A Busy October

October was a shockingly busy month for me! It kicked off with excitement on the second, when my health hut hosted an event to sensitize mothers in my village about common childhood diseases. We focused on the symptoms, treatment, and prevention of diarrhea in children under five, which is super prevalent in my village from September through December. After lunch that day a donkey cart pulled up with microphones and speakers and a car battery to get the party started. About 100 women showed up with their kids and had the opportunity to share their knowledge over the loudspeakers. Mothers that correctly answered our questions won prizes of laundry soap, handwashing soap, bleach, powdered milk, and sugar. I was blown away by the knowledge these women already possessed, including danger signs of dehydration and specific recipes for mixing oral rehydration salts. It was a fun and educational afternoon and maybe the best part was that everyone in the village was subjected to hours of loudspeaker education whether they wanted it or not!

The fun continued over Tabaski, the huge Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to obey the will of the divine. Abraham's faith not only saved his son's life, but got them a delicious animal to sacrifice instead! In my village we celebrated this ancient event with a delicious animal of our own, a ram. Tabaski is a multi-day holiday that involves a great deal of praying and socializing and family time and is quite lovely. But for me it was all about the ram. He showed up in our compound a few days before Tabaski and happily munched on grass and tried to fight our donkey, clueless as to the upcoming holiday. I tried to give him a head's up the day before so he could savor his last meals and sunset, but I'm not sure he understood my Wolof. On the morning of Tabaski my family members donned their fancy holiday outfits and headed to the mosque to pray and greet everyone else in the village. Then they returned home and spent the better day transforming our ram from this docile creature...

into this savory lunch! Lunch was really fun because my entire neighboring family came over and ate with us. Instead of my ten person family we all of a sudden had fifty people around our lunch bowls! I loved it. And all morning I got to watch the various stages in between live ram and lunch, which I have decided to withhold from this blog. Let's just say we used every part of the animal and my vegetarian parents would have been horrified. My host dad grilled various cuts of meat on this tiny charcoal grill, one mom and I made onion sauce for lunch, another mom fried up some potato wedges, and my third mom made a tasty beverage from mango juice and yogurt and ice - yum! I also enjoyed observing the various methods my family used to make the meat last for all four days of Tabaski, including drying it in the sun and packing it with salt. It was all so Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the evening I put on a fancy dress and walked around town with some friends to greet everyone and meet all the family members that were in town from Dakar. It was a wonderful holiday!

After Tabaski I spent a week having some crazy eye-opening experiences with various Senegalese health structures, which I'll write about later. Then I hosted an American study abroad student who has been living in Dakar since September. I was nervous before she arrived that she wouldn't be able to roll with the adventure of life in village, but she couldn't have been a more enthusiastic guest! She even came to the fields with me and my family because we were smack in the midst of harvest season. The photo to the right is my friend's peanut field. The men direct metal plows pulled by horses and the women follow behind and gather the peanuts into bundles and carry them home.

I continue to be amazed by the work ethic of every single member of my community when I go to the fields. My guest and I worked for about an hour in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the afternoon in the shade playing with the kids. Meanwhile, my neighbors aged fourteen to sixty worked in the field for six to nine hours a day in the October sun, which is quite hot. The average temperature is still around 100 degrees every day of October. But there's so much work to be done - beans and millet have been harvested, peanuts are in the works, and corn is up next. The photo on the left shows the collection of millet stalks after harvest.

Health work, holidays, harvest season, October had it all going on! Because so many people travel to be with their families for Tabaski, there was a rash of weddings in my village. Also, I don't know if it was the sudden protein overload from ram meat or what, but four babies were born in the week following Tabaski, meaning four baptisms were hosted the following week. Everyone was thoroughly exhausted from all the socializing at the end of the month and needed a nice nap, like my brother in the photo to the right. Coming up in November is the continuation of harvest season and, allegedly, the introduction of cold season. I am feeling skeptical about that, considering the daily high temperature in my village has not dipped below 95 degrees in the six months since I moved in.

Last week I experienced an unusually non-sweaty morning and I called a friend to share my excitement about cool season. She let me know that we were experiencing a solar eclipse and quipped, "a cool day in Senegal is more rare than a solar eclipse." True enough. Stay tuned for cool season!