Longitude 16° 46' 0 W; Latitude 14° 1' 0 N

Hi Everyone!

Life in Senegal continues. This past week we had village visits: trips to current PCVs designed to introduce us to our future sites (or similar ones) and actual PC life. Since I’ll be the first volunteer in ML~, my village visit took place in P~ with the current eco-T volunteer there. Aside from a few flat tire-induced delays on the travel days, my VV was amazing – a vacation really. We went swimming in the ocean twice. We went kayaking in an estuary/delta. We harvested clams for dinner. We even participated in a UN-sponsored community mangrove reforestation! That last part was really impressive – 20% of the village got involved! (There had been whispers of payment to serve as incentive; ultimately the UN gave some $300 to the community to distribute at their discretion).

It was also very helpful to see how life as volunteer works. My PCV Chris lives in a multi-family compound, but has his own building/living quarters and bathroom. He has a fairly limited connection with his family, but a great relationship with his counterpart (an eco-kayaking guide). He also was able to tell me and Elida (another stagiare) about some of challenges of PC work.

There still isn’t much information about my future site or the work opportunities, but I continue to hear only good things about how beautiful the island is; how enthusiastic my counterpart is to meet me; how wonderful the Seereer people are. That’s another exciting piece of news: although I am studying Wolof in Pre-Service Training, I will likely be learning Seereer with a tutor once I get installed at ML~. The people there will speak Wolof, but Seereer is the native language and learning it will be key to my integration in the community. Let the language nerdiness continue!

There are new pictures of my P~ adventures. Caution: you will be thoroughly jealous of me and want to come visit immediately when you see these pictures. http://picasaweb.google.com/TR6014/Senegal?authkey=Gv1sRgCIi4mZ-JgL-IFw&feat=directlink

RE: mail, I will no longer be reachable through the Thies Training Center after October 16^th. Most of the letters I’ve been getting have taken about 2-3 weeks; my first package took about a month. If you want to send me anything, send it this week to the Training Center or hold off until I can get a PO Box closer to ML~.

Keep the emails coming! I love you all and want to hear your news.

Kisses, bises, nishikot, and ay foòn (which may or may not be the correct way to say kisses in Wolof).

Tamar

:D Looking for things to send me? Bug repellent, books, hand sanitizer, beef jerky, Jelly Belly jelly beans, small packs of Kleenex, granola bars, love ...

A Senegalese phone number!

Hi all,
We FINALLY got cell phones! It will cost an arm and a leg for you to call me, but it's free for me to receive calls!

1+221 77 330 48 42.

Call away! (I'm six hours ahead of MST.)

Love,
Tamar

An introduction to Senegalese culture

As-salaam alekum, everyone!

Yes, it's true: now I am busting out the Arabic. It turns out the pervasiveness of Islam in Senegal has also left an indelible mark on the language here; we're learning to always greet everyone with assalaam alekum and to throw alhamdelilah and bismillah into everyday conversation. But, more importantly, my Wolof is also making strides, and I can now pull out certain key words from my home-stay family's conversations (as opposed to it all sounding like gibberish, which it did for awhile). Hell, I can make a few simple sentences, too! Key among them: asking people how the fast (for Ramadan) is going!

All this has come from my first week at my pre-service training home-stay site. Being out in "real" Senegal made for a difficult week, honestly. The living conditions are beyond what I could ever have imagined back at home, and I feel very vulnerable walking through a town where it is so obvious I am an outsider before I even open my mouth. Still, being back at the training center for a few days with the other volunteers has been reassuring, and I'm not quitting yet! Here are some highlights:

Home-stay I'm living with a small, youngish family in a town called T~. We'll be going back and forth between our home-stays and the training center (with internet) for the next two months. There are four other volunteers in my town, and I see them every day for language classes. I pee into a hole in the ground (Turkish toilet), we sit on the floor for our meals and usually eat with our hands.

Food We eat fish A LOT. The national dish here is ceeb u jen - rice and fish. There are other rice and fish dishes, flavored with tamarind, with bissap (hibiscus), with anything, it all still tastes like fish. Veg is lacking here; we eat lots of carbs. The food is good and spicy, though, and the families are really happy to see us eat (guests gaining weight reflects well on the hosts).

Cloth As I mentioned before, women in Senegal dress impeccably. So, one of the first integrating activities here is buying cloth and getting it tailored into some neat outfit. My "uncle" happens to be a tailor, so I was able to get a pagne (wrap skirt) made this week. It's even got pockets which is a huge deal since most skirts don't have them. I was really thrilled with the skirt and I think my family passed the message to the "uncle" who refused to accept payment for this first skirt. I promised to recommend him to the other volunteers in my town (since we'll all be getting outfits made over the next two months...I've already bought five more meters of cloth here in Thies).

Work Unlike the agriculture volunteers, the SED (aka business) group doesn't really have much we can do during our home-stays. Our real training won't start until two months after we've installed at our permanent sites. Still, we have classes while we're back at the training center; today we learned about marketing and about two current volunteer projects - one on increasing computer access/literacy and one on eco-tourism in a region south of Dakar. It's promising.

I've posted a few (21) pictures on picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/TR6014/Senegal?authkey=Gv1sRgCIi4mZ-JgL-IFw&feat=directlink. The pictures aren't really that great, but they're all I've got for now. I'll post more as I get them.

Well, that's about it. We head back to our home-stays tomorrow for another two weeks (without internet again, ack!). I love having emails from you all when I come back; my head's a little too discombobulated to respond to everyone (hence the scatterbrained email here), but I really do appreciate them.

Love to all of you!
Babenen!
Tamar

The Gods Must be REALLY Crazy!

Nanga def, everyone?!

That is the first sentence I've learned in Wolof here in Senegal, and it's probably not even correctly conjugated for second person plural. My ignorance is - for once - overcoming my grammar prescriptivism. Anyway, it means 'how are you' and it's part of the very important (and long) back-and-forth series of greetings and introductions that are part of every Senegalese salutation.

So, it's official: my Peace Corps adventure has begun. We arrived at the PC training center in Thies on Thursday after a very short orientation in D.C. and very not-so-short flight to Dakar. My group has about 55 people in it (which is huge; there are lots of displaced Mauritania volunteers), and the group seems very cool and interesting so far. We've spent the last few days getting accustomed to various African/Senegalese/non-

American details like the heat and humidity, the bugs (either incessantly biting or grossly huge), the birds (noisy, but usually hidden), the tam-tam drumming (which goes on well into the night) and the Moslem call to prayer five times each day. We've also had some interviews and orientation classes for our programs (mine is SED - small enterprise development) and for language. Very excitingly, I did well on my French interview and have been cleared to move straight into Wolof (many people don't have the French background and were not so lucky).

The details of what I'll be doing or where I'll be going are still up in the air; most of those decisions won't be made until the second month of our training. In the meantime, we're getting ready to head out to our Community-Based Training homestays. My language group (4 others), our Language/Cultural Facilitator and I will be going to a town just outside of Thies for the next week where we'll be staying with individual families. I'm nervous as all hell (you have seen the extent of my Wolof knowledge) - it's the first time we'll really be out in Senegal and we're all expecting horrible GI reactions. Still, I'm also very excited to hear Wolof in use, see how a real family cooks dinner, and just how one manages a pit latrine. (Eek!)

Bon, that's about the basics of life here in Senegal. After tomorrow, it may be awhile before I am back in the training center and have internet again. Please send me emails, even short ones, to let me know how you're all doing. Life at home seems soooo far off from things here; I'm sure in our villages, it'll be even more so.

Lots of love and hugs, kisses, bises, and nishikot,
Tamar

PS Holy sh*t! We also witnessed a third world marketplace during our tour of Thies yesterday. Lots of mud (because of the rain), lots of veggies, lots of flies, and lots of beautiful, beautiful cloths. The women here are always dressed impeccably and I can't wait to buy some fabric and have a skirt made, too!

The Gods Must be Crazy: A Dissertation on How to Reach Tamar in Africa

Hello!

Next week I leave for Senegal with the Peace Corps, so I thought I would let you all in on some of my communication info since I will be very far away for the next two and a half years.

A Series of Tubes
Email is great and easy! I might only have sporadic internet connectivity, but I do have a brand spanking new laptop to access it when it's available. Try to keep the spam/cheesy jokes/cute kitty videos to a minimum, but don't hold back when it comes to updating me with your latest news and gossip. If I do have regular internet, I will try to pop onto Skype and gmail for video/voice chatting as often as I can. (My skype name is Tamar0702.) I may consider keeping a blog, if I can access the internet to do so consistently.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night
Letters are probably the greatest, most meaningful thing you can do for me while I'm gone. With or without internet, I am going to feel very disconnected from you - the ones I love,- and life in general. Write to me about your big news, your small news, your non-news. Send me your gossip, movie reviews, book suggestions, funny newspaper comics, crossword puzzles. I will find even mundane quotidian details interesting. Your mail will keep me going when I am lonely and homesick. If you feel like expressing your love and affection in a more expensive, extravagant way, packages will be greatly appreciated. Another volunteer wrote on her website that "care packages are the way Peace Corps Volunteers judge each others' popularity." So, it's on: make me look good.

My address until October will be:
PCT Tamar Rosenstein
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 299
Thiès, Senegal
West Africa

Some snail-mail guidelines
As proven by my mailing experiences in France, postal services around the world are rarely up to snuff vis-a-vis our cherished USPS. It might take two weeks for a letter to arrive in Senegal from the US; but it can take many more days to get out to distant towns and villages. It may not arrive at all.

• On any and all mail, please be sure to include SENEGAL - WEST AFRICA, AIRMAIL and PAR AVION somewhere the postal workers can see it plainly. You may also consider numbering your letters so that we can keep track of what arrives and what doesn't.
• In packages - seal everything in Ziplock bags. This will keep out the rodents (hopefully) and the rain. Plus, apparently Ziplock bags are as valuable as currency to Peace Corps volunteers; I can re-use any you send.
  
• As law-abiding as some of you might be, do NOT be honest on those customs forms. Everything you send should be recorded as "Used" and shouldn't have a total value of more than $10. This will work to ensure that your packages reach me, and not the family of a Senegalese postal worker.
• Wrap the box/envelope in a couple of layers of clear plastic packaging tape. Make it damn near impossible for someone to cut open a corner and peek inside. You may also consider adding a list of the items you're sending so I'll know if someone got to it before me. (Sad face.)
• I will have to pay a small fee to rescue packages from the post office, so please don't send two boxes where one will do. (Ok, might be getting ahead of myself by assuming there will be multiples of packages.)

Once I get assigned to my service site (in early October), I will send out the mailing address I will have until October 2011!

Âllo, téléphone?

At some point during my training, I will be buying a cell phone to have during the next two years. I'll share that number as soon as I get it. We can rack up sms bills together!

Visits
Want to visit? You'll have to wait at least six months, but my door (assuming I have a door) will be open. We can discuss when works.

Are we there, yet?
Officially, my Peace Corps Service starts on August 11th. However, I'll be leaving Denver on August 6th for my cousin's wedding in Tennessee and then heading straight to Washington, D.C. for 24 hours of safety training and immunizations. (Yay, for starting malaria pills!) I will have my cell phone [720-839-5901] until the 11th, so feel free to call me for last-minute love.

Love you all dearly and cannot wait to keep in touch with you,
Tamar