Another day as a volunteer in transition…

Yet more carloads of volunteers left this morning, leaving the Training Center ever quieter. We’re down to a meager 10-15 of us. Thankfully, a few of my good friends (and ¾ roommates) are still here, so I don’t feel entirely abandoned…until tomorrow.

Part of the excitement (or stress, depending on your outlook) of installation is the (re)decorating. We get to furnish our new rooms/huts/compounds with furniture and household items. Before anyone gets too excited at the thought, you should be aware of what I mean by furnishings – buckets.

Yes, buckets. Buckets are furniture here. I can’t think of a single more useful item in a Senegalese household. You use a medium bucket to bring water from the well or robinet. You use a big bucket to stand in while you bathe and a smaller one to pour water over you. If you have a Turkish toilet, you will need a bucket to flush water down it. You can use a bucket with a lid on it to keep food or store water. You will need a small bucket/cup to take water from your storage buckets and use it for cooking or cleaning. You will need multiple large buckets for laundry. And, it doesn’t hurt to keep a bucket outside to collect rainwater in the wet season; it might not be good for drinking, but rainwater is good for anything else.

So today when I went shopping in the market for my new place, what I was really looking for - and successfully found - was buckets. I also got spoons. Very important. If I can’t make my coffee in the morning, no amount of buckets is going to help. Tomorrow, I might tackle a few other items like a pot or two, a bowl and maybe a couple of forks. Hey, big spender!

One of the more fun parts of the market experience was trying to find a trunk which I can put a lock on. It’s not a bad thing to have in the village because there aren’t many ways to keep passports, money, or other valuables safe. Five of us trailed two “helpful” kids around the market, through the crowded stalls, for about thirty minutes today, trying to find trunks. No one knew the word for trunk in French or Wolof, but we were able to explain the general idea with a mix of both languages and miming. Turns out the word is walees – borrowed from the French word valise. We eventually found some, but the shopkeeper was trying to charge us more than double the price we’d been told was usual. Plus, they were cheeeeaaaap aluminum. A dull pencil could have pierced through it. After all the effort expended, we decided not to buy any.

And, finally, to top off a day of market-going and napping, we went to Chicken Dibi for dinner. Chicken Dibi should have warranted its own blog post long ago, but I didn’t even have a blog when we first went there. Suffice it to say that no one in their right mind would ever go here and willingly put food into their mouths from a place which looks so forbidding, so dark, so unsanitary. Yet once you get over the initial fear of tetanus or food poisoning and dig into the chicken, fries and salad with your bare hands (no utensils or napkins in sight), you will never willingly walk by this place again without going in for dinner. And for 2500CFA (~$5), you will never eat so well for so little. Not a bad way to finish the day.

Pictures from Chicken Dibi and swearing in are online at my Picasa page.