City or Village Life: Which Would You Choose?

While there are definitely stereotypes associated with Peace Corps - some people imagine a hippie life on an island, or a hut deep in the jungle - the truth is that PCVs can end up in all kinds of different living situations around the world. You'll find us living in huts, houses, apartments, you name it. You can end up way out in the bush, five minutes from the beach, tucked away in a small town, or lost in a bustling metropolis. 

I can't say I wish I had been one of those Peace Corps Volunteers placed in a village. I’m happy being a small city volunteer in Kolda, Senegal, because it satisfies my inner drive to always be on the go. I can never be bored here, at least in a work sense! 

There are hundreds of people and dozens of organizations I could work with, which means endless project possibilities. I can work with talibés one day, then nutrition and moringa, than switch it up to a youth internship program - and I love that variety. Also, French is more useful in a city, where it is used in professional contexts. (Every-day conversations are usually conducted in local languages like Pulaar). I’ve loved being able to work in two languages.

My house! And my little host brother, Omar "Doctor" Baldé.

The well inside my family compound

Me with Double Horizon, a local youth group I work with sometimes.

Some health relays I work with in Kolda (we were doing door-to-door vaccinations for children)

Despite the perks, city life isn't all that golden. Unfortunately, Peace Corps Senegal doesn’t equip health volunteers as well for serving in cities. We come in expecting to live in remote villages, and that’s how we are trained and prepared. We learn about baby weighings, how to make nutritional porridges, how to implement well or latrine-building projects – all things relevant in villages, but less so in cities. Then, suddenly, a very few volunteers “luck out” (depends on your point of view) and get placed in small cities or road towns.

Sure, we get electricity and easier access to Internet. The downside is we have to pave our own way and navigate an overwhelming sea of people, trying to find our niche and be relevant and useful, with less guidance from Peace Corps. Big towns already have qualified Senegalese personnel running health and development projects. Duplicating their efforts is not a sustainable contribution. Reinforcing capacity is nice once in a while (like helping local health workers with their child vaccination campaigns), but it still doesn’t make a lasting impact.

Instead, it’s best to find your little niches – meeting the needs that are not already being met, or offer a unique approach to something. A few months into my service I finally started finding those niches, but it took a lot of research and questions to get there. If you're not careful, you can get lost in the city, swallowed up by existing projects and feeling like a needle in a haystack.

When I call Kolda a “city,” I should clarify: Kolda is nothing like Dakar, the capital, which teems over 1 million people living in both luxury and poverty. In Dakar, you can find smoothly paved streets, nightclubs, high-end restaurants (even sushi!), beautiful beaches, a modern shopping mall (where they are currently building a movie theatre), a giant stadium for Senegal’s soccer fan multitudes, art galleries, fashion shows, cafés, and air-conditioned stores with all kinds of imported products. We call these “toubab stores,” because really, only toubabs (foreigners) go there. Most Senegalese won’t be dropping 5,000 CFA ($10) for real ranch dressing or a box of Pop Tarts.

But in Dakar you will also find intense poverty, dusty dirt roads, trash on the streets, sheep and other animals roaming everywhere, open-air markets, donkeys pulling carts next to the sleekest cars, millions of small boutiques, and ragged talibé boys roaming the streets with their begging bowls.

Dakar 

Compared to big cities like Dakar and Thiès, Kolda is definitely more of a very small town. We have a few gas stations that offer products geared towards toubabs – shampoo, Nutella, Pringles, cereal – but not much. We are one of the southernmost regions in this country. You know you’re nearly the furthest you can get when there’s no ice cream to be found! In fact, many people don’t even know what it is, sadly. Though we have refrigerators and convenience stores, there’s no way to transport ice cream all the way down here without it melting.

The majority of Kolda’s population lives on the outskirts, not downtown, and many do not have electricity. Most people live in huts, or combinations of buildings and huts, arranged in a square or circle. This forms a family compound. In the middle of the compound is dirt ground, but they treat it like a floor, sweeping it smooth of debris and animal droppings. Most families also keep animals in the middle of their compound – usually goats, sheep, chickens, and cows. In the city, you may witness the weird dichotomy of a giant satellite dish next to a reclining cow or a bunch of sheep. (Welcome to my house!)

Just like anywhere in Senegal, whether village or city, you’ll find families in Kolda relaxing and socializing in front of their houses, drinking tea. Unfortunately, Jakarta taxi motorcycles buzz like flies – roar like lions would be more accurate – everywhere you go. True silence is rare. After a while, I realized I needed a break from it all.

My family compound, sheep, satellite and all.

Mix of buildings and huts in the city of Kolda

You still find random things like this in a Senegalese city... donkey carting soft drinks to a bar.

Kolda city school kids - - there's a LOT of them.

Inside another city house (Kolda).

Village Visit

Recently, a PCV friend of mine had been encouraging me to visit his village before he finished his service, and I finally found the time to do it. I’m so glad I did. It was just what I needed!

A small village just outside of the big city of Tambacounda (a 5 hour drive from Kolda), Botou breathes calmness in the way that cities never can, unless you’re on the coast and can chill ocean-side. It had been too long since I’d visited a village – I’d started to forget how peaceful and relaxing it can be out there.

In village, without realizing it, you fall into a slower rhythm. People take their time. What do they have to hurry to? I found myself sitting for hours, just talking, without getting antsy like I normally would. It was a miracle!

The beauty around me probably helped: clean air free of car exhaust and the growl of motorcycles, green and trees everywhere, rich gardens of tomatoes and cassava and hibiscus, fields of peanuts and corn and millet. The bush stretched out behind us in an endless expanse of scruffy grass and spindly trees, pierced here and there by massive baobab trees.

At night in village, no light other than cooking fires or flashlights illuminates the deep dark. The inky blackness settles over everything with finality. As a result, you start waking up earlier and going to bed earlier. Without electricity, food is never saved. They buy ingredients daily, cook and consume. Ice and cold things become a distant memory.

My friend’s hut was everything mine isn’t: small, square, clean, organized and rustically lovely. (I inherited some unfortunate situations with my hut that I won’t go into.) His window looked out at some refreshing green, shaded by a large neem tree. He had built himself a front patio out of wooden branches, perfect for relaxing out of the sun. Behind his hut, he’d set up a garden and a gym training area. (Yes, you can stay in shape even out in the middle of nowhere, if you get creative! Think rice sack punching bags, stone-stick-rope contraptions for weight lifting, etc.)

One of the things that I love most about village life is its quietness. Instead of car sounds and all the other noises of the city, I heard the wind in the trees, crickets, and the occasional animals. At night, wrapped in that refreshing silence, I fell asleep so much more easily.

Village Botou

Some bitter tomatoes in Botou 

Village kids in Botou 

You will also find random things like this in villages! (No electricity, but a phone booth.)

My friend's hut

Villages have their downsides too: more extreme poverty in some cases, less diet variety, a lower level of education, less to do, nothing cold to refresh you from the heat, no electricity to charge electronics, lack of medical services (the nearest health hut or post may be kilometers away). PCV friends of mine sometimes groan about the slowness of village life. Implementing projects, and really doing anything at all, will take a lot longer. People may or may not be interested in working with you. If a village of 200 people has only 10 or so interested in working on a project, your options become pretty limited. Of course, every site is different.

Still, many volunteers love village life for its simplicity, friendliness, and natural beauty. It's true, I miss being surrounded by nature. Slow and calm is nice, sometimes, but I don’t think I’d want that every day. All in all I’m happy where I am.

But there is something special about village life that I think everyone should experience at some point in life, if you can.

Whether it’s a village somewhere in Africa or Asia or South America, if you ever get the chance, go. Spend a night or two. You’ll find that your world shrinks, concentrates, intensifies into the moment. The calm seeps into you. You see dozens of people getting along just fine without things you thought you needed. Taking the time to greet and connect with people becomes so much more important, because it’s the human relationships that maintain such a community. There's a lot to learn from this way of life.

Snapshots of Senegal Life

My daily ritual looks like this: wake up to the roosters crowing at 4 AM, followed by the muezzin’s call to prayer. Go back to sleep for a few precious hours. Wake up again to animal sounds and the scratch of my host sisters’ twig brooms sweeping up the dust outside in the family compound. The sun pours through the holes in my tin doors, heating my room slowly.

I turn on my little gas tank and light it, setting a teapot on top to heat water for tea. Trudging out into the sun (why is it so bright this early??), I greet each family member I see – “Pin-da? Tanaa finaani?” (Did you wake in peace? No evil?) – and then I pull water from the well. I carry my bucket to the open-air bathroom area in the back of my hut, enclosed by brick walls. (For those of you who don’t know, a bucket bath does not mean sitting in a bucket: it means using a water scoop to pour water from the bucket on your head, little by little. I’ve learned to shampoo with one hand and rinse with the other! Yes, I’m very proud of this skill.) After my bath, I get dressed and pop next door to the small boutique to buy eggs and a baguette of toppaloppa for breakfast. Eat, slather myself with sunscreen, grab my bag and bike, and I’m off.

Sheep in my family compound... getting an early morning wash.

That’s just the start of my day. The contents of each day vary greatly, from running all over town for meetings to organizing causeries (small group trainings), working on projects, greeting people, snatching wi-fi from whatever office I happen to end up in to quickly check emails, ignoring the endless repetition barraging my ears (men saying they want a toubab wife, kids teasing, etc.), scrubbing laundry by hand, shopping for food in the market, visiting daaras, or other random things.

Monday night this week was the Tamkharit celebration, a Muslim holiday celebrating the first month of their lunar calendar. It’s really like a version of Halloween: kids run around dressed up in strange clothes (sometimes boys dress as girls and vice versa), with white paint on their faces, chanting and dancing at each house for gifts. It’s supposed to be the one night when no one, no matter how rich or poor, should go hungry. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the dead, so it’s not exactly in the tradition of All Hallow’s Eve or Day of the Dead. But some things are oddly similar: the masks, the kids walking around house to house at night, the “candy” buckets. It’s hilarious to see these kids running around with their little tins and sacs, forming circles and bursting into spontaneous stomping, twirling, and booty shaking. At each house, the adults will clap and urge them on. They reward the kids with scoops of rice, millet, peanuts, or candy at the end. My host dad, who has created a local radio station in the nearby village of Saré Yoba, actually used his phone to broadcast some of these kids live on the air. They yelled and chanted like crazy, having no idea what he was doing, while my host mom and I cracked up.

Days are hot, baking my skin even if I’m only outside for 10 minutes. Evenings and nights bring cool relief, and a starry sky to gaze up at while I sit with the family. Social time here means sitting together, chatting, tea, and sitting some more. The other night, as we sat in our plastic chairs in front of our house, listening to the radio, I craned my head back to look at the huge glowing moon overhead.

“The moon is nice, isn’t it?” said my host mother. “Can you see the moon and stars like this in America?” I was shocked – Mariama is not the most educated of ladies, but she’s smart and she lives in a (small) city. I was sure she’d know that the sky is basically the same no matter where you are in the world, give or take some smog and a few constellations. But apparently Americans talk too much about snow, because she said she thought the sky was always obscured by snow and clouds in America.

My host mother, Mariama Baldé.

Speaking of night, the one thing I think I miss above all else from home is a good night’s sleep. Why? Mice have claimed my hut as their own since I first moved in. Every night they gallivant around on the tarp above my head, squeaking like they’re possessed, partying or whatever it is they’re doing. It’s enough to wake the dead. They are joined by chirping crickets and the dogs/ sheep/ goats/ cows/ donkeys in the middle of my family compound that occasionally have panic attacks, baying at the moon or ramming into my corrugated steel front door. That’s when I wake up with a start, convinced my hut is falling down or some other catastrophe. Let’s just say sleep is a little hard to come by!

For a while, I had a ghost in my hut. I call him the Soap Ghost because he has a weird fetish for soap and creams. First, he decided to disappear an entire bottle of body lotion and a jar of Vaseline. Then I started keeping my soap in a case on my dresser, and I’d come home to find it open on the floor – every day. No matter how many times I put it back. My other soap, which I kept outside in a dish in my bathroom area, started moving around also. It was always somewhere random when I came home, never where I’d put it. Now, the logical answer is that mice/rats have stupidly decided they want to eat these items. After all, they did eat through the plastic lid of my Nutella jar to get to the chocolate. But tell me, how did they pick up and carry an entire bottle of lotion? Nah. It’s definitely a Soap Ghost. Probably the cleanest, most moisturized ghost you’ve ever not seen.

More tales to come!