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.