Baaba Maal

CNN is currently hosting Baaba Maal's newest single, and you should all check it out. I saw him play at 2:30 am in the tiny Senegalese village of Aram, which is literally in the middle of no-where, and it blew my mind. There was no power in this village, so they had to bring in generators and cobble together a stage for him and his dancers. It cost me 2,000CFA (about $5 CND) to see him in Aram, which is crazy as two weeks before he played to a sold out show in London where nose-bleed tickets were going for £50. He is a fantastic musician, and people here in the Fouta go crazy for his music. He sings in Pulaar, which is the dominate language here in the North, and the people take great pride in the fact that he sings about their history and traditions. Here is the link so you can experience it for yourself: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/15/baaba.maal/

Baaba Maal's the one with the sweet shades...

And the Skies Turned Red...

In addition to being 45C, it is also dust storm season. Today it's so bad that no one is going out if they can help it. See for yourself - fun times here in the desert!

This was taken at 10am this morning

What's outside your window?

This is what was outside mine last week, and yes, that is an antique rifle that requires gunpowder. Sharpe would be proud, as would Lawrence of Arabia.

Please notice the ram-rod...

Some quick numbers

237 - the number of days I've been in Senegal
45 - the temperature in my room right now (and this is just the start of the hot season!)
29 - the lowest temperature it's supposed to get down to tonight (there's a reason I wake up in
a pool of my own sweat)
4 - the number of times the power's gone out today (and counting)
60 - the average time (minutes) of the power outages
19 - the hour that the internet cuts out every night, without fail
6 - the number of times I've had to get up during writing this to answer the office door
3 - the number of times it's been kids who want to play/talk with me
2 - the number of times it's been work related (1 who wanted some info on the tournee I just
organized, 1 who is going to spend the night in the office)
1 - the number of times it was actually 2 goats fighting against the door. Go figure.
1930 - the hour the sun goes down and I'm left sitting in the dark because Seydou hasn't had the electrician fix my light.
7 - the number of nights I've been sitting in the dark
5 - the number of village portraits I'm supposed to write while sitting in the dark
3 - the number of showers I've had today so I don't smell too "ripe"
2 - the number of minutes I have to let the shower run for so I don't burn myself
62 - the number of days left until I leave the fouta
32 - the number of days I get to spend in Linguere/travelling before I go
3 - the number of episodes of Biggest Loser Sarah and I are going to watch at the Peace Corps house this weekend while eating brownies (thanks Mom and Dad!)
12 - the number of times in the past hour I've salivated at the thought of anything cold (ice cream, perrier, sam adams, ice, etc)
0 - the number of times I've regretted being here

It's a crazy life, but it's the life I chose...

I say tomato, you say tamaate

A while back, I headed out with my adopted family here to help them harvest their tomato crops. Given the poor quality of the soil here in Ndioum, all of the fields are located on the other side of the river (which is crossed in a rickety ferry), followed by a 30 minute horse cart ride to where the soil is richer/where an irrigation system has been installed connected to another river. Since most of the tomatoes harvested in these go to a nearby factory and get turned into tomato paste, this factory sets "collection" days, when it will send it's huge trucks across on the ferry to pick up people's crops. This means that anyone and everyone is out in their fields on these days, putting together as many crates as possible. Any tomatoes that don't make the factory's cut (they prefer ripe to over-ripe) are then sold at the market and on the side of the road, where 6 tomatoes (the most I can eat in one sitting) go for about 13 cents. I love tomato season.

THat day we were all up at the crack of dawn (very literally - it was still dark out when I headed over to their house), and after packing up the horse cart and picking up some of the neighbours, we were off to catch the ferry. Ndioum's ferry is one of the few mechanical ones in service, so it's extremely expensive to operate. This means that they have had to resort to a (relatively) fixed schedule, which results in a crazy gridlock of horses and donkey carts, intermixed with over enthusiastic children and tired adults.

Waiting for the ferry to load


Didn't quite fit on the first one...



Not gonna lie, it was a little cramped...

Once we got to the other side, it was off to the fields for us! After the 30 horse cart, we hopped of and headed into the fields. It seems like the entire town shares the irrigation system, so everyone's crops are connected in these giant fields. You have to balance along thin strips of sand/dirt until you make your way to your own little section of the field. I was definitely not very graceful at this! I should also note that the strict (for my region at least) "no showing your knees" policy for women does not apply when you're harvesting - it was quite entertaining to see all of my friends take of their pagnes (long skirts) to reveal soccer/basketball shorts!

Time to get cracking!

The trick to tomato harvesting is to not fall over into the mud (I wasn't so good at this part), and more importantly to try to gentley twist off all of the ripe (and even over-ripe) tomatoes. Since there were so many plants, we had to make sure that we didn't miss any tomatoes, so there were a lot of impressive acrobatic moves that took place as we twisted around the plants. Once your bucket was full, you then lugged it down to the clearing at the edge of the field, dumped it out on some old rice sacks, and then headed back to do it all over again.

Cartons being filled up in the fields

About 4 hours later, when we had harvested all of the tomatoes, it was time to sort them. As I said before, the factories prefer the ripe/over ripe ones, so we had to separate them out into the big black crates. The slightly less ripe ones went into the plastic buckets to sell and to eat at home. It was quite the time consuming process, and by the end of it we were filthy, exhausted, and extremely pleased with ourselves for getting it done so quickly (we were one of the first families to be finished - rather impressive I thought!). We then lugged the big crates to the side of the road where they would be picked up by the trucks later on in the day, loaded up the remaining tomatoes, and headed back to the ferry. After an hour's wait (the ferry was having some mechanical difficulties) it was back to the house, where we got to enjoy the fruits (pun-intended) of our labour. So delicious!

Sorting out the tomatoes

Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming

I know that I've lapsed lately in my blog writing, but it's been a rather crazy month. There's been a lot of lows lately mixed in with the highs, and it starts to creep up on you. The weather situation has not helped either, for as the Senegalese like to say, "the heat has arrived", with most days averaging around 42C in the shade. It feels like living in a convection oven - even the wind is burning hot. The frequency and duration of power outages have also increased, and we now spend most of our days without power (and our nights without internet, due to a bizarre missing DNS address between 19 and 23 h). I had never passed out before in my life because of heat, yet it happens on a daily basis here. It's truly that hot.

Work never ends here - I'm off again tomorrow to a meeting in Fanaye (about 4 hours away by public transport) regarding a mural painting project I'm working on with a Peace Corps Volunteer, where we hope to train Tostan participants in how to create permanent visualizations of the human rights lessons they're learning. Images are already an extremly important part of the Tostan program, so we are hopeful that this will serve as a reminder of those lessons, even after the classes are over. It's one of my "baby" projects that I've started to keep me sane, as well as to keep me from being stuck writing "portraits" (donor "fluff" pieces) on various villages. I love visiting villages to see the work that takes place on the ground, as I'm very aware now of the challanges that they face, and which successes are "real" versus the exagerated ones that they think I want to hear. I love being able to include these experiences in my reports, to be able provide indepth details that highlight the realities of the region. I'd rather write a constructive, factual, accurate, report any day then a emotion-laced, "Oprah" style piece where I work to tug on the heart strings of donors by talking about the brave struggles of the women and poor malnourished, unclothed children running around. That is a damagin, misleading over-simplification of the problem, and it glosses over far too many elements. Development is about successes AND failures: it's about learning from your mistakes, correcting what went wrong, and continiously working to improve those things that went right. There is good work that is done on the ground, and it should be embraced, warts and all.

Sorry - that was my exhausted and somewhat nonsensical rant for the evening. There's been a lot of things pent up in my lately, and I'm working to excise these frustrations in the hopes of making Tostan a better organization by the time I leave, at the very least in the Fouta anyways. It's hard to believe how quickly the time has gone, and to realize that I've got just a little over 3 months left before I head back home to law school. Scary. Anyways, I'm completely exhausted and sweating buckets, so I think I'm going to hit the sack. I'll update when I get back again, inch'allah...

Never Again...

I woke up this morning at 2:30am to a beetle half the size on my pinkie trying to crawl into my ear. Definitely the worst way to wake up ever - it even beats the time Emily woke me up when we were little to tell me that she was feeling sick, only to then be sick on me. I really hope I get a bed soon - I'm just glad it was a beetle and not a scorpion...