Hello all – hope your bodies are in peace. I’m sure you will allow me to put aside “a day in the life” to tell you about an exciting weekend involving an unnecessary adventure, a birthday party, a church service, and election day.
Friday morning history class was cancelled and we went to a meeting with some representatives of the American embassy so that they could basically tell us not to do anything stupid while the elections were going on. Actually they told us not to go ANYWHERE that wasn’t necessary. Which is probably good advice. This one American dude (not a student, he’s been here a while) had the unfortunate luck to be at the one restaurant in Mermoz that happened to get destroyed with machetes when some youth representing opposing political parties got into a tiff. Yeah, like completely knocked to the ground with friggin machetes. Badass, huh? Actually that’s not funny at all. Fortunately there hasn’t been any more large scale violence other than that one night, and the University has cancelled its classes for the week, not wanting 60,000 people to have an excuse to be in the same place at the same time.
So of course we hopped a taxi and went right downtown. No, we had a good reason, and really the embassy has to impose strict “suggestions” for the young people they might at some point be responsible for. Since Hannah had reservations for these tickets to go to Nashville for her interview on South African Airlines, she had to find the office downtown and pick them up, by no later than Friday. Christina and I went along with her, for moral and technical support, but mostly for chawarma and shopping. We took a taxi without any trouble and got a very decent price (I was so proud of my bargaining!) We successfully ignored all the dudes who try to snare Toubabs immediately when they descend from transportation, and found a little place to get chawarma. After lunch we set out to find the address.
Now even with an address, and especially with an address, this can prove to be difficult, because very few people ever know any of the names of the streets in Dakar, and it’s better to know landmarks like “the big red building” or “across the street from the crane” et cetera. So after I bought some more Malarone at the pharmacy, it took us a good half hour of walking and asking to even get to the street we needed, and once there, we spent another good half hour looking for the South African Airlines office. We were pointed in many opposing directions and even found the numbers that should have been right above and below it. Finally we called the office aaaaannnddd....the office no longer existed. It was instead all the way on the opposite side of the city, a couple of miles from the airport. Which meant we had to give up the rest of our plans and immediately find a taxi.
The problem was, we didn’t know what we were bargaining for, so we got ripped off (oh no, a whole 2 dollars each!) by the taxi driver. It turned out he didn’t speak any french so we called the airline office again and actually had the driver speak to a representative in Wolof so that he knew where to go. We got there and thought our troubles would be over presently. Wrong again. Apparently, they only accept CASH. 1200 dollars, or something like 600 000 cfa, is not something you can just go take out of a bank on a whim. And Hannah’s father was assured by South African that credit cards would not be a problem. We spent another little while arguing with a whiny woman who was really unhelpful. At one point Hannah heard her on the phone with someone (in English) to whom she was trying to explain that their office did not deal with or process Visas, which she explained by saying several times over “We do not care about Visas here.” After some confusion over phone battery and money and trying to reach someone in the states where it was some awful hour of the am, she got through to her dad who called us back some time later to say that everything was figured out online, she could come back on Monday to pick up an e-ticket. Eventually, after learning that the company still wanted to charge an online fee and a bunch of other miscellaneous charges, they gave up on South African and switched to Delta. But hey, we made a great day of it that ended in a lovely snack of yoghurt and fruit juice at Nando’s, the local Toubab hangout which is a supermarket and expensive fast food place.
Friday night was uneventful, and Saturday morning’s dance class went really well. The class gets smaller every time, probably because A) it’s at 9 am , B) the teacher is pretty brutal to those who don’t learn fast, C) everyone’s got some kind of malady at the moment, D) it’s in Ouakam, and E) it lasts like friggin five hours every week. After dance four of us decided to try our luck at this tiny little resto that was serving cebbu jenn, of course – and we ate an amazing meal that costed us 60 cents each. It was just a little lopsided hut with a table and a big bucket of water with a dipper for anyone who was brave enough to drink from it. Which was everyone but us Toubabs. We might eat at restos, but we’re not THAT hard core. Afterwards I bought an orange soda at a boutique that cost more than my meal. There’s just something about drinking out of glass bottles for 65 cents that makes me buy soda all the time.
The rest of Saturday I napped and read a lot of Jane Austen (not in that order) and later in the afternoon Fifi’s mom showed up with provisions for her birthday party! Provisions included: a big tub of butter, about 30 cans of soda, some kind of miscellaneous packaged sliced meat, pork-flavored puffed rice snacks, a loaf of (presliced!) bread, a box of Madeleines, and a cake. She prepared little slices of bread smeared with butter and topped with a slice of meat. This made me think a lot about how people here just take their time about the little things they do – there’s no rush. Each piece of laundry that Maman Amitie folds for her grandsons (and only the boys, of course) takes her a good minute. Fifi’s mom, in cutting up the bread she’d bought to make the hors d’oeuvres, spent about a whole minute on each individual slice to cut it up into sixths very carefully in her hand with a sharp knife. Soon there were all kinds of uncles and cousins and friends running about, and everyone ate and danced and ate and drank and danced and ate and laughed at the Toubabs and sang happy birthday (15 years old) and Fifi’s father ended up in his usual state of happy stumbling oblivion after six glasses of cheap red wine and tried to salsa a little too close. Her mom ran around and served everyone and laughed at the Christmas video (yup, they watched that again) as much as everyone even being all wrapped up in a red handkerchief as she’d gotten a tooth pulled the day before. I took a couple of cute pictures before the kids went crazy about the camera. When we’d eaten enough to bust open (as usual) people started to disperse, if they weren’t staying over on a mat or a bed in the back room. And then, they brought out the dinner, which had been cooking all day. I couldn’t even believe it, and didn’t eat anything else. All things considered, it was a damn good time.
Sunday morning Hannah and I got up around 6 to go to church to hear Mamie’s choir sing. Unbeknowst to me beforehand, her uncle preaches there too. The church is not Catholic – I think it’s evangelical, or at least “evangelique” is in the name. We were there super early as the choir (plus instruments: a base, a piano, and drums) warmed up. The first thing they all did was to sit down and say some personal prayers, then one guy led them all in a prayer. I’ve never seen a group of young people, or an entire congregation for that matter, so exuberant in their faith. People filed in and by 8:30 there was some serious gospel rocking that place. The service was led by the choir with some brief comments and readings in between songs, and people were standing and clapping and just generally enjoying their prayer. It was so odd to be an observer...but not for long, because the guy leading the service actually completely stopped the choir to announce to the entire assembly that he saw two new people off by the side who were not singing - ! – so of course someone handed us a songbook and pointed out the lyrics. There we were, two brown-haired Jewish Toubabs, under the smiling eyes of an entire congregation of people singing the lord’s praise to the high heavens such as I’ve never heard before in my life. So I didn’t mind putting aside our differences to rock the fifth repetition of “Dieu est bon,” complete with drumset, piano and base solos, and a grand key change that could not possibly have been overlooked by Jesu himself. What a world. I couldn’t help but get a little teary.
Sunday brunch was a great meal with cheese, jam, chocolate, butter, and as much bread as we wanted. The rest of the day involved cleanup and reading – and the elections! We went with Maman Amitie to see how it worked – and she didn’t even have to wait on the line with the others since she is over 65. Most of the rest of the family waited in line for at least 3 to 4 hours, and the news later that night said that some waited up to 6 or 8 or more. I have never seen such patience in a group of people standing for hours under the sun. It was just amazing how dedicated people were. The way it works is you take 15 pieces of paper (one for each candidate), go into a booth, put the guy you want in an envelope, and throw the rest away. On each paper is the candidate’s picture and color and information – the photos are there on all campaign materials because of the high percentage of illiterate people. Anyways, the process sounds simple, right? Not according to friends who helped out all day. It was different from the last time, and a good number of people threw away their envelopes, or didn’t sign, or something, to the extent that at some bureaus, they couldnt get the numbers of signatures to match up with the numbers of votes and envelopes and weren’t able to even start counting votes until the wee hours of the morning. We saw my friend Samantha where Maman Amitie went to vote, and she came by the house for a bit, then got some lunch and headed back until she was told to go home around midnight because tempers were getting high. Professor Sene, the director of the program here, was pretty pissed at the 7 or 8 people who went against the embassy’s warning and helped out with the elections anyway. But I think they all had a positive experience. The outcome of the election: unofficial still, but Wade seems to have taken over 85% of the vote. How is this possible with 15 candidates? Nobody knows, and there may be some rioting to avoid within the next few weeks. In any case, Maman Amitie, who sings Wade’s praises daily, is ecstatic. Or at least pacified. She’s the most up on politics of anyone in the house. Felix didn’t even vote because he had work all day. Mamie waited in line 4 hours, and JB waited 2. He saved the 14 candidates’ papers instead of throwing them out, and gave them to me and Hannah. Illegal. But so cool! Jean-Paul brought home this Wade hat that Hannah is so excited about, and hung a giant blue and yellow flag on the ceiling. I suspect someone paid him during the campaign to wear Wade stuff...as long as it wasn’t during the voting. Plenty of stuff went on that’s just not supposed to happen at the polls, but there was no violence and it has been smooth sailing since Sunday...
Sunday night Hannah and I did the dishes and had a pretty decent French-English-Wolof exchange with Jaco (Jean-Paul’s older brother, there are 5 kids as I recently found out). This ended sketchily as usual in odd compliments and we dumped out the dishwater and went to bed.
Monday I went to get lunch near the university at a resto again with Lucy and Sam. We went also in quest of those weird biscuits I am in love with but alas, the university was closed and we could not find anyone selling them. We ran into a Senegalese friend of Sam’s who introduced us to her friends. We’re hoping to get together and have lunch or talk to them because they speak reasonably good English and tolerate our French, and they also asked us some really interesting questions that we didn’t have time to really discuss or elaborate on. I briefly talked about Toni Morrison and Steinbeck with an English literature major, at which point he wanted to know what it is, in my opinion, that defines American youth. What a question! Unfortunately I think I offended him in running off to lunch with the other two.
I realize I’ve said nothing about classes for quite some time. I started this new grammar and discussion class which is GREAT but might actually involve homework, imagine that! Literature is okay, Becky made a great presentation yesterday, and we’re reading good books. that I finished like the second day I got it. History is boring but better – the professor knows us now and we can get him off into some good tangents when necessary. French at IFE is a piece of crap but also at times a little bit useful for bits of grammar and summarizing skills. Dance is awesome. Wolof, other than our test the other day, has been fun. The problem with the test was that it didn’t test us on anything we had done, but we learned a lot while doing it, and it wasn’t really being graded anyways. History of Islam is pretty cool but now that we’ve gotten to discussing women and social systems and the role of the religion in West Africa, it’s a little weird trying to have a useful exchange with the professor that is not poorly said or offensive to either party. More on that perhaps later. And there are my seven classes. I maybe do an hour or two of reading or mild studying every week, at this point. Pretty chill. I hope none of the readers of this blog are responsible for handing out my university credit. I just try to make as many notes as possible in my Senegalese graph-paper-lined notebooks so that it looks like I’m learning academically.
Oh one more thing that I’m still sort of reeling from this morning. We went to talk to Maxa and Ibou again (our friends in construction) and Ibou gave us a whole lecture about the meaning of development, and wondered what our opinions were on development in Senegal. He is such a smart guy, and he hasn’t had more than a high school education. He went on about the importance of building an educational system and all that, and I was just so uninformed so Hannah did most of the talking. I was just blown away by the way he wants to see the whole picture, and how there seems to be no way out of the way developing countries are manipulated by the World Bank and foreign aid so that all the money goes into the outward signs of development, like construction. That’s about all I can say intelligibly since I really know very little about economics and politics. I just wanted to gripe sort of tritely again about that sort of pang that reminds me almost daily of how insignificant my lifetime pursuits are in the grand scheme of globalization. Individualism, pride, curiosity, work ethic, egocentrism – all things which I might have named to “define the American youth,” or at least the privileged American youth who can do things like come to Senegal for five months to learn that some of the world they wanted to see or save is fully aware of being knocked to the ground by machete-wielding organizations who represent the very things we value in ourselves. Good gosh, that sounds awful. Don’t take me too seriously, it’s only a blog. I do try to balance out the heavy with the light and humorous. Now for a tap dance!
And so I come to the end of another very full weekend and a very very long blog, for which I apologize profusely, but then again, there you sit, reading away. That wasn’t even the lot of it. The funny thing is that in telling it, it sounds like I’m always doing something, when in reality it was a lot of semi-uncomfortable boredom and attempts to interact with the extended family and not get laughed at, punctuated by brief periods of fun or excitement or danger or pensiveness or extreme discomfort, all to be laughed at retrospectively. And this, friends, is a way of life.
Don’t forget to wipe!
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Week 7 and Installment 1 of a day in the life of Lili
Chers amis,
It is again a Friday morning and I always wonder where the week has gone...yesterday marked 7 weeks in Dakar. Our history professor is apparently too tired to teach class after arriving back here following a week in Mali or Ghana, I don’t remember. This is of course alright with me. There is no internet access so what better than to write this whole entry in Word then copy and paste later?
Dunno when I last left off but this week has been pretty normal – up and down, several classes cancelled, weather varying between “very cold” (55 degrees and windy) and hot (90 or so with a hot wind). Found some great new lunch options – restos by the university, and sandwiches made by this vendor inside one of the university buildings. They consist of laughing cow cheese and an egg, or tuna fish and an egg. The egg is hard boiled and gets spread out along the bread, and the tuna is this nasty sort of watery paste that is made and spiced and stored in coffee cans and put on the bread with a spoon. It’s actually pretty amazing, but I generally go with the laughing cow cheese instead, since I’m pretty sure the “tuna slop” (as my friend Tina calls it) has given me some serious GI distress once or twice.
As promised, here is the first installment of an excessively detailed description, including commentary, of what it is I do on a daily basis. Actually this will probably only include the morning, since I could write a mountain of things about every minute I spend here.
Reveille: Let’s begin in the dark at 5 am, when I am woken on the majority of mornings by the call to prayer from the nearest mosque. They play it on loudspeakers all over the city and I can hear the neighbors beginning to pray. This is accompanied by the noise of goats and roosters in the street. Once in a while you can hear a really good cat fight, or mice munching loudly on things if I’ve forgotten to put away any plastic bags that might give them away with crinkling...we keep trying to poison/catch them but they’re so smart. Jean Paul asked us if we were scared and I said no, plus “I work in a lab with mice.” To which he responded “aahhh, but those are white mice. These are black mice. African mice,” and then made a face that was probably meant to be scary.
Later: Generally around 7:30 I am woken by my travel alarm. My roommate and I sort of take turns getting out of bed to use the bathroom first. I get out of bed and immediately put away the mosquito net, which means untucking it from under the mattress, twisting it into a sort of knot, and putting it up on top of itself. I get dressed (all my stuff is in my suitcase under the bed), wash up, put my school stuff for the day in my backpack, unlock the little cabinet to get my money out, and then go into the kitchen to see about breakfast. We put the water on to boil on the gas burner, or heat up tea that’s always in a giant pot somewhere in the kitchen if the kids haven’t left us any hot chocolate or nescafe or powdered milk. If there isn’t any bread out already on the table, we have several options: 1) go get three loaves of bread at the boutique/boulangerie outside – this gets paid for weekly, on Fridays. 2) eat leftover dry bread from the bread bag. 3) just drink tea (or chocolate or coffee, see above), then split an entire buttered baguette on the way to school. The first option depends upon there being something to put on the bread – namely, chocoleca, which is like nutella except made with peanuts. Amazing. I eat so much of it. It also is kind of an awkward interaction since the boutiquier is not very friendly and speaks mostly Wolof. The second option is sort of a tossup as to whether it will be actually edible/not moldy.The third option is clearly the best one, because that means eating over a foot of really buttery bread for about 25 cents, but you just can’t do that kind of thing every day. Recently Maman Amitie very kindly bought me and Hannah our own tin of chocolate mix because the kids go through it so quickly and don’t leave us any.
After breakfast we put our cups and spoons outside and wipe the crumbs off the placemats into the courtyard for the birds, which gather there all the time unless someone is walking through. Then we head out to school. On the way there we pass in the neighborhood a lot of maids sweeping the streets and sidewalks in front of the houses free of leaves, with these brooms that every single family has one of. We walk past a giant dusty football field – the edges of the field are full of garbage and generally one or two animal carcasses so it is best to breathe through your mouth until you get down to the big street or turn the corner, particularly in the afternoon when it’s hot and buggy. Then we turn onto a street called something like Bourghiba but that a lot of people (Americans) have taken to calling Poop Street because on the long island that separates the two directions of traffic, people keep goats and cows, and so it’s just full of poop all the time. It’s a good day when I don’t get any little bits in my shoes. On this street we pass our oranges-and-candy vendor lady and sometimes have very minimal conversation in Wolof/French with her. The next person we greet sometimes is the friendly guard outside the pharmacy, who has a bit of a crush on Hannah so sometimes we go to the other side of the street and wave. The third set of greetings is much longer and involves two men who have mysterious jobs that find them out on the street chilling out for probably close to 70 hours a week. Their names are Ibou and Maxa and one of whom knows very little French and the other knows too much and never stops talking. I’m not talking about a qiuck greeting on the way to school every day, I mean any time we decide to brave the interaction we can expect a good fifteen minutes of conversation and a struggle to get away and be on time for class. This is at times a pain, but they’re generally a really great resource and means of conversing about politics and comparing Senegalese and American culture. Hannah made it clear from the beginning that we are not available and that we can’t help them get a visa to the states – she even has a kid in the states, and I’m waiting till I’m 21 and do not want a Senegalese husband. After this was established, things were just very nice and friendly and less superficial than other interactions in the road...
The walk: Here are a lot of landmarks/sights on the way to school, which I am writing down as much for myself to remember in years to come as for your reading pleasure : the corner where someone has been trying to sell the same set of about nine refrigerators for probably years, the Castel beer sign, the Villa Selli, the giant crane on the construction street (which for all intents and purposes is a permanent landmark because like the other thousand construction projects here, nothing ever seems to get done), the gas station where the Talibe hang out and bug us for money, the hospital health center where there is a giant metal spherical sculpture, the long white wall bordering part of the university, I think, that you can see almost the whole way, the man who waters the only patch of weird scraggly uncut grass that I have seen anywhere in the city, the pile of pebbles that you have to climb to stay out of the street, numerous restos and tuna slop vendors and boutiques, women selling sugared peanuts and grapefruits, the banana vendor who seriously overcharges all the Toubabs (because he can), the nursery where Becky bought her plants, the Ecole Franco-Senegalais where all the rich people and Toubabs living here send their elementary-schoolers, the big post office with the old man selling envelopes and postcards outside, the DHL center (!), packs of dogs and stray cats skulking around everywhere, telecenters on every corner, the Creamy Inn, the store called Chez Asse, the guys walking around selling shoes and birds and pans and curling irons and literally anything you can think of, the tailors shops, the men leading goats in the road, guys in business suits and traditional clothing sitting side by side on the sidewalk, cafe Touba vendors carrying around their coffee tins and plastic cups, crowds of people always standing around for some unknown reason on this one street, and gosh darn this list is endless.
I’m done though, for now, I promise. Alxamdulilaay! Wow, I really only got up to about 9 am. Time for a meeting with the American ambassador in which she will most certainly tell us not to go ANYWHERE this weekend between say, right now, and Monday night. Grrr... Tomorrow is dance, Sunday I have plans to wake up at like 6 and go with Mamie to church to hear her choir sing, and then the elections last all day, so I’m sure I’ll have more to write sometime next week.
It is again a Friday morning and I always wonder where the week has gone...yesterday marked 7 weeks in Dakar. Our history professor is apparently too tired to teach class after arriving back here following a week in Mali or Ghana, I don’t remember. This is of course alright with me. There is no internet access so what better than to write this whole entry in Word then copy and paste later?
Dunno when I last left off but this week has been pretty normal – up and down, several classes cancelled, weather varying between “very cold” (55 degrees and windy) and hot (90 or so with a hot wind). Found some great new lunch options – restos by the university, and sandwiches made by this vendor inside one of the university buildings. They consist of laughing cow cheese and an egg, or tuna fish and an egg. The egg is hard boiled and gets spread out along the bread, and the tuna is this nasty sort of watery paste that is made and spiced and stored in coffee cans and put on the bread with a spoon. It’s actually pretty amazing, but I generally go with the laughing cow cheese instead, since I’m pretty sure the “tuna slop” (as my friend Tina calls it) has given me some serious GI distress once or twice.
As promised, here is the first installment of an excessively detailed description, including commentary, of what it is I do on a daily basis. Actually this will probably only include the morning, since I could write a mountain of things about every minute I spend here.
Reveille: Let’s begin in the dark at 5 am, when I am woken on the majority of mornings by the call to prayer from the nearest mosque. They play it on loudspeakers all over the city and I can hear the neighbors beginning to pray. This is accompanied by the noise of goats and roosters in the street. Once in a while you can hear a really good cat fight, or mice munching loudly on things if I’ve forgotten to put away any plastic bags that might give them away with crinkling...we keep trying to poison/catch them but they’re so smart. Jean Paul asked us if we were scared and I said no, plus “I work in a lab with mice.” To which he responded “aahhh, but those are white mice. These are black mice. African mice,” and then made a face that was probably meant to be scary.
Later: Generally around 7:30 I am woken by my travel alarm. My roommate and I sort of take turns getting out of bed to use the bathroom first. I get out of bed and immediately put away the mosquito net, which means untucking it from under the mattress, twisting it into a sort of knot, and putting it up on top of itself. I get dressed (all my stuff is in my suitcase under the bed), wash up, put my school stuff for the day in my backpack, unlock the little cabinet to get my money out, and then go into the kitchen to see about breakfast. We put the water on to boil on the gas burner, or heat up tea that’s always in a giant pot somewhere in the kitchen if the kids haven’t left us any hot chocolate or nescafe or powdered milk. If there isn’t any bread out already on the table, we have several options: 1) go get three loaves of bread at the boutique/boulangerie outside – this gets paid for weekly, on Fridays. 2) eat leftover dry bread from the bread bag. 3) just drink tea (or chocolate or coffee, see above), then split an entire buttered baguette on the way to school. The first option depends upon there being something to put on the bread – namely, chocoleca, which is like nutella except made with peanuts. Amazing. I eat so much of it. It also is kind of an awkward interaction since the boutiquier is not very friendly and speaks mostly Wolof. The second option is sort of a tossup as to whether it will be actually edible/not moldy.The third option is clearly the best one, because that means eating over a foot of really buttery bread for about 25 cents, but you just can’t do that kind of thing every day. Recently Maman Amitie very kindly bought me and Hannah our own tin of chocolate mix because the kids go through it so quickly and don’t leave us any.
After breakfast we put our cups and spoons outside and wipe the crumbs off the placemats into the courtyard for the birds, which gather there all the time unless someone is walking through. Then we head out to school. On the way there we pass in the neighborhood a lot of maids sweeping the streets and sidewalks in front of the houses free of leaves, with these brooms that every single family has one of. We walk past a giant dusty football field – the edges of the field are full of garbage and generally one or two animal carcasses so it is best to breathe through your mouth until you get down to the big street or turn the corner, particularly in the afternoon when it’s hot and buggy. Then we turn onto a street called something like Bourghiba but that a lot of people (Americans) have taken to calling Poop Street because on the long island that separates the two directions of traffic, people keep goats and cows, and so it’s just full of poop all the time. It’s a good day when I don’t get any little bits in my shoes. On this street we pass our oranges-and-candy vendor lady and sometimes have very minimal conversation in Wolof/French with her. The next person we greet sometimes is the friendly guard outside the pharmacy, who has a bit of a crush on Hannah so sometimes we go to the other side of the street and wave. The third set of greetings is much longer and involves two men who have mysterious jobs that find them out on the street chilling out for probably close to 70 hours a week. Their names are Ibou and Maxa and one of whom knows very little French and the other knows too much and never stops talking. I’m not talking about a qiuck greeting on the way to school every day, I mean any time we decide to brave the interaction we can expect a good fifteen minutes of conversation and a struggle to get away and be on time for class. This is at times a pain, but they’re generally a really great resource and means of conversing about politics and comparing Senegalese and American culture. Hannah made it clear from the beginning that we are not available and that we can’t help them get a visa to the states – she even has a kid in the states, and I’m waiting till I’m 21 and do not want a Senegalese husband. After this was established, things were just very nice and friendly and less superficial than other interactions in the road...
The walk: Here are a lot of landmarks/sights on the way to school, which I am writing down as much for myself to remember in years to come as for your reading pleasure : the corner where someone has been trying to sell the same set of about nine refrigerators for probably years, the Castel beer sign, the Villa Selli, the giant crane on the construction street (which for all intents and purposes is a permanent landmark because like the other thousand construction projects here, nothing ever seems to get done), the gas station where the Talibe hang out and bug us for money, the hospital health center where there is a giant metal spherical sculpture, the long white wall bordering part of the university, I think, that you can see almost the whole way, the man who waters the only patch of weird scraggly uncut grass that I have seen anywhere in the city, the pile of pebbles that you have to climb to stay out of the street, numerous restos and tuna slop vendors and boutiques, women selling sugared peanuts and grapefruits, the banana vendor who seriously overcharges all the Toubabs (because he can), the nursery where Becky bought her plants, the Ecole Franco-Senegalais where all the rich people and Toubabs living here send their elementary-schoolers, the big post office with the old man selling envelopes and postcards outside, the DHL center (!), packs of dogs and stray cats skulking around everywhere, telecenters on every corner, the Creamy Inn, the store called Chez Asse, the guys walking around selling shoes and birds and pans and curling irons and literally anything you can think of, the tailors shops, the men leading goats in the road, guys in business suits and traditional clothing sitting side by side on the sidewalk, cafe Touba vendors carrying around their coffee tins and plastic cups, crowds of people always standing around for some unknown reason on this one street, and gosh darn this list is endless.
I’m done though, for now, I promise. Alxamdulilaay! Wow, I really only got up to about 9 am. Time for a meeting with the American ambassador in which she will most certainly tell us not to go ANYWHERE this weekend between say, right now, and Monday night. Grrr... Tomorrow is dance, Sunday I have plans to wake up at like 6 and go with Mamie to church to hear her choir sing, and then the elections last all day, so I’m sure I’ll have more to write sometime next week.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
So I promised I'd finish writing about the rest of our Bambey trip, and so much has happened since then that this may prove to be another ridiculously long post. Here goes.
Saturday night after coming back from the village and having a very superficial meeting about how we felt about the experience, we went out in a big group thinking that we were going to a nightclub. We were exhausted and there was a mixup with the keys so it took us until about 1 am to get out...and then we didn't go dancing, we went to a concert. Given by this really famous Senegalese pop star chick who is on TV all the time. Who knew? Another example of how nobody ever knows what's going on. Anyway, it was another one of those uncomfortable Toubab experiences where the rest of the populace shot us dirty looks for hours - for some reason we were able to get in ahead of this huge line of people who were waiting, and several fistfights broke out as we were shoved into the building, so the bouncers had to hold people back and slam the doors. It wasn't even a huge concert really, it was just that there were tons of people who wanted to get in. We watched Ami lipsync a few songs and talked to the people around us in French and bits of Wolof and got asked for money from a lot of kids, at which point for some unknown reason we all got ushered by our coordinators up towards the stage and through the back doors. We waited in a giant hall while Ami finished, then she came out and took pictures with the Toubabs while tons of people who hadnt gotten in banged on the barred windows and glared at us or called us with the pssssssssssttt noise that is SO dear to my heart. It was so strange and uncomfortable with everyone watching that afterwards, I just went back to the house where we were staying with a few other people. This turned out to be a great plan, even though we were locked out of the rooms where our bags were - we just crawled under the mosquito nets in the courtyard and looked at the stars and drifted off until the rest of the group came back.
In the morning we were woken up my Mariane and it was such a great feeling to wake up outside in the sun. We had breakfast - bread, butter, and coffee with Vitalait. Oh yeah, Vitalait is this weird sugary powdered milk that everyone uses, and they have these weirdass commercials for it on TV all the time with people singing, and everyone in my family always sings along. We all helped to wash the mugs and clean up the courtyard and put away the mosquito nets and stack the mattresses. We all filed into the courtyard of the other house to thank the family again, but I think this made them very uncomfortable. At a certain point it seems insincere to people if you thank them over and over again. We got on the bus to go back to Dakar, and on the way stopped at an agricultural school. We were shown into an odd grove of trees that had been drafted to make fruits that apparently tasted like a combination of lime and grapefruit. This is one of the things the students do, or so I gathered, to create new products for the produce markets. This makes up one part of the school - there are separate tracks in agricultural development, farming, et cetera, and it's very selective, I believe.
Well that's about the end of the story. We stopped on the side of the road on the way back where I bought about 25 clementines for the family - the clementines grown here (not imported) are teeeeny tiny and delicious.
Now it's time to move on to last weekend, beginning with Friday. There had been no power at WARC for most of Wednesday and Thursday so Tina and I were not able to type up descriptions of our Goree field trip for history class...I went in early Friday morning and got lucky in that the power went out again just after I'd printed my paper. Tina wasn't so lucky.
After class I went with 4 girls to the Marche HLM again. We took the car rapide sans probleme and then split into two groups upon arrival - 5 white girls together draw too much attention, and even 3 gets to be a bit much. I was on a mission to buy fabric. We walked through the market and looked at a ton of different little booths and spoke broken Wolof with anyone who would humor us. We started heading back to meet the others for lunch and I decided to just go for it and buy a fabric I really liked - I did some great bargaining and got 6 yards for 3500 (7 bucks!) which is, according to Maman Amitie, an excellent price. When I got home (after a lunch of shawarma and the ride back) she assured me that she'd take me to the tailor the very next night.
The family was very animated on Friday night and I had a good time even without Hannah around to laugh at Jean-Paul's and Samu's antics and supplement my vocabulary, PLUS there was electricity for the first night in like three days so everyone was in a great mood. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse - I discovered that I was missing money from my wallet. Not a huge amount, but a very large bill for here. When JB told Maman Amitie I expected to be blamed, as some of the other Americans who have had things stolen from them get a very cold and insulted response. Instead Maman flipped out at the kids and all but chased them around the house with a broom yelling about morals. I tried to explain that my intent wasnt to blame anyone, but she assured me that it was always best to lock everything up and even lock the room while we're sitting in the family room. This has proved to be awkward since the locking of the door is done in someone else's bedroom in plain sight of everyone else, but it's the best idea. I'm disappointed that I have to let go of my trust, but I'd rather my belongings be safe and not have to go through all that again.
On top of this, I went for a two hour walk with my host brother later that evening to get away from a roomful of seething preteens ignoring me, and it turns out he was waiting for a chance when my roommate wasn't around to say upon our arrival back home "J'ai quelque chose a te dire...Je trouve qu'il est tres difficile de rester indifferent quand je suis avec une si jolie fille...tu me comprends?" If you dont want to look it up and didn't figure out where that might have been going, it means that things are going to be a little awkward between us for a while. I told him I didn't know quite what to say other than "tu es mon frere" and "tu sais que j'ai un petit copain" and he said "ce n'est pas grave...je voulais juste te dire." which means "it's no big deal, I just wanted you to know." He was really very eloquent and cool about it. Still, AWKWARD. I mean, I live with the kid.
I fell asleep in a bit of a muddle and then Saturday morning I took the car rapide up to Ouakam for dance class. Not many people had made it out that morning after some kind of crazy party at the marine house in Dakar, and I was one of the few who remembered all the steps. Thus the teacher and drummers paid me a lot of attention and put me in the front and it was a little uncomfortable, but a really good time - we get so much done when there are only ten or so of us. The class lasted for a good four hours as usual, and when I got home I had to sort of nervously ask Awa the bonne (the maid, little Farou's mom) if there was any food left from lunch. She is Serrer, probably not much older than me, and doesn't speak much French, and I dont like to interrupt her in what she's doing. The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Jean Paul and Reine and Samu's parents were over. I read a lot and watched some terrible MTV shows from like 1997 and then Maman Amitie came home and announced that she and I were going out with the parents. She told me we'd go to the tailor on the way to go see her daughter and son in law, and if he wasnt there we could leave the fabric there and come back another time. I naively thought this was going to be a visit of an hour or so at most, but nooooo, I should have known that there are no short visits in Senegal. We went up into the apartment of Fifi (not little Fifi) and her husband. It was a lot of the parents (Maman has 7 living children, 5 daughters and 2 sons, and 4 of them were there) and the older (maybe age 20 and up) grandchildren. There was an excellent buffet and about a three-hour home video of this year's christmas party that Gilo had filmed and edited with a friend. Pretty boring, but there was so much other conversation going on that I had a great time. I also danced a lot with Marlene (one of the older cousins in her mid-twenties.) The family was surprised and absolutely delighted that the Toubaab knew how to dance, and so of course all the uncles had to take a turn leading me, and even Maman Amitie got up and danced a song with me. It was a great time. We never even ended up going over to the tailor's, and we didn't get home till around 2 am.
I believe that the real purpose of this family gathering was to discuss the relationship of Marlene and her fiance (?) David, who lives in Guinea. I of course don't know the back story but from what I picked up, a lot of the uncles disapprove of him for some reason that has to do with him standing up to his father and also something that concerns the discussion of the dowry. I couldn't believe I was sitting in on what seemed like a very private discussion, but one of the uncles opened it up and then everyone there had their say, in varying degrees of anger and noise levels. It was mostly the uncles bringing things up and Marlene defending herself very eloquently. There was much talk of Dieu and Jesu - everyone present were very religious Catholics and this seems to play a huge role in everyone's speeches and decisions and actions. It was absolutely unlike any discussion I've ever heard in the US, and involved comments like "the man is the head of the family," and "as the first cousin of my generation to get married the wedding has to set a precedent" and "this is your life but it also involves your family and his," and it was all proposed in a very formal sort of family meeting whose sole purpose was to discuss just this. Incredible. For the few of you who can follow me in this, try to picture Captain Barry at the forefront of the gang of Mestel family uncles opening the conversation to comments about how much Ari is worth in dowry, with all of the aunts saying things like "let her speak!" and Nana interjecting "Amen, amen, mmmhhmmm," about once every sixteen seconds. It was at once a shocking attack on a young individual and a beautiful display of family unity and love. Afterwards everyone bowed their heads while one of the aunts made a very long grace. The atmosphere immediately became a lot lighter and relaxed as we helped ourselves to the food.
Anyways, I got home and passed out and woke up around noon on Sunday, and did not leave the house ALL day. It was amazing. Almost like what Shabbat's supposed to be. Hannah was home by that point, raving about Saint Louis which sounds like paradise...less pollution, no garbage in the streets, hot water and flush toilets at the hotel, breakfasts of eggs and croissants, nobody asking for your hand in marriage in the street...I think she's a little down about being back in Dakar. Later the kids came running in to say that there was a parade going on for one of the presidential candidates. This is of course exactly the thing we as Americans in Dakar are supposed to avoid, but we put our cell phones away, got our IDs, and ran towards the noise. Although Samu tried to drag us out to the crowd, we stood rather far away on a street corner and very vaguely saw a car and lots of people off in the distance, then headed home.
Monday was uneventful other than finding the street of restaurants near the University - we got lunch of beef and rice and vegetables for about 600 francs each. SO good. We ate with a couple of Senegalese guys who were friends or cousins of someone in our group. They told us all about how the voting works here. The elections are quickly approaching - this Sunday is the day, and then I'm not sure when the runoff elections take place. 15 candidates is INSANE.
Okay, I haven't been very good about this, but here are a few fun facts for the week:
1) Boubabar is the name of probably every other person I have met here - and a very common nickname is, get this, Boubs. It's really hard not to laugh at that one.
2) People are legit insulted when you dont remember their names. Bad news for me, but I'm getting better.
3) I found out the hard way that you MUST stand to greet someone who is older than you when they enter the room. I was the first chair by the door on Saturday night and so I wasn't able to observe the rest of the family - I stayed seated while greeting one set of aunts and uncles. Everyone else got up right after they passed me and and I believe they were very insulted. Sunday they came over to the house, though, and I got to correct myself. So hopefully it will be okay. Gosh darn this whole new culture deal.
4) Annoyance of the week: no running water most of Sunday. I cleaned my feet and other parts that count and went to sleep a little dirty. At least there was electricity!
I'd also like to add that if you have not pooped in a squat toilet, you have not lived.
Saturday night after coming back from the village and having a very superficial meeting about how we felt about the experience, we went out in a big group thinking that we were going to a nightclub. We were exhausted and there was a mixup with the keys so it took us until about 1 am to get out...and then we didn't go dancing, we went to a concert. Given by this really famous Senegalese pop star chick who is on TV all the time. Who knew? Another example of how nobody ever knows what's going on. Anyway, it was another one of those uncomfortable Toubab experiences where the rest of the populace shot us dirty looks for hours - for some reason we were able to get in ahead of this huge line of people who were waiting, and several fistfights broke out as we were shoved into the building, so the bouncers had to hold people back and slam the doors. It wasn't even a huge concert really, it was just that there were tons of people who wanted to get in. We watched Ami lipsync a few songs and talked to the people around us in French and bits of Wolof and got asked for money from a lot of kids, at which point for some unknown reason we all got ushered by our coordinators up towards the stage and through the back doors. We waited in a giant hall while Ami finished, then she came out and took pictures with the Toubabs while tons of people who hadnt gotten in banged on the barred windows and glared at us or called us with the pssssssssssttt noise that is SO dear to my heart. It was so strange and uncomfortable with everyone watching that afterwards, I just went back to the house where we were staying with a few other people. This turned out to be a great plan, even though we were locked out of the rooms where our bags were - we just crawled under the mosquito nets in the courtyard and looked at the stars and drifted off until the rest of the group came back.
In the morning we were woken up my Mariane and it was such a great feeling to wake up outside in the sun. We had breakfast - bread, butter, and coffee with Vitalait. Oh yeah, Vitalait is this weird sugary powdered milk that everyone uses, and they have these weirdass commercials for it on TV all the time with people singing, and everyone in my family always sings along. We all helped to wash the mugs and clean up the courtyard and put away the mosquito nets and stack the mattresses. We all filed into the courtyard of the other house to thank the family again, but I think this made them very uncomfortable. At a certain point it seems insincere to people if you thank them over and over again. We got on the bus to go back to Dakar, and on the way stopped at an agricultural school. We were shown into an odd grove of trees that had been drafted to make fruits that apparently tasted like a combination of lime and grapefruit. This is one of the things the students do, or so I gathered, to create new products for the produce markets. This makes up one part of the school - there are separate tracks in agricultural development, farming, et cetera, and it's very selective, I believe.
Well that's about the end of the story. We stopped on the side of the road on the way back where I bought about 25 clementines for the family - the clementines grown here (not imported) are teeeeny tiny and delicious.
Now it's time to move on to last weekend, beginning with Friday. There had been no power at WARC for most of Wednesday and Thursday so Tina and I were not able to type up descriptions of our Goree field trip for history class...I went in early Friday morning and got lucky in that the power went out again just after I'd printed my paper. Tina wasn't so lucky.
After class I went with 4 girls to the Marche HLM again. We took the car rapide sans probleme and then split into two groups upon arrival - 5 white girls together draw too much attention, and even 3 gets to be a bit much. I was on a mission to buy fabric. We walked through the market and looked at a ton of different little booths and spoke broken Wolof with anyone who would humor us. We started heading back to meet the others for lunch and I decided to just go for it and buy a fabric I really liked - I did some great bargaining and got 6 yards for 3500 (7 bucks!) which is, according to Maman Amitie, an excellent price. When I got home (after a lunch of shawarma and the ride back) she assured me that she'd take me to the tailor the very next night.
The family was very animated on Friday night and I had a good time even without Hannah around to laugh at Jean-Paul's and Samu's antics and supplement my vocabulary, PLUS there was electricity for the first night in like three days so everyone was in a great mood. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse - I discovered that I was missing money from my wallet. Not a huge amount, but a very large bill for here. When JB told Maman Amitie I expected to be blamed, as some of the other Americans who have had things stolen from them get a very cold and insulted response. Instead Maman flipped out at the kids and all but chased them around the house with a broom yelling about morals. I tried to explain that my intent wasnt to blame anyone, but she assured me that it was always best to lock everything up and even lock the room while we're sitting in the family room. This has proved to be awkward since the locking of the door is done in someone else's bedroom in plain sight of everyone else, but it's the best idea. I'm disappointed that I have to let go of my trust, but I'd rather my belongings be safe and not have to go through all that again.
On top of this, I went for a two hour walk with my host brother later that evening to get away from a roomful of seething preteens ignoring me, and it turns out he was waiting for a chance when my roommate wasn't around to say upon our arrival back home "J'ai quelque chose a te dire...Je trouve qu'il est tres difficile de rester indifferent quand je suis avec une si jolie fille...tu me comprends?" If you dont want to look it up and didn't figure out where that might have been going, it means that things are going to be a little awkward between us for a while. I told him I didn't know quite what to say other than "tu es mon frere" and "tu sais que j'ai un petit copain" and he said "ce n'est pas grave...je voulais juste te dire." which means "it's no big deal, I just wanted you to know." He was really very eloquent and cool about it. Still, AWKWARD. I mean, I live with the kid.
I fell asleep in a bit of a muddle and then Saturday morning I took the car rapide up to Ouakam for dance class. Not many people had made it out that morning after some kind of crazy party at the marine house in Dakar, and I was one of the few who remembered all the steps. Thus the teacher and drummers paid me a lot of attention and put me in the front and it was a little uncomfortable, but a really good time - we get so much done when there are only ten or so of us. The class lasted for a good four hours as usual, and when I got home I had to sort of nervously ask Awa the bonne (the maid, little Farou's mom) if there was any food left from lunch. She is Serrer, probably not much older than me, and doesn't speak much French, and I dont like to interrupt her in what she's doing. The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Jean Paul and Reine and Samu's parents were over. I read a lot and watched some terrible MTV shows from like 1997 and then Maman Amitie came home and announced that she and I were going out with the parents. She told me we'd go to the tailor on the way to go see her daughter and son in law, and if he wasnt there we could leave the fabric there and come back another time. I naively thought this was going to be a visit of an hour or so at most, but nooooo, I should have known that there are no short visits in Senegal. We went up into the apartment of Fifi (not little Fifi) and her husband. It was a lot of the parents (Maman has 7 living children, 5 daughters and 2 sons, and 4 of them were there) and the older (maybe age 20 and up) grandchildren. There was an excellent buffet and about a three-hour home video of this year's christmas party that Gilo had filmed and edited with a friend. Pretty boring, but there was so much other conversation going on that I had a great time. I also danced a lot with Marlene (one of the older cousins in her mid-twenties.) The family was surprised and absolutely delighted that the Toubaab knew how to dance, and so of course all the uncles had to take a turn leading me, and even Maman Amitie got up and danced a song with me. It was a great time. We never even ended up going over to the tailor's, and we didn't get home till around 2 am.
I believe that the real purpose of this family gathering was to discuss the relationship of Marlene and her fiance (?) David, who lives in Guinea. I of course don't know the back story but from what I picked up, a lot of the uncles disapprove of him for some reason that has to do with him standing up to his father and also something that concerns the discussion of the dowry. I couldn't believe I was sitting in on what seemed like a very private discussion, but one of the uncles opened it up and then everyone there had their say, in varying degrees of anger and noise levels. It was mostly the uncles bringing things up and Marlene defending herself very eloquently. There was much talk of Dieu and Jesu - everyone present were very religious Catholics and this seems to play a huge role in everyone's speeches and decisions and actions. It was absolutely unlike any discussion I've ever heard in the US, and involved comments like "the man is the head of the family," and "as the first cousin of my generation to get married the wedding has to set a precedent" and "this is your life but it also involves your family and his," and it was all proposed in a very formal sort of family meeting whose sole purpose was to discuss just this. Incredible. For the few of you who can follow me in this, try to picture Captain Barry at the forefront of the gang of Mestel family uncles opening the conversation to comments about how much Ari is worth in dowry, with all of the aunts saying things like "let her speak!" and Nana interjecting "Amen, amen, mmmhhmmm," about once every sixteen seconds. It was at once a shocking attack on a young individual and a beautiful display of family unity and love. Afterwards everyone bowed their heads while one of the aunts made a very long grace. The atmosphere immediately became a lot lighter and relaxed as we helped ourselves to the food.
Anyways, I got home and passed out and woke up around noon on Sunday, and did not leave the house ALL day. It was amazing. Almost like what Shabbat's supposed to be. Hannah was home by that point, raving about Saint Louis which sounds like paradise...less pollution, no garbage in the streets, hot water and flush toilets at the hotel, breakfasts of eggs and croissants, nobody asking for your hand in marriage in the street...I think she's a little down about being back in Dakar. Later the kids came running in to say that there was a parade going on for one of the presidential candidates. This is of course exactly the thing we as Americans in Dakar are supposed to avoid, but we put our cell phones away, got our IDs, and ran towards the noise. Although Samu tried to drag us out to the crowd, we stood rather far away on a street corner and very vaguely saw a car and lots of people off in the distance, then headed home.
Monday was uneventful other than finding the street of restaurants near the University - we got lunch of beef and rice and vegetables for about 600 francs each. SO good. We ate with a couple of Senegalese guys who were friends or cousins of someone in our group. They told us all about how the voting works here. The elections are quickly approaching - this Sunday is the day, and then I'm not sure when the runoff elections take place. 15 candidates is INSANE.
Okay, I haven't been very good about this, but here are a few fun facts for the week:
1) Boubabar is the name of probably every other person I have met here - and a very common nickname is, get this, Boubs. It's really hard not to laugh at that one.
2) People are legit insulted when you dont remember their names. Bad news for me, but I'm getting better.
3) I found out the hard way that you MUST stand to greet someone who is older than you when they enter the room. I was the first chair by the door on Saturday night and so I wasn't able to observe the rest of the family - I stayed seated while greeting one set of aunts and uncles. Everyone else got up right after they passed me and and I believe they were very insulted. Sunday they came over to the house, though, and I got to correct myself. So hopefully it will be okay. Gosh darn this whole new culture deal.
4) Annoyance of the week: no running water most of Sunday. I cleaned my feet and other parts that count and went to sleep a little dirty. At least there was electricity!
I'd also like to add that if you have not pooped in a squat toilet, you have not lived.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Goree encore, Bambey and Ngoye
Readers, be prepared for a very long post that may very well be sappy, trite, and poorly narrated because so much happened between Friday and Sunday morning that I honestly can't even list what happened in order.
I'll begin with Friday morning - a second trip to Goree Island, this time with my History of Senegambia professor, who had mentioned the week before that we'd meet where the boat leaves for the Island at 10 am. There are five people in the class, one of whom had already been to Goree and decided that he didn't want to come, so that left me, Tina, two Canadians, and the professor. Tina and I met in the morning and bargained for a taxi to the boat port, where we walked around a little in the market. There were giant hanging pieces of beef and fruit and grain and more flies than I've ever seen in one place in my life. Tina bought six of what she thought was a certain kind of fruit that she ate when she lived in Zimbabwe, but actually turned out to be a weird sort of mealy kiwi-esque thing that I didn't really want to risk.
We met our professor, Boubacar Barry (best name EVER, by the way), and waited nervously for the Canadians who probably thought we were meeting at 10 and not that the boat was leaving then. Boubacar bought the tickets and said he hoped the other girls would "have the intelligence to take the next boat" but I knew if it had been me I'd probably just go home, plus they didnt have cell phones so we couldnt communicate with them to tell them what was going on. In any case it ended up being a whole day on Goree with just me, Tina, and this old professor, which was a bit awkward but turned out to be AMAZING.
We got off the ferry and went to have a tour at the slave house where a man named Joseph Ndaiye has made it his life's work to tell the story of the slave trade on Goree and the middle passage. It was a very moving speech he made and there was an Italian translator too. The dude is 82 years old and has only missed a couple of days in like 50 years. Plus, our professor has known him for years, so we got in for free AND got to speak personally with Ndaiye afterwards. This sort of thing kept happening all day long - I mean Boubacar knows everyone there because of his historical work so we just got in everywhere for free and got to see things that not even government officials have seen, like the insides of some of the famous houses on the Island. He even knows Madame Crespin, who is a descendant of the Signares (in the colonialist period, women of mixed race living with white officials). Her house is a living history book and she knows so much - plus she has these museum-like collections of old lithographs and postcards, not to mention rooms and rooms full of artwork and artifacts and a huge courtyard garden. She spoke French that was very easily understood and was interested in our lives in the states, and explained that she doesn't give tours or have visitors except in very special cases for people she knows. She and our professor talked about the future of the island, and she seemed to be very nervous about the government turning her family home into some kind of national museum or tourist trap. We also just happened to run into this other dude who owns a house on the island, who of course Boubacar knew as well, so we got invited for a few hours over to his house for coffee. It was probably the most beautiful courtyard garden I've ever seen, and the rooms were all sort of separated up above the garden looking out on it. The man told us the history of the house and also the history of his family - he's from a long line of traditional Senegalese tribal royalty, that at some point got mixed with the colonialists, and he has some of the first photographs taken of people on the island. Once a year on Goree all of the houses are opened for three days and 20 or 30 artists get to display their work in the gardens and houses. It's unfortunately happening after we leave, but we met the artist who will be displaying in this guy's house. We had a ton of amazing coffee in tiny cups and listened to the wind chimes and chatted with a Brazillian exchange student and a couple of other people who were visiting. Another material plus: really nice bathrooms with flush toilets...
We spent a few hours at the history and womens' museums and had a great lunch of fish and fries at a restaurant (super expensive, but all paid for by WARC - super expensive being like 8 or 9 dollars for fish, fries, rice, salad, drinks, and sliced fruit for dessert) . We were planning to take the 2 pm boat, but we missed that when we were having coffee, then we were going to take the 4:30 boat, but we missed that because we were having some kind of lemonade with Madame Crespin, and so we barely made the 6 pm boat and since this is around rush hour in Dakar I didn't get home until after 8.
Okay so now comes the crazy part. I'm going to leave out a lot and talk about the interesting parts. Saturday I got up at six and got to WARC at 8, where we waited a lot, loaded the bus, and finally left around 9. On the bus we were given bananas and Thiakry, which is a sort of liquidy yoghurt with millet in the bottom that you mix in, almost like granola. It's pretty delicious but really intense, and if you eat it too fast it may very well come up again, which happened on the bus to somebody...
On the way to Bambey we drove through Thies, another large city, and stopped a bit outside of it to visit an agricultural school and also what I think is a sort of project co-op village. The aim there is to "combattre l'exode des villages" which is to fight against the mass exodus of villagers towards the cities. There is a community of weavers and artists who make clothing, dolls, bags, et cetera and sell them for a communal profit. It seemed like a kind of kibbutz, but it was very hard to hear anything people were explaining about it since there were so many of us. A couple of kids bought stuff, but most things were in the range of 40-50 dollars and I didn't bring that much with me on the trip. I did take some awesome pictures (of the whole weekend, actually), which should be on facebook soon.
Upon our arrival in Bambey, we met the family of professor Ngom, who would be feeding and housing all thirty of us, a friend of the WARC coordinators and a professor in the village of Ngoye. The women were all in the courtyard cleaning pots with sand and soap, soaking lettuce and grain, and cooking on outdoor stoves. I noticed in the corner of the courtyard two goat heads hanging up on a pole (they put them there, I believe, so that they dont attract flies near the food before they get disposed of) so I was fairly certain what kind of meat we'd be eating for lunch. We then took horse and cart rides around the town, by twos, so there were about 20 carts. We got laughed at and pointed at in our giant group of touristy Toubaabs. Bambey is Serrer territory so we didn't get to speak much Wolof, or French for that matter. We also took a little tour of a market place, even weirder since it was a huge line of Toubaabs squeezing through the little stalls while Professor Pam tried to explain things to us. Oh also it was about 100 degrees there - Bambey is inland so they don't get the nice Dakar ocean breezes. The city is much dirtier than Dakar - I didn't think it possible - but there was garbage everywhere, and the smell was overwhelming in the heat. Most people who approached us or called out to us asked for money or gifts and I felt very out of place and uncomfortable. We came back to a delicious lunch of rice, meat, eggs, and vegetables, eaten out of big plates that we put across the knees of four or five people in chairs, and dug in with our hands or with forks or spoons.
After lunch it was off to the village. This is where words begin to fail me. It is only 7 km outside the city but it's like a different world. We got there around 5 and were greeted by crowds of kids. The houses are round and made of earth and have grass or tin roofs. The granaries are way outside the living areas in case of fires. The water is all drawn from wells, by the women, and they have a couple of solar panels to provide light in some of the squares. It's actually a fairly large village, miles across, with several thousand inhabitants. I don't know about the level of poverty but there didn't seem to be a lot of obvious signs of malnutrition, and I think they are fairly well off from what we were told. We stopped to greet a group of men who were reposing under some trees, and only the boys were allowed to shake hands with them. A bit later we watched some women grinding the millet to make couscous, with giant pestles (sp?) in bowls. They sort of showed off for us and did it two at a time alternating hitting the wooden stick down into the bowl then throwing it up and occasionally even clapping in the air. Some little girls did it too and it was amazing to see these 8-year-olds with their baby siblings tied to their backs and throwing up and down these heavy wooden things. A couple of people in our group even tried and found it was really difficult. In another clearing a few feet away there was a tree with the bottom of the trunk colored with a sort of dripping white paint. Most families have a tree like that and it's a holy place for animists - even the Muslims and Catholics maintain animistic practices. From what we gathered, when someone is sick or hurt or stressed they come pray and sort of paint the tree and are cured of whatever is ailing them.
After that brief visit we were led by about a hundred children down a large dusty road, to where they had a schoolhouse. We all went into a classroom and sat down with them at the desks. On the board was written in French "everyone will wait here for the strangers," which was promptly erased when we got there. They sang us a song in Serrer about a boy who is leaving his family to go to school, and tells his sister not to cry because he will return soon. It was so many beautiful voices. I have to admit I got kind of teary. We played a sort of game afterwards, then walked back with them towards a big crowd of people preparing for the lutte. We were ushered into some rows of chairs where we had the best view and for an hour or so watched the boys wrestling and dancing. Some of the boys could jump up in the air and touch their feet. I got some killer photos. Everyone was excited and animated and everyone had a kid sitting on their lap. The rest of the people there squashed together in a big circle and pushed and shoved to try and see what was going on. There was one guy who was supposed to be a sort of jester character who was wearing this weird white man mask. The man sitting next to me explained that the guy in the mask was a sort of fortune teller, that people went to with their troubles, and who was a very respected character in the community. The whole time there was a group of men playing the drums, and once in a while, one of them would come out in front and play for us - and ask us for money - which got very uncomfortable, but our coordinators talked to them for us.
After the lutte there was a horse race - everyone lined up in a couple of rows and the horses were brought out by their riders in a kind of line. There was a false start, and then they really began, and all the kids went screaming after them. The race involves turning around at a certain point and coming back, and someone got hit by a horse on the way back with all the insanity of the crowd but he seemed to just roll and get up and everything was cool.
By this point the sun was nearly down and the stars were coming out. It was hard to see and now the crowd of kids was probably up to three hundred and we had to find the rest of the Toubaabs and walk back to the bus. Eventually they had us line up holding each other by the waist so they could count heads, and with some people still carrying sleepy children this proved to be a bit complicated. But finally we headed out holding hands and walked back to the bus in the dark. It was amazing being in that crowd of kids.
I realize, looking at this entry, that it all sounds sort of strange and primitive and typically trite, and I didn't mean for it to come out like that. It's hard to process what they and what we got out of the exchange - there I was, looking in on their daily lives and now describing it to people from home like it's this grand barbaric oddity that I got to look at from behind the glass. And that's how it was, to an extent - there was no possible way to feel at home there, we were just these white wealthy staring exciting guests who came to poke our heads in for a few hours and be gone after sunset. On the other hand, there's something to say for having carried children we couldn't even talk to under a sky full of stars, and for opening our eyes to people who speak and live differently but are really, when it comes down to it, just the same. I felt more maternal than I've ever felt - just seeing all the young girls with even younger kids strapped to them, and walking everywhere with a kid holding my hand or sitting on my lap or my hip. This sounds ridiculous even to me but I know now that I want to have kids one day.
Well since I'm pressed for time I'll finish talking about the rest of the trip sometime later in the week. Its sort of exhausting just writing about it, and I did a very poor job of telling it how it was but that's the way it goes, this whole language thing. Anyways, I hope everyone has a good week and takes the time to find (or make) a little peace.
Jamm rekk.
I'll begin with Friday morning - a second trip to Goree Island, this time with my History of Senegambia professor, who had mentioned the week before that we'd meet where the boat leaves for the Island at 10 am. There are five people in the class, one of whom had already been to Goree and decided that he didn't want to come, so that left me, Tina, two Canadians, and the professor. Tina and I met in the morning and bargained for a taxi to the boat port, where we walked around a little in the market. There were giant hanging pieces of beef and fruit and grain and more flies than I've ever seen in one place in my life. Tina bought six of what she thought was a certain kind of fruit that she ate when she lived in Zimbabwe, but actually turned out to be a weird sort of mealy kiwi-esque thing that I didn't really want to risk.
We met our professor, Boubacar Barry (best name EVER, by the way), and waited nervously for the Canadians who probably thought we were meeting at 10 and not that the boat was leaving then. Boubacar bought the tickets and said he hoped the other girls would "have the intelligence to take the next boat" but I knew if it had been me I'd probably just go home, plus they didnt have cell phones so we couldnt communicate with them to tell them what was going on. In any case it ended up being a whole day on Goree with just me, Tina, and this old professor, which was a bit awkward but turned out to be AMAZING.
We got off the ferry and went to have a tour at the slave house where a man named Joseph Ndaiye has made it his life's work to tell the story of the slave trade on Goree and the middle passage. It was a very moving speech he made and there was an Italian translator too. The dude is 82 years old and has only missed a couple of days in like 50 years. Plus, our professor has known him for years, so we got in for free AND got to speak personally with Ndaiye afterwards. This sort of thing kept happening all day long - I mean Boubacar knows everyone there because of his historical work so we just got in everywhere for free and got to see things that not even government officials have seen, like the insides of some of the famous houses on the Island. He even knows Madame Crespin, who is a descendant of the Signares (in the colonialist period, women of mixed race living with white officials). Her house is a living history book and she knows so much - plus she has these museum-like collections of old lithographs and postcards, not to mention rooms and rooms full of artwork and artifacts and a huge courtyard garden. She spoke French that was very easily understood and was interested in our lives in the states, and explained that she doesn't give tours or have visitors except in very special cases for people she knows. She and our professor talked about the future of the island, and she seemed to be very nervous about the government turning her family home into some kind of national museum or tourist trap. We also just happened to run into this other dude who owns a house on the island, who of course Boubacar knew as well, so we got invited for a few hours over to his house for coffee. It was probably the most beautiful courtyard garden I've ever seen, and the rooms were all sort of separated up above the garden looking out on it. The man told us the history of the house and also the history of his family - he's from a long line of traditional Senegalese tribal royalty, that at some point got mixed with the colonialists, and he has some of the first photographs taken of people on the island. Once a year on Goree all of the houses are opened for three days and 20 or 30 artists get to display their work in the gardens and houses. It's unfortunately happening after we leave, but we met the artist who will be displaying in this guy's house. We had a ton of amazing coffee in tiny cups and listened to the wind chimes and chatted with a Brazillian exchange student and a couple of other people who were visiting. Another material plus: really nice bathrooms with flush toilets...
We spent a few hours at the history and womens' museums and had a great lunch of fish and fries at a restaurant (super expensive, but all paid for by WARC - super expensive being like 8 or 9 dollars for fish, fries, rice, salad, drinks, and sliced fruit for dessert) . We were planning to take the 2 pm boat, but we missed that when we were having coffee, then we were going to take the 4:30 boat, but we missed that because we were having some kind of lemonade with Madame Crespin, and so we barely made the 6 pm boat and since this is around rush hour in Dakar I didn't get home until after 8.
Okay so now comes the crazy part. I'm going to leave out a lot and talk about the interesting parts. Saturday I got up at six and got to WARC at 8, where we waited a lot, loaded the bus, and finally left around 9. On the bus we were given bananas and Thiakry, which is a sort of liquidy yoghurt with millet in the bottom that you mix in, almost like granola. It's pretty delicious but really intense, and if you eat it too fast it may very well come up again, which happened on the bus to somebody...
On the way to Bambey we drove through Thies, another large city, and stopped a bit outside of it to visit an agricultural school and also what I think is a sort of project co-op village. The aim there is to "combattre l'exode des villages" which is to fight against the mass exodus of villagers towards the cities. There is a community of weavers and artists who make clothing, dolls, bags, et cetera and sell them for a communal profit. It seemed like a kind of kibbutz, but it was very hard to hear anything people were explaining about it since there were so many of us. A couple of kids bought stuff, but most things were in the range of 40-50 dollars and I didn't bring that much with me on the trip. I did take some awesome pictures (of the whole weekend, actually), which should be on facebook soon.
Upon our arrival in Bambey, we met the family of professor Ngom, who would be feeding and housing all thirty of us, a friend of the WARC coordinators and a professor in the village of Ngoye. The women were all in the courtyard cleaning pots with sand and soap, soaking lettuce and grain, and cooking on outdoor stoves. I noticed in the corner of the courtyard two goat heads hanging up on a pole (they put them there, I believe, so that they dont attract flies near the food before they get disposed of) so I was fairly certain what kind of meat we'd be eating for lunch. We then took horse and cart rides around the town, by twos, so there were about 20 carts. We got laughed at and pointed at in our giant group of touristy Toubaabs. Bambey is Serrer territory so we didn't get to speak much Wolof, or French for that matter. We also took a little tour of a market place, even weirder since it was a huge line of Toubaabs squeezing through the little stalls while Professor Pam tried to explain things to us. Oh also it was about 100 degrees there - Bambey is inland so they don't get the nice Dakar ocean breezes. The city is much dirtier than Dakar - I didn't think it possible - but there was garbage everywhere, and the smell was overwhelming in the heat. Most people who approached us or called out to us asked for money or gifts and I felt very out of place and uncomfortable. We came back to a delicious lunch of rice, meat, eggs, and vegetables, eaten out of big plates that we put across the knees of four or five people in chairs, and dug in with our hands or with forks or spoons.
After lunch it was off to the village. This is where words begin to fail me. It is only 7 km outside the city but it's like a different world. We got there around 5 and were greeted by crowds of kids. The houses are round and made of earth and have grass or tin roofs. The granaries are way outside the living areas in case of fires. The water is all drawn from wells, by the women, and they have a couple of solar panels to provide light in some of the squares. It's actually a fairly large village, miles across, with several thousand inhabitants. I don't know about the level of poverty but there didn't seem to be a lot of obvious signs of malnutrition, and I think they are fairly well off from what we were told. We stopped to greet a group of men who were reposing under some trees, and only the boys were allowed to shake hands with them. A bit later we watched some women grinding the millet to make couscous, with giant pestles (sp?) in bowls. They sort of showed off for us and did it two at a time alternating hitting the wooden stick down into the bowl then throwing it up and occasionally even clapping in the air. Some little girls did it too and it was amazing to see these 8-year-olds with their baby siblings tied to their backs and throwing up and down these heavy wooden things. A couple of people in our group even tried and found it was really difficult. In another clearing a few feet away there was a tree with the bottom of the trunk colored with a sort of dripping white paint. Most families have a tree like that and it's a holy place for animists - even the Muslims and Catholics maintain animistic practices. From what we gathered, when someone is sick or hurt or stressed they come pray and sort of paint the tree and are cured of whatever is ailing them.
After that brief visit we were led by about a hundred children down a large dusty road, to where they had a schoolhouse. We all went into a classroom and sat down with them at the desks. On the board was written in French "everyone will wait here for the strangers," which was promptly erased when we got there. They sang us a song in Serrer about a boy who is leaving his family to go to school, and tells his sister not to cry because he will return soon. It was so many beautiful voices. I have to admit I got kind of teary. We played a sort of game afterwards, then walked back with them towards a big crowd of people preparing for the lutte. We were ushered into some rows of chairs where we had the best view and for an hour or so watched the boys wrestling and dancing. Some of the boys could jump up in the air and touch their feet. I got some killer photos. Everyone was excited and animated and everyone had a kid sitting on their lap. The rest of the people there squashed together in a big circle and pushed and shoved to try and see what was going on. There was one guy who was supposed to be a sort of jester character who was wearing this weird white man mask. The man sitting next to me explained that the guy in the mask was a sort of fortune teller, that people went to with their troubles, and who was a very respected character in the community. The whole time there was a group of men playing the drums, and once in a while, one of them would come out in front and play for us - and ask us for money - which got very uncomfortable, but our coordinators talked to them for us.
After the lutte there was a horse race - everyone lined up in a couple of rows and the horses were brought out by their riders in a kind of line. There was a false start, and then they really began, and all the kids went screaming after them. The race involves turning around at a certain point and coming back, and someone got hit by a horse on the way back with all the insanity of the crowd but he seemed to just roll and get up and everything was cool.
By this point the sun was nearly down and the stars were coming out. It was hard to see and now the crowd of kids was probably up to three hundred and we had to find the rest of the Toubaabs and walk back to the bus. Eventually they had us line up holding each other by the waist so they could count heads, and with some people still carrying sleepy children this proved to be a bit complicated. But finally we headed out holding hands and walked back to the bus in the dark. It was amazing being in that crowd of kids.
I realize, looking at this entry, that it all sounds sort of strange and primitive and typically trite, and I didn't mean for it to come out like that. It's hard to process what they and what we got out of the exchange - there I was, looking in on their daily lives and now describing it to people from home like it's this grand barbaric oddity that I got to look at from behind the glass. And that's how it was, to an extent - there was no possible way to feel at home there, we were just these white wealthy staring exciting guests who came to poke our heads in for a few hours and be gone after sunset. On the other hand, there's something to say for having carried children we couldn't even talk to under a sky full of stars, and for opening our eyes to people who speak and live differently but are really, when it comes down to it, just the same. I felt more maternal than I've ever felt - just seeing all the young girls with even younger kids strapped to them, and walking everywhere with a kid holding my hand or sitting on my lap or my hip. This sounds ridiculous even to me but I know now that I want to have kids one day.
Well since I'm pressed for time I'll finish talking about the rest of the trip sometime later in the week. Its sort of exhausting just writing about it, and I did a very poor job of telling it how it was but that's the way it goes, this whole language thing. Anyways, I hope everyone has a good week and takes the time to find (or make) a little peace.
Jamm rekk.
Monday, February 5, 2007
again comes the weekend
So I think this should be a bit of a shorter blog because it's only been a couple of days since I've written, but who knows.
Those bug bites I was concerned about? Fleas. Yup, FLEAS. Gross. The worst part is not the itching but the fact that in spite of the dermatologist's diagnosis, my family is mortally insulted by the fact that I would even suggest that I could have gotten these bites somewhere near, in, or around their home. As soon as I told them it was "nope, he's wrong, no fleas in this house." But they did end up washing and treating the mangy dog and letting me spray my room and bed and clothes with some kind of dangerous chemicals, so hopefully the problem will resolve itself, or else I'll just deal with a couple of flea bites for the next three months. And yes, that's about how long I've got left here.
This weekend was fun - dance class on Saturday was super tiring, mostly because we just keep going as long as the drummers feel like it, or until it's so obvious that we're not having a good time anymore that the coordinator drags us out of the teacher's talons. I love the dancing, but when we begin at 9 and keep going till 2, it gets to be a bit much. This time there were tons of new people so we redid the old dance, then began a new one which also involves a song in Serrer. The dances we are learning are actually real traditional dances that have been performed for years.
Saturday afternoon I came home to lunch with the family and a lot of other relatives - there were probably a good twenty kids in the courtyard while I was on the roof for a bit talking on the phone to my parents. They taught me later how to play this sort of tiddlywinks kind of football (soccer) with bottle caps and a rock, which sounds impossible and is but theyre really good at it. Another thing they really like is foosball and they go frequently down the street where you can pay 25 cfa to play on a battered up but sturdy old table out in the street. I played once and made a fool of myself.
Hannah and I got up the courage to ask Maman Amitie if we could go to the beach at Ngor on Sunday, and after much grilling and assuring her we'd be safe and together she said yes. So in the morning we got up and got ready, then walked to meet some people Hannah had to meet with about a presentation for class. I sat and read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in French, which Reine lent me last week. It is AMAZING to read it in French, plus its a sort of junior version so it's easier to understand. They changed all the names of characters to make more sense in French - Snape is Rogue, Malfoy's name and Hedwig's gets an e added to it, Filch's name is different, et cetera.
After her meeting we went to a store and bought baguettes, laughing cow cheese, beef slices, and cookies, and then went to a stand to get oranges and bananas. I bargained for the taxi myself and we headed out to Ngor. Once there you have to buy a ticket (500 cfa or $1 round trip) to take the pirogues - long fishing boats with a motor that can hold about 30 people. They give the toubabs life jackets, and you have to take of your shoes and get wet up to your knees in the ocean to climb into the boat. Its just a few minutes ride over to the island of Ngor. There's a small sandy beach but we chose to hike around for an hour or so first on the rocky coast. We ate our lunch on the rocks at the highest point on the island, and the ocean was out of this world. I have never seen so many different blues at once. Afterwards we spent a couple of hours on the beach lying around and swimming (COOOLD) and talking to some dudes from the peace corps who'd been in Senegal 5 months or so and spoke Serrer. We took the pirogue back and another two taxis (slightly more expensive this time). The rest of the evening was uneventful except that everyone in the family is really into these stupid horror films that are always on TV. They scare me so I read in my room instead. We wanted to go see the Superbowl at the US marine house but we felt kind of bad just leaving again, especially at 23 o clock on a Sunday so we stayed in and just went to bed early. Hannah was convinced there would be buffalo wings, for some reason, but it turns out there were not and that it was just like a bad frat party. Plus the Colts won. Not that I had a preference beyond seeing my Chicago pals happy.
Anyways, that's that. If nothing exciting happens soon, stay tuned for the first installment of "A day in the life of Lili." Or something like that. All I can say is wulla ba. That's one of countless Wolof expressions that essentially mean nothing and thus can mean anything you want. Peace only.
Those bug bites I was concerned about? Fleas. Yup, FLEAS. Gross. The worst part is not the itching but the fact that in spite of the dermatologist's diagnosis, my family is mortally insulted by the fact that I would even suggest that I could have gotten these bites somewhere near, in, or around their home. As soon as I told them it was "nope, he's wrong, no fleas in this house." But they did end up washing and treating the mangy dog and letting me spray my room and bed and clothes with some kind of dangerous chemicals, so hopefully the problem will resolve itself, or else I'll just deal with a couple of flea bites for the next three months. And yes, that's about how long I've got left here.
This weekend was fun - dance class on Saturday was super tiring, mostly because we just keep going as long as the drummers feel like it, or until it's so obvious that we're not having a good time anymore that the coordinator drags us out of the teacher's talons. I love the dancing, but when we begin at 9 and keep going till 2, it gets to be a bit much. This time there were tons of new people so we redid the old dance, then began a new one which also involves a song in Serrer. The dances we are learning are actually real traditional dances that have been performed for years.
Saturday afternoon I came home to lunch with the family and a lot of other relatives - there were probably a good twenty kids in the courtyard while I was on the roof for a bit talking on the phone to my parents. They taught me later how to play this sort of tiddlywinks kind of football (soccer) with bottle caps and a rock, which sounds impossible and is but theyre really good at it. Another thing they really like is foosball and they go frequently down the street where you can pay 25 cfa to play on a battered up but sturdy old table out in the street. I played once and made a fool of myself.
Hannah and I got up the courage to ask Maman Amitie if we could go to the beach at Ngor on Sunday, and after much grilling and assuring her we'd be safe and together she said yes. So in the morning we got up and got ready, then walked to meet some people Hannah had to meet with about a presentation for class. I sat and read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in French, which Reine lent me last week. It is AMAZING to read it in French, plus its a sort of junior version so it's easier to understand. They changed all the names of characters to make more sense in French - Snape is Rogue, Malfoy's name and Hedwig's gets an e added to it, Filch's name is different, et cetera.
After her meeting we went to a store and bought baguettes, laughing cow cheese, beef slices, and cookies, and then went to a stand to get oranges and bananas. I bargained for the taxi myself and we headed out to Ngor. Once there you have to buy a ticket (500 cfa or $1 round trip) to take the pirogues - long fishing boats with a motor that can hold about 30 people. They give the toubabs life jackets, and you have to take of your shoes and get wet up to your knees in the ocean to climb into the boat. Its just a few minutes ride over to the island of Ngor. There's a small sandy beach but we chose to hike around for an hour or so first on the rocky coast. We ate our lunch on the rocks at the highest point on the island, and the ocean was out of this world. I have never seen so many different blues at once. Afterwards we spent a couple of hours on the beach lying around and swimming (COOOLD) and talking to some dudes from the peace corps who'd been in Senegal 5 months or so and spoke Serrer. We took the pirogue back and another two taxis (slightly more expensive this time). The rest of the evening was uneventful except that everyone in the family is really into these stupid horror films that are always on TV. They scare me so I read in my room instead. We wanted to go see the Superbowl at the US marine house but we felt kind of bad just leaving again, especially at 23 o clock on a Sunday so we stayed in and just went to bed early. Hannah was convinced there would be buffalo wings, for some reason, but it turns out there were not and that it was just like a bad frat party. Plus the Colts won. Not that I had a preference beyond seeing my Chicago pals happy.
Anyways, that's that. If nothing exciting happens soon, stay tuned for the first installment of "A day in the life of Lili." Or something like that. All I can say is wulla ba. That's one of countless Wolof expressions that essentially mean nothing and thus can mean anything you want. Peace only.
Friday, February 2, 2007
friday's perspective on monday and tuesday evening
This week has flown and I meant to get on and write about Tuesday as soon as it happened but somehow it's Friday already and here I am, waiting around in the computer lab until I leave for the dermatologist's office to see about some weird bites on my legs instead of going out with my friends to the market to buy fabric and sandals and shawarma as I had planned. Grrrr...well at least I've got the chance to write again.
That said, I'll begin with a Monday that was uneventful other than the discovery of this stand outside the university where you can buy a bag of warm baked buttery biscuits (yum, alliteration!) for 100 CFA. We had gone to find a place to make cheap photocopies for the Senegambia class - which is incidentally improving every time, Alhamdulilaay. We even found a place that for 15 CFA per page will copy the whole thing for you so you dont have to stand there and do each page yourself. Alhamdulilaay! Later that day we were told that since the Muslim new year was that evening there would be no class Tuesday and probably Wednesday as well depending on the teachers. I spent a lazy day hanging out with the fam and reading a lot, and then asked the girls if theyd show me how to do my laundry. I thought it was way too much stuff to give the maid in one wednesday but as it turns out they were more annoyed about pulling out all the buckets for me and told me that it was hardly anything and that next time the laveuse could do it.
Its stuff like me doing my laundry by hand that I want to have a picture of, but I could not whip out the camera in front of the kids without fear of it getting destroyed. I bought powdered laundry soap for about 20 cents at the boutique next door. First I bought the wrong kind of soap in a bar and then Samu came and explained in Wolof what I wanted. You use four buckets - first get the clothes wet and squeeze them out, then put them in the soapy bucket and wash them across your knuckles - really just the armpits and hems and necks and stains. Then you do it again in a bucket of fresh water, then rinse them in a fourth bucket. Then you squeeze them out really well, put them in a fifth bucket and carry them up to the roof where you hang them on a long line with clothespins. Everything was dry within a couple of hours, what with the wind.
When Hannah got back from her day's adventures wandering the city in search of other peoples' houses and less boredom, we sat down to some TV, and then JB came in with a very tall friend. After a few minutes said friend got a phone call and JB asked if we wanted to come to Amitie 3 for a little while. We figured this would be a short walk and some sitting around at a friend's house for an hour or so but due to the usual lack of communication it turned out to be an all-night affair that was possibly the oddest, most uncomfortable six hours of my life but which has turned into a good story since I'm clearly still around to tell it. In any case we grabbed our bags and tried to make sense of where we were going and how long we might expect to be there, and could not. We got in a taxi with tall man who turned out to have a stutter and a liking for beer, both of which made it painfully difficult to decipher his conversation. We spent a good three hours in this weird bar where a bunch of dudes got a plate full of what I think was fried pork and then POURED BEER IN THE LEFTOVER FAT AND MUSTARD AND DRANK IT. oh gosh. Most of them dispersed soon after and tall man commenced to slowly question us about why we were in Senegal and tell us how much the Western world has screwed over Africa. I think this is what he was talking about, anyways, along with some stuff about how someone busted his knees so he can no longer play basketball. It made me think a lot about why I am here, but it was also a very uncomfortable situation that involved periodic bouts of dance with the two men and me and Hannah and us sort of eyeing each other and making half-assed plans to get the hell out of there without them. They paid for everything, the beer and the meat and the public transport, and it was SO WEIRD. I have no concept of whether this may have been a double date. Finally tall man got insulted that we refused to drink more beer with him and the boys finished off their beers and we left. We thought it would be a simple taxi ride home (now about 11 pm) but instead we waited a bit, then hopped into a giant white van with some unknown dude who drove us about halfway to where we were hoping to end up. During the ride JB decided we should probably get hamburgers so we got out and took a car rapide the rest of the way down the road, then walked another twenty minutes through some dark and windy streets to get to this little fast food place. The hamburgers were delicious. Un hamburger complet contains a big slab of meat, eggs, french fries, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, tomatoes, onions and I have no idea what else. JB tried to get us to name everything that was in there. On the way to the burger joint Maman Amitie called us wondering where we were and JB said we'd be home soon so we had to eat our first giant sticky juicy Senegalese burgers in transit. We were sort of dazed upon arrival and went straight to bed wondering if it had all been a dream...
Wednesday my 9 am class was cancelled but I went in to use the computers as WARC anyway. A bit later I went with some girls to the Marche HLM which is like the market downtown except as it turns out, its much more relaxed and easy to just browse and stroll without people trampling or jostling or bugging you about what they have to sell. We walked around and asked prices and it is mind-boggling to me how literally hundreds of people selling the exact same thing can exist at stores side-by-side for years. I didnt have much money on me (or confidence, for that matter, after the previous night) so I didnt get anything yet, but a couple of girls got sandals and fabric. It seems like about 8 bucks for six yards of fabric is a pretty decent price for a toubab, which we can then get made into wrap skirts or outfits very cheaply - maybe a few dollars. Maman Amitie's eldest daughter, Didi, said she'd make some clothes for us if we want, though that could get weird if we offer to pay, so I may go elsewhere. Who wants a skirt? Let me know and that would be a cool thing to bring back for people.
Yesterday was pretty tame save several hours of blackout where the kids sort of went nuts in the dark. Hannah and I have decided our house is like the Neverland of host families since there are nine kids aged 10-27 and one adult who's about 70. The older ones arent on the same schedule as the younguns and dont dole out discipline at all, so sometimes it's a complete madhouse. Samu is just a little terror, poking us with pins and bursting into our room and generally annoying everyone around, but he's alright most of the time. The older kids (Reine 15, Fifi 14, and Jean Paul 18) have been really great and patient with our french and just generally make good conversation and correct our grammar. Reine lent me Harry Potter in French! I'm so excited.
Classes as I said are getting better but there's still very little work and lots of down time to do all kinds of craaaazy stuff as you can see. I'm at the point where I wake up to the alarm and the first thought in my head is "ugh I dont want to get out of bed" rather than "holy crap I'm in Senegal," so I guess that means I've settled in a bit. This weekend we're going to try and get in on a Superbowl party hosted by the American marines. wouldnt that be wild...tomorrow I've got dance class and right now I'm going to the dermatologist to see about my lovely oozing left ankle. Peace out for the time being and maybe when I dont have any more exciting stories I will give you "a day in the life of Leora" and bore you all to tears. Some people here can't imagine what I'm putting in this blog all the time but I feel like I have loads to tell about every minute I'm here, so bear with me, folks.
No random observations today because I'm in a rush now to get out of here but I will give you this shining example of the influence of American culture on Senegalese youth: Jean-Paul turned 18 last week and got a real tattoo that says THUG LIFE in giant vertical letters down his right arm. Enough said.
That said, I'll begin with a Monday that was uneventful other than the discovery of this stand outside the university where you can buy a bag of warm baked buttery biscuits (yum, alliteration!) for 100 CFA. We had gone to find a place to make cheap photocopies for the Senegambia class - which is incidentally improving every time, Alhamdulilaay. We even found a place that for 15 CFA per page will copy the whole thing for you so you dont have to stand there and do each page yourself. Alhamdulilaay! Later that day we were told that since the Muslim new year was that evening there would be no class Tuesday and probably Wednesday as well depending on the teachers. I spent a lazy day hanging out with the fam and reading a lot, and then asked the girls if theyd show me how to do my laundry. I thought it was way too much stuff to give the maid in one wednesday but as it turns out they were more annoyed about pulling out all the buckets for me and told me that it was hardly anything and that next time the laveuse could do it.
Its stuff like me doing my laundry by hand that I want to have a picture of, but I could not whip out the camera in front of the kids without fear of it getting destroyed. I bought powdered laundry soap for about 20 cents at the boutique next door. First I bought the wrong kind of soap in a bar and then Samu came and explained in Wolof what I wanted. You use four buckets - first get the clothes wet and squeeze them out, then put them in the soapy bucket and wash them across your knuckles - really just the armpits and hems and necks and stains. Then you do it again in a bucket of fresh water, then rinse them in a fourth bucket. Then you squeeze them out really well, put them in a fifth bucket and carry them up to the roof where you hang them on a long line with clothespins. Everything was dry within a couple of hours, what with the wind.
When Hannah got back from her day's adventures wandering the city in search of other peoples' houses and less boredom, we sat down to some TV, and then JB came in with a very tall friend. After a few minutes said friend got a phone call and JB asked if we wanted to come to Amitie 3 for a little while. We figured this would be a short walk and some sitting around at a friend's house for an hour or so but due to the usual lack of communication it turned out to be an all-night affair that was possibly the oddest, most uncomfortable six hours of my life but which has turned into a good story since I'm clearly still around to tell it. In any case we grabbed our bags and tried to make sense of where we were going and how long we might expect to be there, and could not. We got in a taxi with tall man who turned out to have a stutter and a liking for beer, both of which made it painfully difficult to decipher his conversation. We spent a good three hours in this weird bar where a bunch of dudes got a plate full of what I think was fried pork and then POURED BEER IN THE LEFTOVER FAT AND MUSTARD AND DRANK IT. oh gosh. Most of them dispersed soon after and tall man commenced to slowly question us about why we were in Senegal and tell us how much the Western world has screwed over Africa. I think this is what he was talking about, anyways, along with some stuff about how someone busted his knees so he can no longer play basketball. It made me think a lot about why I am here, but it was also a very uncomfortable situation that involved periodic bouts of dance with the two men and me and Hannah and us sort of eyeing each other and making half-assed plans to get the hell out of there without them. They paid for everything, the beer and the meat and the public transport, and it was SO WEIRD. I have no concept of whether this may have been a double date. Finally tall man got insulted that we refused to drink more beer with him and the boys finished off their beers and we left. We thought it would be a simple taxi ride home (now about 11 pm) but instead we waited a bit, then hopped into a giant white van with some unknown dude who drove us about halfway to where we were hoping to end up. During the ride JB decided we should probably get hamburgers so we got out and took a car rapide the rest of the way down the road, then walked another twenty minutes through some dark and windy streets to get to this little fast food place. The hamburgers were delicious. Un hamburger complet contains a big slab of meat, eggs, french fries, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, tomatoes, onions and I have no idea what else. JB tried to get us to name everything that was in there. On the way to the burger joint Maman Amitie called us wondering where we were and JB said we'd be home soon so we had to eat our first giant sticky juicy Senegalese burgers in transit. We were sort of dazed upon arrival and went straight to bed wondering if it had all been a dream...
Wednesday my 9 am class was cancelled but I went in to use the computers as WARC anyway. A bit later I went with some girls to the Marche HLM which is like the market downtown except as it turns out, its much more relaxed and easy to just browse and stroll without people trampling or jostling or bugging you about what they have to sell. We walked around and asked prices and it is mind-boggling to me how literally hundreds of people selling the exact same thing can exist at stores side-by-side for years. I didnt have much money on me (or confidence, for that matter, after the previous night) so I didnt get anything yet, but a couple of girls got sandals and fabric. It seems like about 8 bucks for six yards of fabric is a pretty decent price for a toubab, which we can then get made into wrap skirts or outfits very cheaply - maybe a few dollars. Maman Amitie's eldest daughter, Didi, said she'd make some clothes for us if we want, though that could get weird if we offer to pay, so I may go elsewhere. Who wants a skirt? Let me know and that would be a cool thing to bring back for people.
Yesterday was pretty tame save several hours of blackout where the kids sort of went nuts in the dark. Hannah and I have decided our house is like the Neverland of host families since there are nine kids aged 10-27 and one adult who's about 70. The older ones arent on the same schedule as the younguns and dont dole out discipline at all, so sometimes it's a complete madhouse. Samu is just a little terror, poking us with pins and bursting into our room and generally annoying everyone around, but he's alright most of the time. The older kids (Reine 15, Fifi 14, and Jean Paul 18) have been really great and patient with our french and just generally make good conversation and correct our grammar. Reine lent me Harry Potter in French! I'm so excited.
Classes as I said are getting better but there's still very little work and lots of down time to do all kinds of craaaazy stuff as you can see. I'm at the point where I wake up to the alarm and the first thought in my head is "ugh I dont want to get out of bed" rather than "holy crap I'm in Senegal," so I guess that means I've settled in a bit. This weekend we're going to try and get in on a Superbowl party hosted by the American marines. wouldnt that be wild...tomorrow I've got dance class and right now I'm going to the dermatologist to see about my lovely oozing left ankle. Peace out for the time being and maybe when I dont have any more exciting stories I will give you "a day in the life of Leora" and bore you all to tears. Some people here can't imagine what I'm putting in this blog all the time but I feel like I have loads to tell about every minute I'm here, so bear with me, folks.
No random observations today because I'm in a rush now to get out of here but I will give you this shining example of the influence of American culture on Senegalese youth: Jean-Paul turned 18 last week and got a real tattoo that says THUG LIFE in giant vertical letters down his right arm. Enough said.
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