Happy 2010 (resolution enclosed)!

Hello Everybody!

This time I have no excuse! It has been at least 6 months since I updated my blog or updated my pictures. It is part of my new year’s resolution to be a better blogger and picture-uploader. Since it has been many many months since my last blog update, I am going to do chapters and gloss over some details.

August 2009: Ramadan and Torrential rain!

The month of August was fairly uneventful except for the days and weeks of non-stop rain which prevented work and only furthered the Ramadan lull. This last year I decided, out of solidarity with my Muslim family, to fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Fasting involves not eating or drinking while the sun is up. I woke up at 5:30 am, ate some breakfast, went back to sleep and waited until sundown to break the fast with my family at 7:15 pm. Due to the oppressing heat and a fear of dehydration I drank a lot of water. It was a great experience. Although it was exhausting and being hungry is not fun, I really think my host family here appreciated the effort and made it clear to me that they appreciated it. Fasting also gave me a good excuse to break the fast: eat dates, warm milk, and a meat sandwich. It was probably one of my favorite meals all month. This is an extremely important month for Muslims so a lot of time is spent praying and meditating; work is nonexistent. Those that are forced to work (farmers, salespeople, etc.) do so reluctantly and with very little effort. On the plus side, the month gave me a good excuse to just sit back and enjoy the people and life here in Fatick during the very enjoyable rainy days.

September 2009: Ramadan ends and the heat rushes back in!

The end of Ramadan was marked by Korite, the huge 5 days eating extravaganza! Hurray! Everyone can eat during the day again! It was a fun holiday because I too had been fasting and it was monumental to eat at midday again. During September we also got the chance to move regional houses in Kaolack. It was a much needed, and much appreciated move, despite the hard work of physically moving everything to the new house. The rains also slowly petered out and the hot humid fall rushed in, rather unpleasantly. This is the time when everyone gets their late crops planted to take advantage of the final rains. As a result, once again, work was slow but not non-existent. I began planning for a week long Youth Workshop focusing on entrepreneurship. For this I decided to write a Small Projects Assistance grant and get financing from USAID. The grant itself took a lot of work, but getting local organizations and the Senegalese government on board was the biggest challenge. As part of any USAID project, at least 10 percent of the grant must be contributed by the community, so I had to get money from already cash strapped organizations. The workshop was a tough sell: unlike other larger NGOs, I was not going to actually help pay for the participants to start a business. At the end I found a very enthusiastic partner and the City’s Youth Council was happy to participate.

October 2009: GREs and off to Mexico

The month of October I focused mainly on planning for the workshop (logistics, meals, participants, etc) and studying for the GREs, which I took in Dakar. The day after, I flew home to Mexico for two weeks to attend a conference that was honoring my father for his work in the field of animal nutrition in Mexico. It was a great treat to go and be with my father. I also really enjoyed spending time with my sister and family friends I have not seen for years! Needless to say I ate a lot of great food and got my fair share of hot showers.

November 2009: Living Latent

Upon my return to Mexico it was back to work , trying to capitalize on the couple weeks before the feast of the sacrifice: Tabaski. The weeks were spent planning the Youth Entrepreneurship Workshop and preparing the Handicapped Center for another artesian expo; both were to be held the first week of December.
Tabaski was on Thanksgiving day. As good, flexible Paves that we are, we decided to celebrate it a couple days early. This year I was truly by the cooking that went on. The newest intake of volunteers (that arrived in country in August) is a group of talented cooks. They made some very tasty food including: millet bread that was as good as any corn bread, a succulent turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, and a pumpkin roll (made from squash) that was to die for. Tabaski, days after, was a great, and overwhelming as usual. Although having already celebrated and witnessed the mandatory ram slaughtering I was not as aghast and was able to hide my winces. The holiday was also a great time to see some of my host brothers that have since moved to Dakar in search for work. It felt like a family reunion. The food was abundant as usual and ram showed up intermittently in the food bowl for the next couple weeks as I slowly made my way through a sheep leg I was given.

December 2009: Business in the front, camels in the back.

The first week of December was a busy one! It started with the Youth Entrepreneurship Workshop I had spent months planning and getting financing for. Watching it all come to fruition was incredible. The week was focused on getting young people in Fatick (17-24) to think creatively about their environments and hopefully open businesses in the city, rather than constantly seeing Dakar or Europe as the solution. The first few days were an intensive “What is a Business?” course that I taught, first in French, but after a while it just switched to Wolof. Speaking in Wolof really opened up the people in the class and we began having real discussions. The second half of the week was a lot more practical. We did some business simulations and some really interesting discussions with microfinance institutions which paid us a visit. All and all it was a gratifying week and it was incredible to see how involved everyone was in the class.

That weekend was the artesian expo in Dakar, Unfortunately, the handicapped center was not able to attend but I went and attended a class on pricing products for tourists and local markets. It was really interesting albeit a little repetitive. It was too bad the group from Fatick could not make it. After that is off on a long trek up North!

The trek was one of the most interesting things I have done in Senegal. It was cool to explore a completely different culture (Pulaar instead of Wolof) and see a whole new landscape (the Sahara!). The trip involved going up to Ndioum, the extreme north of the country, then hitchhiking to Ourousougui, at the far east border with Mauritania and Mali, then going through the center of the country to Linguere. Everything went really smoothly, although it took almost 10 hours to get to Ndioum, 8 to Ourousogui and 12 more to Linguere. The trip through the center was fascinating as there is no road. I road on a pick up truck through bush paths, hitting random villages where no one spoke Wolof, and seeing a lot of camels. My favorite part of the trip was juts being able to see a culture that is so isolated from the rest of the country, where no one spoke Wolof, and that lead extremely hard lives. The people are mostly herders that migrate from watering hole to watering hole with some permanent villages scattered around. Throughout the twelve hours of trip I saw 3 concrete buildings and one cell phone tower. It was literally the middle of no where.

An incredible trip all around, and I came back to Fatick to do some small consulting for a couple business owners before going up to Dakar to pick up my parents and sister! They came for almost a month and we truly enjoyed traveling the country. I am so grateful that I got to see Senegal from fresh eyes. It was incredibly invigorating! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy New Year everybody! I will update soon (its my New Year’s resolution after all)! HOYA SAXA!

(Pictures on Facebook soon!)