Polyglot by chance

Googlemania

To all of my gmail friends (and gmail-wanna-be friends),
Gmail has this cool new feature that happens to work in Senegal.  Basically, you can send an SMS text, FOR FREE, to my Senegalese cell phone (221 77 673 0064).  When I receive your text, a local Senegalese number is created for you that I can save along with your name.  I can then text you back at my local rate.  Brilliant!  If you try this, be sure to sign your name to your text so that I’ll know who you are as the numbers in my US cell phone did not transfer over and I haven't re-entered all of these yet.  Hope to hear from some of you from time to time.

Polyglot, by chance

So, as some of you know, ending up in Africa was a bit of a surprise for me.  For an entire year, I prepared for life in the Peace Corps in Latin American and spent many studious hours re-learning the Spanish that had been buried in the depths of my brain since high school.  Last July, I took a 40-hour immersion course, studied for and passed the CLEP (College Level Examination Program) exam, and spent every Tuesday evening for the next 12 months in a conversational Spanish class.  However, six weeks before I was due to depart, I got the call from Peace Corps asking if I’d change my plans and come to Francophone Africa instead.  “Sure“, I said.  “Flexibility is key, right?”  I was so tired of waiting for a placement that I thought, “just assign me already!“  In that flash of a moment, I thought that since I’d studied French in high school and college and had spent a semester in Paris and had successfully re-learned one language that I was up for the challenge.  “Bring it on!”

So, five days after arriving in Senegal, I began immersion French classes.  Aside from the obvious problems of trying to speak French with a Spanish accent, learning it from someone with an African accent, and trying to replace all recently-learned  nouns, verbs, and verb tenses with new ones, I was actually doing okay.  Because my host-family in my training village spoke Wolof, and very little French, I got a break from daily immersion each night as I sat around our dinner platter and listened to them speak a truly foreign language.  In a way, I was able to shut language out completely and give my mind a rest at the end of each day.  I did a lot of smiling, pointing, and nodding with my family and although it didn't promote great conversations, it served as effective communication.  Ahh, those were the days. 

In a rush to get us fully prepared to live independently and be able to communicate with people in our assigned posts, the Peace Corps, after just 4 weeks of training, decided to move those of us who reached an Intermediate-Low level of French to Wolof classes.  Aack!  Unfortunately, immediately after this decision, I spent our first day of class sick in bed. When I returned to class, on Day 2 of Wolof training, I felt completely lost.  While I was feverishly sweating in bed and making hourly runs (pun intended) to the bathroom, my classmates had banded together in solidarity to master Wolof without me, putting me at a linguistic disadvantage.  I kid you not; after just one day, they were carrying on lengthy conversations with each other while I stared teary-eyed at the chalkboard. 

What I haven’t really mentioned thus far is that our physical learning environment is a challenge in itself.  Language classrooms at the Training Center are concrete-walled huts with thatched roofs and sheets of wood painted black that lean against the wall and serve as chalkboards.  In the training village, we usually meet in one or two of our host family compounds.  We meet from 9am - 1pm, break for lunch, and then meet again from 4pm - 6pm.    Aside for the unbearable heat of the day or the afternoon deluge of rain, there are many other distractions to effective learning, like: 1) family members that walk by one-by-one as they arise for the day to greet us (greeting is very big here and with large families of 10-15 people this becomes a constant activity), 2) flies, which come in many shapes and sizes, that make sport of landing on us and require constant swatting, 3) random animals that wander through the classroom on their way outside to graze for the day, and 4) our teacher who frequently stops to answer his cell phone or return a text.  Last week, we actually had this strange old woman wander into the compound, interrupt the class, and ask our teacher for some money so she could buy bread.  When I asked him afterward if he knew the woman, he said “No, that’s just what we do here in Senegal.”

Immersion training in action

Language Hut @ Training Center

Classroom in Training Village

Sheep wandering through class

Rooster checking out the lesson

Okay, so now that you have a picture of my daily classroom distractions, let’s go back to imagining me, foggy-headed, dehydrated, and on the verge of tears, trying to absorb my third language in just 12-months.   Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.  It wasn’t until the following weekend that I had any grasp of Wolof what-so-ever.  But that’s the funny thing about total immersion.  Once you have that grasp, as slight as it may be, you can immediately begin communicating.  I’ve since had successful, albeit short and elementary, conversations with my host-family and with the women at the market.  How ‘bout me?!

My Host-Dad (closest to table) learning Polish

Last week we had a Counterpart Workshop for our Small Enterprise Development team at the training center that was attended by the people we'll be working/living with at our permanent sites.  During this 2-day seminar, we had a session on language to help gain some empathy from our local hosts regarding how frickin' difficult it is for us to be communicating and conducting business in another language (in another country) after just 2 months of training.  We asked for three volunteers to come to the front of the lecture hall and had them experience a 30-min immersion class in Polish (one of my fellow trainees speaks this fluently).  My counterpart and future host-Dad was one of the brave few to participate.  It was rather fun to observe them completely lost in words and phrases they'd never heard before and was effective at driving home our point.

Yup, that's me teaching in French

Also at this workshop, we put on an American Cross-Cultural fair to help our host-country partners understand our cultural differences. My group presented Women throughout the 20th Century and outlined things such as the womens' suffrage movement, women taking on industrial roles during WW2, the womens' rights movements, the working woman, and women in politics. We also spoke about the Modern Woman and the concepts of independence, choice, balance, and partnership.  This was quite eye-opening session for a group of people who are used to women staying at home to cook, clean, and share their homes with multiple wives.  Needless to say, we had lots of questions.  Oh, did I mention that we gave this presentation in French?  We had six groups cycle through our presentation, so by the end of it we were a bit tongue-tied.  In the end, Awa, our Cultural Awareness trainer asked us for our presentation so that she could give it to Language and Cultural Facilitators that join the staff.

We head back to the training village this afternoon for one last week of Wolof.  Wish me luck!

The Real Senegal - What's behind the Peace Corps Gates

Back seat of the Sept-Place

On the way to Tivouane

Last Monday, after just 5 days at our Training Center in Thiès, we were released into the wild and sent to our first home-stay villages.  Thanks to a renewed
interest in the Peace Corps and a grant from USAID, we are the largest Peace Corps Training group that has been to Senegal, since it's work began here in 1963.  We total 64, of which 21 of us are in the Small Enterprise Development (SED) Group.  During our first few days at the training center, we were assessed and divided into small groups based on our language and technical abilities and then were sent to host-villages within an hours drive of Thiès for language and cultural immersion.  My group is small, just 3 other trainees and a Language/Cultural Facilitator.  We live in a medium size town, called Tivouane, just 24K north of Thiès.  To get there we took a Sept-Place, a beat-up old Peugeot taxi that holds 7 passenger + the driver.  I was dropped off at the door of the Touré home.  It’s taken me a full-week to figure out the structure of my host-family, which I will explain below, however, it became clear from the first moments I was there that my main family contact would be Cheikh Mbacké, my twelve year old “brother”, as he’s the only one in the family who speaks French with any confidence (and confidence he is not lacking!).   The rest of the family, all nine of them, speak only Wolof.  As the Sept-Place drove off with my colleagues and trainer, I felt as if I had been left on another planet.  Back at the Training Center, we were pretty isolated from our surroundings and, although in the company of folks we’d just met, we at least had a lot in common.  The Training Center was kind of like summer camp: shared rooms, group meals; scheduled classes; communal bathrooms, etc.  The home-stay experience was completely different.  We were suddenly plunged into an existing family structure, very clearly as outsiders who had no idea how to do even the simplest things.  We are like children once again.  I had to be shown how to use the toilet, how to bathe, how to eat, and how and where to sit down, and when we can leave the house.  The Peace Corps had done a pretty good job of preparing us for this culture change and our L/C Facilitator is in the same village to help and support us, but there’s nothing like just being plopped amidst a new family in a foreign land, where everything around you is different from the norm.

My family consists of 4 adult siblings, one wife, and 5 children.  Only one of the adults is male and he owns a “boutique” (a small metal shed on the side of the road that sells basic necessities, like small packets of margarine, sugar, and laundry detergent).  He’s at work most of his waking hours, but his wife is home with us and very much apart of our daily life.  The other adults are all sisters and unmarried.  The oldest of the sisters is a “little person” (I think that’s the PC word for munchkin, right?), so that’s different.  The next oldest is my “mother”, Bousou, who is just 3 years older than me.  She seems to take in all sorts of stray children, like Cheikh the orphaned son of her friend, and Arram, a neighborhood girl who works and also lives in the house.  The youngest of the siblings, who’s just 25 is in charge of caring for another sister’s two children while they are on break from school.

Bébé Maty

Seynabou and Arram sportin' their new bou-bous

My room in Tivouane

Since we're in the middle of Ramadan, home life for my family is a bit lazy.  Not eating or drinking all day in the African summer heat leads to a lot of napping.  This napping takes place on mats in the courtyard or on the vinyl-covered floor in the “napping room”.  This room is the only room, aside from my family's bedrooms  that contains furniture (like a real couch and chairs) but it is never used.  People just seem to go in there and lie on the floor, sometimes all of them at once.

Ramadan brings with it many other interesting daily activities including, loud chanting from a loudspeaker at the mosque outside my bedroom window from 4-5am, followed by the family getting up to eat breakfast before dawn.  People walk around at a snail’s pace because they’re refraining from eating or drinking from sunup to sundown and don’t want to exert too much energy.  The loudspeaker chanting also carries on at other specific times throughout the day, from cars with speakers strapped to their roofs.  There’s also a lot of spitting that goes on because apparently swallowing your own saliva counts as eating.  If for some reason you forget that it’s Ramadan and accidentally eat something, swallow large amounts of spit, and/or, Allah-forgive, vomit during the day (also strangely considered eating??--go figure) then you must pay this day back by fasting for an additional day after Ramadan has ended.

Finally, at about 7pm, the family breaks fast together and eats dates and bread with a thin layer of margarine and spicy tuna, and drinks café touba, which is a finely ground coffee containing cloves, cinnamon and about a pound of sugar.  This activity takes place as a group on a mat outside in the courtyard while watching TV:  first a Muslim prayer session, followed by a half hour Wolof comedy show, and then a really bad Indian soap opera dubbed in French.  Dinner is served at about 9pm on a big communal platter that usually consists of a layer of rice topped with a whole stewed fish and several vegetables in a yummy sauce.  Dinner varies slightly depending on how the rice is prepared and what type of sauce is used, but the vegetables stay the same from night to night:  eggplant, cabbage, carrot, okra, potato, manioc root, and radish.  We kneel on the ground around the platter and eat together.  There is grand protocol regarding eating here which was quite stressful for all the trainees until we’d done it enough to begin to feel comfortable.  We actually had Peace Corps training for this.  My "mother" tells me where at the platter to sit.  I’m not sure if I’m being place with regard to proximity to some specific food or to some person, so I usually wait for her to tell me.  Most of us eat with a large spoon,  but my “mother” and my “uncle’s” wife eat with their hand (just the right hand--never the left, but I’ll leave that to another blog entry devoted to toilet protocol.).  The women who eat with their hand ball up a small amount of rice with a piece of veggie or fish.  They, squeeze out the oil, and pop lick it off their hand.  Then they pick off bits of fish or veggies for others sitting at the platter and toss pieces into their eating area.  This is generally done for the young children and to me and is the equivalent of cutting up a child’s piece of meat for them.  Everyone has a designated eating area on the platter, basically the hand-sized space directly in front of them and it is impolite to reach into someone else’s area for a piece of food.  Instead, the big food pieces are tossed back to the center when people have taken off a small piece for themselves.  It’s important that the small piece is first placed on the platter in your eating area before you can pick it up and eat it.  Taking it straight from the center of the platter to your mouth is rude.  Burping loudly while eating, however, is not, and is it is common to hear a belch or two while we eat.  I try not to laugh at this, because no one else does.  Not to say that dinner isn’t fun.  There’s a lot of laughter that goes on, the joking is mostly in Wolof, and I think mostly directly at me, but I’ve learned to just laugh along with them.  Whatever the crazy-haired Toubac (common slang for white person) at the platter did probably was funny and I’ll learn why later.

My language and culture classes have been great.  It’s amazing how much we’re learned in just one week.  The Peace Corps really has an impressive adult-learning program and they have many Senegalese staff-members who’ve been working with them for 10+ years.  We have language class every morning from 9am - 1pm (or so), then break for lunch, napping, and homework until 4pm, then return for 2 ½ hours of cultural training.  Our classes are usually held at one of two of our host-family homes (the ones who have covered courtyards (aka shade), furniture, and space for us to gather.)   Our small class size is nice yet because we're usually in someone's home, we often are interrupted by someone’s little brother or sister who comes over to greet us (greeting is also worthy of it’s own blog entry, so more to come on that later).

We arrived back at the Training Center yesterday afternoon, after having been away a week, and it suddenly seemed so luxurious.  Chairs to sit on, cold water that has already been filtered, real showers, wi-fi, and fruit.  Many of the Agriculture trainees who are living in smaller villages had less protein then we SEDers did, so we were served a dinner of beef and beans to pump up our protein intake.  We also had fresh salad greens and veggies, which we’ve all begun to miss.  Before dinner, many of us ventured into town for a cold beer which was a great way to catch up with one another.

List of My Most Prized Possessions Thus Far:

• Eventail (woven hand-held fan sold at the markets), used for swatting away flies and creating a small breeze during class
• Oscillating fan, purchased with great fanfare (pun intended) over a 4-day period
• French press and ground coffee brought from home, and enjoyed every morning “sans sucre”
• Shower-to-Shower body powder (applied several times a day)
• PC-supplied 3 gallon ceramic water filtration system
• Mosquito repellent,  mosquito incense coils, mosquito net
• French-English dictionary
• Bar of anti-bacterial soap
• Quick-dry camping towel

So happy about my new fan (and my water filter behind me on the left)

My "brother" Cheikh, who tirelessly helped procure my fan