Two-fer

Don’t look at the bones

We had goat for dinner!! It was sooo good.  Mind you, there wasn’t much of it, but it was de-licious.  My body was pretty excited.  By the way, I actually eat pretty well here.  We have ceeb u jen every day for lunch, which means I get my fill of eggplant, carrot, cabbage, sweet-potatoes (there’s are much tastier than ours, but white, so probably not as good for you), turnips, and fish. I just have to try not to eat too much rice with it, because dinner is almost always almost all rice.  Usually this mash of rice called mbaxkal, or something close to that.  So, the reason for the title is because of the last time we had mbaxkal. There was meat in it, which is not usually the case, so like tonight, I jumped on it.  Unfortunately the meat isn’t cut the same here and you never know if what you’re putting in your mouth is actually meat, or a strange conglomeration of fat and bone with unidentifiable chewy stuff… So, last time we apparently ate something’s head.  Most bites of meat I got were mostly fat and weird stuff, but I persevered hoping for some protein.  One bite had a large piece of bone in it.  Everyone here sucks the marrow out of bones (this is actually not a good idea for me, I mean, I think it’s mostly fat), still, when in Rome and all that. So I sucked on this big chunk of bone for a minute before spitting it out into my left hand. It was a piece of jaw. I wasn’t sucking on marrow; I was basically sucking on cow plaque. Forcing my churning stomach to settle I ate a bit more rice and called it a night. Frankly I’m sure even that meal was pretty patron. A lot of my friends in other villages claim to mostly eat plain rice or millet, so I seem to have hugely lucked out. 

And I still seem to be losing a bit of weight. Just a little. Probably just related to the daily walking, fetching water, cleaning stuff in my room, general living stuff.  I’m good with that though.  Of course people here think it’s a good thing to “am yerem” (literally to have a body), and seem confused that I do yoga not to “dolli sama yerem” (add to my body), but to do the opposite (oversimplification, but my simple language skills cause me to do a lot of that.)

I’ve gotten down to actually doing a little work, finally.  I’ve been here a month tomorrow, so I’m really right on track as far as Peace Corps are concerned.  I’m painting a map of the world on the wall in my counterpart’s classroom (something like 5^th grade). They have maps of Senegal in every classroom, but not of the world. To me, it’s obvious why this is a good idea. And to him too. But there are people in my village who don’t seem to get it. In fact one woman seemed actually opposed to it. … I’ll stop there with that train of though.  Anyway, I’ll finish it Sunday, Inshallah (God willing). Coming up on the 24^th I’ll be helping transplant some trees the students planted with my ancien (the volunteer before me) into the school yard. I am the lorax, I speak for the trees! No. Maybe a little. What else… I’ve spent the last week getting ready to start my base-line survey. I used my ancien’s close-of-service report to get a feel for what’s happening here and learn the demographics, and then I used the Peace Corps guidelines and what I do know to brainstorm the questions for the survey.  I’ll be going house to house talking about water, sanitation, health-care, environmental stuff (what is this? It’s so amorphous…), trying to figure out how I can best help in the two years I have here.

Two years, yeah. Sometimes when I think about that it’s still overwhelming and I get a tiny urge to cut and run. But really, I can totally see living here for two years. No problem. It’s become completely comfortable, and I’m so excited to continue building relationships with the people here. And to keep learning Wolof! It’s so Fun for me, learning this language. Speaking in Wolof, thinking in Wolof, and it’s still super exciting when I make a joke in Wolof that actually works.

Hmm… all for now, I guess.  Oh! Just a quick note about kids. I love my brothers two year old Djibi. He’s taken to mobbing me. As in, he smiles, starts running his little wobbly bow-legged two-year old run, straight for me, and then hurls himself on me laughing. It’s nice getting these wild hugs occasionally. However, yesterday as I was walking to the other family house, I found him out in the clearing crying.  I didn’t know why, and he wouldn’t walk with me back to where his mom was. So, I picked him up to carry him.  Bad idea. He was crying because he pooped his pants. Which meant I had poop on my shirt… Not my favorite Djibi moment, but, hey, what are you gonna do. He’s two. Today he actually pooped on the floor in my room… His mom cleaned it up with bleach, so, … yeah. Yummy. If he wasn’t so flipping cute… 

Okay, theres a good reason for this:

I’m really bothered by the fact that science consistently ignores the fact that all the “laws” of reality are based on our observations of this reality.  We’re constantly projecting this reality on theoretical other realities.  I just finished “the Big Bang” by Simon Singh.  Really good. Really interesting. But in the epilogue, after acknowledging that we’re constantly revising our understanding of reality because of previously assumed to be impossible or just never thought of data, and after acknowledging that the Big Bang Was the Start of space and time, this very reality did not exist before it, and in fact the phrase “before the big bang” has no meaning for the same reason, … so, after all that, he says that if we’re just one universe within a multi-verse, then the other universes therein would be non-viable or even rapidly self destructing if they varied even slightly on the six criteria on which we can measure our universe (including gravitational constants, the way molecules form, etc.) Now, I’m no physicist, but how can we assume that atoms form the same way in a different universe that we have No data for? We literally cannot conceive of something so foreign.  How do we even know that in these theoretical multiverses atoms are the building blocks of matter? Or that matter is even a thing there? Why the obsession with formulas that we can plug things into to figure them out?  There is a different kind of understanding that is possible, and in my experience more meaningful, but impossible to describe. Like this thing I’m saying right now. It could be easily written off for any number of reasons. I mean, it’s entirely theoretical and I have no formal education in the subject matter. But I know this to be true.

Similarly, what’s with the dichotomizing? Like the claim that science and religion can “live side by side.” That you can Either look at the universe as random and view our existence thereby as a happy coincidence, OR look at the universe as divinely created to support our existence.  Or at best that you can believe a mélange of the two?  Why are these things viewed as paradoxical? Maybe the universe was constructed scientifically with the joyous consequence of our existence, full in every molecule, every sub-atomic particle of GOD, just joyously dancing through this wild energy-matter?

Hopefully that’s not too rambly. I won’t blame anyone for not getting through this, but as you can imagine, this is far beyond my grasp to discuss in Wolof. Though I very much want to try and just might later tonight.  That said, PLEASE comment on this for me!! I desperately miss conversations like this.