Travels with Tavish

Timing is very different in Senegal than in the US. Here, often people do not show up on time or at all. Or sometimes they all show up at the appointed time--it's hard to figure out which type of event will have which type of attendance. A couple short anecdotes: (1) During the middle of April I went over to my counterpart Amadou's house to try and pick a date for our upcoming tree sac filling training. I knew that I would be out of the village during the last week in April for a cashew training and that Ramadan will start approximately May 5. That leaves only about 5-7 days in which we could hold a training before people in the village will start fasting for Ramadan. As I have heard from other older volunteers, the capacity to and interest in doing work steeply declines for people in the village who fast (which will be almost everyone in my village). Thus my interest in choosing a date for the training and spreading the word as soon as possible. There is a lot of inertia wi...

Mango season has arrived in my village! Compared to the "fruit desert" I was living in from December through February, I am now in a mango oasis. The mangoes began to ripen in my village around mid-March. Now that April is in full swing, there are more than enough to go around in my family because we have a couple big trees. Village mangoes are of course different from the imported ones that are available in the US. Mangoes here are smaller, stringier, and have much more taste. In terms of flavor, Indian mangoes for me still take the prize as the most delicious of the mangoes, but Senegalese mangoes are much closer to the Indian mangoes than they are to US mangoes. I have to floss every time I eat a mango because of the stringiness--it is inevitable that bits will get stuck between my teeth. I am curious what my family members do to remedy this problem, as I never see them with floss. People in my village often clean their teeth with sticks or leaves, but I have not found ...

I have been doing a lot of biking recently. When I returned to my site after IST, I spent about 10 days there re-remembering how to speak Jaxanke before biking out to visit some other members of my work zone. The ride was about 40km; I woke up early and arrived in about 2.5 hours. We conducted a short pepiniere training with the middle school in my friend's village (see pictures below). My village is located halfway between the city of Kedougou and the rest of the members of my work zone. The last two times I have come into the city to Kedougou I have biked in; this ride is also about 40km. The first time I was by myself and had a nice early morning ride. The most recent time I biked into Kedougou, my whole work zone rode in together; the other four volunteers started from their sites at 5:45am and I joined them halfway when they reached my village at 9:15am. We had a long ride in the heat and encountered some bike trouble along the way, but eventually we all made it to the tran...

Under ORS* I sit in the shade of a large cashew tree in my backyard, a breeze blowing ascross my face. I am sweating slightly, but the breeze quickly whisks it away--my skin is cool and dry. It is hot here, 100F on a cool day, but it is manageable. The breeze dies down for a moment; I grab some ice from my hut, wrap it in a wet towel, and rest the towel across my forehead. I lay down on a bed of leaves under the tree. This is nice. The audiobook I just downloaded, No Country for Old Men, is very engaging. So much that I don't want to pauce it when my younger brother knocks on my door and calls me for lunch: "Mamadou, konton!" "Awa," I reply, "Mbe naani saayin." I slowly sit up from my comfortable position and amble through my room, grabbing my spoon on the way. I take my place at the bowl with the rest of my brothers and my host dad. Lunch today is a giant pile of squash and carrots, fresh from the garden. My favorite. We sit under the shade str...

Here are some more pictures from my site! The tall palm-like tree in the middle ground is bankala, the plant which almost all furniture is made of in many Kedougou villages. It is light, strong, easy to split, and relatively straight; similar somewhat to bamboo in its fitness for construction Attempt 1 (left) and 2 (right) at setting up a pull-up bar in my backyard. The bamboo on the left is suspended by wire; the trees are not strong enough to support this load and the wire sometimes slips. The bamboo on the right is just wedged into the trees--the problem here is that the bar sits at approximately eye-level. Better iterations hopefully coming soon. Putting grass on the roof of a new hut in my village. Note the bamboo ladder How this eventually made its way from Qatar to Senegal I have no idea. I have no idea what I did to make my feet so dirty this day Outdoor bed set up in my backyard. Since mid-March it has been far too hot to sleep in my hut ...

Time for another update on what I have been reading in Senegal. Below are the books I have read since my last post: A few notable titles from the list: The Grapes of Wrath: I started this book thinking that it would be a long, difficult read. I picked it up because it seemed like a book I should read at some point in my life, an American classic. While it took me a couple weeks to get through, I could not have been more wrong about how engaging Steinbeck's writing would be. The novel describes the Joad family's search for work during the Great Depression. Steinbeck alternates short chapters telling anecdotes indicative of the Dust Bowl with longer narrative chapters describing the Joad family's quest. This novel gave me a detailed and nuanced picture of what it was like to live in America during the 1930's. Families setting out west to find work, flyers promising work, used car salesmen, diner owners, truckers, strikes, cotton fields; Steinbeck weaves all these...