Village life: an update

Yesterday, after 10 dusty days in the desert, I finally made it back to Dakar. Luckily, though village life was definitely VERY different from life in the city, we didn’t “suffer” nearly as much as everyone else at the non-profit had warned us we would.

Josie, Natalie and I left Dakar last Wednesday at 6am (two hours late, as our driver was running on Senegalese time) for Guedé-Chantier, a large village about 8 hours north of Dakar. Calling Guedé a “village” is actually a bit of a stretch. Though it’s definitely rural, it’s a pretty big and well developed town, and recently was officially promoted to “town” status by the government. As those at the Center would joke, Guedé is the bourgeoiest village in Senegal. Ousmane, the academic director at the Center, is not only from Guedé, but is also its mayor, and the students from last semester’s study abroad cycle went there with him to develop some income-generating projects for the villagers. Natalie’s assignment was the film these projects, which are on-going, for some promo videos for the Center. Josie and I were merely stopping in for a night before continuing on the Lahel, where we’d be working on our reforestation project. While Josie and I were prepping ourselves for no running water or electricity for a week and a half, Natalie arrived in Guedé to discover her house not only had a TV, plenty of comfortable furniture and a big yard with a view of the river, but AIR CONDITIONING as well. We don’t even have air conditioning in Dakar!! So yes, Natalie ended up at the bougeoiest house in the bougeoiest village. The rest of us had a fun time congratulating her on being hardcore enough to survive the trials of “village” life.

We spent the night in Guedé at Ousmane’s family’s house, where Josie and I met Diewo (pronounced JAY-o), Ousmane’s niece and our guide for the next week. Diewo is 20 and also on break from university right now, and was going to the Lahel to visit her family and to translate for us. I am not joking when I say that girl saved our BUTTS that week… I have no idea how she wasn’t part of the plan originally, but since almost no one in the village spoke French, she was basically our sole means of communication with them the entire time. So after spending the night with Diewo’s family, we woke up expecting to leave for Lahel, only to find out that her grandfather had decided to postpone the trip one day. Welcome to the spontaneity of village life. We stayed. I read a book. The next morning, we got up at the crack of dawn, clambered into Diewo’s dad’s weathered Peugeot, and drove an hour to Ndioum to catch the first ferry.

In the United States, things like ferries and buses run on strict schedules, and everyone scrambles to make it the port by departure time or risks missing the boat. In Africa, this is not the case. The ferry runs when it needs to run. So everyone arrives at the river bank, drops their packages and bags by the shore, and waits for the ferry to fill. If a car shows up, you’re in luck, because the ferry will leave right (cars pay more). But otherwise, it could be 10 minutes, an hour, or two before enough passengers show up to fill the boat. We got to the river bank to discover we were one of the first to arrive for the next departure. After a few minutes of sitting and shifting around, Diewo’s grandfather decided that waiting for the ferry just wouldn’t do… so he commissioned a canoe. As in, a dug-out canoe. The kind that will flip over if you lean too far to the left or right. So grandfather, Diewo, Josie, myself and ALL our luggage, bottled water and snacks for the week climb into this rickety canoe and scoot across the first river, praying the entire time that no sudden movement would cause us to topple over.

Very luckily, we, and all our luggage, made it across. We went and sat under a ferry terminal of sorts made out of tree branches and palm leaves while Diewo’s grandpa hired a boy with a horse and cart to take us to Lahel. After piling on our bags and securing them with rope, we climbed aboard the cart, waved good-bye to Diewo’s grandfather, and headed off on an hour-and-a-half long journey through the desert on the back of a horse-drawn wooden cart.

The sun was baking as we trotted along. Not too far from the first river, we came across the first desert village. In most of Senegal, the village houses are constructed from wood with dried palm leaf roofs, but in the desert, they’re built out of mud, with tin roofs secured on top with concrete blocks. Usually rectangular and surrounded by brush and cacti, the houses weirdly could just as easily be plopped down in the middle of the American southwest. We kept going. As we went farther and farther, the villages and homes got more and more spread out. But we could still see power lines, and were passed by the occasionally truck, usually piled to the brim with desert passengers with their faces wrapped up in scarves Tuareg-style. We made it to the second river. Unlike the first ferry, which had had a motor, this one was simply a small metal barge attached to a pulley system spanning the river. To cross, you simply boarded (horse, cart, and all), cranked a lever to raise the ramp, and began to slowly haul yourself across. And so we did. On the other side, we climbed back into the cart and kept going. Soon after, we lost the power lines.

The last stretch might have been the longest, but it’s hard to measure distance when traveling by horse and carriage. After what seemed like ages, and with sweat rolling down our foreheads and our mouths watering from thirst, we reached a single, lonely sign, simply stating “LAHEL.” We entered the village limits and passed the school, a narrow, two-room adobe building with its doors and shutters painted a cheerful green. As we approached village center, excited children began appearing outside. I heard the first shout of “TOUBAB!” and rolled my eyes. Toubab is the Sahelian equivalent of “mzungu” - literally, white person. Interestingly, the word actually derives from the Arabic word for doctor. While in Uganda, people constantly refer to white (and Asian) travelers as mzungus, in Dakar you rarely hear it. People here are very conscience of appearances, and to use a word like “toubab” conveys ignorance or a lack of education. In the village, however, all is lost, and after two days of constantly being referred to as “whitey” by children and adults alike I kind of snapped and scolded them with “Mon nom est PAS toubab!!”, after which thankfully they just butchered my name every time they wanted my attention (“Emry? Amly? Emery?”)

The cart pulled up in front of Diewo’s family’s house and a crowd of curious, staring faces quickly gathered. In a village as small and remote as Lahel (only 13 houses) the arrival of foreign visitors is the equivalent of the Superbowl. No — scratch that. It’s more like the World Series, which involves a week of constantly, intently watching us, so as not to miss a single move we made. Josie and I would be quietly reading in our room, only to look up and discover 10 children had gathered outside the door and were peeking inside. We would walk to the well to get water to shower and be followed by a pack of 15 loyal fans. Everywhere we went, there were children watching us. The adults, though more discreet, were just as bad. The first day, as we sat with Diewo and her 106 year old great-grandmother, slowly one mother after another would duck in to oh-so-coincidentally coincide her visit with ours. After the first few days this began to subside, but it was both funny and irritating to suddenly discover ourselves the celebrity visitors of a tiny Senegalese village.

[A quick interjection about Lahel: While most of Senegal is ethnically Wolof, most of the north is a different tribe, called the Halpulaar. They are Muslim as well and speaka language called pulaar. There are Halpulaar stretching all the way across the African Sahel, from Senegal through Mauritania, Mali, Chad, and the Sudan. The women wear big wooden earrings and many have decorative lines etched on the sides of their faces. Supposedly, the Halpulaar descend from the pharaohs of Egypt. That’s why we call our Pulaar friend Alasane “Pharaoh”.]

So after several days of travel, we had finally arrived. The only thing left to do was start the reforestation project. Ousmane had assured us before we left that he had already spoken to the ranger from Forest Services up north, who had all the supplies ready for us. We weren’t given many details other than “All the supplies are there. He’ll give you instructions when you get there. Good luck!” And so, we had logically assumed that on arriving in Lahel, the supplies would be waiting for us and we’d be good to go. Of course, this would have been FAR too easy. The second we arrived, we dialed the park ranger to tell him we were there and ready to start. He told us that was great… but that he, and our trees, were all in GUEDÉ. As in, the town we had just spent two days in. And had traveled miles away from to get to a tiny remote village on the Mauritanian border. Where there were NO SUPPLIES.

We were a little, erm, annoyed to have arrived in the village completely unaware that the supplies we needed for this project were elsewhere. We asked him when he could get there with the trees. He said he had some other villages to get to, but he could make it up by Tuesday. We had arrived on…… Friday. And so began our week of sitting in the village, waiting. We both read several books, spend endless hours swatting flies and fanning ourselves, and by Sunday were already plotting a way to leave the village by the following weekend, instead of on the 28th as planned.

Don’t get me wrong. The village wasn’t that bad at all, despite how everyone — including the villagers in Guedé — reacted when we told them we’d be there for a week (looks of shock). We were right on the River Senegal, which borders Mauritania, and the river provided plenty of wind. In the mornings, we stayed inside the mud huts, and later moved outside to lay on mats and enjoy the breeze. But the best part of the village was at night. There were no buildings or lights for miles, so you could see nearly every star in the sky. So each night, without a light to read by or TV or the Internet, we would just lay and stargaze for hours. It was beautiful and humbling.

The food, sadly, was not so enthralling. Mostly rice and powdered milk type concoctions, which often tasted vaguely of sand as the water boiled for food prep came from the muddy river. For showers, we used buckets of water from the village’s sole well, which was also a bit disappointing. Usually, the water was so sandy that it felt like we were throwing as much dirt onto our bodies as we were cleaning off. We were practically jubilant when we arrived back in Guedé and got to take bucket showers with CLEAR water! But in all honesty, despite minor set-backs, village life was perfectly bearable. I think a lot of people who think of certain luxuries like warm showers and air conditioning as essentials would be surprised to realize how easily you adjust to life without those things. If you really think you could never live without a toilet or the Internet, I’d say that probably stems more from a lack of confidence in yourself than an honest dependency on those things. It’s not that Westerners are overly materialistic even, I just think most people don’t give their own adaptability enough credit.

So we survived. Though we were bored. Really, REALLY bored. But Tuesday finally rolled around, and we woke up (at 5am, to the sounds of yelling children and women, per usual) excited to FINALLY start our project. Two hours later, it was pouring. We called the ranger. The roads would be too muddy to pass. They’d come Wednesday. AWESOME.

So WEDNESDAY rolled around, and bright and early, up rolls a white pick-up truck carrying the ranger and several helpers. The ranger himself was kind of a trip. He was a muscular, boisterous guy dressed in military fatigues and black aviators. He smiled and joked and showed us and the villagers how to dig holes for the trees and water them properly. And so being the “tree planting”. Despite it being the sole task with which Josie and I had been endowed, in reality we ourselves “planted” a total of one tree each. And by “planted”, I mean we ceremoniously held the trees upright as the villagers poured soil in the hole. The villagers did the rest, with Diewo giving instructions to them in Pulaar. Josie and I were left to “supervise”. As soon as we realized the tree planting would take less than 24 hours to complete, we immediately called Brooke, our supervisor in Dakar, to inform her that after a week of hard work in Lahel we’d be returning to the city a BIT early.

The next day, after several excruciating hours of waiting in the heat, another cart arrived to carry Diewo, Josie, and I back to Guedé. The next morning, we left for Dakar at 6am with Natalie and our friends Cody and Pharaoh, who had also been working in Guedé. First thing I did on arrival was take a long, cold shower — in a REAL shower!! CRAZY

So that’s my village story. Don’t be that impressed — really, it wasn’t THAT trying. If you really think it sounds so, you need to come to Africa and see for yourself :P