Two-fer shorties

9/26/11

This is a day that deserves a party! This is a day that deserves a new outfit and a feast of yapp! But I’ll settle for a pint of orange juice and a bag of cheetos in a pair of jeans and a ¾ length sleeve tee. Hence the party! Its fricking COOL!! It rained from about 5 yesterday ‘til about 11 this morning, and it looks like it’s not done. Having not rained for ALL of September until now, the heat had become exhausting. I was so excited to get back home from the University and have my fan to keep me cool while I slept (note, I got bedbugs somewhere along the way, so am itchy Everywhere, and it was so hot there, with no air movement, that I barely slept for the week) but last night, it was so cool having the fan on required a sheet and pants!! Freaking AMAZING!! I passed out at about 9 while “ascending” in bed, and slept until 9:30 this morning. No joke.

Being back in village is lovely as usual. It’s impossible to keep the grin off my face as I walk around greeting people, seeing the smiles on the kids who still call me “Rama toubab” ::shrug::. Yesterday I told a few women about my bed bugs and showed them my riddled sides. Strangely enough, they seem to think that when I get bit by bugs it’s hilarious… This began when some kind of small ant wasp bit my inner thigh while we were sitting on mats during Ramadan. It hurt! Aaaand they were keeled over in laughter, unable to catch their breath.  Of course, in that case, I think the humor was more from the location of the bite… Then, last week when we were standing around at night something bit me on the butt. Yet again, location related humor… especially as I shook out my skirts violently and spent the next five minutes rubbing my butt where it burned to a radius of five inches. This bed bug situation however has nothing to do with location. They’re Everywhere! And itch like fire. This is so much worse than mosquito bites…  Maybe not… maybe it’s just like having hundreds of mosquito bites all over your entire body… Yeah. It’s awesome.  ANYWAY, Bintu has decided I’m a comedienne of bug bites. Awesome. And true to the warning that everyone in village knows everything about me, as I walked around this morning, random people requested to pull my shirt up and look at and touch my bites, which, duh, makes them itch!  Yikes. Silly. Fun morning…

9/29/11

Today I had a realization of how magical this job is. I’m still doing my baseline research in order to develop an action plan that will actually be valuable to my community. Last night I realized I have yet to reach out to the local Imam’s (religious leaders), so I made that my goal for today. I go to one of the imams houses regularly because his daughter-in-law sells ice (chyeeeaaaaaahhh…), but have yet to talk to him for any length of time. Right now, pretty much everyone spends their mornings in the field unless engaged in some other form of labor, so I wasn’t sure I’d find anyone there when I went. But sure enough, as I approached his neighborhood, out paths crossed. He was just returning from the field with a large pile of bissap leaves perched on his head, somehow balanced on top of a “pulaar hat” (like a Chinese straw hat, woven to a point). We did the whole formal greeting thing, he asked where I was headed, so I just told him: actually I was headed to your house. He gave me the single chair in the compound and sat on a plastic brick (insisted upon it), and the conversation began as 10 or so other family members crowded around to listen. Turns out he’s a totally nice guy. Aside from the chair thing, he was all smiles, all “as long as you try, whatever you do will be great.” So, he approved of my plans, mentioned that it might be nice to have a well added, as there isn’t one near their house, and that was that! This was an overdue visit, and I’m grateful that I finally had the realization that I needed to spend some time there.

Here’s where Peace Corps, working here in Senegal, is soooo much cooler than a similar job in America. In America, if for my work I had to meet with a higher-up in the institution within which I was working, it would have likely been talk, get the business over-with, maybe offer a glass of water or coffee, then out and on to the next piece of business. But not here. Next they brought out the beans! Where in America, people often offer to share while internally hoping you will politely decline, which you often do even if you’d rather take them up on their offer, because it’s the “nice” thing to do, it’s the opposite here. The polite thing to do is eat, even if you’re already full, you’re supposed to eat at least something to show appreciation of the teranga (hospitality. Senegal is, remember, the Land of Teranga). So I ate. And ate. And when I considered stopping, I was told that I had to eat until the bowl was empty.  YIKES. But yummy… Fortunately this was before lunch. Once I went to visit a friend’s house after dinner, and literally ate beans until I hurt. Ooooh Senegal.

P.S.

After spending an hour trying to fix my background, trying to use a picture of Khatete, unsucessfully, I resorted to this.

Girls Camp and stuff...

Fun times in Saint-Louis. I just got back to the apartment from running some errands. Just as I left the bank I saw a fellow volunteer, and as we were talking a cab stopped by us. I was thinking, “should I tell this guy I don’t need a ride, or just ignore him?” But as we finished our conversation, I looked at the cabbie, which was by then shouting to me. It was a friend from my village! There are several men from Khatete who drive taxi’s and buses here in Saint-Louis, and I’m always scouting for them, but never seem to find them.  My friend gave me a ride for free to my next destination, and en route, we greeted a friends husband, and my drivers brother, another friend. Crazy! Wonderful coincidence! I’ve been away from site for six days, and I miss it. This always happens.  I was going to go home today, but might wait an extra day to get dinner with a friend here in Saint Louis.

So, the reason I’m here is because of our regional girls’ camp: Camp Gem sa Bopp (believe in yourself)! Definitely a good experience. We brought girls in from villages where volunteers did the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship (helping middle-school girls with good grades, motivation to stay in school, and financial need with the means to pay for school.) Hopefully over this year I can establish a relationship with the middle-school (college) in my road town to do the scholarship there and bring girls from my village/region. It was really a trip being there for the first day, because two things I’m quite familiar with—university campuses and youth camps—were placed in a completely different context. So many similarities with just enough of a difference to be unsettling. The dorms had decent beds, and there were toilettes (of the un-seated variety so common here in Senegal) electricity and running water, but there was no air flow in the building. So, at night it was stiflingly hot and I think I got about 3 hours of interrupted sleep per night. Still, there was a lovely garden right next to the cafeteria where I was able to lay on a concrete bench, still cool from the night, and ascend every morning. In the afternoons, there was  a well ventilated room with a ceiling fan to ascend and nap to make it through the day. And, though I’m not sure how much help I really was, with no official role but “helper-with-stuff,” it was an experience I am glad to have been a part of. We had speakers about women in business, female specific challenges in Senegal, and women’s empowerment in education, and visited a great volunteer’s garden in Saint-Louis. We also made friendship bracelets and tie-died. And, since its camp, and in Senegal, there was a decent amount of singing and dancing.

My favorite moment at the camp was yesterday morning when I and another volunteer led a yoga session. We agreed to have a ten minute meditation at the end. While the other volunteer was walking among the girls explaining what they should do to meditate, I was sitting up front. I tried to interject, but it didn’t work. No problem. But the girl right in front of me wanted to hear what I had to say. I told her: there are no good thoughts. There are no bad thoughts. They simply come and go. So, you will have a thought. Just watch it. It will go. Then there will be another, so again, just watch it. Dropping for that blessed moment into beautiful stillness, and feeling it burning in our eye-contact… So, ya know, that is what it is. It was lovely for me, and who knows, maybe it will plant a seed of awareness. It’s impossible to know. But we sat there. I kept my eyes closed and used my first ascension technique. After, another volunteer said she’d opened her eyes to see what was happening, during the meditation time, and all the girls actually had their eyes closed. They were into it! Pretty cool!

I also just finished reading “Half the Sky”, so my brain is all into gender stuff right now, and I feel like I’m seeing some pretty surprising stuff that I had just… immunized myself to? But also, I feel like I have a blockage to truly seeing some stuff that’s going on around me. Like, even at the camp, they did a session of theatre about women’s challenges here: young girls being sexually harassed by teachers at their schools, women being expected to marry at 14 and give up schooling, that sort of thing. Even the basic fact that girls are basically Cinderella-ized here… I fell like this wall pops up inside me when I think about these things or am faced with them. What is that?? Nothing to do but let it be at this point. Keep aware of it. Anyway, for those of you who haven’t read it, it’s an excellent book. One point I’ll pass along: people who care about the suffering and oppression of women should not be called feminists. They should be called compassionate. Humanists. We don’t call people who think the holocaust was an abomination Jewists. We don’t call civil rights advocates racists. Wait, that’s what we call the people who hate people because of race… Point is, the term feminist is a misnomer that creates a negative association. People who support the freedom and empowerment of women would support the same for men who are mistreated or enslaved. But the fact is, women make up about half of the planet, and in many many places are at worst enslaved, or at least marginalized to the point of disempowerment. Okay. So, read the book. There are depressing part, but the overwhelming sense of the book is one of possibility and the goodness of the human heart. The power of one individual to see injustice and do something to correct it.CHYA!

Learning about Love in Africa (not what you might expect)

I just finished “Awareness” by Anthony deMello. Challenging book. Great book. How do I talk about it? In talking about it I am just passing thoughts along, and not passing along his message. Or can I? I don’t know. I’ll just talk about it. It’s a challenging book because it is a ruthlessly compassionate reminder that to be free, you have to drop EVERYTHING. No exceptions. I seem to have compromised my freedom by getting caught in unawareness that instead of dropping concepts, I was swapping them. Maybe I was swapping little concepts for bigger ones, but a bigger box is still built of walls. It’s a challenge because it talks about that time Christ said you have to hate your father, hate your mother, hate your brother, to truly love God. And that time some zen master said If you see your father, kill him. If you see your brother, kill him. If you see the Buddha, kill him. Only then will you be free. This stuff used to really bother me. What is this all about? Is it not right to love your family? To love Jesus, love the Buddha, LOVE people?  Well, yeah, of course it’s all right. But it’s tricky. Just like any other concept, love can become an idol. And any defined thing is restrictive to the truth. deMello advocates an exercise where you visualize someone you love, someone you think you can’t live without, surely can’t be happy without, and to say to that person “I don’t need you. My happiness is not in you. You cannot make me happy.” And in doing so, you are free to actually enjoy that person. To renounce clinging. This is majorly challenging to me, as I’m sure to most people. How could I live without the support of my parents? How could I live without the love of God? But the fact is these questions reveal the presence of expectations! The real question I have is, how could I live without the Approval of my parents. How could I live without the love of God looking exactly like this, or like this, as my little needs are in any given moment. And that “need” kills my freedom. And it’s false! It’s a lie!  deMello also reminds that Eternal Life is NOW. It can’t be eternal if it’s not. … It’s like, I know that true joy, true happiness, true peace, whatever word it is, even those are restrictive and misleading, lies only in complete surrender to God, and still I buy into these little thoughts of what I think I need specifically to make myself feel whole. What I need in order to rest into the Eternal NOW. It may sound like I’m being hard on myself, but I promise I don’t feel that way. I’m not having any negative judgment of myself in saying these things. In fact, I feel GREAT saying them. For whatever reason, whatever past associations I formed, I have formed a groove around what Love is. And if God is love, that means I’ve decided what God is. And That leads to suffering in moments when I think it’s real, but MAN, the FREEDOM when I see through it!! deMello mentions that he did his “I don’t need you” exercise with GOD. WOAH, right?? But I mean, in doing this exercise, you’re addressing a concept. I tried it with love. And seriously, I’ve considered myself a hopeless romantic for I don’t know how many years. Sure, an exceptionally enlightened one, but … okay, I hope you’re laughing with me-at me for that one. I know.  Okay, so that’s a lot of mental activity surrounding what I read about awareness. 

Here’s a fun moment I had with it. I was journaling last night about my experiences with just watching. And I wrote the sentence: Awareness is hard… blissful… some other descriptive words, and then immediately noticed awareness, realizing it was absolutely none of these things. These were the things I was observing. The things I was aware of. Awareness itself had not changed in the slightest. Is completely uncharacterizable. It’s not even alert! You can have an alert experience of awareness, but it is not that.

Hmmm… So, some background? I was having a hard time finding peace, and thinking a lot of things were wrong with that, wrong because of that. Thinking a lot of “I need” kind of thoughts. I turned to my parents. My dad advised taking two days at site to be in retreat. To ascend as much as possible. To re-form the basis of connection with peace/silence/awareness in this context. So I did. And thank God for that. I remembered that I have the choice, when silence or peace presents itself to dive into it and rest there. Drop an attitude. Stay with it for as long as it stays. To nurture that awareness. Bjork said “I can decide what I give, but it’s not up to me what I get given.” Gandolf said basically the same thing. Yes, these are two great spiritual guides. Bjork and Gandolf.

So, as I’ve heard a million times, if you want to change the world, start with yourself. And as deMello and my dad say (among others, of course), if you want to change yourself, you just have to watch and stop trying to change anything. I got in a fight with a good friend here a couple days ago. Got Maaaajorly unconscious for that one (::shrug::) and the next day I was pretty down, registering problems with other people in village as real things (even when they had nothing to do with me), this or course on top of moments of feeling wretched about “myself” for the way I handled the argument. I didn’t know how to resolve it, especially in this cultural context. I was sitting, eating beans with my family, thinking “try to just watch. Try to just watch” (isn’t this hilarious?) when I was graced with a deep wave of stillness. And again, by grace, I was able to choose to give myself to that stillness. I said an attitude, stopped everything I was doing and sat with it. When I looked up I noticed a beautiful sky line. Gorgeous bird songs. The community of family and friends sharing a meal. Peace only. Jamm rekk. Only minutes later I had the chance to talk to the person I had fought with. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say there was only love and peace there in that moment. Throughout the day, I noticed things being perfect and only then realized that earlier in the day I had been projecting an imperfection on them.  What a gift. So, … mmm… wild. I was so sure I needed people! My brain is still saying “hold on, are you sure you don’t?” And ya know, I could probably argue both sides of that. I think it’s another paradox, where the meaning gets twisted by the word “need.” AND by the idea that people are these separate isolated entities that can either “do it” by themselves or not. One thing I really liked this deMello book is this line: “You aren’t even a dancer! You’re being danced.” There is no individual dancing. There is only the dance. So yes, sometimes part of that dance is people supporting each other. And sometimes part of that is being perfectly okay alone. Thinking you need something that is currently NOT a part of the dance is just a denial of the truth.

To give a fair representation of my experience I could share how I sounded when I journaled at the depths of my freaking out before my “retreat”. But… I don’t even want to read that again. Why would I share darkness instead of light?  Oh I can be so cheesy J

For a more practical update, my work is coming along. I’m developing my action plan, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a busy two years. Now if only it would cool off a little bit, I’d go plant some trees…

P.S. feel free to call me out in comments if there’s something in here that seems clear to you and seems unclear to me. Reflect me! Be my mirror! If you feel some truth, share it.

This is from about a week ago. Except the last bit.

It’s been raining for 24 hours. Pretty much solidly. Little breaks for about 10 minutes here and there. Everything everywhere is damp. I’m damp. My computer is slightly damp, which definitely worries me… I feel slightly trapped in my room, but frankly, I’m kind of grateful for that. My parents were just here for six days, which was a Magical vacation in so many ways. But coming back to village, immediately having a death in the village (a friend’s father…), has left me strangely drained. I think it was more the day and a half without my parents and without my village friends, as just another toubab on the streets of Dakar, which truly drained me. I saw some ugly things in Dakar and was called a bad, rude person by a man who was at best trying to get me to go to the bank and make change for him, and at worst trying to get me into a compromising and unsafe position.  I called him rude right back (I can be Sooo mature), sneered, and walked away. Anyway, I’m home now, where I’m Rama Niang, where the men don’t try to marry me, where there aren’t beggars, and where it’s a lovely 73ish degrees. One reason this constant rain is a lovely blessing.

Wanna hear a story? Last night my parents called to make sure I’d gotten back to village okay and was readjusting well (after a week of sleeping in air-conditioning and having constant loving support and familiar/l companionship…). At the end of the conversation my dad asked if I’d put down the lavender they mailed me (it’s supposed to repel scorpions). “No, not yet. I’ll go do that when we hang up.” So I walked into my room from the back door, and right next to my front door was a 3 and a half inch scorpion, dancing with an inch and a half long beetle, ¼ or which was pincers.  Froze with sudden adrenaline, I hoped maybe pincer-beetle would kill the scorpion for me. But no. The scorpion ran away from the beetle (!!!), straight under my bed. So, what could I do? No one was at my house or my cousins’ house next door, because they were still in social-all-day-funeral mode. So I called my friend Modou, who came straight over. He’s Always completely chill, and calmly pulled my empty backpack out from under my bed, shook it (carefully), and killed the thing when it ran out.  Ever since, I’ve been having guilt about getting it killed… I can’t explain, but it’s like I’m personifying the dang things. I mean, it probably just wanted to get out of the rain, and then was scared of a beetle, and then was running for its life when, Squish… But ya know, it just couldn’t stay alive in my room. Not acceptable.

Speaking of scorpions, my dad showed me that you can see all of scorpio on the southern horizon here. It was really nice to look at the stars with him and my mom, all three of us being further south on this planet than we’d ever been before (in Saly Niakhniakhal). We ate ridiculous deserts with whipped cream, house-made ice-cream and crème-anglais (yummmm). This is my family, guys; we eat a lot of really yummy stuff when we get together. Pizza with crème fraiche, yassa poulet, shrimp, curry, mafé, croissants, mangoes, frites with Senegalese mustard, all with a daily supply of fresh café au lait… I got the chance to externalize all my fears and stresses that come with this experience, like, being unable to survive the heat, being unable to do my job, unable to meet the expectations of my villagers, irritated with the expectations of my villagers, being lonely and making connections with people that have an expiration date (in a sense…), fear or mortality and isolation.  All of this stuff came out in floods of stress and emotion, and I definitely did the taboo thing of crying in public in Senegal a few times, the first of which was just when I first got to hug my mom and then my dad. Mmmm… Thanks for coming guys! It was perfect J

P.S. (added a week after initial writing, now that I have internet at will publish this now) I’m totally over that whole feeling bad for the scorpion thing. Two days later there was another one in my room. And ya know, it came in cause it wanted to be dry. Again, it was raining. But here’s the deal:  the power was out. Which meant I saw the thing with a headlamp, called my brother over from next door, and spent the next twenty minutes (before retreating to my mosquito net) frantically scanning in circles around me with my little lamp that could not be worn on my head because that would mean flying things in my face instead of just around my face. Scorpions, we are not friends, and as long as you stay in your zone, scribble around feebly like you do, like your body is too heavy and lopsided for your little legs, good for you. But if you enter my domain, you will die. And I will have no regret.

And while I’m on a roll, a quick additional word about the insects of the rainy season: there are at least four types of at least 3 inch long beetles. There are little brown beetles, big brown beetles, big black beetles, bigger black beetles, HUGE black beetles (but not quite at the 3” mark), giant pincer beetles, tiny black beetles that fall through my mosquito net, dung beetles (they’re pretty cute, pushing their perfect little balls like kids on a slow day. I imagine them meeting up in a corner with them building little dung-men). There are mantises! They’re cool with me. There are flying things that come out in terrifying swarms (plague style, I am NOT exaggerating, like better to sit in the half dark and risk the scorpions than chance even a cell phone light because you will be overtaken in seconds) to beat themselves into lights until their wings fall off so they can enter a crawling phase of their lives. Creepy. When I go to sleep with my fan pointed into my mosquito net, when I wake up there are literally dozens of dead mosquitos who have been held against the net by the force of the breeze. Gross. And then there are spiders. Oh the spiders… Frankly, my rule is this: If you aren’t a scorpion, and are under an inch long, you’re good to go. Just don’t get ON me. If you are bigger than this, you gotta go. And if you bite or sting, sorry, but you’re dead. You have trespassed on my space, and my sense of physical comfort and security is threadbare. At some point in my life I will probably feel bad about this, but it’s the best I can do right now.