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

First round of photos

So I kind of hate taking photographs in Senegal. I didn't put a whole lot of effort into taking these photos, and so far I haven't captioned this album so you won't know what you're looking at. But I'll do that soon, I promise! And since my posts recently haven't been particularly descriptive of my daily life here, I thought this would be good.

Pictures!

I'm working on a couple other posts, but I'm looking to get back to site tomorrow afternoon so I'm not sure I'll be able to finish anything. I'll be back in Kaolack to get a mandatory swine flu vaccine and celebrate Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks, though. So I'll talk to you guys then.

Love and guts!

Jessie



EDIT: I captioned them! Yay for me!

The Art of Losing

PRE-PRE-SCRIPT: Ok, I have two hours in Kaolack to get a ton of work done. So I'm not going to edit this before I post it, even though I finished writing it a few days ago and should really give it a glance, or respond to any emails. But I should be back in a week or two, so see you then! Oh yeah, things in the village are fantastic and work is going well. There's a pretty cool latrine thing I've got going, and if it works out.... Well, we'll see.

PRE-SCRIPT: As I write this, I'm somewhere close to my third month without regular Internet access. We moved the Kaolack regional house a few weeks ago, and we're still working on getting everything going. But I believe it should only be a couple more days. I've been working on a couple of blog entries lately, which has been made more difficult than usual by something that gets explained below. So I'm going to try to sweat these last few paragraphs out. If you're one of the people who's sent me an email recently, please excuse me! I've occasionally borrowed a friend's computer and taken it out into town, to one of the couple local spots with wireless access. But it's been difficult to sit and concentrate on communication recently.

For those of you keeping score at home, I'm almost eight months into my service. It's gone shockingly fast. Tomorrow, the next stage of volunteers will be traveling to their regional houses. We'll receive our newbies here in Kaolack and take them shopping, introduce them to the sprawling mess of this city. We're not the new kids any more. Weird.

One of my bosses came out to my village recently to talk about my action plan, a long-term calendar of goals and strategies related to my work in the village. After his visit, I felt rejuvenated and super excited about things to come. So I'm here in Kaolack to help the new volunteers, and then it's back to the village for some good times.

Anyway. On to what I actually wanted to talk about.

I'm familiar with what it feels like to have a song stuck in my head. The two or three lines that you become stuck on, that keep you from moving on to the end. The urge to hum it out loud, to ask around if you've forgotten what line comes next, to spread your suspension to the people around you and force them to take a share in it. I'm familiar with all these things, but only remotely so. Much more often, I find myself chasing a couple of lines of poetry around my skull, sometimes even paragraphs of prose. A few authors and poets do this to me often: John Fowles, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot. And that's when I find myself in trouble. That's when I get the urge to go back and find the paragraph or verse I'm thinking about, put it in its context, as if it were a part of a wall that needed to be rebuilt, a child that had to be tucked back in properly, a gap urgently needing to be filled.

In Senegal, this has become much more difficult. When I was still in college, I had three resources that are completely lost to me now: my fellow students, books, and the Internet. So these days, if I get a line from something stuck in my head, I have to wait until I come into Kaolack and hope that it's findable from here. In this way, I'm learning patience and apathy.

Anyway, the most recent poem that's been driving me nuts is Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, which I first ran across in a high school English class. I'm re-typing it here, not because you wouldn't be able to find it, but for the fun of going through it like this:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

She wrote this poem toward the end of her life, but I don't know on what occasion. I imagine it was the death of a loved one, though since I don't have any Internet access as I write this, you guys will have to figure that out for yourselves.

It's been a month of small losses for me.

There's a mango tree growing in my latrine. I'll admit to dropping a lot of mango seeds down there recently, mostly out of curiosity. How fertile, exactly, is my poop? Teeming as it is with amoebae and other nasty parasites, can it support more complicated life? Every morning and night, when I brush my teeth, I like to check in on it. Brush, brush, brush, spit. Why, hello, Mango Tree! How are you today? You get the idea. It was the spit part that got me in trouble one night. I went to spit and stare, and my glasses dropped off my nose, bounced (I held my breath and prayed, but couldn't catch them) twice, and fell down the three meters into my poop pit, landing with what seemed to be a rather self-satisfied splooshing noise at the bottom.

I took it very well. Once I stopped choke-laughing on my toothpaste, I slipped back into my hut and found my replacement pair. The Peace Corps, in its infinite wisdom, makes us bring an extra to country. Presumably for just such an emergency. And thanks to the fantastic insurance coverage we've got over here, the American taxpayers will be buying me another pair. The whole thing is more of a funny story than anything else. It all makes me think I should keep a list of the strange things that accidentally or purposefully find themselves in my latrine.

The second loss was more significant. I arrived in Kaolack one day to find that the rainy season had claimed my beloved laptop. Even though I had left it locked up in a secure, metal-plated chest (tastefully decorated in wall-paper covered in teddy bears), somehow the rain had found its way in. I dried it out for a while, but the keyboard's still not working and the whole thing is generally behaving rather funkily. Considering everything that's there, I feel like I have the right to be pretty upset. My music collection, photos, writing from my college years. I'll probably be able to scrape the hard drive out and salvage all that, but I'd also become really attached to the particular experience of writing and working with that machine. I'm borrowing a friend's laptop now, but the keys aren't fit so perfectly to my fingers, it just doesn't feel like home.

I was deeply upset for a day, and then almost completely forgot about it. I only see my computer every couple of weeks or so, and I suppose some forgetting of it had already occurred. And of course I knew when I came to Senegal that there was a good chance my computer wouldn't be making the return trip home with me. This place is hell on electronics, and of course there's always the possibility of theft. Nevertheless, my laptop was on a short list of things I had hoped to protect while here. If you had told me before I left for Senegal that I would have this type of accident so early on in my service, I think I would have been a little bit upset about it. But now, my computer's absence is nothing. It doesn't bother me, I don't ever think of it.

The last thing I lost recently was my cell phone. I didn't lose it, precisely. But I broke it. No need to get into the details of how I managed to do the damage, but it was pretty dumb on my part. Suddenly, on this Friday night, the damn thing was only good as a flashlight. My phone number itself was lost: no one calling my number would have been able to get through. My contacts were all lost, and since my main method of communication with other volunteers is through text messages, a fair number of threads of conversations were gone as well. Friends who sent me texts (and I had been in the middle of a couple exchanges) would wonder why I had all of a sudden gone quiet. And I would be unable to explain myself until I got to Guinguineo, purchased a new SIM card, installed it, waited for two days for the Senegalese phone company people to wake it up. And then I would have to find a way to get back in contact with everyone. It's not as if I had written any one's phone number down, so that part was going to be tricky. Anyway, I was upset with myself, unhappy about how slow the process of healing would be, and bitter about the loss of contact, contacts. I went to bed that night in a black mood, about as bad as anything I've felt since getting here.

I left for Guinguineo the next morning, and was home in time for lunch. A couple of days later, I had a functioning cell phone again and I was able to track down most of the people I had been in contact with. Nothing important had happened during my three nights of being completely out of touch with my friends in Senegal, the Peace Corps folk in Dakar, and people back in the United States. The crisis was past. But during those days, I noticed the same feeling I had experienced with my computer; or rather, the same lack of feeling. There had been the initial anxiety, the initial disgust with myself for messing up my phone. But then, nothing.

I guess it's no surprise that I notice myself becoming less attached to the physical presence of my property, less materialistic. After all, the space in which I live has become considerably smaller. I store some stuff at the Kaolack house, but really, everything I own is in that little hut. And that little hut is itself made of rocks, mud, sticks, and a little bit of cement. Believe it: in the middle of the worst storms of the rainy season, after seeing other huts in the village collapse, I certainly made a mental inventory of the things in my hut I would attempt to salvage if the thatched roof collapsed and the walls caved in. I saw myself sifting through a pile of rubble, looking for... nothing. My wallet, my cell phone, my headlamp. If I hadn't lost my black security blanket utterly shapeless old hoodie, that too. But I realized that all I would really want would be the handful of change it would require for me to catch a charette to Guinguineo, and from there, a car to Kaolack. That's 600 CFA, or a little over a dollar.

Maybe it used to be important to me to have a mental list of the things I could depend upon always having with me. No matter where I found myself, if I had even partial use of my mental faculties I would probably have remembered my wallet, my cell phone, etc. And if I were at home (Los Angeles, Annapolis, Chicago) I would have a familiar stack of books, a computer, other small things to pour over, with which I could spin the sort of net that would keep my personality from leaking away and merging with others. People were like that for me, too. Carrying around a cell phone with a list of names and numbers in it was always a little like carrying around the selves those names and numbers represented. It was always so easy to pick up the phone and be connected. Suddenly those possessions aren't here anymore, and I have recent occasion to realize that the ones that are, aren't here forever. They never were, of course, but the illusion is gone. And the people in that phone book are gone, too. It costs me about a dollar a minute to call the United States, and an international text message costs the same. And even if you guys over there in the States signed up for Skype and called me occasionally, we would inevitably sometimes find ourselves, separated by an ocean and by a vaster gulf of daily experiences, with nothing to say to each other.

If I had made a list a year ago of people and things I was unwilling to lose in this way, it would have been pretty long. I need reminders of others, the presence of things. Or I thought I did. I thought I needed the presence of others and the forces of their personalities to assert the existence of my own, to interact, to expect things of me. I thought I would be lost without a handful of possessions and unable to function. I was wrong, at least in part. I lost my glasses, my computer, and my cell phone. These three items would have been on that list. And yet their loss was no disaster. So I have to ask myself now: what would that thing or person be, that losing them would be a disaster? And since I have to question the validity of my list, as it's been proved inaccurate so far, I have also to ask myself if I'll even know in advance what it is that's of vital importance to me. I can't guess what it's going to be. I can only wait to lose it, in its turn.

Childhood in Senegal

OK! Hello. Remind me to tell you later about mosquito nets. SUCH GOOD NEWS. But yeah, I wanna get this stuff out first.

We're about a week in to Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. I'm fasting along with my family, abstaining from eating or drinking between 5 AM, the dawn prayer, and about 7:30 PM, the sundown prayer. It hasn't been horribly difficult so far, though getting work done is tough. People are hungry, and as the day goes along they become increasingly cranky. There's a lot I want to share about this all, but I think I'll wait until we're a little further a long in the holiday before I talk about it.

I've been thinking a lot about childhood in Senegal recently. The children here don't fast during Ramadan. Some of them are lucky to have leftovers from the previous day's dinner to eat during the day, some eat with other families, some fend for themselves in other ways. It's probably not a horrible time to be a child, in many ways: no school, not as much work, a lot of time to sit around and play cards. Of course, if you happen to still be breast-feeding you might be in for it. Many mothers choose to fast, even if they should be eating for two. And there's one other pitfall.

Every time a child is bugging me in the village, or trying to play while I'm trying to study, or attempting to help me in the pepiniere or while doing a baby-weighing, the response from the adults is always the same: "He's just rude, Aissa. Go find a stick and beat him." Corporal punishment is the norm here, where children are raised not by one father and one mother but by a whole village of extended family members. Maybe the standardization helps, since the children wander from compound to compound, family to family. There's no squabbling over how much time-out is too much time-out, no question of whether a parent is over-reacting by taking toys away (what toys?). If an adult thinks a child is out of line, that kid gets anything from a smack on the leg or face to a full-on beating. Smacking someone else's kid is just as acceptable as smacking your own. Sometimes other adults will intervene if a beating is getting a little out of hand, and if it's being done in public: "That's enough, that's enough." But this is an entrenched community practice. If your kid comes home sobbing, saying the neighbor smacked him, you're going to shrug and accept that your kid probably had it coming. You wouldn't think of going to speak with the neighbor about it, and you're not mad. You've maybe even smacked someone else's kid today. That's how it works.

I've been thinking about all this because from the very first day of the fast, the intensity and frequency of this type of punishment went through the roof. I've seen someone smack a kid for nothing in particular almost every day I've been in Senegal, so I thought I was getting used to it. No way. Not even close. Everyone's in a bad mood these days. Cranky parents are beating the crap out of their kids, or maybe just smacking them a little more than usual. Two kids in my compound got in a little tiff over cards the other day, not an uncommon experience when you're 3 or 5 years old. Their mom responded by dragging them both across the compound to her room, with them bawling and trying to squirm out of their clothes to get away and dragging their limbs and flailing all over the place, with the rest of us looking on. She shoved them in, closed the door and barred it from the inside, and just went to town on them.

All of this made me remember one of my experiences from the very beginning of my time in Senegal (all of 6 months ago now, by the way). When I came back from Thies to my home-stay in Thieneba one day, we had a young visitor. Her name was Fatu, and she was the 4 year-old daughter of my mother's sister's daughter. This is a pretty close relation in Senegal, and her frequent visits weren't anything out of the ordinary. My host mom was always easy-going, perhaps because all the other children in the house were a little more grown up and once your kids get to be a certain age you just don't have to do as much yelling. The family environment was always friendly, always easy, and more like an American household than anything I've seen since. Fatu seemed to be enjoying her visit and loving the attention from my mom, though she was pretty scared of me.

One night during dinner, Fatu had a little hissy fit. I have no idea what started it, but it climaxed when she threw her mug of a warm millet desert called fonde to the floor. In a single moment, the mug shattered against the cement, food flew everywhere, and my mom, who had been sitting right next to Fatu, slapped her once across the face. By the time Fate had recovered from her shock enough to begin crying, my mom had already started cleaning up the mess. She hadn't raised her voice, hadn't at all relished hitting the child, and wasn't looking to do it again. She had hit Fatu once, and in such a way that it marked the end of a tiny crisis, not the beginning of a big one. Fatu sat in the same spot for ten minutes, mouth open, nose running, solid bawling flowing right out of her, water from a storm drain, an un-ending un-varying stream, my mother moving efficiently around her as she picked up the jagged clay remains of the mug. When she had finished cleaning, my mom finished her own mug of millet and headed back to the kitchen niche to clean up the dinner dishes. My sister Ndeye, 13, and still one of my favorites, approached Fatu slowly, coaxed her onto her lap and into silence, soothed her with more of the sweet, warm millet. My mom came back out and sat with us. Still seeming a little disconsolate, Fatu crawled into her lap, where my mom rocked her to sleep. The woman who had made the little girl cry in the first place was the only person who could really console her. Of course, what I saw happen then to Fatu was nothing like the beatings I see in the village. They're different worlds.

I don't know. It's just one more thing about Senegal, I guess. Hard to watch, hard to talk about. I want to try to explain cultural differences away, to make them comprehensible within the world-view I've grown into, to make them disappear. That makes me pretty uncomfortable. But so does refraining from making any comment. I guess I'll just reassure you all that I haven't hit any of the kids yet, and I don't plan on it.

Love and guts,

Jessie