Happy New Year! (Senegalese style)

Tamxarit is the Muslim New Year celebration. The kids celebrate it by dressing up as the opposite sex and/or painting their faces white (almost like ghosts) and running around the village in small groups banging drums and asking adults for something (similar to what we do for Halloween, though instead of directly receiving candy the kids usually get corn or millet or small coins to share as a group, which they divide among themselves at the end of the night and exchange at the boutiques for candy or other treats). This year kids weren’t the only ones dressing up and running around – even adults did, too!

Great photos of Nioro

Here’s my attempt at making a long story short so I can get to the point of this post: the blog of a professional photographer that has some great shots of Nioro.

I’m working with the 4 other PCVs in my sub-region to start school gardens in 4 different schools in 4 different towns/villages. This was all started because a woman, Khady, who grew up in Nioro but now lives in the States, started a private middle school in Nioro for students who didn’t make it in the regular school system and she wanted the school to see if they could find a way to make use of a massive fenced-in field that her dad used to grow things on but now is overgrown with trees (though delicious trees, like mango and lemon trees) and weeds. One of the teachers knew the PCV in Nioro, Elizabeth, so he contacted her to see if she had ideas about what to do, and after many meetings we developed the school garden plan, which has now expanded to 3 other schools. Khady tries to come back to Senegal every year, and this year she came back with a professional photographer, Dawn, to photograph and school and students and stuff because Khady is in the process of turning the project into an NGO. I’m writing all this because Dawn’s blog has some great photos of Nioro (she is a professional after all), so check out her blog: http://dawndeeksphotography.wordpress.com/ Her posts about Nioro start in December and go through January 2. Hope you enjoy her pictures and stories as much as I did!

PS There will be much more coming about the school gardening stuff soon, so stay tuned! :)

What's black and white allover but red on the inside? Lunch on Tabaski.

Arguably the biggest Muslim holiday, Tabaski, fell a week before Thanksgiving this year, on November 17, 2010, though we continued to celebrate it for several days after that. Since I had been in Kaymor last year for Tabaski, I was more prepared for it this year: I was ready for the blood and guts that accompany the sheep slaughter (since that is really what it is), I was ready to hold the raw meat while my host mom and aunts hacked it to pieces (sometimes more gently, simply using a knife, other times much more dramatically, with a machete), I was ready to eat oily sheep for days on end (even though I was ready for this, I can’t say I really enjoyed it…), and I was ready with my fancy new Tabaski outfit to wear (after I had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed to get the sheep guts smell off my hands) when we (quite literally) paraded around Kaymor, greeting everyone with the traditional Tabaski greeting/prayer (“Forgive me.” “I forgive you. Forgive me.” “I forgive you. May God give us peace and allow us to be together next year.” Etc. etc.).

The first day of our Tabaski celebrations involved basic prepping for the day, which meant that I helped my host mom sweep the compound. Since it was a special occasion, we had to be particularly meticulous, so it took longer than normal and I was hot and dusty by the time we were done. I’ll never get over how women here can stand sweeping bent over with their faces right next to the ground so the majority if what they’re inhaling isn’t air but rather dust. After that, we prepped for cooking lunch, which involved cutting onions and potatoes in our hands rather than on a cutting board, which I’ve mentioned before is a tricky skill to master. During this time the men gathered all the sheep and slaughtered them one by one. In general, the head of a household is supposed to purchase a sheep to kill for Tabaski, so we had a lot of sheep since each of my 5 uncles (and host dad) who live in Kaymor (with their wives and children) had a sheep, plus each of my 3 uncles who came back to Kaymor for Tabaski (with their wives and children, if they have them) also had a sheep. As you can tell from the pictures below, it was quite a process, which the kids enjoyed watching.

(Continued on next post.)

Tabaski (continued)

By mid-afternoon, lunch was done. As is done every day in our family, the platters were split up by gender and age, and we all sat down to a meal of meat and potatoes covered in oily onion sauce, which we also soaked up with bread. The meal was good, minus the fact that there was so much oil I felt sick afterward…which made me immediately begin devising ways to convince my family that I was full at every other meal for the next 5 or so days so I wouldn’t have to continue eating the meat and oily onion sauce. I wasn’t very successful at that; Tabaski is too important of a holiday and meat is too rare of a commodity that they wouldn’t let me not eat at all, but I survived. :)

Once we all had our fair share of meat and potatoes and oil, it was time to shower and put our fancy clothes on (the men had already done this before eating since they had time between butchering the sheep and when we ate, but since we women were cooking, we didn’t have time). Here are a few photos of my family as well as neighbors that came over that evening (during their tour of the village).

On the second day of our Tabaski celebrations the women in my corner of the village organized a dance party for themselves which was really fun. These women certainly love to dance!

While Seneglese people aren’t known for their photo-taking abilities (or at least villagers aren’t…), I had to get a couple pictures of me wearing my fanciest Senegalese outfit yet, as well as the black dye painted on my hands and fingernails.

A few days into the celebrations I spent part of the day at the marabou’s house with my friend Tomsir and my other talibe friends who work in the garden. As usual, I got special treatment and visited the marabou to give him an update on the garden and for him to pray for me and my work.

On the last evening of the celebrations, I made sure to get photos of anyone in our family or of close family friends that I hadn’t gotten yet, plus more photos of the kids (because they’re just too cute).

This Tabaski holiday wasn’t all eating and dressing up, though. In fact, we (women) had more work this year than other years because the water tower broke the day before Tabaski, so we had to pull water from the well everyday rather than just turning on the spicket. Before anyone pulled any water, the women poured 2 bottles of bleach down the well to (in theory) kill the germs in the water; I didn’t get sick so I’m guessing it must have worked. I was really surprised that the women thought of this. When it came to actually pulling the water, I didn’t mind at first – and I could even say I enjoyed it – because I have thought this whole time I’ve been in Senegal that I’m not getting the fullest Peace Corps/Africa experience by having running water in my compound. However, I soon decided I wanted that water tower fixed asap. After a couple days of pulling water my blisters broke and my hands were raw. We would almost always pull 2 at a time, sometimes 3, to make it easier, but that only applies to it being easier on our arm muscles, not necessarily on our hands; I would have much preferred having sore arms than bleeding hands. I got pretty good at carrying the water on my head; the hardest part of that is not that the big buckets of water are too heavy to carry (they are heavy, but not that heavy), but that they spill too easily – we carry the water in buckets that slant out, which means the water splashes out pretty easily. I got the hang of it eventually…mostly because my mom just made sure my buckets were always not filled completely full. I got frustrated several times when I would be carrying water back to our house (or a neighbor’s house, because my host mom and I pulled water for several neighbors, too) and my host dad or other men would just be sitting around drinking tea or listening to the radio. I know this is a cultural thing, that men don’t pull water for drinking or cooking at home (they can and do pull water for watering in gardens and stuff), but it didn’t make it any easier to see them sitting there when there were 10 and 12 year old girls pulling water while they sat there doing nothing. Luckily a couple days after the Tabaski celebrations were over people went back to work and the water tower was fixed, though of course by then my blisters had calloused over and weren’t painful any more. :)