Mean Streets

Life moves pretty quickly in the mean streets of Dakar.  As soon as I got here and began to get settled, it was time to start thinking about my next step.  With the countdown to my close of service, a.k.a. COS, now under a year and running out quickly, I have to now devote a part of my attention to what I'll be doing after Peace Corps.  Similar to my attitude coming out of undergraduate, I started out with a fixation on graduate school.  In both instances, I was sure that graduate school would be my next step up until about a year out.  In both instances, when the time came to make hard choices in terms of schools and programs, I began to see the value of other options.  It's true, I've never held a real 9-5 job for more than a few months at a time and turned down internship opportunities during college so I could study abroad.  While the top MBA programs are accepting younger and younger applicants, the ones that I am looking hardest at have an average age around 27 and the extra 2 years of seasoning certainly couldn't hurt my chances at all.  Also, a nice little American life sounds really good right now.  Get a job that I don't have to take home with me.  Watch sports during the week.  See my family.  Play ultimate on the weekends.  Occasionally break routine.  I used to dread the monotony of American suburbia.  Now, I see that that type of life is what everybody is striving for and the possibility of being bored is nothing to be afraid of.  Life's only monotonous if you stop looking for adventures.  You're in complete control.

It's been a busy month for me.  It started out with what was recently renamed to Field Orientation Training (FOT) which involved trainees visiting their permanent sites for a few days before finishing training.  As I mentioned previously, I was responsible for all 3 of the volunteers being placed in the Dakar region.  The visit involved visiting the trainees' future host families, introducing them to potential project partners in their area, and introducing them to the city of Dakar.  We had 3.5 days to accomplish all of this, so everything had to be meticulously planned out ahead of time and there was a lot of running around.  Also, it was simply one person to handle, so I had to employ another volunteer in Dakar to help me.  After those 3.5 days of madness, I returned to Thies to meet the trainees in the Thies region and assist in training for a few days.  Upon completing my responsibilities there, I made my first trip to a city in the north called St. Louis.

St. Louis is the colonial capital of Senegal and is a hot tourist destination.  Unfortunately, my purposes for being there were completely work related.  Every year, Peace Corps helps to organize and event benefiting the local talibe.  Quick refresher on the talibe system, these are young boys that are sent away from their home to study the Koran under a religious leader called a marabout.  They often live in very poor conditions and have to beg for alms on the street.  So, there was a soccer tournament for the local talibe and Peace Corps set up informational booths and activities for the kids who weren't playing to participate in.  In the morning of day 1, there were fun things like coloring, name writing, or face painting and informational booths like microgardening and nutrition.  In the afternoon, there were physical activities including and obstacle course and frisbee.  I helped with the coloring activity in the morning and frisbee in the afternoon and basically ensured kids were sharing properly, that everyone was included, and that any fights that broke out were broken up quickly.  I imagine there were a couple hundred kids who came out throughout the day, so it was naturally a pretty exhausting day for me.  The next day was the actual soccer match between volunteers and the older talibe.  The talibe had homefield advantage in more ways than one and, as a result, were able to win pretty handily, but everyone had fun and it was another chance to talk to the kids and give them a chance to have fun and act like a kid for once.  It was a few days filled with talking to kids, hanging out with fellow volunteers, and getting to know a new city.  Overall, I'm very happy I signed up for this event and will be looking for more excuses to get out of Dakar in the future.

After I returned from St. Louis, I dove right into finalizing planning for the Ultimate Frisbee Tournament.  The tournament was held in Dakar on Saturday, April 18th and involved 5 teams and around 60 players.  We played a round robin, then the top 2 teams played in the final while the next 2 teams played in the 3rd place game.  I had commissioned prizes from my artisan friends for the champions, the most spirited team, and individual awards.  The individual competitions included a hammer accuracy contest, a huck distance contest, and a layout contest on a slip'n'slide.  We only had 11 players on our team (7 are on the field at a time) and played 5 games of one hour each, so I was naturally exhausted by the end of the day.  Nonetheless, I had been looking forward to that day for months and it lived up to everything I was hoping it would be.  Sunday frisbee is wonderful and I'm so thankful to be in a site where I can play frisbee every week, but it just doesn't have that same competitive edge that the tournament did.  Even though I got a little sick afterwards, I'm already looking forward to next year and hoping it can be even bigger and better than this one.

That basically brings us up to date.  Other than that, I've just been carrying on my work.  I still teach English at the ELI whenever I can.   I still meet with the women of Guediawaye every now and again and they've even started a non-profit association.  I have also recently stepped up the work in my school garden as we're starting to get a bunch of moringa leaves that need drying and processing.  I'm also still working on that product catalog for that artisanal village.  It's a long ways off, but I'm making progress.  Finally, I've started teaching entrepreneurship at the School for Tourism and Hotel Services and will start another entrepreneurship training soon.  I've been getting pressured from on high to work more in entrepreneurship and business creation, so I imagine my work will involve a lot of that from now on.  Looking towards the future, the new volunteers will be installed on the 11th and 12th of May, but I don't have any other big trips planned over the next month.  It looks like I might have to get through another few weeks of work around Dakar before my next chance to get out.