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.

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

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