Almost ten weeks?!?!?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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