Hi again! man o man, things move slowly here. Today we had this whole schedule laid out including a tour of the center WARC where most of my classes are going to be, and really it was like ten minutes of tour and then pretty much all day to do whatever we felt like on the computers, eat a huge lunch, sit around in the sun (with sunscreen, mom, I know you're reading.)
Yesterday we had a bit of an adventure by taxi through the rather harshly scented streets of Dakar and finally got to the Museum of African Art which turned out to be a couple of display rooms of pottery and stuff, and the whole basement was made up of six or seven scenes depicting traditional life of some of the ethnic groups in Africa. It was really an interesting tour and the guide was nice and spoke slowly so we caught most of it. There were these giant sort of paper-mache people dressed up in masks and traditional garb and doing different activities in the displays, and we got about an hour and a half tour of just those seven setups - just different elements and ways of life of groups of people in Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal, et cetera. Most of the art depicted maternity or pregnancy and rituals of coming of age and fertility, and there was a lot of explanation about polygamy and its place in African culture. It is still completely incomprehensible to me how women can accept being a second or third or fourth wife, but the two young women Sophie and Marianne who work with us and travel with us all the time were trying to explain. It has a lot to do with how different the role of the woman is in this society, and it's probably not something I should be attempting to re-explain here, not until I've had some time to process this whole world. The museum had a strange air about it though - like everything else it's sort of crumbling away at the edges.
Okay, time for Wolof lesson number one! My family doesn't speak it at all really, they even told me they don't know it very well, so I'm getting lots of French practice, but Wolof should be useful in bargaining and getting taxis and all that. It's hard not to be really timid about it all. My new roommate at the house (American? Parisian? Who knows?) will arrive tomorrow night. Okay send me emails everybody!
Lee