Les Preservatifs, Entreprenuriat, St Patties Day et les Elections!

Hello everyone,

I think it's been about a month since I have last written and that is for a few reasons. First off, my schedule is actually starting to get a little more full, which is good as I was starting to go a nuts from all the free time. (Sounds crazy, I know... but I am theoretically here to do work, not just sit around drinking tea, speaking like a three year old in two languages that I have adequately butchered and sweating profusely.) Also, I've started to realize that my daily life here has become increasingly normal to me, so that things that once would have seen incredibly foreign and bizarre now appear to be nothing special, making it harder for me to find things to write about on a regular basis.

But as I mentioned I do actually have some more work to do now, such as the Sex Ed trainings I did with some other volunteers at a CEM school in Diaobe (Middle/High School). Diaobe is a large market town which gets visitors from all over Senegal, Mali, Gambia and Guinea. With so many people coming in and out and the town being completely packed every Wednesday for the weekly market, a small prostitution problem has developed there. Also, as is true with the rest of rural Senegal, there is a huge problem of girls getting pregnant around age 15 and therefore not being able to finish school. It was these main two problems that we aimed to address. I friend of mine and fellow volunteer, Laura, did these trainings last year at her local CEM and this year led the expansion to two other schools.

Basically each school picks fifty students and ten teachers spread across three grades to come to this 2 day training and learn all about STDs, unwanted pregnancies, the menstrual cycle, etc etc. It is then the job of the students to go back to their classes and give trainings on the material to their classmates. The idea being that since it is peer education it will break down many of the social and cultural barriers that usually make it hard for students to discuss such subjects (remember, this is a Muslim country!) The Peace Corp volunteers are also going to go to the schools twice a month, once to help the students plan their lesson, and the other to 'supervise' the lesson and help out if questions are asked that the student relays can't answer or to steer the discussion in a more apporpriate direction if it starts to go awry (it is likely that things such as "If a girl gets pregnant it's her fault" or "Wearing a bin-bin..." essentially a rope around the girls waist that is blessed by an imam, "... will stop pregnancy" will be said).

I had a great time at the initial trainings (I even got to explain some fairly graphic preventitive measures to a roomful of Senegalese teens who didn't get it, rather interesting) and I'm excited now to have at least two days a month scheduled where I get to make day trips out of site. It's nice to break it up and bit and move around... staying in the same place all the time can get a little tiring. My computer lessons at the Inspectors Office are also continuing. Those are nice because it also adds something concrete to my schedule, but explaining five hundred times how to change the font size, etc. is a little trying of my patience. Fortunately for me if there is one thing that I have learned since being in Senegal it is patience.

I am also going to be starting classes at the girls school in Velingara. It is a lot like a technical school in the US, and teaches girls who have mainly dropped out of regular school. It teaches them the basics, such as math, literacy and french. But the girls also learn to cook and/or sew. The school has a restaurant and tailor shop where the girls put their skills to practice. The money the girls gain while in school is put into a collective account at a microcredit bank. This way, when they graduate they already have a "Groupement Interet Economique" with capital available at the bank, allowing them to start their own little businesses immediately upon graduation. This is great as it not only generates income for their family's, help them with the starting costs which is often times the biggest obstacle to starting a personal business, but it also gets the women out of the house and empowers them as a whole. It's been started numerous times that the key to effective development is empowering women, and the longer I'm here the more I can see why that is true. It is the women who are more likely to go out of their way and bust their but to make some extra money for the family, when oftentimes the men don't have the motivation or determination to do so.

So I showed up at the school and said I could offer basic business classes and the directrice's face lit up. She said that is a component they have desperately wanted at their school but haven't been able to provide. Later today I will go and present my lesson plans to her and start next week with the classes themselves. I will also likely by helping teach the directrice and assistant directrice to use their computers a little better, help with the accounting at the school and it's restaurant / tailor shop, and basically anything else I can find to help with there. I'm really excited to get going... and it's yet another thing to fill up my schedule.

This past week was also St. Patrick's day, and yet another fine excuse to go to Kolda for a few days and relax (maybe play a little poker and have a few drinks!) Of course I had the bright idea of riding my bike to Kolda as the last time I tried I got an exploded back tire within 5 miles. Unfortunately, it's starting to get hot now, with temperatures over 100 degrees every day. So me and a fellow volunteer, Kelly, set off for the 85 mile bike ride. Needless to say, by the end of the trip we were quite exhausted and had gone through all of our water; I think I drank over 7 liters throughout the course of the ride. Unfortunately for us, the last 10 miles before Kolda is void of houses along the road, so we weren't even able to go and use some random person's well. I think we barely made it without passing out, but now I know I can do it! I'll just wait untill the next cold season to try it again...

After finally making it to Kolda I spent a nice long three and a half days there relaxing. I got my computer! Which I'm now using to write this unnecessarily long entry. For St. Patties day we killed and ate a pig, fresh pulled pork... yum yum yum! Me and some Peace Corp friends also started a fantasy baseball draft, they were laughing at my strategy of drafting almost exclusively Red Sox players. All in all it was a good time in Kolda, as always! And now I'm back at site, electricity is almost finished be installed, and soon I should have a fan, can't wait for that. Won't have to sweat myself to sleep every night, Inshallah.

In the wake of our own elections in the US, today is the local elections throughout all Senegal. Of course this means that people have gone running around in large groups yelling god knows what, climbing 100 people on a mini-bus and driving around town blasting load music, and stopping cars on the road and banging on the windows. I don't know about you, but having my travels delayed by mobs and being woken up in the middle of the night by load reggae music makes me want to vote for the candidate they represent. Fortunately, it is not only discouraged, but forbidden for Peace Corp volunteers to have anything to do with politics, so we stay away from all of this. Considering there have already been deaths in Senegal related to the elections (not to mention the fact that 3 countries surrounding Senegal have had military coups within the last six months) the farther away I stay from the excitement the better.

Politics work a little differently than back home, although Senegal is one of the best African nations as far as democratic liberty. It has reasonably free press, although there is only one TV station, which is government run, and spends have the news program simply playing speachesdelivered by President Wade. Also, since they have been freed from colonial French control, whichever candidate has been elected by the people has taken power without much struggle; something that isn't common on this continent. Overall there's a pretty good political situation here, but I'd still prefer to stay out of it.

More to come... including pictures. I think I missed some things, but I write everything down in my calendar so I can go back and check it out. Sorry for the grammatical mistakes! I think my English is going downhill being here...