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!