time flies...

Feb 22, 2009

Hey Folks!

Wow, so as of yesterday I have been in Africa for 8 months...and i have 17 more to go...thats so much and so little at the same time! So how is everyone? I hope you're all well! I've heard from a few of you, Aunt Jen and Sandi and Cory (Le garcon court...hahaha) and I love to get updates so keep them coming! Here's what i've been up to:

I just got back from my little mini vaca...a week backpacking in Senegal. We walked through the countryside village to village, swam under 300ft waterfalls in deep ravines, watched monkies play and saw baboons and warthogs out the car windows, slept in grass huts under giant mango trees, and made tons of new friends! After a week of non-stop walking i threw the towel in, admitted defeat, and went home on my own because of my blistered feet, while the others continued on foot to Guinea. I had a fantastic time though and I was starting to feel that "get back to work guilt" anyway, I'm not here to just abandon my projects and head out on vacation whenever I want and I needed to get back to do some actual work because I don't have mine quite as figured out as my traveling companions did and I felt like i had left some loose ends.

While traveling my cell phone was stolen so I have already gotten a new one but I need to buy a new SIM card for it for Mauritania before I can recieve phone calls, so mom, dad, and cory, when I get it I will call one of you to give you the number so we can talk again! I miss my weekly calls!

I'm trying to think of some fun stories from my travels to share, the whole thing was absolutely one of the greatest adventures I have ever been on in my whole life. I was seriously sad to call it quits early, not to mention terrified of traveling alone back to Selibaby but I ended up really enjoying the trip. When I opted to start back we were staying at a village campement in Dindefelo, Senegal, a little village with a gorgeous waterfall and a decent amount of tourism (for a small senegalese village) with no real regular transport into town short of renting an entire 4x4 which was way out of our price range. This was the leg of the trip that scared me to do alone, we had walked to 35k out there from the nearest city and I had absolutely no interest in walking it back alone. Fortunatly the manager of the campement found me an extremely nice french couple who were passing through on their own vacation and had rented a 4x4 that was planning on leaving the same day i was, the catch: they weren't going all the way back to the city. They gave me a free ride out to the main road, knocking 25k through barely there and confusing criss-crossing roads off my walk and deposited me on a wide well traveled roadway 10k outside of town. I started walking hoping to get picked up by a taxi brousse coming from somewhere else and heading into town but it was not to be. Only one vehicle passed me on my whole entire walk and he had no interest in picking me up, although there was steady bicycle traffic and i was offered several rides on the backs of those (i turned them down though, i had a big bag and walked seemed less likely to end in disaster). I reached town with much of the day left ahead of me so i continued on to the garage and caught a car to the next city on my route back to Selibaby. It was a hot, sticky, miserable car ride with a woman getting sik in a bucket in the seat behind me that left me feeling queasy and dirty and when I arrived at the garage in Tamba I grabbed a town taxi, climbed in and said "take me to a nice hotel, really nice, but not too expensive...preferably with a pool." The driver said he knew three and would take me to each until I found one within my price range. I splurged on the first one we stopped at, wasted no time booking my room, deposited my bags on the ground and made use of the first hot shower i've seen since new years. The hotel staff were incredibly friendly and fammilliar with peace corps. They all called me by my local name, greeted me like an old friend in Pulaar each time I saw them and were sad to see me go so early the next morning to catch my car to Bakel. I loved it there, I felt like i wasn't a tourist at all, just a friend passing through.

My car trip to Bakel was much more pleasant than the previous days voyage. Igot the first place in a car that i thought would take hours to fill (it won't leave until the 6 other places are all sold) when a family of 6 showed up headed the same diretion as me to attend a religious ceremony for a family member. Perfect! They were a friendly and fun pulaar family of the surname Diallo (the bean eating cousins of the Ba's so for the duration of the trip they changed my name to Amineta Diallo and would refer to me only as such). They shared their bread and I gave them all pieces of chewing gum i had gotten from the states. They told me that if I ever go back to Tamba I am to find their house and pay them a visit (impossible as Tamba is a huge city and probably 1/3 of the population are Diallo's, but the thoughts very sweet!) and we parted ways as I got my town taxi to the river and they got their car to their destination city. My taxi brought me right to the banks of the river where I passed through the police post more easily then it ever is when traveling in groups and bought my place in the wooden dugout canoes to Gouraye, on the otehr side of the river. Once in Gouraye I had an eaqually pleasant time with the gendarme post over there (unheard of in mauritania, they just love to give us a hard time!) and easily found my place in a car to Selibaby, without even trying, in fact my place came and found me before i had even reached the garage, the ticket man knew exactly where i was going.

When all was said and done, I was shocked to learn that I absolutely LOVED traveling alone, that said I probably won't do much more of it but it wasn't the scary experience that I had thought it would be. It was fun and easy and strangely empowering! I ate in a restaurant by myself, stayed in a hotel alone, haggled taxi prices, made new friends, crossed borders and rivers, walked 10k, and turned down 4 marriage proposals. If i can do that, i can do anything!

Now i'm back at home and completly out of internet time but I miss and love you allllll and i'll write more soon!
oxoxoxo's
Shelby

Happy New Year!

January 11, 2009


Holy Cow!

It’s a new year! I have completed over 6 months of my Peace Corps service! Man time sure flies when your having fun! I hope everyone back home had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I wish I could have been there, but alas, I was here, on the beach, eating (REAL!) cheese sandwiches and drinking homemade sangria in the sunshine…gosh my life is rough…I don’t know how I do it. All that’s over now though, and I just arrived back at site this morning, at approximately 2 am, slept until now, and here I am! Its 8:30, which might be the latest I’ve slept in 6 months! So…about my trip, it lasted a grand total of 21 days, including a stop in Boghe (for a little party and to break up the trip to Nouakchott); Nouakchott (for Christmas festivities at the Peace Corps Director’s house); Rosso (oh my old home, this is the city where I had “stage” so we crashed here for a bit to break up the trip to Senegal); San Louis, Senegal (sun, sand, and sea to ring in the new year); back to Rosso (to break up the trip back to Nouakchott and for more visiting); Nouakchott again (for Early Term Reconnect and In-Service Training); then homeward to Kaedi (to break up the trip back to Selibaby and celebrate John and Tanya’s birthday); and finally back to Selibaby (the garbage filled streets of Selibaby have never looked as inviting as they did last night at 2 am after something around 7 hours stuffed in vehicles made to hold 9 people with 20 strangers)….oh its good to be home!

So I bet you wouldn’t mind hearing some tales of my adventures would you? I didn’t think so. Here are some highlights:

We did all of our traveling in groups to be safer and happier on the road and when six of us were ready to leave Nouakchott to head for Rosso after Christmas we grabbed a pair of cabs, piled ourselves and all our luggage into them, and said “Le garage Rosso” to each driver, separately, which seemed like a perfectly fine idea considering there is only on Rosso garage…only our assumption proved to make an ass of us as some cab drivers have friends who are drivers and they will bring business straight to them instead of the actual garage. Myself, John, and Emily arrived at a Rosso garage, and the other cab with Sari, Tabatha, and Rob arrived at the Rosso garage, but by the time they did John had bargained us down to a great price for the cab where we were so we decided to have the others meet us there. While waiting for them it became clear that there had already been 3 passengers in the car we had bought out for ourselves who had been booted for us, because we were going all the way to Rosso and they were going only part way so the driver would make more money off of us. These people were not exactly thrilled and a small scuffle broke out between a small collection of cab drivers and the disgruntled man who wanted vary badly to put his things back into the cab…and in fact succeeded only to have them tossed out again by our driver. Being foreign we simply backed up, stayed out of the way, and awaited the outcome of the scuffle. Naturally we won (money always does), and the man left in a huff while our friends loaded their bags and we all stuffed ourselves into our car and headed for the gas station to fill up for our journey. There happened to be another car there with a man in it who happened to be friends with many of the Peace Corps “higher ups” and recognized us as new volunteers. He greeted us and we chatted for a minute and then gave our driver a stern talking to in Hassaniya which John used his awesome language skills to decipher and it was something like this: “I know these people, they are my friends so don’t try anything stupid because I know your name and I know your car and I’ll find you.” This made us a little nervous and reassured at the same time. Okay, we’re all gassed up, stuffed in, loaded up, and on the main road out of Nouakchott, toward Rosso, and ready to relax the short 3 hour trip away when our cab swerves down a little side road and we’re like okay, he probably knows where he’s going, and then he stops rather suddenly and hops out…to retrieve Rob’s bag, which has fallen out. Great. Off to a good start. We reload and head back towards the main road where we hit the gendarme stop we’re now quite sure he was on the back road to avoid but miscalculated a little because there, waiting for us, was the gentlemen who had been booted from the car and hey, good news, he’s a cop. Our driver is instructed to follow him and we set off once again, back in the direction we came from. Down another side road, and our driver slows, the space is growing between us and the other car, and suddenly, sharp left, he floors it, we’re flying down a back dirt road, and Sari in the back, holding all the bags says “are we making a run for it right now?” Indeed we were, we were racing off through the back streets of Nouakchott in search of a police officer that was friends with our driver and would take our side. We found him, stuffed him in the front seat with Rob, and beat the other man to the police station, presumably because he was still searching for us. All parties convened inside the station while we sat in the car and waiting, not really sure what to do. Eventually everything was worked out, and our driver returned to make the rest of trip, which was fairly uneventful, thank god.

Hmm…what else is there to share…it feels like there should be so much but so much of it is just the experience as a whole, being in Senegal, on the beach, with strange men coming to try to sell us things and hoards of children watching our every move. I went out to collect some shells off the shore and an army of children handed me more shells then I even wanted within minutes once they realized what I was doing. One day a (possibly drunk, definitely strange) gentleman came up to us on the beach wearing a pointy beginnings of fat dread locks, a stretched out old tank top, and a big goofy grin, and that’s all. He tried to make conversation but we did our best to ignore many of the locals on the beach because they were always either selling something or begging for something or hoping to steal something and so our friend, not to be deterred, began singing to us. He stayed for quite a while, just singing away to no one in particular. It was an interesting experience.

On another day Sari and Tabatha and myself took a day off from the beach and wandered across the bridge back on to the mainland to shop for some fabric and spend some time in a real market, not the tourist trap that is the island. The market in San Louis was amazing, narrow alleyways of tiny booths stacked with veggies, barrels of raw grains, heaps of fish, and skinned goats and sheep hanging from above. They seemed to go on forever, getting smaller and smaller then larger and than smaller again, twisting and turning, we were good and lost when we came out all of a sudden, facing the river and the bridge back to the island. I could spend days in the food market in San Louis, but instead we headed back to the island across the bridge and to meet some friends for dinner. What an amazing trip! By the end of it though, I was ready to go home to Selibaby. A few days in Nouakchott for training was enough to exhaust my patience with a city that feels like it has more cars than people and basically no traffic regulations, just crossing the two streets to get to the Peace Corps bureau felt like a live version of frogger. It was good to have a bed though, and a toilet with toilet paper, and air conditioning, a tv with 2 whole English channels! It’s the little things in life!

Alrighty, I’ll bet you’re all tired of reading now, or were hours ago, so I’ll wrap it up! Hopefully I’ll get to the computer soon to send this out. Much love and happy thoughts to all of you back home, hope your holidays were as fun and exciting as mine! I’m going on 7 months here now, so I’ll see you all in about 17 more!

Love, Shelby

Merry Christmas!

Hello Friends!

I know it’s been ages since I’ve written, I’m getting lazy. So I’ve currently been here 6 months and I still love it so I must be doing something right. Its still hot, but I’m getting used to it. It’s “reproduction season” here…which means baby goats everywhere, little lambs frolicking in the streets, and alas, kittens and puppies at kim’s. Yes, we currently have 5 cats and 6 dogs here in Selibaby so if you know anyone in the market for a rare African puppy, let me know I can totally hook that up.

A few days ago we got a mail shuttle so let me do a quick round of thank-you’s:

Mom and Dad: I already talked to you on the phone but I forgot a few things…first I gave the little wind up frog to Hawa and she loves it! Its totally adorable, she carries it around and call it my friend and says shes not scared of frogs anymore which is the cutest thing ever! Also, thanks a billion for all the toiletries, your timing couldn’t have been better…I’m getting low on toothpaste, the local variety being Crust (a terrible knock-off of Crest) which scares me, and I bought some local shampoo (made by Palmolive, who I thought only made dish soap, but what do I know) that leaves my hair somehow greasy and dry at the same time. And thanks for everything else, I won’t list it all here because I’m lazy but it was all wonderful!

Cory: I’m going to skype you today and I’ll say my thank you’s then but FYI you’re awesome, thanks for being the awesomest big bro ever!

Grandma: Thank you for everything! The book of puzzles has already provided hours of entertainment and I’ve already started reading the books! I have already eaten some of the food and some of its coming with me on my Christmas vacation to keep food costs down and I’m so excited for that! Thanks for thinking of me, I love to hear from you! I wrote you a big long letter answering all the questions you asked in the last letter I got from you but there was a problem with the last batch of outgoing mail and there is a chance it was stolen, so keep your eyes out for it but if it doesn’t show I won’t be terribly surprised. Thanks again, Love you!

Aunt Ann: Surprise Christmas packages are one of my top 10 favorite things ever! Thank you so much for yours! I have a confession to make, I opened the do not open until Christmas packages because I’m going traveling for the Christmas holiday and I leave tomorrow with only a backpack, space was limited as I’ll be traveling for close to a month so I unwrapped them to see if they were something I would want to bring with me or not and then after I realized I will want to bring both the shirts and the book and then I felt bad for opening them early but not too bad because its Christmas and you can’t be mad! Thank you for all of it, its all great and thoughtful! I love it all, especially the sewing stuff…my locally made clothes tend to spring holes every now and again.

Becky Fogarty: What a fantastic surprise! A box full of yummies from an awesome friend right before Christmas with a letter that made me smile and miss you bundles! Thanks so much, you’re the sweetest friend ever and I miss you like you wouldn’t believe! Hugs and kisses!

And a Merry Christmas to all!!!

Now that that’s out of the way, a quick note and then its off the computer for me, I need to spend some time prepping for my trip tomorrow. Here’s my tentative travel itinerary: Tomorrow we are heading to Bohge, another southern city for 2 days for a little Christmas party with some other volunteers, then to the capital for Christmas eve and day and then off to some combination of Rosso, San Louis, Senegal, back to Rosso, and then to the capital again for Early Term Reconnect and In-Service Training and finally back to Selibaby on January 8^th-ish. I know, sounds exhausting right? But I’m so excited for it! Computer service will be limited or non-existent during this time so don’t expect any updates until its allllll over, but I’ll be thinking of all of you, especially on the holidays, and wishing I was there, no that’s a lie…on new years I’ll be on the beach in san louis so I’ll be wishing you were here but I’ll probably be pretty content where I am!

I’m going to try to put up pictures today so check those out, they’ll be on facebook. Hmmm…what else is there to say? Everything is going great here and I’m happy and healthy again, very well fed, and very excited for my voyage. Hugs and kisses for you all! I’m going to go bake cookies and pack my bags before my skype rendez-vous (yep I speak rocking French wooo!). Much love and warm holiday thoughts from here in warm sunny Mauritania!

Shelby

long time no talk

December 4, 2008

Hiiiii!

So folks, get ready, this is going to be a long email! I haven’t written a real honest to god email in ages so grab a cup of tea, curl up in a blanket, and get cozy because this ones going to take awhile! I say that because rumor has it its getting cold there now, I mean, that’s what the word on the street is, it’s getting cold here too. Yeah, very cold, we were all shivering all night and most of the morning…goose bumps and all. Yeah, freezing, just like where you all are, this morning, in fact, it was all the way down to 70 degrees. Yup, jusssssssssssst like home folks, a real Vermonter here, freezing her heiny off in 70 degree weather, but there you have it. Hey when did it get to be December anyway? What is this? One minute its Halloween and we’re eating donuts off of strings in the backyard at our harvest party and I blink my eyes and everyone’s back for thanksgiving dinner eating ourselves into coma’s and now its December? At this rate folks I’ll be home in no time!

So I’ve been here 5 months and it feels like so much and so little at the same time! My French is improving but I still have a longggg long way to go, but now I at least have the language skills to tell people that I have only been here for 5 months and barely spoke French at all before I came so they should be thankful that I can say the things I can. My Pulaar vocab is improving too, I have a whole library of insults, and the standard “I’m leaving”, “I’m home”, “When night comes, come home” because that’s what my host dad says to me every time I go anywhere in the evening. My Pulaar teacher has accidentally (we hope its an accident!) forgotten our Pulaar lessons 2 weeks in a row now, so I’m just going on what I learn from my other “Pulaar Teacher” our neighbor and my brother’s friend Musa, who comes over and talks at me in Pulaar and I talk right back at him in English and then he yells at me in what he thinks sounds like English but really sounds like gibberish and then I yell back at him in actual English lovely little phrases like “you’ve lost your mind! I don’t even know what you’re doing right now you raving lunatic! You’re totally crazy!” and everybody laughs. Ahhhhh good times and fine memories from Mauritania! Somehow through all of this I have actually managed to pick up some pulaar though, so, all is well I suppose.

At any rate, that’s been my life lately, weighing babies, learning languages, and getting made fun of by my ridiculous family here. In the last package I received my parents sent me a Vermont life magazine with photos of Vermont foliage and changing leaves and other photos of the season. I brought it home with me to show to my family who flipped through it with the speed and efficiency of someone reading a magazine in a language they don’t speak, pausing only once or twice to remark on a picture or sound out a headline just to make me laugh. “C’est toi!” my little sister Hawa says, pointing to a picture of a woman in a wedding dress in front of a barn. “Oooo…un Rastafarian!” my host brother says pointing at a white man with dreadlocks in the UVM ad. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (what’s this?) they ask at a photo of some American dessert product or another; and then they’re finished, not especially interested in “chez moi! Vermont!” all that much at all. Oh well, I think and grab the magazine back only a little disappointed in their reaction (I was expected lots of oooooo’s and ahhhhhh’s and a few c’est jolie’s through in for good measure) when Musa grabs the magazine from my hands and points to a picture in the seasonal spread on fall and foliage. “Here’s the reaction I was hoping for” I think. And Musa says to me in broken French “what’s this?” I don’t know what a scarecrow is called in French so I call it a fake person that we leave in the fields to scare off birds. “We have those here!” he says, “we leave them in the garden to keep the birds and monkeys out.” Yeah…same exact thing. “In Pulaar that’s called a demba nedDo.” (the D being a pulaar letter that doesn’t exist in English but involves breathing in to make the sound, kind of like the sound Homer Simpson would make if he were drowning) “Kaa demba nedDo!” he says. “Whats that mean?” I ask. Souley fills me in, “he called you a scarecrow.” So there it is, no interest whatsoever in Vermont life, but instead a handy new insult for my vocab.

This was about a month ago, since then it has spiraled out of control, last night I was walking home not even close to my house yet, and a man who was basically a complete stranger (he lives a house or two over from me but I don’t think I have ever talked to him in my life) walked past me and instead of greeting me with the standard nalleejam (good evening in pulaar) he busted out “Kaa demba nedDo!” with a big smile. Yes folks, if for some reason you decide to pay me a surprise visit here in Selibaby and you get all the way here and can’t remember my Mauritanian name just ask around for the scarecrow and surely everyone will know just who you’re talking about.

What else can I tell you about? I have lots of time on my hands, Monday is a fete so naturally no ones going to work or doing much of anything at all until at least Wednesday, in fact we even left work early yesterday because “the fete’s coming.” Of course I only ever work from 9am to noon, but it seemed completely normal to leave at 11:15 yesterday because there is a fete in 4 days. “See you Wednesday….or maybe Thursday…” said my coworker as we parted ways, leaving a touch of doubt in my mind as to whether or not I’ll work at all next week given that Thursday is the Mauritanian equivalent of Friday and if you are a Mauritanian and you don’t go to work on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, the chances of you coming on Thursday are not exactly very good. So I have at least the next 6, if not the next 10 days off, which would be exciting if when I worked I was actually busy or tired and in need of a break, but when I work I work no more than 3 hours a day and no matter how hard I try I actually have very little to do but read or write letters home when I’m at work. Last night I was so desperate for a cause as a health volunteer that I stole my host brothers cigarettes and promised to dole them out one at a time until he quit. The standard African’s answer to an American trying to get them to quit smoking: “But American’s are the ones who make cigarettes!” They say that as if its my fault that they smoke…grrr, I’m not a fan of that line of thinking! Its interesting to me that the best selling brand of cigarettes here are called American legends and they are manufactured in the European Union…so at least those aren’t my fault even if they do pretend to be American! So here are my health volunteery plans for the next few months: Anti-Smoking campaign, because its not my fault you smoke damnit! Nutrition seminars in Tabatha’s village for the skinny little kiddies, sex-ed and family planning at the health center for young mommies-they just learned about the female condom here when an NGO gave them a bunch to distribute, only they can’t seem to distribute them because no one knows what they are so Emily and I are going to have the awkward job of telling them, yes I enlisted back-up for this one because I’ll be red as a tomato explaining contraceptives to a bunch of women younger than me with 3 or 4 kids each. I have also been making pretty health posters for the hospital and 2 of them went up on Sunday, one more to go, photos as soon as possible I promise! And finally I’m hoping to organize a series of health talks at the girls mentoring center starting with one about skin-lightening cream because I absolutely hate the stuff. Look up skin lightening cream if you have a minute, its pretty disturbing stuff. So there you have it, all 5 months of my time here have lead up to this plan, wish me luck! Soon though I head to the capital for more health training and when I come back I’ll be on my way to some more projects that will hopefully look a little more impressive on my resume! Anywho that’s all for now, I’ll put pictures up on facebook soon and hopefully be full of amazingly exciting stories by my next email because I hit the road for Nouakchott for Christmas in about 2 weeks, followed by new years in St. Louis, Senegal on the beach baby! Then back to Nouakchott for Early Term Reconnect and In-Service Training and finally back to Selibaby, refreshed and ready to get back to my busy life of whatever it is I do here, except I’ll have spent so much time with other Americans I won’t remember how to speak any French or Pulaar anymore. Oh well, c’est la vie! Learning languages gives me something to do so I should be thankful. Love ya’ll, I’m sure I’m be online once or twice before Christmas but just in case I wish a Very Happy Holiday Season to you all!

Hugs and kisses!

Shelby

la rhume

11/20/2008

Hi Folks,

Its been too long since i've written and this is going to be short so sorry bout that. I seem to have attrapp-ed la rhume (that pure franglais baby...it means i have a cold) and possibly an eye infection, so here i am, the un-healthy health volunteer spouting health advice to people and sniffling. I'm told its the "saison du vent" (windy season) and everyone gets sick now, which certainly seems to be the truth given that its been insanely ridiculously windy all day every day for the past week, and everyone at my house has the sniffles (these things travel fast in the land of the communal cup, bowl, tea casse, everything). Its also evidently the season of eye infections, i was warned, i reluctantly gave up my contacts and picked up my sunglasses so that now i stumble around in blurry darkness, and still i seem to have a slight unhappiness in my left eye. It's not hard to see how this could have come about in a land where waste management doesn't really exist and its not uncommon to find both the feces and the bones of various animals in any given square foot of ground, when the winds pick up its not just sand they're blowing in your eyes if you know what i mean.

Still, its hard not to remain positive in the land of so many friends! I have millions of friends, i made three more on the way here. I made three friends, received one dinner invitation, and was told twice by random people that they will be returning to the US with me. A friend came over last night, he was a friend of my host brothers first but now i think he might come over half to see my brother and half to pester me, and he told me that i read too much and need to talk all the time so that i will speak pulaar in two months. Why you ask? So we can get married of course! A friend found me on my way to work yesterday and invited me to his house, me and any other white female friends i might like to bring along. I have gotten 4 business cards, 3 phone numbers, 2 dinner invitations, and a partridge in a pair tree since the last time i wrote an email. Everyone is just so friendly! Its weird though, they all seem to be men. Okay, so i'm not really this naive, i get phone numbers because i refuse to give out mine, i get dinner invitations for my friends because i refuse to go and they think if i can bring a friend i'll be more likely to come, and i never actually got a partridge in a pear tree through it would have been a nice gesture. Its not easy to make female friends here, mostly because the women work constantly, and the mens sole household chore seems to be making tea, the nature of which is purely social anyway. I drink 15 or so tiny cups of tea a day and talk in some interesting combination of languages with men during all my free time. This has been very informative and from our talks i have learned how to effectively stave off marriage proposals, at least for the time being. I HATE KIDS. that all you have to say. Men here want wives for the sole purpose of keeping their house and raising their children and as i am an american who can barely wash clothes let alone cook who doesn't want children, i am virtually unwanted...unless i can bring them to the states with me, then they might be willing to compromise. I love getting all womens rightsy on them, evoking the children debate and reminding them that as men than can have no possible comprehension of what childbirth is like and therefore have no right to tell me i have to have children, men here aren't used to women who stand up for themselves. "No babies for me, no thank you" works better than "I have a finace" or "i'm married" here. Interesting.

Thats all for now,
I have to go do some work or something now, Love and miss you all!

Shelby

"Taxi-ing"

11.05.2008

Hi Folks!

FIRST I need to say HAPPY (slightly belated) BIRTHDAY TO BECCA! 22! Hope it was fantastic! This winter we’ve been friends for 20 years, TWENTY YEARS! I love you and I miss you! Have a fantastic 22^nd year; I’ll see you sometime during our 23^rd!

So here I am, back in Selibaby, after my first real taxi brousse experience out to Gouraye to watch Levin and Sam make a very successful school garden at the elementary school there. Tabitha, Sari, and I, all came along so that we could pretend to be real volunteers with actual projects for a day. The trip out was my first time riding taxi brusse, and it went well, I’m told. Of course I had no idea as I had nothing to compare it to and I found it rather uncomfortable and a touch crowded (14 people in the back of a small pick up truck, 4 in the cab, 1 on top of the cab). I was tucked snugly in the back of the truck bed with the other 13 people back there and all their luggage, sitting on my backpack and listening to my old i-pod, who unfortunately broke again about half way though the trip. As far as I was concerned it was a touch too snug back there for my liking, considering we left at a steamy 11:30 in the morning and drove through all the hottest hours of the day and successfully sweated off all of my sunscreen and got a nice rosy glow on the top of my nose, which is now peeling off, but the others assured me that I was very happy with the situation, evidently there are frequently many more people stuffed into the truck bed, though I don’t see how that would be possible with out sardine stile stacking. At any rate, it was a beautiful scenic drive, we made good time, and we only had to get out and walk once where the road got rocky and the driver thought we might pop the tires with all that weight.

Once in Gouraye we commenced with the school garden, and it was really inspiring. About 20 students came with 2 teachers and took turns doing everything that needed to be done to prepare the beds and seed them. I took about 12 billion pictures, so keep your eyes out for those because I’m going to do my darndest to post them ASAP.

The whole thing too only about 2 hours and left us the afternoon to wander on foot out to Sounatu, a little Pulaar village where the boys needed to check on some trees they had planted. This was what Levin described as a 40 minute walk, which turned out to be just over an hour, but to be fair we took our time, taking pictures and visiting with some random French tourists we met along the way who are driving their way across Africa for no apparent reason. It was a beautiful walk and we saw shepherds with flocks of sheep and goats, a giant lizard, some snake trails in the sand, huge seasonal lakes filled with lily pads, and the always beautiful Senegal River, on the other side of which loomed the always illusive Senegal where they have things like paved roads and beer…jerks. The village was adorable, with all sorts of baby animals and cute kids trailing behind us wherever we went and picking the burs out of my skirt for me when I tried to do it for myself. The walk back sucked a bit, considering it was 1:00 pm when we left and it was hotter than hell outside. Just to put this in perspective, when we got back the t-shirt I was wearing was not only fairly thoroughly soaked in sweat, but it was also crusted with salt from all the sweat that the hot wind dried while I was en route. Gross right? Sorry, it was necessary to share that.

So that brings us to the trip back, taxi brusse ride numero deux pour moi (I’m so good at French!) and this one started out a little worse and ended a little better if you can believe it. (OK here’s where everyone who’s easily excitable when it comes to my personal safety should just skip ahead to the next paragraph…that’s you Dad). This time the taxi picked us up at the house we were staying at and was already packed and ready to go, the truck was a bit smaller than the first one and the entire truck bed was packed with luggage secured in place with a rope net with 8 people sitting on it already, 3 on one side with their legs hanging off the edge, a woman and her two small children in the middle, and 2 on the top of the cab. We had about 5 minutes to clamber on, and secure ourselves with all of our luggage before the truck started moving. I was sitting facing the back with my legs curled under the bumper, clinging to the net for dear life with my purse on my lap and some nice gentleman on the top of the cab was wearing my backpack backwards. I’m not going to lie, I was a bit scared. The roads are uneven deep sandy ruts through fields of dry grass sprinkled with scrubby trees covered with sharp thorns and our driver didn’t really seem to be taking his time (we were probably going about 30 mph, but it feels like a lot more when your on the bed of a truck with your legs flapping in the breeze). Anyway when we got going and I adjusted a little I started to feel much better and by the end of the trip it felt more like an amusement park ride than a taxi and we were all laughing at poor Tabitha who got the seat facing backwards on the middle of the tailgate and was literally caked with dust on every exposed surface, it really was hilarious. They dropped us right at Kim’s door and it was no hassle at all to get our luggage because ours had never been secured under the net anyway so no one even had to get off the truck. Fantabulous!

As fun as it all was, I think I’ll avoid taxi brusse whenever possible during the rest of my time here (aka be a giant homebody and just sit around here in good old Selibaby, which is just fine with me).

That brings us to election day, and the election day party. We had big plans (a bag of brownie mix and several Michael Moore movies to make us good and angry at the current administration and dreams of cold drinks and pita sandwiches from a local restaurant) which turned out to be a bit of a bust as the electricity had apparently been out since we left for gouraye the day before and no one had any cold anything, pita man didn’t have any pitas, and our little oven doesn’t work without electricity. As stubborn as I am, I refused to give up on the brownies though, so I tried and succeeded at making a brusse oven (a pot of sand with a lid over a gas burner that kind of unevenly cooks everything you put in it) and made a decent batch of alright brownies, with only one minor setback, the “oven” got so hot it heated up the whole little gas stove, melted off the knobs, and burned the hell out of our already disgusting pot holders, but everyone agreed that it was a worthwhile trade for brownies. Shortly thereafter the power came back on and we went out and got salads instead of pitas and I made another batch of much more successful brownies with caramel swirls, cookies and cream and chocolate instant pudding, and Luis came over with his internet and laptop and we kept up with election polls until I passed out at around 11:30. All in all a good night, oh, and kitty had kittens, 3, we named one Obama. Perfect. Now I must go because I am writing this on my laptop at Kim’s and its after 6, which is my self imposed curfew because I like to spend the evenings learning Pulaar with the fam, plus I think they get a little sad when I spend all day at Kim’s with other Americans. Every time I go back at the end of the day they say I’ve been gone for 4 months and have probably forgotten all my Pulaar and French because of all the English I spoke while I was gone. I don’t want that to happen! So here I go! Much love and happy thoughts! Dad, try not to think too much about the taxi brusse, its just part of life here, and besides I’m fine! Love you all!

Shelby

BANDITS!

October 22, 2008

Hello Lovelies!

I don't know what to write to you all because I've written so much lately in journals and letters and emails and messages that I can't remember who I have told what but I'm going to tell you about the "bandits" at my house and if I have already told any of you this…too bad.

During my long and arduous search for a family and/or place to live I visited many a household (like 4), eventually settling on the one I love with now. When I went to drop off the lease we had Emily and her host sister Hawa with me and as we walked away Hawa told Kim and Emily all about how I should not live there and the neighborhood was full of bandits. We found this disconcerting and didn't return to sign the lease until we had taken the time to ask around to see if there was any merit to this claim. We found that my host family has been housing volunteers forever and ever (15 years-ish) and no one seemed to have any qualms with the neighborhood so I went for it and signed the lease. Ok, before you all freak out and think I'm totally crazy for moving into the bandit filled neighborhood you should also know that after proclaiming that my new neighborhood was full of bandits (my new neighborhood being college, the very same quartier Hawa lives in herself, and about a 5 minute walk from her house) she announced that I should rent a little house from them and move in there, so though I trust her, I had some doubts as to her motives.

So, lease signed, I moved in and got settled. The family consisted of my host mother, Leldo Ba, whom I adore, even though we don't really speak the same language at all, my host father, whom I refer to as father figure because I don't know his name and who also doesn't speak any language that I do but is very nice, 2 older guys, Ibrahim and Souleymane, whose places in the family I couldn't quite figure out until much later, (Souley being my oldest brother at 27 and Ibrahim's place in the family being the basis of this entire story), an older sister Amineta, another big brother, Adama, a younger brother Alieu, and a little sister, Hawa. I spent plenty of time trying to divine Ibro's place in the family, as I had plenty of time to spare, until one day he up and disappeared. Souley asked if I had seen him and I admitted that I had not, but he had only been missing since breakfast and he would turn up. So the following evening hw still has not turned up and a gentleman pulls up in a truck looking for him. Souley informs him that we have not seen Ibro in a few days and they talk in angry hushed tones for a few minutes and then the man leaves. Oh man, what was that all about, I think, but before I can ask Souley tells me.

Ibro (who is 42) is my brother Adama's (who is 24) friend from Senegal and he was staying with us against the wishes of my big brother, Souley, because my father refuses to turn a friend of the family away, even though Souley didn't trust him. Souley maintained his distrust and never left Ibro at the house by himself, slept in the same general area, and watched him like a hawk. Evidently just a few days ago Ibro left and never came back, with some money that belonged to the man who showed up in the truck and now the whole of Selibaby is looking for him. Mystery solved, bandit found, and suddenly I feel a whole bunch more appreciative of my big brother who made sure I locked my bedroom door every time I wasn't in there, or if I was in there but I was sleeping (at first I just found this annoying, but now I get it). Before you all freak out and think I'm living with dangerous people know this, my family watches out for me more than I know, they take turns walking me to work if they hear the kids yelling toubob at me, they make sure my room is locked and my windows closed and they help me keep even the termites out of my room, they make me sleep right smack dab in the middle of the compound so that I'm surrounded while I'm asleep, and when a sand storm or anything else picks up they make sure I'm safely relocated into my locked bedroom. People here don't steal from friends or family or people who are good to them and for the most part they only steal out of desperation, Ibro stole because he had nothing else. I believe that he would never have done it if he had any other options but he had only days before asked me to ask my Portuguese road worker friend to get him a job, so I believe he was desperate. Don't worry about me, the bandits are gone. I'm safe now, but I still keep everything locked up like fort knox just in case.

I gotta go now, but I'm happy and healthy and doin just fine, and I saw a monkey yesterday so my life is complete, love and miss you all,

shelby

ps. i almost forgot to mention, i got so many wonderful responses to my last message i just wanted to say thank you to everyone who wrote to me....i'm so lucky to have the friends and family i do! love you guys!