Sully and Senegal: June 2009

Hey everyone (or, as they say here, I greet you),

Just wanted to send another exciting (hopefully) update on my life here in Senegal. I promise its much less of a downer than the last one.

When I last wrote, I was on my way to being a "tournee" of all the collèges (essentially middle schools) of the Kedougou Region. A group of volunteers, myself included, were going to be travelling to each location with the aim of accomplishing three goals: paint an AIDS awareness mural (that was my team), conduct interviews for the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship (a scholarship created in memory of a former PC Senegal volunteer which provides money for school supplies for the winner), and to invite students to apply for our upcoming summer leadership camp (headed by a group of 3 other volunteers).
As I mentioned, I was recruited to be on the mural team and worked alongside another PCV from the north of Senegal, Colleen, who extended an extra 6 months in order to do educational murals such as this in various regions of the country. She and I worked on the design together, which was simply a guy and a girl holding hands, apparently coming to an agreement to talk about the most crucial ways to prevent HIV/AIDS: abstinence, fidelity, condoms, and testing. The message, in French, was "We respect our community. We talk about AIDS (SIDA in French), and we included the red ribbon, Senegalese flag, and I tried reproducing the PC logo later on. Then we got started on our whirlwind tour. Rather than go through each and every one, in the end, we completed a mural at each of the 11 collèges in our region, as well as interviews and camp stuff. Of course, being Senegal, some schools had to be completed piece-meal, with our only doing a mural that day because the teachers weren't prepared with the girls' info, etc. and it required multiple trips by different people to get everything done. Others went very smoothly, with Colleen and I knocking out the mural while the others did the interviews. We got pretty fast towards the end; using a grid-system was much easier and made the drawing much faster so we could get other people to help us fill in the colors sooner. Our adventures included a lot of biking out to some pretty beautiful areas of the region, getting caught in a storms and spending the night at health posts, taking some nice, and not so nice transportation, and above all interacting with a lot of different students. The best ones were where the discussions already started to take place before we had even finished the painting. At the collège in Salemata, the town closest to my village, a teacher started asking the onlookers (they were usually more willing to watch us than paint themselves) what they saw: A boy and a girl. And what are the dangers of them being together? Diseases. Like what kind of diseases? Like AIDS. What do you know about AIDS?...and they were off. It was a great experience and a great way to see a lot of the region I had yet to visit. Colleen had to leave shortly after completing #10, which I had gone back to the village for, so #11 was completed by myself and a few other volunteers just a couple weeks ago.
In amongst this whole tour of the region, the Bassari Festival happened. Im not sure if Ive mentioned this before, but the Bassari Fest is an initiation ceremony for adolescent males thats steeped in tradition, since the Bassaris around me claim to have been there long before the Pulaars. Theres one of the largest populations of Bassari villages out by Salemata, near my village, and finally having a volunteer in Salemata, my closest neighbor, Lindsey, after about 12 years, made getting to see the initiation a lot easier than in years past. The Bassaris are notorious for not announcing when their particular village is going to be staging its initiation until the last second, which makes it difficult for tourists, especially PCVs, to get out there; last year, in fact, before Lindsey or myself or any PCV was out there, a group of volunteers traveled all the way there on the weekend they had heard the initiation was supposed to take place, and found they were a week early. This year, though, Lindsey had the inside scoop so people new exactly when to be there.
The result was a group of approximately 40 volunteers descending upon the department of Salemata. We had a little soiree at our house, which we took a break from the scholarship tournee for, and the next day had transport arranged to take us all out there. We left our things at the nearest tourist campement, and let the festivities commence. As some of you may know, Muslims dont drink alcohol; Bassaris, however, are NOT Muslim by any means, and the palm wine flowed like, well, wine. The next day was the big event of the entire initiation, the combat. Each of the 45 "pledges", we'll call them, had to go up against a Bassari "brother" in one-on-one combat. However, we had the feeling that over the years, despite the fact that the young men get a sword and a kind of bow-shaped shield, and the brothers are armed with sticks and a handguard, that the fighting had probably been dumbed down a bit once tourism to the event started to take hold, because most of the fights quickly turned to just grappling, and either one of them got thrown down or they called a stalemate...lame. Some of the fights were pretty good though, with kids making good use of their swords and cocky brothers getting taken down.
Now, a few weeks prior, Lindsey and I had gone to a smaller village's initiation, which was much the same order of events as this one. However, Lindsey was told she was not allowed to go to the battleground because it was for men only to watch. The Bassaris, during the festival, wear elaborate masks to hide their faces (check out the pics on my blog), and those come off for the most part during the fights. This "secret" must be kept from the women, so they arent allowed to watch at all. That sucked for Lindsey, but we talked to the coordinator from the village whose initiation this huge group of PCVs was going to attend, many of them women, and asked if they would be prohibited as well. He said maybe not, but it would be up to the village. Well, the village ultimately went the same way as the others, and all the females who came to the ceremony werent allowed to watch. They said they still had a good time though, and were able to watch from the top of a large hill where you could still see what as generally going on.
With the Bassari Fest over and the subsequent mural/scholarship tournee done, Ive been back in my village focusing on slowly getting a new garden going (currently waiting on new fencing to be made), and mainly working with my 5 pilot farmers about what we're going to do with their fields this rainy season. Id been meeting with them individually, since they were the people said to be the better farmers in my village and the one nextdoor, to see if they would be willing to not only receive improved seed varieties from me for their crops, but also to try new techniques that, if they work well, can be taught to other farmers. They're commonly called "demo plots". Theyve all been very receptive to reserving parts of their fields for these demonstrations, and we had a good meeting with everyone together not long ago where they were able to learn the demos each other was doing and get an idea of the bigger picture. Ive been told with all the things I want them to try, Ill be putting a lot on my plate, but I think they can handle it. Some of the demos include (if youre interested in that sort of thing): improved spacing between rows/plants for corn, sorghum, and peanuts; intercropping beans with corn/peanuts; a demo of chemical vs. organic fertilizers, a demo of alleycropping rows of trees into the corn field for fertilizer; planting other trees for fertilizer in various places within fields. One other that Im proud of is one that my village brother and I are doing. He wanted to some of his corn on the side of one of the many large slopes in our village, so we're trying a contour planting demo with him. We constructed whats called an A-frame (see pics) to find the contours along the hill every 5 meters, and we will be planting rows of trees along them to help stop soil erosion.
Most importantly, theyll be helping me distribute the improved seeds to other farmers as well, which is what I came in to Kedougou to pick up. Id be back there with them not, if not for my first case of Senegalitis that floored me all day Thursday with a fever, vomiting, and diahrrea. Its gotten progressively better since then by yesterday I was feeling much better without having had to take any antibiotics which was good. I figured I should pay my dues at some point for having made it this long without getting that sick, and the fact that it only lasted 2 days, well...it could have been much worse.

Last thing, but definitely not the least, is a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone back home for contributing the AMAZING number of art supplies that have been shipped over here slowly but surely over the last couple months (and THANK YOU to Mom for packing them all up). The request went out at my moms work, Spectrum Gymnastics Academy, for any supplies people might like to donate, since I had expressed interest at our primary school to start teaching art classes; a curriculum which they currently dont have. The response was enormous, and the supplies havent even all made it here yet. Needless to say, these kids are going to be set for a while. I completed the first class with the youngest kids about a week ago, and with the help of a couple of the teachers it went over really well. I told them to draw their families and their compounds, with markers and crayons, and did a little demo of what I meant. It was obvious these kids had never been encouraged or given the opportunity to draw before; they seemed to think it was some type of test. But once they realized it was supposed to be fun, they loosened up a bit. Check out the pics on my blog if you get a chance (a handful of the 130 that the teacher I loaned my camera to took over the course of an hour). Hopefully we'll get to do many more of these in the future.

Thats about it for now; I'm heading back to the village tomorrow, healthy and ready to get these seeds in the ground (hopefully); and I wont be coming back again until our huge 4th of July bash, which I'll be sure to tell you all about...or not, depending.

Thanks again for everything!

Happy Fathers Day, Dad. Love and Miss You.

And Happy Fathers Day to all the other Dads.

- Steve "Samba" Sullivan

P.S. I also included a picture of the mural I've been doing off-and-on at our regional house, which will probably be done by our party.