Merry Christmas!!
I’m just getting home from spending Christmas at the beach with a group of other volunteers from my region. It was definitely a little atypical to say the least, and it didn’t really feel like Christmas. But it was nice to spend the holiday with other volunteers and have a few days to relax in our rented beach house with Christmas music blaring from the stereo nonstop. For Christmas dinner, we rented out a restaurant that is right on the beach and had a great Senegalese chicken dish with chocolate cake for dessert.
Right before Christmas was the Muslim holiday Eid-al Kebir, known in Senegal as Tabaski. This holiday celebrates the day that the prophet Abraham sacrificed his son for Allah and was quickly rewarded with a ram for his faithfulness. This is one of the big two Muslim holidays (the other is Eid-al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan) and every Muslim household kills a sheep the morning of the holiday in remembrance of Abraham. For the rest of the day, it’s a feast of epic proportions. After going to the Mosque in the morning, the men come home, kill the sheep in the yard, then skin it and clean it. This was a little shocking to watch as blood and entrails ended up everywhere. Everyone kept trying to get me to kill one of our sheep (we had three) especially after they found out I had never killed or even seen an animal get slaughtered in the United States. This led to an explanation of how Americans purchase meat which blew some of my family’s minds. I was able to get out of killing it by promising to help more next year so we’ll see what happens then.
After butchering the sheep, the women start grilling the meat for lunch and we ate a huge lunch of sheep covered in a mustard and onion sauce with French fries. After eating lunch at my family’s compound, I went next door to my extended family’s compound where I ate the same lunch again. During the afternoon, everyone lazes around in a food coma - drinking tea and visiting with family. For dinner, we ate another giant meal of sheep in a heavy sauce with bread. After dinner, everyone goes out and visits friends and family into the early morning.
We followed the same schedule the following day: eating massive amounts of sheep (which at this point expanded to include the stomach, intestines, and feet), visiting friends and family and relaxing around the compound. For the entire holiday, everyone wears traditional clothing – men wear long, brightly colored gowns and women wear very elaborate dresses or skirts with matching shirts. Women also put henna on their hands and feet and braid extensions into their hair.
I hope all of you are well and had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year. I miss you all.
Chris
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
These past few weeks I have continued to meet more and more people and visit different organizations that I can potentially work with. I’m flooded with new information about people, my town, Senegal, and everything else imaginable ranging from traditional medicine to the proper way to make Senegalese tea.
I have also started Wolof tutoring with a teacher at the vocational school for girls. Neither of us really know how to go about teaching a language that is largely a spoken language, it was only put into writing 20 years ago or so (nobody here writes in it). But, we plug away at it and I think I am beginning to make some progress, slowly but surely.
My tutor shares a house with several other teachers – teachers are placed in schools by the state and consequently don’t necessarily work in their hometowns. So they live in faculty housing which is a lot like a college apartment. I’m becoming friends with the teachers in her house and am spending more and more time there, which has been great. They are all very engaging, easy to talk to, and are patient with any language barriers we encounter.
Also, feeling the need to start doing something more tangible, I’ve started helping my tutor with one of her English classes at the school. Yesterday was my second day of class and all of the girls choose English names for the class. They were all very excited to have English names and kept on saying “my name is ____” and then giggle uncontrollably. The style of class is so different than American classes. It is solely based on repetition so I’m not sure how much the girls are retaining or comprehending, but it’s too soon to judge.
Finally, this past weekend I went to a village about 30 km south of me to meet with an NGO and several women’s groups that want to start selling vegetables at a local market. To get down there, I was told there was a mini-bus that left from Nioro every afternoon. After waiting at the garage for several hours and seeing no sign of the bus, I began to ask around and finally another car headed in that direction showed up. I don’t know what kind of car it was but probably about the size of a Ford Escape and designed to hold 6 people. When all was said and through, we were tumbling down the road with 15 people in the car and a live goat tied to the roof.
Once I got to the village, a volunteer there told me about a huge, weekly party that happened to be that night. It didn’t begin until a little after midnight, but there were people from all of the surrounding villages. People were dancing to a group of drummers and there were two commentators with microphones announcing who was arriving (in the same way that announcers work the red carpet before a large film premiere). The announcers immediately took a keen interest in the two Americans at the party and conducted a 20 minute interview with us, which ended by them saying “You have everything you want here: dancing, food, Americans.” The party is actually more of a giant wrestling competition in which each of the villages selects a representative for the event. The wrestlers then compete in a round-robin tournament through the night. The wrestling was occasionally interrupted by kids sprinting through the ring with flaming torches and other events. I can’t really say that I understood everything that happened there, but it was definitely amusing.
All in all, things are going well here and I am beginning to feel more comfortable with the town, my family and my activities. I hope you are all well.
love
Chris
I have also started Wolof tutoring with a teacher at the vocational school for girls. Neither of us really know how to go about teaching a language that is largely a spoken language, it was only put into writing 20 years ago or so (nobody here writes in it). But, we plug away at it and I think I am beginning to make some progress, slowly but surely.
My tutor shares a house with several other teachers – teachers are placed in schools by the state and consequently don’t necessarily work in their hometowns. So they live in faculty housing which is a lot like a college apartment. I’m becoming friends with the teachers in her house and am spending more and more time there, which has been great. They are all very engaging, easy to talk to, and are patient with any language barriers we encounter.
Also, feeling the need to start doing something more tangible, I’ve started helping my tutor with one of her English classes at the school. Yesterday was my second day of class and all of the girls choose English names for the class. They were all very excited to have English names and kept on saying “my name is ____” and then giggle uncontrollably. The style of class is so different than American classes. It is solely based on repetition so I’m not sure how much the girls are retaining or comprehending, but it’s too soon to judge.
Finally, this past weekend I went to a village about 30 km south of me to meet with an NGO and several women’s groups that want to start selling vegetables at a local market. To get down there, I was told there was a mini-bus that left from Nioro every afternoon. After waiting at the garage for several hours and seeing no sign of the bus, I began to ask around and finally another car headed in that direction showed up. I don’t know what kind of car it was but probably about the size of a Ford Escape and designed to hold 6 people. When all was said and through, we were tumbling down the road with 15 people in the car and a live goat tied to the roof.
Once I got to the village, a volunteer there told me about a huge, weekly party that happened to be that night. It didn’t begin until a little after midnight, but there were people from all of the surrounding villages. People were dancing to a group of drummers and there were two commentators with microphones announcing who was arriving (in the same way that announcers work the red carpet before a large film premiere). The announcers immediately took a keen interest in the two Americans at the party and conducted a 20 minute interview with us, which ended by them saying “You have everything you want here: dancing, food, Americans.” The party is actually more of a giant wrestling competition in which each of the villages selects a representative for the event. The wrestlers then compete in a round-robin tournament through the night. The wrestling was occasionally interrupted by kids sprinting through the ring with flaming torches and other events. I can’t really say that I understood everything that happened there, but it was definitely amusing.
All in all, things are going well here and I am beginning to feel more comfortable with the town, my family and my activities. I hope you are all well.
love
Chris
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