Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Sadat Toma



Souleymane and I are going to Senegal soon to attend a Sadat (SP?) on March 20. A Sadat is an event marking the anniversary of the death of a well-loved and well-respected person, in this case Kande's father, who passed away on March 20, 1989. Souleymane is named for Kande's father, so we thought it would a be fitting occasion for Souleye to make his first of what we hope to be many trips to Senegal. Souleye's grandma was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing her grandson for the first time.

While we are there, I hope to keep everyone up to date. Senegal is always a good source for interesting and sometimes inspiring stories so I am looking forward to corresponding.

Toma, by the way, means "namesake" in Mandinka, Kande's family's mother tongue, so it's really Sadat Toma for Souleymane only; for me it's just a plain ol' Sadat.

Also, I put all my old emails over to the right. I am looking forward to reading them and getting back into the mindset I was in just a few short years - yet seems like lifetimes! - ago.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

2003 - 2005 Senegal Email Archive

1
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 10:03 AM
Subject: Hello from Africa

Hello All! I made it to Senegal in one piece. Sorry it has taken me so
long to write but it is hard to type on this keyboard and the cyber cafes
are always full - possible business opportunity?

I have left all my mailing addresses in Philadelphia so PLEASE mail me your
address. Email is o.k. too but real mail is better because we only get a
limited time on the computer and to get a REAL letter is easier and more
satisfying. Also, most packages come through just fine - for some reason
they do not sell fly swatters here so if you have on lying around send it my
way please - or send me a bunch and I will start a black market for weapons
against flies. The best way to mail things is in bubble envelopes or in
boxes that are sealed in tape. My address is PCT Kate Kowalski, Corps de la
Paix, B.P. 299, Thiès, Senegal West Africa.

At this point, you may want to print this email out to read the rest of it
because it is long and quite possibly boring to you, but I took the
following out of my journal entry on 9/24/03 to give you an idea of what it
is like here. We have been pretty transitory so I have not yet gotten a
chance to break out my camera but I will send photos as soon as I can.

Also, we have been learning Wolof but I just found out today I do not need
to take French and can go straight into local language classes. The
language I will be learning is Fulakunda, which means I will be assigned to
the southern part of the country but I will not know exactly where until mid
October. This is good because the southern part of Senegal is supposed to
be the prettiest; but on the downside, this also means I will be FAR about
14 hours from Dakar.

Hope all is well back in the states; I will write again next week.

love,

Kate

We (Morgan & I) are on our site visit in a town on the border of Senegal and
Mauritania in order to get a sense of what life will be like, who we will be
working with, and what we will be doing.

Up to now, myself and 28 other volunteers have been isolated within the
confines of our Peace Corps compound (which has had a 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. guard
since 9-11). Morgan and I have been lucky to have gotten a well-integrated
young volunteer as our hostess, because we needed a friendly face after our
journey from Thies. Much of the inter-town travel occurs in what is called
a sept-place (7-seater). A sept-place is an old beat-up, rusty on the
outside, torn to shreds on the inside Citroen or Renault station wagon with
a standard cracked windshield. Here is how the sept place system works.
You go down to the town “station”, which is called a garage. In no sense
does it at all resemble a real garage, not even in Thies, which is the 2nd
biggest city in Senegal. Rather, it is a vast, dusty, littered parking lot
on the outskirts of trown with a couple of rows of long car ports. The
carports are labeled periodically with names like Louga, Ziganchour, or
Tambacounda. We went to the one labeled St. Louis. A sept-place does not
leave at designated times. It leaves only after all seven places are
filled, and usually it is some time after all the seven places are filled
before the driver decides to get in, start the car, and head directly to the
gas station. Also, you should know that a sept-place easily becomes a neuf
(9) or dix (10) place, as there are no seat belts limiting it to seven seats
only, although the actual space available limits it to only five
comfortably.

My first ride in a sept place I decided that it was not going to be all that
bad, that I could endure it, as long as I had something to read. Before I
got on,note that the worst part of a sept place trip is getting your spot,
as the driver will insist that you get in the car even if you are only the
first on of the seven places and there’s no other takers in sight. So you
get in, it smells of baking vinyl, there are enough flies to have one on
every part of your body at the same time, it is hotter than hell, talibe
(more on the talibe later) are pressing against the other side of the glass,
singing for coins, and you’re wondering why on earth you’re stupid enough to
be sitting inside of a germ-buttered car all by yourself when you have no
hope of going anywhere for at least another hour. But eventually spots and
fares for bodies as well as bags are negotiated and the car fills up and
you’re on your way. So it was on Sunday last, Morgan and I en route to St.
Louis, and then on to Dagana.

I was well into my acquisition of the night before, the most recent issue of
BBC’s “Focus on Africa” and happy because I was finding it surprisingly
interesting and engaging, and I was well into it even though we only just
headed out of the garage and still were making our way through town, when
Morgan turned around in the seat infront of me and said, very alarmed,
“We’re moving!” I looked up from my magazine, thinking she wasn’t as smart
as I thought, as we had been moving for about five minutes already, so I
said, “Yes,” feigning excitement, since maybe that was what she was driving
at, that we were finally on our way. “But the driver’s not in the car!”
Sure enough, I looked at the driver’s seat and it’s empty, his door is wide
open, and the car talking to someone while his care is heading steadily
forward. Lucky for us, he quickly finishted his conversation, caufght up
with the car, and climbed back in. After that brush with death, we thought
nothing of it when he stopped at the gas station a few minutes later and
proceeded to fill the tank, engine running. After that, we were on our way
– on the road (and off, when there were potholes to be avoided) to St.
Louis. Going 40 MPH meant we got a nice breeze through the windows, all of
which were rolled down, and we left the flies behind.

Unfortunately our movement didn’t do much to alleviate the heat. Barely
20 minutes had passed before my leg wasw swapping sweat with the leg of the
man on my right, clear through our trousers. Women have to keep their legs
covered at all times, as this is a Muslim country predominantly. So there I
was, sweaty me, wedged between a sweaty man and the side of the car, which
had an opening the size of a straw that was blowing hot air from beneath the
car like a Barbie sized hair dryer, directly onto my right thigh, and the
person in front of me, whose clothes are filtering the air in from the front
window, smells like armpits on the ninth day after a shower.

But we made it and here I am on a piece of foam, contorting my limbs so as
to avoid the raindrops that are finding their way through the tin roof, as
it is the end of the rainy season here and a monsoon is raging. It was
whipping all the doors and shutters against the house so we had to close and
lock them all, so now there is no breeze at all unless you count the min
winds generated by the tiny wings of these baby cricket looking bugs that
appear every three seconds on my paper. We don’t even have a fan anymore
inside our hot box, as the electricity has gone out. When I say hot box,
it’s hot not only because we’ve shut ourselves off from any available
breeze, but because all the surfaces here retain the heat they’ve been
amassing all day, and remain hot continually. The lack of electricity is
okay though because I am writing this with my spelunker’s helmet. I can’t
just move out of the way of the drops coming through the roof because my bed
is also occupied by Morgan, who has a 104 degree temperature, so as you can
see I’m caught between a Scylla and Charybdis (sp?) at 3 a.m. The bathroom
door (you have to go outside to get to the bathroom) is swinging again,
Morgan must have forgotten to lock it. I would get up and lock it myself
except that I know she will be making her way there within the next 10
minutes to see to one end or the other if her pattern from last night and
tonight is any indication.

There is a French woman working for an NGO here in Dagana (a “two-bob” as
all white people are called – I learned this on my first walk through town
when all the kids five and under called out “TWO-BOB!” at me, grinning from
ear to ear). Anyway, the French woman, like many Westerners who aren’t
American I’m told, can’t figure out the concept behind the Peace Corps.
She asked Erika (our hostess) what she had done thqat she had to enlist,
thinking it was a way to opt out of a prison sentence by some particularly
tortuous community service.

But for all the poverty – and the poverty is dire, much worse than anything
we saw in Bolivia or Peru – for all the litter, the puddles, the smells of
sewage and horseshit and goats, for all the bugs, ranging from those who lay
eggs in your skin to those whose urine is so acidic it blisters your skin –
for all the 2 a.m. car horns and inexplicable shouting and bleating lambs
wandering the streets right on the other side of your open window and
six-inch thick wall, there is beauty here. There are smiles, wide bright
smiles, and handshakes – kids run after you just wanting to shake your hand
– and there is a lot of laughter, especially with two-bobs like myself
around who don’t yet know how to speak Wolof. There is bright colorful
beautiful fabric with patterns you’ve never seen before, and savory
spice-filled dinners (even if you do eat them with your hand out of a
community bowl). And there are legions and legions of kids here,
malnourished and half-naked, but they’re here and for better or worse, they
don’t know any better and they’re happy.
2
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2003 9:19 AM
Subject: Africa


Hello all.

I have been trying to send this email for some time now but the first time I
tried, my storage device broke the computer at the internet cafe; the second
time I tried, I put the disk in and it fell into a sort of abyss, like I was
dropping it into a mail slot. The worst part is, every time I use my
computer, I have to take it to the Center for recharging as I don't have an
outlet in my bedroom at home. I will be loading photos soon to an album on
snapfish, but first I have to find a place with a computer that has a USB
port. Everything is very difficult here when it comes to technology.

All of my colleagues made it home from their site visits around the country,
although not without incident. I thought MY ride in the 7-place was bad,
one volunteer rode back in a 7-place with a live goat tied to the roof. The
poor goat relieved itself en route, spraying down into the open window, all
over my friend, and all over the rest of the people in the car. It took my
friend until the goat was finished before he realized what was going on
(that no, it wasn’t raining, not a cloud in the sky!) and that what the
rest of the riders were screaming at him in Wolof was “Roll up the %$#*
window!” Another group of volunteers didn’t make it back until
midnight, as their car was stuck in the mud for five hours, so ze weren’t
the only ones with heavy rains.

I am now safely ensconced in my African family. I now have five brothers
and three sisters, ranging in age from 9-25. My name is Penda Sow
(pronounced Penda Sew). My dad works for the government financing public
projects, and my mom does not work outside the home, like many families
here. I eat well - my mom would put any Italian mother to shame the way she
makes me eat. I have to tell her I am full at least three times, and then I
have to tell my dad several times as well before I can leave the bowl. We
all sit on the floor and eat out of one big bowl, well, two actually if
everyone is home, and we eat with our hands. One of the funniest things to
do here is talk about what everyone had for dinner because the African way
seems to be to take the most random shit you can find, throw it together and
call it dinner. The best so far have been: a dinner of beignets and
watermelon, a dinner of sliced cucumber, and a dinner of goat's head and
millet. The goat's head didn't have the skin on it but it still had they
eyes. So comparatively I have been lucky. My family keeps their house
sparkling clean but because we are in a city and the doors are always open
there are lots of roaches. It really disturbed me at first but now I have
come to accept them all as my pets. I am not as keen about housing the
blister beetles, especially since I was struck early on by one in the shower
- it was dark so I didn't see it but suddenly the side of my knee just
started burning and when I looked there were several blisters.

My dad told me that the government just started a new department:
Department for le developpment des enterprises petits et moyenne (small and
mid-sized businesses), which I later found out was an initiative of Abdulaye
Wade's. Wade was elected in 2000, and is the first new president Senegal
has seen since 1981, and only the third president since independence from
France in 1960. I did see a center for support of women in business, so
official women-owned businesses are not uncommon here (although the informal
women-run businesses are plentiful).

For the next 10 weeks, this hot little room will be my home. We will be
sworn in on December 5 in Dakar by the U.S. Ambassador to Senegal, and then
on the 8th of December we will be installed in the cities where we’ve been
assigned. I think I told you already I will be in the south as I am
learning Fulakunda, which is what my family speaks, or is supposed to speak.
The mom and dad do but the kids mostly speak a mixture of Wolof, French,
and Fulakunda since most people in Thiès speak Wolof and the teachers teach
school in French.

In my last email, I mentioned the talibe (prounced tally-bay). The talibe
are young boys who are sent off to a marabout (local Muslim leader) to learn
the Koran and to learn the five pillars of Islam, one of which is to give
alms. Eventually, they will become marabouts themselves if they keep at it.
The boys, sent off at 5 or 6 until they grow up, become beggars in order
to learn humility. They sleep at the marabout’s house and give all the
money they receive to the marabout. Another PCV (who’s been here for two
years) told me the kids don’t end up learning the Koran. Often these kids
are fed by various families in the neighborhoods they’re in, but only
after everyone else has eaten; the kids get the leftovers.

Speaking of religion, I have been to the church here now a couple of times.
The history of Catholic missions around the world is mixed, but yesterday I
experienced only the good (although the Muslims might disagree because all
the pigs that run around the neighborhood belong to the Catholics – the
Muslims won’t touch them). The church was packed and the singing was
phenomenal. I didn't understand how much French I knew until I accidentally
went to the Wolof mass today.

I have been struggling somewhat with the humility and simplicity of my
family. They pray at designated times several times a day every day and
have very few possessions. It makes me feel shallow and capricious and
selfish by comparison. It seemed like I had more stuff in my two suitcases
than they had put together – all 10 of them. My view on the whole issue
of developing countries will continue to change somewhat, but for now it is
becoming apparent to me how gray that area is between what is in their
control and my control to change and what is not. I guess in a way, I have
made progress – ironically - by seeing just how little progress I will be
able to make. But even so, I was in my first development class the other
day and was ecstatic about the work I will be doing and thrilled about the
prospect of learning more about the development, e.g., we have already had a
lecture from an econ professor from the University of Dakar, which is the
only university in Senegal, which was enlightening. The literacy rate here
is 40 percent, which means most of my clients won't be able to read and part
of my job is to teach classes that explain basic business principles.

Now that I’ve bored you to tears about my own personal philosophical
issues, I will sign off.

Love,

Kate
3.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 3:54 PM
To: zleblond@yahoo.com; achinni@erols.com; arich@mail.clvhts.com; bkenney@ohc.com; bbl3@cwru.edu; jim3710@aol.com; emvet@hotmail.com; ian.hoffman@usdoj.gov; jennifer_stainforth@ohnd.uscourts.gov; jangle27@yahoo.com; James.Kowalski@trab.aorcentaf.af.mil; JWisniewski@CBIZ.com; kevin.broida@seurat.com; kimberly.kilby@mvfairhousing.com; lnovickis@cbiz.com; kowalski@one.net; Michelle_Wray@fclass.hilliard.k12.oh.us; mkc.swimgirl@fuse.net; mom3710@aol.com; natwak@yahoo.com; pkowalski@columbus.rr.com; pryan@rwsu.com; rmvarga@ra.rockwell.com; rkilby@sbcglobal.net; rconnolly@fuse.net; ritzr@pios.com; sjr4@cwru.edu; sanstaett@mymailstation.com
Subject: Another long email from Africa

Hello All =

This computer eats up time faster than you can say Bobs your uncle; I have
pictures but they are too big to attach. I will try to upload them to
Snapfish soon and as soon as I do I will give you the link.

Boring email disclaimer here = so boring in fact that I could write it in
Fulakunda because we have just learned the what I do everyday tense:

I have settled into a routine here, which mainly consists of studying and
sweating. Bucket baths and showers (3-4 a day) help, but only for the
amount of time I am actually inside the shower, because as soon as I step
out I am sweating again and have to slather on mosquito repellant on top of
the sweat. But lucky for me, feeling hot and sticky is about the only
complaint that I have.

My days here are regimented. I get up at six, and sounds of Islam prayer
are coming from loudspeakers outside and sometimes also from a radio inside
the house (even though my whole family is asleep, except for my mom who
sometimes prays). I go outside, take a bucket bath, and try to find some
clothes that are modest but not too hot. At seven, I meet some other
trainees who live in my neighborhood and we walk the 2 kilometers to the
center together, crossing two very busy streets on the way. There are no
traffic lights and very few traffic signs, so crossing the street is
probably the most difficult part of my day. We get to the Center at about
7:30, where I dip buttered baguette into a café mocha made with instant
coffee and whole milk and cocoa powder while I struggle through the Senegal
newspaper from the day before (it’s in French). Monday through Saturday,
I am in Fulakunda class from 8 a.m. to 12:30 noon and then we break for
lunch. My class all sits at the same big bowl (usually filled with fish and
rice) and we have to speak in Fulakunda so not much is said. This is partly
why I skip lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for yoga.

There is a volunteer in my group who leads Bikram yoga for an hour and a
half. Birkam yoga is a type of yoga that people do in a room that is heated
to like a hundred and five or something ridiculous like that, so our outdoor
basketball court at the Center is well suited for it. On Tuesdays and
Thursdays I usually use my midday break to run errands (to the tailor or
cybercafe) or to study in our rec room because I like having a table to
study on and there is no table at my house.

After school, which doesn’t get out till 6 – and it gets dark by 7:30
– I have been running a couple times a week at a stadium that is about a
quarter mile from the Center. It is a gravelly 400 meter track around a
soccer field which is unkempt and home to sheep and chickens. However,
there is a practice field right next to the track that is trimmed and there
are often soccer players practicing there. I would prefer to run around the
town, but the traffic, pollution, and general anti-women-in-shorts attitude
that is supposed to pervade the population here keep me inside the stade.
The afternoon is spent in Small Enterprise Development (SED) classes
usually, although sometimes there are changes for medical and cross-cultural
training. Most of the trainers here are Sengalese and they do some pretty
fun cross-cultural sessions; a couple of their skits have had me creased.
The med classes are interesting too. We got a medical manual that includes
everything from setting a bone to delivering a baby, because in our villages
there may not be a doctor and many people here think that because you are
white you know how to cure things. A fellow volunteer has already had to
diagnose and treat conjunctivitis at his house and one of my brothers comes
running to me every time he gets a cut or has a headache. Malaria, which is
the #1 killer here, is obviously still a problem, but people here can
develop a partial immunity to it, where they will get sick, but not too
sick, and although they could still die, they often don’t. But you can
get it a bunch of times. My Fulakunda teacher is actually sick with malaria
right now but he is still teaching. It can’t be spread person-to-person
– you can only get it from a certain species of mosquito, and I have a
quinine pill I take weekly to prevent me from getting it.

Every Friday, I join a group of seven total for a one hour conga drum lesson
after class. This is one of the highlights of my week.

The only chunk of free time that I get is Saturday afternoon and Sundays,
and most of that is sucked up by studying Fulakunda. I have tried to adopt
a no-French policy at home because my family speaks Fulakunda as well as
French, and I need to get up to speed ASAP if I want to talk to them. It is
hard to stick to my policy though because I don’t want to not get to know
my family. As I write this, I am sitting out in the courtyard with my two
youngest brothers, who are reading aloud – separately – from their
schoolbooks, even though school doesn’t start till the 20th. This is a
pretty typical evening for me, sitting out in the courtyard, because it is
about 20 degrees cooler out there than in the house and about 30 degrees
cooler than it is in my room.

The routine has really made for a boring email but it has also made me more
comfortable: since everything is routine now, all the weird, scary,
uncomfortable stuff (e.g., roaches) seem normal (e.g., like pets, except I
squash them). My family, for instance, no longer has the halo they did when
I first arrived and thought they were impoverished, austere, prayerful
Muslim saints; they’re just a typical family that is better off than most.
One thing that I will never get used to is the birds. There are so-o-o
many and they make so many weird and different noises. There is one that
whistles woo-woooo! just like an appreciative construction worker when a
foxy lady walks by. Outside of these self-esteem birds, there are birds
that hoot like an owl throughout the day, birds that screech, birds that
sound like those bird-shaped water whistles you can get as a prize at church
festival fish ponds, and giant vampire bats that come out at dusk and almost
look fake, they’re so Halloween-ey looking. You see their large black
outlines against the dusk-blue sky overhead and feel closer to Transylvania
than Tambacounda.

For those of you that are considering visiting, DO! We were visited by the
ministries of tourism and national parks yesterday in our SED class and
there are some very beautiful, very unspoiled places in Senegal, all of
which I will take you to myself. Part of our SED group is eco-tourism, and
it is their job to publicize these places better, which is a little ironic
because the more people, the less pristine, no matter how careful you are.
Besides the Niokolo Koda Park, in Eastern Senegal, which has lions and
elephants, there is a place called Iles de Madeleines, which is only 20
minutes from Dakar, on the coast, and breathtakingly beautiful. You can
only get to it via canoe, and you’re not allowed to spend the night. I am
keeping track of all these places so you will be enthralled when you come to
visit and not be scared away by my graphic emails. One of the speakers
earlier this week runs eco tours in which the tourists pay a premium to live
in a village and stay with an African family – which you can do for the
low, low price of a plane ticket to Dakar. There are also some pockets of
very traditional animist tribes that have festivals, customs, and beliefs
that alone would make the trip worthwhile.

So please come visit next year or the next. And if you can’t come, write
me a letter.
PCT Kate Kowalski
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 299
Thies Senegal
West Africa
Love,

Kate
4.
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 10:01 AM
To: akohls@gjcs.k12.in.us; zleblond@yahoo.com; achinni@erols.com; arich@clvhts.com; quint_mitchell@bah.com; lmimura@jjroop.com; huths@sconet.state.oh.us; bkenney@ohc.com; bbl3@cwru.edu; cooper.265@mail.com; jim3710@aol.com; emvet@hotmail.com; ian.hoffman@usdoj.gov; jennifer_stainforth@ohnd.uscourts.gov; jangle27@yahoo.com; JWisniewski@CBIZ.com; kevin.broida@seurat.com; kimberly.kilby@mvfairhousing.com; lnovickis@cbiz.com; kowalski@one.net; Michelle_Wray@fclass.hilliard.k12.oh.us; mkc.swimgirl@fuse.net; mom3710@aol.com; natwak@yahoo.com; pkowalski@columbus.rr.com; pryan@rwsu.com; raevarga@hotmail.com; rkilby@sbcglobal.net; rconnolly@fuse.net; ritzr@pios.com; sjr4@cwru.edu; sanstaett@mymailstation.com
Subject: The game is up.

Dear All,

Okay, the game is up. I weighed my desire for pity and packages against my
desire for visitors and the latter won, of course. In order to minimize the
recurring threats from some of you to stay home and the recent excuses
you’ve found for not being able to visit (for some reason, everyone thinks
its going to be too hot), I am coming clean: life here is not all roaches,
rice and rolling sweat.

On the 15th of October – my one-month anniversary of being officially
enlisted (it seems like it should be more) – our SED class took a field trip
to Popenguine, which is on the coast about an hour southwest of Thies and
about an hour southeast of Dakar. We visited Popenguine because about six
members of our SED class are actually eco-tourism (not business) trainees,
meaning they will all get beautiful resort-like sites at which they’re
supposed to help the locals develop sustainable ways to draw visitors and
make money off them while maintaining and even enriching (I’m starting to
sound like a Peace Corps manual) the wealth of natural resources that brings
the visitors there in the first place. The ecotourism volunteers tend to be
all sorts of biology students fresh out of the ivory tower who are somewhat
anti-business, so it makes for an interesting dynamic in the class. (My dad
– my real dad – in fact refrained from sending me fly swatters for fear of
upsetting this faction of our group : ). But it also makes up for killer
field trips like to one to Popenguine. And Popenguine needs an ecotourism
helper (and is getting one of us) because all you will find written down
about it in the Lonely Planet guide to the Gambia and Senegal (which is also
the only guide book written about Senegal so take note) is that “20 years
ago Popenguine used to be the place for wealthy Dakarois to come, then it
stopped being trendy and became a really cool and unpretentious place to
chill for a couple of days” which says nothing about the World War II
bunkers lining the coast there, nor about the scattered garments you will
see that widows have stuffed into antholes at the end of their mourning
period, nor about the sacred baobab jekel (sacred baobab) that has seen the
baptism of every village child for five generations. The Lonely Planet
guide, as good as it is, says nothing about Popenguine being the destination
for a Pentecostal pilgrimage hundreds of Catholics make every year, because
they believe a miracle occurred there around 1890, and it doesn’t mention
that the former French governor from colonial times built an ornate
oceanside palace nearby which became a second home for Leopold Senghor,
Senegal’s first president elected in 1960, and every one of his successors
(all two of them). It neglects to mention that the highest point on the
Petit Cote (which is the coast that stretches south of Dakar) is right there
in Popenguine, but we will forgive them for that as the altitude of the
highest point is 74 meters. These are the things you’ll only learn from the
tour guide who, with the help of one woman, runs the tourist center and the
volunteer force that helps keep the village’s nearby national park clean. I
was surprised to read that it ever was a tourist hot spot because there are
only a couple of hotels there and very little else that is not part of the
residents’ daily lives (like fishing boats). I got a taste of more
developed beach resorts this past weekend on my own little field trip to a
little town south of Dakar called Toubab-Diallao.

Several of us rented a few sept-places to go the 45 minutes to the beach
after class Saturday, and we spent the night at a beautiful seaside hotel
complete with terraces, hammocks, gardens, innumerable breezy shady places
with comfy chairs to chill. Called the Sobo-Bade, almost all the surfaces
at this hotel have been artfully mosaic-ed and the staff is difficult to
distinguish from the guests, so relaxed and friendly they are. So I spent a
breezy, sweatless Saturday seaside, sipping fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice,
reading The Life of Pi (my book club suggestion to all y’all), chatting,
listening to the pounding surf against the rocks about 100 feet below. By
nightfall, one of our group had made a local friend, so we went to his small
shack that was clinging to the cliff next to the hotel and spent the evening
on his front porch under a starlit sky, our conversation accompanied by the
steady rhythm of the conga drum. In two’s and three’s, the group gradually
retreated back to our rooms at the hotel, which were spacious and fitted
with ceiling fans (which to me is a/c) and mosquito nets. I was among the
last group to finally retire, when sunup was right around the corner of
Earth. A few hours later I was up and down the seaside stairs to the beach
for a swim. I spent all of Sunday in the water. The worst part of the
weekend was having to leave, and our drivers showed up at five,
unfortunately timely for once, and we grudgingly stuffed the station wagons
with our sunburned selves and headed back to Thies, each of us about $25
poorer, after having to pay $8 for the room, $6 for the ride out and back,
and the balance on steady turns at the terrace bar and café.

The weekend at the beach was made all the more festive by the Friday
afternoon activity that preceded it: all 27 of us getting blindfolded and
led to our site assignments on a basketball-court sized map of Senegal. No
one was allowed to take off their blindfold until we were all situated. I
was one of the first ones led out, and it was no surprise that the other
voices that arrived and were closest to me were the same ones I hear in my
language class (of four total including me), which is good because we all
like each other. We are in the south of the country and I am in the capital
city of the province, Kolda, which, I am told has 16 bars and three mosques.
That may seem like a trivial point of fact to you, but considering Senegal
is a Muslim country where no one drinks (a good thing), this speaks to the
different nature of those who populate Casamance – the Diola (sp?).
Apparently they’re a little less devoted to the rules of their religion.
There are plenty of Peace Corps Volunteers already there in the area,
although I will be the only SED person, and the Peace Corps regional house
is right there in Kolda City, which means I’ll have quick and easy access to
modern Western conveniences (like an oven) and will probably be responsible
for throwing parties and such.

The Kolda Region is south of the Gambia and is lush and green. The best
part: guess what one of the biggest businesses there is? Cashews! The
chances are very good that one (or several?!) of my clients will be in the
cashew industry. Plus, there is a cashew processing plant in Kolda City
that is supposed to be in need of some consulting because (here’s the best
part) they can’t ship their cashews out fast enough and they all go to
waste! They’ve called on the right woman for the job. Could life get any
better? Before you think I’m nuts :) consider that Kolda City also has big
mango processing and dairy farming, and the biggest problem all these
industries face isn’t drought or HIV infected workers or not having enough
of anything; it’s sorting out all the resources that they do have.
Apparently, tons of mangoes and milk and cashews go to waste because of poor
infrastructure, logistics and management.

But this is all hearsay. I will only be able to separate fact from fiction
when I do my site visit, which is a five-day visit a mere three weeks away.
I have many beautiful photos but they take too long to upload onto Snapfish
but I am working on getting an email account that will allow me to send them
so stay tuned.

love,

Kate
5.

-----Original Message-----
From: Lori Novickis (CBIZ)
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 12:08 PM
To: Margaret Wetzler; Dan Clark (djclark007@aol.com); Doreen Johnson (djohnsonnyc@yahoo.com); Felicia Young (fyoung@evergreenbonds.com); Jean Gianfagna ('jean@gianfagnamarketing.com'); John Sikon (johnsunoco@aol.com); Johnson, Doreen; 'Kathie Price (KPrice@evergreenbonds.com); Laura Mimura; Matt Sikon (bigsike@hotmail.com); michctrs@columbus.rr.com; O'Connor, Nancy; Peg Ryan; Stan Berger (Stan@smberger.com); Mark Waxman (CBIZ SKC); Candace Kozak; DL B&I Cleveland; DL CBIZ ATA CLE Everyone; DL CorpHQ Building ALL; Frank Yensel; Jodie Kamins (CBIZ ATA-East Region)
Subject: Message from Kate #5 - Cooking in Senegal


-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:46 AM
Subject: Cooking in Senegal

Dear all:

First off, anyone who thinks pictures of supermodels in magazines and on TV
are bad for a person's self image should try living in Senegal. Here, you
are surrounded by women who are tall, lithe, stunningly beautiful, and have
an average body fat of about 3%. But despite the fact that, by contrast, I
feel like a giant thumb at tam-tam parties (i.e., short, stubby, and with a
limited range of motion), I still somehow manage to average about three
marriage proposals per week.

About the only thing out of the ordinary I did since my last email is cook
dinner for my family on Sunday. As you might expect, it took all day. They
did like it though, or said they did, and I tend to believe them because
everyone was in a really good mood after eating. I was annoyed earlier in
the evening partly because it was such an ordeal, and partly because my
sister was being kind of bossy and ended up throwing whole chicken parts
into the pot even though I told her that wanted to cut it into convenient
cubes, since you are not allowed to use your left hand at the dinner bowl
(although you can pick your nose as much as and whenever you want. While
people tend not to do it at the dinner bowl, its not uncommon for them to do
it in mid-conversation. It is disconcerting.). As a result of the
left-hand rule, people have to hold each others' chicken parts as they tear
off meat and the whole exercises turns into a sort of party. In fact, after
dinner, my dad here said it was a grand fete tonight at our house because I
had made such a great dinner – yay! This is good because Ramadan started
the very next day and everyone needed to be well-fed to make it through the
day as un-crabbily as possible. No one eats or drinks (not even water) from
sunup to sundown.

As I said, cooking in Senegal is an all-day affair. First you have to go to
the market and buy your things from each vendor, as each only sells a few
things, and the packaging, when there is any, is inventive. For instance,
the couscous lady just pours all your couscous out of an empty coffee can
into a scrap of brown paper and folds it into a sort of closed taco and
there you go. This packaging reminds me of the peanut lady who comes to the
Center every day because she wraps the peanuts she sells in the most random
bits of paper. Once my peanuts (which are always nice and warm and
perfectly roasted) came in a little part of an article in French that hinted
that the Monty Python crew is reuniting; and my last wrapper was some poor
student's English exercises. But I digress: back to the market. You have
to bargain for everything: your cucumbers, your tomatoes, your oil, your
squash, your peppers, your chicken. Speaking of which, any worries I had
about the freshness of the meat disappeared the second my sister led me into
a long dark covered arcade that was packed to capacity with live chickens.
I paid an extra 500 CFA (pronounced SAY-fuh) to not have to do the dirty
deed to my two newest pet birds (and any of you who know my history with pet
birds knows I was just expediting the inevitable). But even though the
chicken salesman did the plucking and beheading, I was still responsible for
the feet and all the innards. Thank Allah for my sister, who helped me –
okay, she pretty much did all of the gutting but I held the chicken taut for
her so she could saw through it with my Swiss Army knife. Since there is
only one burner at our house we had to do the couscous first. Here, you
can't just add the couscous to the boiling water. You have to steam it
through a cheesecloth! Only after that is done can you add the onions,
garlic, and other spices you've buzzed through the mortar and pestle, and
cook it with the chicken. Also, next time you find yourself serving an
African family of 10 dinner, forget about serving a side dish: the
tomato/cucumber salad that I'd put in a separate bowl was too confusing and
everyone ended up just throwing some into their wedge of the chicken bowl.
Plates are something I miss, although the cleanup afterwards here is a lot
easier: your hands, the dinner bowl, and the one pot you used to cook in.

I guess there is one other out of the ordinary thing that we did, and that
was a cultural day. One of the things that they covered was excision, or
female circumcision, a practice that Lonely Planet claims has been performed
on 80% of the women here, although it’s difficult to say or to know how they
came up with that number. Excision is a traditional rite of passage in
which women show their “stoicism and independence from men” by making their
parts less like male genitalia. The practice is illegal and because of the
increased urbanization, triggered by a long drought in the 70’s, there is
not the same retreat into the bush for the rite. Ergo, without this bonding
experience, the excision, which is now a surreptitious one-day event, rather
than a weeks-long twisted version of Girl Scout camp, fewer and fewer women
do it. I’m told the government has stationed undercover agents in the
villages (which is where this occurs) and people are in jail for it. Boys
are circumcised at age six or seven and walk around in white clothes and
hats for four weeks afterward. They are followed by a big scary-looking
dude who is covered in bark (he’s called a konkuran) and who carries a
sickle and who chases a way girls and evil spirits during the vulnerable
time for the boys.

This weekend I am off to Dakar where I will stay in an A/C hotel room, see
the famous slave island Ile de Goree, and deliver some rosaries to a
nunnery. I miss autumn in Ohio with all of its cozy accoutrements, but must
admit that somehow it feels like fall here too: days are cooler, the leaves
are dropping (unchanged), and the sky seems to be that different autumn blue
(although that last bit is probably just my imagination). One especially
great thing about Africa in autumn is that the Halloween decorations put
themselves up. I have already written about the sky at dusk. Well, a few
nights ago, I noticed that the clothesline that crosses right over water tap
– about a foot above my head – serves as the lower border of a giant spider
web, the diameter of the circular part alone is three feet, and its
builder/owner is two inches long, not counting its eight legs. It sounds
small on paper but when it is menacing just above your head every time you
need some water, it is a chilling experience. But I am basking in the chill
(the literal chill, not the figurative one) because reports are that March,
April, and May in Kolda are too hot to do anything at all, supposedly
wa-a-a-ay hotter than September, which is difficult to imagine. So plan
your trips for anytime but then.

miss all of you and
love most of you,

Kate
6.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 7:57 AM
To: akohls@gjcs.k12.in.us; fyoung@rwsu.com; zleblond@yahoo.com; achinni@erols.com; arich@clvhts.com; bkenney@ohc.com; bbl3@cwru.edu; benjaminlind@yahoo.com; cooper.265@mail.com; jim3710@aol.com; emvet@hotmail.com; huths@sconet.state.oh.us; ian.hoffman@usdoj.gov; James.Kowalski@ellsworth.af.mil; jennifer_stainforth@ohnd.uscourts.gov; jangle27@yahoo.com; James.Kowalski@trab.aorcentaf.af.mil; JWisniewski@CBIZ.com; kevin.broida@seurat.com; kimberly.kilby@mvfairhousing.com; lnovickis@cbiz.com; lmimura@jjroop.com; kowalski@one.net; Michelle_Wray@fclass.hilliard.k12.oh.us; mkc.swimgirl@fuse.net; mom3710@aol.com; natwak@yahoo.com; pkowalski@columbus.rr.com; pryan@rwsu.com; raevarga@hotmail.com; quint_mitchell@bah.com; rkilby@sbcglobal.net; rconnolly@fuse.net; sholland@plaind.com; ritzr@pios.com; sjr4@cwru.edu; sanstaett@mymailstation.com
Subject: Awa Ba has a hut.

Dear All:

Here I am, deep in the heart of Senegal! My name is Awa Ba and will be for
the next two years. I have a real ive African hut: one room, round, and
about 12 feet in diameter. You have to duck to get in because the grass
froof, which is a big cone, comes down to about 3 and a half feet off the
ground. This is to protect the mud walls from getting wet with rain and
dissolving - my hut is concrete though. My "bathroom" is down a little dirt
path behind my hut, which has a light along it for me to turn on at night.
The bathing area is only about 50 feet away from my hut though. There is a
grass screen surrounding a concrete area that is about as big as my hut, and
on the outside of the screen are large banana trees with beautiful broad
green leaves, about two feet wide, than hang low over my bathing area. It's
like a little bathroom paradise. The toilet is simply a hole in the ground
- with a brand new empty space that goes way way down so it doesn't smell at
all and there's no danger of anything crawling up any pipes because there
are no pipes. The shower is where the concrete slants a bit so the water
from my bucket bath can run off and out of the area. The bathroom is my own
private space and I am tempted to hang out there all day but for the fact
that it is a bathroom. The water for my bath - and for filtering for
drinking - is drawn from a well which is only about 20 feet outside the
front door of my hut.

I have some space to do some gardenting, marked with stones outside my front
door. By the way, when writing this in my journal from the front door of my
new abode, I noticed an empty wine bottle under my bush here. You see these
around here and there - I hear they are a holdover from animism and protect
against evil spirits. I don't know the whole story behind this but I do
plan to find out. My hut, bathing area, well and garden are all inside a
large compound. My "dad" - who I call Baabaa (the Fulakunda word for dad)
is a 70-something man with three wives and innumerable children, all of whom
live here. This contingent of the compound is the traditional set and speak
pretty much Fulakunda only, although some of the kids have some French from
school. My dad's younger brother - Abdoulay, 37 - is the modern contingent
of the compund. He lives in a separate house with his wife and three month
old baby. Abdoulaye is a pharmacist who speaks French and has satellite
television.

I get BBC World Serice clearly on my shortwave here, which is a relief for
two reasons: one, because it was difficult to receive anything in Thies
where there is a lot of competition on the airwaves; and two, because with
GW in office it seems as if we could be plunged into war at any minute and I
don't want to find out about it days later. Way down in the sticks here,
you don't get a big variety of newspapers and media - maybe a quarter of
what we get in Thies and I thought Thies was limited. On a map, Senegal
looks like the profile of a skull, wiht a tiny pointy nose (Dakaar) and a
stump at its base (Kedagou). The gap that would be the mouth represents the
Gambia, a separate country and former British colony, which is mainly the
river valley along the Gambia river. My town, Kolda, is in the middle of
the lower jaw, almost halfway in from the chie (the chin is Cap Skiring and
a Club Med!)

The drive from Thies was about 13 hours. We stopped twice so the driver
could pray (which didn't take but a minute or two - he just tossed down his
mat and left the car running) and made a couple of "bathroom" stops, which I
have gotten way too comfortable with. By the time I get home I'll be
surprised if I even bother with a toilet, let alone paper. When we arrived
we went straight to the Peace Corps regional house, which was like a frat
house but for the copy of e.e. cummings' collected works in the bathroom. A
couple hours later the volunteer I am replacing and I set off on bikes to my
house. On the way out, I noticed many dark spots covering the ground, and
they were were moving. They were little four-inch long frogs and they were
everywhere! It was all so biblical plague-like, especially after I squashed
one of them underfoot, which made a total of two animal deaths I was
involved in that day, as our sept-place driver hit a baby goat on the way
in. We arrived safely, had dinner, I went to bed, and the next day I was
christened Awa Ba. I even got a picture of my tokora (namesake) to keep for
always. They take the naming thing seriously and told me just this morning
they’re going to have a naming ceremony when I come back to stay.

But back to dinner – I have some information to share with you about the
hibiscus plant. Did you know that the red flower, dried and then soaked in
water, makes a tasty juice and powerful red dye? Did you also know that the
leaves, boiled and smashed, and mixed with smashed okra, make a very special
African sauce for rice called follere? Overall the cuisine here has been
pretty good except for the one glaring exception of follere. It is thick
and green and exactly the consistency of saliva right after one’s had some
orange juice (i.e., viscous). The sauce is so stickily saliva-like that
when you spoon it there are lines of it pulling the spoon back, kind of like
mozzarella cheese only its like snot rather than cheese. And going down…if
it didn’t trigger your gag reflex right away, just wait a moment because
while you think you have swallowed it, you still haven’t because it’s so
slimy you can’t really swallow it. Instead, it stretches, slips and slides
down the throat slo-o-o-owly. If my first three nights here are any
indication, I will be having follere 29 nights out of 30.

My first three days here indicate that I will be spending at least the first
few weeks as a the family pet. Like a dog, I only understand the
conversation when I hear my name. Someone says, “Blah blah ugubuga blah AWA
blagu bla” and my ears perk up and I wait for a command and lose interest if
one doesn’t come. Sometimes though, one does come and when it does it’s
“Awa, ar gaa!” [Awa, come here!] or “Awa, jood!” [Awa, sit!] They’re
really big into sitting here, as they like to sit and chat and there’s a
dearth of chairs so them presenting you one is a bit of a production you go
through several times a day.

But overall I expect life here to be quite nice. I was told it would be
green and that the living was easy, as it’s blessed with lots of natural
resources. And that is true, living is easy if you like the local produce,
which doesn’t include Internet access nor much beyond the few things in
season (and the farmers aren’t all that imaginative, as there’s not a demand
for anything out of the ordinary I am told – will have to work on my ag
friends on this). Internet access is three times the price it was in Thies,
and about a million times as slow. I have a feeling most of my pleasure
reading will be done in front of the computer, and most of my SED work will
be with cybercafes. Only three short weeks till I get to start! If you
want to send me mail, start using my new address please: Awa Ba, B.P. 190,
Kolda, Senegal, West Africa.

Love,

Kate
7.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lori Novickis (CBIZ)
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 9:42 AM
To: Margaret Wetzler; Dan Clark (djclark007@aol.com); Doreen Johnson (djohnsonnyc@yahoo.com); Felicia Young (fyoung@evergreenbonds.com); Jean Gianfagna ('jean@gianfagnamarketing.com'); John Sikon (johnsunoco@aol.com); Johnson, Doreen; 'Kathie Price (KPrice@evergreenbonds.com); Laura Mimura; Matt Sikon (bigsike@hotmail.com); michctrs@columbus.rr.com; O'Connor, Nancy; Peg Ryan; Stan Berger (Stan@smberger.com); Mark Waxman (CBIZ SKC); Candace Kozak; DL B&I Cleveland; DL CBIZ ATA CLE Everyone; DL CorpHQ Building ALL; Frank Yensel; Jodie Kamins (CBIZ ATA-East Region)
Subject: Message from Kate #7 - Awa Ba has a hut.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 7:57 AM
Subject: Awa Ba has a hut.

Dear All:

Here I am, deep in the heart of Senegal! My name is Awa Ba and will be for
the next two years. I have a real ive African hut: one room, round, and
about 12 feet in diameter. You have to duck to get in because the grass
froof, which is a big cone, comes down to about 3 and a half feet off the
ground. This is to protect the mud walls from getting wet with rain and
dissolving - my hut is concrete though. My "bathroom" is down a little dirt
path behind my hut, which has a light along it for me to turn on at night.
The bathing area is only about 50 feet away from my hut though. There is a
grass screen surrounding a concrete area that is about as big as my hut, and
on the outside of the screen are large banana trees with beautiful broad
green leaves, about two feet wide, than hang low over my bathing area. It's
like a little bathroom paradise. The toilet is simply a hole in the ground
- with a brand new empty space that goes way way down so it doesn't smell at
all and there's no danger of anything crawling up any pipes because there
are no pipes. The shower is where the concrete slants a bit so the water
from my bucket bath can run off and out of the area. The bathroom is my own
private space and I am tempted to hang out there all day but for the fact
that it is a bathroom. The water for my bath - and for filtering for
drinking - is drawn from a well which is only about 20 feet outside the
front door of my hut.

I have some space to do some gardenting, marked with stones outside my front
door. By the way, when writing this in my journal from the front door of my
new abode, I noticed an empty wine bottle under my bush here. You see these
around here and there - I hear they are a holdover from animism and protect
against evil spirits. I don't know the whole story behind this but I do
plan to find out. My hut, bathing area, well and garden are all inside a
large compound. My "dad" - who I call Baabaa (the Fulakunda word for dad)
is a 70-something man with three wives and innumerable children, all of whom
live here. This contingent of the compound is the traditional set and speak
pretty much Fulakunda only, although some of the kids have some French from
school. My dad's younger brother - Abdoulay, 37 - is the modern contingent
of the compund. He lives in a separate house with his wife and three month
old baby. Abdoulaye is a pharmacist who speaks French and has satellite
television.

I get BBC World Serice clearly on my shortwave here, which is a relief for
two reasons: one, because it was difficult to receive anything in Thies
where there is a lot of competition on the airwaves; and two, because with
GW in office it seems as if we could be plunged into war at any minute and I
don't want to find out about it days later. Way down in the sticks here,
you don't get a big variety of newspapers and media - maybe a quarter of
what we get in Thies and I thought Thies was limited. On a map, Senegal
looks like the profile of a skull, wiht a tiny pointy nose (Dakaar) and a
stump at its base (Kedagou). The gap that would be the mouth represents the
Gambia, a separate country and former British colony, which is mainly the
river valley along the Gambia river. My town, Kolda, is in the middle of
the lower jaw, almost halfway in from the chie (the chin is Cap Skiring and
a Club Med!)

The drive from Thies was about 13 hours. We stopped twice so the driver
could pray (which didn't take but a minute or two - he just tossed down his
mat and left the car running) and made a couple of "bathroom" stops, which I
have gotten way too comfortable with. By the time I get home I'll be
surprised if I even bother with a toilet, let alone paper. When we arrived
we went straight to the Peace Corps regional house, which was like a frat
house but for the copy of e.e. cummings' collected works in the bathroom. A
couple hours later the volunteer I am replacing and I set off on bikes to my
house. On the way out, I noticed many dark spots covering the ground, and
they were were moving. They were little four-inch long frogs and they were
everywhere! It was all so biblical plague-like, especially after I squashed
one of them underfoot, which made a total of two animal deaths I was
involved in that day, as our sept-place driver hit a baby goat on the way
in. We arrived safely, had dinner, I went to bed, and the next day I was
christened Awa Ba. I even got a picture of my tokora (namesake) to keep for
always. They take the naming thing seriously and told me just this morning
they’re going to have a naming ceremony when I come back to stay.

But back to dinner – I have some information to share with you about the
hibiscus plant. Did you know that the red flower, dried and then soaked in
water, makes a tasty juice and powerful red dye? Did you also know that the
leaves, boiled and smashed, and mixed with smashed okra, make a very special
African sauce for rice called follere? Overall the cuisine here has been
pretty good except for the one glaring exception of follere. It is thick
and green and exactly the consistency of saliva right after one’s had some
orange juice (i.e., viscous). The sauce is so stickily saliva-like that
when you spoon it there are lines of it pulling the spoon back, kind of like
mozzarella cheese only its like snot rather than cheese. And going down…if
it didn’t trigger your gag reflex right away, just wait a moment because
while you think you have swallowed it, you still haven’t because it’s so
slimy you can’t really swallow it. Instead, it stretches, slips and slides
down the throat slo-o-o-owly. If my first three nights here are any
indication, I will be having follere 29 nights out of 30.

My first three days here indicate that I will be spending at least the first
few weeks as a the family pet. Like a dog, I only understand the
conversation when I hear my name. Someone says, “Blah blah ugubuga blah AWA
blagu bla” and my ears perk up and I wait for a command and lose interest if
one doesn’t come. Sometimes though, one does come and when it does it’s
“Awa, ar gaa!” [Awa, come here!] or “Awa, jood!” [Awa, sit!] They’re
really big into sitting here, as they like to sit and chat and there’s a
dearth of chairs so them presenting you one is a bit of a production you go
through several times a day.

But overall I expect life here to be quite nice. I was told it would be
green and that the living was easy, as it’s blessed with lots of natural
resources. And that is true, living is easy if you like the local produce,
which doesn’t include Internet access nor much beyond the few things in
season (and the farmers aren’t all that imaginative, as there’s not a demand
for anything out of the ordinary I am told – will have to work on my ag
friends on this). Internet access is three times the price it was in Thies,
and about a million times as slow. I have a feeling most of my pleasure
reading will be done in front of the computer, and most of my SED work will
be with cybercafes. Only three short weeks till I get to start! If you
want to send me mail, start using my new address please: Awa Ba, B.P. 190,
Kolda, Senegal, West Africa.

Love,

Kate
8.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 12:21 PM
Subject: Happy Korite/Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Korite! No school yesterday - we were supposed to sit home and listen
to the Arabic chants that are sounding at top volume all over the city. My
two good friends that I have made here (Olivia and Rob - the same people
I'll be in Kolda with) and I made plans to celebrate the holiday together by
paying visits to each of our respective families. That's what you do on
Korite. So I memorized the various blessings and responses in Fulakunda
but most people here, including my family who is supposed to speak
Fulakunda, speak Wolof, so I didn't get to use them. Even if I had known
the Wolof ones, I probably wouldn't have gotten to use them because few of
the things that are supposed to happen here ever really do. That is one of
the best and worst things about being here - the constant element of
surprise. Case in point: no one knew for the longest time when Korite
would actually be. The thing is, it is only Korite when you can see the
moon again after a new moon. After a month of fasting during Ramadan (not
even water between sunrise and sunset), Korite is when you can eat again
during daylight hours. Anyway, it is a big mystery as to whether or not you
will get to see the moon or have to wait a whole nother day to eat, which is
all neat and fun and suspenseful except that there WAS no moon night before
last but still somehow it was declared that it was Korite anyway. Go
figure. It was my 10-year old brother who told me it was Korite. When I
asked him how he knew because there was no moon, he said because the
calendar said it was Korite on the 25th (!) Today, though, we all went to
school and they called it off because some people decided to celebrate it
today, so we got almost two days off out of it. So that was me yesterday
jamming to Arabic in accapella and understanding nothing until Olivia came
to get me to go a'visiting. It's like Halloween a bit too because kids are
everywhere asking for money. Actually, there are always kids asking for
money but on Korite they are all dressed up in their Friday best.

Islam is one of the really interesting things about being here. Because
most of the country is Muslim, the government kind of is too. For instance,
nothing is played on any of three Senegalese radio stations except for news
and prayers during Ramadan. I don't know though if this is because they
choose not to or if it is because the government doesn't let them. It's
strange because they play the trashiest American TV here on their one
Senegalese station. I know a lot of you watch "24" - they aired THAT here -
and it may be okay in the States but it's embarrassing in the context of
this culture and makes me wonder who is doing the programming and why they
would choose to show that, especially during Ramadan, if the radio is only
doing prayers. I try to imagine in the States if during certain periods all
we had was Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham on the radio, and what it would be
like if their preaching was coming from various speakers around town.
Apocalyptic... I don't speak Arabic but I suspect the chants are prayers
rather than fire and brimstone sermons, but the possibility that one
charismatic religious leader could gain a large, powerful, and blind
following - given the place religion holds here - is daunting. This is the
case in a city here called Touba, where the state has no power because one
super-powerful marabout pretty much runs the town there. He makes the laws
and he funds many public works. If you are caught smoking there, the
penalty is death.

Such supremecy is possible because Senegal has a decentralized governmental
system, i.e., everything is grassroots and local. To see how this works
firsthand, we visited a mayer's office yesterday of a town of about 30,000.
(The bonus of the arduous journey was that he had overstuffed leather sofas
and chairs in his office - I almost cried I'm so shallow. It's just that it
was really a beautiful thing after two months of stumpy wooden stools and
plastic lawn chairs, having to put your books on your lap where within
seconds they're stuck to your legs with sweat. It gives me pleasure right
now just remembering the leather chairs... I understood every word of French
the guy said, maybe because I found it so interesting but I think it was
because of the leather. It is so much easier to be smart when you're
comfortable.) Anyway, the mayor gets a nominal salary - he also works in
the local battery factory. The town pays for all its schools, healthcare,
sanitation, roads, etc. They get very little money from the national
government. Last year, they got 6 million CFA, which is about 12,000USD.
After a lot of lobbying this year, they got 36 million CFA, or about
72,000USD. So the tax base consists mainly of whatever businesses are
within city limits. This was helpful for me to learn because my work, which
will be through a local community government, took on a new importance when
I realized it was their only source of potential change. As you would
imagine, in a society where 60% of the population is illiterate, it is tough
to prove people's tax bill and collect a meaningful amount. So this town of
30,000 has an annual budget less than our Peace Corps center, where there
are about 40 employees and about 80 trainees in a year. Your first reaction
might be to wonder why the national government makes so little a
contribution to its people's welfare. I wondered that too but then looked
at one of my handouts and saw that Senegal's national debt is almost 80x its
GDP, and that interest payments alone on this debt are 1.3x its GDP. Pretty
intimidating but that's why I'm here I suppose.

Happy Thanksgiving. We will celebrate it Saturday at the Center because the
Thursday interfered with Korite in the kitchen (it's probably Korite
tomorrow too). We will play football and make imitation Thanksgiving food,
e.g., squash pie instead of pumpkin, chicken instead of turkey, and will be
with new friends and no family instead of old friends and lots of family.
Although I really really really wish I could pop home to be with you all I
still have loads to be thankful for: I am safe, happy, healthy, its sunny
here, and I am doing something I have wanted to do since I can remember. I
am also grateful for all the great letters I have gotten from you all - they
make a big difference in my day because when it really sucks here and I
understand nothing anyone is saying and I am frustrated and annoyed and
hungry because I have already had more white rice than any one person should
have to eat in a lifetime and there is nothing else to choose from, I
remember that I can always go home and I remember that I am really lucky to
have this option that most everyone else here does not.

love,

Kate
9.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:36 PM
Subject: Au revoir to Thies

Dear All:

Tomorrow is the big day: I get a CELL PHONE! At last! Oh, and I get sworn
in as a real bona fide Peace Corps Volunteer too but the best thing is I get
a cell phone so you can all call me whenever you want using one of those
super cheap online international calling cards - if you're good maybe I'll
even get it for you for Christmas. As a result, there is little to report
other than what is going on around here - I've been noting it well as I'll
be leaving soon.

Magically, the bougainvillea that spills over the high walls around our
center has been in bloom since we have arrived and it’s fuchsia it’s orange
it’s purple it’s blindingly bright in the afternoon sun, especially from the
inside of our dim classroom through the screen door. From inside there, it
glows electric. It was the bougainvillea that I gave thanks for on
Saturday, our one enchanted evening, when we celebrated Thanksgiving. We
put three long tables in the center of our courtyard, used melted wax to
stick tall red candles in a long row down the center of each. So even
though there were about 50 of us in all it was an intimate candlelit dinner,
with all of us together in the small circle of light isolated in the thick
velvet blackness that is the night in Africa, like one of the many stars
that are sprayed overhead had fallen to earth and landed right in the middle
of our courtyard. After spending the day in a crowded kitchen and spending
two and a half weeks eating Senegalese food (read: fish and rice), we
Americans were ready for the chicken, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green
beans, and pumpkin pie we cooked. We feasted with our Senegalese friends in
a manner befitting the occasion (read: ate until we could eat no more) and
we added a touch of soul by going around and each of us giving thanks in
what ended up being four different languages. After that, band came,
complete with drums, and played in our big round gazebo until midnight. I
have to admit, I was skeptical. Knowing that they would be doing some
Western music I anticipated really pathetic covers of Elvis or the Beatles,
but my fears were unfounded: the music was African to a T – getting all of
us on our feet – but had just enough of the familiar in it to make it feel a
tiny bit like home (and help us feel like we knew what we were doing
dancing).

Midnight was too soon to put an end to the voodoo and go our separate ways,
as we knew the permanent parting of ways was but a week away, so we went to
a club. Being the first Saturday after Ramadan, during which no one really
goes out, the club was packed with hot sweaty young bodies (I felt like the
runt of a litter of puppies squirming for a nipple) moving to African tunes
and some American hiphop. After 2 and a half hours of this I showed my age
and forced Olivia and Rob out, but not before we were treated to a
spectacular display of frenetic dancing by a group of about five guys. The
were camped out in front of where we were sitting and moved their bodies
such that they looked like an audition for Cirque de Soleil. It was
fabulous and highly entertaining, esp. after an extra rough week.

We just had two days of a very intense workshop where we worked with our
counterparts. The whole thing was in French, which means I had to listen
twice as hard as I normally do to understand about ½ as much as I normally
do. Our counterparts (for small enterprise development) are the heads of
community development in the regions or departments we are in. There are 11
regions in Senegal, and each region is made up of three departments). My
counterpart is the head of community development for my whole region (the
region of Kolda). However, nice as he is (I met him on my site visit) he is
too busy and important to come so my supervisor, who is the head of
community development for the *department* of Kolda, came instead. She is
the person I am supposed to go to weekly to compare notes – I will be
meeting with the regional head monthly. I am pretty independent of them but
in order to be presented legitimately to various groups and businesses and
make sure my projects are in line with those of the community, we work
together. She also offered me some office space which was kind, as she’s
not obligated to do that, so if that works out I will probably see her more
than once a week.

Tonight is my last night with my family in Thiès. Tomorrow we will be sworn
in and sleep in Dakar and Saturday night we will sleep at the Center because
our sept-place, loaded down with all our luggage, bikes, mosquito nets and
selves, leaves yet again at 5:30 a.m. Sunday night we will spend at the
regional Peace Corps house. Monday I will meet the police, the prefect, and
the sous-prefect (whatever that means) and move into my hut. One good thing
about being so clueless all the time is that I learn something new everyday.
Recently I learned that some Senegalese don’t like their president because
his friendship with USA is compromising Senegal’s relationship with France.
Recently Chirac was in West Africa and didn’t come to Senegal because
Senegal supported the U.S.’s role in Iraq. I also learned not to call
babies cute or fat, but to instead declare them ugly and scrawny. To do
otherwise is bad luck. Rats can get larger than cats (in countries where
cat food is scarcer than rat food) and there exist mosquitoes that are
faster than flies and can pierce fabric. Fly paper works for roaches. And
if you are a unmarried and childless woman in Senegal you are not complete.
Finally, all kids under age two speak the same language. And a bonus for
those of you who are still reading: stop spending money on silver polish.
Just use ashes from a fire (I used them from a charcoal fire but maybe wood
woul work just as well) and add a little spit and buff away and your silver
beads will be shiny enough to wear on swearing in day.

If you want to send me any thing other than a letter please send it to the
following address:

PCV Kate Kowalski
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 2534
Dakar
Senegal
West Africa

But PLEASE send letters to the Kolda address (B.P. 190)

love,

Kate

10.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 6:27 AM
Subject: It's official

Dear All:

I am all arrived and moved into my hut now, and so begin the two years of
seeing how I can help turn a bunch of happy easygoing poor people into
uptight stressed out less-poor people. I’m no longer sheltered within a big
American compound – just me alone in my little city in the backwater. I
like this better, as it was hard to practice the language with all Americans
around (here I don’t have a choice) and I finally feel like I am beginning
the real part of my African experience.

Anyway, you can see my hut on Snapfish. It’s just your typical African hut
but I love it much and am extremely happy right now. This is good because I
know there are going to be times that I am pulling my hair out and so sick
of dirt and animal droppings and scabby, snotty kids and white rice that I
will question the wisdom of my decision to come here. But I figure every
moment I’m happy is that many fewer moments I’m annoyed, ergo making the sum
total of my time here that much better of an experience, and since stepping
into my compound, I have been loving it. My family here I have already
described – all I’ve learned in addition is that they seem to be even nicer
than my first impression. We’ll see how quickly the novelty of my being
unable to understand things wears off and they get annoyed with the stupid
American.

I am trying not to spend too much time in my hut, but it’s hard not to.
It’s well shaded and has that nice roof overhanging and so stays about 10 –
15 degrees cooler than outside when the sun is up. Plus I have music now (I
brought speakers that I wasn’t able to listen to before because I had no
electricity in my room) and a computer. Oh, and, yes, I also now have a
CELLPHONE! My number is 575-5095. You have to dial 011221 to dial out of
the US and into Senegal. Remember, now that the time has changed over
there, the difference is 5 hrs from the East Coast (it’s no longer 4) and to
use a low-cost international calling card (see callingcards.com or
noble.com). Calling a cell phone here is just as cheap as calling a land
line if you’re dialing from outside Senegal.

So, my bed takes up about half the hut, and would sleep two people very
comfortably, three if they all like each other. I can throw another
mattress on the floor for myself when you come to visit. I have a door in
front, and a door in back, and a window with bars on it. There are no
screens, so the
mosquito/frog/lizard/whatever-other-creepy-crawlies-sneak-in-at-night net is
all important. Last night I heard: a cricket that sounds like a beeper
going off; the teeming tiny frogs that sound like wooden wind chimes; an
unhappy donkey; and the t.v. What Africa lacks in light at night, it makes
up for with sound: I think I’ve already mentioned that is a very noisy
place -- the smartest thing I packed were earplugs. At 8 every night, my
family – all 13 of them – sit out in the courtyard and watch a Brazilian
soap opera called Secrets de la Famille. It is as racy as the American
programs but without the violence and with American country music as the
soundtrack to the dressing, daydreaming, and making out scenes (although the
opening theme song is The Girl from Impenema so you’ll find people
everywhere humming it under their breath). Theme songs here are funny:
sometimes on the news they play Abba’s Dancing Queen when they scroll
through the list of weather around the world. Actually, all of the TV here
is a little wacky. They have a few programs and commercials in Wolof,
although these programs are usually only like 5 or 10 minutes long. One of
the programs is this midget who runs around with a billy club doing minor
gymnastics and screaming at people and trying to bludgeon them. It’s pretty
funny. And in the Wolof commercials, they’ll be in the gritty-in-the-city
market with close-ups of real-life sweaty faces bargaining. These are a far
cry from the Western style commercials, which there are more of, but which
depict African families in a way that is far from reality, e.g., sitting at
tables indoors using utensils, thrilled with their choice of margarine.
Sometimes friends come over to watch the TV too, so our courtyard becomes
like a movie theatre but for the size of the screen (13 inches).

This week I will take it very easy and hang out with my family with my
Fulakunda notebook close at hand, as I have a lot of learning to do. I will
visit some more neighbors (my dad took me to a few yesterday) and get some
paint and mosquito nets to use as screen doors and windows for my hut. Next
week I plan to start scoping the town and seeing who is who and what is what
but we’re not supposed to start any projects until we’ve been here for three
months. So for the next three months it’s going to sound to you all like
I’m hanging out doing nothing, which is correct, but it’s endorsed by my
boss so to do anything else would be disobedient. Really, though, we will
be re-tested on our language in three months, when we all go back to Thies
for 10 days, and I am supposed to have already gotten a handle on what
projects I want to start. At the pace things go here, and my inability to
communicate on top of that, this will take three months. And you can’t
expect to sweep in and start assuming you know what to do, who can do it,
etc. People have to know, like and trust you before they’ll listen to you,
so the three-month ban on starting projects makes sense (even then I’m not
sure they’ll like or trust me).

A lot of my work will be with women, with groupements (financial
organizations women organize to save money) and with what will be the third
annual week-long bicycle ride called Tour des Femmes. Good thing too, as
the women here work so extremely hard it is scary. They live longer than
the men, though I’m not sure that’s a good trade off, since for some it just
means they get to work longer. They harvest whatever – rice, corn, millet,
peanuts – and process it from where it’s picked to where it goes into your
body. I woke up this morning to the sound of pounding, and am listening to
pounding now (it’s 5:23 in the afternoon), as they pound just about anything
into a grain or a powder or something that can be put into a sauce. I am
trying to learn to do what they do, i.e., buy a mess of unlikely looking
sundries (e.g., dried-up fish, some millet, and some leaves) in the market
and somehow turn it into a spicy delicious meal, but I am not sure I have
the patience. The girls do go to school but the kids here don't start till
they are like 10. Yesterday I was knitting and sitting with my little
sister (one of them) and she kept writing words on a little scrap of paper.
First she wrote "China" in very neat script and I was pretty impressed, as
she hasn't started school yet. Then she wrote "Kate" and I was very
impressed, since I had only told her my name that day and for her to have
spelled it correctly in English is pretty smart. Then she wrote
"post-consumer waste" and for a split second I was shocked until I realized
she was copying words from the back of my little travel sewing kit ("Carton
contains 5% post-consumer waste"), and my name off my pencil.

Ciao,

Kate
11.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2003 6:45 AM
Subject: Black Christmas

December 25, 2003

It’s Christmas, and since it is 8 a.m. here that means Santa is still very
busy all over North America making his rounds. I used to think he went all
over the world, but now I realize he skips a lot of countries altogether,
not because the kids are bad but because they don’t believe in him. I saw
neither hide nor beard of him anywhere around here. Maybe it’s just too hot
for him.

I’ve been here two and a half weeks and already the charm of drawing my own
water from the well has worn off. I really shouldn’t complain though, since
I only have to carry it 38 paces from the well to my bathroom – the people
in the village have it much worse. My friend Olivia’s well is at the edge
of her village, as is Rob’s, so much so that he is stingy with his water
when you go to visit him. But the distance of the well is nothing compared
to all the other challenges they face in the village. It’s so different
from living in the city - it’s a completely different Peace Corps experience
for the volunteers. In the villages, they’re stuck with whatever they’re
given to eat (or not) in the village, and without electricity. I can always
go to a restaurant and the cybercafe and use my phone when I feel the need.
I came home from my visit feeling like I lived with the Rockefeller family.
Olivia’s village is overflowing with kids, all of whom are really cute and
nice and dirty. They have one change of clothes, so the naked ones I saw
did have clothes, they were just being laundered that day. Miriama, who is
about seven and really bright and cute, taught me a lot of new words and was
really patient with me. Apparently, there is also a dying season in the
villages, which is August and September, before the harvest is in but after
their food stores have run out. The villages I visited are about 40 minutes
away by bike (Rob and Olivia’s villages are right next to each other) so
they only get into town a few times a month. It is a really beautiful bike
ride, though. Although on my way home, there were all these fires
everywhere. They looked intentional but I don’t know what they’re for and I
don’t know how or if they were controlled. It was strange – I heard them
before I saw them. On either side was bush that’s flat enough to see for
miles and miles, broken only by the occasional baobab or slight swell. You
could imagine big game thundering through at any time. There actually was
big game here in West Africa at one time but there must not have been a lot
of it because the French, who aren’t known for their skills in weaponry,
managed to obliterate them over the course of a few hundred years. Anyway,
faintly at first and then almost deafening, I heard what sounded like storm
water slapping down onto concrete – maybe from a rain-swelled gutter that is
way up high – buckets and buckets of it. And then there were fires on
either side of me, and flakes of white and black ash floating down like
snowflakes.

In Kolda city, though, things are not nearly as dire as in the village, for
my family anyway. Everyday here is like being on a family vacation to a
campground. There is always a campfire going and around it we sit while
we’re waiting for the next meal, which, as you know, takes all the rest of
the day to prepare. And instead of playing cards we dance. We sit and chat
and pretty much just hang out all day. The kids go to school, and the older
boys work, so for them I guess it’s not as much of a vacation but they do
get all the Muslim holidays and all the Catholic ones so their schedule
isn’t so demanding. Work here is not like work at home – it’s much more
relaxed and laid back. With the possible exception of the post office
where, if they’re not efficient, they act all crabby and stressed out – post
office syndrome must be a global phenomenon. But as far as the rest of the
working world here is concerned, they are all pretty chill. I went to the
carpenter to get some shelves made for my hut, and it was like going to a
party. You can’t help but admire their handiwork they have so little to
work with as far as tools are concerned. For instance, one guy’s job is to
just sit on the board while the other guy cuts it. And they don’t seem to
use nails very much but shape the wood into joints. (I watched them for
some time – they’ve all got killer muscles).

Given the pace of life here I could sit around with my family all day and be
perfectly happy but since that is not why I am here, I have been working to
improve my language so I can be more effective when I do start projects. My
strategy has been to write down all the words my family uses that are new to
me and to buy the paper here in French and read that (although it’s always a
day or two late because we’re so far removed from anywhere else). One thing
I have noticed is that there is no bad news here. I don’t know that I have
ever lived in a country where the newspaper is run by the state (if not
officially) but it is really strange – it’s like reading a bunch of news
releases issued by the government. You feel like you don’t know what is
really going on. Although even if it were a normal newspaper I would
probably still wouldn't know what is really going on. But that will come...
inch Allah.

Have a Merry Christmas and a great 2004.
Love,
Kate
#12
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 12:35 PM
Subject: Mangoes on my Mind

Dear Everyone,

Be warned, probably only very few of you – if any – are going find this
email half as interesting as I do so you may want to stop reading after the
first two paragraphs. But I wanted to let you know exactly what kind of
work I’m doing here, so that’s what the rest of the email talks about. As
for me, I am fine, although irked because some animal ran off with my
Neutrogena facial soap, I guess because the melon-scented soap that he
gnawed on was too heavy for him. He did leave me my Dial though. And I
continue to discover: today someone bought for me a little sachet of snacks
that (with a little imagination) turned out to be something like stale
Peanut Butter Captain Crunch cereal but with a little chocolate (more like
Reese Peanut Butter Cup cereal then I suppose), so I took the sachet home,
put it in a bowl of powdered milk, and had cereal, which I never thought I
would miss so much. Also, did you know donkeys eat peanut leaves – I know
this because that is the fuel for the mango transport. And I found a new
place to eat, although the bathroom is a block away and very very dark,
especially at night. I entered having no idea where to the hole was,
thinking I was just going to have to guess, but after I kicked around in the
dark for a bit I came across an actual toilet, a rare find in this part of
the world.

If you send me a letter, and want to jazz it up a bit, stick a packet of
sugar-free koolaid (obviously there is no need for diet drinks here) or an
herbal teabag or two or an italian salad dressing flavor packet or, if you
live in Cincinnati, some skyline chili spice packets – I found a guy who
will ground meat for me and I had a dream about skyline last week. Also, if
you send me a package here, put Kate Kowalski on it, because I have to show
my ID to pick it up and my Senegalese name isn’t on it. I had a serious
altercation with the postmaster on Christmas Eve (that didn’t have to do
with the name), but we’ve made up now. It was in the end a bonding
experience and I have already gotten two packages here so I think we’re good
to go. Not that picking it up there is painless, as the package man is very
deliberate and very meticulous: you present him your slip, the one that you
got in your mailbox which lets you know you got a package, he looks around
for his ledger, finds it, opens it, he takes out his ruler, he carefully
traces some lines in red for the new entries, he puts the date on it, he
fills it out according to your slip taking special care to print everything
neatly and correctly, he takes your money and your ID, he fills into his
ledger all the information on your ID, and maybe even the serial number of
the currency, then he hands you back your ID, hands you your packages. But
you’re not free yet! Then, you have to wait for him to fill out a receipt
with all the same information and hand stamp the receipt and the carbon copy
and then use his trusty ruler to tear the receipt out of the book. So an
hour later you get your package (not to mention a receipt with a very
straight edge) but it’s totally worth it.

It’s the new year and I have finally started doing work, since my French is
coming along well enough. It’s a good thing too, as there are so many
opportunities in developing countries, especially this one. There seem to
be a lot of imbalances that can be rectified with just a little foresight
and planning. The foresight and planning are supposed to be what I bring to
the table but everything else, skills, materials, and eventually foresight
and planning, are the people who live here. Case in point: corn, right
after the harvest, goes for 60 CFA a kilo. Wait a month, and corn will go
for 250 a kilo. But nobody has the money to invest and stock up on the
corn.

This is why microfinance clubs are so big here. My mango guy started one
two and a half years ago. Each member pays 600CFA a week. They now have
2,300,000CFA – that is about $4000! If you have something like this to rely
on, you can take advantage of all the little opportunities as they arise.
Members take loans and can grant loans as well, e.g., if someone wants to
make an investment, they can fund a particular request for a loan. The rate
is 10% on both ends. Of course mostly the GIE (group of economic interests)
is who makes the loan, and they can afford, if someone wants to liquidate
their holdings in the GIE, to pay back 2% above what the member paid in
during his membership, so that is another incentive to join. But, because
they meet weekly, perhaps a bigger benefit is the camaraderie, the planning,
the sharing of ideas, the discussion of prospects, etc. that occurs at every
weekly meeting. I have already had two requests to help people start
savings clubs.

But back to the imbalances… I don’t know if it’s the philosophy (people
always saying “inch allah” and saying things are God’s will) or the sheer
poverty, but people here don’t plan ahead. Even little things like the
meals. You know you’re going to want sugar everyday with your fonday, so
why don’t you buy a bunch of sugar and keep it? We buy little plastic
baggies of sugar, salt, powdered milk, etc. EVERY DAY. I can see doing it
with fresh vegetables, especially since we don’t have a fridge, but I don’t
understand why people don’t buy the imperishables. Maybe because they have
time to go to the store everyday? Anyway, as a result of the need for all
these daily transactions, there is a boutique on just about every corner and
all the boutiques sell pretty much the same thing: little baggies of
instant coffee, instant milk, sugar, tea, and laundry detergent (in little
sachets). The other day I wanted peanut butter and I was in a different
neighborhood and the boutique owner showed me the house I needed to go to
for peanut butter. I went and it appeared to be just a family that had some
extra peanut butter, although maybe they had a mill in back or something.

The commerce in this country is so underdeveloped people starve or are
malnourished because there isn’t enough of variety of food year round
because they don’t have the means to store it and they pretty much just eat
what’s locally grown because to do otherwise is expensive as the roads are
bad (I too would charge an arm and a leg to transport a case of tuna 14
hours on the disintegrated trails of concrete and dirt they call roads
here). This is why the mango transformation (“transformation” because with
mangoes, we can dry them, we can can them, we can make them into jellies or
chutneys, we can do all kinds of fun things with them, even make wine) is so
important. But, you see, glass is expensive here, as there are no glass
factories nearby, and the as I said the roads are terrible because there is
no tax revenue to repair the roads. So I have to start a glass factory,
build a road, and then I can think about selling canned mangoes at a more
affordable price to the local market. Till then, for customers we have to
rely on you all or France or on some other suckers with money. The bright
(some say dark) side is, as you know, that the labor here is cheap cheap
cheap cheap cheap. But the people are happy to have a means to make money.
As a result, you all can get a half-kilo of dried mangoes for less than a
dollar. And they’re really really good. I don’t even like dried fruit and
I like them. Although that may be because hunger is the best sauce.

Anyway, I am looking forward to putting together some marketing materials
with them, and getting them on an accounting system that they can use every
day. They had a really nice system, balance sheet and all, set up on a
computer but using it means going to the cybercafe everyday and retyping in
the transactions they’ve written in their notebook (since they don’t have a
computer). Another challenge has been the short drying season. Because the
rainy season starts in May, they really only have March and April to dry the
mangoes in their solar dryers, because after that the rain prevents them
from drying quickly enough. There are a couple of solutions. One is to get
gas dryers, but it’s hard to regulate the temperature (previous attempts
have blackened the mangoes). Another solution is to teach the people in the
villages how to do it and sort of outsource a lot of the drying to them.
That way, the villagers will learn a food conservation method for
themselves, earn some money, Naange Fuladou (that’s the name of the mango
operations) can maximize their drying months, and their method of solar
drying will still be ecologically friendly and cheaper than the gas dryers.
All in all, it is a great case for business school any way you slice it:
operations, accounting, HR (that’s a whole nother email in itself) and econ
because the demand for dried mangoes is tricky here. No one local even
knows what they are.

If you want dried mangoes, let me know: we’re taking orders.

Love,

Kate
#13
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 8:20 AM
Subject: Dance Party

Dear all:

note bien: if you read these emails, you may want to print this one out and
read it later - it's long.

My brother Jim says he did extensive research on my name Awa Ba and finally
found out that it means “dancing white girl” and I think he’s right (see
photo on Snapfish). I wonder if the people who pay all the money to do the
ecotourism trips – the kind where they spend a week in a village like
they’re anthropologists – I wonder if they know that it is THEY who are the
tourist attraction. I recently rode out with my friend to his wife’s
people’s village, a remote Mandinka village of only about seven compounds.
We came out for a circumcision party – boys here are circumcised when
they’re six or seven, and six of them had passed on to manhood on this
occasion. Clearly, the village is way too off the path for them to ever get
any white passers by, as the eyes were on me the entire time – I could feel
them – all sets of the kids’ eyes and even some of the adults’. Every time
I would catch them gaping they would quickly look away. I noticed one kid
who was about three or so staring at me wide-eyed but keeping a consistently
safe distance. To have some fun I made a beeline toward him and he ran away
screaming and hid behind his mother.

The poor kids here have it rough (even without my tormenting them), and not
just in the villages but all over Senegal. The kids in the compound behind
me are always screaming like they’re being hung by their thumbnails and
forced to eat worms, although you know how kids are, it’s probably just
bathtime or something. But they are at the bottom of the pecking order
which makes it great to be a grown up here – for me it’s like having a
million little Patty’s handy that I can boss around all I want. Patty is my
little sister in the States. I don’t abuse the luxury here – I don’t have
to, they’re so well-conditioned. My little sister here, Fema, who is about
11, sweeps my hut every time she comes in. She’s kind of like that anyway,
always putting stuff in order, correcting my French, etc. The other day
while sweeping my hut she asked my why I never swept my hut and not wanting
to tell the truth (which was, "Why should I bother when I know you'll be in
sooner or later to do it for me?") I told her that I just forget, and she
said, “You can remember to mess it up but you can’t remember to sweep it?”

If they’re using all the chairs and anyone walks up, the kids automatically
vacate, the older the interloper the quicker the reaction. Did I mention
chair rental is a business here? Really. And, from age four on up, they’re
forever running to the store and delivering messages; and not much after
four they’re deftly handling knives and machetes. This may be why the
passage-to-manhood rite of circumcision happens at six. Anyway, this night
in the village, even the babies had it rough, getting jiggled in their
snuglis while their moms would shake it up at the drums (it’s all about how
well you can shake your booty here). I did hold one baby while his mom
danced. That is one thing that is nicer here than at home, people aren’t
all anal-retentive about letting you hold their babies. Complete strangers
offer them up to you. I guess I am the one who should be anal-retentive, as
I’m the one left holding the bag o’ bacteria. The baby I held at the drum
circle in fact really buttered me with germs. I put my nice, extra soft
Wakulchik scarf against his cheek, thinking he’d enjoy my soft American
yarn, but he decided to use it as a handkerchief instead, to the extent that
I had to dry it over the campfire.

Speaking of campfires, the compulsion to stare at fire must be something we
are born with. This night in the village, I alternated from campfire to
dance floor: when my backside got too cold I would go put on a show for
them, and then head back to the fire when I needed to sit, which was after
about thirty seconds of dancing. At the campfire, there was a tiny baby,
couldn’t have been more than 6 months, who could not stop gaping at the
flames. Sparks and smoke would fly his way, straight into his saucer-wide
eyes, and he would get all twitchy and squinch his eyes shut and they would
water down his cheeks for a minute, and they he would open them again and
continue staring like he was under a spell, which he may very well have
been, given the hypnotic chanting from the griots’ drum circle.

What are griots? There is still kind of a caste system here. The griot
caste is the entertainment caste. They are the drummers, singers, and
storytellers. Even now most of the West African musical celebs come from
griot families. So the griots arrived at our compound at about eight and
did the drums until sometime after I went to bed, which was almost midnight.
They will do the drums fast and urgently and whistle which is when the
frenetic dancing happens, then it will slow to a non-dancing speed (there is
no slow dancing here) and everyone – or a soloist – will chant for a few
minutes, and then the tempo speeds up again. The dancing gets kind of
aggressive – if one woman is dancing inside the circle another will come and
shove her out of the way and take her place, but it’s in good fun. The
drums and the dancing are the absolute best thing about this place. You
don’t need to know the language, you just start dancing anytime, anywhere,
and you become the smash hit of the century, particularly if you’re white.
When my sisters and I get bored we have dance parties in my hut and they’re
actually really fun. Even after two hours on my mountain bike out to the
village, the last third of which was on excruciatingly deep, dry sand, even
after this had turned my legs to jelly, dancing still managed inexplicably
to cheer me up and bring me back to life. Falling asleep to the drums and
the chanting, I decided the spasms aplenty rippling my calves were a small
price for the exotic exuberance under the full Fouladou moon.

But now its back to the lush lovely city, back to the mosque right behind my
house with the muezzein who I think is trying to wake up God every morning
at 5 when he calls, from the bottom of his lungs,
"A-lla-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!!!!!" over the loudspeaker and then does it
again at 6 and 6:05 like a sort of Snooze button. He must not be a morning
person because he always sounds drunk when he hollers. Back to traipsing
through the chicken-litter sand out to my bathroom, when I always vaguely
wonder if I'll see my friend Giant Cockroach. I tried to kill him the other
night and think I must have because I haven't seen him since. Back to work.
Yesterday was day two of an all-day mango workshop with the mango guys,
the village women, and two reps from a Canadian concern, nine in total. We
sat in a semicircle while the discussion leader wrote our plan on big pieces
of paper taped to the walls. It was almost like a meeting back home except
for the elements of the absurd, which you can always depend on here: a
large colorful rooster popping his head in periodically, then a small
shirtless boy running in grinning from ear to ear. We told him to leave but
I think he thought we said "Pretend that large pot you have covering your
stomach is a drum and bang on it loudly" because that is what he proceeded
to do. Imagine a CBIZ meeting being interrupted by a rooster and a
shameless drumming five year old. Life here is fun!
#14
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 4:12 AM
Subject: Cel-l-l-ebrate good times, come ON!

It’s party time in Senegal. We’ve had two birthdays in one week, on Friday
the 20th we beat Kenya, and yesterday was Tabaski, the Muslim equivalent to
Christmas. The birthdays are my culinary contribution to the family, since
helping with dinner is daunting and doing the cooking myself for 20 people,
even just once, with their equipment and raw materials is even more
intimidating. As a result, I decided early on to share this Western
tradition of birthday parties with cakes, candles, and gifts. It’s been
well received. The African way is so community- and group-oriented and the
families are so big that there aren’t many occasions to make people
(especially kids) feel really special and unique. In fact, most kids here
don’t know when their birthday is and some, especially in the villages,
don’t even know how old they are. My family all knows their birthdays,
except for Binta, so we decided hers would be February 4th – she seems
Aquarius-ey enough.

Our second cause for celebration, Tabaski, is a more festive holiday than
Ramadan. Ramadan’s more like Easter, with all the fasting that leads up to
it. For Tabaski, the head of each family kills a goat (ceremonially), the
women cook it, and then everyone eats it, along with loads of other food.
They kill a goat because the prophet Mohammad was told by God to kill his
favorite son and so Mohammad got his son all blindfolded and ready to
slaughter but (surprise ending) God intervened just in time and replaced the
son with a goat (although I don’t think the son disappeared altogether). My
aunt here (who is 23) said it’s a good thing God intervened because
otherwise we’d have to slaughter our favorite son every year. I agree
because her one and only kid, a son, is my favorite baby in Senegal. The
goat is the center of Tabaski, and you should see all the wheeling and
dealing going on in the marketplace this time of year – the town is overrun
with bleating goats. The marketplace hustle and bustle is also what makes
Tabaski like Christmas, all the shopping going on. People get so hard up
for Tabaski money they start hawking their stuff. Case in point: a couple
of kids came by the Peace Corps house recently and sold us their pet monkey.
We let her pick bugs (imaginary or real I don’t know) off the guys for a
couple of days and then we liberated her after she bit one of the women so
hard the woman had to go to Dakar for a rabies shot.

Our third cause for celebration was also a slaughter of sorts, of the Kenyan
national soccer team. It happened in the first 30 minutes of the game, with
Senegal scoring three goals that early on. There were 11 of us and a baby
goat watching in a tiny room, empty but for us and the TV, while my three
moms, two grandmas, two visiting aunts, and older sister puttered around
outside, only poking their heads in when they heard us all gleefully
screaming and high-fiving after each goal. The African Cup of Nations (CAN)
is an annual event, and this year Cameroon is going for its fifth
consecutive title. I don’t know when or if Senegal ever won the CAN, but I
do know (courtesy of my brother) that we beat Kenya 3 to nil in the 1992 CAN
and am reminded continually of Senegal’s defeat of defending champions
France in the opening game of World Cup in 2002. I’m not a huge soccer fan,
but I do like to watch a good game, and being here with the whole country
swept up in soccer fever is fun. We tied yesterday, so now we will face the
two toughest teams in the final rounds, Tunisia and Cameroon. Watching all
the players who came home from their European teams to play is interesting.
I use the term “home” loosely because apparently there are several this year
who were allowed to play for countries that aren’t really their homes (even
though they’re technically nationals), e.g., Santos, a Brazilian who plays
for a team in France, is playing for Tunisia. It’s kind of controversial,
as is the refusal of some teams to release their players for CAN – opponents
of these teams claim that African soccer gets no respect and they’re
probably right, because they don’t have much money. Case in point: poor
El-Hadj Diouf, one of the most famous players for Senegal. The letters of
his name were falling off his jersey throughout the match till all that was
left was his number, which is famous enough so I guess it didn’t make that
big of a difference but still…jerseys shouldn’t be so shoddy for such a big
event. No matter how poor you are, ceremony and beauty and aesthetics are
still important.

There isn’t much here that is beautiful, at least by my (admittedly
subjective and Western) standards of beauty. There is litter everywhere,
dirt on everything, nothing planned or landscaped, and all the buildings
look the same. The people are beautiful though. In fact, my cousin here,
who lives in France, came home for the holiday and he looks so different
from his sculpted relatives: he’s all soft and puffy, which is how all of
us white people must look to the Africans, like marshmallow men. Their
clothes, for holidays, are beautiful, much more beautiful and creative and
varied than Western clothes. But now and then Mother Earth does toss the
odd treat our way. This morning, I ran toward a perfect Maxfield Parrish
(or Miami Dolphin) sunrise, with tangerine cotton-candy clouds dappling the
horizon, all lit up from below by the rising sun, with the turquoise turning
to azure upwards, deepening imperceptibly like the ocean floor or like the
hour hand moves on a clock. These runs in the morning have been essential
to keeping me focused and sane – it’s so easy to sit around all day and do
nothing, when I start my day with a run and an icy bucket bath I’m ready to
move, even if nobody else is. Alright, I have one more thing to report on
and then I will shut up.

I visited my sisters’ school the other day. The kids asked questions like
“If it snows can you open the door?” and “Do the kids go home from school
for lunch?” and “How do people dance in America?” I think their favorite
part of my sister’s show and tell (with me as the showpiece) was my response
to the last question. I demonstrated for them the Worm (remember the
coolest dance move that came out of the 80’s break dancing scene? Better
than the wave, better than the moonwalk, was the rippling human inchworm
move that gets your front all dirty) even though I guess I kind of lied in
that people don’t really dance that way in America, at least not anymore
(nostalgic sigh). Because it was a Monday, school was only in the morning.
It was supposed to start at 8, but the teacher didn’t show up till 8:30, and
then class was over at 9 and all 72 kids in the classroom that had no lights
went home. I was annoyed that my sister kept her daughter home from school
the other day so she could get her hair braided for the holiday and then I
realized that she really wasn’t missing much, but still it sucks that school
is such a low priority for everybody. No wonder so few people here can
read…although this way I suppose they aren’t subject to such meandering
drivel as the above.

A bientot,

Kate

#15
long article
#16

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 4:27 PM
Subject: The Hajj Party

Dear Everybody back in the States, and my friends in the U.K.:

We ate our first mango of the season today. We have six mango trees in our
compound, and mango trees get really huge. They look like oak or maple or
other deciduous trees except now they’re heavy with hard green mangoes of
various sizes. I don’t know how my brother knew this one wa-a-a-ay up was
ripe, but I came home to find him tying together some really long bamboo
poles in order to smack the ripe mango out of the tree. Smack it out he
did, then peeled it, and cut it into 20-some pieces so we could each try
some. It was good.

Well, that’s about the most exciting thing that’s happened since I last
wrote almost three weeks ago. Life here is pretty boring unless you want to
hear about work, which is where it gets colorful but then I get a little too
preachy so we’ll skip that.

I did go to my first “Return-from-Mecca” party recently. The trip to Mecca
(the Hajj) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam – the Pillars are the
conditions you have to fill to be a good Muslim. The others are pray, fast,
give alms, and believe in one and only one God. You’re only held to the
Mecca trip condition if you have the means to do so without doing serious
financial damage to your family, thus very few Senegalese Muslims ever make
the trip so it’s a big deal when one does. Timing the trip is kind of like
pitching nickels: you want to get as close as you can (to the end of your
life) without going over (dying) because going to Mecca purges you
completely of all your sins in your lifetime. So the closer you are to
death’s door by the time you get back, the easier it is to keep the slate
nice and clean for when you have to turn it in. In fact, upon return the
pilgrims speak only truth for 200 days. Or so they say. The returnees wear
all white all the time and are, all in all, holy and respected when they get
back. Anyway, the RFM party we went to was for a Jahanke family so the
party lasted an entire week, starting the day before the couple’s return and
ending a week later. Sofie, the 23-year old wife of my dad’s younger
brother who lives in my compound, took me.

We got there, and the ever-present party drummers were pounding away in the
courtyard on drums bigger than I’d ever seen before, so it was more like
fireworks than a happy tam-tam sound. We crossed the courtyard, which was
full of people dancing and sitting in chairs, and went into the room where
the wife, in full white regalia, was seated on a cot and all her guests were
seated on the floor in front of her. We approached her, shook her hand,
curtsied, and sat on the floor with the rest of the women. The men,
including the returned husband, were over on their own mat in a corner of
the room. So we sat and watched while people filed in and greeted the
woman. This went on for some time and since it didn’t sound like anyone was
saying anything other than blessings, I had mentally drifted far, far away
before I was yanked back to reality by the appearance of a large tray filled
with shot glasses. Each one was filled with a clear liquid and suddenly,
Hope, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, fluttered up in me
ever so briefly, ever so irrationally, as I thought, *tequila* - rashly took
one, and raised it to my lips. Of course it wasn’t tequila at all, which I
should have figured out, given the dearth of limes or salt, and the fact
that we’re a long way from Mexico and, of course, Muslims don’t drink. It
was holy water from Mecca. I drank it anyway, even though what I really
wanted to do was put it back on the tray. Uneventful – needless to say, it
tasted like regular water and I didn’t feel any different afterward – in
other words, it was not at all like tequila. I guess the most eventful
thing about the whole experience was how irrationally excited I got at the
prospect of doing a shot – kind of scary.

Tomorrow I leave for 10 days of in-service training at the center back in
Thiès, which means I have to go now in order to mentally prepare for the
trauma of the 14-hour swervy, unseatbelted, fumey, sept-place ride seated
between one sweaty person who smells like raw potatoes and another sweaty
person who smells like a wet dog. I guess I could have made that last
sentence much shorter by using the one adjective that has been ever so handy
here, “nauseating”. Keep your fingers crossed that I arrive in one piece
and uninfected.

Love,

Kate

p.s. Actually, I'm not as crabby as that last paragraph would lead you to
believe. It's just that the hot season is kicking in and I was sweating
like a Marine at boot camp when I wrote the above. Now, it's evening, I'm a
little more chill, and today was excellent: I now have not one, but TWO
offices in town, and have found a great little bar, "Chez Jeannine" with a
shady tiled patio and cold beer and free fatayer (which is what they call
these little deep fried, meat filled, pierogie shaped pastries). Although I
think the fatayer was only free today because we were witness to a little
"scene a menage" - slightly physical disagreement between members of the
household/bar. The best part is that it has been a really busy week and I'm
finding a circle of friends and entrepreneurs who are motivated.

#17

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 6:50 AM
Subject: Good to be Home

Dear All:

These last two weeks have been mostly spent in in-service training back in
Thiès, where we did our pre-service training. The weather there was nothing
short of absolutely perfect every single day. It’s like crisp autumn in the
morning and at night but during the day the sun heats everything that it
happens upon to a temperate 80 degrees – temperate because there is no
humidity and a gentle breeze stirring all the while.

I made several stops on my way north, sleeping one starry night on the
rooftop of a house in Velingara, and the next in a big fancy apartment that
one of my fellow SED (small enterprise development) volunteers scored in a
city called Kaolack. Both nights were spent eating well, talking – in
English – into the wee hours of the morning, and rising the next morning
whenever we felt like it.

My third stop was in Dakar, where I had one of the highlights of my trip.
Where the rich people live, Fenêtre Mermoz, there is a public walkway along
the oceanfront, high up along the cliff, where people run, walk, and play
volleyball and soccer. Basically, it’s like America there. I had a long
run along the paved path, and then went out onto one of the rocky cliffs
that jut out into the ocean. There I sat, surrounded on three sides by
ocean, with the waves smashing and looking like laundry down below, and the
wind not quite strong enough to blow me away up top. I could have spent the
rest of my days there it was so perfect, but, as the existence of this email
testifies, I didn’t. After an hour or so of feeling like one with the
earth, the ocean, God, and the universe, I headed back, stopping to watch
students from the nearby University of Dakar play an impressive match of
volleyball.

That evening I had dinner with a new American, non-Peace Corps friend and an
American university professor of business who was in town teaching a short
course. It was nice to mix with people outside of Peace Corps, especially
people who are involved in development for real (i.e., not on a voluntary
basis). We dined at the Centre Culturel Français, and over red wine, talked
about everything from substitutes for diesel fuel (which apparently is any
kind of filtered vegetable oil, even if it’s used) to Rwanda, where this
professor happened to be teaching in April 1994 – he says a quarter of his
class was slaughtered in that genocide. Next day, some other friends and I
visited the Museum of West African Culture, where there were a lot of masks
and life-size figurines displaying aspects of the different tribes – nothing
too exciting, which is kind of sad because according to Lonely Planet it’s
the best museum in West Africa. Being among non-Peace Corps expatriates was
fun – partly because they, like me, are more interested in development than
a lot of the Peace Corps volunteers, who tend to be younger, and partly
because I realized how low in the expat strata Peace Corps volunteers are.
We’re one step above college backpackers (the penniless ones). But, while I
envied the fact that they were where the big action happens, I reveled in
the fact that I get to see it like it really is. Plus, trying to build and
live a Western life here would be a pain in the ass – kind of like those
people who go camping and bring a tv with them to watch outside, or put an
air conditioner in their tent. I did actually see that once, at a
campground in Kentucky.

But I digress. The following day training began, and it’s not worth writing
about, because there I feel like I’m trapped on a remote island and getting
nothing done, although I have to admit I did come back with better Fulakunda
and it was good to talk to other volunteers to see what they’re up to and to
hear their wild stories – much better than mine. I know I’ve made this
point before, but it never ceases to amaze me, that the difference between
village life and city life here is greater than the difference between city
life here and life in America. One volunteer came across some of her
villagers – grown-up villagers – out in the rice paddies at dark, and, not
being able to see her very well when she called out to them, they ran away.
They apologized later and explained that they thought she was a ghost.
Another volunteer wowed his villagers when he barehandedly removed a snake
from the hut of his village chief. What he didn’t tell the chief was that
the snake was fake and that he had planted it. But the villagers were too
scared to get close enough to see it was fake so the volunteer simply
emerged from the hut holding the snake above his head triumphantly. So he
is the snake hero there now. I am eager to hear what happens when he gets
called in for the removal for a real snake.

But I'm back in Kolda now, and it is good to be "home". My family says they
missed me, I really did miss them. They also think I'm crazy because my
version of fasting for Lent means I can't eat meat on Fridays. My dad
thought that was so funny he started belly laughing hard.

Till next time,

Kate
#18

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 3:02 PM
Subject: Fun with Animals

Dear Everyone:

I bet a lot of you are still thinking elephants and lions when you think of
Africa, but that's not the case here. Since I'm not in East Africa with all
the beautiful big game parks, the biggest difference I've noticed between
the animals here and those at home is that here the animals seem pretty
independent of any human-initiated rules and regulations.

Their lives here would pose kind of a quandary for animal-rights activists.
The animals here have all their rights and freedoms – all the chickens here
are free range – but they don’t always use their freedoms responsibly and
end up starving, getting sick, being nuisances and - justifiably - getting
eaten by the humans. But other the food chain thing, the humans and animals
exist here on what appears to be an even plane. The chickens and dogs and
goats and pigs all have social lives that include their neighbors, and they
freely come and go and mingle in the street or at each others’ houses. They
stay up being obnoxious to all hours of the night and get in fights -
there's a Mike Tyson of dogs somewhere around here, I suspect, as evidenced
by all the earless curs roaming the streets. And in an empty lot by my
house the goats like to meet to climb on things and bang their heads
together. African goats, by the way, have the biggest testicles I've ever
seen on an animal in relation to the rest of its body. I can't attest to
theirs being bigger than American goats', as I've never had occasion to
look, but my sister had goats for a while and I think I'd have noticed if
they were like they are here. In Thies, for the longest time I thought they
were udders. And the animals go out for food about as often as they stay in
and sometimes they stay out for months - one day at our house everyone just
started shouting and laughing, except for me since I didn't know the source
of the serendipity, until they explained that their goat, who'd been gone
for two months, finally came home.

So we don't have zebras and lions and giraffes here in Senegal, but we are
one of the bird-watching capitals of the world - so far I've identified a
lot of vultures hanging out behind restaurants, in addition to the chickens
I spot all the time. And we do have monkeys. I hear they are rascals.
Since I’m in a city (sort of), I only see them in captivity, but a friend of
mine in the village says one monkey pooped on her toothbrush, and that they
will also come and take one bite out of every vegetable in her garden just
to be jerks. Some farmers will stake up a dead monkey to keep the other
ones away, but I haven’t heard too many reports of monkey on the menu. Also
in the villages, on the full moon you can hear the hyenas howling away, or
so I’m told – again, it’s a village thing. I was in a village to witness a
brave young man descend down into a well to rescue a duck that was swimming
down there. He didn’t do it to save the duck’s life - everyone threw rocks
at it after it got out - but he did it so the duck wouldn’t die down there
and contaminate the water.

I told my family over speakerphone (I’m so Charlie) that living here was
kind of like being trapped in one big video game with all the animals and
their droppings being the targets and the villains. Not that I target them
(I avoid their droppings, which harder than it sounds), but some of the
people here do target them. They also get underfoot and underwheel a lot by
accident. It’s just because there are so many of them and they’re
everywhere. Right now, for instance, I am in the community development
office in the city, having the fan blow hot air on me like a hair dryer (in
fact I think I’d be cooler if I turned it off), and I can hear loads of
chickens clucking right outside the door. A friend of mine accidentally
killed a piglet by running it over on her bike. It was her fault – she had
her head down and was looking at the ground instead of the road ahead when
suddenly she heard the squeals of death of an innocent Babe coming from
beneath her.

The animals here are also a primary mode of transportation. I have been
trying to do a traffic-count study for you, to give you an idea of the ratio
of cars to donkey carts, but the sample is skewed somewhat because I’ve been
doing the counts in the early morning on my run when the count is about
seven donkey carts to each car, but as it gets later in the day, the cars
outnumber the carts. Anyway, I bring up the donkey carts because, since
they are so much more common than cars, the dogs here chase them instead of
chasing cars. It’s not hard for them to do because the donkey carts go so
slow I usually pass them when I’m running (and I’m not a fast runner). As
it gets toward midday and the sun gets hot, the dogs go underneath and walk
along in the shadow of the cart. It’s kind of cute.

Finally, last but far from least, the animals are food, although not as
often as I would like. I call my mom the Chicken Whisperer because she
loves clucking in the chickens – they all come squawking and half-running,
half-flying when she starts up – and she continues clucking and cooing the
whole time she shakes feed out to them, and we haven’t once had any of her
chickens for dinner. My church here (and this is a practice I think all
churches should adopt) has a bar after mass every Sunday where they have
beer and wine and, because it’s hunting season right now, wild boar. I
think they do the bar as a sort of solidarity thing, and when there’s no
wild boar they eat pork, because most everyone else here is Muslim and
therefore eschews pork and the Drink. The wild boar was the best-tasting
meat I have had here so far. The woman cooks it so it’s pepper-crusted on
the outside and white and tender and juicy on the inside. It seemed juicier
and more tender and more flavorful than pork. And the funny thing is, the
name for wild boar in Fulakunda is babaa ladde - "bush ass" - a term which
becomes redundant when translated. Since we’re on the subject of meat,
those of you planning a trip should be warned that the hamburgers here are
about half the size of the bun. In fact, one restaurant here served it to
me in a bread bowl, you know, like you get at Panera with soup in it? It
was that, with a little bread lid cut out of the top of the bread ball, and
inside was a tiny hamburger and lots of lettuce and a tomato slice and
French fries and fried egg. This is the norm for most sandwiches here –
they’re like the Paninis in Cleveland – mostly bread with all kinds of crap
loaded in the middle, even beans and macaroni.

Enough of the minutiae - now for the themed joke I thought up here in chicken-land just for this email. Ready? Why DIDN'T the chicken cross the
road? Because he was too chicken.

Finally, if I still have your attention after that, here's your punishment:
those of you in Cleveland should find somebody to either buy or rent my
house please since the real estate agents seem unable to. It's A/C'd, has
auto garage door, and has all those other fancy luxuries, like a toilet and
shower and sinks. Seriously, it's a nice house, a minute from I-77, (5 min.
from downtown, and 5 min. from Independence). Plus, like me, it's really
pretty on the inside.

En en tuma (till next time),

Kate
#19

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 4:15 AM
Subject: Water and Dirt
Dear All:
Because there is rarely running water anywhere in this city, you see these
plastic teapots all over. They're all the same make and size, and they all
have the same two-color swirly design, although the colors vary. This is
what people use when they go to the bathroom. They don't use toilet paper -
they wash themselves instead, using their left hand. That's why it's so
gauche (pun intended) to use put your left hand in the food bowl. But the
teapots are used to wash hands before and after meals, and to wash the face
and hands and the inside of the mouth before each of the five prayer times
every day. This is why they're everywhere, because people pray right on the
spot when prayer time hits. Anyway, what this means is that you have to do
all your washing one handed, and 99 times out of 100, there's no soap
around, which means you really have to rub hard to get the grease or dirt or
whatever off. Now one of my greatest pleasures back home was turning a
thick slick bar of lathery soap in over and over both hands under a
decadently heavy stream of warm water, with lavender or vanilla cherry or
whatever scent wafting up and then staying on my hands afterward. It's
sensual, the handwashing and the afterglow. Sometimes back home, when I
thought no one was watching, I would sneak little sniffs of my hands for the
first ten minutes or so after washing them, or I would find an excuse to put
them somewhere within sniffing distance of my nose. I got a lot of tactile
enjoyment out of washing my hands, and consciously appreciated it every time
I did it. For those of you who have to do your handwashing in public
places, liquid soap isn't nearly as much fun - you should bring in a bar, no
matter how messy it gets the basin, although experience has shown that the
custodial staff will usually remove it. But I digress...
At my house here in Africa I've coped with the problem by putting a basin in
my bathroom and filling it by hand and submerging, but in the villages,
where it's dirtiest, you have only a teapot. And I can't tell you how
unafraid of dirt people are in the villages. I think I already told you
that some people smear dirt into their open wounds to treat them, and last
week, when I was sweeping out water (which was really mud because there was
so much dust) from a friend's hut, the kids standing in the doorway watching
me (because as a white person you're always the exhibit of the day) were
unfazed. They were so fascinated by my presence there, and having been
trained not to cross the threshold, they stood there in their front row
spots and got sprinkled with mud. I warned them in advance over and over
that they were going to get showered with mud. They just didn't care.
Finally, after I'd sprayed them with a couple of sweeps and they still
hadn't moved, just kept standing there staring and getting flecked with mud,
I had to push them out of the way because I felt too mean caking them in
even more dirt.
Anyway, back to handwashing. So last week I think I finally perfected the
skill of washing my hands with a teapot. First, you have to slightly spread
your legs and bend your knees, and then place the teapot between your knees,
at a very slight angle, and clench it there between your legs. Now, bend
over and place your hands under the spout, and then slowly straighten your
knees so the teapot will tip forward and you can put your hands under the
stream of water. It's tricky because sometimes the pot will slip or is too
full or too empty. Also tricky is face washing. When you're splashing
water on your face with both hands, it's hard to straighten your legs to
make the teapot stop pouring while you're still trying to bend over to get
the water on your face. After seven months here, I've learned that it's the
daily victories that mean so much.
Also of interest (to me, but alas probably not to you) has been our new well
bucket. Before, we had one lousy lightweight pseudo-bucket that was really
a milk gallon-like container whose top had been cut off, and the holes
through which the wire handle was threaded would always break because the
plastic was too thin for the weight of the water, so then we'd have to fish
it out of the well and reattach it by punching new holes, so the bucket got
holier and leakier every time. Plus it was so lightweight that it couldn't
pull down its own cord into the water - you had to lower it hand over hand.
But now we have a big heavy rubber bucket, attached with a thick rubber
cord, that falls down the well quickly and efficiently, making life a whole
lot easier and taking my biceps to a new level in my weight training.
Although I haven't had to pull as much water as I thought I would for my
garden. A few weeks ago, after getting the chicken-proof grass walls
installed and clearing out all the litter, I finally put the seeds in the
ground. I gave my little sister Fema a plot, since she helped me dig the
whole thing and makes salad every chance she gets. This was a smart thing
for me to do, despite charges of favoritism (I have lots of little sisters)
because her life is now centered around the garden. She sleeps in a room -
in one bed - with her mom and her sister and her sister told me that the
first thing Fema does every morning after she opens her eyes is say, "Mido
fotda roosde sardin o", "I have to water the garden." And she does, her plot
and mine. Although as of today, she said she's sick of watering mine
because mine's all weeds - and she's right, it is. But I like the thick
patch of green so much I can't bring myself to thin it. Plus I'm not really
sure what gets pulled and what stays.
Anyway, that's the sum of my exciting African existence at the moment.
That, and I had to file my grandma's toenail this morning. She snagged it
and apparently I'm the only person in the compound with a nail file so I got
the pleasant, though time-consuming, task of filing it down for her.
Happy Baseball Season, and here's to hoping we've gotten beyond having to
sing "I'm proud to be an American" at every seventh-inning stretch this
summer,
Kate
#20

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 2:21 PM
Subject: Quick Note From Africa

All is well in the land of litter. I flew in from Dakar Monday and the
first thing I noticed from the airplane was the litter all over the ground.
Lucky for me, there is a plane that goes from Dakar to Kolda, turning the
trip from a hellacious and life-threatening 11-hour sept-place ride into a
pleasant 45-minute flight.

There is good news on the work front. I work with a groupement of women who
make instant African food and put it in simple clear plastic bags, which are
sold from neighborhood boutiques. The food the people eat here basically
takes hours to prepare, so what these women do is prepare it up to the final
point so all the purchaser has to do is add it to boiling water and it’s
done. Anyway, I’ve been working with them because they don’t know how to do
any accounting at all (actually, they don’t know how to read or write).
Long story short: the president of Senegal had a big contest for women
businesses and we entered into it and won a prize! We all got to go to
Dakar to a big ceremony with President Wade. We won 1 million CFA (about
$2,000), a solar food dryer, and a mill to grind down the millet that they
currently either pound by hand or pay someone else to process. So, although
the grant application I had prepared for them is now unnecessary, that’s
alright – we’ve got all the money we need. So now I have to work with them
to make sure it’s wisely spent. Probably this will be the hardest part.

I wish I had more interesting things to report but I don’t. I tasted my
first (and last) sip of booneyap today while having lunch at a friend's
house. It is a thick `n murky brown drink the Djolla tribe makes that has
alcohol in it, as well as a measure of chunky white flotsam. The mangoes
are ripe. I eat several a day and, in lieu of money, I now pass mangoes out
to the talibé. The talibé, in case you forgot, are those shoeless little
boys in Islam school who are sent out to beg to teach them humility. I’m
told it’s better to give them food than money. There’s one especially
friendly one called Souleymon, who I sometimes take out for food when I see
him (he sits on the back of my bike). He’s curious, and asks a lot of
questions, not at all like the other talibé who are usually shy. I met him
on my morning run when he and about five of his talibé buddies ran behind me
for about a mile, clutching their empty tomato cans they use as loot
collectors (sometimes cooked food leftover from someone’s dinner goes in
there as well as money). I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, in lycra
rather than lederhosen. Souleymon and one buddy kept up with me till I got
to my destination, a park near my house.

As I compose this I am sitting in my office pretending to be working on
something real. I’ve settled into one office – a government office that is
called the ministry of family, social development and national solidarity
for the region of Kolda. The Kolda region is one of 11 regions of Senegal
(within the region there is also a Kolda department, and within that
department, there is a city of Kolda, which is where I live). A total of
five people work here, unless you count the guy who sits outside and makes
attaya (Senegalese tea). He is a trained accountant, and would like to do
the accounting for our office, but at the time there is not money in the
budget for him so he works on a voluntary basis making tea instead.

Nel Carter, btw, did not die – she moved to Senegal and works with me in my
office. She doesn’t know how to use her computer (beyond solitaire – which
everyone here must be really good at by now – and the basics I have shown
her in Microsoft Word) which means there is little for her to do here at the
office other than talk to me. She would usually be on the phone but today
the phone is not working. So sometimes, like today, we sit across from each
other and she talks and chomps on mangoes, wiping the juice from her chin
with a piece of paper, while I try to plan my upcoming management course or
translate documents I’ve done for clients into French. Which I should
probably get back to now.

till next time,

Kate

_
#21

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 5:00 AM
Subject: Lost in Translation

May 18, 2004

Dear everyone:

It’s getting better all the time. I no longer try to avoid people so as not
to have to go through the agonizingly long and repetitive greeting process –
it’s become an automatic thing for me now so these days I don’t even have to
think about it. And you only have to do it once per reappearance, i.e., if
I leave and come back I have to do it again, but if I hang around the
compound all day, the morning one will take care of me till bedtime (except
in the case of Senegalese Mom Number Three, Naynay Aissatou, who is a
little out there and, who, even if I’ve just ducked off to my latrine for
three minutes, greets my return as if I’m back from the hundred years’ war
and asks yet again whether I’ve slept well, if I woke up in peace, and if I
woke in peace only, as if any of that would have changed because of a trip
to the bathroom). Conversations here follow the 80/20 rule in that 80
percent of your conversation will use the same 20 percent of the language’s
words. So because most of my verbal interactions are greetings, I sometimes
get a little over-confident in my Pulaar abilities and end up sounding like
the Riddler. To illustrate, I have transcribed for you the following actual
conversation:

Scene: Eight women dressed to the nines in West African finery, walking
single file through the sub-Saharan bush en route to a baptism, on a narrow
path from one village to another that traverses rice fields, which are lined
with tall palm trees. Even though we’re all going at the same pace and are
underneath the same sun, I seem to be the only one sweating through my
boubou. I am trying, without success, to remember the name of the meal that
is sometimes served between breakfast and lunch.

me: Naynay?

Naynay Jenaboo: Yes, Hawa?

me: the food we eat - food in front of lunch but behind breakfast. Its
name is what?

NJ: what?

me: food, food. the food we eat in front of lunch but behind breakfast.
what it’s name is?

NJ: meat.

Not the word I was looking for. But the walk, while beautiful, is long and
boring and no one is saying anything and I’m feeling chatty. So for topic
introduction, I demonstratively scratch my arm and point out the red spot to
my mom. Since she’s walking in front of me, I have to tap her make her turn
around to see my scratching and pointing.

me: nayany, look. not mosquitoes.

NJ: What is it?

Unforeseen obstacle: I don’t know the word for spider. This must be why I
never win at chess.

me: uh, not mosquitoes. not flies.

NJ: Really?

me: it’s “insect” (the French word for “insect” is “insecte”, which doesn’t
really help because she doesn’t speak French).

NJ: What?

me: It is thing. Has eight legs. It bites. (I lamely demonstrate by
moving my five-fingered hand up my arm in a crawling movement and pinching
when I get to the end).

NJ: Really.

me: What is that?

NJ: mmmm….

me: I think it jalamba? or jawaba? (My Senegalese brother told me the
word for spider a couple of months ago).

NJ: (with a look on her face like she’s thinking really hard) hmm… (then,
her face lighting up) It’s “cheppa”!

At which point I assume the puzzled expression and say:

me: Not cheppa.

NJ (emphatically): It’s cheppa.

That’s not the word I was thinking of, and I know there probably aren’t a
lot of synonyms for spider, but I also know that I am in no position to
argue. What I suspect is she’s invented this word to finish the
conversation.

me: Ah, okay! Cheppa! (pointing to my spiderbite) Ko cheppa!

I smile, she smiles, and we continue wordlessly. When I got home, I looked
in my notebook where I had written it down and the word for spider is not
cheppa. It’s jamambal. This kind of thing happens all the time. I can’t
chat away in Pulaar so I have found myself speaking to the chickens and
goats in English, asking them questions like what the *&#@ do they think
they are they doing in my hut. The bright side of no one understanding me
is that I can use all the swear words I want, as loud as I want.

As I write this, the one plug on my hut wall is making snapping and
crackling sounds, which it does whenever I plug something into it. I don’t
know if it is too strong or what, but if you touch my MP3 player when it is
charging, you will get shocked, and the plug of my multi-plug adaptor is all
corroded now, and it’s only five months old. The electricity seems to come
more in waves than in a current, for even though my computer is plugged in
right now, every few minutes as I write the battery appears on my screen
because the electricity has stopped for a second. I have this Senegalese
friend called Idy who is an engineer. Not unlike my brother Joe, Idy has a
habit of pointing out faults in engineering, but while Joe sticks to
interesting (in his opinion) notables in civil engineering, Idy is not bound
by any one discipline. He notes faults in buildings or roads or electricity
or whatever. So needless to say he’s drowning material over here, and
walking with him is like going on a field trip in an engineering class. He
seemed to really enjoy his critique of my hut’s electrical system, but he
hasn’t offered to fix it yet.

Till next time,

Kate
#22
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 05, 2004 8:31 AM
Subject: Visitors Welcome

Dear All:

Life marches onward here same as always, or at least, it did until two weeks
ago. Up until then, there had been a few milestones of note, mostly
work-related. I taught a 32-hour management course that the local
government here requested. It was done over the span of four weekends and
was specifically for women who own their own businesses and who can read and
write in French. It covered accounting, marketing, and inventory management
at a very basic level (e.g., how to calculate your break-even price). I
co-taught – the theory is that if I train someone to teach then the classes
can continue after I leave. There were only six in my class, and they were
all great: very nice, very fun, and somewhat eager to learn. It’s hard for
me to get to know women over here, because all too often it is men I
encounter in my work, because it is usually men who are educated at a level
where they’re seeking microfinancing (and because the women are at home with
their co-wives cooking and taking care of beaucoup d’enfants). These women
though were more highly educated than average. I liked it so much I will be
doing it again during the month of August, but I plan to give more homework
and cover less material – they didn’t do as well on their final exam as I’d
hoped.
I also got to go to Dakar with Kolda’s track team. It happened like this:
a very generous man in San Ramon, California who runs ultra marathons (which
are races for superhumans who think 26.2 miles is not long enough) collects
running shoes from his running friends who have moved on to a fresh pair.
The shoes, still in great condition, arrived here in Kolda, where I gave
them to the track coach. The track coach and the government officials in
charge of sport were so grateful they held a press conference over it, so I
was on the radio, and then they hosted me in Dakar for the national track
championship for 15 – 17 year olds. They wanted me to witness for myself
how great the need was for running shoes here. So I got to ride up to Dakar
with the 21 runners on the track team and their coach. That was an
experience in itself. Upon arrival, I got to sleep in the Leopold Sedar
Senghor Stadium, the big stadium, where Senegal’s national soccer team
plays. The stay at the stadium was pretty cool – we had sinks with running
water and flush toilets and I got to run around the track at night when the
sprinklers were on. And I did witness the need for shoes. There were
mostly barefoot runners, doing events from 50-meter sprints to 5,000 meters,
both girls and boys. Since you see really big races where people run
shoeless you could say they simply get habituated to running barefoot and do
just as well, but what I noticed was that in every event but one the winner
had shoes on.
The trip to Dakar was well-timed, since my older sister (my real, American
sister) arrived to see me the following Tuesday. That was two weeks ago. I
subjected her to three days of sampling the delights of Dakar and then, in
payback for all the torture I suffered at her hands growing up, made her get
in a sept-place for the 14-hour journey to Kolda. We tried to reduce the
life-threatening torture that is a sept-place ride with books, games,
snacks, and my MP3 player, but to no avail. We did arrive in one piece,
alhamdoulalahai. Since then, she’s been reminding me of everything strange
here that I’ve grown accustomed to with questions like, “Do the adults here
think you’re some weird pedophile because you’re always hanging out with the
kids?” And since she’s seeing everything for the first time, we’re doing
things I wouldn’t do by myself, like ride our bikes by a big drum party
because she wanted to take pictures. I know what awaits a toubab* at a
dance party: the toubab is forced to dance. This particular dance party
involved guys dressed up like cannibals with painted faces, grass anklets
and bracelets, and fangs. We were still on our bikes, on the street, but
that was close enough for one of the cannibals to spot us and drag us in
with his sweaty hands. Our bikes were left on the street while we were
pulled into a big circle of about 200 people and forced to dance. Then we
had to give them money, probably as a fine for such miserable dancing.
But that was nothing compared to our encounter that very morning. The sky
was threatening when we set out and it started to drizzle just after we
turned back to avoid the downpour, partly to appease the locals who kept
telling us we were going to get caught in the rain. By this point, everyone
else had taken cover except for one bearded man up ahead. As we walked past
him, he said something to us that neither of us understood, and then
proceeded to whip out his special purpose and point it right at my sister.
Then he pivoted so the eye of it followed her till we were past. I don’t
know what he did with it after that because we were laughing too hard. Who
knows what he was doing. Maybe he was trying to tell us it was going to
rain.
Today we will ride our bikes to spend the night in a village 50K away, and
then tomorrow we’ll go to spend the night in another village. After that
it’s on to Kedougou in eastern Senegal where it’s jungle-ey, with good
hikes, hippos and waterfalls galore.

A la prochaine,

Kate

p.s. *Toubab means white person. The origins of the word are unknown, but
my guess is it comes from the words for “one who moves to music in an
awkward, embarrassing way.”
#23
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 11:49 AM
Subject: Doongoo, aka The Rainy Season

Dear All,

It's the rainy season now, and in some ways, rainy season is nice. Long lazy mornings in the hut reading and drinking tea… the river is no longer a dried-out basin of garbage but filled with deep and fast-flowing water… and bright green vines climb over everything and make the landscape like a long cool drink of water for the eyes after all that brown.

But also, I find the rainy season kind of spooky. It *feels* spooky with the hot heavy air closing in on you all the time. The sky is overcast and there’s usually lightning flashing along the horizon somewhere, like a
distant war. The vultures, so attracted to death they perch on the stumpy
tops of old dead trees, sleep with their heads tucked under their wings.
Against this sporadically lit up sky they look like huge headless harbingers
of evil. Maladies start popping up everywhere because nothing dries. One
small scratch is bound to become a festering wound, and the kids start
growing all kinds of weird lumps and bumps. A little boy in my friend’s
village had a lump in his arm that got bigger daily. My friend was not
present when it burst, but ministered to it when it was scabbed over. As
she worked, she wondered aloud to the boy’s mother what could possibly be in
there, at which point the mother untied a little cloth that had been tied
around the boy’s other arm and opened it to display a little wormy like
white bug, still alive and squiggling a bit. Presenting it, she said, “This
is what came out.” So this is all rainy season too; interiors smell like
mildew, and the air is thick with mosquitoes.

So it’s in this macabre setting that I’m learning all the weird West African
superstitions. My introduction was at English Club. I’m not sure if I told
you about the English Club of Kolda. It doesn’t even deserve to have a name
it’s so informal, but we’ve been meeting once a week for five months now.
I created it as an answer to all the random strangers I meet in the street
who ask me if I will teach them English. Sometimes they show up, but
usually it’s just all my Senegalese friends that come and I make them talk
in English. I write something about the United States in English, make them
read it aloud while I correct their pronunciation , ask them questions about
it, and then when we have time left over we play games. Truth or Dare is
one of our favorites (“I dare you to walk over there and kiss that goat!”)
After that, we go out for a drink. I get beer and they have to sneak it
into their glasses mixed with orange Fanta because good Muslims don’t drink.

We in the English Club meet from 5 to 7 every Saturday under the mango tree
that is in the front of my office. One day as we were leaving we stopped to
chat with the family across the street. This family is the keeper of the
keys to the office building. If you show up to work and no one is there (a
common occurrence), or if you’re the last to leave, you pick up or drop off
the keys with the family across the street. I really like this family.
There are two small children there. One has an unusually large head and a
teeny tiny body. He can walk, and he’ll come up to shake your hand, and his
hand is so-o-o small, like an infant’s. The other I think maybe suffers
from a condition caused by prenatal iodine deficiency. She can walk, but
she’s kind of lopsided and appears to be kind of slow mentally. She’s very
affectionate, and when I go over there she holds my hand or grabs my leg and
doesn’t let go. This family once said they had pictures of my family they
wanted to show me, and since people here do all seem to know each other, I
said, Sure, let’s see ‘em. So they pulled out the album and showed me
pictures of some relatives of theirs posing with some white people and said,
See? It’s your relatives. It’s the same way in the villages. If there are
any other white people around (usually French hunters), they’ll come and get
you and make you go greet them since they’re your cousins. Imagine having
to chase down an armed foreigner in the African bush just so you can say hi.

But I digress. As we were chatting the other day, I noticed something odd
hanging off this family’s mango tree. It was a red rag, tied to a piece of
some kind of animal’s hide. I’d noticed red things on other mango trees
here and there around town before, so I asked them what they were. They
told me it was a talisman that said if you steal mangoes from this tree you
will be immobilized – perhaps for hours on end - and that it works to keep
children and adults from pinching mangoes. Of course, I laughed but the
people in English Club didn’t think it was funny. They all believed that
you really would be temporarily paralyzed, and said that they’d seen it
happen before. A guy on the street, says one, stole something from a street
vendor, but the street vendor had been protected so the thief was
immediately paralyzed. He was stuck standing on the side of the street
unable to move for eight hours, even while it rained. And then my friend
Idy, an educated, otherwise pretty normal guy, swears that a marabout on the
sideline of a soccer match blew up a balloon that had been charmed in some
way, and simultaneously the belly of one of the players on the field got
bigger and bigger and bigger and he had to be taken out of the game. Isn’t
that weird? It seems like inflation and immobilization might be a good way
to curse an economy maybe, but not a person. So far here, I’ve been victim
to a curse only indirectly and as part of a group. It was when my little
sister here Binta blew on the cards and mumbled some words in Arabic (after
throwing shreds of paper on the floor) to help her win a hand in Uno and it
worked.

Ciao,

Kate

#24
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 9:06 AM
Subject: Things I Think About

Dear All:

I usually write about visits to the village because if I describe to you life here in the city, you would not be impressed. It is littered, the dirt roads turn to mud pits in the rainy season, there’s donkey dung everywhere and the flies that play in it fill the air. But living over here you become blind to it after a while. Instead of seeing barefoot talibé and feeling sorry for them, you see talibé having fun and are actually kind of jealous of them making faces at themselves in a parked car’s sideview mirror, or jumping on the backs of slow-moving cars for a joy ride, or singing in a chorus to nobody in particular. You find their second-hand clothes funny, not sad, especially when it’s a six-year old boy wearing an oversized t-shirt that says, in English, “I can handle any crisis. I have children.” Is that messed up of me?

Being over here has really changed my view of poverty. It is normal to feel sorry for and to want to help people when they are sad or ill, but now I realize how condescending it is to pity people for not having money and for not having things. They’re happy without them, and those that aren’t are often the same kind of people who will never have enough. Should we automatically assume the people here are sad because they don’t have cars or tap water or the other niceties of Western life? As far as power goes - political, economic, etc. - the Western world will always have more.
Developing countries have to develop as we have if they want it. Maybe that is why we spend so much money trying to help other countries develop. We have some innate sense of justice and want to level the playing field.

In a developing country, the biggest industry is aid, and instead of corporations, there are NGO's. In place of ads on billboards there's publicity about social issues. For instance, there are a lot of “luttes”
(battles) over here – the lutte against AIDS, the lutte against malaria, the lutte against poverty, there’s even a lutte against the guinea worm. The names of these battles are spray-painted on walls around the city, appear on t-shirts and are patterned into peoples’ clothes. You’ll see a woman wearing a dress on which there’s a drawing (over and over) of a woman filtering her water through a cloth. Underneath the drawing are the words, Lutte Contre Le Ver Guinée (war against the guinea worm).

But what should be the biggest lutte goes unrecognized – the lutte against ignorance, or the lutte for education. It goes unnamed because it is hard to sort out education from culture. Education (outside of memorizing the
Koran) is seen by some people over here as a Western thing, and the building of schools and educating of children as cultural imperialism. Some here would argue that it’s Western methods and ways that are ignorant. They’re right to a degree, as we are ignorant of much of the natural world here and the cultural norms here and the superstitions. But there is something to be said for the scientific method and establishing links between cause and effect. Once you do so over here though there are people who see it as a strike against the mystic, the spiritual, and ergo God.

So these are the things I think about, nothing new or revolutionary. In fact it’s ancient subject material, the very problem that hindered Adam and Eve, the pros and cons of pursuing knowledge. But it's timelessly interesting, and while I know I’ll never find the answers, living over here I feel like I get closer to them every day.

Happy Long Weekend (only five days away). Labor hard this week to make it worth it.

- Kate

#25
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 3:55 PM
Subject: Round 2 of 2

Dear Everybody,

I have been back in Senegal for two weeks after a too-short two-week sojourn in the U.S. In that span of time, sleeping in a real bed in a real bedroom with a carpeted floor in the insulated, air-conditioned house of my parents who seemed to me extravagantly wealthy, I forgot how noisy it is here. Not just the large assemblies of frogs with their variations on the croak theme.
There are orchestras of one kind that sound like they are clicking hollow sticks together or like wooden wind chimes rattling relentlessly. Others sound like laser guns firing - or what I imagine laser guns firing sound like – in an all-out space war. They, and the konkurans, and the inky blackness that swallows you up, can make nighttime here otherworldly.

My first night back, a konkuran was roaming the streets clanging his two knives together relentlessly and howling like a cat in heat. The singinabe (circumcised boy) must have been next door because the konkuran sounded like he was right outside the compound wall all night, clanging and howling, clanging and howling. A konkuran is a man dressed head to toe in a shaggy tree bark – even his face is covered. He chases away women and evil sprits to protect the boys (ages 6-7) who have just been circumcised. There have been at least three a week since I’ve gotten back, and I avoid them like the plague because if they see me, they come after me and they *are* pretty scary. They look kind of like Chewbaca (sp?), that shaggy beast from Star Wars, only you can’t see their face. Just last night, in fact, there was traditional drumming going on at the house on the opposite corner from me.
It was still going on at 5 a.m., when I woke up because of the heat (oppressive at the moment). Today the boy who lives in that house will go down to the river for his bathing. That is what the boys do after they’ve been circumcised, and then the konkuran will be swarming around his house all day, flanked by crowds of boys waving bushy tree branches. The girls in the neighborhood like to venture out as close as they dare to see the konkuran, but when the konkuran sees them, he chases them and then they all run scrambling gleefully away from him, trampling each other to get through the door of whatever house is closest.

It is all part of a bizarre existence that is becoming ordinary in its unexpectedness. Last week, my friend Djiby’s 14-year old daughter went blind, a story corroborated by others in his neighborhood. According to him, she was cutting fish for lunch and suddenly lost her vision. His brother and some other men prayed all night, and concocted something to spread over her eyes, and now her vision has come back. Over the weekend, a village chief told me that they used to annually sacrifice one healthy young man and one healthy young woman at the entrance to his village to protect it. Today a woman crawled into the office – flip-flops strapped to her knees and hands to protect them. Then I went home for lunch and was visiting with my grandma who was sitting with her top flipped up because it's so hot. I can bear that. But then the one-year old in the compound comes teetering in and she starts flapping her breast at him enticingly, just picks it up with her hand like it’s a bottle and starts waving it around…

As I start my second year here, I am comforted by the fact that this will be my last Ramadan, my last Korite, my last hot season, my last rainy season.
It lends an urgency that is pushing my to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I’ve made a conscious effort to become fluent in Pulaar and am now taking weekly lessons in a non-frustrating way (i.e., we don’t spend ½ hour trying to figure out the meaning of word through gestures and pathetic drawings in the dirt). These efforts are probably at the expense of getting French down tigi tigi (really really), but if it helps me feel even just a little bit less foreign all the time, it will be worth it.

love from West Africa,

Kate
#26
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 3:26 PM
Subject: USA

Dear Everybody,

One of the best and worst things about being here is having to explain the United States. It can be fun. For example, Jenaboo (who is still my favorite even though she has taken to calling me Madame Wokkude, which means Mrs. Chin) was leafing through a magazine and remarked at how lovely the women were. So I looked at what she was talking about and saw a half-naked airbrushed lady in a carnival outfit. I explained that really she wasn’t all that pretty and that she probably had surgery in order to look like that. Jenaboo just gave me a puzzled look, and so I proceeded to explain that, oh yeah, if you don’t like the nose Allah gave you, you can just go to the doctor and have him give you a new one, or if you don’t like your boobs, you just get an operation and when you wake up they’re exactly what you wanted. The look of horror and fascination that took over her features as I spoke is indescribable.

I have a little more trouble relaying such vital information to the guys.
When we get on American culture, inevitably the subject turns to Mike Tyson or Eminem or Tupac Shakur, and they’re the ones who educate me: I never knew, or maybe I forgot, the Mike Tyson asked for a rematch after he bit that guy’s ear off, and I didn’t know that there was a debate over where exactly Tupac Shakur is now, as he is probably alive since, apparently, they never found his body. And I get a satisfaction out of explaining how the electoral college works, although this is usually to my European NGO friends rather than to Senegalese people.

But some of the other explanations are a little tougher. I can’t explain why some of the things that people do here would be unacceptable in the States, so I just cringe and bear it. I was interviewing a guy here in town about his movie theatre. It is a room with long hard wooden benches and a tv. Usually he shows soccer games on weekends, and it’s 100 CFA (20 cents, but 20 cents will buy you a loaf of bread) to get in. He also has loads of video cassettes, all in French, but you can pay 1,500 CFA to watch one – regardless of the number of people. Or, you can bring your own video or DVD (so he says) and watch it. Anyway, during the entire interview he kept wiggling his front tooth. He had one, in the center, that he pushed side to side with his two pointer fingers, as he looked at me through very thick glasses. It was distracting because it looked so painful. I always try to find corollaries in the U.S. with stuff like this. With this, I guess in the States I also get distracted and don’t hear what people are saying when their tongues are pierced. I tend to just focus on the glittery thing glinting around inside their mouths as they talk and think about how much that must hurt. Whatever words are coming out of that glimmering interior are completely lost on me.

And I hate having to explain Iraq, but I do.

Tonight is a full moon, which means we are two weeks into Ramadan. I am fasting. I say that it is in solidarity with my Muslim friends and family, but really I just want to see how hard it is. So many people lay around and act generally lethargic during Ramadan – even more so than usual – that I wanted to see if it would have same effect. Plus, I got tired of them throwing back their heads in condescending laughter saying, “Toubabs can’t fast!” so I rose to the challenge. It’s not as hard as I thought. I thought it would kill me, not drinking water from sunup to sundown, especially with the heat, but I am still alive.

In fact, I am not only alive, but I am well – doing very well. The flashes of exuberance that I had when I first got here have returned and I am grateful every day that I am here and getting to do things that would be ludicrous back home. I’m sure part of it is from slowing down and being less American. Walking to work allows me to have Mary Poppins-like experiences, like last Sunday, when a little girl I had never seen before told me to go to her house because her mom wanted me to greet her. So I did, and quickly found myself amidst a gaggle of scruffy children who – not knowing any better – asked me to sing. So I did, all the French songs I knew, and they danced and clapped and sang along. Completely goofy, but loads of fun.

And that’s it from this corner of the world. The world’s eyes are now focused on you all. I cast my ballot weeks ago and now am standing idly yet eagerly by to hear the results. I hope we won’t have to wait as long as we did the last time we went through this exercise.

Lots of love from the Fouladou to you,

Kate
#27
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 7:32 AM
Dear Everyone,

I just wrapped up two weeks of vacation. Senegal has more to offer than I thought. My friends Mitch and Aviva arrived on the 5th of November in Dakar, greeted by the cricket invasion and a cholera outbreak. Fortunately, they couldn’t personally attest to the presence of either one and we started off unencumbered by said bugs.

After a day visiting the slave heritage site of Goray Island in Dakar, our first trip was to the north of the country, the colonial city of St. Louis.
The highlights included a guided horse-drawn tour of the city and pristine beaches. Had we visas to go to Mauritania, we’d have done a quick border-crossing and ridden the obligatory tourist camel in the desert. But we stayed in St. Louis and took a pirogue ride out to the Langue de Barbarie, a long peninsula that curves around and extends way beyond the island of St. Louis, which is right off the mainland coast. Our city tour coincided with the breaking of the daily fast at 7 p.m. (we were in the middle of Ramadan) so our driver left us for his drink and bit of bread, wherein the horse took advantage of the driver’s absence to try a three-point turn to take us back the way we came.

On our way to the southern part of the country we passed through Touba, which is a self-ruled city in the middle of Senegal. Not self-ruled really, but ruled and financed by a marabout (Muslim religious cleric), so the streets are beautifully paved and things there are cheap. The trade off for living in such an oasis is having to submit to its adherence to Muslim laws (e.g., in Touba, smoking is a capital punishment). I thought we were passing through to see the big beautiful mosque, which we did, but as a bonus we got a lot of smaller, but still very beautiful mosques.

Our destination was Parc Niokola-Koba, which I had driven through before but never visited. Sadly, the elephants and even giraffes that were indigenous have disappeared, but we still go to see a hyena, bushbucks, waterbucks, crocodiles, baboons, and monkeys. The hippos that live there eluded us.
Before we even set out on our safari, one monkey jumped up and tried to steal a banana right out of my hand. So while the day was excellent and full of animals, passing the night inside the park surpassed that – it was pure magic. The hotel where we stayed was straight out of a Hemingway book, complete with guidebook-wielding Englishman. It is surrounded by water on both sides – the Gambia River on one side and a marsh on the other – so water birds are abundant. Best of all, it is isolated - very remote from human habitation, deep inside the jungle, so at night (moonless) there were all kinds of spooky jungle noises. Instead of making me cling to the security of my room, the sounds drew me out into the darkness. The mystery of the jungle is that you know there are so many animals that you just aren’t seeing, and that instead are watching you, and going out into the night feels like a way to see them without them seeing you. Pure folly I know, and very dangerous, since animals on their own turf are highly superior to the half-baked tricks of a city girl from half-way across the globe. Luckily for me, the hotel’s generator clicked on and the lights came up, reminding me that it was 5 a.m. and that the hotel people would soon be up and chastise me for venturing out in the night alone, so I bagged that plan. I may have saved my own life, since the monkey cries that awakened me we were told were warnings of a panther on the ground.

After that, we headed to the very southeast corner of the country, just across from the Guinean border, where Aviva and I hiked to a hidden corner of the hills and swam beneath a spectacular waterfall (cascading from at least 200 feet above us) and Mitch went chimp-tracking with a friend of mine who tracks chimpanzees every day for a living. They didn’t find anything but chimp nests (which the chimps build nightly) and chimp feces.

We got back to Kolda in time to celebrate Korite, which meant visiting friends all over town. The village people visited Korite the day after the city people, since the village people didn’t see the moon, so we go to celebrate it twice. Both had their advantages – the city with its nightclub and dancing and Mitch singing “Let’s get this Korite STARTED!” and doing the “Back it up – beep! beep! beep!” and the village with a lovely soft sunset on the palm-tree lined rice farrow which stretches for miles, drinking fresh-tapped palm wine, which is as sweet and thirst-quenching as lemonade.
It doesn’t really even deserve to be called palm wine until it’s been sitting for some hours and gotten stronger.

The grand finale was Ziguinchour and Cap Skiring. Mostly Cap Skiring.
Words can’t describe it. You’ll have to come see it for yourself, and you better start planning soon since I only have one year left to get all the things done that I came here to do. In that vein, I’d best quit babbling on and get to work.

love,

Kate
#28


This is a good one; a long one, but a good one. Enjoy...

-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 6:56 AM
Subject: Worth seeing...

Dear all:

I thought you might enjoy the pictures from my friends' trip to Senegal in November - the link is at the bottom. Mitch and Aviva were here for two weeks, and I should say were real troopers. The email is interesting too - particularly for me. Reading it, I feel as if I have changed a lot, although I am not sure if it is for the better or worse. Illiteracy (the rate in Senegal is 60%), poverty, pollution - after a year they all seem, well, not *that* bad... it's good to be reminded of the way the world is supposed to work. But even though I am used to it, don't think that means I have lost hope - I haven't. I am still working hard and getting results.
Yesterday, in fact, was a great day. I found out that a microfinance group I helped form has already turned their money over (i.e., given out loans) three times, each time for a profit for both the lender and the borrower.
So, even though they are tiny, there are positive changes. It's just happening *much* more slowly than I thought it would - and I was expecting them to happen slowly.

Aviva's email seems like a good message for this time of year especially to share with all of you across the pond: don't forget how well off you are in relation to not only Senegal but the rest of the world. And don't forget the two things that bring us such blessings: the hope that tomorrow can always be better than today, and the sense of responsibility we feel to make it that way. My good citizenship message said, I hope you spend the holidays enjoying the fruits of your labor and surrounded with family, good friends, and good food.

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All,

Kate

>From: Aviva Rich
>To: Kate Kowalski
>Subject: RE: Fwd: Fw: Thoughts on and Pictures of Senegal
>Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:08:54 -0800 (PST)
>
>I have some random thoughts on Senegal below and even further down the
>e-mail a link to a few select pictures. For those of you that get
>Kate's e-mails, some of this stuff might be a little repetitive. Feel
>free to read only if you're interested.
>
>The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
>
>Instead of writing a traditional trip review/log, I’d just like to
>provide some insight on Senegal on the thoughts that occurred to me
>when I was there. It was definitely the hardest trip I’ve ever been on
>- emotionally and physically exhausting. There were several times I
>said to Mitch, I just want to go home now. However, ultimately my
>experience was positive, worthwhile, and fulfilling due to spending
>time with Kate (who I miss terribly), meeting so many wonderful people,
>seeing the natural beauty of the country, and experiencing a culture
>and lifestyle that most Americans will never experience.
>
>The Bad and the Ugly
>
>Poverty - Poverty is all around Senegal. I have traveled in developing
>countries before (Peru and Bolivia), but found the amount of poverty in
>Senegal to be particularly striking. You see poor people everywhere -
>there is an extremely small upper class.
>Kate (my friend in the peace who we visited) lives with a family in a
>backwater city of Kolda. Her family is considered middle class. There
>are 25 people who live in her compound, which has no running water. The
>compound has electricity, which is used for lights and the t.v., but is
>used for virtually nothing else (no refrigerator, no stove, no
>washer/dryer, etc.). Kate’s family doesn’t own a car - all transport is
>public transportation, walking, or biking. Despite this, Kate’s family
>is doing relatively well - Kate’s 70 year old collects a pension from
>his former position as a gov’t administrator, everyone has a bed to
>sleep in, everyone is clean and clothed, and there’s always food.
>
>In the villages, you see what true poverty is.
>Basically, the villages are made up of subsistence farmers who have
>little contact with the outside world except for the occasional trips
>to a nearby market to sell their meager peanut crop. No one in the
>village has electricity, water or a car. In order to travel to a nearby
>town, villagers must walk out to the road and wait for a car with an
>empty seat to pass by. This can take hours and, sometimes, days. We
>spoke with a peace corps volunteer who lived in a village, whose
>"father"
>(the village chief) makes the equivalent of $180/year.
>There simply is no money for "luxuries," such as store-bought food,
>basic furniture, even medical care.
>
>
>The thing is, that Senegal certainly isn't the worst of the African
>countries. There's no massive drought, starvation, or war and there's
>a stable government.
>Quite frankly, it's hard to imagine the poverty that exists in poorer
>or war-torn African countries.
>
>Trash - It’s everywhere in the cities - giant piles all over the
>streets - sometimes burning, sometimes not. Sometimes the stench of the
>trash in the heat of the day was so bad it made me want to vomit.
>There was one street in Kolda that was particularly bad - it happened
>to be the street where our hotel was located.
> On both sides (and sometimes in the middle) of the street there were
>giant piles of trash that were several feet high, as wells as several
>rusted, burned out vehicles. On our last morning there, Mitch and I
>were walking down the street when we saw a goat vomitting - I, mean, a
>goat - who pretty much eats trash every day of his life - found
>something on the street to be so bad, so repugnant, that he had to
>vomit.
>
>The state of Senegal seriously made me appreciate the level of
>environmental awareness this country has (and can afford to have).
>
>Disease - While we were there, a cholera outbreak occurred, which lead
>to the deaths of several people.
>We washed our hands about 150 times a day and managed to skirt cholera
>and all the other illnesses floating around (we *love* Purell by the
>way). In almost every family we met, there was a least one family
>member who was ill or handicapped - sickle-cell anemia, mental
>retardation, missing limbs, etc. In the villages, things were even
>worse. Every child we saw had a runny nose or cold of some sort. There
>is no one in the village that has even basic medical training (except
>for villages lucky enough to have a peace corps volunteer, like Kate's
>friend Eugenie, who is trained in agriculture, but dispenses regular
>medical treatment to villagers) and going to a hospital is too far and
>too expensive for most villagers. Eugenie said during her first two
>months in her village of 170 people (about 100 of which are children,
>btw), 4 people died - only one of old age. The night we spent with her
>in her village, a baby died. In Senegal, it’s estimated that between 10
>and 20% of all children die before their 5th birthday.
>
>One thing that Senegal has largely escaped (at least for now) is the
>AIDS crisis. But one wonders when lack of medical treatment and
>education will catch up with Senegal and cause a rise in AIDS cases.
>
>Illiteracy - I don’t have stats on this, but illiteracy is real problem
>in Senegal. There is very little importance placed on education.
>Children are required to go to elementary school - but require no
>further education. In Kate’s family, only academic stars go onto high
>school. One problem is the lack of books in Senegal - they are
>extremely expensive and outside the monetary reach of most families.
>Kate, who’s in business development, struggles with her job b/c many of
>the people that she’s attempting to help can’t keep any business
>records (inventory, receipts,
>etc.) b/c they can’t read. What makes things even more frustrating is
>that many of the illiterate people you run into are intelligent, even
>business savvy, people
>- but they can’t get ahead b/c they can’t read.
>
>Malnutrition - While there’s very little true starvation in Senegal,
>malnutrition is rampant. Almost everyone is underweight and/or sick. In
>villages, families rarely eat meat and get very few vegetables (and the
>vegetables they do get are extremely starchy
>- potatoes, onions, squash, and cabbage). The vast majority of the
>diet is grains - primarily rice and millet. There have been steps made
>to help curb malnutrition, but many are unsuccessful based on either
>the ignorance, distrust, or traditions of the Senegalese people. For
>instance, a program was started to hand out multi-vitamins, but most
>Senegalese refused to take them believing they were pills to sterilize
>them.
>
>Transportation - Anytime I drive through East Cleveland, I will think
>twice about complaining about the condition of the roads. In Senegal,
>there are stretches of road connecting one city to another that are so
>covered in potholes, that it literally takes
>2.5 hours to go 60 kilometers. We spent about 36 hours in the car
>during the two weeks we were there traveling a country that is smaller
>than the state of California. Drivers use the entire road and both
>shoulders to get around the potholes, pedestrians, and domestic
>animals. We had several near-misses with people and domestic animals -
>including once where a bull attempted to charge the car. Most people in
>Senegal cannot afford the luxury of a car, so the roads have light
>traffic, which makes the constant swerving at least a little safer.
>
>Believe it or not, the roads are not the worst part about traveling in
>Senegal - rather it’s the public transportation. We used (with the
>exception of one surprisingly comfortable bus ride) either taxis or
>sept places to travel from one city to another. We hired taxis at a
>premium to take us where we wanted to go based on our schedule and with
>no other passengers.
>Taxis weren’t that bad - just mainly old, hot, and filthy (after one
>ride, I was literally covered in dirt - black stuff in my fingernails,
>smudges of dirt on my face). Sept-places on the other hand, took
>discomfort to a new level. Sept-places are small station wagons, that
>"fit" seven passengers. First you need to go the "garage" - basically a
>big lot where all the sept-place drivers gather - and is, honest to
>God, one of the most vile, filthy places in the world.
>Over the shouts of touts and constant harassment by vendors, you try to
>find a sept-place driver who’s going to your destination. You buy a
>"ticket" (a ripped up piece of notebook paper) for a ride in the car.
>You also get charged for luggage, which goes in the trunk or is tied to
>the roof. If you hold it in your lap, you’re not charged (which I’d
>advise against b/c it’s so dang hot and uncomfortable without a
>backpack on your lap). The charge is almost always higher for white
>people. Kate has made it her personal mission not to ever get ripped
>off in Senegal, so we’d often spend at least a half-an-hour or so
>debating over the cost of luggage. Mitch and I, who don’t have to live
>in Senegal, often were willing to pay what often was the equivalent of
>an additional 50 cents or $1, just to eliminate the hassle. However,
>since Kate was the one who spoke French and Pulaar and made the country
>her home for two years, we followed Kate’s lead.
>
>Where you sit in the car depends on the order in which you bought
>tickets. For instance, the first person gets the coveted front seat.
>The second through fifth people, get the middle seat. And the last
>three get the back "seat" - which is basically a rumble seat, with no
>real place to put your feet (which puts unbelievable pressure on your
>arse) and no ability to roll down windows (so you’re totally dependent
>on the middle row seats to roll down their windows - which often they
>don’t want to b/c of the wind in their face, as well as dirt flying
>in). The main draw back to getting one of the first four seats is that
>you have no idea how long it will take to fill up the last three or
>more seats. The driver won’t go until the car is full. In some cases,
>it may take a matter of hours.
>Very frustrating.
>
>The thing is, that we didn’t even experience the worst of the public
>transport. There are these mini-buses, which work on the same
>principles as the sept-place, except with more people. Ugh.
>
>The Heat - While we certainly weren’t visiting at the hottest time of
>the year and the highs generally only reach the upper 80s, there were
>times during the trip where I literally thought the sun was burning a
>hole through my brain. The mornings were generally pleasant and the
>evenings after the sun went down were bearable, but between noon and
>4pm, the heat made me miserable and cranky. As Senegal is only about 15
>degrees north of the equator, the sun is extremely strong in the middle
>of the day. Being in the shade vs. the sun was literally at least a 10
>degree temperature difference. Many businesses, stores, schools, etc.
>took a break or siesta in the middle of the day to escape the heat. The
>thing that made me feel unbelievably wussy about the heat was that we
>were there during the month of Ramadan where Muslims fast from sunrise
>to sunset everyday for a month.
>During the fast, no food OR WATER is consumed. I felt dehydrated and
>weak even when I was eating and drinking - it boggles my mind how
>Senegalese Muslims were able to function.
>
>The Good
>
>The People - The unbelievable thing about Senegal is that despite all
>the horrible negatives I’ve listed above, the people are incredibly
>friendly, generous, and optimistic. Everywhere we went people wanted to
>talk to us, feed us, and give us things. People wanted to hear about
>the election (and everyone asked who we voted for - every Senegalese
>person we met was pro-Kerry). People had a strong interest in what we
>thought about Senegal. There’s also a lot of what Americans would
>consider "nosy" such as whether you’re married, if you’re not, when do
>plan to get married, when do you expect to have children, etc. But
>that’s just typical Senegalese conversation. There’s also a lot of
>joking about marriage and, to a certain extent, sex. For instance,
>Mitch was taken aback when Kate’s father asked Mitch (jokingly) if he’d
>be interested in taking his 12 year old daughter as a wife because she
>liked him. Mitch politely declined. (BTW, Muslim men can take up to
>four wives and Kate’s father has three). In another instance, one of
>Kate's Senegalese friends asked Mitch if he knew what bin-bins are and
>told him that they were beads that a woman wears around her waist that
>make a clicking noise and let's her man know that she's interested in
>sex (sort of Senegalese lingerie). Anyway, each time he saw Mitch, he
>asked if Mitch bought bin-bins yet - and everytime I was standing right
>there and usually there were other women around.
>
>Honestly, one of the biggest highlights of the trip was getting to know
>Kate’s family. They were so welcoming and so nice. I felt like we got a
>genuine taste of Senegalese culture and experienced something most
>tourists never get to. They constantly fed us, always gave us the best
>seat (you constantly have people telling you, "Sit" - and you have to
>even if you want to stand), gave us traditional African clothes to wear
>for Korite (a holiday which celebrates the end of Ramadan -
>unfortunately we have no pictures of us wearing them, but I think Kate
>got some), braided my hair (unfortunately we *do* have pictures of
>that), invited us to dance and celebrate with them, and shared their
>lives with us. It was really very special and something we will always
>remember.
>
>Wildlife - Senegal doesn’t have much in the way of big game animals -
>most have been poached. However, we went to Nikola-Koba National Park
>where we got to see really a tremendous amount of wildlife - including
>baboons, water buck, bush buck, monkeys, wild boar, crocodiles, monitor
>lizards, and a hyena. I’m sure that monkeys are pretty much just like
>squirrels in Senegal, but each time we saw one we were so excited.
>Probably our best wildlife sighting was when a troop of about 50
>baboons passed our truck in the park - the males came to the front and
>acted aggressively while the females and children scurried past. It was
>really cool. Also, Mitch got to go track chimps with Kate’s friend
>who’s researching chimp behavior for a professor back in the states.
>Unfortunately, Mitch didn’t get to see any chimps (just some chimp
>nests and chimp feces) - but he was excited learn about the chimp’s
>behavior and see where the live.
>
>Moderate Islam - A little over 90% of the population of Senegal
>practices Islam. My own feelings about Islam had been largely negative,
>particularly in recent years. However, I was pleasantly surprised by
>the type of Islam practiced in Senegal. Non-Muslim (mostly Catholics
>and Animists) live peacefully among Muslims. While Islam bans such
>things as alcohol and pork - these things are legal and are consumed
>freely by non-Muslims (sometimes even Muslims). And despite the
>occasional Osama bin Laden sticker or Saddam Hussein t-shirt, I never
>felt any hatred directed at me b/c I was American. While Islam
>definitely has practices I don’t agree with (most concerning the low
>status of women), I can say that it does have at least some positive
>influences on Senegalese culture (particularly in light of the level of
>poverty), including low rates of alcoholism and drug abuse, giving of
>alms to the poor, and relatively low crime rates. Also, you can see in
>the younger generation that Islam is becoming more progressive - we
>talked with many young men who only want one wife.
>
>Beautiful Beaches - At the end of the trip, we spent a day in Cap
>Skirring at one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever been to. Soft,
>white sand, crystal blue, warm water, palm trees, craggily rocks, and
>only about 10 people on the beach. The major disappointment with Cap
>Skirring was that the color divide was extremely evident (in the rest
>of Senegal we almost never saw white people). The staff at the hotels
>and the vendors in the dirty little tourist town were all Senegalese,
>whereas every person on the beautiful, relaxing beach was white
>(primarily French and Spanish). Despite this, if I ever went back to
>Senegal, I’d definitely want to stay in Cap Skirring for at least
>another day or two - while there are hotels scattered along the beach,
>there are no high rises and the hotel buildings seem to blend in behind
>the trees and hills, making everything feel very secluded. Our day in
>Cap Skirring was a well-needed treat after nearly 2 weeks of intense
>traveling.
>
>The Landscape - While the cities aren’t attractive in the least, due to
>the poor condition of the buildings and the trash, the countryside is
>beautiful. In the north, it’s arid - so there’s lots of brown/green
>grass, baobab trees, and brush - it feels very exotic and desolate. As
>you move south, it becomes lush and green with small rolling hills.
>There is so much of Senegal that seems to be untouched and uninhabited
>- I hope that the economy allows for a greater degree of
>environmentalism in the near future, so that the countryside will
>remain beautiful.
>
>The Children - There are kids *everywhere* in Senegal.
>And being a white person in Senegal, particularly in the smaller towns
>and villages, you become a curiosity to the children. When you pass by,
>the children shout out "Toubab!" - which means white person (in a
>matter of fact way - not necessarily in a negative or a positive way).
>The kids all run up to you and want to shake or hold your hand. When we
>were in the village, despite the language barrier (most villagers speak
>only their tribal language and children are taught basic French in
>school), the kids wanted to play games and sing songs with us. Some
>just wanted to touch my hair or feel my clothes. There were countless
>times that we felt like pied pipers with a gaggle of children following
>us around town.
>
>Unlike American children, Senegalese children are taught patience and
>how to entertain themselves from a very young age. Infants and toddlers
>spend a significant amount of time being strapped to their mother’s
>back while she toils away either in the fields or in the home. On one
>of our sept-place trips, a young mother had a child who was probably
>about two or so, sitting on her lap for the entire duration of the trip
>(about 5 hours). The child never cried or fussed. Never required
>distraction by toy. Truly amazing.
>
>Appreciation for all that I have - The thing I walked away with that
>means the most to me, is the appreciation for what I have. The material
>things are the most glaringly obvious differences between the US and
>Senegal. My guess is that most Senegalese can’t even fathom two people
>(such as Mitch and I) having three cars (even if one of them is Mitch’s
>dented and scratched 1995 Ford Contour) and a house with 10 rooms and 3
>bathrooms - much less all the stuff inside it.
>Beyond the material things, I can appreciate all the opportunities that
>I’ve had in my life. If I were born into a Senegalese family of similar
>social status as my family, I would have probably had a minimal
>education, be married (quite possibly to a man 20 or more years older
>than me and with other wives), and have several children (one or more
>probably would have died). My worries seem minuscule when compared with
>those of a Senegalese person. Bitching about the price of holiday
>gifts, weight gain, or the inconvenience of airline travel seems so
>myopic. If I were born in Senegal I might be worrying about how to feed
>my family, if my husband could find work, or how to care for my sick
>child. I’m not saying that I won’t complain about the various
>"inconveniences" of American life (I already have) - but my limited
>experience in Senegal has opened my eyes a little more.
>
>Stealing John Nolan's brillant idea, I thought I'd share some select
>pictures with you from our recent trip to Senegal.
>Unforunately, the
>captions are limited to 120 characters - so I couldn't explain as much
>(or as artfully) as I'd like.

#29
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2004 11:53 AM
Subject: Joyeux Noel

December 23, 2004

Dear Everybody,

I hope you are all getting loads of beautiful cool snow. It has been very very hot here, hotter than it has been since last spring. About the only facet of that Christmas feeling that I have managed to capture here is the busy-ness. And since most of the things on my to-do list are not holiday-related, I can only guess that it’s the closing of the year that is polluting my list with tasks.

They are all good tasks, though. The two village savings clubs I started in the beginning of the year are keeping me very busy. They have now both opened accounts at their local banks, have turned their money over several times (at a profit for both the lender and the borrower), and are managing their funds wisely. This is by far the most rewarding of my work here, the self-funded microfinance groups. Microfinance groups are groups in which about 15 people convene to save money, each member paying the same amount at their weekly meetings. As the savings grows to a certain point, they begin to make loans to members, who then pay the loan back at a fixed rate of interest which has been decided by the group at its conception. I then keep busy helping the various borrowers implement whatever plan they had in mind for that money.

I get very motivated making sure people spend money the way they are supposed to – perhaps it is because I am so very bad at managing money for myself, I try to compensate for it by managing others’ money. I recently found out that Senegal receives the highest amount of donated money per capita, and after having been here a year, I can personally attest that grants should not be made to businesses. The problem is, that to cover the risk, the only loans available to people are at impossibly high rates. I suspect the gap – low or no interest financing – might in small part be due to the fact that you can’t write off a loan but you can write off a donation. Not to mention the damage the money does to lending institutions – as a bank it is hard to compete with free money. In any event, I made the decision to never again ask for a grant for a business – for a non-profit entity like a school or a health hut or a library, okay – but some of the businesses I work with just go from gift to gift without ever really having to worry about whether or not they sell anything. But really you can hardly blame them: if given the choice between money you had to pay back and money you could keep, what would you choose? Free money is clearly the better business decision, but it has created such a very difficult-to-reverse dependence in them on grant money.

Anyway, before I start sounding too Scrooge-like… I have done a few Christmas-ey things to try and muster up the spirit, including going to the Peace Corps regional house and blaring mangled carols (our cassette player is a little tired) and decorating cut-out cookies. I pasted snowflakes a friend sent me last year all over the walls. In keeping with family tradition, I plan on going to midnight mass tomorrow. Not in keeping with family tradition, I plan on going out dancing afterward – perfect timing since all the soirees don’t start here till 1 or 2, an hour which normally finds me fast asleep. Christmas Day the volunteers will all dine together – on pork. It is a sad story, that of our pork, and will get even sadder Saturday as it is I who will (try to) prepare it.

But sad stories are for another day – right now it is the holiday and I am celebrating it the best I can far from home. I keep telling everyone here that Christmas isn’t even worth celebrating this far from my family, and it’s true. But it is not so hard knowing that next year Christmas will find me on the other side of the pond.

Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May 2005 bring you peace, prosperity, and plenty of happiness.

Love,

Kate


#30
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 3:52 AM
Subject: Goats and Dwarves and Evil Kings

Dear All:

The holidays are over and the new year is here. If you’re looking for ordinary traditional holidays, then mine pale in comparison to what you all
celebrated: fat turkeys, snowed-in Christmases, and what I hear were a record number of runners for the 5th (?) Annual Chilly Willy NYE run. But I did get to hear a lot of firecrackers on Christmas and got presents for New Year’s (they get the two mixed up). Since then life here has been a laugh a minute – if you have a sense of humor with very low standards like mine.
And my Senegalese family’s, who found it really funny this morning when a chicken came up behind me while I was sitting on a low stool and bending over to wash dishes. The chicken starting pecking my right butt cheek! I forgot I had a tiny grain-of-rice-sized hole in my pants and to the chicken my shiny white skin glowing forth must have looked like food.

Goats always provide good material – not even counting the vomiting goat that Mitch and Aviva encountered while here. The noises they make are very human, except they are about 10 times louder. I know a coughing goat or a farting goat doesn’t sound very funny to you reading this, but when you’re in a crowded market or just walking down the street and one just explodes, it’s hard not to laugh, so I do and whatever random little boys happen to be standing by usually join me. Coming into my dark hut the other day, a goat suddenly leaped from the other side of the hut onto my bed, hopped around on it for a little bit, and then bounded out. And now that we are getting close to Tabaski, a major Muslim holiday during which every head-of-household buys a goat, the goats are everywhere. You will see Pulaar men literally dragging goats down the road. The goat has every muscle in reverse and is utterly determined not to move forward, so his hooves skid along the ground. I guess animal protection people would get mad, but I find it comical. The goat is very clearly against moving forward but he’s got a rope around his neck and a wiry little guy on the other end pulling a tiny bit harder. I’ll try to take a picture. The one goat-related thing that is not cute is the burning goat skull on the fire pit right outside my window. Last year they smoked it for two days and it smelled like death and put sort of a damper on my Tabaski. And then I had to live with the scorched “good luck horn” dangling from the banana tree into my latrine area. It’s still there.

One weird thing about Senegal is that people are immortalized in stories, songs and statues even if they are evil. I am too young to remember when Secou Touré was in power in Guinea, but my understanding of him was that he was crazy: he thought all the Pulaars were plotting against him and starved his best friend to death in prison. Yet, the other day, there was a long interview in our paper with his wife, and they made no mention of his sorry human rights record. Here, he is seen as kind of a hero because he was the first to win independence from the French. And I recently heard the story of Moussa Molo. I heard of him upon arrival in Kolda because there is a giant old baobab tree close to the center of town named after him and also because there is a statue of him at one of the hotels. But I never knew who he was till this morning when someone told me that he was a Pulaar king in the 19th century. He was the king of the Fouladou , which is this southern part of Senegal where I live, aka the Casamance. He is remembered for cutting fetuses out of women’s wombs to examine the positions in which they laid (he was curious) and for sometimes forcing new mothers to pound their newborn babies in their big mortar-and-pestle pounders that characterize West Africa. He also used to lock people with dwarfism into one hut at night to keep them from sneaking into women’s huts and diminishing the race.
When I asked for a nice story about Moussa Molo, nobody could remember one. And then there is the popular song about a man named Abdou Diouf, who lived just a little west of here. Unlike the Moussa Molo story this one they swear is true. Abdou was a king who was so in love with his second wife he couldn’t be away from her for even 24 hours. But this second wife really liked her mom, so she would go away to see her mom every few days, causing Abdou great heartache. Finally, he had had enough. He went to his second wife’s mom’s house, cut off her head, and brought it back to place in his wife’s hut so she would no longer have to leave to go see her mom.

The best and happiest news of late is that I finally got the World Space radio that was bequeathed to me to work, and can even get NPR for an hour a day, which I just discovered this afternoon! It was a happy hour. Not that I am all that concerned about Delta cutting down on its number of flight attendants, or am happy that I can now eat a few parts per billion of perchlorate without having to worry about my thyroid function, but just hearing those familiar voices and those familiar bars of music brings me home. Sigh… Only 10 more months and then I’ll get to hear those inane stories over and over every day.

Lots of love,

Kate
#31


From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 5:34 AM
Subject: The Spoils of Diplomacy

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope everyone there is happy and healthy. I have been very healthy here in Senegal up until recently, when I got a cold, followed by strep throat, followed by a fever that sent me to Dakar, from whence I am writing this email. I am back to feeling 100% now though. We have a very good medical staff here.

I think I told you guys about the guy in California who periodically sends boxes of running shoes donated by people in his running group. I gave a pair to each member of my family, so that is why a few days ago I was really surprised when my little sister Binta asked to borrow money so she could by some "plastiques". "Plastiques" are those jelly shoes, kind of latticed?
that were popular in the 1980s. I asked what she needed them for, and she said so she could go running! I was astonished! I said, "But Binta, I just gave you a pair of really nice running shoes." "I can't run in those," she replied, meaning, she saves them for when she gets dressed up to go out. It shows how much continually surfaces that is cultural based that surprises me. I am glad that I made the track team connection because I had this vision of promoting running over here, but more often than not, people savor the quality and the heft and the beauty of the shoes. They really are little miracles, when you're used to looking at items made here from scratch, which is about 99% of things. Except for the stuff that comes from China. You know, the Economist is always going on about how powerful China is becoming, and that strength is giving them some soft power as well. I was at a Senegalese family's home for lunch the other day and the after-lunch discussion was about China. The initiator of the conversation was a man who buys stuff in Guinea-Bissau and sells it in various places in Senegal. He's got a wife and kids in Guinea-Bissau and after he pays his transport, probably only earns about 60 dollars a month. Anyway, he was praising the Chinese because before, it was impossible to dress your whole family for the Tabaski holiday (for which it is almost a religious sin not to have new clothes) for less than 40 dollars. Now, with all the great stuff coming from China, you can do it for under 20. It was interesting to see the “Power of China” working in more ways than one – people here now feel very favorably toward China.

Although, really, people here feel favorably about almost every country.
Some say this is the legacy of their first president: a very well-educated, refined, diplomatic, and well-traveled head of state who made friends with a lot of rich and powerful countries. Senegal has been able to maintain that standing, and today has very good diplomatic relations with the United States as well as Iran. Other very close friends include France, China (really Taiwan but all the signs have to say China) and Saudi Arabia. I've been told that Senegal receives the highest, not one of the highest, THE highest amount of development per capita of any other country in the world, and because of these good relations, I am inclined to believe it. After all, that is whey they maintain such good relations. And while the good relations are a good thing, I am not sure really how good the monetary gifts are, when they are given so freely and on such a massive scale, as it seems to deaden the population’s sense of value of these gifts. In an AIDS project I organized, I was appalled at the amount of waste these women were capable of. The goal was for each woman to do a AIDS talk to raise awareness in her neighborhood, and the limit ("LIMIT", not "recommended spending amount") was 100 bucks. Well, of course they took the full hundred and brought back receipts with ridiculous charges, i.e., $10 in electricity charges for plugging in the music box for 2 hours at one woman's house. $10 is a lot of bread here (50 loaves, to be precise). The goal was that they would learn to do these talks independently, especially since I am not and don't want to be a health volunteer, but of course after the first couple I realized that they were going to need a lot of monitoring and reminding that the less they spent, the more money could go to OTHER people for OTHER talks and more people could be educated about AIDS. I didn't go so far as to say this money is not free - it comes from people who donate it (via taxes) who want to help save Senegal from the unbelievable devastation the disease has wreaked in other African countries, but I wanted to.

Anyway, the point of this all is to say that I have learned that in the business sector here, each time something is given to this country, the incentive to earn it is taken away. I have seen this with my clients. Why account for depreciation when all you have to do to replace equipment is apply for a grant? Heck, why even raise any capital at all paying interest on a loan when the money is available for free? It doesn't do very good things for the credit industry here, that is for sure. I support grant money for things that are fundamental to a society that should not be run solely for a profit, like health and education, and think grants to them are indispensable, but grants to businesses? It is an oxymoron. How will a business ever become self-sufficient if it's constantly fed money it can spend without having to answer for the value received? Personal giving, on the other hand, is really rewarding, for both sides, and in a lot more senses than just the exchange of goods and words. The shoe-sending guy has really been getting a kick out of the thank you notes he receives in reply, and he likes to publish pictures of the kids with their new shoes in his running club’s newsletter. Plus people learn a little bit about how people in other countries live and think. I am doing a correspondence between two 5th grade classes, one here and one in the States, and it is probably the most rewarding thing I do. With the US defining its place in the world more independently than it has in the past, I feel like people outside the US are growing wary of us. Plus, with the prices rising for US passports and visas (causing a rebound effect for US citizens needing visas for other countries) the drop in international travel expected between the US and other countries is expected to continue. With all this going on, I feel it is even more important now to promote interaction between regular people from different countries, kids especially. Because most of us really are more alike than we are different.

In addition to my other illnesses, it appears that now I am apparently suffering from a touch of logorrhea as well – my apologies.

Lots of love from the land of teranga,

Kate

#32


-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2005 8:38 AM
Subject: Still here, still sweating

Dear Everyone,

Apologies for the long dry spell and the resulting much-too-long email that follows, but I have been traveling. I finally got to see the northeastern desert-ey part of the country and it’s way different from where I live in the green south. Someone told me that this contrast in the terrain accounts for the yellow and green in Senegal’s flag – easy enough to believe after touring the border edge along the Senegal River. It is on this river that my Senegalese mom tells me genies dance early in the morning. I saw no genies when I was there, only the other side: Mauritania and then Mali, stretching out into vast dry nothingness. Miles and miles of sand dotted with trees and bushes. Looking at it made me lonely and thirsty.
Especially since I was in a van that packs 37 passengers – five to a seat and then two up front next to the driver. It took two days to get home this way because you drop people off and pick people up wherever they like along the way, but it was worth it. I never thought I would ever say that about using public transportation here in Senegal but I must be getting used to it with all this traveling.

Since my last email I have been to Dakar yet again, and happened to be there on Palm Sunday, which is the Sunday before Easter when they give you a long, slender palm frond. At least in the States, that’s what you get. Here, you get an entire palm branch and it is lethal. Maybe they give you the whole branch because it makes a better swishing noise when you wave it in the air, which is what we did in a ceremony outside before mass, pretending we were the crowd welcoming Jesus into town. Although if I were Jesus I’d have fled in the other direction, with hordes of people waving what amount to organically grown meter-long razor blades at me. And they were handing them out to kids and adults alike. I don’t know how everyone survived. I was lucky to make it out with two punctures in my hand and a laceration on my thumb and that was from holding it – gingerly – for a mere two minutes.

Having made it home to Kolda with all my limbs still attached, I decided to risk them again with a trip to the national park. These minicars (the 37
seaters) stick you in so tight next to one another that you can’t sit with both shoulders square against the back of the seat, so if you’re right next to the window you are practically obliged to stick your arm out of it, which I did. However, the driver, no doubt out of a concern for safety that characterizes transportation in Senegal, yelled at me to pull it back in, like a power-crazed ride conductor at King’s Island. But then, in an even more touching display of concern for my well-being, a roadside guard made us all get out and wash our hands and a roadside hand-washing stand he’d set up. It was to prevent the cholera epidemic from spreading. Every year, cholera breaks out in the city of Touba when all the Muslims of a particular brotherhood (Mourides) go to there on a pilgrimage. I think I have written about Touba before. It’s kind of like its own little self-governed part of the country, ruled by a marabout.

Anyway, I put my limbs at further risk once more when we got to the park by swimming in crocodile-infested waters. I don’t know why I did this, knowing full well that there are crocodiles – lots of them – there, other than it was really hot and the water was shallow and clear and moving swiftly. I have to admit that we were a little irresponsible letting all the girls in the water too, and sticking them on the top of our bus for a better view on the safari, in full danger of falling off or getting whacked off by an overhanging branch. But got to see warthogs and deerlike creatures and monkeys and baboons and on our boat safari lots of colorful birds and hippos and crocodiles, one of whom actually chased our boat snapping his jaws.
Just a little guy but his teeth looked sharp. But we got lucky and were not only unharmed but had a fantastic three days full of games and songs and goofing off. The girls, almost all of whom came from villages, had a great time being together although the thrill we get in the States from “roughing it” was a bit lost on them considering the camping part of it was no different from their everyday lives at home: no electricity, sleeping outside, cooking over an open fire.

My most recent trip was to visit a friend in her village, from which I just got back Wednesday. On the way home, I stopped at a lumo, which is a weekly market. This particular lumo is the biggest in the Casamance (which is the part of Senegal south of Gambia). I saw a friend there who sells used clothes. Bored, and seeing nothing I wanted to buy, I decided to try my hand at selling. I piled a stack of folded t-shirts on my head, held an especially colorful one out for display, and walked up and down the market shouting “Chappanjoyi! Chappanjoyi rekk!” (“250 CFA! Only 250 CFA!”) I did as I have learned from countless hours on the streets of Dakar, in transport stations, and in the Kolda marketplace. I walked up to everyone, holding the display t-shirt up to size them. I stood in front of people to block their way. I asked them what their favorite color was and then gracefully swept the stack off my head and extracted whatever color I fancied at that moment. I thought it would be my chance to get revenge on all those pushy vendors that have pushed me to the limits over the past year and a half (once, I went so far as to pretend I was deaf, and my sister, who was visiting at the time, played along, and we did fake sign language all the way down the street). But wouldn’t you know, Africa won again. Everyone was enamored. Within the first 30 seconds, I sold a big blue Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt to a guy who must have been in his 50’s. Here was a white girl speaking Pulaar and wheeling and dealing in used clothes. Not to brag or anything, but I was a hit. I ended up selling ~$10 worth of clothes in the 20 minutes or so that I was out. It doesn’t sound like much but considering most pieces were only 50 cents, I would say I did alright for a beginner. Heady experience (no pun intended). It made me wonder if I could work such magic with insurance policies or used cars or I don’t know, corporate jets or something.

So that’s my story morning glory. Happy Springtime. Now all ya'll in the Eastern Time Zone are only four hours behind me which should make it easier to call: 575.5095 or 996.1519 or 996.1716. The first two numbers whoever answers will understand English. The third number, if I am not there just leave your name and make sure you ask for Hawa Ba.

Till next time,

Kate


#33

From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 9:08 AM

Dear Friends,

It rained yesterday evening which was a good thing because May 11 was the date I picked among a few friends here for the first rain. Yesterday was also the anniversary of the death of Bob Marley, who would have been 60 this year, God rest his soul. People here *really* like Bob Marley. All the schools in Kolda got together and had a big party all day yesterday. The kids did skits, all with social issue themes, that were hilarious. In an anti-drug sketch the high kid asked, “Don’t you hear the voices? They say that all clothes are unnecessary,” and he started taking off his clothes.
And then last night I was on the radio to talk about Bob Marley for two hours. Like I know anything about the guy…I ended up just citing lyrics that appealed to me and saying insightful things like “You know, it’s like an instant party when you put his music on” and “His music really unites the world.” But they asked me only yesterday about an hour before the show started so I don’t feel too guilty about being unprepared. It was a good thing that it was a roundtable discussion, with other people on the panel who know a lot more about the Bob Marley than I did. Radio is crazy here.
Everyone on the roundtable said hi to their families and friends around town, so I did too. The wind was clanging the shutters in the studio room, the DJ put a clattering fan right next to one of the panelists, and another panelist was receiving calls on his cell phone throughout the show. Very unlike the studio in Cleveland where I did my famous radio spot about Peru (where my comments were equally evocative, i.e., "It was really pretty there"), but maybe with all the background noise I, the lobotomized toubab, didn’t sound quite so void.

Other than my radio appearance the other exciting thing that is happening is that I am moving into my husband’s house this weekend. You see, some old Muslim men got together at my house and prayed about it, so now I am a married woman even though neither my husband nor I were part of the ceremony. My family here is happy about it and ought to be since they’ve been telling me I need a husband ever since I arrived. It should be interesting and challenging living at his house, since we will be sharing one room and his mother and brother live there (at the house, not in the one room). Although, the house is a decent-sized one, so maybe it won’t be that cramped. I figure if I can survive living with my mother-in-law and a wily German Shepard in a pretty solid state of poverty, life together in US will be easier by comparison. The guy they married me to is named Kande Keita and I am extremely happy about it.

I have been trying not to work as much because it is extremely hot here – over 100 degrees every day and no air conditioning – and also because with lots of clients you can’t do a good job for everyone. But try as I might people still track me down to help them find financing for their businesses and helping them is complicated. At least they are looking for money for a business, unlike my family here who to this day thinks that because I am white I have loads of money. Try as I might to convince them otherwise, they don’t believe it and tell me I have “jude yoorni” –“dry hands” – every time I don’t give them money when asked (having dry hands means you’re stingy). In fact, they are all miffed at me at the moment because I plan on moving my things to Kande’s instead of leaving my things for them. I have been able to deal with this okay until now. I think it is because with my leaving I feel like we should have a warm goodbye rather than bitterness because they’re not getting my stuff. It is kind of a downer but there are lots of downers here so I am taking it in stride. I sometimes wonder if being over here is not turning me into a bitter person. In fact, I literally just now asked someone (since I am writing this in my office) if he was deaf because three times in succession he asked me for money and I told him three times in succession, very clearly, that I *don’t* have any money for him.

Okay, well sorry to be whiney. Life over here really isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. Like everywhere, there are good days and bad days, the only difference is that here the peaks and troughs are more extreme. That is all for now. I hope this note finds everyone well.

love,

Kate


#34

From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 5:33 PM
Subject: I've seen the future, and it's nuts

Dear Everybody,

Since my last note, I have traveled yet again. I went to Thiès, to the training center where I spent my first three months in Senegal, for a week-long workshop on project design and management. It was definitely the hardest I have worked since I’ve been here. Even though we were in the cushy training center with running water and ceiling fans, we didn’t have much time to enjoy them, as it was an 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. workschedule, something I have definitely fallen out of touch with. I brought two of my work partners from Kolda who dry okra and sell it in powdered form (don’t worry - I won’t be sending you any samples as I did the mangoes, although I am thinking of sending a sample to Oprah Winfrey). I know what you’re thinking, but people use it in the food all the time here - slimes it up real nice.

Living in my new house has been fun. I have been cooking once a week (the lunch and dinner on Wednesdays) as a kind of symbolic effort to fit in and have met with mixed success. Last Wednesday was the most delicious thing I have cooked in-country, although I am the only one who felt that way. It was Madras Chicken Curry, but apparently the Indian spices combined with the yogurt-based sauce were too overwhelming a change from the beef-bouillon-and-onion base used for practically every plate in this country and there was a lot left over. Kande even suggested after lunch that maybe I try just doing dinners instead (dinners are the more minor meal here). We compromised by agreeing that I would only do only one or two “experimental” meals a month and do the other meals as a sous-chef to his sister so I can learn how to cook some Senegalese plates.

Since yesterday was Sunday we went out into the bush where Kande’s family owns some land along a river valley. Nobody in his family farms it anymore, but his mom cultivated a rice paddy there till a few years ago and lots of cashew and mango trees remain. It’s very peaceful there, especially with the quiet sound of crickets jumping - they sound like raindrops - on the dried fallen leaves. They weren’t ordinary crickets: they were yellow with black spots like leopards and they stood very still and looked you right in the eye, and they were everywhere. Kande’s brothers were in town so all of us and a few friends hiked out and had a cashew roast. We put green cashews in big sieved metal bowls and set them on wood fires. A thick white smoke comes streaming out of the pan and it’s like a witch’s cauldron and you stir and stir with a giant stick until the nuts catch on fire. That is when you know they’re done (unless you’re Kande in which case you’re just getting started). You dump them out and then pound each one with a rock to get them out. But even then you’re not finished (unless Kande roasted them in which case there will be no nut inside but a fine black powder: “ash-of-nut” I call it). There is yet another skin on the nut, and to get that off you have to roast the nut yet again and then peel that skin off. This is why cashews don’t come in the nutcracker mixes at Christmas and why they’re so expensive - they’re ludicrously hard work. The four hours of nutcracking/fingersmashing yesterday made me think of two things: one, why on earth don’t they have nutcrackers here? They’re a pretty simple concept; and two, remember Crabby Mondays at Red Lobster with the all-you-can-eat crab legs and the surge of satisfaction you get when you extract an entire leg without breaking off any? It’s like that with cashew nuts too. Given the tediousness of the task, we took the nuts home and have taken advantage of the lack of child labor laws here. The scores of children that are always underfoot now have jobs as nut extractors. They don’t mind since they eat one for every one they put in the bowl. (It’s easy to pick out the snackers because their lips are all black from soot.) Final thoughts:
Although idyllic and interesting for the first three minutes, processing cashews is a line of work that screams for automation. If I ever start a business here, it will definitely be a cashew factory. Think of all the bad nut puns I could put in my corporate communications...the list is endless...

till next time,

Kate


#35


-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 8:29 AM
Subject: What to Watch in West Africa


Dear Everybody,

The lizards like to hang out in our side yard, and I like to watch them. In
Senegal, there are many different kinds of what I think are all in the
lizard family – chameleons, geckos, salamanders – but in our yard there are
mostly just two kinds. One I call the Michigan lizard because he is a royal
blue with a yellow head and a yellow tail and resembles a U of M fan. He is
just under a foot long normally and he is always doing pushups. The other,
which is just the female version of the blue and gold guy, is smaller and
rounder and green with orange spots on her back. There is another kind that
supposedly likes to pee in water urns, which is bad because according to
local wisdom the peed-in water makes a person really sick if they drink it.
But anyway the lizards at our house are so quick they jump up and catch
flies in their mouths. It is pretty cool to watch on a steamy lazy
afternoon when there is nothing else moving but the lizards and the flies.
I also like to watch the sky at night, especially when I am in the village.
The night sky is interesting here because you can see it – you don’t have
self-important streetlights and carlights and city lights blocking out the
glory of the universe. Although often the things that make the night sky
here interesting are things of this earth, like bats en masse swarming
around magnificent palm trees or just regular birds flying at night, backlit
by moonglowing clouds. I think they’re sea gulls but it is hard to tell in
the dark. I’ve never seen large flocks of birds flying in the middle of the
night at home but they do here - maybe because they’re not blinded by light
sources from the ground. Probably the prettiest thing I have seen in the
night sky so far has been lightning bugs. One night in the village they
were not flying near to the ground within catchable distance but high up, a
few meters above the grass roofs, and their were dozens of them. At this
height they blended with the stars and satellites and looked just like a
meteor shower, their lighted tails streaking and falling.
Finally, I like to watch TV5, the French station, which we didn’t get at my
old house. The Tour de France has been on every day recently and there are
also shows unlike any I’ve seen before. There is one called “We Tried
Everything” with a team of comedians that has kind of a talk show format and
some of the guests are real but some of them are the comedians. For
instance, they did one on the subject of the Le Plombier Polonais (the
Polish Plumber), who is currently very popular in France. Even the news did
a spot on him. The Polish Plumber is a handsome man who was chosen because
he resembles David Beckham. Featured on a poster meant to boost tourism in
Poland now that it is part of the EU, the Polish Plumber wears tight blue
jeans and a tight white t-shirt and carries tools and some long pipes. It
was expected that after Poland joined there would be a mass exodus of
workers from Poland to higher-wage paying countries, but written on the
poster is “Je reste ici. Venez nombreux!” i.e., the good-looking plumber is
saying “I’m staying here – come in numbers!” So on the show they had the
Polish plumber as a guest and one of their comediennes as a guest too, but
in the guise of a female plumber. It was pretty funny: she was scratching
her armpits and picking her nose and doing all sorts of beastly things that
you don’t normally see French women doing.
So that’s what’s worth watching over here. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: I
like to watch my cellphone light up with calls from the U.S. too but that’s
a rare treat because my phone apparently has problems getting calls from the
States. However, Kande’s phone works a treat, so please try getting in
touch with me on his phone if you haven’t been able to on mine, even if it
is for only a minute. It’s just good to hear voices from home. I miss home
more than ever – I think it’s because I am getting closer and closer to
being there hence home is always on my mind. Dial: 011 221 618 71 46.
Kande will answer but his English is good enough to understand you if you
speak slowly.

Ciao for now,

Kate


#36 From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:57 AM
Subject: Pop Culture

Dear People of the United States,

Having just spent a week working for the US Embassy in Dakar, I am happy to report that we have improved the public image of our dear country among at least 45 17 – 22 year olds. I was one of a few volunteers that helped with the summer camp program for students of English. The trip to Dakar was great all-around. First of all, I tagged along with some Embassy workers who happened to be going from Kolda to Dakar the day I was supposed to leave, so I got treated to a comfy air-conditioned ride up in a 4-wheel drive. And, while in Dakar, I got to read the latest Harry Potter book (although I had to finish it in three days as a condition of the loan). I liked it better than the last one. Even the trip back wasn’t so bad because I had with me an interesting 8 year-old. She’s a friend of Kande’s family and wanted to spend a few weeks with her dad who lives in Kolda so I volunteered to chaperone. She’d never left Dakar before in her life and so was wide-eyed and craning her neck to see the same boring landscape over and over asking, “What city is this?” every time we would pass a few tin-roofed shacks. She did pee in her seat and puke on the way down, but even with that, it was better than most other sept-place rides I’ve been in.

So, anyway, for the Embassy’s Summer Camp, another volunteer and I were assigned to a high school where we spent every morning doing various activities and games in English. Since the kids selected were the top of their class and came from all over the country, it was an incredible experience – one of the most rewarding of my service. It made me want to be a teacher, but only of the gifted enthusiastic students like these guys were. The last day we had a party and a breakdancing marine came. We watched him “break” and then he did a little instructional session. He was really good – built like a gymnast – and could spin with one shoulder only on the ground, then with one hand only one the ground, but wouldn’t you know, the one move he couldn’t do was, yep you guessed it, my specialty, so when my turn came I was still able to elicit oohs and aahs (or was it ewws and ughs?). Honestly, I don’t know if he really couldn’t do it or just didn’t want to embarrass himself – being a master breakdancer he may be way beyond the worm. Even the Senegalese teachers we were working with got up and started trying to moonwalk and the like. And just like real summer camp we exchanged a lot of numbers and addresses the last day and I hadn’t been gone from our party an hour before I got my first call from a student.

Our strengths were well-balanced at the camp, with me doing the stories and skits and Will, my partner, doing sports and pop culture, e.g., shocking the kids with facts like Britney Spears doesn’t write her own music and R. Kelly is a rapist. It was a glaring reminder of how null I am in pop culture. I am trying to Americanize myself again to prepare my return, but not being there it’s kind of hard to tell if it’s working. You can only get so much from the Internet… It seems lip gloss made a comeback? How big is Akon (if you’ve even heard of him)? People here tell me he’s HUGE in the US right now, but I suspect a bias, given that he is Senegalese.

Yesterday, I went to a spectacular soccer game. The neighborhoods here compete against each other and ours was in the final game yesterday. It was played at the Kolda stadium which has real covered concrete stands and VIP seats (which I fanagled somehow) but only on one side of the field - on the other side there is nothing. The winning team got a three-foot high silver cup. Anyway, the first goal was scored by our team. Now there is this guy that rolls around town in a wheelchair/bike that he pedals with his hands.
He is a really big fan of our team, which has never won in its 20-some year history of existence. The minute we scored, he rolled across the one end of the field (behind the goal) gaining speed and gaining speed and gaining speed till he just about reached the wall on the other side at which point he came to a very abrupt halt, catapulting his body through the air and into the tall weeds! It was frightening! All the kids ran over there in a mass and a minute later he was perched again in his contraption, rolling back, no apparant damage done, swarms of kids trailing behind. Apart from that, it was like an American football game in every other way, with a music section (all drums), organized chants and cheers, people selling snacks (peanuts) and drinks (that you suck out of a plastic bag). There was a yellow card, a red card, a fight in the crowd, an injured player the firemen had to take off the field on a stretcher - all in all, a very satsifying match, especially cause we won. Walking back, I was awash in revelers, who arrived in our neighborhood before me. When I arrived, the crowd had grown, and there was a woman of about 50 running with the cup through the streets cheering. Everybody got to carry it and cheer. The party lasted all night.

Okay, signing off here because it’s time to eat (I write these emails at home). Kande just got back and walked in the door with food calling out “Pizza man!” but really he is just Lachiri Man, since the food he has brought is not a box of pizza but a large bowl of millet couscous with peanut sauce. I don’t know how he knows these obscure fragments of American
culture. The other day he recounted to me the entire saga of “Dallas”
(SueEllen, Bobby and JR). The subject came up because we were talking about George Bush, which made him think of Dallas.

Okay, till next time,

Kate


#37
-----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 3:18 PM
Subject: 99 percent perspiration

Dear Everybody,

Saturday marks my 2-year anniversary in Senegal, but instead of winding down, everything here seems to be speeding up. The last few weeks have been packed from sunup to after sundown, and things aren’t looking any clearer until I quit the country. All of this is good thing – my clients are happily busy and richer than when I found them, and the mental downtime that would be lacking in the States is easily salvaged at the post office or the gare routière. I think I have gotten lucky in that, now, towards the end, all of the really inspirational people are having an effect on me. The "one percent" of inspiration has come at last.

The most inspirational are the three guys I work with who have organized 10 villages into an association to improve their crop yields and sell their gumbo in bulk. The villages they have organized are a few kilometers outside of town, and, having no means of transportation other than their feet, my guys – the management committee – have to walk to each and every village to get their work done. It rained just about every single day in August, and September hasn’t been much drier. I see the president of the groupement, and he is just bone thin, red eyes, and tired. His kid is nice and fat but has bumps all over him. Anyway, none of these guys has a regular job, but they spend all their time organizing this association and it is starting to pay off. On Sunday, the Minister of Youth came to observe one of our village gumbo fields and the work that the women had done. He brought the media and an armed entourage with him – HUGE African soldiers with harrowing guns. My blood ran cold just looking at them. I think I am getting faint of heart in my old age. But I was able to give my little speech in Fulakunda and the Minister was impressed. He gave our association
5 bikes and the equivalent of a thousand dollars. It was much nicer than President Wade’s visit to Kolda. On that day the square was teeming with angry youths, wearing red bands around their arms to peacefully manifest their protest. They weren’t protesting Wade as much as they were their mayor, who is in the same party as Wade and who never shows his face in Kolda. 2006 and 2007 are both election years, so things are heating up.
I’m glad I won’t be here for that excitement. Okay, but the greatest thing about the Minster of Youth is that he’s in his 30’s and guess where his wife lives? Cincinnati! Isn’t that cool?

Saturday – tomorrow – is the groundbreaking for the new processing center for my mango guys. We are starting with the digging of the well, and the work crew has demanded we kill a goat and pour its blood on the spot where they’ll dig. Cleverer than they, we decided to go out, do the blood thing, and hang around for the goat roasting. The bloodbath tomorrow rates right up there with my friend the cybercafé manager who wanted to have a fetishist put a death curse on the person who stole some equipment. The way it works is that if the person doesn’t bring it back by such-and-such date, he will die. But even though the service costs merely one liter of palm wine his boss, fearing its efficacy, forbid him from doing it.

But also inspirational are all the people doing their farming right now, with their donkeys and kids. You see the work they do planting, weeding, harvesting and then turning the grain into food and you can’t help but wonder if they are actually producing as many calories as they are consuming. These are the kind of farmers you’re supposed to have subsidies for, the kind who depend on their two hands and one or two crops for their livelihood. But let me stop here before I start pontificating. I miss everybody and am looking forward to coming home. I should have a firm date by the end of next week.

love,

Kate


#38


----Original Message-----
From: Kate Kowalski [mailto:kathryn_kowalski@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 1:57 PM
Subject: Mom and Dad in West Africa

Dear Everyone,

There are some kids just outside the window as I sit typing this that are chanting the same three non-sensical syllables over and over, really loudly.
Not nearly as nice as the impromptu drum circles – on cans and buckets – the boys in the neighborhood sometimes treat us to. But since I only have three more weeks here in Kolda (and then two more in Thies and Dakar), I am not going to be the one to go outside and make them scram. Nor is anyone else – they’ re all too lethargic from the heat and Ramadan (no food, no water from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.). It has been in the 90s since the beginning of last week and the nights haven’t been much cooler. I’ve been fasting too except when I am with other Americans, in which case I will extravagantly indulge in a glass of water during daylight hours. I am just glad my parents were here when everybody was well-hydrated and not so crabby.

One of the highlights of their week-long visit was a trip to a friend’s village, where she had musicians and dancers waiting for us. We could hear them before we even got out of the car, and they made a sort of procession to come to the road and meet us. Once we all arrived in the village we settled in the shade of a healthy mango tree, the musicians and us and about 50 or so villagers, the vast majority of whom were 8 and under. The dancers were more the kind you join than the kind you sit and watch, so my dad jumped in with both hands and feet and entertained the villagers. By the end everyone had danced to the nyanyarus (a Pulaar fiddle) and water drums (empty gourd bowls turned upside down on a basin of water). After a lunch of chicken and rice, we tried to hike out to the rice paddy. I wanted to show them as close as you can come to paradise here – it is so beautiful and quiet down there, all lined with tall palm trees and no one around but birds. We only got about a third of the way there through the tall grass before the conversation turned to snakes and that was enough to turn our little party in reverse and send us back to the safety of our hut.

While they were here we also visited to a nutritional recuperation and education center, for which my parents’ parish had collected a monetary gift of support. The nun that runs the center, Sister Valerie, showed us around and told us how children end up there. Some cases are caused by a genuine lack of food, others by, as she put it, l’ignorance et la paresse: ignorance and laziness (my mom suggested translating this “lack of information and procrastination” I guess so as not to portray the nun as unkind). Examples of ignorance would be some age-old superstitions, particularly among the Pulaar, that if you give a child meat he will grow up to be a thief, or if you give a child fruit, his teeth won’t grow in properly. Among the few lowlights of their trip was the 12-hour ride down from Dakar only to disembark from our car into muddy traffic-clogged streets in the middle of Kolda. One look at my dad’s face and I knew he was cursing his moment of folly when he agreed to accompany my mother to West Africa. But they both survived their eight days, as I have my 27 months.

I will miss bathing outside, although I will not miss dancing while I wash to keep flies and mosquitoes off me. Nothing like a fly landing on you to make you feel dirty again. I know I will miss the food, although I will not miss cooking it. Most of all I will miss the ubiquitous kids, all around you night and day, even if they are excessively noisy. Binta, who is not quite three and lives across the street and whose head is spotted with about twenty teeny pigtails, comes over on her own to visit, even after dark.
Only in Africa.

I can’t end my last email from Africa without at least a little political
messaging: Let’s give our president George W. Bush a big thank you for his proposal to curb farm subsidies, and support his proposal in Congress. This may be the only time you see the Kansas Farmers Union, Oxfam, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Environmental Defense, the WTO and George Bush all on the same side of an issue, an indication that you should be there too. Being here in the midst of so many people who work so very hard for so very little, and being hungry as a result of these outdated policies, the issue is near and dear to me.

Okay, well, lots of love and see (most of) you soon,

Kate