Paperasse

Taking cues from its former colonial power, Senegal has in place a bureaucracy almost as asinine as the one I encountered in France. No surprise. But here, insisting on the formal where the informal reigns is futile. And so getting my residence permit renewed in Senegal was in no way like the organized, if complicated and unending process of doing the same in France.

Here’s how it went:

March 10:
PCVs receive a text message reminding us to renew res permits. For my stage, expiration dates are coming up; get on that.

March 14:
Deciding to head to Kaolack to get this out of the way, I make the mistake of sleeping in on a travel day. I’m rewarded with 6 hours of crowded, squishy transportation during the hottest part of the day. And my first bus broke down twice en route.

Why Kaolack? I’ve been informed that the office in my region’s capital hasn’t opened yet – no further explanation. And Dakar is a more expensive trip.

March 14, p.m.:
Upon arriving at the PC regional house, I’m told by 3 other volunteers that I am doomed to fail. The guy who signs off res permits is a dick; he won’t do it before the actual expiration date. And no one knows where the office is anyway, not even the PCV (M~) who lives in Kaolack.

March 15:
Tempting fate (my permit expires the 22nd), I head downtown to find this mysterious office and confront the evil troll guarding my legal status to be in this country.

M~ and I navigate trash heaps and construction pits before stumbling into a jail – no joke – which we then realize is exactly the building we need. We run as fast as we can past the incarceration area to an admin doorway. There, we find the Troll quite literally guarding the hallway.

I explain my quest, wave my soon (so soon!) to expire permit in his face, and get hit with the verbal equivalent of a cascade of arrows: each tip a sharp Wolof phrase insisting the renewal can’t and won’t be done before March 22.

Smiling, I pull out my two secret weapons: infinite patience (public transportation in a developing country requires it) … and a hand-written note to the Kaolack commissaire from my counterpart.

Residence permits can’t be renewed until the very day they expire?
“I understand, really, I do,” said in every language I know. “But can I please just speak with Mr. Fall for a moment, briefly, just to say hello? You see this note with Mr. Fall’s name and phone number? My counterpart will be furious if I don’t. Just to say hi. Salutations only, I swear. Nuyoo rekk.”

Eventually the Troll, weakened by my insistence on saying hello in a country where greetings are so important, caved. I was shown to Mr. Fall’s office where, a moment of name-and-note-dropping later, I found myself waiting while he went back out to smoothly request the Troll’s assistance in such a minor bureaucratic task. Seconds after that, I was in possession of the prized residence permit, renewed to the end of 2010.

I thanked Mr. Fall effusively and quickly snuck out the side door so as not to disgruntle the Troll again.

Just like that. Easy.

Telling this story later to my host-sister E~, she said, “Wow. You’re work like a Senegalese person now.” Yikes. Come December 31, 2010, though, I know how to navigate this bureaucratic mess again. Step 1: head to Dakar…


As an aside, I spent a lovely 36 hours in Kaolack. Post-adventure, M~ and I visited the local artisanal market and spent the rest of the day catching up in a restaurant. Nice.

I've gotten good at SST (Senegalese Standard Time)

IST is over and I’ve been back at site for almost a week. I’m once again relieved to be “home,” breathing the clean air (pollution-free, but a little dusty), sleeping in my own bed. There is still some residual motivation and optimism from my training. The sense of overwhelming isolation and simple goddamn heat just knock a lot out of me, but there is work to do!

Anyway, some funny things from the last few days:

I. No matter how right you are, if you are a young, toubab (white) girl, you are always wrong. To get back to site last week, I rented a car with a couple of other volunteers. It’s a much more expensive alternative to public transport; but with a month’s worth of luggage, it was an attractive solution to getting home.

The only problem was that the car’s owner refused to take the route I laid out, swearing the paved road was a safer bet than the red bush-road for the last leg of the trip. Except that I actually live here now and I know that the paved road is a wreck, utterly beat up and potholed. What should be a 25-minute ride takes an hour and a half because the cars are forced to slow down and navigate the trenches. The bush-road, on the other hand, is in fine condition this side of the rainy season.

But having three counts against me (my age, gender and skin color), I couldn’t possibly be right. We took the paved road. The driver, unlike his boss, had never even heard of my port town; would you believe he was asking me, “Are we there yet?” every half hour?! The trip to N~ ultimately took an excruciating 3 hours. And topping off the day’s adventures in transport, I then had to wait 2 hours for the next pirogue. When I bitch about being isolated in spite of being this close to Dakar, you can understand what I mean.

II. On Saturday I went to buy some milk powder and laundry soap.

En route I

a) scared a donkey (hysterical), and

b) saw a charette with a sign reading “Hitler – Mar Salou – 1933-45” (uncomfortable and weird).

Ah, Senegal. You never cease to confuse the hell out of me.

III. File this under the List of Things You Probably Didn’t Want to Know About Your Food Before Eating It:

Ndambe is a bean dish made with onions and spicy red sauce. Wander around any village or neighborhood any morning of the week and you’ll eventually find at least one woman selling homemade ndambe out of a large, shallow bowl. If you’re lucky, you’ll get your ndambe on tapalapa (village bread, as opposed to industrially produced crap) and the vendor might add in kane (hot sauce) or homemade mayonnaise or hardboiled egg. Some families eat ndambe as an evening meal, over rice or millet couscous, often with bread to ensure that you have an overdose of carbohydrates equal to the unusual quantity of protein in the dish. Ndambe is one of the few tricks of Senegalese cuisine worth bringing home. (We’ve already discussed introducing bean sandwiches to the American breakfast diet; it’s our post-service business plan.)

As ubiquitous as bean sandwich ladies are, my family in ML~ doesn’t eat ndambe –or beans in any form – all that often. So when I saw a plate of beans (black-eyed peas, I think) out in the sun the other day, I got excited. Hoping to subtly relay my enthusiasm through overeager curiosity, I asked E~ why she’d put the beans out in the sun, if that was an integral part of the cooking process.

Well, she replied, she’d been storing those beans just a little too long and des petites bêtes (read: insects) had gone and eaten holes into every last been. Placing the metal plate out in the hot sun forced the bugs to crawl out of the beans and die. A quick look confirmed the fact: tiny black bugs were withering next to the precious black-eyed peas. Seeing my face turn what I can only assume was a disconcerting shade of green, she added, “All good beans have bugs. That’s how you know they’re good.”

…

That night we ate ndambe with shrimp, using tapalapa in lieu of utensils. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in 7 months, petites bêtes notwithstanding.

III. b)

And here is how wext (dried sea urchin, I think?) is prepared:

Dried, chopped and salted to keep away the flies, on a cinder-block in the middle of the compound.

More training sessions

Today we had a couple of interesting guest presenters: one from the US Foreign Agricultural Service and another from the West African Trade Hub. They talked about exporting to the US and opportunities for volunteers to get involved on the ground, at the local level (like with farmers or something). This was cool because a) it made me optimistic about work possibilities when I get back to my site, and b) it reminds me that there is life after Peace Corps and it doesn't have to involve a boring accountant job or whatever. Hell, I almost applied to a pretty sweet FAS internship back in 2005. [I'm currently playing the "What if...? game in my head.]

But I'm wavering here (between optimism and depression) because the prospect of going back to my site, feeling so goddamn isolated and frustrated and dealing with jerks/creeps and other generally poor work partners, does not inspire the enthusiasm and motivation to go back. Argh. And I'm still really, really tired... which might explain why this post is so uninspired. [I probably stayed up too late watching those HIMYM episodes. ;)]

WAIST+IST = sleepy

Ok, so it's a little unusual that I should be so sleepy right now (it's only 9pm on a lazy Sunday!), but the last two weeks have been exhausting. The All-Volunteer conference in Dakar was very interesting and, more importantly, WAIST (West African Invitational Softball Tournament, read: drunken softball party) was an absolute riot. I'll post some pictures from that part of the week to Picasa.

We've been back in Thies for almost a week now and our training sessions have been going fairly well. Some have been less successful/informative/worthwhile than others. [Note to self: don't try to teach about the importance of intimacy in an adult classroom while you yourself are wearing dark sunglasses and ignoring questions.] A session we had on food security and the process for certifying artisanal food products was fascinating. We learned that only 30% of market transactions here are in the formal sector, so any effort to formalize more of it could be kinda cool. I'm just grateful to finally get some relevant training to take back to my community; hopefully I CAN do something productive in the next 21 months.

And...I'm starting to lose focus (a bed and an episode of How I Met Your Mother are calling me). Anyway, we are staying in the center this weekend instead of our homestays. This morning a whole bunch of us took advantage of the day off to go to a nearby monastery known for its goat cheese. We sat through an exceptionally long Lenten mass and were rewarded with delicious, delicious goat cheese. We all ate too much and were happy happy happy (I swear I'm not just speaking for myself here).

Ok. That's all I can do. Goodnight!

Permagardening

I'm in Thies right now for a few days of Food Security-related Permagarden training. For a SED/Eco-T volunteer, this has actually been loads of fun: a chance to get dirty and green and actually feel productive. If I'm especially motivated, maybe I can take some of this stuff back to my site and start a small garden there. [Ha. You never know...]

There are pictures on Picasa. You can check out the permagarden plot my group prepared today. You can see what happens to a white shirt when you're dumb enough to pick up a sack of charcoal. And you can see just how happy an Eco-T vol can look when she has something to show for the day's work.

Next up: Dakar for the All-Vol conference and some drunken softball playing. Back to Thies next week for the rest of our In-Service training.

Gratitude

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I am so grateful (and lucky!) to have this surrogate family.
:D

La lutte

January – ‘tis the season for la lutte! That’s a style of traditional Seereer wrestling, and the season is in full force. Every week, the competition is held in a different village. What used to be a weeklong event is now a more modernized, compressed, high-energy weekend with three nights of wrestling. Sunday night is the culmination with the heavyweight finals and the presentation of the champions for the other two weight classes. The lutte was quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in my village so far.

Night I : [ho-ly-shit]
Having suffered through another excruciating hour with my language tutor with only the solace of the excitement to follow, I headed into town to meet E~. I found her at a friend’s house, where the buzz of anticipation was decidedly less high-pitched than I expected. In fact, the women barely seemed to register the loud speaker noise coming from the village square and they were in no hurry to head in that direction. It took the time to make and drink tea (at least an hour) before E~ and I took our leave.

When we got to the main square, it was dark out and electric. Huge tarps marked off the arena, keeping the source of the noise, the music, the thrill hidden. E~ found an unmarked hole in the fabric wall and leaned in, speakeasy-style, to negotiate a ticket for me.

Even now I can’t adequately describe what it was like when we first entered the arena. It was loud – the crowd, the drumming, the chanting. There were people – the audience - lining the arena, standing or sitting in chairs and on the ground. And there, in the middle of it all, stomping and strutting and peacocking around the square, were a bunch of young, buff, half-naked men: the lutteurs.

It took me a good hour to un-drop my jaw. These men, ripped and clothed in underwear and gris-gris (protective, good luck talismans) and not much else, were running around the arena, dancing creatively to the beat of the tam-tam drummers, and pouring strength-giving ‘potions’ over their bodies. It was like watching Olympic swimmers gone Lord of the Flies and, I would find out later, these weren’t even the heaviest weight classes. Yes, there was some wrestling, too, but honestly, my brain was too overwhelmed by the entire spectacle to really focus on the sport’s finer points.

The night’s stimulation was interrupted, and then interrupted again and again, when the generator powering the arena lights cut out. Since the fight officials couldn’t very well officiate in the dark, the matches got held up every time the power shut off. Eventually E~ got fed up and we left. For the better, perhaps, since I can’t really think of anything that could have pulled me away from the scene.

Night II : Ear Plugs
Saturday night was the continuation of the lutte. This time, E~ and I and a bunch of children showed up early, before the lutteurs even, to snag some good seats behind the organizing commission. To our left was a dozen tam-tam drummers; to the right, half a dozen hefty female musicians who spent the night chanting praise-songs of the various wrestlers and notable village-people. The noise levels were beyond intense; the crowd’s reactions to the back-and-forth between the drummers and singers was almost as loud as the music itself. Again, there was some wrestling…which was ever-harder to focus on.

Night III : The Riot
Sunday night was the most anticipated night of the lutte. Even all of the toubab tourists from the campements came, sprinkling the crowd with white and random camera flashes of light. The light- and middle-weight awards were presented, again with lots of praise-chants from those lady singers. And the winners took to dancing outrageously in the center of the tam-tam circle, much to the crowd’s delight.

And then Mbalka, the local lutteur, darling of ML~, and a champion of some recent Africa Cup lutte, arrived. The crowd, which had been cheering enthusiastically for two-and-a-half nights already, erupted into a thunderous roar. And Mbalka relished every shout, every cheer, every second of the crowd’s adulation. He ran circles around the arena, strutting and stomping to the drumming, soaking up the attention. The other wrestlers awkwardly continued their rounds and their matches, trying to pretend like they were still attracting some of the attention. Everything was wonderful and festive.

But then something was not wonderful. There was a loud noise from off to my right. The women around me, who had been cheering and clapping in delight, snatched up their children, knocked over chairs, and started to rush anywhere, away from that noise. I had been so caught up in the show that at first I didn’t know what we were running from – an animal stampede, maybe? (Yes, that’s dumb, but this is Africa, right? The Discover Channel has me convinced they materialize from nothing like storm clouds.) E~ yelled for me to get out of the arena, to get away and get safe.

It wasn’t until a little later, when we had reconvened at E~’s mother’s home, with all of the kids and grandkids accounted for, that the rush and the riot were explained. Apparently, the organizing commissioners had decided that Mbalka had shown up for the lutte’s registration – gasp – late. Excuse my shock, but this is Senegal, isn’t it? Everyone is late to everything. And, horror of horrors, they weren’t about to let anyone break the rules and fight, even someone like the adored local Mbalka.

The young people’s collective reaction: riot. Throw a shit-fit. Tear apart the arena (explaining the loud noise). And maybe try to beat up the commissioners. The villagers know that this sort of thing – favoritism or de-favoritism of a local lutteur - has happened before and the resulting melee has resulted in some serious injuries, even a death or two. Hence the people-stampede.

Unfortunately, this meant that the lutte was cut short. The heavy-weight fights were not fought. If Mbalka wasn’t going to fight, no one was. And instead of ending on a high note, the 2010 ML~ event ended with most of the villagers peering out from their compounds, wondering if those angry youths had succeeded in finding those despicable commissioners (they didn’t).

Still, for me, it was one hell of an experience.

Pictures and videos are up on picasa.