Outback Adventures & NGO Work

Blog blog blog!

I have a very good reason for not having written in my blog lately: last week was vacation so I was out in the middle of the boondocks, away from internet access, hiking through the savanna and jungle, visiting little villages and learning yet another local language: Pular. Where do I even start?! So much has happened:

Kate, Megan, Ed, and I made our way via Sept-place and bus to the furthest south-eastern corner of Senegal called the Bassari Region. We were the backpackers; the active bunch the group that was not going on the city-hopping tour around Senegal, nor the Mali trip forty hours away by bus, nor the cultural tours through Spain, Morocco, or Paris. We planned for dirt, sweat, and a whole lot of green because, when you’re living in a city like Dakar, fresh air and trees become first priority for vacation. Then there’s the allure of possibly finding climbing amid the sole rough terrain in all of Senegal and, oh yeah baby, we climbed the highest mountain in Senegal –all three-hundred and forty-something meters of it! On top of one of these mountains -- er, hills -- Megan and I did actually manage to find a patch of climbable rock and it was bliss. Fingers touching rock = heaven.

What else was there to find besides virgin patches of climbable roche?: waterfalls, caves, monkeys, and wasps. The first three were great, but the last one not so much. Amidst the call of baboons, the four of us and our two guides would set off up steep, jungly paths deeply reminiscent of northern Thailand trekking and the sweat would flow. Pausing for a breathtaking view of a cascade, majestically pouring over the verdure of a nearby cliff side, we would continue upwards, perhaps parting the foliage to find ourselves on a plateau with a small village of thatched huts, or maybe winding through with the river only to suddenly perceive the waterfall tumbling beneath us. Meditation came easily in this space, with the roar of water muting both the words of my companions and the murmurs of my mind. But then you have the wasps. They crept up on me as I rounded the corner, climbing this fabulous blocky riverbed rock, and swarmed Ed first. His cry was my warning call to remain still and relaxed –or as relaxed as you can be while still maintaining a firm hold on some juggy rock a few feet off of the ground…just far enough that you can’t reach safety without making a few moves. Ed got away with two stings, and I was saved by my favorite guide of all time, Jibi, who hazarded the wasps to put me on his shoulders and back me away and into safety. I came away with one sting on my arm and a few imperceptible ones on my fingertips. All I can say is that you’ve never been more keenly aware of a wasp than when you watch it hover over your arm hairs and fingertips, knowing that it has registered you as danger and wondering when it will decide to take action. I was lucky as hell, pardon my French, and Jibi didn’t even receive one sting during the rescue mission.

Okay, now you know about the wasps, but I have not appropriate emphasized the sweat. No, that’s an understatement; the SWEAT. Rivulets running down our arms without end -that was our lot for the first day of trekking on flat, un-shaded savanna terrain between the city of Kédougou and the village of Bandafassi. Why would we do this to ourselves? 1) We wanna walk. It felt so good to get my heart pumping again. 2) Who wants to pay for a Quatre-quatre car at 50,000 francs par jour (~$100)?!?! We are poor students. We definitely brought canned food to save on lunches and sterilized shower water so that we wouldn’t have to pay for the bottled stuff. When our guide, Alfar, found out about that, we suddenly started getting free breakfasts at all of the campements. Its good to be a starving student! But I digress; the SWEAT. I never knew the true significance of this word until I perspired my entire bodyweight over the course of three days on that baked, savanna road. The shaded jungle treks, with only demi-rivultes running along the brow and not-quite-so-soaked clothing, felt exceptionally mild on the following few days. Ah! It was good to have to pee again! And dad, your Elmer’s Glue sunblock is the nectar of the gods; t’aint any other goo that’ll stick in spite of those rivers of sweat! (PS Don’t worry peeps; we drank LOTS of water.)

Other highlights?...

Learning some traditional pottery-making impromptu with the women of a hill-top village. I have an open invite to come back, perhaps during my rural visit in three weeks, to learn from them. So cool.

Alfonso the ity-bity monkey at the Dindenfelo campement. You will see pictures of him later. Suffice to say that he actually put his little lips to the lip of some fine china in an attempt to steal come coffee from breakfast. Absolute cutie, little rascal, and wild animal all in one.

Peanuts! I’d never had a fresh peanut before this trip! Sure, I’d already realized the folly that is American peanuts. Pshaw! Those things are stale by the time they get to us. Real peanuts must be had in the country whose main export is peanuts. But in Dakar, I’d only had the grilled ones. Who knew that you ccould have them uncooked, with that lovely green flavor still embedded deep within? Since it is peanut season, every household that we stopped by offered us handfuls of peanuts fresh out of the ground. I found the peanut plants exceedingly interesting, with the peanuts as sorts of fungal-esk growths on the roots. I didn’t get to go out and pick peanuts with my buddies because I was feeling ill, but they got to get down and dirty, pulling up the stalks to uncover the root structures plein de cacahuetes – abundantly full of peanuts. These bundles of plants could be seen pilled on top of shade structures and unshelled peanuts were out drying in every yard. Peanuts were everywhere.

Anyhow, all in all it was a great trip. There is so much to be said, but you’ll have to pry those stories out of me later! Since I’ve been back in Dakar, I’ve become absolutely inundated in business and realized that I need to recover my internal balance. But aside from some mild kinks in the works, I’m really happy with what I’m doing here. I’ve buckled down and decided to study hard at Wolof. It’s getting to the point where I can actually carry on fragmented conversations, but conversations none-the-less. I was getting sick of getting through the lengthy intros only to have my conversant discover that I had nothing else to say and little else that I could understand. I’m doing a lot of work with my internship co-coordinating CIPFEM, the student-founded NGO providing a tutoring and activities program for twenty girls here in Dakar. The girls are absolutely fabulous and we’ve partnered each of them up with a mentor, which is working out wonderfully. One of our volunteers has started teaching them karate and we have plans for doing goals and dreams collages, a soccer game, a leadership project for the older gals so that they can take initiative and teach the other girls, and many many other things. We’re hoping to bring in a local artist, Kan-si, to do a project with them, which I’m really excited about. This Friday we’re hosting a family orientation event so that we can help inculcate greater understanding in the goals of our organization and get to know them. Doing this organizing while simultaneously navigating multicultural interactions between local volunteers, student volunteers, and the girls themselves is proving a real learning experience. There are so many internal needs of this organization to be balanced at once, such as not imposing American values on the girls through our choice of tutoring activities and not transgressing the local volunteers’ need for autodetermination, which has repercussions on a national level, by overlooking their input. We cannot contribute to the persistence of relations of inequality and residual colonial relations by implementing our own ideas without respecting their need for a voice and choice. It is that negation of their choices that perpetuates the colonial mindset in the first place –and even well-meaning NGOs can take part in that continual subjugation of African countries by overlooking the local voices. I refuse to take part in that, but it is a tangled web to navigate in practice.

Well, I’ll be writing more later. Love to everybody!


Peace and hugs,

Jocelyn Price