Sukundu ma weydi???

One thing I love about living in Senegal, is the ability to change your hairstyle drastically, and people will continue to tell you that you are beautiful! It's great! Things most people (especially us females) would probably be extremely hesistant about trying out is actually well accepted here in Senegal.  Is it because we fear the harsh judgement or looks of critisism from our fellow Americans that we feel like we can't change our appearances in an extreme manner? Or is it just that we get a free pass here in Senegal for being a "toubab" where being a volunteer and trying something "Senegalese", or extreme, in a sense, is quite amusing and hilarious?  Or maybe we are tired of feeling yucky all the time from the high temperatures of the hot and dry season that doing something completely different from our "ordinary look" will give us a nice jolt of energy? :) Whatever the underlying reason happens to be, I guess, really doesn't matter because I have bad ass hair, and I LOVE it! 





The story starts out with Ally, (one of my BFFs in country) who was tired of her beautiful, long blonde hair. And with the hot and dry season among us, Ally decided that instead of trying to mess with getting shampoo out of her lovely locks during a bucket bath, or brushing through the tangles we all get from the lack of conditioner, that it would be best to just shave it all off her head. We went to a local hair salon (for boys) and the town of Goundaga's baker/barber/mason shaved off her hair in Kounkane because we have electricity here! :) Ally wanted to rock a mohawk because let's face it, she can here in Senegal, and people love it! Which is precisely what happened.  When Ally and I walked out of the barber shop, all the people around us just stared, but she began to get comments such as "Sukunu ma weydi!" which means your hair is beautiful :) And it is!  Ally is a bad ass for being able to rock a mohawk with such elegance :) 



As much as I wanted to shave my head, I decided to have my sister, Ndiole, braid bright red yarn into my hair.  It was inspired from Ally's avatar costume when she had purple yarn braided into hers.  It took my sister 4 hours! But she is the best hair braider in Kounkane, and it was well worth it! I have literally an entire roll of red yarn tied into my long hair, but it gives me some volume. Everyone also tells me I'm beautiful.  Gotta love that, especially when I feel gross and ugly every day. I have to say that I really enjoy experimenting with different hairstyles here in Senegal; I haven't worked up the courage to shave all of it off yet but I'll keep y'all posted on the next major hair alterations Ally and I decide to do! :) Bisous! xxx

Ally and I with our new hair :)

  

April Adventures....

Sorry for the delay in blog posts.  I've been really busy for once.  For starters, I'd like to say Happy Belated Easter, even though, it is "Easter Monday" according to my calendar so I think I can still count today as part of the holiday.  Everyone else in Senegal is, so why can't I? :)
Instead of Easter egg hunts and chocolate bunnies, I spent my Easter holiday with my best friend Ally.  We decided to go to one of the 2 churches here in Kounkané.  We have one catholic church and one evangelistic chruch here, and Ally and I went to the one of which the location we knew.  It ended up being the evangelistic church.  Apparently this church has only 5 members, only 1 of which actually came to the "service".  The church service started out with the guardian, who lived next to the church unlocking the doors for Ally and me.  We sat in the small red church with a glass cross in the back of the room and 6 benches filling up the middle of it.  It was so much different from the churches in America, which isn't surprising with 98% of this country being muslim :) Ally and I sat on a bench to see if anyone else would show up.  We chatted, read a hymn book that was translated into pulaar, and finally 1 member of the church came to inform us that all 4 other members went to Velingara to the bigger service for Easter.  He then said a prayer for us in Pulaar, and he asked Alla/God to bless our families in America and in Senegal.  He also prayed for God/Alla to help us during our 2 year service in Senegal.  It was really nice of him to pray for everyone, especially because we just met him 5 minutes before the prayer.
We then spent the rest of the day working with bamboo and plywood trying to make a solar dryer (stay tuned for a future blog post on that).  Ally and I spent the evening eating one of my favorite dishes for dinner: leciri e maffe jambo :) Yum! Then we watched a few episodes of Weeds, season 3 on my laptop in my backyard (it's waaaayyy to hot to sit indoors during hot/dry season).  We accompanied our Weeds marathon with eating jelly beans from America, chocolate cream filled cookies from Turkey (Biskrem), and getting drunk off a bottle of terrible red wine from Senegal.  It was a great way to end the night :)

When I wasn't celebrating the Easter holiday, I spent the rest of April planning work for our girls conference, IT classes (inchallah), making a solar dryer, having girls' club meetings, eating a ton of mangos, celebrating passover with our 2 jewish volunteers in Koda (super fun!), and working on distributing a scholarship to some girls at the CEM (middle school) in Kounkané. Work. Work. Work. :) I'm so happy to have lots of stuff to do!
Also, this month I was thrown off my bike while I was riding through a busy market.  I collided with a walking female pedestrian who cut me off while I was biking, making me crash into the side of a donkey cart; therefore, throwing me over the handle bars, landing on my face, into a pile of vegetable that a woman was selling on the side of the street.  It was painfully embarrassing.  The people at the marché were super helpful! They picked me up (literally), poured water on my arms to wash off the dirt, asked if I was ok, they didn't even laugh in my face, which was surprising.  Looking back, a white girl flying off her bike into a vegetable pile after hitting a donkey cart is quite hilarious!
Fortunately, I didn't brake anything, and the only remaining signs of my bike accident consist of large swollen bruises on my right leg that resemble beatings with a baseball bat, bruises on the upper half of my abdomen, a scratch on my nose, and the nickname "Air Diaobe" which my family gave to me after I told them the story of me soaring through the air (Diaboe is the city where I crashed) hahahaha! Always wear a helmet while biking! :) over and out....

Seeds!

On my usual, (almost daily) trip to the Case Foyer de Femmes I make every morning I decided to switch up my normal routine. Usually I head to the Case, chat with my friend, Fall, chat with the directrice, Salimatu, hang out with the girls who go to school there, and sometimes I even try to instigate some future planning for formations there with Salimatu, which usually goes nowhere. But one morning last week, I did something quite different. In fact, you could say I even did some cross sector work. :) I, a small enterprise development volunteer, decided to collect seeds :) hahaha! It's kind of a joke around PC Senegal that SEDers aren't "really" volunteers because we usually live in bigger cities, have electricity, and fairly consistent access to wifi and good reseau unlike many village volunteers. But as a Peace Corps family, us volunteers share information and learn many different things from those working in different sectors.  I, for instance, learned from my neighbor Allyson, who is an AgroForestry volunteer, who primarily works with trees, that moringa seeds are ready for collection when the seed pods turn brown. 

So noticing that the Case Foyer de Femmes had 3 moringa trees with tons of brown seed pods, I decided to collect as many seeds as I could to give to Ally and contribute to our Kolda house seed bank, that way any volunteer in need of moringa seeds could just go to the seed bank and there would be plenty available. I spent a good amount of time shaking the trunks of trees to catch the falling seed pods, climbing the brick wall to try to get to the very high branches, and finally, (a trick I learned by watching Senegalese children), taking a large stick and hitting the pods off the middle branches of the trees that I couldn't quite reach even if I jumped.  It was quite hilarious because the pods would, oftentimes, break open and moringa seeds would fly out all over the ground like candy from a piñata, which I would happily pick up and put in my old oatmeal can :) It was a great morning!

On my seed collecting adventure, however, I stumbled across the most beautiful seeds I've ever seen! While waving my stick around in the air and hitting brown moringa pods off the branches, I accidentally hit a neighboring tree with larger pods causing one to fly off, and upon landing, burst open on the ground revealing 5 large Fuchsia colored seeds. I was taken aback by the exquisite beauty of these seeds.  Out of excitement of my new discovery I went to show my friend, Fall, and he explained to me that it is a seed that requires a lot of water, and he suggested I wait to plant them right before rainy season.  I happily continued to collect all the reachable seed pods off the tree because I was so excited about my beautiful new seeds that I found.

Some of the pretty seeds I collected

When I came home, I showed the seeds to my family.  I learned that the seeds are called "panté" in pulaar, and they grow into a flowery vine of yellow and green.  The plant sounds just as beautiful as the seeds! I also learned that pulaar kids like to collect the seeds sometimes in order to use them to play games, and local "witch doctors" (maribous) sometimes bless them and hand them out to people to protect from evil spirits.  I, personally, have never seen any seeds more beautiful than these! Before moving to Senegal, I never would have thought a day would come where I would get so much enjoyment from finding seeds.  They are just so exotic looking :)

Panté seeds