Whoa. America is just like I left it! I'm still in the holy-crap-hot-water-and-paved-streets phase and am trying to deal with reverse culture shock and about a hundred people who want me to sum up Senegal in six words, and even though this was expected, it's haaaard. So, time to finish this thing up, I guess.
I had to take care of a lot of goodbyes and figure out stuff for Paris and coming home in the days before I left. I went to the market as well to spend my last CFA and bargained for some woven fabric for my mom. I had 12000 CFA left and the guy wanted 27000 which was of course much too high a price but I literally could not spend more than 11000. I believe I got a really great deal which involved him urging me to lower the price I would pay and me actually giving the guy all of the money I had left in my wallet except for what I needed to get to the airport. A most successful last bargaining experience. The night before I left Dakar I went with Spencer to see his drum teacher's djembe ballet. It was in Bopp in the youth center which was difficult to explain to the taxi driver who did not speak any French and so it took a good half hour of driving around and asking people before we got there. The rehearsal was in a tiny tiled room and I can't imagine how any of the participants are going to hear anything in about ten years because it was so loud and echoey that my ears rang for a good three days afterwards. These women dance like nothing I've ever seen before. There were about eight or nine of them and it was run just like our dance class only loads more complicated and energetic. I got some great videos with my camera. At one point I ended up dancing with them, one girl taught me a few steps and we did it together, then I soloed during one of the sort of jam sessions. It was one of the coolest things I did in Dakar. Later that night I had my last dinner with the family and then went out with JB to Nando's. He thought I was planning to drink a lot with him (what? come on, JB) and was surprised and a little disappointed when I told him I had to get up at 6 so all I wanted was a soda. It was the usual awkward French conversation and the beginnings of saying goodbye...
In the morning I got up, at 6, and went over to Becky's to say goodbye to Lucy and Ryan who are currently traveling for 3 weeks in the desert of Mauritania, who the heck knows why. They are wearing headshawls and turbans, respectively, nobody talks to Lucy cause she's a woman, and since few people actually speak French they are getting by with Wolof, Spanish (oddly enough) and many hand gestures. They are very brave. It was a lovely and sad goodbye. Soon after that I went home to pack and say goodbye to the family. After feeding me a sort of lonely meal since it was too early for dinner, they came with me to the curb and saw me off in the taxi, where I cried my way to the airport next to a very confused driver. I gave him the extra change - JB had spent a good ten minutes arguing over 200 CFA - 1800 versus 2000 - which I ended up just giving the driver anyways, explaining that I was leaving the country. Oh well.
The airport was very odd, and the flight even weirder - there were 12 of us on the same flight and a bunch of us managed to sit all together and freak out about everything. The Paris airport involved a lot of waiting and running around to help Sam and Kate store their bags before they went to London. Matt's flight was delayed because of a Tornado in New Jersey, of all things, so I waited with them a couple of hours and we were ecstatic over giant chocolate muffins and coffee but couldn't deal with the outrageous Euro prices. Then they were off to London, and I to wait at the gate for Matt. Forty-five minutes of breath-holding as people came one by one through the tinted glass doors, and then we sort of blinked at each other, stunned, and five minutes later everything was about the same as it was before I left, and then...we spent a week in Paris!
I'm not going to give you the day-to-day breakdown, but I'll say that we walked all over the city, met up with friends, and saw everything you're supposed to see as a tourist. Including: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, that weird obelisk, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, the cemetery, the Luxembourg Gardens, les Invalides, the Rodin museum, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysees, Saint-Germain des Pres, the Pompidou Center, and a hundred other things. We'd just sort of pore over the map, pick a place, and walk there. And if there was anything in between that looked interesting, we'd go there too. One day I think we walked about fifteen miles. We also went to a really nice Vietnamese restaurant at the suggestion of Matt's parents which was delicious but upon getting there it turned out they didn't take credit or debit cards and we didn't have enough cash to have a full dinner. Oh well, next time. We met up with some friends, rather miraculously since very few of us had any means of communication on us. A few people from my program were there as well as a friend from Brown studying there for the semester who took us to a great Sangria bar. We were hoping to take the metro home before it closed as it was kind of far but even though we ran, we were a bit too late to make the second connection and had to walk a ways home anyway. The whole time I was a little blown away by Western civilization and a little giddy over reconnecting after some months away, but in general it was a marvelous trip and a good transition back. From the colony to the colonizer, woohoo!
The flight home was fine and the parental reunion at the airport was lovely. I had a few whirlwind days at home, though nothing terribly huge happened other than a small dinner party with ridiculous amounts of great homemade food loaded with dairy and vegetables, and a lot of hanging around relaxing and reconnecting and attempting to get over the jet lag. Then Matt and I caught a ride up to Providence with some friends, and here I am in his room, after two ridiculous days of saying hello to a hundred people and seeing the streets of Providence full of fifteen thousand people here for graduation and reunions (Brown does them at the same time). Today's been quite the day of short meaningless exchanges and revisiting hangouts that are now overrun with everyone and their mother here for the weekend. It's all a little too much, but I'm getting better at summing things up in a sentence and am trying to stay calm and patient and positive. I ran into a friend who was in Senegal last semester, and she gave me some words of wisdom on readjustment. It's odd jumping back into the drama and conversational patterns that I left almost six months ago, thinking that somewhere in there is a totally different Lili than the one who left this town in December, but knowing that outwardly I'm pretty much the same to everyone who saw me off. I expressed this to one friend at the gates of a fifteen-thousand person yearly graduation party called the Brown Campus Dance, who in a rather intoxicated state (as most tend to be at said event) told me it might help to look at myself in a full-length mirror for ten minutes daily just for the reminder that I'm in the same body, after all. I opted out of the Brown Campus Dance.
So. So that's it, then. Alxamdulilaay. Writing this and knowing there are readers out there among the people who care about me has brought me great joy and forced me into a sense of perspective even hours after any bout of insanity that went down in that great and grimy city called Dakar. It is at the moment above all a comfort to know that I don't have to start from square one with everyone. It is going to be rather a task to resume life as it was, and I'm still unreasonably hopeful that from somewhere within will emerge that one perfect sentence that can communicate everything I did and observed and how it has transformed me. I am slightly shocked to find that aside from a killer tan, these changes have not manifested themselves in a tremendous and glaringly obvious way. I feel a little bit new and slightly baffled by this marvelous and terrible nation in which I have come back to things like hot water, gender equity, toilet paper, some semblance of racial equality, and breakfast cereal. In light of these luxuries that I will probably go back to taking for granted, I am terrified that what has changed in me is so subtle that I will start to forget. But oh! I can with some certainly rely on that miraculous piece of modern genius called the Internet to keep watch over this compilation of memories, which contains almost every single thing I have lived and wondered at and stored away for these four and a half months and which I can take out and mull over from time to time for as long as I like. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to read this. It means a lot - when anyone tells me they've followed my blog I know I don't have to struggle for that sentence to sum it all up because, well, all the words are here.
In hopes that you find peace -
Lili
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
This is it
Well...that's it. I'm leaving tomorrow. I just sort of showed up one gray January day in this country, chilled out for four and a half months, and now I'm peacing. WHAT? I haven't written for over two weeks I believe, which means I have a lot to say because I've been trying to cram in everything before I go, but it's also probably a good thing because honestly the primary topic of conversation among us Americans is constantly something along the lines of HOLY BUCKETS OF GOAT DUNG WE ARE GOING HOME. In both positive and negative senses, of course. I'm so conflicted it isn't even worth talking about. Yet. Starting with two Wednesdays ago, in list form, until things merit paragraphs:
Wednesday-discovered an American style cafe that has real smoothies and coffee and that we should have known about four months ago, dangit-went to visit a very sick Ryan at his beautiful yet somewhat mosquito-infected residence (dengue fever? typhoid? who knows? he's okay now, though somewhat lighter)-watched Garfield in French which was way better in French than in English, especially because of the family's comments-spent most of the evening freaking out with Hannah about leaving, then cuddling in her bed because we'd had too much caffeine and couldn't sleep and instead talked about, oh yeah thats right, how we're leaving
Thursday
-went to WARC in the morning to discover that French had been cancelled
-got food at the Toubab store and spread out a picnic on the long back porch of WARC, which can be accessed through the back door to a classroom that has four locks that need to be undone just to swing the door forward
-wrote papers in the library
-walked all the way to the baobab center, read books in the air conditioning, walked all the way back to TRG to say hi to Ibou with Hannah
-was given something bought by Ibou, which will have to remain secret, as cool as it is, because it is a gift
-was all ready for bed and pajama'd when Hannah's boss called to tell us to come hang out at a bar before dinner
-went to the bar, Baobab 4, very cute, close to home, nice atmosphere, should have discovered it four months ago
Friday
-wrote papers, went to the Baobab center to read
-picked up stuff from the tailor that I'd had made-yeah this day wasn't terribly exciting
Saturday
Okay actually Saturday gets a paragraph. I woke up in the morning and headed to dance class where we were preparing to do a performance in the afternoon at the university for its fiftieth anniversary. It was a huge event and there were to be tons of booths set up by all the international student organizations. We had a booth, decorated with really odd pages ripped out from magazines, and some random posters from American art events in the 80s that happened to be lying around. It was kind of unfortunate because everyone who asked us questions wanted to know about what was shoddily hung up on the walls and nobody had any idea. Sene got us a gigantic American flag on a pole. More on that in a minute. Anyway, we had our last rehearsal for dance and got the costumes Kadja had bought for us: brown and white SHORT wrap skirts with dangling shells, and matching sleeveless tops. SO ugly. Oh well. Only six of us were dancing, five girls and Craig. We went home to eat and sleep and then headed out again in the afternoon, found our booth at the university and before getting ready to dance were bombarded with all kinds of odd historical questions in French and broken English from whoever came by. Such as: when did George Washington die? Who is the best president ever of the United States? What is the date of birth of JFK? Who was the original president of the thirteen colonies? Et cetera. I mean, what the heck? I made up a lot of things I think, that people nodded happily at. And then it was time to dance! We went into an empty classroom and came out in our costumes and binbins, legs way too bare to walk through the crowd again, and met up with the drummers. We warmed up a little and hung around and talked to the crowd of friends that had begun to assemble, then we all went over towards the stage. By this time there was a rap artist up there, lyp syching of all things, to a rather disinterested audience of several hundred people, all standing several hundred feet away from the gigantic raised stage. It was really bizarre. Then someone introduced us as the Americans and we got up on stage. The drummers played a bit first, then started our call, and we danced in front of everyone who was there. It was really incredible. People were really cheering and screaming and so appreciative. We didn't get to do our second dance or drumming because they shooed us off the stage, but it was just the craziest performance I've ever done in my life. Even Kadja came out and soloed while we were dancing. She got all teary, she was so proud of her fumbling American dancers. Someone filmed it but I doubt I'll ever see it. Afterwards I walked home with Hannah and JB with my pants on under my costume. Later that night Hannah and I headed out to Becky's, and from there to Baobab 4. We tried to go see Youssou Ndor but he wasn't playing and right near his club Becky's bag got stolen. We were in a large group and the guy came up to the two people who had bags, ripped them off their shoulders (we think with a knife) and ran away. People in the street chased after him but he got away. It was kind of upsetting and Becky lost a lot of stuff but she was fine. Instead of Thiossane we went on to a salsa club where Kate's host uncle was playing the guitar. We danced the night away and then went to Les Ambassades for burgers at 5 AM. It was a good night other than the unfortunate bag incident.
Sunday/Monday
-slept in and worked
-finished my very last paper, leaving me with a whole ten days of freedom before leaving
Tuesday
-went to the hospital, waited around but Diagne did not show up, got fed up and returned my blouse and just left, never to go back. It was just enough.
-went to WARC to meet up with people to go to the Artisanal village but instead got spaghetti bolognese (!!!) at the restaurant and met up with some girls at le Palais.
-went to Sandaga with Hannah and Renee and bargained insanely all afternoon. I am SO proud of this final trip there
-saw a play at the national theater about a village of people trying to buy a gun
-were approached by a crazy dude afterwards in the theater who recited then explained some poetry and spoke to us in English and admonished the general American lack of friendliness and took down some email addresses. whhoa.
-had a delicious dinner at the Institut Francais
-watched a crazy kung fu movie with the family on TV
Wednesday
In the morning I got up early, couldn't sleep because I was freaking out about, what else, the fact that I'm leaving here, so I organized the room. I then went to IFE class which had been switched to Wednesday (who just switches a class to a different day and ges away with it??? oh wait, I'm in Senegal) and where we had a really intense class discussion about homosexuality and how it is viewed in this society. I was the only white person, the only American in the room, and had to defend myself in French on some pretty racy and ridiculous opinions from the point of view of a mostly religious conservative group of international students. Really interesting and difficult, and got verbally attacked to a certain extent by some very religious Muslim men but held my own. That night Hannah and I had planned to make dinner. We bought the chicken from Jules the week before, but when we got home Awa had already washed and cleaned it and was starting in on some kind of weird spice rub, so we were intially sort of upset and disappointed. She actually ended up marinating and then boiling the chicken and peeling and boiling the potatoes for us. Geez. It was supposed to be our night, but that's how it goes. So what we ended up doing was deep frying the boiled chicken on the bone, having dipped it in egg mixture and then flour. We mashed the potatoes with butter and took the excess chicken fat and made country gravy with reconstituted milk. We also used the milk to make mav and cheese that my mom had brought with her in April. It took us something like 45 minutes to boil water because we had way too much and there wasn't enough gas to use the stove burners. But in the end, it was a huge success. Everyone absolutely loved everything, and nine of us ate an entire two chickens and two kilos of potatoes and two boxes of mac and cheese. We put some aside for Awa to eat at lunch. It was so wonderful and the family loved it and in the end I'm glad we did it even though I was reluctant to try. After dinner the family presented us with going away gifts: these really goofy yellow and red pagnes, beach wraps covered with dolphins and decorated with beads. The kids were so excited, all 'your friends are going to think theyre so pretty and youll be like I got them from my family in Senegal!' and it was really cute. We actually did wear them to the beach on Friday.
Thursday
-got locked out of the cabinet and didn't have any money or keys
-planned some stuff to do in Paris (wooohoo Paris!)
-ate shawarma for lunch
-said hi to Ibou
-went back to the tailor
-said goodbye at Raddho with Hannah and were given lots of mangoes from their tree
-went to get Hannah cell phone at home, then sold it to a friend of Ibou's
Friday
Hannah and I got up late and went to the beach and stayed all day. First we were hassled by the guys who sell places under huts on mats, and were further hassled by many children and dudes trying to hit on us. I mean at times we very clearly said "we do not want to talk to you, we are married and do not want male company and are not at all interested" and people still didn't understand that we wanted them to go away. At one point some kids got off of a horse cart and talked to us for a while and then asked if we would go swimming with them. We had burgers for lunch at a stand, which in retrospect is probably what made me really sick all of Saturday and Sunday, but who knows. When we got home Julo and Jules and all of the kids came and hung out in our room for a while. Later Sylvan (Mamie's boyfriend; remember him?) came over and after dinner everyone did gymnastics on mats in the courtyard. I have never seen Mamie so animated. She actually did gymnastics as a kid.
Saturday
We had our last dance class and said goodbye to Kadja at the car rapide stop. Later after lunch I went over to WARC to meet up with our whole group and Andre Siamundele, the director of our program in the states. He has come back for our last week and has been hanging out with us everywhere. He's wonderful, and we had a meeting about the program, suggestions, complaints, what needs to be changed and improved. It was mostly positive. As luch as we've all complained, we've come to the conclusion that this is about the best in can be... An interesting fact I've neglected to mention; actually I find it more interesting that Ive neglected to mention it than I take interest in the fact itself: there has been some kind of a power outage, generally several hours during the day and several more at night, every single day for probably the last two months. It just got to be habitual, keeping the windows open for light, then getting out the candles when the TV and all the lights go out in the evening. Usually we'll sit in the dark for about a minute, whining a little, until our eyes adjust enough to go into the cabinet for candles and flashlights. Hannah's last night ended like this - she left during a coupure de courant, followed by the whole family in the dark. Even Mamitie waddled out to the front door by the street, holding the lantern and sporting a loose flowery tunicy sort of garment that does nothing to hide some seriously pendulous grandmotherly mammaries. I mean you don't mess with those things, they fed eight children. Enough of that. Mamitie got all teary and assured us both that if we ever want to come back, we are her grandchildren and the door is always open. And then we trekked out to the curb on the other side of the terrain de foot, waited for a taxi, and were off to the airport. In keeping with the general themes of insanity in this country, a teary-eyed Hannah and I were first brought to a gas station, then pulled over in the taxi by a cop who demanded that the driver pay 1000 francs before passing. I had a brief moment of fear that I was going to be asked for my passport, which I did not have on me, just other forms of ID. But no, the cop was gone in a minute, and the driver got out to do something in the trunk. He stayed out for several minutes, coming back around only to ask Hannah, who was in the front seat, to bend over the driver's seat and hold the emergency break while he messed around with who knows what in the trunk. Ten minutes later we were off, then saying goodbye at the airport door.I met up with others saying goodbye, met Cate's family finally, and then we headed out to a Sabbar in Medina. A Sabbar is pretty much indescribable, but I'll try anyway. A circle of drummers sits or stands on the inside side of a ring of hundreds of spectators, all in the middle of the street after dark, and play rhythms in unison and with many accompaniments while women in beautiful and often matching outfits dance individually or together. Sabbar dance involves a lot of jumping from leg to leg and a lot of kicking and knee bending and pulling up of the garments. If you saw it for the first time you'd probably laugh your head off, but it's really breathtakingly beautiful and energetic and requires a certain concentration and balance and presence of mind that I'm sure I don't have. Sometimes a dancer will approach a particular drummer and the two of them will solo kind of crazily for a few moments. At one point after 1 or so there was a power outage and it went pitch black and the drummers just kept on going. Spencer, who got really decently good at the djembe this semester, actually played with the drummers for a while, and seemed to be holding his own. I was very impressed. He even was given a bill to hold in his teeth like the other dudes. After the sabbar everyone dispersed and the Americans had a little fun dancing, at which point we headed out to a bar downtown by taxi. The other taxi of people got lost with a driver who spoke no french and could not find the club, so we waited and avoided crowds of people and prostitutes and when they finally arrived went in to the sweatiest, sketchiest dance club I've ever been to. It was very hot and sticky and my glasses fogged up and there were hundreds of people and they blew foam all over us and we danced maybe three songs and got out of there. I got home and went to bed around 5.
Sunday
Uneventful, as I was extremely sick all day and reluctant to go more than twelve feet away from the bathroom. I was about as sick as I was the first week I got here, only this time I wasn't freaking out, just disappointed that one of my last days here had to be spent in bed. The family was so great about it, making me plain rice and telling me to just go to bed.
Monday
We went to the Isle de Madeleine again after buying lunch at the Toubab store and spent the afternoon exploring in our bathing suits. I have a sunburned nose with a really lovely white line from my glasses right across the bridge, and the soles of my feet are kind of blistering because the black rocks were so hot. But it was a great relaxing day and we were the only people on the whole island. Andre came along with us.
Today
Well, I'm at WARC, finally done catching y'all up after three hours of typing, two power outages, and a lot of procrastination. This afternoon I plan to go to HLM one last time and then maybe even Sandaga for some more souvenirs. It's coming down to the last hours, the last dinner, the last this and that and everything, and I'm constantly having pangs of fear and regret and excitement in turns. I wanted to end with something a little more profound than see you later, but I will be going to Paris so I'll include that and my departure and arrival in the states in my next blog from home, as odd as that is. I began a double-sided list of things I will and won't miss from this place, then realized - I only need a single list because I can't distinguish anymore. I'm trying to put down everything I can possibly think of, and I plan to work on it during the plane flight when I'm not sobbing or watching terrible movies. Many bisou and I'll see you on the other side, where I will reassume my proper name, get super clean in a hot shower, don some sneakers and jeans, shave my armpits, reclaim my very own laptop, eat whatever I want whenever the hell I want it, and any number of other fun Occidental activities.
Jamm rekk - peace and peace and peace only.
Wednesday-discovered an American style cafe that has real smoothies and coffee and that we should have known about four months ago, dangit-went to visit a very sick Ryan at his beautiful yet somewhat mosquito-infected residence (dengue fever? typhoid? who knows? he's okay now, though somewhat lighter)-watched Garfield in French which was way better in French than in English, especially because of the family's comments-spent most of the evening freaking out with Hannah about leaving, then cuddling in her bed because we'd had too much caffeine and couldn't sleep and instead talked about, oh yeah thats right, how we're leaving
Thursday
-went to WARC in the morning to discover that French had been cancelled
-got food at the Toubab store and spread out a picnic on the long back porch of WARC, which can be accessed through the back door to a classroom that has four locks that need to be undone just to swing the door forward
-wrote papers in the library
-walked all the way to the baobab center, read books in the air conditioning, walked all the way back to TRG to say hi to Ibou with Hannah
-was given something bought by Ibou, which will have to remain secret, as cool as it is, because it is a gift
-was all ready for bed and pajama'd when Hannah's boss called to tell us to come hang out at a bar before dinner
-went to the bar, Baobab 4, very cute, close to home, nice atmosphere, should have discovered it four months ago
Friday
-wrote papers, went to the Baobab center to read
-picked up stuff from the tailor that I'd had made-yeah this day wasn't terribly exciting
Saturday
Okay actually Saturday gets a paragraph. I woke up in the morning and headed to dance class where we were preparing to do a performance in the afternoon at the university for its fiftieth anniversary. It was a huge event and there were to be tons of booths set up by all the international student organizations. We had a booth, decorated with really odd pages ripped out from magazines, and some random posters from American art events in the 80s that happened to be lying around. It was kind of unfortunate because everyone who asked us questions wanted to know about what was shoddily hung up on the walls and nobody had any idea. Sene got us a gigantic American flag on a pole. More on that in a minute. Anyway, we had our last rehearsal for dance and got the costumes Kadja had bought for us: brown and white SHORT wrap skirts with dangling shells, and matching sleeveless tops. SO ugly. Oh well. Only six of us were dancing, five girls and Craig. We went home to eat and sleep and then headed out again in the afternoon, found our booth at the university and before getting ready to dance were bombarded with all kinds of odd historical questions in French and broken English from whoever came by. Such as: when did George Washington die? Who is the best president ever of the United States? What is the date of birth of JFK? Who was the original president of the thirteen colonies? Et cetera. I mean, what the heck? I made up a lot of things I think, that people nodded happily at. And then it was time to dance! We went into an empty classroom and came out in our costumes and binbins, legs way too bare to walk through the crowd again, and met up with the drummers. We warmed up a little and hung around and talked to the crowd of friends that had begun to assemble, then we all went over towards the stage. By this time there was a rap artist up there, lyp syching of all things, to a rather disinterested audience of several hundred people, all standing several hundred feet away from the gigantic raised stage. It was really bizarre. Then someone introduced us as the Americans and we got up on stage. The drummers played a bit first, then started our call, and we danced in front of everyone who was there. It was really incredible. People were really cheering and screaming and so appreciative. We didn't get to do our second dance or drumming because they shooed us off the stage, but it was just the craziest performance I've ever done in my life. Even Kadja came out and soloed while we were dancing. She got all teary, she was so proud of her fumbling American dancers. Someone filmed it but I doubt I'll ever see it. Afterwards I walked home with Hannah and JB with my pants on under my costume. Later that night Hannah and I headed out to Becky's, and from there to Baobab 4. We tried to go see Youssou Ndor but he wasn't playing and right near his club Becky's bag got stolen. We were in a large group and the guy came up to the two people who had bags, ripped them off their shoulders (we think with a knife) and ran away. People in the street chased after him but he got away. It was kind of upsetting and Becky lost a lot of stuff but she was fine. Instead of Thiossane we went on to a salsa club where Kate's host uncle was playing the guitar. We danced the night away and then went to Les Ambassades for burgers at 5 AM. It was a good night other than the unfortunate bag incident.
Sunday/Monday
-slept in and worked
-finished my very last paper, leaving me with a whole ten days of freedom before leaving
Tuesday
-went to the hospital, waited around but Diagne did not show up, got fed up and returned my blouse and just left, never to go back. It was just enough.
-went to WARC to meet up with people to go to the Artisanal village but instead got spaghetti bolognese (!!!) at the restaurant and met up with some girls at le Palais.
-went to Sandaga with Hannah and Renee and bargained insanely all afternoon. I am SO proud of this final trip there
-saw a play at the national theater about a village of people trying to buy a gun
-were approached by a crazy dude afterwards in the theater who recited then explained some poetry and spoke to us in English and admonished the general American lack of friendliness and took down some email addresses. whhoa.
-had a delicious dinner at the Institut Francais
-watched a crazy kung fu movie with the family on TV
Wednesday
In the morning I got up early, couldn't sleep because I was freaking out about, what else, the fact that I'm leaving here, so I organized the room. I then went to IFE class which had been switched to Wednesday (who just switches a class to a different day and ges away with it??? oh wait, I'm in Senegal) and where we had a really intense class discussion about homosexuality and how it is viewed in this society. I was the only white person, the only American in the room, and had to defend myself in French on some pretty racy and ridiculous opinions from the point of view of a mostly religious conservative group of international students. Really interesting and difficult, and got verbally attacked to a certain extent by some very religious Muslim men but held my own. That night Hannah and I had planned to make dinner. We bought the chicken from Jules the week before, but when we got home Awa had already washed and cleaned it and was starting in on some kind of weird spice rub, so we were intially sort of upset and disappointed. She actually ended up marinating and then boiling the chicken and peeling and boiling the potatoes for us. Geez. It was supposed to be our night, but that's how it goes. So what we ended up doing was deep frying the boiled chicken on the bone, having dipped it in egg mixture and then flour. We mashed the potatoes with butter and took the excess chicken fat and made country gravy with reconstituted milk. We also used the milk to make mav and cheese that my mom had brought with her in April. It took us something like 45 minutes to boil water because we had way too much and there wasn't enough gas to use the stove burners. But in the end, it was a huge success. Everyone absolutely loved everything, and nine of us ate an entire two chickens and two kilos of potatoes and two boxes of mac and cheese. We put some aside for Awa to eat at lunch. It was so wonderful and the family loved it and in the end I'm glad we did it even though I was reluctant to try. After dinner the family presented us with going away gifts: these really goofy yellow and red pagnes, beach wraps covered with dolphins and decorated with beads. The kids were so excited, all 'your friends are going to think theyre so pretty and youll be like I got them from my family in Senegal!' and it was really cute. We actually did wear them to the beach on Friday.
Thursday
-got locked out of the cabinet and didn't have any money or keys
-planned some stuff to do in Paris (wooohoo Paris!)
-ate shawarma for lunch
-said hi to Ibou
-went back to the tailor
-said goodbye at Raddho with Hannah and were given lots of mangoes from their tree
-went to get Hannah cell phone at home, then sold it to a friend of Ibou's
Friday
Hannah and I got up late and went to the beach and stayed all day. First we were hassled by the guys who sell places under huts on mats, and were further hassled by many children and dudes trying to hit on us. I mean at times we very clearly said "we do not want to talk to you, we are married and do not want male company and are not at all interested" and people still didn't understand that we wanted them to go away. At one point some kids got off of a horse cart and talked to us for a while and then asked if we would go swimming with them. We had burgers for lunch at a stand, which in retrospect is probably what made me really sick all of Saturday and Sunday, but who knows. When we got home Julo and Jules and all of the kids came and hung out in our room for a while. Later Sylvan (Mamie's boyfriend; remember him?) came over and after dinner everyone did gymnastics on mats in the courtyard. I have never seen Mamie so animated. She actually did gymnastics as a kid.
Saturday
We had our last dance class and said goodbye to Kadja at the car rapide stop. Later after lunch I went over to WARC to meet up with our whole group and Andre Siamundele, the director of our program in the states. He has come back for our last week and has been hanging out with us everywhere. He's wonderful, and we had a meeting about the program, suggestions, complaints, what needs to be changed and improved. It was mostly positive. As luch as we've all complained, we've come to the conclusion that this is about the best in can be... An interesting fact I've neglected to mention; actually I find it more interesting that Ive neglected to mention it than I take interest in the fact itself: there has been some kind of a power outage, generally several hours during the day and several more at night, every single day for probably the last two months. It just got to be habitual, keeping the windows open for light, then getting out the candles when the TV and all the lights go out in the evening. Usually we'll sit in the dark for about a minute, whining a little, until our eyes adjust enough to go into the cabinet for candles and flashlights. Hannah's last night ended like this - she left during a coupure de courant, followed by the whole family in the dark. Even Mamitie waddled out to the front door by the street, holding the lantern and sporting a loose flowery tunicy sort of garment that does nothing to hide some seriously pendulous grandmotherly mammaries. I mean you don't mess with those things, they fed eight children. Enough of that. Mamitie got all teary and assured us both that if we ever want to come back, we are her grandchildren and the door is always open. And then we trekked out to the curb on the other side of the terrain de foot, waited for a taxi, and were off to the airport. In keeping with the general themes of insanity in this country, a teary-eyed Hannah and I were first brought to a gas station, then pulled over in the taxi by a cop who demanded that the driver pay 1000 francs before passing. I had a brief moment of fear that I was going to be asked for my passport, which I did not have on me, just other forms of ID. But no, the cop was gone in a minute, and the driver got out to do something in the trunk. He stayed out for several minutes, coming back around only to ask Hannah, who was in the front seat, to bend over the driver's seat and hold the emergency break while he messed around with who knows what in the trunk. Ten minutes later we were off, then saying goodbye at the airport door.I met up with others saying goodbye, met Cate's family finally, and then we headed out to a Sabbar in Medina. A Sabbar is pretty much indescribable, but I'll try anyway. A circle of drummers sits or stands on the inside side of a ring of hundreds of spectators, all in the middle of the street after dark, and play rhythms in unison and with many accompaniments while women in beautiful and often matching outfits dance individually or together. Sabbar dance involves a lot of jumping from leg to leg and a lot of kicking and knee bending and pulling up of the garments. If you saw it for the first time you'd probably laugh your head off, but it's really breathtakingly beautiful and energetic and requires a certain concentration and balance and presence of mind that I'm sure I don't have. Sometimes a dancer will approach a particular drummer and the two of them will solo kind of crazily for a few moments. At one point after 1 or so there was a power outage and it went pitch black and the drummers just kept on going. Spencer, who got really decently good at the djembe this semester, actually played with the drummers for a while, and seemed to be holding his own. I was very impressed. He even was given a bill to hold in his teeth like the other dudes. After the sabbar everyone dispersed and the Americans had a little fun dancing, at which point we headed out to a bar downtown by taxi. The other taxi of people got lost with a driver who spoke no french and could not find the club, so we waited and avoided crowds of people and prostitutes and when they finally arrived went in to the sweatiest, sketchiest dance club I've ever been to. It was very hot and sticky and my glasses fogged up and there were hundreds of people and they blew foam all over us and we danced maybe three songs and got out of there. I got home and went to bed around 5.
Sunday
Uneventful, as I was extremely sick all day and reluctant to go more than twelve feet away from the bathroom. I was about as sick as I was the first week I got here, only this time I wasn't freaking out, just disappointed that one of my last days here had to be spent in bed. The family was so great about it, making me plain rice and telling me to just go to bed.
Monday
We went to the Isle de Madeleine again after buying lunch at the Toubab store and spent the afternoon exploring in our bathing suits. I have a sunburned nose with a really lovely white line from my glasses right across the bridge, and the soles of my feet are kind of blistering because the black rocks were so hot. But it was a great relaxing day and we were the only people on the whole island. Andre came along with us.
Today
Well, I'm at WARC, finally done catching y'all up after three hours of typing, two power outages, and a lot of procrastination. This afternoon I plan to go to HLM one last time and then maybe even Sandaga for some more souvenirs. It's coming down to the last hours, the last dinner, the last this and that and everything, and I'm constantly having pangs of fear and regret and excitement in turns. I wanted to end with something a little more profound than see you later, but I will be going to Paris so I'll include that and my departure and arrival in the states in my next blog from home, as odd as that is. I began a double-sided list of things I will and won't miss from this place, then realized - I only need a single list because I can't distinguish anymore. I'm trying to put down everything I can possibly think of, and I plan to work on it during the plane flight when I'm not sobbing or watching terrible movies. Many bisou and I'll see you on the other side, where I will reassume my proper name, get super clean in a hot shower, don some sneakers and jeans, shave my armpits, reclaim my very own laptop, eat whatever I want whenever the hell I want it, and any number of other fun Occidental activities.
Jamm rekk - peace and peace and peace only.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Toubab Dialaw and two weeks to go
Wooo weekend on the beach!! Or at least one night. We left for Toubab Dialaw on Firday afternoon after Tina and Craig and I came back from a conference at the University for History class. We thought this was going to have something to do with history but it was in fact a celebratory meeting organized by our professor for the 50th anniversary of UCAD, where a panel of old dudes talked about the university. We got out of there pretty quick when we realized there were many hundreds of people and that our professor wouldn't know whether we were there or not because his eyesight isnt good enough even to spot a couple of Toubabs among the students of the audience. So back to the beach: the (air-conditioned!) bus ride took only an hour or two and then we were there at this cute touristy hotel. Over the 24 hours we were there, we designed and dyed batik fabric, went swimming, bargained for tons of jewellery on the beach, drank cheap gin, spent the night hanging out in hammocks overlooking the ocean, slept under mosquito nets (!!), went tanning, and generally enjoyed a relaxing if short beach vacation. The food there was great and the water was slightly lukewarm when it was running and the beds had sheets and blankets! Wondrous!
Saturday when I got back I went to the tailor's where he had finished my dress! I am very pleased, and wore it on Monday. I was so tired Saturday night that instead of going to a party hosted by Spencer's family, I went to bed. Apparently we didn't miss too much so no worries. Sunday morning I went with Hannah to where she works for a conference on Darfur. We couldn't hear very well and anyway we were about an hour late but we did get great croissants and coffee and other fun western munchies afterwards, which made it all worth it. Later Hannah and I hung out at Nando's until around 16 when we met our friend Ibou. He took us to his house in Medina for the afternoon, where we met his (80-year-old) father and his sisters and nieces and such, and drank all three glasses of attaya which kept me up far into the evening what with the coffee I'd already had in the morning. He paid for our taxi there and our car rapide home and it was just such a pleasant afternoon and early evening of sitting around on a bed listening to music and watching bad tv and chatting (in terrible french on both ends). When we asked to use the toilets after an afternoon of drinking tea Ibou was all embarrassed because they were 'African toilets' aka a hole in the ground behind a door. I mean come on Ibou, we've been here four months! On the ride back he told me he was going to get me one of those plastic teapots that every senegalese house has in the bathroom in place of toilet paper.
Monday for lunch we went to the Toubab store and bought real cheese, tomatoes, and zucchini which we thought was cucumber and made delicious sandwiches. Later in the afternoon I relaxed at the Baobab center for a bit, then met some girls to go to the talior and pick up a TON of bags that we had made for friends. We also commissioned some other works. So many souvenirs and presents, gah! We went to Becky's and sorted things out, then visited Ryan who was at home sick. By this point it was getting dark and I had to take a taxi home or face a probable mugging on Poop Street aka Bourghiba.
Monday night a horde of cousins took me and Hannah out drinking at Nando's - very moderately on our part and not at all moderately on the part of said horde who eventually got kind of unbearable and started spilling beer and getting touchy and not preventing random friends and strangers from hitting on us. A neighbor took us home relatively early despite the boys' requests that we continue on with them to some kind of soiree with their friends, from which they didn't get home until after 7 am. I'm so glad we opted out of that. It was a pretty good time in any case.
In the morning I slept in and didnt go to my internship which was probably cancelled anyway. Tuesday was labor day here so WARC wasnt open. We got up and had a late breakfast with the family - there was even an exciting odd egg-and-onion fried mash thing made by the enormous Odette, Fifi's mother. Most of the boys were hungover and cranky. Excellent. Later Hannah and I met Kate at nando's (a great meeting place among other things) and we headed out to do some souvenir shopping on the route de ouakam. We ended up walking ALL the way to ouakam in the height of the afternoon sun which is probably like four miles, and I have an aesthetically horrendous (but not really too bad) farmer's sunburn on my shoulders and neck. We got shawarma for lunch and I did end up buying some souvenirs, and we looked around the food market at Ouakam, and then went down to the beach. Other than being bugged by a couple of fishermen it was really wonderful to be out by the ocean and the weather was just wonderful - not that it is ever bad (it hasnt rained since I've been here) but there was a nice breeze. A bit later some of Kate's host sisters who were hanging out further up the beach brought us a fresh fish they had sort of barbecued, and we just plopped it down on a piece of plastic bag and ate it with our hands and spit out the bones. That is the kind of thing I'm really going to miss. Hannah and I took the car rapide back to Nando's and shared some grapefruit and banana. The rest of the evening was uneventful and full of organizing and paper-writing. It was oddly quiet after all the cousins had left, and a little sad because we most likely will not see them again before we leave.
Okay folks I've got to write a ten-page literature paper so you may not see me for a while. Then again you may. After leaving Dakar I'll be in Paris for a week! In any case I'm a comin' home soon. Jamm ak jamm -
Saturday when I got back I went to the tailor's where he had finished my dress! I am very pleased, and wore it on Monday. I was so tired Saturday night that instead of going to a party hosted by Spencer's family, I went to bed. Apparently we didn't miss too much so no worries. Sunday morning I went with Hannah to where she works for a conference on Darfur. We couldn't hear very well and anyway we were about an hour late but we did get great croissants and coffee and other fun western munchies afterwards, which made it all worth it. Later Hannah and I hung out at Nando's until around 16 when we met our friend Ibou. He took us to his house in Medina for the afternoon, where we met his (80-year-old) father and his sisters and nieces and such, and drank all three glasses of attaya which kept me up far into the evening what with the coffee I'd already had in the morning. He paid for our taxi there and our car rapide home and it was just such a pleasant afternoon and early evening of sitting around on a bed listening to music and watching bad tv and chatting (in terrible french on both ends). When we asked to use the toilets after an afternoon of drinking tea Ibou was all embarrassed because they were 'African toilets' aka a hole in the ground behind a door. I mean come on Ibou, we've been here four months! On the ride back he told me he was going to get me one of those plastic teapots that every senegalese house has in the bathroom in place of toilet paper.
Monday for lunch we went to the Toubab store and bought real cheese, tomatoes, and zucchini which we thought was cucumber and made delicious sandwiches. Later in the afternoon I relaxed at the Baobab center for a bit, then met some girls to go to the talior and pick up a TON of bags that we had made for friends. We also commissioned some other works. So many souvenirs and presents, gah! We went to Becky's and sorted things out, then visited Ryan who was at home sick. By this point it was getting dark and I had to take a taxi home or face a probable mugging on Poop Street aka Bourghiba.
Monday night a horde of cousins took me and Hannah out drinking at Nando's - very moderately on our part and not at all moderately on the part of said horde who eventually got kind of unbearable and started spilling beer and getting touchy and not preventing random friends and strangers from hitting on us. A neighbor took us home relatively early despite the boys' requests that we continue on with them to some kind of soiree with their friends, from which they didn't get home until after 7 am. I'm so glad we opted out of that. It was a pretty good time in any case.
In the morning I slept in and didnt go to my internship which was probably cancelled anyway. Tuesday was labor day here so WARC wasnt open. We got up and had a late breakfast with the family - there was even an exciting odd egg-and-onion fried mash thing made by the enormous Odette, Fifi's mother. Most of the boys were hungover and cranky. Excellent. Later Hannah and I met Kate at nando's (a great meeting place among other things) and we headed out to do some souvenir shopping on the route de ouakam. We ended up walking ALL the way to ouakam in the height of the afternoon sun which is probably like four miles, and I have an aesthetically horrendous (but not really too bad) farmer's sunburn on my shoulders and neck. We got shawarma for lunch and I did end up buying some souvenirs, and we looked around the food market at Ouakam, and then went down to the beach. Other than being bugged by a couple of fishermen it was really wonderful to be out by the ocean and the weather was just wonderful - not that it is ever bad (it hasnt rained since I've been here) but there was a nice breeze. A bit later some of Kate's host sisters who were hanging out further up the beach brought us a fresh fish they had sort of barbecued, and we just plopped it down on a piece of plastic bag and ate it with our hands and spit out the bones. That is the kind of thing I'm really going to miss. Hannah and I took the car rapide back to Nando's and shared some grapefruit and banana. The rest of the evening was uneventful and full of organizing and paper-writing. It was oddly quiet after all the cousins had left, and a little sad because we most likely will not see them again before we leave.
Okay folks I've got to write a ten-page literature paper so you may not see me for a while. Then again you may. After leaving Dakar I'll be in Paris for a week! In any case I'm a comin' home soon. Jamm ak jamm -
Thursday, April 26, 2007
It's Thursday, and here I am, procrastinating instead of writing the paper that is due tomorrow morning. I just wanted to relate the boring events of the last three days and finish with an extremely exciting yet kind of morally devastating turn of events.
Tuesday I went to the hospital and sat around in the TB department for four hours with another Toubab friend who just started working there last week. Everyone was really nice but there wasn't much to do except fend off the advances of one male employee and learn a bit about how tuberculosis gets treated here. The treatment, which is pretty much the same all over the world, lasts nine months. The first two months are the most important and it is imperative that the patient take the antibiotics every day or else the disease can become resistant. Because there's such a problem with people having relapses, for the first two months they monitor every patient by having them come in and take what seems to be a large handful of white pills every morning before they eat. So the job of the people in the department is to process their paperwork by hand, sort out the medicines, and give pills to the twenty or so people who come in daily. I again felt kind of useless, this time because there just wasn't enough work to do.
Most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I have been in the computer lab writing papers. Boring! Enough said about that. Tuesday night the kiddies all came in and hung out in our room and made string bracelets and just generally made a lot of noise. It was a good time. They also told us a lot of stories about all the Americans who have stayed here, including one last year who was so gross that Mamitie had to come in and throw out and wash a ton of her stuff for her. It amazes me how little we know about everyone who lives in our house but some more information surfaced, including the fact that Felix was in the army and like legit went to war somewhere (or so we were told). Which is apparently also why he doesn't ever sleep in a bed, only on the floor. What? I mean this is the kind of information we get out of the kids with seemingly simple, direct questions, and there's some kind of cultural barrier that doesn't leave anyone satisfied.
Other news: Mamitie is gone till Friday again, sewing more school uniforms at her daughter's house, and last night we watched a League of their Own on TV which in my mind was the best thing on television in the last two months. It was in French of course, but it was so refreshing to actually want to watch what was on the telly.
I leave for Toubab Diallo tomorrow after some kind of conference in place of history class, to spend a day or two on the beach put up in a hotel by our program. Sweet! According to some people who have been there, the hotel is really nice, and has great food. Really nice in terms of our now very low standards, as it still does not have hot water.
Okay now for the story of the week:
So when I got here in January, I was quickly informed that the toilet in our house was broken and that it would be necessary to dump large buckets down to flush when flushing was necessary. There was a flusher, a little pull thing on the top of the toilet, but that didn't work, and I had to get yelled at before I knew about the bucket procedure. When Hannah got here, she told me the flusher actually did work, but when I was sick and in the bathroom for like four days straight Mamitie kept pushing the bucket method, which I adopted and didn't even think about until this Tuesday night. I was commenting to Hannah on how it was really kind of weird that our family has satellite TV, yet finds it necessary to walk an extra kilometer rather than spend for 13 of us to take the car rapide for 150 CFA each, and also hasn't had the toilet fixed in months, and all kinds of other odd ways of cutting back on the small daily spending sums. To this Hannah responded "wait a second, what are you talking about - the toilet flushes," or something to that effect. Which, believe it or not, turns out to be true. Sure enough, it flushes like a charm. All nicely pressurized and everything! So for three months I didn't even think to test out the flusher and have been lugging buckets around and filling and emptying them at least once daily, when the whole time I could have just pulled a little thing on the back of the toilet. This is not a joke. NOT A FLIPPING JOKE!! I want those months back!
That is all.
Tuesday I went to the hospital and sat around in the TB department for four hours with another Toubab friend who just started working there last week. Everyone was really nice but there wasn't much to do except fend off the advances of one male employee and learn a bit about how tuberculosis gets treated here. The treatment, which is pretty much the same all over the world, lasts nine months. The first two months are the most important and it is imperative that the patient take the antibiotics every day or else the disease can become resistant. Because there's such a problem with people having relapses, for the first two months they monitor every patient by having them come in and take what seems to be a large handful of white pills every morning before they eat. So the job of the people in the department is to process their paperwork by hand, sort out the medicines, and give pills to the twenty or so people who come in daily. I again felt kind of useless, this time because there just wasn't enough work to do.
Most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I have been in the computer lab writing papers. Boring! Enough said about that. Tuesday night the kiddies all came in and hung out in our room and made string bracelets and just generally made a lot of noise. It was a good time. They also told us a lot of stories about all the Americans who have stayed here, including one last year who was so gross that Mamitie had to come in and throw out and wash a ton of her stuff for her. It amazes me how little we know about everyone who lives in our house but some more information surfaced, including the fact that Felix was in the army and like legit went to war somewhere (or so we were told). Which is apparently also why he doesn't ever sleep in a bed, only on the floor. What? I mean this is the kind of information we get out of the kids with seemingly simple, direct questions, and there's some kind of cultural barrier that doesn't leave anyone satisfied.
Other news: Mamitie is gone till Friday again, sewing more school uniforms at her daughter's house, and last night we watched a League of their Own on TV which in my mind was the best thing on television in the last two months. It was in French of course, but it was so refreshing to actually want to watch what was on the telly.
I leave for Toubab Diallo tomorrow after some kind of conference in place of history class, to spend a day or two on the beach put up in a hotel by our program. Sweet! According to some people who have been there, the hotel is really nice, and has great food. Really nice in terms of our now very low standards, as it still does not have hot water.
Okay now for the story of the week:
So when I got here in January, I was quickly informed that the toilet in our house was broken and that it would be necessary to dump large buckets down to flush when flushing was necessary. There was a flusher, a little pull thing on the top of the toilet, but that didn't work, and I had to get yelled at before I knew about the bucket procedure. When Hannah got here, she told me the flusher actually did work, but when I was sick and in the bathroom for like four days straight Mamitie kept pushing the bucket method, which I adopted and didn't even think about until this Tuesday night. I was commenting to Hannah on how it was really kind of weird that our family has satellite TV, yet finds it necessary to walk an extra kilometer rather than spend for 13 of us to take the car rapide for 150 CFA each, and also hasn't had the toilet fixed in months, and all kinds of other odd ways of cutting back on the small daily spending sums. To this Hannah responded "wait a second, what are you talking about - the toilet flushes," or something to that effect. Which, believe it or not, turns out to be true. Sure enough, it flushes like a charm. All nicely pressurized and everything! So for three months I didn't even think to test out the flusher and have been lugging buckets around and filling and emptying them at least once daily, when the whole time I could have just pulled a little thing on the back of the toilet. This is not a joke. NOT A FLIPPING JOKE!! I want those months back!
That is all.
Monday, April 23, 2007
The home stretch
Another week already? Not too much excitement here, things are winding down which means I have tons of papers to write, no longer have class in the afternoons, and am trying to figure out the new Brown online course registration system which, being in a technology-unfriendly city, is giving me a terrible pain in the all the diodes down my left side. (Ten points to anyone who got that reference.)
So, so, so. Exciting academic events of last week: handing in three two-page papers on Islam and a really ridiculous written exam at the university involving the writing of one paragraph on pollution using five verb connectors, in order. Oh yes, we had an hour and a half to write 100 words. Good times. What's left is a 10 page history paper, a 10 page literature paper, a grammar exam, a dance and drumming spectacle in front of probably hundreds of laughing people at the university, and a written Islam test.
Mamitie was gone for the whole week, just left all us kiddies to ourselves, so we had a party. Just kidding. The kids enjoyed themselves though. Hannah and I decided to profit from her absence to go out for dinner. Thursday night I met her and Christina at Nando's where we killed time for a while and then took the bus downtown to the French Institute for an excellent dinner. There was a cover charge just to get in because there was a performance later in the evening that we weren't sure we wanted to go to, but we ended up deciding to go anyway after checking out a couple of other places. The food there is just SO good. We decided to hang out for the performace which turned out to be a bunch of high school drama groups from different parts of Dakar performing a series of short plays. We stayed for the first one which was an interpretation of "8 femmes" which was made into a French musical movie a few years ago. I really thought they did an excellent job, there were a couple of girls who were really very strong actors, and they'd sort of adapted this French script for Senegalese society - they spoke in Wolof when they were angry or when it just fit, the daughter in the play had just returned from the states, et cetera et cetera. It was a great night and we took a taxi home where the family was still eating dinner, so that was kind of awkward.
Friday afternoon after class I went to the marche HLM with a bunch of girls and we bought a lot of fabric so that we can take it collectively to a tailor and have a bunch of things made. We would all like to get tons of small bags made for our friends at home but you only need like half a meter of cloth for that and most vendors won't sell you less than 6 meters at a time. So we're going to split it. We took the car rapide both ways. That whole experience used to freak me out thoroughly every time, but now I love it. It's a very good way to just be an observer of the city streets without seeming like a tourist. I feel like I've now perfected what I like to call the "commuter's look of utter indifference" which on a good day allows me to walk and ride and sometimes even shop without too much hassling. It really is all about your attitude and body language - if you look like you are lost or nervous or hesitant, people will know and act on that. At HLM I also bought some bin-bins, which in case I haven't said before, are stretchy beads that girls wear around their waists to attract sexual attention (and which also make good bracelets and necklaces and small gifts.) I was just attacked by this group of women at a stand selling them, who kept piling them into my arms and requesting money and not giving me any change, and who shoved things back into my hands and would not let me hand back the beads to the point where I had to choose between dropping them on the ground and paying for more of them. Well, I dropped them. I was alone in the market at that point and it was just this great measure of how far I've come here because I was telling them what I wanted in Wolof, bargaining, just surrounded by people shoving things in my face and it wasn't so much "ohmigod this is insane" as "how can I calmly extract myself from the current state of affairs and still come away with what I want?" And I did, I got 5 bin-bins for 3 bucks and all is well. I also bought another mumu for wearing around the house, this time for the right price - I asked Mamie and she told me I paid way too much last time. All in all, a very pleasant shopping experience.
The weekend was completely uneventful. Hannah went to Joal and I went to dance class, read a lot, and did some work. I was invited to church and declined. Jaco slept in our room again since there was the empty bed, and I woke up to him calling my name at 4 am, just for kicks, to see how loud he needed to get to wake me up. I mean the kid is 24 years old. I think we're both (me and Hannah) sort of at a loss about what to do about him, but that's a story for another time.
Samu and his cousin asked me yesterday for some Ziplock bags for their marbles with bits of string to tie them around their necks. These of course got ripped within the hour, at which point they got mad when I wouldn't give them more plastic bags. When I gave Samu a pack of Orbit gum last week he put the entire pack in his mouth at once. I mean, an entire pack of Orbit! I brought hundreds of meters of thread to make bracelets and it all got used up in a couple of weeks. I give Fifi and Reine safety pins probably once a week and I have no idea where they put the ones I gave them the week before. I shudder to think what would happen if anyone knew how much food we eat on the sly in our room...my parents brought so much stuff for the kids that I can't even begin to give it out to them without it being a completely inappropriate display of wealth. Little things, a pack of stickers, some jelly beans, a set of jacks, more string, stuff that's no biggie in the states, is something the kids will all fight over here, and if I give one of them more than the others they take it personally. They love the jacks but when I gave them to Samu expecting him to share and had to tell him they were for everyone, he was insulted, and everyone else was sore that they weren't around when I gave
them to him. I think I'm going to give the notebooks to Becky, who works at a night school for kids who work but still want to learn to read and write and speak French. Anyway that's enough of that.
Last night we finally got up the courage to ask Mamitie if we could make dinner! Among the stuff my mom brought was some mac and cheese, so we're going to try for fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. Maybe even some vegetables! A very American meal. As we all eat around one big bowl we're not sure how we're going to serve that quite yet, and they're used to having some kind of sauce on everything, plus we're afraid they won't like the mac and cheese. I mean, on the one hand how could you not, but on the other hand, I eat something I don't like probably six days a week at home, and which the others eat with relish. You never know. I mean, sometimes I have to convince myself I'm not going to barf before every bite, so I figure they can deal with one meal they might not like too much, if that's the case. I'll let y'all know how that goes.
Alright well thats about all for now. As things have gotten more and more normal here I seem to have less and less caraaazy stories to tell, but that's probably how it should be. 23 days left in this city and only 3 weekends, one of which will be spent relaxing somewhere in the countryside with our group of Toubabs. I'm going to spend the afternoon working on a paper. Aka playing euchre and talking about working on a paper. Peace upon all.
So, so, so. Exciting academic events of last week: handing in three two-page papers on Islam and a really ridiculous written exam at the university involving the writing of one paragraph on pollution using five verb connectors, in order. Oh yes, we had an hour and a half to write 100 words. Good times. What's left is a 10 page history paper, a 10 page literature paper, a grammar exam, a dance and drumming spectacle in front of probably hundreds of laughing people at the university, and a written Islam test.
Mamitie was gone for the whole week, just left all us kiddies to ourselves, so we had a party. Just kidding. The kids enjoyed themselves though. Hannah and I decided to profit from her absence to go out for dinner. Thursday night I met her and Christina at Nando's where we killed time for a while and then took the bus downtown to the French Institute for an excellent dinner. There was a cover charge just to get in because there was a performance later in the evening that we weren't sure we wanted to go to, but we ended up deciding to go anyway after checking out a couple of other places. The food there is just SO good. We decided to hang out for the performace which turned out to be a bunch of high school drama groups from different parts of Dakar performing a series of short plays. We stayed for the first one which was an interpretation of "8 femmes" which was made into a French musical movie a few years ago. I really thought they did an excellent job, there were a couple of girls who were really very strong actors, and they'd sort of adapted this French script for Senegalese society - they spoke in Wolof when they were angry or when it just fit, the daughter in the play had just returned from the states, et cetera et cetera. It was a great night and we took a taxi home where the family was still eating dinner, so that was kind of awkward.
Friday afternoon after class I went to the marche HLM with a bunch of girls and we bought a lot of fabric so that we can take it collectively to a tailor and have a bunch of things made. We would all like to get tons of small bags made for our friends at home but you only need like half a meter of cloth for that and most vendors won't sell you less than 6 meters at a time. So we're going to split it. We took the car rapide both ways. That whole experience used to freak me out thoroughly every time, but now I love it. It's a very good way to just be an observer of the city streets without seeming like a tourist. I feel like I've now perfected what I like to call the "commuter's look of utter indifference" which on a good day allows me to walk and ride and sometimes even shop without too much hassling. It really is all about your attitude and body language - if you look like you are lost or nervous or hesitant, people will know and act on that. At HLM I also bought some bin-bins, which in case I haven't said before, are stretchy beads that girls wear around their waists to attract sexual attention (and which also make good bracelets and necklaces and small gifts.) I was just attacked by this group of women at a stand selling them, who kept piling them into my arms and requesting money and not giving me any change, and who shoved things back into my hands and would not let me hand back the beads to the point where I had to choose between dropping them on the ground and paying for more of them. Well, I dropped them. I was alone in the market at that point and it was just this great measure of how far I've come here because I was telling them what I wanted in Wolof, bargaining, just surrounded by people shoving things in my face and it wasn't so much "ohmigod this is insane" as "how can I calmly extract myself from the current state of affairs and still come away with what I want?" And I did, I got 5 bin-bins for 3 bucks and all is well. I also bought another mumu for wearing around the house, this time for the right price - I asked Mamie and she told me I paid way too much last time. All in all, a very pleasant shopping experience.
The weekend was completely uneventful. Hannah went to Joal and I went to dance class, read a lot, and did some work. I was invited to church and declined. Jaco slept in our room again since there was the empty bed, and I woke up to him calling my name at 4 am, just for kicks, to see how loud he needed to get to wake me up. I mean the kid is 24 years old. I think we're both (me and Hannah) sort of at a loss about what to do about him, but that's a story for another time.
Samu and his cousin asked me yesterday for some Ziplock bags for their marbles with bits of string to tie them around their necks. These of course got ripped within the hour, at which point they got mad when I wouldn't give them more plastic bags. When I gave Samu a pack of Orbit gum last week he put the entire pack in his mouth at once. I mean, an entire pack of Orbit! I brought hundreds of meters of thread to make bracelets and it all got used up in a couple of weeks. I give Fifi and Reine safety pins probably once a week and I have no idea where they put the ones I gave them the week before. I shudder to think what would happen if anyone knew how much food we eat on the sly in our room...my parents brought so much stuff for the kids that I can't even begin to give it out to them without it being a completely inappropriate display of wealth. Little things, a pack of stickers, some jelly beans, a set of jacks, more string, stuff that's no biggie in the states, is something the kids will all fight over here, and if I give one of them more than the others they take it personally. They love the jacks but when I gave them to Samu expecting him to share and had to tell him they were for everyone, he was insulted, and everyone else was sore that they weren't around when I gave
them to him. I think I'm going to give the notebooks to Becky, who works at a night school for kids who work but still want to learn to read and write and speak French. Anyway that's enough of that.
Last night we finally got up the courage to ask Mamitie if we could make dinner! Among the stuff my mom brought was some mac and cheese, so we're going to try for fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. Maybe even some vegetables! A very American meal. As we all eat around one big bowl we're not sure how we're going to serve that quite yet, and they're used to having some kind of sauce on everything, plus we're afraid they won't like the mac and cheese. I mean, on the one hand how could you not, but on the other hand, I eat something I don't like probably six days a week at home, and which the others eat with relish. You never know. I mean, sometimes I have to convince myself I'm not going to barf before every bite, so I figure they can deal with one meal they might not like too much, if that's the case. I'll let y'all know how that goes.
Alright well thats about all for now. As things have gotten more and more normal here I seem to have less and less caraaazy stories to tell, but that's probably how it should be. 23 days left in this city and only 3 weekends, one of which will be spent relaxing somewhere in the countryside with our group of Toubabs. I'm going to spend the afternoon working on a paper. Aka playing euchre and talking about working on a paper. Peace upon all.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
28 days later
Okay, so I need to write about ten days of stuff, Monday to Thursday, right? First off, today I have twenty-eight days left in Senegal. Under a month. When the BLEEP did that happen? I mean, when did I even stop counting and start loving the living in this infernal place? I don't want to think about leaving so I'm going to pretend it's not happening and shut up about it. Last Monday morning Hannah and I woke up and found out we were going to some kind of concert that Mamie was singing lead in, at a church somewhere within walking distance of our house. Thinking it would actually be a concert, we went cheerily off with JB and found that it was an all-day affair involving very poor acoustics, extraordinarily long and repetitive songs, an hour-long sermon and an hour-long discussion, essentially on why people should never listen to music that doesn't sing the praises of our lord and savior JC. On the bright side, there was toilet paper in the bathrooms and JB left early with us. Score! We were so disappointed in the events of the morning that Hannah and I dropped our plans to go to the tailor and bummed around at home. A family friend Jules took the opportunity to inform us that we were wasting our time in Senegal because we don't go out or talk to anyone or ever have any fun. He's been over at the house all of three times since we've been there, and okay, so I'm a homebody, but it really felt awful to be told off by this kid who hasn't a clue of what daunting cultural differences can do to your morale and how they affect your interactions with people of the host culture. That sounds so academic. But geez, I was pissed.
Tuesday was a very disappointing day, as were Wednesday and Thursday, for that matter: I was trying to figure out summer plans from across the ocean, Wolof got cancelled after I'd walked forty minutes to get there, nobody was back from spring break, I got slammed with news of two exams and three papers due within the week, the power went out while I was in the cyber, it was too cold to even take a shower so I had a bucket bath, and it was generally one of those crappy crappy days that come along once in a while. Things are working themselves out though. Thursday's Wolof class was fun - there were only seven of us back from our spring break trips so we all got together in one class and attempted to describe our vacations in Wolof. Also we learned the Wolof version of "head, shoulders, knees and toes," and repeated it about a hundred times. Oh also Tuesday I went to my internship at the hospital where I started in the baby vaccinations department. The mornings there are just insane. I mostly just watched (the interns there only do administrative stuff in vaccinations) and was taught how to register pregnant women and babies in small hospital record books that each woman brings with them, and in the big department book. I've never seen anything like it. Two nurses and two interns run the whole operation. For the first two hours there was a continuous line of about twenty women with their kids outside. Newborns are supposed to have a certain series of shots, and one women came in with a six-month-old who had never been vaccinated for anything. The nurses were furious. Babies need to be brought back to be weighed sometimes for several months, and when it was just a weighing someone needed, they cut the whole line. It worked like this: a woman would come in and leave her booklet and ticket (you pay a fee to get a ticket for whatever service you're getting, and then go and wait), and then one of the interns would take it and write down the information in the big book, check the info in her booklet to find out what part of whatever series of vaccinations the woman or baby was having that day, and record a date for the next part of the series, even before the woman came in. Another intern would call out names, and the woman and baby would come in, sign their name in the big book, and go over to the back wall where the vaccinating nurse would prepare the needles and screech out questions about weights and vaccines to be answered nervously by the interns. Mostly this happened in Wolof, most of which I could understand after a bit because it was the same words repeated over and over, and a lot of French for the medical stuff. At some point they caught on that I understood a bit and were really surprised, and somewhat embarrassed as they had been talking about how they didn't have the time today to explain what was going on to some Toubab who would only be there once. Whoops! I wasn't insulted, I know that's how it is and I'm really just here as an observer. Friday morning I made a presentation in history class and was then informed that we had to write a ten-page research paper by next week (on top of everything else, and with very minimal computer and internet usage). That is of course not going to happen until probably two weeks from now, and we're sort of relying on strength in numbers (none of us will be able to type them up by then) and forgetfulness of the old professor. Friday afternoon I went over to my internship at the hospital and waited around for the director who showed up an hour later and couldn't understand why I'd come by in the afternoon - all the other interns come only in the mornings. What I don't understand is why he didn't tell me this a month and a half ago when I first said I had Friday afternoons available, or any other Friday that I kept coming by and just talking to him in the afternoon. He promised me he'd find me a white blouse that I could wear like all the other interns (I had to call him later in the evening and remind him), and that Tuesday I could go to the maternity ward.
So after I found out I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon I went to the cyber, then met Hannah and Christina to go to a tailor and have dresses made! Hannah had printed out some designs online, so I sort of bummed off of them and decided to have the same style sundress made. We got some bananas along the way and then found the tailor's shop quite a bit farther down the road than we'd thought it was. Hannah had been there before for her suit. The tailor is a middle aged man with a very clean, organized shop (for a tailor here), and two guys were working away at the sewing machines in the back as we presented our fabrics and had our measurements taken and explained what we wanted and when. He's got this great reserved smile, half a pair of glasses (the earpiece on one side is missing so they sit all crooked across his face), and a very quiet demeanor, and spent several minutes looking at our designs before nodding in agreement. In ten days we'll have our dresses fitted, 14 dollars each. Score! Every few hours when something ridiculous or incomprehensible happens at home, Hannah or I will be like "dresses!" which is a nice thing to look forward to. On to Friday night!Fifi's mom spent the weekend at our house and did everybody's hair again. Friday night we hosted a fiftieth birthday party for one of Mamitie's children, and a lot of family came over and drank and hung out and ate great food. Hannah and I didn't help much but we did some dishes later in the evening and mostly hung out with all the male cousins around our age which would have been really chill if one of them hadn't decided that Hannah was his "muchuplove" and bugged her about it the whole night. I still don't know what this means other than he's into her and has a big ego.
Saturday was uneventful and I did a lot of hand-writing papers, but Sunday, oh Sunday, was quite the day. I got up and did some work and then we got all dressed up to go to a communion party for one of Mamitie's grandkids way out up north half an hour outside of Dakar by taxi. Hannah and I went with the boy cousins who live in the house (so as to miss church services and get directly to the party) and then the party lasted ALL DAY. I mean like noon to midnight. There were probably 200 people in the house at any given time, dancing on the roof and in the courtyard, drinking 40s of amazingly awful Senegalese beer or small jars of very strong cape verdien coconut punch or terrible boxed wine, eating from giant round plates of rice and cous-cous and maize and fried things and cake at times judged to be appropriate for meals, and generally having a damn good time. Hannah and I hung out with the boy cousins again and met a lot of old family members (everyone there was related for the most part) and got a lot of attention being the only Toubabs there. Everyone got tipsy to the high heavens, I mean Mamitie was calling everyone "chose" (thing) and JB and I had a long conversation he doesn't remember about his views on marriage, and Jean-Paul was falling down in the sand and still managed to steal a banana and two cans of juice soda at the end of the night. Everyone dances at parties like that here, everyone. I mean the adults just love it and even the old women were having the time of their lives, even after having cooked all day and all night long, it would seem. I talked to one old lady who was the other grandma of the kid having the communion. She was 74 and had the most ridiculous osteoporosis I've ever seen and yet spent hours on the dance floor. Other moments of insanity: 1) everyone in the sitting room took separate pictures with communion boy who was dressed in a startlingly white tuxedo-like suit. 2) An old man, presumably someone's uncle, who had gotten drunk beyond cognition fell down in the sand and had to be removed. 3) Someone found out me and Hannah were Jewish and spent the last forty-five minutes of the party trying desperately to convert us to bible-loving Christians. This kind of thing used to bother me but after Senegal I think I'm going to spend at least an hour at the door with any Jehova's witness that comes my way. Ever. After the party the party was not over. We (the thirteen people returning in the direction of our house) decided that taxis were too expensive and mobilized towards the bus, Mamitie shoving all kinds of bags in our hands and leading the pack. She seems to think we got the very last bus of the night which isn't even possible but in any case we were a very noisy pack, several among us trying not to puke the day's five meals out the back window. There ensued the conversation about marriage, a small episode involving an angry sober man, and a rather rowdy Jean-Paul simultaneously pulling the hair of his Toubab host sisters and leaning out said back window. After we descended the bus, we walked a kilometer across town then filled up half a car rapide where Jean-Paul hung off the back of the car playing the apprenti. We got home and the boys would not let us go to sleep until some ridiculous hour of the am, and then I got up and went to class. What a Sunday!Monday morning I went in super early to type up a four-page paper and prepare a presentation for class at 10 am. Whereupon the professor gave us an extra week to do it and shortened the paper to 2 pages. Ah, Senegal.
Tuesday I went in the morning to my internship at the hospital and waited two hours for the director to show up with a blouse for me to wear. He took me to the department where a nurse does consultations for pregnant women. I've found that people mostly think I'm an idiot since they either think it's weird that I'm a third year med student (I don't know why everyone thinks that) and have no experience, or they wonder what I'm doing at their hospital if I want to get a degree in neuroscience or medicine. At least when the nurse figured out I understood what she was saying about me in Wolof she stopped telling people I was useless. I justobserved really, which is fine. It was all in Wolof so I missed a lot of it but most of it was women coming in for morning sickness, getting examined for all of three minutes behind a curtain (I wasn't allowed to watch), and then getting prescribed a big list of prescription meds. I can't imagine what they are, and even after I asked it wasn't clear; I wonder if people normally get prescribed meds for mild first trimestersickness. Weird. One very young woman came in who was early in her pregnancy and when they were taking down her information (name, residence, height, weight, age, husband's name and age, etc) she said she didn't have a husband and was hesitant about the man's last name and after that the nurse sort of treated her like dirt, which was awful. I feel pretty useless there but it's still really interestingto go around to the departments and see how things go here. There was a power outage most of the day and so there were tons of people waiting around to have dental and surgical procedures. What happens when it goes off in the middle of the surgery? Goodness.And we have gotten all the way up to today, Wednesday, which has been unexciting and very busy in the computer lab: I waited two hours to get online.
I have to go to class in fifteen minutes but here are the last two stories I would like to tell: Sometime last week Hannah and I came home to JB looking after a big young dog on a chain in the side courtyard. Someone had given it to him and he had to see if it was okay with a) Mamitie and b) Arture, the reigning canine, before he could bring it into the main courtyard. So it sat outside on a chain on a very cold evening and whimpered and when Mamitie came home she didn't notice it until it was being so loud that she had to go investigate. It was like this big secret, all the kids were whispering about it and went to the back window to visit - and of course in the end it was no. It was SO typical that I felt like I was in a childrens' book, or an Arthur cartoon, except that there was no cute moral at the end of half an hour.
Also typical was Samu's insistence, before the party late Saturday night, that he knew how to iron, and everyone else's insistence that he would burn his nice white shirt, whereupon he picked up the iron and within a sixth of a second burned his nice white shirt.
It feels SO good to be caught up! I'm afraid I may not have time for updates in the next week or so but they wouldn't be exciting anyways, I'm just going to be writing papers. Ba beneen yoon (until the next time). Bisou!
Tuesday was a very disappointing day, as were Wednesday and Thursday, for that matter: I was trying to figure out summer plans from across the ocean, Wolof got cancelled after I'd walked forty minutes to get there, nobody was back from spring break, I got slammed with news of two exams and three papers due within the week, the power went out while I was in the cyber, it was too cold to even take a shower so I had a bucket bath, and it was generally one of those crappy crappy days that come along once in a while. Things are working themselves out though. Thursday's Wolof class was fun - there were only seven of us back from our spring break trips so we all got together in one class and attempted to describe our vacations in Wolof. Also we learned the Wolof version of "head, shoulders, knees and toes," and repeated it about a hundred times. Oh also Tuesday I went to my internship at the hospital where I started in the baby vaccinations department. The mornings there are just insane. I mostly just watched (the interns there only do administrative stuff in vaccinations) and was taught how to register pregnant women and babies in small hospital record books that each woman brings with them, and in the big department book. I've never seen anything like it. Two nurses and two interns run the whole operation. For the first two hours there was a continuous line of about twenty women with their kids outside. Newborns are supposed to have a certain series of shots, and one women came in with a six-month-old who had never been vaccinated for anything. The nurses were furious. Babies need to be brought back to be weighed sometimes for several months, and when it was just a weighing someone needed, they cut the whole line. It worked like this: a woman would come in and leave her booklet and ticket (you pay a fee to get a ticket for whatever service you're getting, and then go and wait), and then one of the interns would take it and write down the information in the big book, check the info in her booklet to find out what part of whatever series of vaccinations the woman or baby was having that day, and record a date for the next part of the series, even before the woman came in. Another intern would call out names, and the woman and baby would come in, sign their name in the big book, and go over to the back wall where the vaccinating nurse would prepare the needles and screech out questions about weights and vaccines to be answered nervously by the interns. Mostly this happened in Wolof, most of which I could understand after a bit because it was the same words repeated over and over, and a lot of French for the medical stuff. At some point they caught on that I understood a bit and were really surprised, and somewhat embarrassed as they had been talking about how they didn't have the time today to explain what was going on to some Toubab who would only be there once. Whoops! I wasn't insulted, I know that's how it is and I'm really just here as an observer. Friday morning I made a presentation in history class and was then informed that we had to write a ten-page research paper by next week (on top of everything else, and with very minimal computer and internet usage). That is of course not going to happen until probably two weeks from now, and we're sort of relying on strength in numbers (none of us will be able to type them up by then) and forgetfulness of the old professor. Friday afternoon I went over to my internship at the hospital and waited around for the director who showed up an hour later and couldn't understand why I'd come by in the afternoon - all the other interns come only in the mornings. What I don't understand is why he didn't tell me this a month and a half ago when I first said I had Friday afternoons available, or any other Friday that I kept coming by and just talking to him in the afternoon. He promised me he'd find me a white blouse that I could wear like all the other interns (I had to call him later in the evening and remind him), and that Tuesday I could go to the maternity ward.
So after I found out I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon I went to the cyber, then met Hannah and Christina to go to a tailor and have dresses made! Hannah had printed out some designs online, so I sort of bummed off of them and decided to have the same style sundress made. We got some bananas along the way and then found the tailor's shop quite a bit farther down the road than we'd thought it was. Hannah had been there before for her suit. The tailor is a middle aged man with a very clean, organized shop (for a tailor here), and two guys were working away at the sewing machines in the back as we presented our fabrics and had our measurements taken and explained what we wanted and when. He's got this great reserved smile, half a pair of glasses (the earpiece on one side is missing so they sit all crooked across his face), and a very quiet demeanor, and spent several minutes looking at our designs before nodding in agreement. In ten days we'll have our dresses fitted, 14 dollars each. Score! Every few hours when something ridiculous or incomprehensible happens at home, Hannah or I will be like "dresses!" which is a nice thing to look forward to. On to Friday night!Fifi's mom spent the weekend at our house and did everybody's hair again. Friday night we hosted a fiftieth birthday party for one of Mamitie's children, and a lot of family came over and drank and hung out and ate great food. Hannah and I didn't help much but we did some dishes later in the evening and mostly hung out with all the male cousins around our age which would have been really chill if one of them hadn't decided that Hannah was his "muchuplove" and bugged her about it the whole night. I still don't know what this means other than he's into her and has a big ego.
Saturday was uneventful and I did a lot of hand-writing papers, but Sunday, oh Sunday, was quite the day. I got up and did some work and then we got all dressed up to go to a communion party for one of Mamitie's grandkids way out up north half an hour outside of Dakar by taxi. Hannah and I went with the boy cousins who live in the house (so as to miss church services and get directly to the party) and then the party lasted ALL DAY. I mean like noon to midnight. There were probably 200 people in the house at any given time, dancing on the roof and in the courtyard, drinking 40s of amazingly awful Senegalese beer or small jars of very strong cape verdien coconut punch or terrible boxed wine, eating from giant round plates of rice and cous-cous and maize and fried things and cake at times judged to be appropriate for meals, and generally having a damn good time. Hannah and I hung out with the boy cousins again and met a lot of old family members (everyone there was related for the most part) and got a lot of attention being the only Toubabs there. Everyone got tipsy to the high heavens, I mean Mamitie was calling everyone "chose" (thing) and JB and I had a long conversation he doesn't remember about his views on marriage, and Jean-Paul was falling down in the sand and still managed to steal a banana and two cans of juice soda at the end of the night. Everyone dances at parties like that here, everyone. I mean the adults just love it and even the old women were having the time of their lives, even after having cooked all day and all night long, it would seem. I talked to one old lady who was the other grandma of the kid having the communion. She was 74 and had the most ridiculous osteoporosis I've ever seen and yet spent hours on the dance floor. Other moments of insanity: 1) everyone in the sitting room took separate pictures with communion boy who was dressed in a startlingly white tuxedo-like suit. 2) An old man, presumably someone's uncle, who had gotten drunk beyond cognition fell down in the sand and had to be removed. 3) Someone found out me and Hannah were Jewish and spent the last forty-five minutes of the party trying desperately to convert us to bible-loving Christians. This kind of thing used to bother me but after Senegal I think I'm going to spend at least an hour at the door with any Jehova's witness that comes my way. Ever. After the party the party was not over. We (the thirteen people returning in the direction of our house) decided that taxis were too expensive and mobilized towards the bus, Mamitie shoving all kinds of bags in our hands and leading the pack. She seems to think we got the very last bus of the night which isn't even possible but in any case we were a very noisy pack, several among us trying not to puke the day's five meals out the back window. There ensued the conversation about marriage, a small episode involving an angry sober man, and a rather rowdy Jean-Paul simultaneously pulling the hair of his Toubab host sisters and leaning out said back window. After we descended the bus, we walked a kilometer across town then filled up half a car rapide where Jean-Paul hung off the back of the car playing the apprenti. We got home and the boys would not let us go to sleep until some ridiculous hour of the am, and then I got up and went to class. What a Sunday!Monday morning I went in super early to type up a four-page paper and prepare a presentation for class at 10 am. Whereupon the professor gave us an extra week to do it and shortened the paper to 2 pages. Ah, Senegal.
Tuesday I went in the morning to my internship at the hospital and waited two hours for the director to show up with a blouse for me to wear. He took me to the department where a nurse does consultations for pregnant women. I've found that people mostly think I'm an idiot since they either think it's weird that I'm a third year med student (I don't know why everyone thinks that) and have no experience, or they wonder what I'm doing at their hospital if I want to get a degree in neuroscience or medicine. At least when the nurse figured out I understood what she was saying about me in Wolof she stopped telling people I was useless. I justobserved really, which is fine. It was all in Wolof so I missed a lot of it but most of it was women coming in for morning sickness, getting examined for all of three minutes behind a curtain (I wasn't allowed to watch), and then getting prescribed a big list of prescription meds. I can't imagine what they are, and even after I asked it wasn't clear; I wonder if people normally get prescribed meds for mild first trimestersickness. Weird. One very young woman came in who was early in her pregnancy and when they were taking down her information (name, residence, height, weight, age, husband's name and age, etc) she said she didn't have a husband and was hesitant about the man's last name and after that the nurse sort of treated her like dirt, which was awful. I feel pretty useless there but it's still really interestingto go around to the departments and see how things go here. There was a power outage most of the day and so there were tons of people waiting around to have dental and surgical procedures. What happens when it goes off in the middle of the surgery? Goodness.And we have gotten all the way up to today, Wednesday, which has been unexciting and very busy in the computer lab: I waited two hours to get online.
I have to go to class in fifteen minutes but here are the last two stories I would like to tell: Sometime last week Hannah and I came home to JB looking after a big young dog on a chain in the side courtyard. Someone had given it to him and he had to see if it was okay with a) Mamitie and b) Arture, the reigning canine, before he could bring it into the main courtyard. So it sat outside on a chain on a very cold evening and whimpered and when Mamitie came home she didn't notice it until it was being so loud that she had to go investigate. It was like this big secret, all the kids were whispering about it and went to the back window to visit - and of course in the end it was no. It was SO typical that I felt like I was in a childrens' book, or an Arthur cartoon, except that there was no cute moral at the end of half an hour.
Also typical was Samu's insistence, before the party late Saturday night, that he knew how to iron, and everyone else's insistence that he would burn his nice white shirt, whereupon he picked up the iron and within a sixth of a second burned his nice white shirt.
It feels SO good to be caught up! I'm afraid I may not have time for updates in the next week or so but they wouldn't be exciting anyways, I'm just going to be writing papers. Ba beneen yoon (until the next time). Bisou!
Monday, April 16, 2007
The fam comes to town
So I wasn't allowed to say anything beforehand, but my parents and Talia came to visit me over spring break! They were unfortunately delayed in Lisbon an extra day or so, but this gave me some time to sort of re-enter the real world after five days of river baths, hordes of children, and goat meat. The morning they came Maman Amitie told me that my taille basse was finished (!!) and so of course I had to try it on, at which point she made me wait half an hour so that she could take in a couple of seams before I went over to the hotel to meet the fam. Pictures should be up on facebook soon - its a long skirt and top that flares out plus a head scarf. I don't like the model much but as it was really done mostly as a gift I can't complain. Mamitie expects me to wear it a lot more than I would like to...In any case I showed up in full Senegalese garb at this fancy shmancy hotel and got to the room where it was so wonderful to see my family that I got all teary. My mother brought an entire suitcase full of stuff for me and the family, most of which I really can't give to them and either sent back with the family or am still hiding in my dresser (suitcase, that is) waiting for the opportunity to very slowly distribute things so as not to create more insanity than usual. Read on for that. We had a huge breakfast buffet at which I could barely eat anything because I'm so used to having just bread and tea. We spent the day relaxing a bit and took a pirogue over to the beach island of Ngor, and just walked around. Any time we took a taxi from the hotel it was a fixed price which was way higher than anything I can bargain for, so a couple of times we walked way down the road so I could show off my skills. Later we went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant which I thoroughly enjoyed, probably a lot more than the fam who are used to eating all kinds of delicious things all the time... also Talia and my mom took out all of my braids, and then I washed my hair about twelve times (until the water wasn't coming out black anymore, gross) and I am convinced I lost half of it. Oh yes there was HOT WATER (I stayed in about half an hour) and BIG TOWELS and any number of excellent hotel luxuries. The next day we spent on Goree, taking a taxi which took just about six minutes too long due to traffic so we missed the boat and ended up just getting a bit of coffee in a cafe near where the boat leaves. I paid for the tickets, three tourists and a resident (me!), and argued over getting Talia a children's ticket but was refused...sometimes that kind of thing works. Then we were crowded in to the station with no room to breathe and were afraid we wouldn't make it on the boat, it was such a huge group of pushing sweaty loud people. On Goree I was a terrible guide, and where we had to pay some kind of tourists' fee that I didn't understand, and fend off dudes who wanted to guide us around the island for a fee. The museums there are very odd, but we had a nice lunch and got the speech in the slave house. Unfortunately it wasn't the old guy Joseph Ndiaye, but another guy gave way more information anyways, and we saw Ndiaye who was in an awful mood and yelling at everyone in Wolof or else I would have gone up and reintroduced myself. It was a nice time and afterwards we met Hannah downtown to brave the marche Sandaga. My mother will insist this was a great time, but personally the whole experience of the market there gives me the heebie-jeebies, every time. As a family of Toubabs we got dragged around to the tourist-trap shops but I'd like to say that my minimal Wolof and decent French and bargaining skills brought the prices down a bit. People are so insanely aggressive that you can't help but buy something at times. After Sandaga we spent quite some time wandering the downtown streets of Dakar in search of the French Institute, a cultural center, store, restaurant, and performance space that I've been meaning to get to. A random vendor offered to walk us there and later demanded that I pay him for it, how rude. Yet how typical. Once there, we watched a bit of sabbar dancing, looked around the shop, and ate dinner. The merchandise had actually come from that town I had visited outside of Bambey where there is a sort of commune of tailors who make beautiful stuffed animals and blankets and clothing (for comparatively exorbitant prices, but really amazing nonetheless). The dinner was the best meat sandwich I had tasted in three months. They wouldn't make us drinks because there were apparently too many people in the restaurant, and it took us a good forty minutes to actually pay for the meal, what with us not being sure we had enough cash and practically nobody having the means to take credit cards anywhere in the city. A taxi ride took us back to more hot showers and giant soft beds and noiseless sleeping conditions. The next day we got up and prepared ourselves to take the walk I make daily starting from WARC and ending at my house in Amitie 2. We stopped along the way to buy street breakfast and coffee and bananas and to greet the various characters that I have met on my commute. The boutique man near WARC gave us free cafe Touba and bread with butter, the Talibe left us alone, we crossed the main road with no incidence of broken bones or spirits, stopped to say hi to Ibou and company at TRG, and finally arrived chez moi, where Mamitie had gone out to get provisions for a very special afternoon. I mean she broke out the bissap juice AND the bouille juice AND small bowls of table munchies. Awa made a seriously excellent cebbu jenn, and we spent a very nice afternoon chatting and playing with baby Farou and translating and watching TV. Mamitie took out the woven blankets for my mom to goggle over, and one of her grandkids (aged 31) showed up (I'd never met her before) and miraculously made English conversation all afternoon. Everyone loved the photo album my parents had brought full of photos I'd taken of the family that they'd printed from facebook. All in all it went very nicely and we spent the rest of the day lounging around at the hotel and then ate dinner there (oh em gee, vegetable soup). The next morning we packed up all our stuff, stored it with the hotel, and hit the marche HLM where despite the fact that most of the stores were closed, we bought something like thirty meters of fabric and several pieces of cheap jewelry. I think my Senegalese garb helped with the prices, but bargaining for fabric is a lot easier than bargaining for anything else because you go in knowing what each kind is worth. Stuck in the hotel without a room, we hung around the lobby (next to a giant group of Arab men and photographers that I recently found out was the Libyan president and his entourage) until later that night when we ate dinner there again. Then my family was off to the airport and I caught a ride with the hotel's airport van to somewhere that the taxis would be cheaper. Unfortunately I was spotted by all the taximen coming out of this fancy hotel's van and bargaining was not much easier than it would have been at the hotel. I didn't want to be out on a road in the middle of the night so I finally hopped in a taxi for 2000 cfa. We proceded to have the typical French-Wolof exchange which involved this 18-year-old driver telling me of how he dreams every night of marrying a white woman and going to America, and me telling him about how I have a Senegalese boyfriend who I will be marrying next month and then staying in Dakar to have babies. This works every time I use it in response to any expressed romantic interest, and has thus become the story that I use. Probably not every other day - I'd say every third. At least twice a week. At least. At the end of the ride the driver did not have any change for the bill I had, and none of the boutiques I asked at would give me change for a 5000, so I ended up paying him 1000 and an empty water bottle. How do you not have change dude, you drive a taxi!!! Small bills and coins are so scarce around here that everyone holds on to it. I mean sometimes I'll go to a big store and try to buy a can of juice for 450 francs with a 1000 and they just don't feel like making change so I just can't have any juice. Infuriating. Okay anyways I got home and the family had recently arrived, most of them tipsy from the annual Mendy family Easter party. Poor Hannah was the object of much cousin-ly attention and numerous dancing requests, and when I came home was doing the dishes. I'm kind of sorry I missed out on more family insanity but oh my oh my there was more the next week. In any case that ends my story of the end of spring break so now I'm only a week or so behind in my blogging. Mom, dad, and Tali: I hope the account of our adventures was to your satisfaction and that I didn't leave out anything you esteemed to be worthy of the blog. Go in peace!
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