Greeting from Séssene, Senegal! First- I’m sorry for being blog M.I.A. for so long! My mom told me people were starting to ask if I was still alive, so I’ll start by saying YES, I’m alive. Also, my disgusting feet healed up nicely so no need to worry about that either. I don’t know how to start explaining the last two weeks, but here goes-

I arrived last Monday. Early that morning all us MSID kids headed South of Dakar for our internships piled onto a bus and set off. I was the very first to be dropped off- Waly kept referring to me as his “first victim”. After a couple extremely nervous hours on the bus, we abruptly pulled off the side of the road toward a stand of grass thatched huts and small cement block rooms. Waly and Awa got off the bus with me, where I met my new supervisor at Agrecol/Afrique, M. Mamadou Pene. The four of us walked to the small sandy courtyard (for lack of a better term) in the middle of the huts and rooms where my new family lives. I was briefly introduced to my host grandfather, Grandpere Doudou Niasse, an old man who typically wears blue robes and a matching cap. Waly told me that here in Senegal, “you treat your grandfather like your husband!” and laughed, slapping me on the back- I’m don’t know what he meant by that, nor did I particularly care to find out.

I only had time to drop off my suitcase before the four of us hopped back on the bus and drove a ways down the road to the office of Agrecol/Afrique. I hugged Waly, Awa, and my fellow toubabs goodbye, and with a few toots of the horn the bus was off down the road and I was all alone in this crazy new place. M. Pene gave me a brief tour of the one room office and explained some of Agrecol’s activities here in Séssene.

Agrecol’s main goal is to promote organic agriculture in Séssene and the 19 other small villages in the region. M. Pene explained that farming organically is important not only because pesticides and fertilizers can cause all sorts of environmental problems, such as groundwater contamination, but also because organic farming saves Senegalese farmers the money they would normally spend on these pesticides and fertilizers. He explained the projects that Agrecol has undertaken here in Séssene, including cooperating with Senegalese farmers undertaking organic farming or gardening, helping organic farmers get their produce and other goods to market, organizing a monthly hour long radio program about Agrecol’s recent projects, and setting up a connection between women’s groups growing bissap and international buyers in Europe (last year these women sold thousands of tons of bissap abroad and made almost 17 million CFA!) He explained that the Séssene office’s latest project was hosting a group of Belgian high school students, who would arrive in the region on Wednesday to stay for about a week, helping build chicken houses in 20 different locations. The Belgians were paying for the building materials, as well as a gift of 10 chickens to go along with each house. The goal is to provide villagers with a means to raise local chickens to sell at the market, which they can breed to be larger and more healthy than your average Senegalese chicken by keeping them separate from other chickens in the new chicken houses.

After my tour and briefing, M. Pene sat down at his desk and started a crossword puzzle, and I was left to sit, read my book, and write in my journal until noon, when Pene threw down his pencil and announced it was quitting time. The rest of the day I was left to settle in at home.

My first few days at my new home, I was positive I would never get used to living in the village. My only hope was that when I first arrived in Dakar in September, I thought I would never get used to living there, but I did- I could only hope the same thing would happen in Séssene. (It has, don’t worry!) The first afternoon I spent there, I lay down on a mat in the sand to take a short nap, but was rudely awakened by a chicken that jumped on my back and started walking around until I shook him off. I decided to forgo the nap and rinse off instead- of course, there’s no running water in my village, so my host sister Nafi helped me tote a bucket to the “shower,” a corner of a small fenced-in area reserved for Pap the horse shielded by a sheet strung between two branches stuck into the sand. My first couple of nights were absolutely miserable. Apparently I was spoiled in Dakar, having a fan in my bedroom- my new family’s home has no electricity, so my days of living a life of luxury in the big city with an electric fan are OVAH! My first night I was so hot I didn’t fall asleep until around 4 AM. The second night I moved into a different, supposedly cooler room that my family had prepared for me but that wasn’t ready the first night I arrived. It was indeed cooler, but my second night I was kept awake until the wee hours by the scratching of some sort of crazy big nocturnal beetle on the concrete floor, and some more worrying large thumps coming from the armoire. The next morning, Ndiaga, my host brother, told me they had found a rat in my room, but that he had put out a bowl of water with poison in it, and the rat would probably be dead really soon, so I could still sleep in the room, no problem! However- being a spoiled city girl, this was a bit more than I could handle, and I insisted on sleeping in a different room and only moved back two nights later when Ndiaga showed me the dead rat before tossing it away.

Anyway, that was the worst of the shock I felt my first days here. Since then, bathing with Pap the horse, passing donkey drawn carts on the road, and going to the bathroom in a hole in the ground have begun to feel almost normal. I’ve also gotten much more comfortable at home thanks to the fact that my family is AWESOME.

I’ll start off by saying that the Niasse family is huge. Technically my immediate host family is only my host dad, Pere Paté Niasse, my host mom, Baay Mariam, my host brother, Ndiaga, (22), and my host sister, Nafi (14). (Baay Mariam and Pere Paté have at least 2 or 3 other kids, but they’re all in other parts of Séssene or away at school or in the army.) However, our little stand of huts is also home to a slew of other extended family and their children. My first week in Séssene I started carrying my journal around with me wherever I went and jotting down names and descriptions whenever I met someone new. (Example- 1. Omar Niasse- little boy with funny ears 2. Abdoulaye Niasse- Grandpa Doudou Niasse’s brother; creepy old guy who stared at me through my window 3. Thiama Diaine- speaks a little French, pregnant 4. Ndama Faye- the funny friendly lady who dances crazy 5. Fama Niasse- the lady who’s missing a finger… You get the idea.) The Niasse family tree is further complicated by polygamy. Thiama Diaine and Ndama Faye share a Niasse husband, as does Astou Mbene, (mother of 1. Omar Niasse, boy with the funny ears,) and an anonymous woman who is sick in the hospital but will return to the village soon. Another woman, Mam Diabe Guye, is the second wife of Gora Niasse, who spends most of his time living and working in Mbour, where he has another wife and children. So weird! Another confusing factor is the apparently common practice of sharing children. One afternoon I was sitting with Nafi and Ndiaga, trying to sort out who was married to who, which children belonged to which women, etc. I asked about the mother of Youssou Ndiaye, who eats every meal with our immediate family (Baay Mariam, Pere Paté, Ndiaga, Nafi, and myself) but doesn’t share their last name. Nafi explained that his parents had moved to the Gambia and “given him” to her mother. Another little boy, Pap Guye, is biologically Mam Diabe Guye’s son, but is “shared” by Mam Diabe and Baay Mariam- everyone in the village says he has two mothers! As you can imagine, it gets rather difficult for me, an only child from a household of two people, to keep all these names and family ties straight.

Everyone in the family has been extremely nice to me since the moment I arrived. They insisted that I call myself by a new Senegalese name, Mariame Niasse, which every other Senegalese person I’m introduced to thinks hilarious. The first night when I couldn’t sleep because of the heat, I had a minor break down and started crying in my room. Around 10 people came to my door to see what was the matter, and Baay Mariam even offered to let me sleep on her bed while she slept with the kids on some mats on the floor. Everyone talks to me and asks me about my work, the United States, food, my various gadgets and pills and creams, etc., though the vast majority of them don’t speak any French and my Wolof is ridiculously bad (Nafi, Ndiaga, and Thiama Diaine are the only ones who speak French.) Saturday, Pere Paté drove me and Nafi to market on a cart pulled by Pap the horse! We bought vegetables and fish, and I helped cook ceeb u jen for lunch. Each smaller nuclear family eats dinner together, and I’ve had to learn to hide out for a while after I finish eating because if I try to walk through the courtyard back to my room while others are still eating, 3 or 4 people demand that I come eat, (“Mariame! Kaay reer! Lekkal!”) and I wind up so stuffed I can barely move. When the sun goes down and it starts getting cooler outside, everyone drags mats outside and lies looking up at the stars. A couple of nights last week a bunch of the women of the house would pull me out of my room to dance and sing while Sohkna Jamme would beat on an empty water jug, and everyone had a good laugh when I tried to dance like them. (Everyone’s favorite was when I made up a move called “The Omar Niasse.” Omar loves to dance, stomping his feet as fast as he can on the ground. I imitated him once, to everyone’s amusement, and now they always tell me to do the Omar Niasse- “Feccal Omar Niasse!!”) I love having so many kids around- Astou Mbene has one baby daughter, Fatou, but other than that all the young Niasses are boys. I’ve made three special buddies- Omar Niasse, Pap Ndiaye, and Pap Guye. Omar is 3, has the most contagious laugh you’ve ever heard, and dances nearly constantly. Pap Guye is 4, wears a huge glittery plastic pink necklace every day, and likes to give me high fives (his all-time favorite game is “Up high! Down low… TOO SLOW!”) Pap Ndiaye is around 6 or 7 and pretty quiet, but always runs up to say hi when I get home from work, and asks each morning if I slept well. A

This week also saw an addition to the Niasse clan! When I arrived, Mam Diabe Guye was extremely pregnant, and this past Monday while I was at work, she went into labor and was taken to a hospital in a nearby town. Tuesday, she was back in her hut with a brand new baby boy!! People drift in and out of her room all day to say hi to her and the baby and just hang out, so for the past few nights Nafi and I have gone in and sat with her and whoever else is around, and held the baby. I’ve never met anyone so young! In Muslim tradition here in Senegal, the baby’s baptism is held at the home a week after it is born, and it isn’t given a name until that day. So Monday I’ll take the day off from work and see a baptism!

Of course, not everything at home is perfect. Having so many people around and constantly wanting to talk is difficult when I want some alone time, and the language barrier can often be frustrating. Generally though, I’ve been having a great time with the Niasse clan.

Unfortunately, work has been much less awesome than home life for the past couple weeks. The Belgian students arrived to build chicken houses on Wednesday, as promised by M. Pene. Our first day, we drove on bumpy dirt roads through the countryside to a remote village. The chicken houses were to be build of cinder blocks and cement, and so our first task was to move the cinder blocks needed for the house from their neat pile behind a hut to the building site, about 20 feet away. This first task turned out to be our last, too. A couple Senegalese guys took over from there, using the only two shovels and trowels to dig the foundation, mix the cement, and start construction. I tried my best to get involved- I asked if I could use the trowel to try a bit of cement work, but after about a half an hour, one of the Senegalese guys took it back, probably tired of my slow progress. I felt a little angry and frustrated that I couldn’t help, but M. Pene and the other Senegalese men hanging around were astounded by my half an hour of slopping cement every which way- that kind of work is never expected of women, especially not of toubab women. M. Pene slapped me on the shoulder and said something along the lines of, “You’ve worked SO HARD!!!! And in the SUN!!! You must be exhausted, sit down here in the shade.” He also mentioned calling Waly to tell him what an excellent intern I was. Oh boy.

The last 7 days of “building” chicken houses with the Belgians progressed about like that. We would drive to a remote village, and would promptly be ushered into chairs or a bench in the shade to watch construction progress. The Belgians often played games and sang songs with the village children, which was always entertaining, and I managed to finish a really great book of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri called “Unaccustomed Earth,” and start rereading “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. The Belgians were all very nice, and I had a good time talking with them about this and that- the new Harry Potter theme park planned for the U.S., Burger King, Belgian chocolate, European geography, etc. I also met the other two people who work in the Agrecol office, Mariame Faye and Samba Dia. Mariame works with the women’s groups in the Séssene region, and though I’m not 100% sure of M. Dia’s job, I think he keeps track of Agrecol’s gardening and farming projects. It was neat to see all the villages in the Séssene region and to meet people who live in them- a couple times groups of women brought out tam tams, diembes, and calabashes strung with beads to make music and dance, and we also visited a couple of schools in the region to deliver gifts that the Belgians had brought along for the kids. Generally the days were disappointing, though. It was frustrating to be expected to do nothing and to sit around for hours on end. The chaperone of the Belgian crew told me that they weren’t very happy with the organization of the trip, though they were enjoying meeting people and seeing the villages. They left this morning to head back to Dakar to catch a flight tomorrow, and I’m hoping that next week I’ll have a more regular schedule and actually start doing things.

So. That’s about all I can write at the moment, though there’s so much more I could say. Thanks to everyone who read this whole entry, holy cow. This weekend I’m visiting Emma Willenborg, my fellow Grinnellian in Senegal, in a town called Joal where she is working for an NGO in microfinance. I’ll get back home Sunday, (inshallah,) in time for the new baby’s baptism on Monday! I’ll be sure to update the ol’ blog by Friday at the latest.