Mr. Simon’s class is a new class I’m exchanging letters with this year. They are a 7th grade class outside of Boston. Below is my second letter to them.
Dear Mr. Simon and Class,
The most comfortable sept places. My friend is peaking out from the least comfortable back row
Hey guys? How’s everything going state-side? Things are crazy-busy here, as I’ve had to travel all over Senegal the past few months for work. It’s been cool to see parts of the country I’ve never seen before, like the far north where people live in the desert and the only trees that grow have needles for leaves, but traveling here is also very tiring. 95% of my travel takes place in cars called “sept places,” which is French for “7 seats.” The cars are basically huge, over-grown station wagons that bumble along roads filled with pot-holes. It took me 19 hours to get up north last month! At least after traveling here, traveling in the states will be easy.
We’re entering cold season here, which means nights in the low 60s… freezing! Seriously, it’s cold when you consider that \our summers (or “hot season” as we call it here) gets up to 136 degrees. These evenings, I sleep in long pants, socks, long sleeves, a hat, and with 3 blankets on. It is nice compared to sweating all night in the hot season, but with cold season also comes bed-bugs, so those are no good. Every 3 or 4 nights, I have to pour boiling water all over my bed and sheets and walls around my bed to try and kill them, but I swear, bed bugs NEVER die. I despise them.
Rice and leaf sauce! Mmmmm
One really nice thing about cold season is that our food is really\good because the harvest from the rainy season is in. Usually, we eat either millet (which is a grain) or rice with some sort of sauce over it, usually leaf or peanut-based. Wealthier Senegalese families put oil and lots of vegetables and meant into their food, but since my village is poor, our food is usually just a sauce over rice or millet. At first, I’ll be honest, it’s not that great, but you get used to it, and believe it or not, eventually even crave leaf sauce! Weird, I know. The food starts to run out by April though, so we begin cutting meals and eating smaller portions until the next harvest in the fall. My village has to grow the majority of the food they eat, which, no matter how hard they work, seems impossible sometimes. We live about 18 kilometers form the main road where the weekly market and little shops are, and considering that no one in my village has cars or motos, 18k can be a really long walk (or bike ride). For my contribution to the family I live with, I buy vegetables and beans every week, which makes the food a bit better. Either way, let’s just say I crave pizza, cheese burgers and burritos a lot.
I just got back form a big conference called the West African All Volunteer Conference. It’s an annual gathering for Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) from all over West Africa, though most attendees are from Senegal. This year though, volunteers from Cape Verde, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Mali flew in, (the Gambian volunteers drove).
One of the sustainable technologies presented at All Vol - a briquette press, which makes "bricks" to burn for cooking fires out of organic waste. One way to fight deforestation, yay!
The conference is basically a huge, two-day series of presentation on innovative projects that different PCVs are doing and around-able discussion on how we can improve what we’re already doing. My country director (basically by big-boss, the CEO or PC Senegal) and Senegalese bosses even came. Though the days can be long, it’s really interesting to hear about other volunteers’ work, and wonderful to see friends of mine that I only see twice a year.
I even presented this year! My talk was with my friend Annicka, and we presented on behavior change methods and theory. Sounds boring, right? I know. Actually, it’s pretty simple and pretty interesting (in my opinion as well). Basically our talk discussed ideas on how you can get people to consider new ideas or habits that may benefit their health or daily lives without immediately writing the new idea off because it’s unfamiliar. For example, in my village, people have a lot of problems with cuts and wounds getting infected. In traditional medicine, people here will put sap or a leaf paste over wounds, and wrap them in cloths. As you may guess, this often leads to infections and their wounds get worse. The thing is, I can’t just run around my village telling everyone that they’re treating their wounds wrong because they would never listen to me. Think about it – if you parents had been telling you since you were born that sugar is healthy, and then someone fro a different country, who barely speaks your language, and that you’ve only known for three months, told you that your parents were wrong and that you should eat carrots instead would you listen to them? Probably not.
What Annicka and I presented on then, was how to lead people to their own conclusions instead of tell them these new ideas. For example, instead of telling someone that they should wash their wounds with a clean cloth and hot weather, I them how to clean their wounds properly, and then, once their wounds heal instead of getting infected, let them decide which method of wound-care they prefer.
The cool thing is, once someone likes the way I’ve taught them to clean their wounds (for example), they usually then become advocates of the method, and teach their friends and families. And new ideas coming from Senegalese people is always better received than new ideas coming from the crazy white person in their village, right? People in my village teaching each other ideas is a heck of a lot more sustainable than me yapping about ideas for the two years I’m here. Make sense? All-around good stuff.
Well, I have to jet off to the garage to get back to my site. I’ve included a few stickers in your envelope. In Senegal, people like the put these stickers all over their cars, so I’ve put stickers all over my bicycle. Enjoy!
Happy holidays and New Years!
Your friend in Senegal,
Amanda
