The Visitation

Being here for as long as I have, you start to get numb to how different things are. My friend Caroline came to visit this week and seeing her experience helps to readdress the little things you forget to feel weird about. For instance, we have frogs that live in our shower, but I just kind of forgot about them completely. Then Caroline would bring it to my attention that we shower with frogs, and I can remember to think, oh yeah, that isn’t normal. Also I don’t hear all the random roosters anymore, or the loudspeaker chanting from the mosque. She sat in on the adult classes in the evenings to see what it was like, and other than being hit on by a lot Senegalese men, she has enjoyed them. She says that life here “isn’t as scary as I thought it would be” which I’ve decided to take as a compliment.

We did some St. Louis touring on mopeds during the day to see a lot of the city. We took a lot pictures, and here are some of them. I also have some video, but the internet isn’t working well enough to upload it here, so I will have to wait till I get home to post it. On that note, it looks like I will be coming back to the states earlier than originally expected. I got a job offer from Bat Conservation International about a field biologist position, and it looks like a really good job, so I decided to take it. This means that I will have to leave St. Louis in March instead of May like I planned in order to start the job. I told my host family and students and they are all really sad that I will be leaving, but understand the circumstances.

The view from the roof

Caroline meets John Waller and an instant friendship is kindled

Kids in the house enjoying some fish and rice

Caroline with baby OusmanCaroline falls in love with hand washing clothes, vows to never use a machine again

Spot of whimsy during bike rideNot so whimsical part of the bike ride

Caroline's love of household chores is a big help to the familyWe stopped by a Senegalese kindergarten to say hi to the kids
During the dry season, the river becomes a landfill

Living Green in Senegal

Being an environmentally minded person, living in Saint Louis is sometimes difficult. There aren’t any trashcans or public waste management, so people here just litter everywhere. I have a trashcan in my room, but I think they just dump it down by the river. Even if I am walking down the street and drinking a soda, I can’t bring myself to just throw the can in the river because it goes against some natural instinct. I take the can home and put it in my trashcan, which my host brother takes and dumps in the river. Part of me wants to compress all my recyclables down and try to take as much trash home as possible. They sometimes recycle here, but they don’t melt the glass down. They just wash out the glass bottles and refill them. Not a great way to prevent disease, but a great way to save energy. There are also a lot less cars than American cities, but most of the cars come from Europe after failing emissions tests. So they ship all those cars here and sell them cheaply to African companies who don’t have emissions standards. Which you would think should be illegal, but apparently is not.

There are some other ways though, that St. Louis saves a lot of energy, not necessarily by choice, but by lack of availability. All the showers are cold, and since the weather has become cooler, they have become less tolerable. When I first arrived, I was taking 3 cold showers a day and loving it because it was so hot, but since there has been a change in the weather, my schedule is on a need-to-shower-basis, which is as charming as it sounds. I had a really awful moment when it had been a few days since my last shower and went out to feed the sheep, and petted it on the head and then smelled my hand and thought it didn’t smell that bad. Then I dropped my hand in horror and took a shower right after. Sometimes when I need to step into the freezing water, to psyche myself up, I will shut my eyes and think really hard “environmentalism!” and then step in, hoping that the good feeling I get from saving energy will help dull my senses to the water. Doesn’t really work, but it’s part of a routine now so you get used to it. Same with washing clothes just because I really don’t like washing them by hand in buckets, so through clever garment management, I can usually get away with doing laundry only once a month now with only minor regrets.

As for work, I started teaching adult classes to give me something to do at night. The striking at the public school is sporadic still. Usually a couple days a week there’s a strike, but the kids I work with on Fridays are always there. One of the other volunteers who works at a preschool said they had a strike too. I know it has to be the teachers who are striking, but it is more fun to imagine little preschoolers with poorly spelled signs demanding more milk breaks. I sometimes give my family members English lessons too, to fill the time.

Also, my friend Caroline is coming to visit this weekend! She will be in Africa for about two weeks, so we will get to do a little traveling while she is here.