Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Village Women

From the title of my email you might get the impression that im going to be filling you in on some juicy gossip from the mystical land of senegal or about some sort of love interest. and its true, I love women. And Senegalese women are some of the most beautiful I have seen. beautiful skin and well defined features, truely a blessing. but this isnt that sort of email... its about my uttmost respect for the women that carry me through my day and make my small village function on a daily basis.
As you might know, women here dont exactly have it easy. They are often treated as second class citizens. they have to often share husbands, and by that i mean that men often have more than one wife, as according to muslim law they are allowed many, presumptiously no more than 4 but... there are some with more. But women do all the grunt work, all the domestic work.
Anyways these women continue to astound me on a daily basis. My father abdulye, certainly a good man, spends a good majority of his day praying. And it is understandable, he is the religious leader and there is certainly nothing wrong with having a strong devotion to the creator. but he is only able to keep up his 5 daily prayers, and the many others hs engages in but is not required to, because his wives take care of the household. I have two mothers. And it appears they are on a cycle of being with him. For example, Ami So was in our household for the first 3 weeks I was in my village. Last week she left and Jeneoba Jope is now taking over duties. Each morning the women pull the daily water from the well that is easily 50 deep, maybe more. they pull and pull, again and again, working together to make the job a bit easier. Like many of you probably imagine, they than carry enormous amounts of water on top of their heads. They than go back to the house, make breakfast, clean up after breakfast, and than begin their daily chores. Oh and after she has made the breakfast she will than carry it to each group of people, the kids, the women, my father, and me, and than come collect it when we all finish. Meanwhile my father will become thirsty so she will need to stop whatever she is doing, walk to the water bucket, bring him a cup of water, retreat and continue whatever she is doing.
After breakfast she will generally sweep up around the compound, picking up the accumulated trash that piles up through the day; watermelon rinds and plastic bags are the usual; and make the dirt in the compound look neat and acceptable. Later she will make lunch, building a fire for each meal, clean up, and than begin another chore. Maybe she needs to wash the clothes. Most likely she will need to pound the millet or sorghum so it can be cooked later. Oh and clear the millet of sand. Oh and crack peanuts for the sauce. Maybe she needs more water. Meanwhile while she is doing all this in the course of day she has a baby strapped to her back... the entire time. They carry babies in a towel so that the child is straddled behind her facing in the same direction. This is done with a beach towel.
Now this is not to say men dont do any work... they work in the fields in the morning and occassionaly the evening if there is lots of work to be done, and they upkeep the maintence such as the fencing and replacing structural dalage to the huts. Difficult work except it may take a week. aA the fields are only being used 8 months of the year. Starting now there is nothing to plant, im interested in what the men will do.
It appears that there is a silent consensus amongst the men that the women are truely the backbone of the operation, that they are incredibly strong women who do the majority of the work while the men relax and drink tea and talk about... well i dont understand what they talk about. Im interested to know. But they will never admitt that the women does more work, and they dont like it when i tell them that they are lazy. The women do.
And there it is... me spelling out what life is like for women in my village. They are strong, not only physically but mentally, they bend over backwards for the men, they are magnificent human beings and put me to shame when i begin to feel tired or that ive done too much work and i need to rest.
alhumduliah.
brad

Pictures

This is by no means a complete collection of pictures but all i had time to upload. I sort of noticed i didnt put that many pictures of my home and village life as i did my friends and parties and beach trips. Eh... Maybe im just a college kid at heart, or just whatever. Deal with it. There will be more soon. Cool.

http://community.webshots.com/user/bradcebulko

enjoy.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Coming soon

Id like to do some pictures, some link, some cool stuff. believe me im working on it but it takes time... my parents have not even seen m pictures. itll happen, maybe by christmas... wouldnt that be nice. bonne chance.


Toenails

so im back in the regional capital after another short stint in the village. i was there for only a week and now i came back up here to do some emailing, buy some garden materails, and drink some beer. oh cold beer... really ive started enjoying the simple delights of cold drinks such as cokes or beer. in the village i drink water, room temperature water from my filter. occasionaly i get alittle wild and add some foster clarks which is a drink mix like koolaid but without the familiar nastalgia of koolaid. and it doesnt taste the same. none the less that is when im feeling a bit wild and need to spend money. yea so i literally dont spend money in the village. ok not true, i buy a bucket of water each day which costs me the equivelent of one american penny. other than that my needs are taken care of. there really isnt much to spend on. we have a small boutique with rice, suagr, candles, and matches for your daily hut needs but i dont really need much of that. so after a couple days i just feel the compulsion to spend money, for really no other reason than because im american and thats what we do. so i ride my bike , if it doesnt have flat tires which it currently does, numbers 3 and 4, 5k into a neighboring village to charge my phone, learn alittle woloof, and drink a cold coke. but hey im pumping money into the economy right?
so i ate lizard the other night. no kidding. about 2pm the talibey, the young boys who live in my compound, work in the familys fields, and learn the koran from my host father, come waltzing in from the fields with this lizard, about 2 feet long, 8 inches in diameter, head chopped off just hanging lifelessly from omars hands. they couldnt wait to show me what they had. they throw the lizard onto my mat to show me what they had caught and the thing splatters down spraying blood onto my sandals. i didnt know what to say. i wasnt so worried about the blood as i was in disbelief that there was a lizard that big and it looked so fake. it looked like a rubber toy i would have played with. anyways that night, after dinner which was a delicious meal of neverdie tree leaves, peanuts, and sorghum (sarcasm) the boys decide it is their turn to do some cooking. so using the campfire we have most nights that they use for reading light to study the koran and pray, the chopped up the lizard, got a nice concotion of spices and onions from my mom, and boiled the sucker. i had a fellow PC friend in the village for the night and he was captivated. he lives in a city with woloofs and had always heard that pulaars love lizard but had never actually seen it. well so it boiled, and it smelled awful. just terrible. but these boys were having the time of their life and couldnt wait to dig in. naturally being the wonderful people that they truely are (no sarcasm, i really enjoy these kids) they offer me one of the finer peices of the lizard, a leg. of course im going to have to try it but a leg? scales still on... toenails still attached.... it felt like a rubber toy. and it was spicey, i dont know what they put on it but it tasted like chewy, spicey, chicken. i guess.... i dont know, but i liked it.
last bit of news, my garden is beginning to take shape. i have a huge plot that is 20m by 10m with a nice sacket sorghum fence. think corn stalks attached together with three bark used as rope. it is what all the fences are made of in villages. there are some holes that need patching so i can keep out the baby goats, kids, and the chickens. those damn chickens and roosters keep me up at all hours of the day. anyways my hands are terribly torn up from spending two daysd ripping up weeds from my plot and starting sunday i am going to begin plowing and seeding, hopefully be done by monday. im going to have some beans, tomatoes, cabbage, salad, basil, and of course my new favorite food item in the world, watermelon. its going to be sad in a month when the wtermelon season is over. hopefully not too long until papaya, cashew, and mango season. we shall see.

enjoy america everyone. it truely is a wonderful place despite all of its obvious problems. enjoy cold beers and cheeseburgers, daily if you have the opportunity. everyone here wants to be there and im sure few of you want to be here so.... do the math. alright enough of that stuff... so yea, go colts. broncos fans are losers... i wish i was in vail skiing 25inches of pow.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

post

ive been told that i need to post more often and that i need to shorten my posts. two good points that i will take into account. so here is today... The president of the country is in Thies today and the streets are chaotic. Looks like some fun. Something always clicks inside of me when i get around politics and it makes me excited. i love to see people being active within their country and showing concern. Other than that it is hot today. but i guess it was hto yesterday too; and the day before that. I keep hearing that it will eventually get cooler here but i dont buy it. i still sweat at night and the mosquito net doesnt make things any cooler. so.... thats it. i dont have much else to say.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Counterpart Workshop

So here it is... patience is something i need to work on. I can not handle waiting for these computers all the time... i spend half of my hour on the internet waiting for the computer to load and catch up with my typing. AHhhh. But enough of that. Today and tomorrow is the counterpart workshop. So what is this counterpart workshop? well 2 people; one male and one female; from my village made the trip up to Thies to stay for a couple days. they are who i will be working with for the next couple years. effectively my first contqcts in the village although i will be living with neither of them. I will live with the chief of the village. but they will introduce me to the village and will be the only two people trained about the Peace Corps mission. Which is important because most people in the village will assume that I am there to give them money or build something and than leave. I can understand the misunderstanding. That is what many NGOs do. The anticipation leading up to this day was incredible. i was so nervous because i was really worried about making a good first impression. Someone tried reminding me that they are as scared of you as you are of them but i found no solitude in that knowledge. It made things worse. I dont want them to be uncomfortable because than i will sense it and everything would get worse. Granted I was on my¨¨home turf¨ but that didnt really reassure me either. I had a conversation with a friend today about anticipation... that it is always worse than the actual event. And it is true. I spend far too much time worrying about what might happen instead of just dealing with it as it happens. The opposite is often true as well. The anticipation of something wonderful can be better than the actual event. And we could get into a discussion about why we anticipate and the necessity of it; which we did of course because what else would we talk about? Certainly not development; but that isnt relevant at this moment. the point is that my counterparts are wonderful people. Truely i had an excellent day trying to talk to them with what little pulaar i can actually speak. I can say that i just took a shower and now i dont smell... which i did and they got a good laugh out of it. They wore big happy smiles all day and said things that made me blush. The females name is fawoura and the males name is ken. Im not kidding. he isnt an american transplant but an actual senegalese. apparently in woloof ken means nobody and his whole first name means nobody wants. There is a superstition here that if you compliment a baby that bad spirits will take it away. so you never say that a baby is beautiful or smart or cute. people also wear waist bracelets to keep evil spirits away. So his name is what it is. I found this amusing. My pulaar teacher told me this... there is no way i could have understood that if my CP tried explaining it.
And so tomorrow we continue with the workshop. And i only have a week left in Thies. This is moving at such a rapid rate i can barely understand what is going on. didnt i just arrive in senegal? what am i doing going to this village? Wait... yea Im not suppose to be anticipating; just dealing with it. Things always work out right? or else i just rationalize it until i believe things worked out. Its all the same.
Brad

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Welcome to hopefully the first of many blogs to com from Senegal. Now I know I said I would be posting frequently and I have meant to but doing so has not been easy. But enough of my excuses... im ready to roll. Alright so how to catch you up onto 6 weeks of living in Senegal. hrmm...
Like I said I live in the city of thies (pronounces like chess, sort of) which is a fairly large city. A couple hundred thousand people. It is roughly 1h30m from Dakar, the capital, and more importantly 45m from a quality beach. Well that is not more important but it is nice. I live with a wonderful family with many many people running around the compound. I guess that is important too, I don't live in a house per-say (is that a word?) but a compound. It is an area that has 4 buildings with a few rooms in each one. The buildings are situated on the perimeter leaving an open dirt area in the middle shaded by two large mango trees. Really it is quite wonderful. We spend all of our time sitting in the shade. At night my family rolls out the TV and we sit around, drink tea, watch TV. My mother also sells peanuts outside our house in the evenings. This rocks my world. Frequently I sit outside, people watch and munch on peanuts. I would love to show pictures but that is pushing it right now. Give me another month. hell, I have 26 more.
6 days a week I go to the peace corps training center to be educate about agriculture, senegalese culture, and to learn the language of pulaar. Oh pulaar. pulaar is something akin to the red neck language. It isn't so much elsewhere in Africa but it is in Senegal. Traditional pulaars are nomads. so they are throughout western Africa and can be found in 25 countries, no kidding. It is a funny language that often sounds like Japanese. I would love to be able to say a few phrases for you but writing them just doesn't carry the same affect. It isn't a written language, or wasn't until colonial times, so the fact that I can read pulaar is weird. Not that there are any books written in pulaar but... Whatever.
in two weeks I will be sent to my village to begin my service. This sounds funny but I am not actually allowed to write publicly what village I am in or my exact whereabouts except that I am in the Kaolack region. Pace Corps monitors our websites. It is for safety concerns that I am not allowed to say where. Anyways I am excited to be going and i shall be writing before than. Please keep emailing me,
Brad

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Genesis

So it begins, my journey to Africa, Senegal, somewhere far from here. I am beginning to welcome this adventure with greater enthusiasm than I have previously experienced. I leave in only 10 days which sounds like plenty of time to pack except that it isn't so easy to pack for two years. Do you know the clothes you want to wear for an indefinite amount of time?