Greetings from Senegal! I have been sent here for a root canal because Benin lacks adequate dental facilities, so I have been taking advantage of my free time outside of dental appointments (today will be my fifth) to explore this new country. Most of my time has been spent in Dakar, the capital city, which is home to a quarter of Senegal's 13 million residents. Dakar bears an uncanny resemblance to a European city with its modern buildings, nice cars, and bakeries that seem to have been transplanted directly from Paris. With the palm trees and beaches, it would be easy to believe that you were somewhere on the French Riviera.
However, since I suspected that not all Senegalese live this life of luxury, I accepted a Senegal Peace Corps volunteer's offer to get a glimpse of rural Senegalese life by visiting her village. As expected, life in her village of 400 is radically different from Dakar.
The Peace Corps standard in Senegal is to live with a host family. The volunteer has his/her own small hut within the family complex, but the hut is simply a bedroom with a latrine and shower area behind it. The volunteer eats all his/her meals with the family. Even though Senegal is a former French colony and schooling is in French, one of the local languages, Wolof, has become the lingua franca. Volunteers learn Wolof during their first few days in Senegal and then immediately switch to learning the local language of their future village. The village I visited was a Wolof village and the volunteer spoke Wolof fluently. When I arrived, I was given a local name (first and last): Awo Lo.
Senegal boasts 260 Peace Corps volunteers, second only to Ukraine in the number of volunteers. Volunteers intervene in health, business, but mostly agriculture. The volunteer I visited was an agriculture volunteer herself.
Below are some photos of the village.
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| Inside the volunteer's hut, which is only as big as what you see here |
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| Part of the courtyard where the volunteer lives with her host family. Some family members live in the building on the left; the volunteer's hut is the white building with a grass roof on the right. |
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| A biogas digester that the volunteer made with her counterpart. The gas will collect in the tire tube (hanging on the right), and then it can be used as cooking fuel. |
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| A view of some of the fields where the volunteer and the villagers work |
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| The family eating "breakfast" together at noon. Eight of us ate out of this bowl, some with hands and some with spoons. This meal was millet with milk, butter, and sugar. |
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| Ataya, the tea that concludes breakfast. It comes in three rounds: the first is very strong and somewhat sweet, the second is weaker and sweeter, and the third is weaker and sweeter yet. I noticed that many Senegalese have terrible teeth, and I wonder if it is because of their high sugar diet. The Beninese are the opposite: generally good teeth and a low sugar diet. |
The hut seems nice and clean. If only one person lives there, why is there a bed and a hammock?
ReplyDeleteTell us more about the biogas digester. Did the Peace Corps bring this idea to Senegal? What goes into it and how long does it take to generate the fuel by-product?
What looks like a hammock is actually the mosquito net that has been neatly tucked up to get it out of the way. The volunteer did have a folding cot that she put into the middle of the room as a second bed when I stayed overnight.
ReplyDeleteThe biogas digester has manure in it and other materials. It takes weeks/months to get started producing gas. It is supposed to produce more gas in the hot season. The last few months have been cool, so the volunteer expects it to really start producing gas in the next few weeks as things start to heat up. For the first few rounds that the tube fills up, the gas has to be expelled to push out any oxygen that may have gotten in. Any oxygen in the tube could cause an explosion when the gas is used for cooking.
I, too, was wondering about the biogas digester. Thanks for explaining it. But do you know if it was the Peace Corp volunteer's idea or the Peace Corp's The contrast of poor and wealthy is so striking in Senegal, is that also true in Benin? This is the direction the U.S. is headed if we don't do something about it. It''s interesting to see the difference between your Sonsora situation and that of the worker in volunteer in Senegal.
ReplyDeleteJean Ralley
I assume the biogas digester is something that the volunteer learned during Peace Corps training. I also took advantage of her expertise to troubleshoot my moringa and my compost pile.
ReplyDeleteThe contrast between the rich and poor was much more striking in Senegal than in Benin. To be honest, there aren't many wealthy people in Benin, even in Cotonou. Cotonou does, however, out-educate the rest of Benin. Nearly every job requiring an education in Sonsoro (health professionals, principals, teachers, etc) is held by a southerner, and very often someone from Cotonou. I find that the workers from Cotonou often look down on village life with disdain. For example, the nurse is from Cotonou, and instead of trying to improve health conditions and education in her jurisdiction, she just criticizes the locals for how backwards they are.