This past week I’ve been doing a lot of traveling for
Counterpart Workshop and a trip to Dakar. Follow along with my convenient
subheadings to find out more!
Counterpart
Workshop
This past Monday through Wednesday, our training stage
hosted a Counterpart Workshop at the training center. A counterpart is a local
Senegalese person in you community that will help you to integrate into the
community, help you assess the community’s needs, help you find projects to
work on, and be a general resource for language learning and cultural
questions. My counterpart is an awesome woman named Kadiata Bah who runs an
organization who runs an organization that teaches agricultural techniques to three
surrounding villages near Taredji. She is the perfect counterpart and really
understands that my role in the community to be a teacher and help facilitate
her work (not to hand out money or be a knight in shining armor). She already
has plans to start a demonstration garden at her organization’s location in
Taredji and know a lot about the agriculture of the area.
Coming into the Peace Corps with doubts about what I could
possibly do to help Senegalese people improve their agriculture system when I
have no real expertise or local knowledge, I have been reassured by PC
Senegal’s counterpart system. I will in fact be trained in agriculture technics
by the Peace Corps and will be passing them along to someone who will stay in
this community and is actively working with people in her community to pass
along this knowledge. After Counterpart Workshop I have been slightly reassured
about the sustainability of my work in the Peace Corps. I will still have to
see how exactly my relationship between my counterpart, my community, and
myself unfolds, but for know I am pretty content with my function as a
volunteer.
Dakar Day and the
US Embassy
Yesterday, we took two 25-seater PC buses from Thies to
Dakar to see the PC Senegal office, apply for Senegalese residency, and get a
general sense for the city. My first impression was that Dakar is practically
like any other Western city I have been too. There were malls, bowling allies,
resorts, a theme park, museums, organized roads, a highway, and a new traffic
signal. Compared to Nairobi (the only other major city in Africa I have been
to), Dakar was much more organized from my first
impressions, qualified by the fact that I only spent a few hours there.
Peace Corps Senegal’s office was made up of a three-story
air-conditioned building with a marbled staircase. The offices of the Country
Director, the program assistant directors, and the admin are all located here
as well as the medical office. We filled out a lot of paperwork and were
introduced to all the people who work at the office, which were to a great
relief of mine all Senegalese nationals minus the Country Director and one of
the doctors.
The most interesting part of this trip was getting to go to
the Atlantic Club – a mini-resort with a swimming pool, tennis courts, etc.
that PCVs get free admission to. Here, we were met by two representatives of
the US Embassy to discuss the services they provide to PCVs in Senegal and
safety concerns for us. After that we got to eat American style cheeseburgers, and it was wonderful.
In terms of
logistics, I found that I will be moving to my permanent site on
November 11th, so don’t send me any more mail until I have a new
address or I will never get it. Until
next time!
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