A weekend to keep one on one's toes

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!