An Apology and Update
So here you have it, the long-awaited and much anticipated entry on my life in the bush. I’ve divided it into sections so you can read about what interests you. I apologize for the long delay in my blog update. Life has been more than hectic here and internet is less than immediately available. Since I'm dividing it into sections, I'll post them as I write them. I have so much to say about the village, but unfortunately, not enough time to sit down and write all my thoughts out at once. But this gives you something to read for the time being. Keep checking back periodically. I've promised myself to be done with all my entries by the end of this week, Incha Allah.
A quick update on my life in Senegal. As most of you probably know by now, I’ve decided to stay in Senegal for another semester. With my program, the second semester is dedicated to independent research and a long term internship. I decided to stay in Dakar, rather than continuning on in the village with the agency there. Much more work is done in this primate city, and well you’ll hear about my internship in the village later. It was a hard decision to make to stay here, it meant giving up a lot of things and time with people I love back stateside. But ultimately, this seemed like an incredible opportunity: I have a great family, a good network of friends, connections with organizations here, and a good support system from my professors here in Senegal. I am researching carbon sequestration projects in Senegal. I’m interning with the NGO CRESP (check them out at www.cresp.sn) and also with the Direction des Eaux et Forets, Chasses, et la Conservation des Sols. It’s a government division within the Ministry for the Environment and Protection of Nature. I am just doing basic research right now to understand the concepts of carbon sequestration, green tags, and Clean Development Mechanisms from the Kyoto Protocol. Hopefully, I’ll be able to help the ecovillage network in Senegal receive funding for its various “green” projects, such as mangrove rehabilitation, reforestation, bioenergy, and solar ovens. As the weeks progress I’ll be able to tell you a lot more.
And with great pleasure, I present to you: Mbam
I’ll begin with a brief introduction to the village of Mbam. It is located in the region of Fatick, the rural community of Djilor, and in the islands of the Sine-Saloum River Delta. It is 3km behind the town of Foundiougne. It is a small Serere (an ethnic group in Senegal) village, well it’s big relative to others in the area, but by our standards of cities, this one is tiny. No one knows exactly how many people live there, as Senegal has not had the resources to complete a census in over 20 years. I heard estimations between 3000 and 5000. It’s important to remember though that each house compound has, I’d say on average, 8-10 people. The village has a for-the-most-part regular grid layout. The roads are all of sand, and many paths have been cut through the fields surrounding Mbam to connect it with the other villages in the area. The vast majority of people do not have cars. In fact, my siblings would run and jump up to look over the fence every time they heard a vehicle driving past.
(And on that note, I remember one time I was sitting outside with several of my siblings. The boys were roasting peanuts and my sister and I were working on pounding peanuts into peanut butter with a huge mortar and pestle. Suddenly everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up to the sky. I didn’t know what was happening. I asked and they all responded “Il y a un avion.” [There’s a plane.] Mbam does not seem to fall below any flight paths, so planes are rare events. This is huge contrast from my experience in Dakar. My house is near the airport and every plane landing in Dakar seems to fly right overhead, so close that I can see the paint details and read the serial numbers. So imagine my surprise when everyone stopped their activities to observe this one plane. But that is the essence of village life.)
So I was talking about transportation, horse- or donkey-drawn carts are the most common forms of transportation, besides, of course, the conventional walking approach to getting from place to place. It was by horse-drawn cart that I traveled to the weekly market on Tuesdays in the town 3km over, to other villages as a part of my internship, or for baptisms and funerals with my mother, or just to go to the beach to clean the horse and trade water for fish from the fishermen. (Don’t worry, I’ll address all these topics later.) I became adept at hopping onto the cart and developed the instinct of where to position myself in order to best balance the cart for the horse.
As for the amenities: there was electricity in Mbam, though definitely not every house had it. There was also running water, but again this was not found in every compound. And in those in which you could find running water, we’re talking about a single spigot in the yard from which you fill up buckets for bathing and cleaning. All drinking and cooking water is fetched from a well, and you can pay to fill water canisters at community faucets.
As for my house and family
I lived with a large family. Bineta was my mother. She is an oddity in Senegal, a woman in her 40s, unmarried and without children. However, she has a huge heart and the financial means by which she can afford to take people in. There were five students that lived permanently at her house and one old man. The boys were: Badara (age 19), Joseph (16) and Jean (14). I think those are their ages, although they all say they’re younger b/c in Senegal, you can easily change your birth certificate in order to appear younger so you can repeat a grade in the school system if you failed to pass the promotion exams. (It’s complicated, I wish I could explain this better.) Jo and Jean are brothers. There were two girls: Marie Noel (19) and Fatou (18). Jo and Jean are brothers, and they, in addition to Badara and Marie Noel, are all from the next village over—Gague Mody. Then depending on the night of the week and if there were evening courses, Badara’s brother, Cheikh, and another girl Ami, would stay at our house. In addition, there were two boys Mbanigck and Pape, who lived in a nearby compound, but took almost all their meals with us and spend a considerable amount of time at our house.
Bineta’s house was a social center, people were always hanging out there. I LOVED it! Two other girls often at our house were Rama (20) from next door, and Sadio (10). Then there was also Fape Mag (Serere for Grandpa). Bineta took him in. He apparently has some mental problems, but I was never aware of them. He was just the sweetest, older man ever, who could sit and do nothing for hours on end.
The house compounds varied throughout the village. Our house was big by Mbam standards. We even had a cement structure, in addition to the sand-brick, thatch roof huts found in all compounds. The compound was encompassed by a large fence, as they all are, one side made of brick, the rest out of dried bean stalks tied together. The house had 5 bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen with no light bulb, and an area referred to as the terrace. We never used the living room, except to watch t.v. at night and to entertain guests. Most of the living was done in the terrace area or outside in the yard. The kitchen is nothing like we’re used to. It’s essentially a storage area with all the spices, pots and large bowls, utensils, and gas canisters. The gas is brought outside or to the terrace and that is where all food preparation occurs.
All food is prepared fresh and by hand every day, every meal. You cannot buy minced garlic or prechopped onions. And, as it turns out, every Senegalese dish calls for minced garlic and chopped onions. They don’t have a stove and oven set like I’m used to in the States. Instead they have one canister of gas with a single burner, so you prepare one part of the meal at a time. Meal preparation takes a good several hours. Not to mention you are preparing for at least 8 people every time. (The night I cooked, I made scrambled eggs and potatoes. 3/4 liter oil, 29 eggs (1 bounced off the horse-cart), 4 kilos of potatoes, 2 kilos of onions, some salt, garlic, 4 green peppers and 2.5 hours later, I fed 13 people for dinner around two very large bowls. They loved it. It was good to have a taste of home too, but it was exhausting to prepare on that scale. I should also mention this entire meal, plus soda, and cookies, cost me US $21.20. 30 eggs cost me US $5, and that is considered very expensive.) So that was the house itself.
The rest of the compound consisted of 3 thatch-roof huts. One is the outdoor kitchen, but also doubles as a storage chamber for the horse feed (the peanut plant itself). The brothers in my family, slept in another hut, and the other hut was used for storage, but later converted into a bedroom for our grandfather.
And I suppose you want to know about toilets too. With the one spigot outside, flush toilets and showerheads were not an option. There was a chair (as they call the toilet bowls we know) that you could access from inside the house, but it was hard to flush (manually) and often smelled terrible. I preferred the Turkish toilet, which was part of the main house structure, but accessed from the outside. I also took my bucket showers in this stall. There was also an outdoor shower area, privacy created by the bean-stalk fence, and an outdoor traditional douce (a cement hole in the ground—don’t ask me what happened to anything deposited in the hole b/c I have no idea.) I know the Turkish toilet and toilet chair were connected to a septic tank, emptied periodically by a big truck. All trash was dumped in a pile, burned from time to time, behind a fence in our yard. (Not much trash was created though b/c this is not a culture like our own in which everything is individually packaged. All food scraps were given to the goats or other animals.)
I neglected to mention the other key members of our family. There was Malabar/Mbagnick the horse (he had 2 names), Hannah (the sheep they named after me) and her mother, Nyiadie the cat and her 3 kittens, a goat, 1 rooster, 3 hens, and 9 chicklets, And then there were many other animals that wandered through the yard throughout the day. I was in heaven! This was my dream-come-true village life.
ASPOVRECE—The internship
I “interned” with l’Association Populaire des Volontaires pour la Rehabilitation et Conservation de l’Environnement. I think it took me all 6 weeks just to learn the name of the organization. Essentially it’s an organization of volunteers who work toward the rehabilitation and conservation of the environment. They also create/fund projects that contribute to the local economy. Their major activities include the rehabilitation of the mangroves, a bioenergy project, a plant nursery, and a small business that fabricates personal flotation devices (aka life vests).
Unfortunately, my internship itself was a flop. The grassroots organization was founded by 80 residents of Mbam in 1999. It does really great work both in Mbam, and in the 7 other surrounding villages. My third night in the village they convened a meeting for the leaders of the organization. They essentially asked me what I wanted to do as their intern. I had anticipated that they would have a project for me to do. So we were sort of at a standstill. They asked what I was interested in, and when my response was, “everything” they decided that the best plan of action would be for me to go around and interview residents of the other villages with which they work to find out what activities they do concerning the environment. They also arranged for me to observe a science class at the elementary school and talk with the teachers. In addition, I got tours of all their projects in Mbam: the bioenergy structures, the mangrove rehabilitation sites, the reforested eucalyptus trees, and an interview with the master tailor for the life vests.
They made a calendar for me, allotting a week for research and reading, two weeks for the interviews, and a final week during which I’d draft up my report. There was no formal structure to my days. My mom, Bineta, was the vice-president of ASPOVRECE and my head supervisor. I was to follow her to all of her meetings, as well, as part of my internship. There was no main structure to which I went each day, or set hours during which I worked. (Just my westernized idea of what constitutes an internship.)
I suppose this would have been a very cool opportunity for independent research on eco-villages if I’d entered the internship with a specific research question. However, I did not have a specific purpose so it was a bit awkward to try to create a set of questions to which I wanted answers. Ultimately, I tried to learn how the ecovillages inspire their residents to live in a sustainable fashion, since inspiring other always seems to be the biggest hurdle for environmentalists back home. However, I quickly learned that environmentalism in a rural village in Senegal is a whole different game from environmentalism in the large cities of the United States, shockingly enough. I’ll talk more about this in another entry.
So essentially, once the interview phase began, I would get up, Thierno Djiby (a member of the org) would pick me up an hour later than our designated meeting time, and then we’d take his horse-drawn cart to two neighboring villages. I’d conduct my interviews and we’d be back to Mbam in time for lunch. It was very relaxed. When I describe a typical day for me, you’ll see how relaxed and informal this internship was.
I guess in the end I did learn a lot about mangroves and their bioenergy project. ASPOVRECE works with one Economic Interest Groups (consortiums of villagers that collaborate to promote their economic interests) in each of the surrounding 7 villages. They coordinated the efforts of the villagers to reforest their portion of the mangroves in an attempt to rehabilitate the entire coast. During the 70s, the coasts of these islands used to have thriving mangrove ecosystems, but now the mangroves have disappeared completely due to overfishing and over-cutting of the trees for firewood. This has had a number of adverse effects on the environment, including the advance of the sea taking over valuable farmland, salinization of the land and groundwater, loss of fish (an important food and economic source), to name a few. The World Fund for the Environment funds efforts to rehabilitate the mangroves, and ASPOVRECE coordinates the efforts in this region. All the villages spoke about the positive efforts they’ve already seen since they started planting seeds a couple years ago. Some fish species have already begun to return and they think the mangroves bring more rain during the rainy season.
As for the biomass project, the objective is to produce electricity and cooking gas. It is an amazing project that I think has incredible potential for rural villages. The gas produced by fermenting cow manure and water, is burned to turn a turbine and create electricity. Some of the gas will also be captured and used as cooking gas by the local villagers. With the sludge that is left over, the water is filtered out and using in the farms, and the remaining product is dried and sold and organic fertilizer. Imagine the benefits this carries for rural villages short on electricity and gas and with a plentiful supply of cow pies. ASPOVRECE has all the structures in place and owns 4 cows. However, there was a problem with the funding, and the project has come to a standstill. I’m hoping to use my time here this semester to try and help find funding to continue this project.
So those are two of the very-worthy projects ASPOVRECE coordinates and about which I learned during my 6 weeks in the bush. As for feeling like I accomplished something, my internship was a flop, but I did learn a lot about the “green” projects in rural Senegal, and living in the bush was the most eye-opening experience of my time in Senegal. I am so glad I was placed in Mbam for my internship.
