From March, 1978 through June, 1980, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, West Africa. As a Rural Development animator (animateur), I lived and worked in the village of N'Doyenne in the drought stricken zone known as the Sahel, which included the Louga Region of northern Senegal. To give you some idea of the difficulty in obtaining water, the wells in N'Doyenne ranged from 45-52 meters deep. The burden of bringing this water to the surface fell on women in the village who used pulleys, ropes and rubber bags to fill their galvanized steel tubs, which they then had to place on their heads (with the help of other women) for the arduous trek back to their family compounds. This strenuous routine had to be repeated daily.

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       Two of the greatest gifts I received while living en brousse were fluency in Wolof and teranga, the Wolof term for their famous hospitality. I knew that wherever I traveled during my two year stint I would be fed and given a place to sleep in whatever village I visited, even the poorest--and there were many of these. On those occasions, I would pretend that I had eaten my fill so that the host family's children would receive my sumptuous leftovers--at minimum a chicken would be slaughtered and prepared on a bed of rice rather than millet, the everyday staple of the Louga region. In essence teranga meant that nobody starved.

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     I decided to write a novella based on my experiences in N'Doyenne, and since I wanted its focus to be on the incredibly resilient people with whom I lived, I wrote myself out of the story. What remains is fiction that is true to the life I was fortunate enough to experience in the Peace Corps. The Remarkable Conversion of Abdou Diouf became part of a collection of novellas published by Running Wild Press in 2018 under the capable direction of editor Lisa Diane Kastner. Just click on the above link to purchase the collection.