Tivaouane

Greetings from Tivaouane!
Along with another trainee from my group (Thomas Wheat), I am staying in Tivaouane with a current volunteer named Daniel. We've been staying with his host family, who has been very friendly to us, and has also fed us incredibly well. Tivaouane is only about 20-25 km away from my future site (Ngaye Mekhe) and is the departmental capital of the region. As I indicated in my earlier post, Ngaye Mekhe (or Mekhe for short) is a town very focused on artisanal products. The leather sandals made there are fairly well known, and there are also several other types of artisans that use the town as a base. Our host volunteer, Daniel, has been working alongside the Mekhe volunteer (whom I will replace after training) in helping the surrounding villages in this region export their hand woven baskets. Much of their work involves going to the villages and assessing the capabilities each village has in terms basket production. They have already received some orders from the U.S and hope to increase production. This type of work is very interesting to me, and I am excited at the potential opportunity to jump into it. For now, I need to focus on improving my Wolof and finishing training. We spent our first 3 days here walking around town and checking out the local businesses and institutions. People are generally very friendly and seem to be quite well educated in this part of the country (I obviously speak from my experience of 3 weeks in country so please don't take what I say as fact). We went to a youth soccer game on Saturday evening, which was pretty fun (soccer on sand looks quite difficult/tiring...)

On Monday we went and visited my site and its current volunteer (Pete). It was great to see my town, even if it resembles most other towns I've seen here. Pete, whom I will replace in Mekhe, had a lot of good things to say about the site and my host family. The four of us spent most of the afternoon sitting in a small restaurant and discussing the site, their work, and the trouble Dakar region volunteers get themselves into. Needless to say, I'm very excited to be part of this region and spend the next two years hanging out with this crowd. Tuesday we traveled once again, this time to the villages surrounding the area. The first village was called Diama Thiendou, and was about a 1 kilometer walk off the national highway (which would be a country road in the U.S). The main supervisor of the basket weaving operations (funny how I graduated from college and will soon be working in the Senegalese basket weaving industry...) was ill and had gone to Thies, so we sat around for awhile until lunch arrived. After a typically Senegalese lunch (and the obligatory post-lunchtime nap on mats under the big tree), we ventured out to another similar village where some of the women were actually weaving baskets. It was a little bit overwhelming, as my Wolof is still not advanced enough to discuss work opportunities with the women in the village. Nonetheless, it was a good time and I enjoyed to chance to get to meet some of my future work partners (who were quick to inform me that I have big shoes to fill in replacing Pete).

Tomorrow the three of us are going into Thies to meet up with some other Dakar region volunteers and have a small cookout, which should be awesome. Thursday will have us back in Thies for the weekend, and then back to the villages for more language classes. This weekend promises to be entertaining as it is our beach trip. While in the village today, I called in and reserved a large house on the beach in Popenguine (the beach site we visited last week). The schedule suggests that Saturday, once classes are finished, all 40 of us will load up into an Alhum (Massive minivans that can fit an unholy amount of souls onboard) and drive off to the beach to spend the night there. It sounds as though only 12-15 people will have some sort of bedding, so there will most likely be a lot of people crashing on stairwells, hallways, or even the beach itself. We still have to finish the preparations, but everyone is very excited to go, myself included. Well, I'm off for now, but the three of us will be staying up to watch the Presidential debate on TV (Daniel, the PCV here, has internet in his room). Hope everyone is doing well back home in spite of the floundering economy. Ba beneen yoon!

P.S A funnny side note ==> I have to be careful when saying "I am going to Mekhe (my town)" in Wolof because that exact sentence also means that I am in the process of having sex... thus I will more often than not say "I am going to Ngaye".