So please visit the World Computer Exchange website - (http://www.worldcomputerexchange.org).
Click the "Donate Now" option from the top navigation bar
Click on the "Donate Now through Network for Good" button- Specify “PCV Michael Hebert - Senegal” as the designation, and your donation will be applied to the Senegal shipment for Ecole 4, Vélingara.
Even $5 would be a great help. The grant I applied for in conjuncture with the WCE computers should be going through any day (it received positive remarks from my superiors) and will be paying for everything needed besides the computers themselves. So the project is waiting and ready to go as soon as the computers can be shipped! Thank you all once again and I'll stop this shameless begging and continue on with some stories. And for anyone who is interested, here is an article that appeared in our Hingham paper, describing my project in further detail: http://www.wickedlocal.com/hingham/news/education/x488842557/HHS-grad-wants-to-bring-computers-to-Senegal.
I suppose I left off right before the Fourth of July, so I will start there. Now you may want to settle in and get comfortable for this entry, it's going to be a bit long! To celebrate our national holiday, a bunch of volunteers went down to Kedegou to celebrate. I went a few days early with friends to check out some of the local waterfalls that Kedegou is known for. Upon arriving in Kedegou we biked about 40km on dirt trails out to the village of Segou. There we then left the village and biked into the woods on a small dirt path surrounded by palm trees, bamboo, huge red-rock cliffs and monkeys yelping. It was definitely a cool bike ride! Eventually the path ended and we had to hide our gear and lock our bikes to a tree and started hiking along the rocky, slippery river bed. It felt like being in an Indiana Jones movie and was a nice break away from the normal day to day life in Senegal. After about an hour and a half of walking we finally made it to the waterfall, which, to our surprise, was almost completely dry! The rainy season had started, but I guess we needed to wait a bit longer before the full brunt of the rains could feed the waterfall. At least we got a few rocks showered down on us from some monkeys above.
That afternoon, after a little swim in the waterfall pool and refilling our water bottles, we headed back to where we left our bikes and set up camp. We spent the night camping, nestled between bamboo chutes and giant termite mounds while listening to the baboons howling all around us. Pretty cool... and we didn't run into any poisonous snakes or scorpions, which was a plus! At this point all of our diets have changed quite substantially, and we can survive miles and miles of biking and hiking across a few days on a little bread and some sardines. It's amazing what you can get used: mentally, socially and physically. So after getting a little sleep (can't lie, it's a little hard to sleep by yourself in a tent when baboons sound angry at you for being in their territory... and they can travel in packs of sixty plus and are aggressive) we got back on our bikes and went to another village, Dindephelo, to see yet another waterfall. Fortunately, this fall was fed by an underground spring, so there was actually a substantial chute and a large pool of cool, clear water in which to swim. There were also some groups of young Senegalese people there, who had come to the village for a party, dancing and rapping under the falls. It was quite hilarious. Finally, that afternoon, we biked back to Kedegou to get some rest and regain our energy for the Fourth of July, which was only 2 days away.
When the Fourth finally arrived, there were about 50 Peace Corps Senegal volunteers in Kedegou. Some of the local Kedegou volunteers had organized a morning 5k memorial run that was open to volunteers and the Senegalese public to celebrate our nation's holiday and better inform the public as to exactly what Peace Corps is and does (plus it was fun). The race essentially ended up being between all the military and police forces of Kedegou and a bunch of Peace Corps Volunteers who had partied a little too hard the night before. Needless to say, my fellow volunteers were crushed (I didn't run, I was 'helping' work the race / I didn't feel like trying to run in 95 degrees after getting only a couple hours of sleep). It was quite a sight, however, to see a bunch of white people running through the town, some with American flags as capes, getting confused looks from all the local Senegalese. The first place prize was three live chickens, tied by the ankles and handed to the winner at the podium. The other prizes were various articles American paraphernalia that you can find in most any market here: Barack Obama hologram belts, 'Barack and Michelle in Love' slow-dancing t-shirts and World Trade Center sandals. Meanwhile, great American classic 80's music was blaring from speakers lent from the local radio station, most likely doing a better job of scaring people off than attracting them. Oh well, we were all having a great time!
When the race was over it was time for the real party to begin. The Kedegou Crew does a great job getting ready for the party, which is the second biggest Peace Corps gathering off the year, after WAIST. We had large speakers rented (and stole the power from next door to use them), two large party tents, some games reminiscent of college, freshly made honey wine, a piñata full of goodies, more than enough to drink and two pigs to eat! Basically we all just enjoyed ourselves celebrating the great country that we are fortunate enough to have been born in. At night we even shot off a few fireworks, which some Senegalese people apparently mistook for something blowing up (there had been some fairly intense riots there a few months before). All in all it was a good time and gives me something to look forward to the next 4th of July.
After the nice break for the Fourth, it was back to day-to-day life in Vélingara. Now that we are in the rainy season and school summer vacation, my schedule has changed slightly. One of the main projects I've been working on (besides the computer lab project) has been continuing work with the Girl's Technical School. In the spring I gave entrepreneurial classes at the school to the girls who were about to graduate. This, however, is not incredibly sustainable as I will be gone in a little over a year and won't be able to teach the course. Throughout the summer, therefore, I have been working with one of the school's teachers, Mr. Gaspar Korea, on the class. I have been teaching him all the business basics while we simultaneously create a curriculum for the school to use, complete with tests and homework and all. Mr. Korea is a great guy and one of the few Catholics in town, so it's been quite humorous the few times he's wanted to have a glass a wine after lunch, and he asks me in a low, secretive voice if I know what wine is. To his surprise, I do! Senegal being a mainly Muslim country, the Christians who are here tend to be discreet when enjoying an alcoholic beverage. He also has more of an entrepreneurial spirit than most Senegalese (possibly to be attributed to his religion... it seems that the average Christian is a slightly more successful business person than their Muslim counterpart) and a great person with whom to work on this project.
The plan is to teach the class together the upcoming school year, work out any 'bugs' in the curriculum next summer, and then he can continue teaching the course once I return to the States. I'm a huge fan of the project because it is directly applicable to the students real lives, and isn't just an exercise in theory. During the last year, the students will spend half the year working to plan their proper enterprises. They will then graduate with a micro-loan from a local credit mutual and have the plans for their business already worked out. In this way the young girls can start working and making money right out of school. This will also help to get the women out of the house, where they are often stuck doing all the work. People here often complain that there isn't enough work. They will sit around construction sites and hope someone will pay them $2 a day to move cement. Otherwise they spend 75% of their time sitting around the house talking about how there is no work. Apparently the idea of creating their own enterprise and job is one that doesn't cross many people’s minds, and leaves the local economy stagnant and heavy in unemployment. Hopefully this course can improve the standard of living for these girls and their families and prove that with a little entrepreneurial spirit and effort there is work out there. Inshallah.
So on a day-to-day basis I have mostly been working on that project, teaching excel classes to people that work at the IDEN and doing any more work needed to get the computer project going strong. From time to time, however, it proves necessary to head out of Vélingara for a day and visit another volunteer; enjoy a change of scenery and company. While I like it here in Vélingara, it can be a very repetitive life (something I was partially hoping to avoid by coming to Senegal in the first place!) and a slight change of pace can be refreshing. Plus, it's always a boost of self-confidence to visit a volunteer in their village. When meeting people for the first time they are always amazed that you can speak Pular, while the people you're around everyday can tend to focus more on what you cannot yet understand. This is mainly due to the fact that with new people I just go through introductions and basic conversations that I have down pat in Pular, while with your own host family there tend to be more in-depth and complicated conversations that test your language level.
So on one of these days I went to visit my friend, Anika, in a village about 20km down the road. Very similar to my computer lab project, Anika worked in cooperation with a mosquito net distribution NGO and donors from home to bring over 650 mosquito nets to her village and the surrounding village. On this day she was distributing the nets to one of the surrounding villages while also doing a malaria 'info-session' to inform the public how to avoid catching malaria, how it's spread, etc. So I came to help carry the nets by bike from her village to the distribution village and, unexpectedly, to give a presentation in Pular on how to detect and avoid malaria. It was interesting being put on the spot in front of thirty women and told to do this presentation with Anika with no prior preparation. It's surprising, however, how well I was able to explain things through broken speech, some hand motions and a few animated demonstrations. It's also interesting to work a bit in another field, specifically health, as most of my work has to do with business and computers. Malaria is a disease that gets large international coverage and for good reason: it kills a lot people here every year, mainly children and elderly. The worst part about it is that someone can be completely healthy, a day later they have incredible hot sweats and are hallucinating in agony, and the next day they are dead. It's hard to get medical attention for such an affliction when your village is 25 km from the nearest health post. A teacher at the Girl's Technical School had recently fallen ill to malaria and couldn't so much as speak, never mind get out of bed. Fortunately he got the medicine in time and appears to be on the mend, but it just goes to show the problem malaria poses.
Being on this subject, it's interesting to note the difference in attitudes towards death between Americans and Senegalese. When someone died recently in the neighborhood, I asked my brother how or why. He looked at me with a face of amused confusion and said: "What do you mean how did he die? He just did, God willed it so." Of course I wanted to know if it was malaria, an infection that had spread, a car accident, anything! But to him it seemed a completely ridiculous question... people just die sometimes. Whether it's a child, adult or elderly person, it just happens. Back home we like to find the exact reason why a death occurred, oftentimes find someone to blame for it, and do everything we can to prevent it from happening to someone again. Quite a different attitude towards the one thing that we all, as human beings, have in common: the inevitability of death.
I was going to mention this later on, but I might as well get all the gloomy stuff out of the way all at once. Recently a 14 year old girl in Vélingara died while giving birth. Fortunately her baby daughter survived. I mention this as it is all too common here, especially in the southern sections of Senegal. Girls here tend to be far too young when they quit school and start having children, whether in wedlock or out. In the villages it is common for a girl to be married at the age of 14 to a man who's forty years old and already has two wives and ten children that he cannot adequetly support. I suppose the idea is that it's better for a young girl to become pregnant under these circumstances than young and unwed, however neither seems all that appealing. Fortunately the girls in town are often given more of a chance to attend school and hold of on having children than their village counterparts. My father here is good about insisting that all his daughters finish school just like the boys, but still uses marriage in an interesting way to avoid the girls getting pregnant. My one cousin, for example, tends to spend a little more time out roaming the streets at night than a 13 year old girl should. After not listening to her families warnings and continuing to go out, my father solved to the problem the best way he knew how: by marrying her off. The way this works is that the actual marriage will not happen for at least a few more years, probably depending on how she does in school and how demanding her husband to be is. In the meantime, the mariage promis will, theoretically, stop her from putting herself in the position to get impregnated by another man. An interesting solution and one that seems absurd given the way we view maraiges (true love, free choice, etc.), but given the culture and circumstances there are, at the very least, worse ways of dealing with this issue.
Ok, so after that I'll now try to lighten it up a bit. We're deep into the rainy season now, a fact that drastically changes life here in Senegal. For one, everything is green where it used to be sandy and dry. Seriously, no exaggeration, everything is green, including most of my possessions. Due to the extremely high level of humidity most everything has a thin layer of mold growing on it. My clothes, shoes, bed etc. are all finely coated in a thin layer of green. Smells great! The rainy season, as the name indicates, means there is a lot of rain. The storms, unlike at home, appear very quickly. One minute it's sunny out, the next you are hit in the face by a wall of wind and sand which is immediately followed by a downpour. Fortunately, the storms often leave as quickly as they appear, although sometimes they can be more reminiscent of New England rains by simply drizzling and keeping the skies grey for a few days. Here in Vélingara, the rains turn the roads into little rivers, sometimes forcing you to wade up to your knees in flood water, disgustingly dirty flood water, just to walk next door. As there is no trash collection system the water in the roads is stained brown by the run-off dirt and mud, the animal (and likely human) feces which covers the roads and all sorts of trash which was not fully burnt away. I make sure to do a good job washing off my sandals and feet after a walk around town.
The coming of the rainy season also means that it's time to work in the fields. Almost every Senegalese person has at least one field, regardless of their profession. Even in town, every square meter of free space within the compounds is used up with miniature corn fields. I enjoy riding my bike through the fields and watching everyone working, hacking away at the ground with a crude hoe, planting their livelihood. It also makes me glad that I'm not an agriculture volunteer, it looks like backbreaking, hard labor. Even the kids are involved, and they can commonly be seen working all day, leading donkey's with plows in tow or hanging out in the fields over-night warding off hungry monkeys; troops of which are know to eat entire fields in one night. It's a beautiful, although wet, time and while I enjoy it I'm also looking forward to it ending. Every small cut or scrape, even ones that are so small you couldn't see them, somehow get infected and turn into large sores lasting weeks at a time. It's a good thing Peace Corps gave me a whole briefcase full of meds upon my arrival in Senegal!
Recently we celebrated the marriage of one of my sisters, Hadji Camara. She has been 'promised' / engaged for a while, and hardly knows her husband as he lives and works in Dakar, but the two family compounds know each other well. Senegalese weddings tend to last a couple of days (they love their parties) and involve overwhelming amounts of people hanging around the house. Much of the celebration is only for the women. In the morning, about fifty women descended on the house and starting preparing the food together. Preparing a feast for 100 plus people without any modern equipment takes a while, so it makes sense that all the women come and prepare the meal together. They prepare rice, meat (a treat!) and sauce for the main meal and make packets of salt as a traditional gift to all the visitors. For me, being the unofficial camera-man of the whole celebration, it was somewhat overwhelming: being surrounded by a seemingly endless number of women yelling at me in Pular from all sides to take their picture, and then demanding to know when I'm going to print everyone off copies and deliver them! Some of the pictures, however, are quite funny. I wasn't able to figure out exactly why they do this, but as part of the celebration, the sisters of the bride dress up as men and pretend to hassle the bride. Like I said, I'm not exactly sure why but it's funny! After an afternoon of picture taking, I used the incoming rain storm as an excuse to sneak back to my compound and room and catch a breather.
Later in the night, the party was moved from the house to the local 'hotel.' This is the nicest place in town, but would be at about the same level as a Motel 8 without cleaning maids. Here was the celebration for the younger people (no children and older adults allowed) which impersonated the type of wedding celebration we all know at home. This part of the wedding is, as far as I can tell, fairly new and not generally found in the villages, just the 'hip' town kids. It involved the cutting of cake which the bride and groom then fed each other, arms crossed. They also shared the first dance, while being encircled by all the bride's maids and best men. The weird part is the giving of gifts. Each guest has to come up one by one, kiss the bride and groom on the cheek and pose for a picture while handing over the gift. That way everyone gets to see who gave gifts and how many! After all of this is some excessively load music and dancing. My family, particularly my sisters, have been bugging me to come out and dance with them at some point and I usually turn them down... I don't think it's really necessary for me to go to parties with a bunch of teenagers. So I agreed to dance with them at the wedding, and after all the build-up and hype there was only music and dancing for about 15 minutes. I couldn't believe how worked up they could get for those 15 minutes! (Check out my picasaweb account for pictures from the wedding.) All in all it was a fun day, a nice change from the ordinary, and made for quite a few funny pictures and memories.
This past month has also been the month of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for the Muslim faith. This means a lot of praying, reflecting on how you live your life and, of course, fasting. The rule is that you can't eat or drink anything during the sunlight hours. So every morning we wake up a 5am and eat a little bread and drink some coffee. My family members then go and pray at the mosque, and I go back to sleep. Most people end up sleeping half the day away, trying to conserve energy, while others take the philosophy of working away the hunger. I've found that I can agree with both schools of thought. Some days I go out and work all day and am able to, for the most part, forget my hunger and thirst. Other days, however, I simply sleep most of the day away then watch movies on my computer or read. Overall the fasting is not nearly as bad as I had expected it would be. It being in the mid-nineties every day the whole no-drinking part is a little tough, but it sure does make that first sip of water and bite of bread taste great when you break the fast at around 7:15 pm! Most people here appreciate it when I take part in the fast. Most people tell me "No, you're not fasting, white people can't fast." But then my family members defend me and say I actually am and the person usually ends up looking pleasantly surprised. There are also the people that have been vehemently trying to convince me to pray with them and I just respond that I will not say something in pray that I don't understand. This led to a few small attempts at learning some basic Arab, which will unlikely go anywhere as my head is already full with two new languages. Plus, Arab would be much harder to learn than French or Pular as a whole new system of writing is involved and the pronunciation is just plain crazy. Ramadan will be over soon, though, and I can get back to my normal eating habits... that is if my stomach lets me! At this point a little bread and a cup of water and I'm pretty much full.
Now that you've all been staring at your computer screens so long that you've had out and vamp up you eyeglass prescriptions, I'll try to wrap it up. As of September 10th (today), I've officially been in Senegal for a year. I know it's cliché to say, but time is flying by! I'm in Kolda, at the regional house, for a good-bye party. A group of my fellow volunteers are leaving and a new group is going to arrive any day. Believe it or not, I'm a 'junior' in the Peace Corps world. Pretty soon it'll be me who is coming home. While I'm starting to realize how much I will miss being here when my time is up (and its half-way there), I'm also starting to realize how much I miss being home. Much of the excitement surrounding my that came with being in a new environment has, at this point, largely been lost as I am used to living here now. This makes some of the repetitive aspects of life in Senegal wear on you over time, and recently I've been a bit out of it. I guess that's the real trick of life, viewing each day as new and exciting, even if it's almost identical to all the days prior. Fortunately, I'm about to go on vacation and see my parents in Europe for a couple weeks. Getting this break a year in is perfect. It will let me get a taste of life in the first-world, which, frankly, I'm a little afraid of at this point. Upon arriving in Senegal I remember thinking all the volunteers that had been here a little while were a little weird or off. I'm sure that's me and this point, I just hope I can still function in 'toubab' society! Upon returning to Senegal I will know that each day that passes will be one day closer to me coming home for good, so I better enjoy the time while I have it. While I miss home, I know I will miss Senegal as well. Life here sure is something else...
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