It's Thursday, and here I am, procrastinating instead of writing the paper that is due tomorrow morning. I just wanted to relate the boring events of the last three days and finish with an extremely exciting yet kind of morally devastating turn of events.
Tuesday I went to the hospital and sat around in the TB department for four hours with another Toubab friend who just started working there last week. Everyone was really nice but there wasn't much to do except fend off the advances of one male employee and learn a bit about how tuberculosis gets treated here. The treatment, which is pretty much the same all over the world, lasts nine months. The first two months are the most important and it is imperative that the patient take the antibiotics every day or else the disease can become resistant. Because there's such a problem with people having relapses, for the first two months they monitor every patient by having them come in and take what seems to be a large handful of white pills every morning before they eat. So the job of the people in the department is to process their paperwork by hand, sort out the medicines, and give pills to the twenty or so people who come in daily. I again felt kind of useless, this time because there just wasn't enough work to do.
Most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I have been in the computer lab writing papers. Boring! Enough said about that. Tuesday night the kiddies all came in and hung out in our room and made string bracelets and just generally made a lot of noise. It was a good time. They also told us a lot of stories about all the Americans who have stayed here, including one last year who was so gross that Mamitie had to come in and throw out and wash a ton of her stuff for her. It amazes me how little we know about everyone who lives in our house but some more information surfaced, including the fact that Felix was in the army and like legit went to war somewhere (or so we were told). Which is apparently also why he doesn't ever sleep in a bed, only on the floor. What? I mean this is the kind of information we get out of the kids with seemingly simple, direct questions, and there's some kind of cultural barrier that doesn't leave anyone satisfied.
Other news: Mamitie is gone till Friday again, sewing more school uniforms at her daughter's house, and last night we watched a League of their Own on TV which in my mind was the best thing on television in the last two months. It was in French of course, but it was so refreshing to actually want to watch what was on the telly.
I leave for Toubab Diallo tomorrow after some kind of conference in place of history class, to spend a day or two on the beach put up in a hotel by our program. Sweet! According to some people who have been there, the hotel is really nice, and has great food. Really nice in terms of our now very low standards, as it still does not have hot water.
Okay now for the story of the week:
So when I got here in January, I was quickly informed that the toilet in our house was broken and that it would be necessary to dump large buckets down to flush when flushing was necessary. There was a flusher, a little pull thing on the top of the toilet, but that didn't work, and I had to get yelled at before I knew about the bucket procedure. When Hannah got here, she told me the flusher actually did work, but when I was sick and in the bathroom for like four days straight Mamitie kept pushing the bucket method, which I adopted and didn't even think about until this Tuesday night. I was commenting to Hannah on how it was really kind of weird that our family has satellite TV, yet finds it necessary to walk an extra kilometer rather than spend for 13 of us to take the car rapide for 150 CFA each, and also hasn't had the toilet fixed in months, and all kinds of other odd ways of cutting back on the small daily spending sums. To this Hannah responded "wait a second, what are you talking about - the toilet flushes," or something to that effect. Which, believe it or not, turns out to be true. Sure enough, it flushes like a charm. All nicely pressurized and everything! So for three months I didn't even think to test out the flusher and have been lugging buckets around and filling and emptying them at least once daily, when the whole time I could have just pulled a little thing on the back of the toilet. This is not a joke. NOT A FLIPPING JOKE!! I want those months back!

That is all.

The home stretch

Another week already? Not too much excitement here, things are winding down which means I have tons of papers to write, no longer have class in the afternoons, and am trying to figure out the new Brown online course registration system which, being in a technology-unfriendly city, is giving me a terrible pain in the all the diodes down my left side. (Ten points to anyone who got that reference.)
So, so, so. Exciting academic events of last week: handing in three two-page papers on Islam and a really ridiculous written exam at the university involving the writing of one paragraph on pollution using five verb connectors, in order. Oh yes, we had an hour and a half to write 100 words. Good times. What's left is a 10 page history paper, a 10 page literature paper, a grammar exam, a dance and drumming spectacle in front of probably hundreds of laughing people at the university, and a written Islam test.
Mamitie was gone for the whole week, just left all us kiddies to ourselves, so we had a party. Just kidding. The kids enjoyed themselves though. Hannah and I decided to profit from her absence to go out for dinner. Thursday night I met her and Christina at Nando's where we killed time for a while and then took the bus downtown to the French Institute for an excellent dinner. There was a cover charge just to get in because there was a performance later in the evening that we weren't sure we wanted to go to, but we ended up deciding to go anyway after checking out a couple of other places. The food there is just SO good. We decided to hang out for the performace which turned out to be a bunch of high school drama groups from different parts of Dakar performing a series of short plays. We stayed for the first one which was an interpretation of "8 femmes" which was made into a French musical movie a few years ago. I really thought they did an excellent job, there were a couple of girls who were really very strong actors, and they'd sort of adapted this French script for Senegalese society - they spoke in Wolof when they were angry or when it just fit, the daughter in the play had just returned from the states, et cetera et cetera. It was a great night and we took a taxi home where the family was still eating dinner, so that was kind of awkward.
Friday afternoon after class I went to the marche HLM with a bunch of girls and we bought a lot of fabric so that we can take it collectively to a tailor and have a bunch of things made. We would all like to get tons of small bags made for our friends at home but you only need like half a meter of cloth for that and most vendors won't sell you less than 6 meters at a time. So we're going to split it. We took the car rapide both ways. That whole experience used to freak me out thoroughly every time, but now I love it. It's a very good way to just be an observer of the city streets without seeming like a tourist. I feel like I've now perfected what I like to call the "commuter's look of utter indifference" which on a good day allows me to walk and ride and sometimes even shop without too much hassling. It really is all about your attitude and body language - if you look like you are lost or nervous or hesitant, people will know and act on that. At HLM I also bought some bin-bins, which in case I haven't said before, are stretchy beads that girls wear around their waists to attract sexual attention (and which also make good bracelets and necklaces and small gifts.) I was just attacked by this group of women at a stand selling them, who kept piling them into my arms and requesting money and not giving me any change, and who shoved things back into my hands and would not let me hand back the beads to the point where I had to choose between dropping them on the ground and paying for more of them. Well, I dropped them. I was alone in the market at that point and it was just this great measure of how far I've come here because I was telling them what I wanted in Wolof, bargaining, just surrounded by people shoving things in my face and it wasn't so much "ohmigod this is insane" as "how can I calmly extract myself from the current state of affairs and still come away with what I want?" And I did, I got 5 bin-bins for 3 bucks and all is well. I also bought another mumu for wearing around the house, this time for the right price - I asked Mamie and she told me I paid way too much last time. All in all, a very pleasant shopping experience.
The weekend was completely uneventful. Hannah went to Joal and I went to dance class, read a lot, and did some work. I was invited to church and declined. Jaco slept in our room again since there was the empty bed, and I woke up to him calling my name at 4 am, just for kicks, to see how loud he needed to get to wake me up. I mean the kid is 24 years old. I think we're both (me and Hannah) sort of at a loss about what to do about him, but that's a story for another time.
Samu and his cousin asked me yesterday for some Ziplock bags for their marbles with bits of string to tie them around their necks. These of course got ripped within the hour, at which point they got mad when I wouldn't give them more plastic bags. When I gave Samu a pack of Orbit gum last week he put the entire pack in his mouth at once. I mean, an entire pack of Orbit! I brought hundreds of meters of thread to make bracelets and it all got used up in a couple of weeks. I give Fifi and Reine safety pins probably once a week and I have no idea where they put the ones I gave them the week before. I shudder to think what would happen if anyone knew how much food we eat on the sly in our room...my parents brought so much stuff for the kids that I can't even begin to give it out to them without it being a completely inappropriate display of wealth. Little things, a pack of stickers, some jelly beans, a set of jacks, more string, stuff that's no biggie in the states, is something the kids will all fight over here, and if I give one of them more than the others they take it personally. They love the jacks but when I gave them to Samu expecting him to share and had to tell him they were for everyone, he was insulted, and everyone else was sore that they weren't around when I gave
them to him. I think I'm going to give the notebooks to Becky, who works at a night school for kids who work but still want to learn to read and write and speak French. Anyway that's enough of that.
Last night we finally got up the courage to ask Mamitie if we could make dinner! Among the stuff my mom brought was some mac and cheese, so we're going to try for fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. Maybe even some vegetables! A very American meal. As we all eat around one big bowl we're not sure how we're going to serve that quite yet, and they're used to having some kind of sauce on everything, plus we're afraid they won't like the mac and cheese. I mean, on the one hand how could you not, but on the other hand, I eat something I don't like probably six days a week at home, and which the others eat with relish. You never know. I mean, sometimes I have to convince myself I'm not going to barf before every bite, so I figure they can deal with one meal they might not like too much, if that's the case. I'll let y'all know how that goes.
Alright well thats about all for now. As things have gotten more and more normal here I seem to have less and less caraaazy stories to tell, but that's probably how it should be. 23 days left in this city and only 3 weekends, one of which will be spent relaxing somewhere in the countryside with our group of Toubabs. I'm going to spend the afternoon working on a paper. Aka playing euchre and talking about working on a paper. Peace upon all.

28 days later

Okay, so I need to write about ten days of stuff, Monday to Thursday, right? First off, today I have twenty-eight days left in Senegal. Under a month. When the BLEEP did that happen? I mean, when did I even stop counting and start loving the living in this infernal place? I don't want to think about leaving so I'm going to pretend it's not happening and shut up about it. Last Monday morning Hannah and I woke up and found out we were going to some kind of concert that Mamie was singing lead in, at a church somewhere within walking distance of our house. Thinking it would actually be a concert, we went cheerily off with JB and found that it was an all-day affair involving very poor acoustics, extraordinarily long and repetitive songs, an hour-long sermon and an hour-long discussion, essentially on why people should never listen to music that doesn't sing the praises of our lord and savior JC. On the bright side, there was toilet paper in the bathrooms and JB left early with us. Score! We were so disappointed in the events of the morning that Hannah and I dropped our plans to go to the tailor and bummed around at home. A family friend Jules took the opportunity to inform us that we were wasting our time in Senegal because we don't go out or talk to anyone or ever have any fun. He's been over at the house all of three times since we've been there, and okay, so I'm a homebody, but it really felt awful to be told off by this kid who hasn't a clue of what daunting cultural differences can do to your morale and how they affect your interactions with people of the host culture. That sounds so academic. But geez, I was pissed.
Tuesday was a very disappointing day, as were Wednesday and Thursday, for that matter: I was trying to figure out summer plans from across the ocean, Wolof got cancelled after I'd walked forty minutes to get there, nobody was back from spring break, I got slammed with news of two exams and three papers due within the week, the power went out while I was in the cyber, it was too cold to even take a shower so I had a bucket bath, and it was generally one of those crappy crappy days that come along once in a while. Things are working themselves out though. Thursday's Wolof class was fun - there were only seven of us back from our spring break trips so we all got together in one class and attempted to describe our vacations in Wolof. Also we learned the Wolof version of "head, shoulders, knees and toes," and repeated it about a hundred times. Oh also Tuesday I went to my internship at the hospital where I started in the baby vaccinations department. The mornings there are just insane. I mostly just watched (the interns there only do administrative stuff in vaccinations) and was taught how to register pregnant women and babies in small hospital record books that each woman brings with them, and in the big department book. I've never seen anything like it. Two nurses and two interns run the whole operation. For the first two hours there was a continuous line of about twenty women with their kids outside. Newborns are supposed to have a certain series of shots, and one women came in with a six-month-old who had never been vaccinated for anything. The nurses were furious. Babies need to be brought back to be weighed sometimes for several months, and when it was just a weighing someone needed, they cut the whole line. It worked like this: a woman would come in and leave her booklet and ticket (you pay a fee to get a ticket for whatever service you're getting, and then go and wait), and then one of the interns would take it and write down the information in the big book, check the info in her booklet to find out what part of whatever series of vaccinations the woman or baby was having that day, and record a date for the next part of the series, even before the woman came in. Another intern would call out names, and the woman and baby would come in, sign their name in the big book, and go over to the back wall where the vaccinating nurse would prepare the needles and screech out questions about weights and vaccines to be answered nervously by the interns. Mostly this happened in Wolof, most of which I could understand after a bit because it was the same words repeated over and over, and a lot of French for the medical stuff. At some point they caught on that I understood a bit and were really surprised, and somewhat embarrassed as they had been talking about how they didn't have the time today to explain what was going on to some Toubab who would only be there once. Whoops! I wasn't insulted, I know that's how it is and I'm really just here as an observer. Friday morning I made a presentation in history class and was then informed that we had to write a ten-page research paper by next week (on top of everything else, and with very minimal computer and internet usage). That is of course not going to happen until probably two weeks from now, and we're sort of relying on strength in numbers (none of us will be able to type them up by then) and forgetfulness of the old professor. Friday afternoon I went over to my internship at the hospital and waited around for the director who showed up an hour later and couldn't understand why I'd come by in the afternoon - all the other interns come only in the mornings. What I don't understand is why he didn't tell me this a month and a half ago when I first said I had Friday afternoons available, or any other Friday that I kept coming by and just talking to him in the afternoon. He promised me he'd find me a white blouse that I could wear like all the other interns (I had to call him later in the evening and remind him), and that Tuesday I could go to the maternity ward.
So after I found out I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon I went to the cyber, then met Hannah and Christina to go to a tailor and have dresses made! Hannah had printed out some designs online, so I sort of bummed off of them and decided to have the same style sundress made. We got some bananas along the way and then found the tailor's shop quite a bit farther down the road than we'd thought it was. Hannah had been there before for her suit. The tailor is a middle aged man with a very clean, organized shop (for a tailor here), and two guys were working away at the sewing machines in the back as we presented our fabrics and had our measurements taken and explained what we wanted and when. He's got this great reserved smile, half a pair of glasses (the earpiece on one side is missing so they sit all crooked across his face), and a very quiet demeanor, and spent several minutes looking at our designs before nodding in agreement. In ten days we'll have our dresses fitted, 14 dollars each. Score! Every few hours when something ridiculous or incomprehensible happens at home, Hannah or I will be like "dresses!" which is a nice thing to look forward to. On to Friday night!Fifi's mom spent the weekend at our house and did everybody's hair again. Friday night we hosted a fiftieth birthday party for one of Mamitie's children, and a lot of family came over and drank and hung out and ate great food. Hannah and I didn't help much but we did some dishes later in the evening and mostly hung out with all the male cousins around our age which would have been really chill if one of them hadn't decided that Hannah was his "muchuplove" and bugged her about it the whole night. I still don't know what this means other than he's into her and has a big ego.
Saturday was uneventful and I did a lot of hand-writing papers, but Sunday, oh Sunday, was quite the day. I got up and did some work and then we got all dressed up to go to a communion party for one of Mamitie's grandkids way out up north half an hour outside of Dakar by taxi. Hannah and I went with the boy cousins who live in the house (so as to miss church services and get directly to the party) and then the party lasted ALL DAY. I mean like noon to midnight. There were probably 200 people in the house at any given time, dancing on the roof and in the courtyard, drinking 40s of amazingly awful Senegalese beer or small jars of very strong cape verdien coconut punch or terrible boxed wine, eating from giant round plates of rice and cous-cous and maize and fried things and cake at times judged to be appropriate for meals, and generally having a damn good time. Hannah and I hung out with the boy cousins again and met a lot of old family members (everyone there was related for the most part) and got a lot of attention being the only Toubabs there. Everyone got tipsy to the high heavens, I mean Mamitie was calling everyone "chose" (thing) and JB and I had a long conversation he doesn't remember about his views on marriage, and Jean-Paul was falling down in the sand and still managed to steal a banana and two cans of juice soda at the end of the night. Everyone dances at parties like that here, everyone. I mean the adults just love it and even the old women were having the time of their lives, even after having cooked all day and all night long, it would seem. I talked to one old lady who was the other grandma of the kid having the communion. She was 74 and had the most ridiculous osteoporosis I've ever seen and yet spent hours on the dance floor. Other moments of insanity: 1) everyone in the sitting room took separate pictures with communion boy who was dressed in a startlingly white tuxedo-like suit. 2) An old man, presumably someone's uncle, who had gotten drunk beyond cognition fell down in the sand and had to be removed. 3) Someone found out me and Hannah were Jewish and spent the last forty-five minutes of the party trying desperately to convert us to bible-loving Christians. This kind of thing used to bother me but after Senegal I think I'm going to spend at least an hour at the door with any Jehova's witness that comes my way. Ever. After the party the party was not over. We (the thirteen people returning in the direction of our house) decided that taxis were too expensive and mobilized towards the bus, Mamitie shoving all kinds of bags in our hands and leading the pack. She seems to think we got the very last bus of the night which isn't even possible but in any case we were a very noisy pack, several among us trying not to puke the day's five meals out the back window. There ensued the conversation about marriage, a small episode involving an angry sober man, and a rather rowdy Jean-Paul simultaneously pulling the hair of his Toubab host sisters and leaning out said back window. After we descended the bus, we walked a kilometer across town then filled up half a car rapide where Jean-Paul hung off the back of the car playing the apprenti. We got home and the boys would not let us go to sleep until some ridiculous hour of the am, and then I got up and went to class. What a Sunday!Monday morning I went in super early to type up a four-page paper and prepare a presentation for class at 10 am. Whereupon the professor gave us an extra week to do it and shortened the paper to 2 pages. Ah, Senegal.
Tuesday I went in the morning to my internship at the hospital and waited two hours for the director to show up with a blouse for me to wear. He took me to the department where a nurse does consultations for pregnant women. I've found that people mostly think I'm an idiot since they either think it's weird that I'm a third year med student (I don't know why everyone thinks that) and have no experience, or they wonder what I'm doing at their hospital if I want to get a degree in neuroscience or medicine. At least when the nurse figured out I understood what she was saying about me in Wolof she stopped telling people I was useless. I justobserved really, which is fine. It was all in Wolof so I missed a lot of it but most of it was women coming in for morning sickness, getting examined for all of three minutes behind a curtain (I wasn't allowed to watch), and then getting prescribed a big list of prescription meds. I can't imagine what they are, and even after I asked it wasn't clear; I wonder if people normally get prescribed meds for mild first trimestersickness. Weird. One very young woman came in who was early in her pregnancy and when they were taking down her information (name, residence, height, weight, age, husband's name and age, etc) she said she didn't have a husband and was hesitant about the man's last name and after that the nurse sort of treated her like dirt, which was awful. I feel pretty useless there but it's still really interestingto go around to the departments and see how things go here. There was a power outage most of the day and so there were tons of people waiting around to have dental and surgical procedures. What happens when it goes off in the middle of the surgery? Goodness.And we have gotten all the way up to today, Wednesday, which has been unexciting and very busy in the computer lab: I waited two hours to get online.
I have to go to class in fifteen minutes but here are the last two stories I would like to tell: Sometime last week Hannah and I came home to JB looking after a big young dog on a chain in the side courtyard. Someone had given it to him and he had to see if it was okay with a) Mamitie and b) Arture, the reigning canine, before he could bring it into the main courtyard. So it sat outside on a chain on a very cold evening and whimpered and when Mamitie came home she didn't notice it until it was being so loud that she had to go investigate. It was like this big secret, all the kids were whispering about it and went to the back window to visit - and of course in the end it was no. It was SO typical that I felt like I was in a childrens' book, or an Arthur cartoon, except that there was no cute moral at the end of half an hour.
Also typical was Samu's insistence, before the party late Saturday night, that he knew how to iron, and everyone else's insistence that he would burn his nice white shirt, whereupon he picked up the iron and within a sixth of a second burned his nice white shirt.

It feels SO good to be caught up! I'm afraid I may not have time for updates in the next week or so but they wouldn't be exciting anyways, I'm just going to be writing papers. Ba beneen yoon (until the next time). Bisou!

The fam comes to town

So I wasn't allowed to say anything beforehand, but my parents and Talia came to visit me over spring break! They were unfortunately delayed in Lisbon an extra day or so, but this gave me some time to sort of re-enter the real world after five days of river baths, hordes of children, and goat meat. The morning they came Maman Amitie told me that my taille basse was finished (!!) and so of course I had to try it on, at which point she made me wait half an hour so that she could take in a couple of seams before I went over to the hotel to meet the fam. Pictures should be up on facebook soon - its a long skirt and top that flares out plus a head scarf. I don't like the model much but as it was really done mostly as a gift I can't complain. Mamitie expects me to wear it a lot more than I would like to...In any case I showed up in full Senegalese garb at this fancy shmancy hotel and got to the room where it was so wonderful to see my family that I got all teary. My mother brought an entire suitcase full of stuff for me and the family, most of which I really can't give to them and either sent back with the family or am still hiding in my dresser (suitcase, that is) waiting for the opportunity to very slowly distribute things so as not to create more insanity than usual. Read on for that. We had a huge breakfast buffet at which I could barely eat anything because I'm so used to having just bread and tea. We spent the day relaxing a bit and took a pirogue over to the beach island of Ngor, and just walked around. Any time we took a taxi from the hotel it was a fixed price which was way higher than anything I can bargain for, so a couple of times we walked way down the road so I could show off my skills. Later we went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant which I thoroughly enjoyed, probably a lot more than the fam who are used to eating all kinds of delicious things all the time... also Talia and my mom took out all of my braids, and then I washed my hair about twelve times (until the water wasn't coming out black anymore, gross) and I am convinced I lost half of it. Oh yes there was HOT WATER (I stayed in about half an hour) and BIG TOWELS and any number of excellent hotel luxuries. The next day we spent on Goree, taking a taxi which took just about six minutes too long due to traffic so we missed the boat and ended up just getting a bit of coffee in a cafe near where the boat leaves. I paid for the tickets, three tourists and a resident (me!), and argued over getting Talia a children's ticket but was refused...sometimes that kind of thing works. Then we were crowded in to the station with no room to breathe and were afraid we wouldn't make it on the boat, it was such a huge group of pushing sweaty loud people. On Goree I was a terrible guide, and where we had to pay some kind of tourists' fee that I didn't understand, and fend off dudes who wanted to guide us around the island for a fee. The museums there are very odd, but we had a nice lunch and got the speech in the slave house. Unfortunately it wasn't the old guy Joseph Ndiaye, but another guy gave way more information anyways, and we saw Ndiaye who was in an awful mood and yelling at everyone in Wolof or else I would have gone up and reintroduced myself. It was a nice time and afterwards we met Hannah downtown to brave the marche Sandaga. My mother will insist this was a great time, but personally the whole experience of the market there gives me the heebie-jeebies, every time. As a family of Toubabs we got dragged around to the tourist-trap shops but I'd like to say that my minimal Wolof and decent French and bargaining skills brought the prices down a bit. People are so insanely aggressive that you can't help but buy something at times. After Sandaga we spent quite some time wandering the downtown streets of Dakar in search of the French Institute, a cultural center, store, restaurant, and performance space that I've been meaning to get to. A random vendor offered to walk us there and later demanded that I pay him for it, how rude. Yet how typical. Once there, we watched a bit of sabbar dancing, looked around the shop, and ate dinner. The merchandise had actually come from that town I had visited outside of Bambey where there is a sort of commune of tailors who make beautiful stuffed animals and blankets and clothing (for comparatively exorbitant prices, but really amazing nonetheless). The dinner was the best meat sandwich I had tasted in three months. They wouldn't make us drinks because there were apparently too many people in the restaurant, and it took us a good forty minutes to actually pay for the meal, what with us not being sure we had enough cash and practically nobody having the means to take credit cards anywhere in the city. A taxi ride took us back to more hot showers and giant soft beds and noiseless sleeping conditions. The next day we got up and prepared ourselves to take the walk I make daily starting from WARC and ending at my house in Amitie 2. We stopped along the way to buy street breakfast and coffee and bananas and to greet the various characters that I have met on my commute. The boutique man near WARC gave us free cafe Touba and bread with butter, the Talibe left us alone, we crossed the main road with no incidence of broken bones or spirits, stopped to say hi to Ibou and company at TRG, and finally arrived chez moi, where Mamitie had gone out to get provisions for a very special afternoon. I mean she broke out the bissap juice AND the bouille juice AND small bowls of table munchies. Awa made a seriously excellent cebbu jenn, and we spent a very nice afternoon chatting and playing with baby Farou and translating and watching TV. Mamitie took out the woven blankets for my mom to goggle over, and one of her grandkids (aged 31) showed up (I'd never met her before) and miraculously made English conversation all afternoon. Everyone loved the photo album my parents had brought full of photos I'd taken of the family that they'd printed from facebook. All in all it went very nicely and we spent the rest of the day lounging around at the hotel and then ate dinner there (oh em gee, vegetable soup). The next morning we packed up all our stuff, stored it with the hotel, and hit the marche HLM where despite the fact that most of the stores were closed, we bought something like thirty meters of fabric and several pieces of cheap jewelry. I think my Senegalese garb helped with the prices, but bargaining for fabric is a lot easier than bargaining for anything else because you go in knowing what each kind is worth. Stuck in the hotel without a room, we hung around the lobby (next to a giant group of Arab men and photographers that I recently found out was the Libyan president and his entourage) until later that night when we ate dinner there again. Then my family was off to the airport and I caught a ride with the hotel's airport van to somewhere that the taxis would be cheaper. Unfortunately I was spotted by all the taximen coming out of this fancy hotel's van and bargaining was not much easier than it would have been at the hotel. I didn't want to be out on a road in the middle of the night so I finally hopped in a taxi for 2000 cfa. We proceded to have the typical French-Wolof exchange which involved this 18-year-old driver telling me of how he dreams every night of marrying a white woman and going to America, and me telling him about how I have a Senegalese boyfriend who I will be marrying next month and then staying in Dakar to have babies. This works every time I use it in response to any expressed romantic interest, and has thus become the story that I use. Probably not every other day - I'd say every third. At least twice a week. At least. At the end of the ride the driver did not have any change for the bill I had, and none of the boutiques I asked at would give me change for a 5000, so I ended up paying him 1000 and an empty water bottle. How do you not have change dude, you drive a taxi!!! Small bills and coins are so scarce around here that everyone holds on to it. I mean sometimes I'll go to a big store and try to buy a can of juice for 450 francs with a 1000 and they just don't feel like making change so I just can't have any juice. Infuriating. Okay anyways I got home and the family had recently arrived, most of them tipsy from the annual Mendy family Easter party. Poor Hannah was the object of much cousin-ly attention and numerous dancing requests, and when I came home was doing the dishes. I'm kind of sorry I missed out on more family insanity but oh my oh my there was more the next week. In any case that ends my story of the end of spring break so now I'm only a week or so behind in my blogging. Mom, dad, and Tali: I hope the account of our adventures was to your satisfaction and that I didn't leave out anything you esteemed to be worthy of the blog. Go in peace!

A disappointingly short account of my adventures in Fouta

Okay, to begin with the week before spring break, in which nothing exciting happened outside of the daily sphere of excitement in this country. On Tuesday I went to my internship and instead of doing anything had several hours of sociopolitical conversation with one of the doctors until he had to go to the mosque. Apparently, nobody gets sick right before vacation, and he just sent me home. What else? No chances to get online because of three consecutive days of power outages and a conference in the computer labs. Lots of trying to plan for spring break, a couple of classes, lunch at the university, meeting peoples' parents and friends who were visiting (notably a friend's girlfriend who came over from Europe and surprisingly enjoyed herself a lot), several large assignments, the first of the semester, and a lot of wandering around the city looking for cybers that didn't have power outages.

Now on to the beginning of spring break, 4 nights in a village north of Saint Louis. We left early in the morning on Saturday in a Ndiagundiaye - a big, exraordinarily sturdy yet most certainly unsafe white van that is used as public transport all around the country but that we rented for the personal use of 27 Toubabs, professor Pam (we stayed with his family), Sophie and Marianne, two drivers, and an apprenti who probably would have been able to fix the Ndiagundiaye had it broken down. Probably. It took us 12 hours to get there, since we left on the prophet Mohammed's birthday (here they call it Gamul), which caused a TON of traffic around all the major cities, particularly Rufisque and Thies. Tempers were high, drivers were smelly, and some seats had no backs or no more than a foot of tush space. Highlights of the journey: a dude got on the back of the car and caught a ride to the outskirts of Dakar, we bought clementines on the side of the road, I tried somebody's mom's fattaya. It was poorly organized and we didn't eat anything until about noon, when we stopped at a restaurant on the side of the road for breakfast of bread and chocolate. The rest of the ride we sang a lot to the chagrin of our drivers and apprenti, studied some Wolof, read a little, got hungry and cranky again, and finally arrived in the village we'd be staying at for four nights. Pam's family hosted all of us, cooked for us, cleaned up after us, and generally treated us like honored guests. It was pretty amazing.
Since we did so many things that I can't even remember how they happened in I'm going to make a nice list which should be roughly chronological and then tell the story of the goat, which is quite the story.
Saturday night we met the Imam of the whole village as well as the chief of the village. Guede Chantier has about 4000 inhabitants, all of whom are Muslim. Anytime we talked to anyone, they would speak in Pulaar, which would get translated into Wolof, then to French, and then sometimes to English. We sat in a large tired group and asked questions about how the village was run and about the Imam's take on the situation in the middle east. Answers were not really satisfactory, what with the translation, and the hundreds of times the name of allah was invoked before any real conversation happened. It was sort of hard not to get defensive about American and Israeli policy, hearing religious leaders talk about how the "terrorists" have been provoked and are therefore justified in acts like the September 11th attacks, but we weren't really having a conversation, just asking questions, so it was impossible to respond. Our coordinators realized we were getting pretty drowsy and took us back to the house where we went to be kind of dirty because there wasn't any water left.

Okay here comes some daily lists - as much as I would like to say a hundred things about each of these events it is not possible, what with the six papers I was just assigned and all the stuff I need to do on the internet.

Sunday:
1) meeting Pam's 103-year-old grandma, who can't stand up on her own, but who is actually all there mentally.
2) being served drinks in one of the villages.
3) very illegally swimming to Mauritania across the Senegal river in our underwear, observed by an entire village, just so we could say we'd done it, then drying off in the desert sun in about five minutes.
4) pulling ourselves on the ferry across the river and back with a rope (no motor).
5) rolling up everywhere in a sweet ndiagundiaye instead of an air-conditioned tour bus (so much more street cred).
6) shaking hands with probably six hundred children over the course of the day.
7) bathing in the Senegal river by moonlight (we did it every night, there wasn't running water)

Monday:
1) visiting the women's organisation in Pam's village
2) visiting the tiny clinic and meeting the midwife who delivered Pam's sons (there aren't any doctors, and none of the village volunteers gets paid, and the nearest hospital is 15 kilometers away)
3) going to the market in the nearest town and buying like thirty bin bins from a woman who probably din't appreciate a huge group of toubabs blowing through. bin bins are stretchy beads you wear around your waist under your clothing to attract men.
4) picking tomatoes for about an hour with some of the village tomato farmers (pictures on facebook soon)
5) taking tons and tons of pictures
6) meeting Pam's family in another part of the village and being served more drinks
7) bathing in the river again
8) hanging out on the roof listening to music played by some members of the family and then falling asleep up there (we slept there every night, it got SO cold and I had tons of flea bites all over my hands where they weren't under my sheet but it was so beautiful under the full moon)

Tuesday:
1) breakfast (the same as every other day on our trip, bread and chocolate and tea and cheese, as much as we wanted, mmm)
2) sleeping late and waking up on the roof
3) saying goodbye to the family with many thank yous on either side
4) eating lunch at the house of a host family in saint louis where a girl on hannah's program is staying
5) going to the bathroom (gotta love turkish toilets) and then realizing that some little kid had been watching me the whole time
6) shopping in a little artists' compound around the corner
7) driving to saint louis then immediately taking a horse and cart ride to tour the city, where we were told many jokes in French that went over our heads
8) sleeping in a girls' dormitory, thirty of us in three little rooms, but we were SO excited about the mosquito netting and the BEDS!
9) chatting with the drivers and emma in wolof
10) watching some kind of army parade for independence day from the ndiagundiaye at night
11) deciding not to go out dancing but staying up anyway playing euchre

Wednesday:
1) Getting up super early and taking the sept-place by myself back to Dakar because I thought my parents had already arrived (oh yeah, my family came to Dakar!)
2) Meeting this 33-year-old american traveler slash accountant who happened to be in the sept place, didn't speak any french, and who later bought me lunch at les ambassades (what kind of crazy person just comes to senegal to travel alone, not speaking any french?? he's so brave)
3) having a REAL SHOWER back home, then talking to the boys and hannah for a while

Oh and now for the goat story! This one village of 150 people that is really in terrible poverty welcomed us with open arms - the children sang us a song in French about poverty, the village elders spoke to us about the health problems of the village and the history of the village, and they were so very honored we were there that they wanted to give us a gift. So they did: it was a goat. A real live goat that Pam said we could not possibly refuse, and it was a huge deal because that's like their food and their livelihood and everything. So, we had to put the goat on the ndiagundiaye. It sat under the seats and crankily tried to bite everything and ate a couple of tomatoes. Meanwhile, we're trying to figure out what we're going to do with this goat, and were asking Pam if we could give it to someone else, but noooo, Pam said "what do you mean what are we going to do with it? we're going to eat it for dinner." Aaaand...we ate it for dinner. The first and last time I will ever ride on a bus with my living dinner. I have to admit it was pretty delicious...

Okay that ends my trip. Sorry so short! I'm afraid most of my entries are going to have to be like that from now on...so much work coming up now that I've only got 5 weeks left here! When did that happen? More to follow about the visit of the family! Peace.

The Gambia!

On to...THE GAMBIA!

I apologize for the delay in getting this up but a series of power outages and meetings kept me from the internet for a good week or so, and then it was spring break. The purpose of this Gambia entry is not to describe what I did in the Gambia, but how I got there. Alone. Safe and sound, after all. Alxamdulilaay!

On Wednesday morning I left the house at 5:30 am, accompanied by Jaco, who wanted to hold my hand, and with whom I had the same conversation as JB about a month ago. Geeeeez, it never ends. Anyways he walked me about ten minutes down the road to meet some friends so we could go catch the bus downtown to the Gambia. Said bus leaves most mornings and costs only 2000 cfa, whereas a sept-place (a taxi with room for seven) is 5000-6000 cfa. We even had reservations for our group of 8. However, here comes a typical Leora moment: in the taxi, on the way downtown, I realized thanks to Sam that I HAD FORGOTTEN TO TAKE MY PASSPORT from where it was locked up at school, visa-stamped and everything. We got to the bus stop, met the dads of Becky and Cate who were coming with us, and there I had to make a choice. My options: A) not go at all, wasting 60 dollars on my visa and missing an awesome trip and having to face my family after all my planning and excitement, and B) make the 12-hour journey across the border by myself, take the ferry to the capital, and meet up with them in a hotel outside the city that probably, but not definitely, existed. I chose B, and thus began the greatest adventure of my life.
First I had to get back to school and wait for someone to unlock the office and get out my passport. I got a free bus ride on the first bus leaving to go uptown for the morning, because I talked to the driver and probably made him think I'd give him my number...nope, I just got off the bus and will never see him again. I love that game. After walking to WARC I waited a good half hour for Marianne who was surprised that I was actually going to meet up with the others, then passport finally in hand took a taxi to the Gare Pompier where the sept-places leave. This was quite a scene. I got dragged around immediately by a bunch of guys to the sept-places to Gambia and after much confusion I was shoved into the back of the taxi to wait until we had seven. This only look about half an hour and can sometimes take three, I think partly because the Gambian president, in case you didn't know, announced that can cure AIDS with his hands, on Thursdays. Fridays are reserved for asthma and I think Saturdays for TB. What are we coming to, Africa? Actually, what aren't we coming to? Anyways while I was sitting there in the taxi keeping a good eye on my bag which had been ripped out of my hands and thrown in the trunk (and which I was later charged for, being a Toubab, after much argument), hundreds of vendors were poking their heads in the windows and trunk to sell EVERYTHING you can imagine. And everyone else in the car, far from being annoyed, was LOVING it. The woman in front of me, who in spite of our inability to communicate in any language later sort adopted me and helped me cross the border, bought a toy gun for her son. He sat on her lap the whole ride and pressed the button that went eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwww wwwwwweeeeeeewwwww and made other fun gun sounds for the ENTIRE ride until it broke at which point he made up for the lack of gun sounds by whining. Another woman bought a cheap gold watch, and the man next to me who also helped me out a lot later bought some headphones for his cassette player. I just got attacked by people shoving phone cards and toys and home improvement products in my face, while I held tight to my bag and said no, no, no, and eventually paid off the dudes who helped me get to the car so they'd stop asking me about my Senegalese husband. My favorite product was a toy phone with a Barbie-looking character on the front labeled "BENIGN GIRL." Yep. Harmless.
Finally we were off, and I was squashed into the back left corner with my knees up to my chest for about four and a half hours while the rest of the car squabbled back and forth in Wolof and passed the kids around to various laps, including mine, which I didn't think existed in that small space until there was a child on it. We stopped a couple of times so the kids could pee, and when they got lifted into the car, every time someone would bump their heads on the ceiling and they would wail. One of the kids had some pretty nasty ringworm-ish-looking stuff going on on his head that his mom kept picking at. It was kind of hellishly hot and the countryside was not distracting in the least. The roads everywhere are so awful that the drivers mostly go on the sides in the dirt or take weird windy shortcuts across the dust and between masses of bushes and trees. When we got to the border everyone went their separate ways and I escaped the masses of young girls speaking terrible minimal English and pushing Gambian money in my face so I would change it and get ripped off, and went in to show my passport. As an American I was brought into the back room to sign a big book and get stamped and the police were reluctant to stamp my passport when I refused to give them my number or address, but I just kept on speaking French which pissed them off enough to let me use the bathroom without paying and get me out of there. The same thing was repeated three minutes later on the Gambian side. Three of my fellow taxi-goers had waited for me, the man next to me, and the woman with ringworm-toy-gun-child. It was just so amazingly human of them to know I'd be totally lost and take me under their wing to get me where I needed to go. My Wolof amused them but it was mostly gestures. They bargained for a taxi to take us another hour out to where the ferry left for Banjul, the capital. Thankfully we only had to wait about 15 minutes for the ferry (the ride's about an hour so you can wait up to two) and after the mad rush to get on and the presentation of the tickets we sat inside a hot smelly corridor for the ride across. I met a couple of Gambians and explained (in English!) where I wanted to go, and they assured me they'd get me there somehow when I got to the other side. I wanted to wander around the deck but was put off by the loads of men loading the cars and trucks that were on the ferry, and stayed put thumbing through a guidebook while my companions stared at me sort of mutely. On the other side I was pulled by my newfound gentleman friend to where there were a line of buses waiting to go who knows where, and then three or four guys tried to get me to follow them onto various vehicles where they would very loudly ask the passengers in English and in Wolof who was going to "make the sacrifice" and get off the bus with me to take me to the town I wanted to go to. This of course was not necessary and I tried to say so but there I was stuffed into bus after bus of screaming people who were loudly expressing their disgust at having to really go out of their way for a total stranger, some stupid tourist Toubab. Finally one very large agressive woman stood up and said, I kid you not, "I will make the sacrifice," and sat down, at which point the bus was off and I got some very dirty stares. Eventually the apprenti came around to collect the fares and tried to rip me off, since the money I had changed at the border - oh yeah, I sketchily changed some money at the border, forgot about that one - was completely foreign to me. The woman next to me told him off, though, and he gave me the correct change. People continue to amaze me. I stood for the first thirty or so minutes of the ride and there were so many people that I didn't even need to hold on to anything, and then as the bus cleared out I went and sat down next to the woman who'd made the sacrifice. This is when I realized that if things didn't work out, I was actually a little bit screwed, because on the bus and later after she dragged me off and down the street to another van, she grilled me on where I was going and who I was meeting and when and how and where and why, and I couldn't come up with any satisfying answers. Our cell phones did not work, the hotel was questionable, and if the people I was meeting had gotten detained or sick in Banjul I'd have had no way of meeting up with them. Geez, what a situation. Finally the woman got so fed up with this that she got out of the van and left me in the care of another passenger who shoved me out at a stop he said was near the Abuko nature preserve that I was looking for. So, there I was, on the side of a highway, with a giant backpack, in the middle of nowhere, probably but not definitely somewhere near where I wanted to be, hadn't eaten all day, had no idea if my friend had made it, it was getting dark, and the nature preserve was closed. I walked a bit and fortunately ran into a group of English-speaking rasta dudes who pointed the way (without even hitting on me, how refreshing!) to the hotel I was looking for, three hundred meters down the highway. One of them came with me on a rickety bike and kept pointing up to this huge wall and saying "do you see the white? it is at the white." And yes it was, and there was the hotel...but no one else was there. After a good twenty minutes of terrible English conversation with the proprietor, he asked me if I was with a group of 8 americans who called to say they were coming to stay that night, and here comes the sappy part: in that moment I experienced probably the greatest sense of accomplishment I had ever felt in my life, because I had made it. When the rest of them got there after two hours, I had about the best dinner of oily chicken I've ever tasted and stayed up talking most of the night.

So what did we do in the Gambia? I'm not going into much detail because the getting there for me was the most exciting, but in the morning we went to the nature preserve with a guide. Tons of birds and crocodiles and green monkeys. Then after lunch of more chicken at the hotel, and a lot of semi-tearful goodbyes (we'd spent a lot of time talking to the hotel guys and one of them told us the most amazing story of his experience during the Sierra Leone violence and how he got out of there). We headed off to the east in a giant rented van to Tendaba Camp where we would spend two nights. The van we really bargained for and our driver was pretty pissed off but gave us a great price because he was a friend of the proprietor's. It took about three hours I think, in the dark, on the worst roads I have ever been on, and we had to stop the van cause I thought I was gonna puke at one point. Tendaba turned out to be alright - we were so excited about the huge beds with sheets and the towels and the showers! In the morning we took a sort of desert hike (lots of crabs in the mud, lots of making up verses to a parody of "we didn't start the fire" which is about senegal) and in the afternoon of the next day we took a boat tour of the wetlands where we saw more birds and even a crocodile! good times. We spent a good amount of time trying to calculate who owed who what and decide how we were going to make it back to Dakar. Very early the next morning we left by Pirogue, three hours down the Gambia River at sunrise. It was beautiful and very peaceful. We then took another sept-place back to Dakar, buying some bread before we left, and in Dakar got amazing ice cream. I went home and slept for like two days straight, I was so tired. We hadn't slept very much...in any case that was the Gambia and since I'm now finishing the story about three weeks after the fact I didn't do a great job of it but I am going to skip the week after Gambia and move on to spring break! The next entry will be up soon...