Fatou, my second Mom and Adama's second wife, is a ball of energy. She starts her mornings before the sun comes up, stoking the morning coals before heading out to the family onion and tomato patches to water, a 4km round trip.

She has kids sprawled on her all day long and loves to joke. She also loves to ask me for money just about every other day. I try to say no with a smile and give her bread or milk instead.

It could just be another mefloquine morning, but I woke up to dreams flying around my bedroom, and my heart feeling heavy with the weight of two years in front of me in Senegal, in Mouit, in this very hut of mine. Fortunately, Tom Robbins has been keeping me realistic about putting too much onus on anything other than the present with wise words from Only Cowgirls Get the Blues:

“For the most part, however, Sissy had joined the ranks of the Unhappy Waiters and Killers of Time. Oh God, there are so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they’re discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’re married, workers who can’t be happy until they’re retired, adolescents who can’t be happy until they’re grown, ill people who can’t be happy until they’re well, failures who can’t be happy until they succeed, restless who can’t be happy until they get out of town; and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin.”

Lord knows I don’t want to be part of that mix. Besides, my thoughts were quickly interrupted by the morning orchestra of barnyard noises, crackly radio broadcasts and routine loogy-hacking by my father Adama just outside my door. Sleeping-in at my compound means staying in bed until 8AM, and I made it just shy of 7:30AM.

One of the sheep in the livestock pen at the other corner of the yard just didn’t want to stop whining, and I can’t say I could blame him. The poor guy has all of 12 inches of slack in the rope tied around his front leg and spends most the day stepping back and forth, side to side, exercising his hoof’s worth of freedom until the slaughter next month for Tabaski.

I think it was Bernard Malamud who postulated that the human spirit or character is strengthened by suffering. I think he was right. Suffering, or at least quiet tolerance for discomfort is a theme in my village that the people offer with a smile and happy “How are you?” and the sheep offer with a “Baah” described above.

My sister Marietou, for example, the one who has been complaining about a toothache for the last week, finally showed me her tooth and yikes! Between two of her top left molars, a hole big enough to fit a pea into gaped wide open with decay, her nerve hanging out in the breeze. My first thought after seeing this was more a gut reaction, a wince in fact, than an actual thought. My second thought was that if I have children and they ever wine about going to the dentist, I’m going to smack them. Marietou’s aunt Fatou prepared a tonic with some sort of root mixed with water for her to drink. Medicine, not surprisingly, is called “garab” or literally “tree” in Wolof.

After lunch I decided that I needed to get a little time alone and went to the park. I walked along the river and found a nice spot where, after taking a good swim, I dreamed up money making schemes and life scenarios for when I get back to the US. Meanwhile a guy about my age appeared out of the bush to go drift-net fishing, the extra slack of his line held in his teeth while he threw the net into the current. With every couple casts, he carefully picked out one or two small fish and put them in a cloth sack tied around his waste, keeping his catch fresh until going to market. Snapping a photo of him, I felt a little guilty. He’s not some novelty or zoo animal after all, but I wanted to remember him and the contrast between him working in the water that I use to recreate and relax.

As I returned to my village, I passed by three older fishermen who were sitting under the shade of a thorny tree on the beach, drinking attaya. One of them was carefully sewing his pants where they had ripped, one attended to the bed of coals in the sand heating the tea, and the other man, the oldest, looked at me with a piercing gaze that only an old man can produce. His eyes had a ring of blue around the cornea, not a normal site and one I couldn’t help but stare at as he sized me up.

We talked about how the fish in the river were smaller and fewer than before the canal had been built, and the men complained that most of their friends had gone to Dakar or the Gambia to fish or find work as a result. I asked if they had a boat, and they motioned to what looked like a miniature pirogue, a model, maybe a boat for kids to play with. But splintered and weathered, the five foot vessel was obviously a work horse. In the two seconds it took for me to turn and look at the boat, I found myself conflicted about my thought earlier in the morning of trying to get a deal from the owner of the nearby campement, the ZebraBar, to see if I could rent his windsurfing gear. Fisherman number two handed me my glass of attaya while the old man told me that it was good I am here to work because these are poor people and they need help.

Two days into my village stay and my neighbor Mamadou takes me for a tour of the village, hand in hand from house to house. “Diop, Diop, Diop” is the refrain, “Alhumdulilay” (Thanks be to God) the chorus. The villagers will ask me “Nanga def?” or “How are you?” over and over again, maybe because they think it’s all I can understand, but more I think because that’s just how it works here when greeting someone. I can hardly make it more than half a “block” before someone is calling “Manssour!” asking “Fooy dem?” “Where are you going?” They also ask after Harit, or Angela, the volunteer I’ve replaced.

Angela did quite a job with the park and the people, but also kept a distance or existence unto her own as the villagers tell me about her “husband” who I know to be here boyfriend, and about her weekly trips to “church” which were actually days spent at the beach or a campement. I wonder what and how much I will feel compelled to disguise myself.

The days here feel slow, much the way they did in Thies. My breakfasts have been very relaxing- hot toubab coffee, baguette with butter, beans, or a fried egg. My hut is comfortable and bright with two big rooms, one my bedroom, complete with a double bed (rice sack, straw filled mattress), end tables, and a mirror. The other room has a single bed that doubles as a couch, along with a small desk and makeshift kitchen made up of a cutting board table and shelf, along with a gas stove that serves at night as my gas lantern.

It is at night when I truly feel the difference of living in the village versus in Thies. Everyone gathers on the veranda of the house in the light of the family’s single gas lantern, seated on mats on the concrete. The smell of charcoal fills the air and we eat dinner as the sun goes down, me with my own bowl of thiebunebbe (rice and beans with remnants of fish from the thiebujen from lunch). Having eaten around the bowl with my family in Thies it feels a bit odd to sit alone and eat while the rest of the family, all 13 of them, crowd around two large bowls. But this is how Harit did it, and my father Adama tells me that I would hardly get a scrap if I had to compete with the kids.

My two moms, Tabara and Fatou, alternate in making the attaya as the rest of us eat peanuts after the meal. The stars, “biddeo” are unbelieveable here, Orion moving from the Southeast horizon to the top of the sky throughout the evening. It actually gets chilly at night and to my disbelief I am happy to have the comforter that I bought from Angela.

I made it to the park the other day and was introduced to my new office my Mamadou Sidibe, my new boss and Conservateur of the Langue de Barberie National Park. As we looked over the office computer, “In” box, “Out” box, and CB radio, Mamadou cradled his two year old son Bamba in one arm as he guided me with the other. The office has cracks in the walls, bugs buzzing, dusty books strewn about, but a certain charm that American Property Management could never produce in Portland, even with a window office.

My first call to duty was assisting Mamadou and the other park staff in “repairing” the radio antenna before the minister of tourism’s visit to the park this Sunday. I put repair in quotations marks because what we did was re-splice a frayed cable that had already been spliced many times and attach it to a new antenna extension that will add three feet of reception. The antenna however, didn’t fit on the existing bracket, so with undersized U-bolts and a ton of electrical and packing tape, we “fixed” the antenna only to watch the cable snap in the process of raising the tower.

“C’est pas grave” says Mamadou, “No big deal,” and we lower the tower to jury-rig it once more, this time with success. My Leatherman was handy for the job, a sophisticated tool compared to the plastic bag full of rusty tools as our disposal.

After the antenna incident I got a boat tour of the park with my counterpart Arona Fall, our piroguier pilot Sayibou, and four toubab tourists, two Spaniards and two Canadiens. The pirogue is an interesting vessel in design- somewhat reminiscent of a Native American canoe, though wider, and pretty tippy. The park is a mix of river, ocean, beach, lizards, palms, turtles, birds, birds, birds, and wait, garbage. Sure enough, the folks in Saint Louis and every other upriver community haven’t been sensitized to the effects of littering in the river. “Pristine” is a relative term here and while the banks of the river do collect old bottles, bags, and flip-flops, it is still an incredibly beautiful place, and holds fantastic potential for ecotourism.
Later in the week I went with my brother Pape to the family’s fields, a two kilometer walk in the bush behind our house. The soil is actually just sand mixed with manure, but seems to work just fine for the onions, tomato, and manioc that I could see. It was really something to walk past the old ruin of the Balacoste, which I now understand to be a remnant of one of the first French colonial outposts from the early 18th century.

Weaving between cactus, palms, and the dunes we passed a small Pulaar village. The Peuls, or Pulaars, are a gentle people that originated in Ethiopia but are dispersed across the continent because of their traditional lifestyle of herding and animal husbandry. We made it to a filed of onions, 108 1.5’x 3’ plots of green sprouts. Pape showedme the not so easy task of how to water the plots as he pulled one gallon of water for each plot, hauling bucket after bucket 15 feet from one of the many wells that dot the landscape. We carefully poured the water around the border of the each plot, using a mesh of straw and fishing net as a filter to protect the newest seedlings. Pape smiled each time he passed me my buckets and never once grunted or even sighed as he labored for the better part of an hour.

Pirogues on the beach in Saint Louis after returning from the ocean.

Just when I thought I had a grasp on what it feels like to live day to day in Senegal, my village has jolted me back to reality through the voices of curious children, anxious chickens, dying goats, and my new host family the Diops. Mouit is quiet in the way of cars and telephones, but is busy with conversations from runny-nosed kids that like to rub the hair on my arms and follow me wherever I go. I woke up this morning to the seemingly continuous call of the rooster right outside my door and decided to walk to the Balanterre—a ruin of some old building behind my house that sits on top of a high spot among the dunes. It offers a great view of the surrounding area and is the only place where my cell phone gets a signal. The stars in the last grasps of night were bright, clear, and everywhere. In my village I am away from the city, away from electricity, and that much closer to the real world.

The sun came up slowly at first with a pale light that finally gave way to the glowing orange ball I’ve seen in idyllic pictures of Africa. It rushed into the sky illuminating the dunes, the cacti, the scrub brush, and palms. As I shot a few pictures of this unfolding scene, two camels approached from the bush, greeting me with sniffs in my direction. While only a few miles from Mauritania, I had no idea there were camels in Senegal.

Later in the day as I rode in a bush taxi from Mouit to Saint Louis, a troupe of monkeys ran across the road in front of the car.

Beyond its natural beauty, Mouit is making realize that this country does live in poverty and that the relatively humble conditions of my host family in Thies are quite luxurious in comparison to the village. Mouit is off the paved road with no electricy. At night, it is dark except for candles, gas lamps, and the coals of the small charcoal stoves used to for cooking and for making attaya.

I sat with my host family the Diops and tried to memorize everyone’s name in the compound, not an easy task with my dad, two wives, and what I think are about 10 kids. My new name is Manssour Diop, which will take a bit of getting used to after being Matar Thiam for the last two months. They are sweet, soft spoken, and sit with each other throughout the day making fun of each other. Within an hour of my arrival, my sister asked me for medicine for her tooth ache, and for an awful looking open sore on one of my little brother’s legs. I knew I would see things I was not expecting, but to see a two year old with a giant wound, just playing in the sand peacefully I felt off balance. I gave Marietou ibuprofen and antibiotic cream, and I know it won’t be long before she asks me again.

Per the Peace Corp’s recommendation, I drew up a contract and receipt for rent, laundry, and water at my new house and went over it with Adama, my father. I asked him to sign next to his name, and he made a scribble. Most of the kids cannot read or write either. I am waking up to the new standard to what I take for granted, basic education, power and clean water, medicine, and ease all included.