Re-entry and conclusion

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

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.

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 -

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.

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.

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!

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!

A disappointingly short account of my adventures in Fouta

Okay, to begin with the week before spring break, in which nothing exciting happened outside of the daily sphere of excitement in this country. On Tuesday I went to my internship and instead of doing anything had several hours of sociopolitical conversation with one of the doctors until he had to go to the mosque. Apparently, nobody gets sick right before vacation, and he just sent me home. What else? No chances to get online because of three consecutive days of power outages and a conference in the computer labs. Lots of trying to plan for spring break, a couple of classes, lunch at the university, meeting peoples' parents and friends who were visiting (notably a friend's girlfriend who came over from Europe and surprisingly enjoyed herself a lot), several large assignments, the first of the semester, and a lot of wandering around the city looking for cybers that didn't have power outages.

Now on to the beginning of spring break, 4 nights in a village north of Saint Louis. We left early in the morning on Saturday in a Ndiagundiaye - a big, exraordinarily sturdy yet most certainly unsafe white van that is used as public transport all around the country but that we rented for the personal use of 27 Toubabs, professor Pam (we stayed with his family), Sophie and Marianne, two drivers, and an apprenti who probably would have been able to fix the Ndiagundiaye had it broken down. Probably. It took us 12 hours to get there, since we left on the prophet Mohammed's birthday (here they call it Gamul), which caused a TON of traffic around all the major cities, particularly Rufisque and Thies. Tempers were high, drivers were smelly, and some seats had no backs or no more than a foot of tush space. Highlights of the journey: a dude got on the back of the car and caught a ride to the outskirts of Dakar, we bought clementines on the side of the road, I tried somebody's mom's fattaya. It was poorly organized and we didn't eat anything until about noon, when we stopped at a restaurant on the side of the road for breakfast of bread and chocolate. The rest of the ride we sang a lot to the chagrin of our drivers and apprenti, studied some Wolof, read a little, got hungry and cranky again, and finally arrived in the village we'd be staying at for four nights. Pam's family hosted all of us, cooked for us, cleaned up after us, and generally treated us like honored guests. It was pretty amazing.
Since we did so many things that I can't even remember how they happened in I'm going to make a nice list which should be roughly chronological and then tell the story of the goat, which is quite the story.
Saturday night we met the Imam of the whole village as well as the chief of the village. Guede Chantier has about 4000 inhabitants, all of whom are Muslim. Anytime we talked to anyone, they would speak in Pulaar, which would get translated into Wolof, then to French, and then sometimes to English. We sat in a large tired group and asked questions about how the village was run and about the Imam's take on the situation in the middle east. Answers were not really satisfactory, what with the translation, and the hundreds of times the name of allah was invoked before any real conversation happened. It was sort of hard not to get defensive about American and Israeli policy, hearing religious leaders talk about how the "terrorists" have been provoked and are therefore justified in acts like the September 11th attacks, but we weren't really having a conversation, just asking questions, so it was impossible to respond. Our coordinators realized we were getting pretty drowsy and took us back to the house where we went to be kind of dirty because there wasn't any water left.

Okay here comes some daily lists - as much as I would like to say a hundred things about each of these events it is not possible, what with the six papers I was just assigned and all the stuff I need to do on the internet.

Sunday:
1) meeting Pam's 103-year-old grandma, who can't stand up on her own, but who is actually all there mentally.
2) being served drinks in one of the villages.
3) very illegally swimming to Mauritania across the Senegal river in our underwear, observed by an entire village, just so we could say we'd done it, then drying off in the desert sun in about five minutes.
4) pulling ourselves on the ferry across the river and back with a rope (no motor).
5) rolling up everywhere in a sweet ndiagundiaye instead of an air-conditioned tour bus (so much more street cred).
6) shaking hands with probably six hundred children over the course of the day.
7) bathing in the Senegal river by moonlight (we did it every night, there wasn't running water)

Monday:
1) visiting the women's organisation in Pam's village
2) visiting the tiny clinic and meeting the midwife who delivered Pam's sons (there aren't any doctors, and none of the village volunteers gets paid, and the nearest hospital is 15 kilometers away)
3) going to the market in the nearest town and buying like thirty bin bins from a woman who probably din't appreciate a huge group of toubabs blowing through. bin bins are stretchy beads you wear around your waist under your clothing to attract men.
4) picking tomatoes for about an hour with some of the village tomato farmers (pictures on facebook soon)
5) taking tons and tons of pictures
6) meeting Pam's family in another part of the village and being served more drinks
7) bathing in the river again
8) hanging out on the roof listening to music played by some members of the family and then falling asleep up there (we slept there every night, it got SO cold and I had tons of flea bites all over my hands where they weren't under my sheet but it was so beautiful under the full moon)

Tuesday:
1) breakfast (the same as every other day on our trip, bread and chocolate and tea and cheese, as much as we wanted, mmm)
2) sleeping late and waking up on the roof
3) saying goodbye to the family with many thank yous on either side
4) eating lunch at the house of a host family in saint louis where a girl on hannah's program is staying
5) going to the bathroom (gotta love turkish toilets) and then realizing that some little kid had been watching me the whole time
6) shopping in a little artists' compound around the corner
7) driving to saint louis then immediately taking a horse and cart ride to tour the city, where we were told many jokes in French that went over our heads
8) sleeping in a girls' dormitory, thirty of us in three little rooms, but we were SO excited about the mosquito netting and the BEDS!
9) chatting with the drivers and emma in wolof
10) watching some kind of army parade for independence day from the ndiagundiaye at night
11) deciding not to go out dancing but staying up anyway playing euchre

Wednesday:
1) Getting up super early and taking the sept-place by myself back to Dakar because I thought my parents had already arrived (oh yeah, my family came to Dakar!)
2) Meeting this 33-year-old american traveler slash accountant who happened to be in the sept place, didn't speak any french, and who later bought me lunch at les ambassades (what kind of crazy person just comes to senegal to travel alone, not speaking any french?? he's so brave)
3) having a REAL SHOWER back home, then talking to the boys and hannah for a while

Oh and now for the goat story! This one village of 150 people that is really in terrible poverty welcomed us with open arms - the children sang us a song in French about poverty, the village elders spoke to us about the health problems of the village and the history of the village, and they were so very honored we were there that they wanted to give us a gift. So they did: it was a goat. A real live goat that Pam said we could not possibly refuse, and it was a huge deal because that's like their food and their livelihood and everything. So, we had to put the goat on the ndiagundiaye. It sat under the seats and crankily tried to bite everything and ate a couple of tomatoes. Meanwhile, we're trying to figure out what we're going to do with this goat, and were asking Pam if we could give it to someone else, but noooo, Pam said "what do you mean what are we going to do with it? we're going to eat it for dinner." Aaaand...we ate it for dinner. The first and last time I will ever ride on a bus with my living dinner. I have to admit it was pretty delicious...

Okay that ends my trip. Sorry so short! I'm afraid most of my entries are going to have to be like that from now on...so much work coming up now that I've only got 5 weeks left here! When did that happen? More to follow about the visit of the family! Peace.

The Gambia!

On to...THE GAMBIA!

I apologize for the delay in getting this up but a series of power outages and meetings kept me from the internet for a good week or so, and then it was spring break. The purpose of this Gambia entry is not to describe what I did in the Gambia, but how I got there. Alone. Safe and sound, after all. Alxamdulilaay!

On Wednesday morning I left the house at 5:30 am, accompanied by Jaco, who wanted to hold my hand, and with whom I had the same conversation as JB about a month ago. Geeeeez, it never ends. Anyways he walked me about ten minutes down the road to meet some friends so we could go catch the bus downtown to the Gambia. Said bus leaves most mornings and costs only 2000 cfa, whereas a sept-place (a taxi with room for seven) is 5000-6000 cfa. We even had reservations for our group of 8. However, here comes a typical Leora moment: in the taxi, on the way downtown, I realized thanks to Sam that I HAD FORGOTTEN TO TAKE MY PASSPORT from where it was locked up at school, visa-stamped and everything. We got to the bus stop, met the dads of Becky and Cate who were coming with us, and there I had to make a choice. My options: A) not go at all, wasting 60 dollars on my visa and missing an awesome trip and having to face my family after all my planning and excitement, and B) make the 12-hour journey across the border by myself, take the ferry to the capital, and meet up with them in a hotel outside the city that probably, but not definitely, existed. I chose B, and thus began the greatest adventure of my life.
First I had to get back to school and wait for someone to unlock the office and get out my passport. I got a free bus ride on the first bus leaving to go uptown for the morning, because I talked to the driver and probably made him think I'd give him my number...nope, I just got off the bus and will never see him again. I love that game. After walking to WARC I waited a good half hour for Marianne who was surprised that I was actually going to meet up with the others, then passport finally in hand took a taxi to the Gare Pompier where the sept-places leave. This was quite a scene. I got dragged around immediately by a bunch of guys to the sept-places to Gambia and after much confusion I was shoved into the back of the taxi to wait until we had seven. This only look about half an hour and can sometimes take three, I think partly because the Gambian president, in case you didn't know, announced that can cure AIDS with his hands, on Thursdays. Fridays are reserved for asthma and I think Saturdays for TB. What are we coming to, Africa? Actually, what aren't we coming to? Anyways while I was sitting there in the taxi keeping a good eye on my bag which had been ripped out of my hands and thrown in the trunk (and which I was later charged for, being a Toubab, after much argument), hundreds of vendors were poking their heads in the windows and trunk to sell EVERYTHING you can imagine. And everyone else in the car, far from being annoyed, was LOVING it. The woman in front of me, who in spite of our inability to communicate in any language later sort adopted me and helped me cross the border, bought a toy gun for her son. He sat on her lap the whole ride and pressed the button that went eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwww wwwwwweeeeeeewwwww and made other fun gun sounds for the ENTIRE ride until it broke at which point he made up for the lack of gun sounds by whining. Another woman bought a cheap gold watch, and the man next to me who also helped me out a lot later bought some headphones for his cassette player. I just got attacked by people shoving phone cards and toys and home improvement products in my face, while I held tight to my bag and said no, no, no, and eventually paid off the dudes who helped me get to the car so they'd stop asking me about my Senegalese husband. My favorite product was a toy phone with a Barbie-looking character on the front labeled "BENIGN GIRL." Yep. Harmless.
Finally we were off, and I was squashed into the back left corner with my knees up to my chest for about four and a half hours while the rest of the car squabbled back and forth in Wolof and passed the kids around to various laps, including mine, which I didn't think existed in that small space until there was a child on it. We stopped a couple of times so the kids could pee, and when they got lifted into the car, every time someone would bump their heads on the ceiling and they would wail. One of the kids had some pretty nasty ringworm-ish-looking stuff going on on his head that his mom kept picking at. It was kind of hellishly hot and the countryside was not distracting in the least. The roads everywhere are so awful that the drivers mostly go on the sides in the dirt or take weird windy shortcuts across the dust and between masses of bushes and trees. When we got to the border everyone went their separate ways and I escaped the masses of young girls speaking terrible minimal English and pushing Gambian money in my face so I would change it and get ripped off, and went in to show my passport. As an American I was brought into the back room to sign a big book and get stamped and the police were reluctant to stamp my passport when I refused to give them my number or address, but I just kept on speaking French which pissed them off enough to let me use the bathroom without paying and get me out of there. The same thing was repeated three minutes later on the Gambian side. Three of my fellow taxi-goers had waited for me, the man next to me, and the woman with ringworm-toy-gun-child. It was just so amazingly human of them to know I'd be totally lost and take me under their wing to get me where I needed to go. My Wolof amused them but it was mostly gestures. They bargained for a taxi to take us another hour out to where the ferry left for Banjul, the capital. Thankfully we only had to wait about 15 minutes for the ferry (the ride's about an hour so you can wait up to two) and after the mad rush to get on and the presentation of the tickets we sat inside a hot smelly corridor for the ride across. I met a couple of Gambians and explained (in English!) where I wanted to go, and they assured me they'd get me there somehow when I got to the other side. I wanted to wander around the deck but was put off by the loads of men loading the cars and trucks that were on the ferry, and stayed put thumbing through a guidebook while my companions stared at me sort of mutely. On the other side I was pulled by my newfound gentleman friend to where there were a line of buses waiting to go who knows where, and then three or four guys tried to get me to follow them onto various vehicles where they would very loudly ask the passengers in English and in Wolof who was going to "make the sacrifice" and get off the bus with me to take me to the town I wanted to go to. This of course was not necessary and I tried to say so but there I was stuffed into bus after bus of screaming people who were loudly expressing their disgust at having to really go out of their way for a total stranger, some stupid tourist Toubab. Finally one very large agressive woman stood up and said, I kid you not, "I will make the sacrifice," and sat down, at which point the bus was off and I got some very dirty stares. Eventually the apprenti came around to collect the fares and tried to rip me off, since the money I had changed at the border - oh yeah, I sketchily changed some money at the border, forgot about that one - was completely foreign to me. The woman next to me told him off, though, and he gave me the correct change. People continue to amaze me. I stood for the first thirty or so minutes of the ride and there were so many people that I didn't even need to hold on to anything, and then as the bus cleared out I went and sat down next to the woman who'd made the sacrifice. This is when I realized that if things didn't work out, I was actually a little bit screwed, because on the bus and later after she dragged me off and down the street to another van, she grilled me on where I was going and who I was meeting and when and how and where and why, and I couldn't come up with any satisfying answers. Our cell phones did not work, the hotel was questionable, and if the people I was meeting had gotten detained or sick in Banjul I'd have had no way of meeting up with them. Geez, what a situation. Finally the woman got so fed up with this that she got out of the van and left me in the care of another passenger who shoved me out at a stop he said was near the Abuko nature preserve that I was looking for. So, there I was, on the side of a highway, with a giant backpack, in the middle of nowhere, probably but not definitely somewhere near where I wanted to be, hadn't eaten all day, had no idea if my friend had made it, it was getting dark, and the nature preserve was closed. I walked a bit and fortunately ran into a group of English-speaking rasta dudes who pointed the way (without even hitting on me, how refreshing!) to the hotel I was looking for, three hundred meters down the highway. One of them came with me on a rickety bike and kept pointing up to this huge wall and saying "do you see the white? it is at the white." And yes it was, and there was the hotel...but no one else was there. After a good twenty minutes of terrible English conversation with the proprietor, he asked me if I was with a group of 8 americans who called to say they were coming to stay that night, and here comes the sappy part: in that moment I experienced probably the greatest sense of accomplishment I had ever felt in my life, because I had made it. When the rest of them got there after two hours, I had about the best dinner of oily chicken I've ever tasted and stayed up talking most of the night.

So what did we do in the Gambia? I'm not going into much detail because the getting there for me was the most exciting, but in the morning we went to the nature preserve with a guide. Tons of birds and crocodiles and green monkeys. Then after lunch of more chicken at the hotel, and a lot of semi-tearful goodbyes (we'd spent a lot of time talking to the hotel guys and one of them told us the most amazing story of his experience during the Sierra Leone violence and how he got out of there). We headed off to the east in a giant rented van to Tendaba Camp where we would spend two nights. The van we really bargained for and our driver was pretty pissed off but gave us a great price because he was a friend of the proprietor's. It took about three hours I think, in the dark, on the worst roads I have ever been on, and we had to stop the van cause I thought I was gonna puke at one point. Tendaba turned out to be alright - we were so excited about the huge beds with sheets and the towels and the showers! In the morning we took a sort of desert hike (lots of crabs in the mud, lots of making up verses to a parody of "we didn't start the fire" which is about senegal) and in the afternoon of the next day we took a boat tour of the wetlands where we saw more birds and even a crocodile! good times. We spent a good amount of time trying to calculate who owed who what and decide how we were going to make it back to Dakar. Very early the next morning we left by Pirogue, three hours down the Gambia River at sunrise. It was beautiful and very peaceful. We then took another sept-place back to Dakar, buying some bread before we left, and in Dakar got amazing ice cream. I went home and slept for like two days straight, I was so tired. We hadn't slept very much...in any case that was the Gambia and since I'm now finishing the story about three weeks after the fact I didn't do a great job of it but I am going to skip the week after Gambia and move on to spring break! The next entry will be up soon...

A briefer update than I would like

Okay, where was I? Oh yes, starting over from the end of dance on Saturday. Since I actually wrote all this yesterday really nicely and can't bring myself to do it over and am extraordinarily frustrated and pressed for time and want to just catch up already, I'm going to make this a list, using past-tense verbs and boring language. Forgive this outburst of bitterness.

Dance: disappointing. We left after about an hour and decided to go to to the Phare (lighthouse). We followed our djembe teacher friend who told us to ask for Sise and mention Moussa if we wanted to get up top. We walked half an hour there, half an hour up the big windy hill, stopped at some lookouts, saw a beautiful view of Dakar, tagged along with a German lady and her son who were getting a tour in very poor French, but which involved an amazing GIANT lightbulb from the "olden days" (aka the nineties) and the mirrored dome of the new tiny light installed in the tower which rotates using an ancient motor or by hand. So cool. Later the woman wanted us to pay the guide even though he insisted we shouldnt but we gave her something to pay him anyways and made him slightly uncomfortable. We walked the hour back and went to a restaurant where we waited a good hour or so for a meal and talked for about three. Some friends came by who were passing and just spent a couple hours, thats the kind of thing we've just got time for here. Which is good and bad: nothing gets done, but people are tons more relaxed. Saturday night I read and talked to Jaco who is pretty crazy but he has given me some good advice about engaging the family, for all his sketchyness. More on that later.
Sunday morning I got up to read, got walked to church by Jaco when I forgot how to get there, arrived for the end of the first service and immediately embarrassed myself by remaining standing, not knowing that I was standing to recieve communion, and had to decline and sit down. Oops. I found Marlene and her fiance and was embarrassed again when we were asked to move to a row that was not for families with children. Oops. It was a pretty good service with the usual gospelly choir, and there were also some Americans visiting who didn't speak any french and I went and introduced myself and they gave me all kinds of Christian organization contacts and were amazed that I'm actually living here. As nice as everyone was, I felt a little lonely later in the day...that's another more personal story but man, sometimes I could go for a minyan and some matzah in this city where Muslim prayer is blasted from loudspeakers up to six times a day and anyone who's accepted Jesu as their lord and savior displays it proudly on their clothing and in their conversation. Later in the day I met up with Jeremy to work on a presentation and go to a cyber cafe and then more hanging out at home and bed.
Tuesday two exciting things happened: the beginning of my internship at the hospital and getting my hair done. I'll keep it short: we walked around town, Reine and Fifi and I, looking for rubber bands, found them after two hours and then the two of them plus Mamie set to doing my braids which took them two hours before and after dinner. Now I'm Senegalese! It's lasted a good ten days and is getting kind of icky but I'm hoping to leave it another week or so.
Tuesday morning I went to the hospital to start my "intership" which consisted that day of being introduced to every single person who works at the hospital for three hours. There was no sense of privacy and we just friggin walked in on people having small surgeries, and getting teeth pulled, and screaming babies being stuck with needles, and pregnant women waiting in lines, and doctors prescribing all kinds of shit, and old dudes half-naked on exam tables. It was unreal.
Okay that is far less detail than I would have liked but I just wanted to catch up a little before I leave for Saint Louis tomorrow and ten days of spring break! I'll talk about Gambia when I can. Jamm ak jamm.

playing catch-up

Hiya folks,

It's been over two weeks due to an unfortunate series of power outages and a crazy trip to the Gambia. As I am currently in a weird slow cyber cafe the latter and probably most of the former is going to have to wait a little, hopefully a second post later today, but I'll begin catching you up starting with two weekends ago, as quick as I can on this French keyboard that keeps getting stuck on the letter qqqqqqqqqq...
To begin with last Friday, Hannah and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies for the family before she left on Saturday morning for the Gambia (I left the following Wednesday.) This is not the simple task it is in the US, and a huge deal because the oven takes a ton of gas and some hands-and-knees effort to turn on and is very rarely used. I spent a good part of the afternoon in the computer lab trying to look up recipes and do metric-English and liquid-solid conversions so that later we could tell the boutiquier how much we needed. I went to the Toubab store to buy baking soda and try to find chocolate chips, which they didn't have. The girls were going to help us later that night with other ingredients.
Hannah and I walked home from WARC together and pretty soon afterwards the incomprehensible Jaco asked us to accompany him on a walk to Samu's school as it was report card day in all of Senegal. There were no teachers by the time we got there since he'd slept too late in the afternoon, but we now know where they go to school, and when to avoid the reeking sewage canal that borders the campus (pretty much all the time). On the way back we stopped off at some friends/cousins houses, where we dropped off a mysterious bike and said hi to Marlene and her fiance and his brother. Their family's house is sort of oddly bare of furniture and decor but they do have a computer and several electrical appliances. Odd. I mean people choose where they put their money...my family has satellite tv but the flush toilet hasn't worked for 8 months. In any case I promised Marlene I'd go to church on Sunday. More on that later.
So getting the rest of the cookie ingredients turned out to be a much bigger deal than we expected, since you have to go to the boutique and ask for dry ingredients in either half or third kilos et cetera, and we didn't know the word for third or sixth in wolof, and practically the whole family had gotten involved, what with us walking to the store with the boys, and down the block with the girls, and Mamitie getting all pissed at our attempts at mixing and eyeballing and questioning the available utensils that she finally threw up her hands and said "Callie a fait ca toute seule et c'etait parfait!" - the last exchange student did it all by herself and everything came out perfect! Hannah and I felt pretty awful buying the chocolate (in bars that had to later be smashed with a big wooden spoon and knives) because it cost almost 12 dollars and we bought it in front of the kids, who never just have that kind of cash. At one point during the mixing they all berated me because I went to wash my hands and dried the heels of them a little on my pants before I put them back in the batter. I mean, there are no hand towels, everything drip dries, and I was in the middle of mixing, and come on, theyre going to get baked anyway. We decided to throw in an extra egg and a lot more flour and some vanilla and probably too much baking soda, but how bad can you really mess up cookies? Several hours later, after lighting the gas oven in several places with matches, and severely buttering the pan for each of four batches, we had a large bowl of sort of cakey chocolate chip cookies. They were delicious, and everyone liked them, though they did get compared in every way possible to Callie's. Mamitie, knowing the kids would eat them all, gave us a small jar to keep for ourselves, and they didn't last long. They were about the best thing I've eaten in months...
Another interesting observation from Saturday night: chez nous, the word of Mamitie is god. As absent as gender equity is in this society, the matriarch has considerable power in her home. Sylvan, Mamie's boyfriend, came over to say hi while we were making the cookies. He still has to ask permission every time to go into Mamie's room, which is visible through an indoor window from the family room couch, though the two of them have been dating for a year and a half. He was about to leave since he had class very early the next day, but Mamitie said "no, you should stay for dinner," to which he of course responded "no thank you, I have class very early," to which Mamitie said "no really, you have to stay and eat," followed by "no thank you, really, Mamitie, I have to go," and then "You will sit down and stay for dinner. Sit down!" And he sat down, just like that.
Saturday morning I woke up to find that there was EVERYTHING possible available for breakfast, and no one around to see me eating it all piggishly. I had two cuts of bread, one with chocolate, and one with jam AND butter, plus there was hot chocolate mix and instant coffee (mmm mocha) and tea and even sugar and powdered milk left (the kids never leave us any). I cannot WAIT until I can wake up in the US and make whatever the heck I want, eggs and real cheese and cereal with real milk and stuff. But onward! I went back into my room to get dressed and when I came out to leave for dance, Mamitie (Maman Amitie in case that contraction was not obvious) was screaming at the top of her 68-year-old lungs while beating Arture on the ribs with a giant wooden pole because he had dug up her freshly planted flowers. It went like this: poor Arture would run by whimpering, she'd whack at him, he'd scream and run into the house, she'd scream at him to get out, he'd run by whimpering for another smack, et cetera. I got out of there ASAP. The poor dog was all bruised and limpy for a week.
Dance was disappointing as our teachers (dance and drums) are on some kind of strike against WARC who doesn't pay them enough and whose students never show up because the class is so damn disorganized that lots of us gave up. The six or so of us who were there learned a little bit of Sabar for half an hour or so from another girl who works at the WARC restaurant. She was a terrible teacher, only talked to one person the whole time and was impossible to follow, plus she speaks very little French and everyone ended up frustrated and just went home. It's a sort of unfortunate situation and I don't know whats going to happen since last week when I missed it to go to the Gambia only one student and one drummer showed up. Who even knows?
Ugh I have not even made it to the end of last Saturday and my hour here is up, so this may just get more and more postponed...sorry all, but don't worry, I'll get to my Gambian adventures hopefully before I leave for spring break and Saint Louis from the 31st to the 10th. If there's no power outage, n'shalah. Tootles!

Almost ten weeks?!?!?!

Today is the halfway mark (in days, and yes, of course I counted, you would too) of my time here in Senegal. I mean, what happened? Rather than dwell on how long I've been here, I'll say that I'm glad I didn't do my usual Tuesday blog post because I was having a serious down day yesterday and today I am in a much better position to describe the last very full week with the usual cynical yet positive spin. Here goes.

Thursday: Okay so morning French class got cancelled yet AGAIN, as it will be tomorrow, and we also found out we had no class in the afternoon...so I decided to take the opportunity to make the journey downtown all alone. I waited a good half hour for the ten bus on the corner and since there was no traffic, made it downtown in good time where I changed a bunch of money at the bank and immediately spent it all on antimalarials at the pharmacy. I mean I literally had only enough left to eat some shawarma and grab the bus back, but I was meeting some friends who wanted to shop for presents, so I figured I'd follow them around and be jealous of where they spent their money. I met them by the pharmacy, and had to make a huge circle around the block because I was being hassled by all these guys who wanted to drag me around to various shops, and avoiding them was one of my goals for the afternoon. However this proved impossible since as soon as we three Toubaabs met up we were accosted and had to choose a couple of them to bring us around. This seemed really sketchy to me the first time it happened, but honestly it really helps since they know where to take you and will often give you better deals (or so it seems) because they assume that next time you'll come back with your Toubaab friends. This of course is true, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating to be dragged around and flattered by dudes who buy you oranges and say "okay, okay, just look, and then later you can decide if you want to buy." I'm really great at standing my ground about not buying anything, especially when I really honestly don't have any money, and also because my horrendous attempts at Wolof amuse vendors into friendliness or indifference. Others give in easily and buy mountains of expensive or useless crap just to avoid hassling or bargaining, which is all well and good if you actually want any of the stuff you end up with at the end of the day. At some point I'm going to have to make a massive shopping trip and go all out with the gifts, but that's for later. In any case Tina and Jeremy bought silver jewellery and scarves and stuff and I followed them around and insisted I had no money. Later we found a bus stop with some difficulty and since it was still mid-afternoon we went over to Jeremy's house to hang out with his family.
Jeremy lives with five brothers and two sisters and the house is huge and beautiful. The brothers spend a good amount of time up on the terrace outside the room all five of them share, making tea, and chatting, and just hanging out. It was really refreshing to hang out with some guys who didn't ask for my number within five minutes, and we spoke French and bits of Wolof the whole afternoon and talked (as usual) about the US and how it compares with Senegal, and why we came here to study, and all that. I'm getting much better at summing up my thoughts on all this, but it depends entirely on the person you're talking with. You sort of have to judge how much they want to hear, and how patriotic they are, and the extent to which they're going to scorn you when you tell them the (tangible and intangible) things you really miss at home, and whether they'll give a flying pork rind about your goals and dreams, and how they're going to react to you summing up your culture and theirs in poorly constructed French phrases. In any case it was a very relaxing afternoon and so different from my family who relaxes in front of the TV and never drinks Attaya and just talks. Then again they're all of different ages and I suppose there's less interest in having sociopolitical exchanges when Samu would prefer to play soccer or Uno, and Reine and Fifi would prefer to parade about in fancy tank tops and write in their mutual notebook about boys, and JB would prefer to zone out, and Jean-Paul would prefer to be out getting a new tattoo, and Mamie would prefer to read aloud her bible or make unreadable faces at us while heating up fish, and Maman Amitie would prefer to hail the president or the Seigneur and do up her hair in tiny dyed-red bunches in front of the couch, and Felix would prefer to be anywhere else but where he is.
Attaya, by the way, is the tea that Senegalese men make ALL the time. It used to be the women who made it, but due to the fact that the men just have loads of time on their hands, what with unemployment and the fact that a few people can easily feed a family of twenty with decent part-time jobs, it is now the men who do it. There are three rounds. The first is very strong and bitter, the second strong and plain, and the third very light and sweet. I like the second round the best. The whole process takes a good three hours if you want it to, and usually there are three or four cups the size of shot glasses passed around among ten or more people, for each round. Before the tea is served, whoever is making it takes one shot glass full and pours it back and forth between two glasses for several minutes to make a good foam that stays on the top of the tea as you drink it. This has to happen for every glass of every round. There's really an art to it - you start a few inches above and pour the tea from one glass to the other, while lifting it up to about a foot above the glass, then bringing it back down. I spilled it all over the place. I've heard several explanations for the foam, including: a) it's just for decoration b) it's for keeping it hot, and c) it's because there isn't much else interesting to do with our time. On to...

Friday: A usual school day, with a long lunch, some games of gin, and stories of debauchery from a friend who was stopped by the police, arrested, and taken to the police station for having spent some "quality time," shall we say, with his girlfriend on the Corniche (the beach) , but not until after the police had observed them for over half an hour. Oh my. Nothing else particularly exciting on Friday, but I did stop by and say hello to the men who work at TRJ to have some stimulating political conversation and a lecture about how I should really know Wolof by now. And oh yes, later JB "took me out" to Nando's and paid for our beers though I insisted he should not, but he really was enjoying having me alone (Hannah was in the states) and promenading me around to the youth of Dakar, who, I swear, ALL congregate at Nando's on Friday nights. He brought up the subject of getting my hair done again, and we discussed animistic practices for a little while, which ended in me insisting that if I don't believe in those kinds of things nothing will happen to me, and him insisting that this is precisely what makes me more vulnerable to them. We gave up on this topic and went home to watch crappy movies until bedtime.

Saturday: Matt, forgive me for a little bit of copy-and-pasting. Dance was cancelled since our teacher was in Touba for the Maggal. I met 4 friends at WARC, all girls, and we had planned it to be a sort of girls day out on this island, Ile de Madeleine, we'd heard about where you pay some guys at the beach to take you over there and it's just you and this rocky island with tons of birds and pretty much nothing else. We were all excited about getting away from the stress of agressive men and the insanity of the city when Natalie told us she'd invited four others - two guys from the ivory coast (one of them is her boyfriend) and one from cape verde and a girl from France. Ah well, we were all sort of annoyed but nobody got mad, it's just sort of a given that here you take it as it comes and shut up. So we bought some lunch, found the beach and the little shack where these guys were sitting around in hard hats (dont ask me why) and asked them if we could go over to the Isle de Madeleine, and they were like oh okay sure, we'll just take your names and bring you over in this boat and pick you up at 5:30. Sweet. It cost us about 10 bucks each but it turned out to be one of the most relaxing days I've had, even with the presence of loud obnoxious vulgar (yet essentially harmless) men, one of whom made me very angry towards the end of the day by forcing me to put my ear to his head while he asked me the equivalent of "Have you ever tasted a salty Ivory Coastman?" Really pleasant. I refused to speak to him after that, and he shall forever hate me for it, and I'm glad.
In any case the boat took about 15 minutes to get over there and we had to wear giant orange life jackets. The waves were huge and got us pretty wet, but it was ridiculously hot so it was really nice. Then the island! As you approach it you can see hundreds and hundreds of birds just sitting on the rocks, and diving for fish, and flying inthe air. We got into a cove with a little cement dock, threw our life jackets in, got out, and the boat went away. There's very little on the island to see, not much vegetation, stunted trees, rocky beaches, thorny brush, flies everywhere, mountains of rock covered in bird poo, and little trails leading up towards a couple of odd stone or cement pavillions, but it's apparently some kind of national preserve. There was nobody else there, until later in the day when some couples came out, women decked out in high heels and fancy pants just to sit around on the dusty rocks. I don't get it. We americans escaped the rest of our companions and hiked up to the plateau in our bathing suits where you could see the city and the ocean for miles and miles. There were a couple of little trails up there but mostly it was sort of picking through the thorns and trying not to get bitten by flies or squirted by odd white liquid that oozed out of the plants ifyou stepped on them. Tina, the adventurous one among us, had the idea to find a way down to the beach on the other side on the island so we could go swimming. We sort of scrambled down this really steep rocky incline and got down where we wanted to. I swam for maybe three minutes but honestly it was so cold that I couldn't feel my legs and in the end we waited on the beach as our bathing suits dried on us in the sun in about ten minutes. We got back up with some difficulty and explored a little and then went down to see about lunch. Things were a little bit cold between us and the others but they warmed up as we shared lunch and played a trivia card game on the beach (in french, really hard) and made attaya (Charles the salty Ivory Coastman had actually brought a teapot and a little metal thing to stand it on and some stuff to make a fire.) I attempted to read a book but was mostly thwarted by Charles who would not leave me alone - partly because it's a Salmon Rushdie book that is banned in Senegal, which is why I wanted to read it on the island in the first place.
After a while I went with Tina and Natalie across the cove because Tina wanted to show us where she'd climbed the bird poo rocks to the highest point on the island. This, among other things, involved crossing several pools full of sharp shells, clinging desperately to a rock wall and barely hanging on enough to avoid falling into a shallow pool full of sharp rocks and sea urchins, scrambling up an incline of loose rocks using hands and feet, and finally emerging onto a sort of plateau. In any case it was an amazing view. Getting down was even harder than coming up, but we all made it back unscathed. It was something I would never have decided to do myself but I'm really glad I went. Tina is officially insane. We got down and Charles had cut some mussels and sea urchins from the rocks and was in the process of roasting them over a small fire and eating them with relish. It was pretty gross, and my excuse for not trying, instead of insulting them with an "I'm afraid of microbes," was to explain that Jews can't eat those kinds of things (Charles had, get this, guessed that I was Jewish, from my appearance, he said, which provoked several arguments earlier in the day.) Meanwhile the guys had come back with the boat and were messing around somewhere on the other side of the island so we had to go call them and get them to take us back.
Saturday night we just watched a lot of TV and I read some in my room. Then, when I was about to go to bed, my cousin Jacko (yes, that's hisname) came to the window and made a lot of gross noises and finally said "aren't you scared of me?" Keep in mind he's 22. I went over to the window, and there he was, looking pretty out of it, and he said "do you want to tell me something? do you want to tell me why you're so bizarre?" which of course is an excellent conversation starter in Jacko's mind, and I know he doesn'treally mean anything by it, so this happily terminated in a long philosophical conversation outside. I was finally able to explain some cultural differences to him and to Bouba the neighbor who really wanted to converse about it without too much judgment. Bouba told me that he thought I was an exception among Americans here because I am friendly to his family (they live across the street) and always greet them and shake their hands and ask after them and try to speak some Wolof in the afternoons. I was able to say that I hoped I wasnt the exception, but that Americans a lot of the time seem really unfriendly to the Senegalese because the notion of salutations and self-introductions in America has none of the informal importance that it does here. It's simply something we didn't grow up with and so aren't that comfortable with comporting ourselves in situations of greeting and thus try and avoid them. Or at least that's how I see it. I thought I did pretty well explaining this, what with the french and the sitting cross-legged in pajamas at 2 am on the sidewalk.

On to Sunday: I woke up and read a lot and just kind of lounged around all day until around 5:30 when JB and I had planned to take a walk. Actually he had planned to take a walk with me and I didn't have much choice in the matter, and anyway I wanted to get out of the house and see this beach where I've been meaning to go, but the program directors would kill us if we went alone, just as a group of Toubabs, so it was actually the perfect opportunity to see it. I mean, I really enjoy JB's company but it's so awkwardly obvious that he's attempting to win my affection and has no qualms about the fact that I live in his house. It was another one of those times where I didn't know what was going to happen till it did, and we ended up getting into a taxi (which he yet again paid for despite my protests) and getting out at the beach. It was absolutely beautiful, and there were hundreds of guys working out and running and sitting around with their girlfriends and I got a ton of stares (no comments thankfully, that's not ok when a woman is walking with a man) but that's how it goes. We climbed down to the beach and since the tide was high got soaked up to our waists as the waves came in. We went over and sat by this little cove and talked for an hour or so. The sun was setting and it was gorgeous, and he wanted to climb over along some slippery rocks to show me this cave he knows, and I thought it was too slippery but we started out anyway. Of course as suits the situation, about ten seconds later I fell down and bashed up my legs on the rocks. Good times. No serious lasting injuries, so don't you worry, folks. After another very frustrating conversation in which he attempted to understand exactly why I refuse to hold his hand, and why I am not interested in dating him, and I attempted to understand why he keeps pursuing this issue and why not holding his hand is such a mortal insult, we ended up walking all the way back from the beach- nearly an hour - because there weren't many car rapides. It was a great walk and when we got back, the girls decided to make a cake! This took several hours and involved a kilo of flour, the equivalent of three sticks of butter, and eleven eggs, the whites of which we took turns beating for 45 minutes straight, through a short power outage and during dinner. The ingredients for any baking don't get kept in the house; whenever you want to make something, you buy exactly as much as you need and no more, which may prove to be a problem when Hannah and I try to convert a chocolate chip cookie recipe into metric measurements.
Sunday night we watched King Kong (the new one) on TV which was super exciting even though I missed the first 40 minutes and even though Maman Amitie, who had seen it when she visited her daughter in the US, told us what was going to happen right before it happened. It was mostly so that we would not worry our little heads about the fate of each character, but this is how it goes with every movie we watch: things get commented on as they are happening, like "did you see that face he made?" or "did you hear him roar?" or "watch out, the man has a knife!" or "close the door immediately, the men are going to find you!" Half the time we come in to a movie three quarters of the way through and no one knows whats going on so they ask each other questions that nobody can answer, like "is that his wife?" or "why is he running from the police?" or "what happened in the first seventy minutes of this film?" Some would find this all very frustrating but as some of you can testify, I am notorious for this at home, and I can do it ALL I WANT here without anyone getting annoyed; in fact, they love it when I participate. So there! In any case I absolutely loved King Kong but this might be as much a product of spending most of my TV time watching bad 70s copper flicks and poorly filmed Australian pirate movies and the Jesus channel as it was of actually finding it to be a good movie.

Monday: Grammar class and then, you guessed it, class was cancelled, so after some lunch of chicken and rice at the Palais I went to the marche HLM again with three Canadians. We split up into pairs and John and I very efficiently spent our time. I totally splurged and spent about 19 dollars, and had a great time bargaining even though Maman Amitie told me I'd been seriously overcharged. I got one of these weird tie dye house gowns that women wear in the house and to bed here, in orange, which I'm so excited about, and also a pair of sandals and three yards of fabric which I'm not sure how I'm going to use yet. Afterwards we took a taxi to near where the three of them live and I went to a cyber cafe until I had a bit of a stomach attack and had to run to use the toilettes across the street and search out a bus stop to get back home. Getting home on the bus worked out fine, amazingly, though I had to ask for directions, which was unfortunate because looking like a lost Toubaab invites male attention. Aside from the many requests for money and kisses and my address and other fun things, I made it back without trouble and by that time the mal au ventre had subsided and I was annoyed at having lost thirty minutes of internet time at the cafe. Ah, Senegal.

Tuesday: At around 5:30 am Hannah came back, safe and glowing from a week in the states, which I don't need to bore you with because you know all about the daily pleasures of hot showers and flush toilets and reliable electricity and maybe even things like chicken fingers and hotel buffets and planned bus schedules. In the morning JB walked with me to WARC around ten so he could talk to Sophie (I think this happens once a month when the families get their stipend). And then I got a bit of a surprise. I had told Sophie months ago that I was interested in helping out at the hospital, and she said "Oh, Leora, you have an interview with the head doctor and director of Gaspard Camara hospital at 18:30 following your Wolof class today. I can't come with you like I usually do to get students internships because I have a meeting. You can probably go there and ask for the doctor and give him this request from Professor Sene and tell him what you want to do there." Which left me a couple of hours between class to write up a schedule and create a resume of sorts in French and change my shirt and research words I might need to use and generally freak out a little. In any case I shouldn't have worried, because aside from getting lost and having to ask directions for the entrance of the hospital (which is two minutes from my house, literally) everything went great. I got there and couldn't find anyone to ask about where to find the doctor's office except for some haughty-looking patients and lots of nurses running around busily, but after wandering through the building past doors of wards and offices I finally just went and asked some dudes sitting around at the front who directed me through five or six other people until a secretary had me sit on a bench and wait for the guy to show up. Now this twenty minutes of my life was like a typical waiting room hospital movie scene with the sounds of wailing babies being vaccinated and children with all kinds of ailments climbing on each other, and silent tired adults wearing expressions of worried patience and looking up expectantly when anyone came into the room. As for the director, when he finally came, I shouldn't have been worried at all because he just sat me down and asked me what I wanted to do there, and told me later that my French was totally fine. I told him I had a lot of experience in labs, didn't have any in hospitals but was considering medicine, and though he was surprised I wasn't already working toward some sort of medical degree he immediately made a list of things I could do. He seemed really pleased that I just wanted to help and he told me he'd introduce me to "the whole team" and after that I could observe, ask questions, help a little, in any ward I wanted to at any time of day. I told him Tuesday mornings and Friday afternoons were good and he said at those times I could come see infant vaccinations, pediatrics, maternity, or adult women consulations. He even said I could come at night between 11 pm and 5 am and observe the "accouchements" was the word I think, which bascially means I could just go over any night and watch babies being born. My goodness! The "interview" ended with him saying I should come next Tuesday morning to his office, at which point I will be free to choose what I want to see, he'll tell all the nurses about me, and if I do well I can help them out with whatever they're doing, aka baby vaccinations and taking blood pressure and the like. Also he said "maintenant tu es chez toi," in other words, I should make myself at home. All this after saying a couple of sentences in French, enough to demonstrate that I was interested and probably capable. I find this kind of thing completely amazing and incomprehensible as in the US I had to have two TB tests, fill out a mountain of paperwork, go to two separate orientations, have four meetings over the course of three weeks, get a badge made, and take a ten-hour online course on privacy protection and health law just to volunteer in a lab where I would spend my days doing Western blots and washing glassware and barely interacting with any humans. I am SO excited!

This morning, Wednesday, we had Islam class and got riled up about Jihad which the professor explained really well but which we will probably spend three weeks on since we could talk about it for a lifetime and not really get past our nationalistic and religious prejudices. Since then I've been sitting around like a bum in the computer lab writing all this, munching clandestinely on an egg sandwich and banana biscuits that Tina brought me from the university. This week's random observations:

1) The crossing guard is in love with me, wants me to come to his house on Sundays for cebbu jenn, and doesn't yet know my name. He is apparently very insulted and hurt because I laughed at him when he told me, yet will still not let me pass without a very long caressing handshake and some tidbits about my day and inquiries to each others' health. Jamm rekk, alhamdulilaay.

2) Several days of normal bowel movements does wonders for the morale.

3) I have started to feel that I dress like a complete bum in my t-shirts and loose skirts, surrounded by older women in beautiful boubous and younger women in tight black pants, pointy shoes, and flashy tank tops.

Okay that's all that I can think of for now. A postscript which I've already shared with Ari: I hope that none of you ever learns to distinguish between rotting goat carcass and just-plain-smells-like-garbage, as has yours truly.

Yendoleen ak jamm (Y'all pass the day in peace now, ya hear?)