Buildings that Crumble

Warning: this post will be all over the place. Be ready.

A mosque about a 20 minute walk from my house.

I had never experienced so many mosquitoes in my room at one time than I did this one night after spending the day coming in and out of my open room door  (opens to the outside of the house) with my 12-year-old sister and the 8-year-old son of my "Mom"'s coworker. We played long and hard with a quickly deteriorating orange foam/sponge ball in the limited space of a patio-type walkway in front of my room. That night I entered my room to discover over 25 mosquitoes lazily flying around or hanging out on my walls, just waiting for me to settle down for the night. My sister couldn't believe how many there were and grabbed the mosquito killing spray which then fumigated my room. The great thing about this process is the pungent lingering smell of the spray that has become as much a part of my life as the dust on my feet each day. That night, however, the other great perk of the spray was that when I entered my room several hours later, I found the mosquitoes dead all over my floor, bed, table, and chair. In fact, I could not walk through my room without stepping on them, and I had to pick through my bed sheet to avoid sleeping with them. They made a nice little black pile when I swept them all up before bed. Definitely looked like more than just 25 in that form.
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I have been attending International Baptist Church with some friends of mine who are fellow followers of Christ. The first Sunday I went I was overwhelmed by the richness of being together with a body of believers like that. It had been about a month since I had been able to go to church, and I had been missing that community. The family that sat behind us used to know a family we knew in Ethiopia, and since then we have eaten at their house and spent time getting to know them a bit better. The pastor is from some other African country and preaches in English, the songs being a mixture of French and English. Most of the congregation are from various anglophone African countries. It takes me about an hour to get to church each Sunday, and I enjoy every minute of it. I never feel alone when I walk or take the public transport-- I sorta slip into this place of quiet communion with God as I take in all the sights and sounds (and often, smells). More about the walking: I have started walking home from my study center twice a week when my classes finish early (at 16:15). The walk home takes about an hour, unless you stop for ice cream or beignets on the way.

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I haven't really slept on a real pillow in 2 months :) My bed didn't have one, and I didn't wanna go buy one. I have discovered that my jacket and my fleece blanket work really well as pillows! My bed, like many Senegalese beds I have heard about, is dipped in the middle giving an almost sleeping-in-the-hammock feeling. I'm a fan. I sleep under a mosquito net each night, and each morning I tie it up like you tie up the ropes at the rock wall. I'm mastering this daisy-knot business. 

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Last Friday I starred in a French film. Well, maybe not "starred" but the movie was called "Des Etoiles" and I was an extra in the airport scene. One of my friends, Austin, and I made up a whole story about how we were siblings arriving in Senegal to visit our sister in the Peace Corps. There is chance I made it in the background of a 2 second clip, but that might be stretching it. There were a lot of extras from my program who did this too! The movie producers fed us breakfast and lunch, and though we did a lot of standing in lines or sitting around, we had a great time. When we returned that night to Ouakam, we discovered a huge crowd of people just down the street from my house. Turns out a building that was under construction (5 stories tall) had collapsed that morning because it was not safely built. They had built it about 3 stories higher than they had the permit to built it, and the cement blocks being used were not a good composition. The rebar reinforcement was also not a good quality, thus creating the unstable building that I used to run past several times a week. About 2 workers died, 4 were injured, and several cars who had been driving past got smashed. My family didn't want to talk about it when I got home.

View from the nearby lighthouse. 

Unexpected things happen every day. It is such a comfort to rest in the knowledge that God is in control. No matter how "safe" or "unsafe" our lives may seem to us, we are as safe as we will ever be when we are in God's hands. Safety itself, then, is really a matter of perspective. Eternal security trumps all earthly safety nets and door locks. I feel like Jesus could make a parable about this house, about how the composition of the building, the essence of its frame, is more important than how firm or pretty it looks from the outside. Our lives need to be built with blocks that won't crumble when they are pressured, with what won't be destroyed by the passing of time. Reading Jesus's teachings in Matthew always reminds me that the God we serve and the Kingdom of Heaven is worth so much more than anything we might "give" on this earth. The Treasure of unfathomable price. And yet it can be scary to pray that we would seek this Kingdom no matter the cost. We love our comfort, we love feeling like we are in control of our lives. We don't like pain. But if we truly believe in God and His Kingdom, isn't the logical next step is to give all that we have in the pursuit of this Kingdom?

Backpacking Kedougou: Part 2

Walking to the village after the bus dropped us off

We had made friends with a Peace Corps volunteer who lives in a village 30km east of Kedougou and the plan was to spend one of our last nights at her place. Though we found a minibus right away that was heading the right direction, East, we ended up waiting about an hour and a half for it to finish filling up beyond its capacity so that we could leave. This wait was possibly one of the lowest points of the trip as I legitimately felt ripped off for having to pay extra (a whole dollar!!) for my bag to get tied on the roofrack, I was low on energy (after walking across town to discover that Lonely Planet had misled us into false hope of finding somewhere with froyo), my body was sweating from every pore, and I was crammed in next to other hot bodies who were also low on energy. I felt better, however, as we were roll-started out of the lot we had been parked in and the car came shudderingly to life. When we reached the right village, the driver forgot to stop, and we ended up walking 2km back into town watching the sun set over Africa-- a beautiful sight. We asked around the village until we found our friend's hut and met her family. That night we got to listen as one of her friends shared the story of the village founder while star gazing at some of the most amazingly bright stars I have seen in years. The 3 of us girls slept on her bed (built for 1 person), our friend took her hammock, and Anthony (the French couch-surfer was staying with her for a few days) and Mike were on a small pad on the hut floor. It was basically a sauna in there, and I didn't think I would get any sleep because of the heat and the inability to move without disturbing another sweaty body. 

Our friend's village

The overnight bus we took back from Kedougou the next day was an adventure from the start. Within the first hour we were stopped, and by the second stop (about an hour and a half into the trip) every person but maybe 3 got off the bus and started praying towards Mecca. I came to find out that these frequent stops were not, in fact, because of small bladders but were the result of engine trouble. We ended up stopping a total of 7 times in the 7 hours it took us to drive a stretch that should have taken us about 4 hours. The driver McGyvered up a fix to the slit in some part of the cooling system, but there was just too much to fix. Once when we were stopped for an hour, a local drunk approached me and my two girl friends and started to proclaim his great love and serenade us with one line from a song about "1963." He provided great entertainment for everyone waiting on the bus. Knowing the tendency for buses to break down, I'm glad we were on the overnight bus. It was much better being broken down at 11pm than it would have been at noonday (much less sun at midnight)! We switched buses in one town and our trip got significantly less interesting but more restful for the remaining 9ish hours of the trip. 

God knows how to challenge me. He knows when I am ready to learn a new sort of lesson in faith and when I am becoming too comfortable. This time round the challenge was not through physical circumstances, the times when we didn't know where our next water or food would come from, but rather in relationships and continuing the process of learning to love. Discovering more about myself and what I believe. Finding refuge in Him when I feel alone on certain issues. He knows how we are formed-- He remembers that we are dust. And He never leaves us on our own. Jàmm rekk, Alxamdulilaa ("Peace only, praise be to God"). 

Backpacking Kedougou: Part 1

Picture jumping on a janky Peugeot that seats 7 (cleverly called a "sept place" here) with a driver that speaks no French or English, heading south for 12 hours with fellow adventure-seekers bound for who-knows-what. Exchanging sweat because of the close proximity in the car that sometimes feels like it is fixing to give up its last exhaust fumes any second. True to the time estimate, we arrived in the town of Kedougou that evening around 8pm and after some searching, found ourselves in a "campement" for the night. Campements are composed of a few huts with beds inside, and if you're lucky (or spend a few more bucks), possibly a wall that has a toilet and bucket with water for bucket showers behind it. Showers which we soon discovered were a sort of lifeline to improved sleep, as the heat kept you sweating all night long and the dust you gathered during the daytime created a sort of mud that clung to your body and embedded itself in the creases of your skin. All that to say, any place that had a bucket shower option was welcomed with open arms.

The road to Dindefelo

It would be impossible to sum up my trip in just a few words, but I will give an overview in two posts (and they will undoubtedly be long ones). My group was composed of 2 other girls and one guy (who split off at Kedougou the first day but whom we met up with a couple days later in a different village). Our second night, the three of us girls spent the night at the Peace Corps house in Kedougou, two of us sharing a mosquito-netted bed in a wall-less hut called the "Disco Hut." The following day, we headed off on a market bus to a small village called Ségou in search of some waterfalls we had heard about. We shared our adventures that day with a French couch-surfer named Anthony who we had met the night before with the Peace Corps. Ségou had a beautiful campement overlooking a valley that is farmed when the rains come. We tried some local tea on wooden benches in the village and saw the "international highway" that connects Senegal to Mali (tempted to take it, but resisted the urge). I wish I had a picture of this road, as it was about the width of a Honda Civic and was composed entirely of rocks. Apparently it is impassible by car which made a lot of sense to me looking at it. We hiked 7 km out to the waterfall (more of a "watertrickle" because of it being dry season) through burned off brush and through dry riverbeds. There were a few beautifully inviting water pools we swam in as we followed the river. I discovered that though my Chacos were perfect for the occasion, the rocks took full advantage of my exposed skin and took a few chunks outta my feet. Only saw one snake. Dinner that night was under the stars on a bench in village: we sat around the bowl and ate rice and peanuty sauce with hot pepper on top, a cow literally looking over our shoulders one foot away, the stars bright in the sky above, and the lady who cooked our meal eating right next to us with the village chief. 

Waterfall at Dindefelo

A 5km walk down the road brought us to Dindefelo, a larger village next to much bigger waterfalls. We met up with our 4th party member by asking where the tall American was (Mike is about 6 and 1/2 feet tall) and went swimming at the gorgeous falls. It was so cold in the waterfall gorge that I had goosebumps during the hottest time of the day! We dined on egg and bean sandwiches in town just about every meal in Dindefelo.

Mainstreet in Dindefelo

On the trail between Dindefelo and Ibel

The following morning we left Dindefelo at 6:45am and began our 25km hike to the next village, Ibel. Our guide kept a lively pace, and we only stopped once for him to use the bushes, this "break" lasting all of 2 minutes (if that). 3 hours and 13 minutes brought us to Ibel, but the campement was deserted. I explored the village with one of the others, Camilla, and ended up finding out that no one knew where the manager of the campement was. 2 hours after arriving in Ibel, we made the grand decision to keep walking to the next village, Bandafassi. It was about 12noon at that point, and we each had about half a liter of water on us when we headed out. 7km later we arrived dusty and tired to our destination and walked into the campement in time to collapse on chairs a table over from a proper-looking French family sipping tea. We probably left dirty sweat marks on the chairs when we finally got up to pump water into our bottles from the nearby well. My feet cursed me with every step I took on them after that, and walking another 1km into the village to find lunch was rough though rewarding. A random guy we met brought us to his sister who cooked us up a feast of eggs and veggies which tasted better than Thanksgiving dinner to a hungry and expectant stomach. That night we calculated that we had walked over 34 km that day and went to bed early. The night that ensued seemed to last forever, however, between laying in a pool of sweat all night, hearing dogs viciously fighting right outside (ended finally by a gunshot), and a member of our group up twice vomiting our dinner of fries and egg all over the bathroom floor. 

"Mountain" overlook

The next morning the three of us who weren't sick climbed up the "mountain" behind our village and were able to look out across the whole valley as the sun rose in the sky. BEAUTIFUL. We wished we could just stay there for hours, but we had arranged to catch a ride back to Kedougou with the campement manager at 9am. We squatted all day at a well maintained hotel restaurant overlooking the river with views of people beating clothes clean on rocks and washing trucks. Though we each ordered a drink (I had forgotten how good just black tea is), we stayed there for about 4 or even 5 hours eating our own messy mangoes (...including flossing the fibers out of our teeth right there in plain daylight), oranges (which had to be peeled with pocket knives), and millet (made with the extra hot water for the tea). Let's just say that they were ready to see us leave when we told them we weren't going to buy their lunch. Going cheap can be insanely obnoxious for those who want you to spend.