling asleep, I can't think of anything wrong with her way of seeing things.

"Aissa," she says. "Aissa," she insists, calling my name and speaking half from her dreams. "When I'm sleeping, scratch my tummy a little bit. Scratch it a little bit right here, and then when I wake up and ask, say it's Pierre, say it's your cat. OK? Say Pierre is rubbing my tummy. Aissa, Aissa, today Pierre went up into the tree, he ate a bird." She mumbles something a little more about the cat and the tree, curls up and grabs at my hand, finally is still and deeply asleep.

The wind is coming up again. I'm thinking that it'll rain tonight, and I'll pull my feet up again and hope they don't get wet. I'm lying on my back, swatting at a few mosquitoes, listening to muted voices in the darkness, not thinking of anything in particular, watching triangles of stars and a passing satellite. Pierre deposits himself on my stomach comfortably. Fama is sleeping beside me and any minute now I'll carry her to her grandmother's bed. It's cooling off enough to sleep. I never used to fall asleep easily in the States, but here it just comes naturally.

Today was good. I've never been happier in my life, and I'm thinking maybe tomorrow will be a good day too.

Love and guts, and please excuse the typos. It's past my bed-time.

Jessie