July 10th...relieved

Today was a better day. Though I had intended on going to take the malaria test first thing in the morning, there was a tourist couple staying at the campement who were driving to Kedougou to send some emails and offered Yohan and I to tag along. Perfect. Free ride, and WiFi synch of my tablet. Good to catch up with the world a bit, though no news from my family at all. Sad.

Anyhow, I also took advantage of the ride to buy 20 liters of water, vitamin C and more mosquito spray. Ready for the jungle again. Hehe!

It was weird to be in a pseudo developed city again after two weeks away. Not sure I liked it, though being able to buy fruits and veggies whenever I want is such a treat.

When we got back to Indar I did ta the test. The interaction with the interim kid subbing for the doctor who was in Kedougou for the day was quite interesting and representative of the lethargic effortless behavior of countryside villagers and hence why there doesn't seem to be any potential of improvement.

In any case, the test came out negative. What a relief. It is probably just a bad cold or bronchitis. I showered, changed, took a gram of paracetamol, and a gram of vitamin C, and we ate lunch.

We all rested after lunch. The early afternoon was hot and humid. Amadou prepared some tea which took forever to be ready. The tourist couple decided to drive to the waterfall of Dindefelo (where I intended to bike to and spend a couple of days this week). Yohan and Amadou were offered to join. I jumped on the opportunity to go as well, that way I would check out the place and know whether biking all the way there would be a waste of time.

July 9th...rough day

Uffff...I definitely caught something. I woke up with the worst headache and quite feverish. I didnt feel like talking to anyone. I just wanted to take off, yet stayed a bit because I wanted to experience the early morning in the village.

The breakfast was only a cup of coffee and a couple of cookies. Of well, what to expect for USD2?!

Soon after I took of. The sky was very and quite threatening. I just hoped it wouldn't rain. I was not in the mood for that.

A kid led me to the trail to get to the next hill village of Andiel. Slight same scenario as to get up to Iwol, but this time, the trail was way harder and hidden and I definitely thought I had gotten lost many times. Or perhaps it was the threat of snakes that worried me the most. The potential of already having Malaria was bothering me enough to the get bitten by a poisonous snake. Anyhow...what else was I gonna do. I kept on hiking and jumping from tock to rock to try not to walk into the grass. I definitely got a serious sweat out of it. The views of the valley were incredible.

When I finally got atop the hill, I was so frustrated as I was convinced I had accidentally looped bad to Iwol. I felt so stupid. I kept walking into the village and happily realized that no, I had made it to Andiel. At last. But as expected, barely anyone in the village other than the old women and new mums with their new born.

I was so feverish I needed water. My two bottles were empty. So I asked where to find the well pump. "Down" they replied. Ufff...I didn't feel like walking around the village more and so made my way "down" hoping that it was not all the way down. Hmmm...it actually was all the way down. :-(  allllll the way down in the valley. As I was hiking down, I couldn't believe that women would actually climb all this way with buckets on top of their heads. Seemed inhumane for an NGO to have dug a well pump down there when the village is all the way up. Why?! (The pump was built by the Saudi Arabia Fund for Development...no comment)

Once I got my bottles filled and purified, I went to salute the woman who was farming nearby. She had something to her her smile. I should have known. She told me her name was Angel. When she saw I had fever she told me to go lay down by her hut under the tree, she would come up later to check on me.

So I went. It felt good to be in the shade. I watched her beautiful kids play around. Soon after se came up and brought over a bamboo mat she laid down on the floor and told me to rest and nap a bit. She would come by again later and bring me food.

The place was dream like. A big tree in the middle of the valley. A hut, couple of kids running and laughing around.

I went in and out of sleep for a good 2 to 3 hours. She later came by to see my photos of Ethiwar. She happened to be Bernard's cousin and used to live in Ethiwar. She was so happy to see everyone on the photos.

Then she went to a "corvee" nearby while her three kids where caring for each other. The 11yr old daughter was the one cooking for all three...and coincidentally for me as well. But I had zero appetite.

Later on I asked Angel if like the rest of the women, she was selling jewelry. She said yes with a big smile. Her stuff was up in the village. She actually ran up and down to bring it back to me. I felt it would be a nice way to thank her to buy a couple of pieces from her. So I bought a few things for Angelina from Angel. :-)

After resting, I felt strong enough to get up and walk...ufff...the sun was high up and strong. But I had to get going. I just wanted to shower up and lay down on a mattress. So I left. It was a long walk, in the dry hot sun hoping all along that I was on the right path and that Indar would pop up in the horizon soon.

After an hour and a half of walking, passing by the Patassy military training camp, I got lucky when some guy offered to give me a ride on his motorcycle.

It was good to arrive back at the campement. I showered and changed in the open air bathroom because Yohan, my hut mate had locked it while he went to Kedougou for the day. So then I just went to hang out in the tree roots with the guys, and rest.

The evening went by quick. A tourist couple from Dakar arrived. They seemed cool. He from Senegal and she from france. They apparently ordered a little baby goat to be grilled for dinner. We ate it all together. It was the worst goat I ever ate. Barely cooked. I forced myself though as I wanted to make sure to gain strength and most importantly, to not loose any weight over whatever bug I had caught.

Tomorrow I will go take the Malaria test. Strangely enough, after being so sick and losing so much weight in Nepal, the potential of having malaria didn't so much scare me for the excruciating pain, vomiting, or high fever, but rather for the sole risk of losing more weight.

Finally I am in bed. I just hope tomorrow will be better. I miss Angelina.

A demain...

July 8th...Iwol!

As I am seeing lots of young fathers and family heads just here doing absolutely nothing day after day, sitting by a tree, I am thinking about the industry of remittances and how the Asian culture is so much different from the African culture. Let me explain myself.

In Asia, young men or most men in age of working, with a little bit of smarts and motivation, will be willing to sacrifice their family life at home to travel abroad and work hard to make enough money year over year to send back home via remittances to help support their family. That way, entire villages in Asia manage to grow economically and in terms of infrastructure. Micro enterprises open up. Kids get schooled. Villagers have access to more information, and most importantly, the growing generations have higher and higher ambitions. This often creates entire villages of women farmers and entrepreneurs, which does inevidently increase and improve the role of women in society.

I went through so many villages in Bangladesh, India, and even Nepal where I saw a clear majority of women vs men, and when I asked why, I was told that the men were working abroad either in Dubai, Qatar, or the capital.

Here, no one is missing. Maybe only a couple of men are working in Dakar, but the rest of the men are just here doing nothing but drinking, smoking, and sitting around waiting for the day to pass.

When I ask them what they want to do they mention some low ambitious careers, which still require a minimum level of education. Yet for the majority, they seem to refuse to seriously commit to going to school or to even catch with the years of schooling they missed. It is not as if, like in Asia, going to school meant not helping your patents generate money in the farms, since here, the farming season is relatively short due to strong dependency on rain water.

I find this all so discouraging and frustrating. There is most definitely no impression of any kind of desire to improve their livelihood, but rather to continue being complacent. Everyone in the village is wearing each day different T-shirt imprinted by some past NGO or Foundation projects. Does it mean that the village and its livelihood is on its way to reach Asian or even Latin American countries? If you ask me, my answer is a clear NO.

On the other hand, are the people unhappy? Not necessarily. So is complacency negative? Perhaps not. But comparatively speaking, what a contrasting shock with my journey through Asia where you feel this constant vibrating need to improve and grow. You do feel a sense of fatigue and struggling at the same time, whereas here, in eastern Senegal, I wouldn't necessarily say, but rather that it feels that the villagers are waiting for something to happen, or for some new NGO to do something for them.

I definitely have a strong feeling that all the aid organizations pouring millions of dollars every year to help Africa are taking the wrong approach. Do I have a solution? Not sure, other than perhaps asking the locals what they want and crafting the solution with them rather than offering the things they might not even need.

I have been here for almost two weeks and it seen a single Peace Corps kid come around the villages yet. Yet, there are a ton of them located in Kedougou, 15km away in the regional capital. What are they doing? I don't know. Especially when the villages where I am now are part of the ethnical minority and have a definite need of training on farming techniques and livelihood. The villagers sont really have any source of revenue. They don't produce enough crop to make a real growing business out of it. And malaria is definitely constantly hitting the population. Sad, when the fertile land is far from missing, the vitality and energy could be here, and the natural environment produced way enough herbs and such to produce natural mosquito repellant.

Is the fact of having a very cheap malaria medicine available in every village a real solution for people to change their behavior a start really wanting to make an effort to protect themselves from malaria? I have my doubt...

Anyhow, these are thoughts I had this morning while sitting inside of the comfy roots of the big central tree of the village while observing the "life" of the village.

My plan for today was actually to depart from Indar and head to Iwol, the largest Bedik village in the region.

Lethargic me, I took off at 1:30pm, for a 7km walk in the sun, on the red laterite powder road. Ufff...it was only 7km but felt twice longer, like many of those days on the Camino, when we were convinced that the authorities measured it all wrong. Anyhow...the 7km was OK compared to the climb up I then had to take to get all the way on top of the mountain where the village is located. The fake thief pseudo guides at Ibel, before attacking the hike up, tried to convinced me that I would need their help to get up there. Honestly, when someone tells me the village is atop the 600m high mountain, after the trails in Nepal, it is almost a joke. All I got to do is hike up towards the clearly visible top. Trail or no trail. Oh well...just makes the hike a not spicier. Especially since the hills are like bumps and not chains of mountain. So no way to get lost. Just go up until you can no more.

Anyhow...on top of that the wild trekking I did in Indonesia help me improve my instinct quite about in the jungle. And as soon as I saw an old woman carrying logs of wood on her head while pulling a family of goats up, I knew I was on the right track.

And when I arrived at the top...wow! What a surprise! It was like seeing one of those villages they create specifically for movies like Lord of the Ring. Spectacular and timeless. Removed from the world.

Not many toubab, white people, go through the village usually, so they were a bit weirded out and shocked to see me appear, especially on my own without a guide.

Though most young people were in the field, farming, the people left in the village were mostly the younger kids and the older women. These women were as traditional as can get. Bare chested. Ears covered in piercings. Nose pierced with a long tooth pick, bull ring style. Hair braided and covered colorfully. Kids running around naked everywhere. Goats of all sizes all over. Some of the women stomping millet using a wooden mortar and a long wooden pole. Some women breast feeding their babies. Other women pumping water down the hill. Others bringing back buckets of water on their head.

Because I know that it is farming season, I know that the resat of the village is out farming and will be back in a couple of hours to celebrate.

I knew there was a sort of old campement called Jean Baptiste. So I looked for it. I expected it to actually look like a mini campement with the infrastructure of it. To my good surprise, not at all. It was just a couple of huts like any other almost, among the rest of the village.

I found it. Knew that Jean Baptiste was in Dakar, so chatted with his daughter(s?) to find out about price and meals. The daughters were laughing because they had no clue. It was so cute and funny. Finally they told me the price for a bed and two meals. 1,000CFA! Cheaper would be free. Lol

So I drop my bags, and walk with one of them to fill up a couple of buckets of water further down. The place was magical. The water pump was not as easy as Indar's, so I helped a few women to fill up their buckets. Took advantage to get a mini work out done that way. Hehe

After that, I just walked around alone. I just wanted to walk everywhere and discover every little secret corner the place seemed to have. My favorite spot was atop a big rock under the cheese tree. It so happened to be near the blacksmith of the village, and also in front of the place where the "corvee" mask takes his rest and changes. But best of all, I have an overlooking view of the village. Beautiful!

So I sat there for hours, taking a few photos but also soaking up the village vibe and activities as the farmers were coming back.

Bunch of kids came up to me to chit chat. After a while, it was getting late. As the sun was setting, the men were finishing up the palm wine that had just arrived fresh from the valley before getting ready for the evening of singing and dancing.

I walked back to the campement, showered, and sat down, watching the women shower their babies, and prepare the dinner. The moon was rising up, almost full, casting just enough light to be able to fully distinguish the silhouettes of everyone.

Then dinner was ready. We all sat around, men with men, women with women and kids. Absolute silence.

I was tired. I finished eating and went to bed.

I hope the mosquito net holds strong, and that the bad ass ugly duck walking around doesn't try to walk into my room.

Sweet kind of quiet dreams and we can hear the party starting a few houses down the village. I am too tired to stay up and check it out.

Bonne nuit!