When I went into the Peace Corps I learned that my training was to last 4 months. In February and March, 1977 I was to be in Putney, Vermont on the campus of Windham College. Then I would travel to Thies, Senegal for another 2 months of in-country training. In June, I would be posted to a remote village somewhere in Senegal, where I would engage in "rural development."
At the time, I had no idea what rural development was supposed to be. I joined the Peace Corps because I enjoyed travel. Not the sort of tourist travel I'd been treated to while growing up, spending a few days here, a day or two there and always slave to some insane itinerary loaded with museums, historical sites and restaurants. I did not (and do not) find that sort of thing enjoyable at all. I preferred to go to a country and live there for a time - at least a few months. I wanted to get to know the people, learn the languages, and see the sights at my leisure. The Peace Corps seemed ideally suited for that.
When I was going through the interview process the recruiter told me that while the stereotype of the Peace Corps volunteer was some young idealist parachuting into a remote village where they had never seen a white man before, the reality was different. When the Peace Corps started in the early 1960s, that's how it was. But it soon changed as the organization gained experience and a track record with the governments it was working with. When I signed up, most volunteers served in the cities, teaching English for the most part, as well as other things. For example in my group we had an engineer who was to be teaching at the University of Dakar, and an entomologist who was to be teaching a group of Senegalese scientists.
Only a few volunteers were sent to remote posts any more, and those were carefully screened. One thing the Peace Corps had learned was that most Americans couldn't survive remote postings and suffered a variety of mental ills that made them ineffective. Some flipped out completely and had to be evacuated, what we called "psych-evac." Despite the careful screening, there were a couple of volunteers in my group who lost their marbles and left them in Africa when they were psych-evac'ed.
I wanted a remote posting. I wanted to be immersed in the most foreign culture I could find, with no fear of being yanked out of it and being made to rush around visiting museums and snapping pictures of cathedrals. Since I had a degree in Hebrew and Arabic, I thought it would be nice to go someplace where they speak Arabic (my Hebrew was already fluent at the time, having spent 18 months immersed in Israel.) I looked longingly at the map of Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. I choose Yemen as my destination. Unfortunately, the middle eastern posts had just been filled, and there wouldn't be any openings there for another 6 months. The only ones coming up were in S. Korea (teaching English) and Africa (pretty much everything was available there.)
Never a patient person, I couldn't wait 6 whole months. The recruiter said, "They're Moslem in Senegal." I had never heard of Senegal. I thought it was an island in the South Pacific somewhere. Visions of tropical beaches and hula girls dancing in my head, and figuring that Moslems must speak at least some Arabic, I agreed and signed the dotted line. It was much later that I discovered that Senegal was in West Africa. It does have many miles of beautiful beach, but no hula girls.
I was approved for a remote posting. I had no idea where in Senegal I might end up, the postings weren't finalized until the Thies portion of the training. It could have been in the north, in the heart of the Sahel, the sub-Saharan desert wasteland that is advancing at the rate of about 7 kilometers per year. Or it could have been in the lush, heavily forested southern Casamance region. I didn't care. It was all exciting to me, especially since I had started out not even knowing where Senegal was.
I was going to Africa! I knew nothing at all about it. In my school, the only thing we learned about Africa is that it was where the slaves came from. "Roots" had not been published in those days (it actually came out while I was in Senegal,) and Africa was just the "dark continent," land of mystery, pygmies, Watusis who danced strangely, and primitive and superstitious people.
Boy, was I in for a surprise!
Putney, Vermont
In February, 1977 I flew to Putney, Vermont. We were put up in a dorm on the Windham College campus. I don't remember why school wasn't in session at the time, but it wasn't, and we had the place to ourselves. The training program was a new, experimental one in which they took volunteers destined for several West African countries and spent 2 months teaching French, culture and history of West Africa, tropical medicine and other topics. We had full days of study, but not a lot of homework. So we spent our evenings at Shamans, a local watering hole where we often got roaring drunk, loud and boisterous. The owner of Shamans loved us. Since school was out, he would have had no customers but for us. We were a rowdy bunch, and that was fine with him!
My roommate was a volunteer also headed for Senegal named Rocco. Rocco was a former Golden Gloves boxing champion. When I say "former," I mean "yesterday." He was built like Muhammed Ali, moved very lightly and with his New Jersey accent he gave the vague impression of being a mobster. He wasn't of course. In fact, he was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. He was a construction foreman and was going over to help the Senegalese learn to build buildings. I remember that Rocco drank raw vinegar straight from the bottle. He said that it was good for the stomach.
In February, Putney is cold. In fact, the area was under about 5 feet of snow when I arrived there. There was still snow on the ground in patches when we left at the end of March. By that time, most of the snow had melted though, and "mud season" was in full swing. That was the first time I'd heard of mud season. I recall that a group of us was headed into town (the campus was a little ways outside of Putney.) I needed to get something at a convenience store that was across a small field. There was no easy way to drive there without going a long ways around, so I hopped out of the car with the idea of jogging over there, making my purchase and running back to the car. As I headed into the field, someone yelled "watch out for the mud!" By the time they'd finished "watch out ..." I was ankle deep in mud. By the end of the word "mud!" I was in it over my knees. In my sheltered life so far, I'd never seen mud that deep! With a lot of sucking sounds, I pulled out my legs and gradually made my way back to the car, where they told me to walk back to the college. After all, who wants someone caked in gooey mud from the thighs down sitting in their car?
In late March we all boarded a plane for Senegal. While most of the people I'd trained with were going to other countries, they were all going to Dakar, where they would get their connecting flights. I remember the flight being very long and uneventful.
Map courtesy of CIA Fact Book
Dakar
Nothing could have prepared me for landing in Senegal. You could have told me all about it (and they did during the training,) but I still would not have understood. You see, there was nothing in my experience to compare it to. I'd lived in Israel, England and France. But none of those were anything like this.
The first thing that hit me was the light. The African light is far more intense than sunlight in more northern climes. Sunglasses merely made it tolerable so that I didn't have to squint my eyes closed. The light was everywhere. And with it was the heat. It was probably only about 90 degrees, but it was a different sort of 90 degrees than I'd experienced. First, I didn't expect it. After all, it was only late March and it simply doesn't get to be 90 degrees in spring. It isn't done. Then there was the fact that there was no humidity. This was dry heat, so getting off the plane and walking onto the tarmac, which was visibly radiating heat, felt like walking into a kiln. I think I got sunburned in the minute that it took me to walk to the terminal.
When we got off the plane we were immediately surrounded by Africans asking to carry our bags. We had been not to part with our belongings if we ever wanted to see them again. Don't give them to porters, friendly Africans, taxi drivers or anyone. Hold on to them through thick and through thin until we got to Thies. I later learned that this was good advice. Now, most Africans are not thieves or dishonest in any way. But the airport draws all sorts. Some of the folks who met us with the hands grasping for our luggage were honest folk trying to make a living. Others were thieves playing in the airport grabbag, eager to see what kind of haul they would get from the gullible new arrivals.
We were processed through customs without incident. I remember that experience as being very confusing. There was a lot of color, the bright light was everywhere, even in the shadows, it was swelteringly hot even in the air conditioned terminal, and people were speaking the strangest languages and wearing the most colorful clothing I'd ever seen. I was very happy that I was simply following a guide who knew what she was doing. I would have been utterly lost and probably become victim to one of the helpful thieves.
The Senegal volunteers said farewell to the others who were headed into other countries, and we boarded a bus to Thies. Dakar is a major city, sometimes called "the Paris of Africa." Of course, Abidjan in the Ivory Coast is also called that. I suspect travel agents may be behind that phrase. But Dakar looks very western with hotels and shops and apartments and government buildings. On that trip we didn't see the poorer sections, which look like a shanty town with thousands of huts build from aluminum and asbestos "toll" (corrugated building material), open cooking fires and dirt streets. That's the "other" Dakar, the one where all the Senegalese drawn to the big city with promises of untold wealth and ease tend to end up.
There is only one paved road in Senegal, or at least there was at that time. Looking at a current map, It looks like they've built more in the meantime. At that time, the road ran from Saint Louis (pronounced, "san looey") in the far north down through Dakar and then south through the Gambia to Ziguinchor and then east toward Tambacounda. There was a spur that went from Dakar to Thies, a distance of about 30 miles. All other roads in Senegal were dirt and most were not really roads at all. They were just tracks that cars, or more commonly (and intelligently) land rovers would use from time to time. But I didn't know that while we were riding from Dakar to Thies. I thought that the city of Dakar looked very civilized, and the road was lined with palms and carefully manicured and landscaped making it look a lot like roads in rural southern California. Except for the intense and pervasive light and heat of course, which make California look dark and gloomy even on its brightest day.
Thies
Thies is the second largest city in Senegal, after Dakar. Our training program was housed in an abandoned French army barracks on the edge of town. This was our home for the next two months. Most of the volunteers were going to be stationed in northern Senegal, so they would be speaking Wolof. Those of us going to the Casamance region would be speaking Mandinka or Diola (pronounced "jo'-la",) although it didn't hurt to learn some Wolof as well. Wolof was spoken throughout the country since the Wolofs were the majority tribe. The capitol of Dakar was in Wolof country and the government, while including members of other tribes, was largely Wolof. There was a certain amount of cultural and social tension between the Wolof and Serer tribes in the north and the Mandinka and Diola in the south, but at that time there was no violence and the groups got along well enough. A few years after I and my group left, a "cold" civil war broke out between the Casamance and the north. Today, tourism to the Casamance region is restricted.
I was hooked up with a Fulani speaker and started learning that language. The Fulani are mostly a nomadic tribe that herd large herds of cattle along trade routes north and south, ignoring borders. They consider cattle to be wealth, and I was told that a Fulani would starve to death before slaughtering his cattle for food. That struck me as odd, but then it probably would never occur to me to eat a stack of dollar bills even if I were starving. So perhaps it isn't that strange. As it turned out later, the people of Bafata, the village I was eventually sent to, did not speak Fulani. They spoke Mandinka, and were very proud of their Mandinka heritage. They were not happy when their Peace Corps volunteer showed up knowing only Fulani, and no Mandinka. More on that later.
In addition to learning the native languages, we learned agricultural techniques used in the region, and were introduced to the Senegalese bureaucracy and international aid organizations. We would be working with bureaucrats to get permits and access to resources, and the aid organizations would help with information and would provide some materials as well. For example, when I helped my villagers plant 40 hectares (1 hectare = about 2.5 acres) of bananas, the banana suckers we started with came from such a group. In order to learn tropical agriculture, we planted large vegetable gardens and tended them over the 2 months of training. We also learned aviculture and raised 100 chickens, along with some sheep. At the end of the training, we slaughtered the animals, harvested our vegetables and had a feast.
Two stories from the days in Thies are "Hot Pepper" and "Spotlight."
