Travels with Tavish

I have completed my first three weeks at my site in the region of Kedougou! It feels good to have reached this milestone (albeit, an arbitrary one) and made it to Christmas. After swearing-in, I rode down to Kedougou in a roomy sept place (old 8-seat Peugeot station wagon) with two other volunteers. Only three were in each car because we were bringing with us all of our luggage and bikes; the roofs of the cars were full. We spent two days in Kedougou with a host of current volunteers who accompanied us to the market. There we bought buckets to store food, benoirs to do laundry, soap, bleach, brooms, food, stoves, trunks, mattresses, and everything else needed to furnish our huts. The two days went by quickly, and soon enough it was December 4th, install day. I waited nervously at the transit house as the sept places arrived one by one to take us to our sites. I was the second-to-last to leave of the eight who installed on the 4th. The same current volunteer who visited my site with me...

(written on 11/30/18. I had a little snafu trying to post this a couple weeks ago while I did not have internet access, but those technical difficulties have now been resolved.) The official swearing-in ceremony was on November 30th at Ebbets Field, the US Embassy's outdoor sports facility. (I am curious who named the field and if it was named soon after the Brooklyn stadium was demolished). My fellow trainees and I woke up very early in Thies, dressed in our fanciest Senegalese fabrics, and hopped on two buses to travel to Dakar. About 150 people attended the ceremony, including all the trainees, Peace Corps staff from the Thies Training Center, Peace Corps staff from Dakar, and some former Peace Corps Volunteers who happened to be in Dakar. After the PC Senegal Country Director spoke, the US Ambassador to Senegal spoke for a few minutes in French and English. I understood most of what he said in French, but that may have been because he gave a similar speech to the one he ...

Here are some pictures from my pre-service training! Most are of my Jaxanke language group's CBT  (Community Based Training) garden and my local host family in Mbour: Pouring attaya (tea) at my host family's house in Mbour CBT garden week 1: vegetable beds and vegetable nursery CBT compost pile week 1 CBT garden week 2 CBT garden week 5 Under the cashew tree with my Jaxanke colleagues after a hard day of gardening Under the cashew tree Wedding in Mbour with my Jaxanke friends This baby is not sure about me Moringa intensive bed week 6 CBT garden week 9 Moringa intensive bed week 9 CBT garden week 9 My host mom and I at a baptism in Mbour Host siblings--last day in Mbour Host siblings--last day in Mbour Papa (host brother) Host family in Mbour CBT host family reception at the Thies Training Center CBT host family reception at the Thies Training Center

Thanksgiving at the Thies Training Center has come and gone in what feels like a whirlwind. It is hard to believe the holiday was less than a week ago. Last Thursday I helped cook a Thanksgiving dinner with about 10 other trainees. We cooked for about 80 people: the trainees, the LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators), and the kitchen ladies who cook for us every day. We started cooking at 2:00 pm, right after lunch. I was on potato duty. The first orders of business were cutting up the potatoes and garlic and getting a giant pot of water boiling on the gas stove. The stove was a little tricky to light (with matches), so we had to have the kitchen ladies help us. After watching the process a few times, I am now pretty confident that I could light it successfully if called upon to do so. In addition to the standard Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, we were planning to make candied sweet potatoes. Unfortunately, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are not possible to find in Thies right now,...

I have completed my final technical exam and have submitted my written responses about my readiness to serve in the Peace Corps. Now all that stands between me and swearing-in as a Peace Corps Volunteer on November 30th is a short group presentation with my fellow Jaxanke-learners, a Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) to ensure that I have reached the minimum required language level (Intermediate-Mid), and Thanksgiving. All this will happen in the next week--training is quickly coming to a close! I have spent the majority of the last three weeks with my local home-stay (CBT) family in Mbour. As usual, most days I walked to Jaxanke class in the morning and to the garden in the afternoon. The amount of garden work that we have had to do has also been winding down, allowing us more free time with our families and sometimes a Jaxanke lesson in the afternoon. In addition to the garden work, the temperature in Mbour has also, thankfully, been decreasing. My walks to and from class eac...

Last week we had Field Orientation Training (FOT), where each of us trainees traveled to the village that will be our permanent site. A current first-year or second-year volunteer (who can speak the language) went with each trainee to help facilitate the weekend site visit. At 6am last Friday morning, I packed into a sept place ("seven places") with six other trainees and we headed out for Kedougou. The sept place is the main form of public transit that I will be using during my time in Senegal. The cars are very old 8-seat Peugeots, many of which are in various states of disrepair. I have not yet broken down in a sept place, but I hear from current volunteers that that is a fairly common occurrence. We drove east down the national highway, stopping every 3-4 hours. I had a bean sandwich--similar to what I eat at the training center for breakfast every morning--from a small roadside stand at our first stop. The drive was overall relatively uneventful other than making very...

My second stay at my Jaxanke host family was all too short, just three days. I wish I could have spent a longer period of time there. I feel as though I am becoming more integrated (or maybe simply more comfortable) living with my host family each day that I spend there. Again there was lots of sand, lots of sun, and lots of Jaxanke practice. I am learning little by little (donding donding). Sometimes the slow progress can be frustrating, as I often have to learn a word multiple times before I finally remember it, but when I realize that I have committed a new set of words or a sentence structure to memory it is very exciting to use it. Finally the day for site reveal had come, October 15th. We had a policy session in the morning; I anxiously sat in my chair knowing that in a couple short hours I would find out where I will be spending the next two years. After a small snack of bread and beans during the morning coffee break, I walked over to the basketball court with my fellow trai...

At the start of the second week of training, we had language announcements. I was assigned to and have begun to learn Jaxanke (pronounced something like jaw-haw-n-kay)! I was really excited to be assigned this language because that means I will almost surely be serving in the south of Senegal where the climate is more humid. Almost all Jaxanke volunteers serve in Tambacounda, Kolda, or Kedougou. The climate in the south I expect will be somewhat easier to manage for me than a very hot, dry site in the north, but it will still be very difficult to deal with the intense heat. Many sites in the southern regions of Senegal are also more than one day's drive away from the training center, making commuting back and forth for trainings in Thies a little more time-consuming. In addition to being assigned a local language, I also got assigned a host family in Mbour, a city about an hour southwest of the Peace Corps training center in Thies, where I will spend 5 weeks over the course of O...

I have arrived safely in Senegal! The first two weeks of training have been a whirlwind of information and activities to prepare me and the 60 other trainees for our two years of service ahead. After my one-day staging event in Philadelphia and a "good-bye dinner" with some fellow Peace Corps trainees at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant near our downtown hotel, our group departed for Senegal. On our way to the JFK airport, the bus drove through Times Square in Manhattan. I don't know the roads all that well, but I am sure there was a quicker way to get to the airport and avoid some traffic. We decided that it was a good-bye present, a last look at one of the most well-known places in the country before living abroad for more than two years. I enjoyed every second of it. Our flights to Belgium and Dakar were relatively uneventful, other than having long waiting periods in the airports. As we descended into Dakar we flew over the Sahara desert: barren, sandy, and hot. I...

Hello Travels with Tavish Readers! I am writing this post as I take a break from packing for Senegal!  I am joining the Peace Corps in Senegal as a Forestry and Environment Change Agent. For two years, I will be living with a host family and working with farmers to help implement sustainable practices on their farms. Many of my projects will be focused on tree planting. I depart for my Peace Corps staging event in Philadelphia on Friday, September 21, then my cohort will fly to Senegal together on Sunday, September 23. We will train for 10 weeks at the Peace Corps Training Center in Thies before moving to our respective communities. Due to limited internet access during service, my posts on this blog will likely be infrequent. You can subscribe to the blog to get an email update whenever a new post is made. After you click the "Subscribe" button and complete the Captcha, you will get an email from Feed Burner to verify your subscription to t...