Hello to all of you! I am very excited to start the school year off talking about Senegal and some of the Peace Corps work in country! My name is Kim and I'm currently a Preventative Health Volunteer in the Kolda region of Senegal. I just had my six month anniversary a couple days ago and I will be here until April 2015. I am originally from Troy, NY, and I joined the Peace Corps my first year out of college.
For those of you who are just hearing about the Peace Corps, let me explain our goals and work. We were founded in 1961 by John F. Kennedy with three goals:
- Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
- Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
- Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.
Peace Corps Senegal has volunteers working in several different sectors: health, agroforestry, sustainable agriculture, urban agriculture, and community economic development. Now let me give you some super fun facts about Senegal:
It is located in West Africa.
It is a former French colony that gained independence in 1960.
French, along with Wolof, is the national language. Pulaar, Mendinka, Jola, and Serere are also minority languages spoken. I speak Pulaar, which is concentrated in the south-east and north of the country. Mendinka has small holdings in the south east and a large area in the south-west, and Wolof, which is the national language, is spoken everywhere else. The rest of the minority languages are found in pockets around the country.
Many people are subsistence farmers, with the main crops being rice, peanuts, corn, and millet.
Remittances are also very popular and most families have at least a distant member sending some sort of cash home.
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