dancing, islands, and baobabs

And once again too much has happened since my last post! I will try to write about most of it anyway, and I am sorry in advance for the length problem that it is going to create

A few weekends ago, I went to see Orchestra Baobab at Just 4 U, one of the clubs in the area. Shani assured me that they she had heard them before, and that they were some of the founders of mbalax, one of the most popular genres of music here, and thee music that Youssou Ndour plays. However, Orchestra Baobab, it soon became clear, is a Senegalese salsa band, though she was right in that they were as old as dirt. However, they could still play like nothing else. It was wonderful to be able to dance again; much of the time when I go out dancing in Senegal, guys will be so all over me that it’s not fun anymore, but apparently salsa draws a different crowd. The men I danced with were respectful of my space, and patient with my total lack of salsa skills. Plus salsa music in Wolof was pretty wonderful to hear, especially sasla that was played with this much soul behind it. All in all, the night restored my faith in going out in Senegal.

The week after that, I had another village stay to complete. My second village stay was very different from the first one. While I was overwhelmed by my first village stay, it was actually pretty tame, I was walking distance from one of the other girls in my program, and spent every day with my class, only returning to the village at night. On top of that, we got there by way of a chartered bus with air-conditioning.

The idea of the second rural visit is for the students to have the chance to be more independent, and see another aspect of Senegal all by themselves. Our program director gave us a list of possible rural sites, each with their own specialization, and the idea was for us to choose somewhere off the list based on our interests. Since environmentalism is a very different animal in Senegal, I decided that I wanted to go somewhere related to ecology and the environment, thinking it would bee a good chance to get to know this animal a little better. However, the process of finding a village stay was very Senegalese: the first three or four options I tried couldn’t work, either the people who would host me were busy, or in Dakar that weekend, or maybe just wouldn’t answer their phones at all. Eventually I picked a village off the list that had nothing to do with ecology, but looked interesting and different from where I had been before, and once it was clear that the contact there was the family of one of our Wolof teachers, it became relatively simple to arrange for me to go there the next day. Which is how I ended up going to Ndiondior.

Ndiorndior is a village island in les Iles de Salum, a group of islands in the river delta just north of the Gambia. In order to get there I had to take a sept-place to Mbour, then another one to Djiffer, and a pirogue (a boat a little like a canoe with a motor) to the island itself. I took a taxi to the garage (not the greatest translation of gare, which is also the word for a train station) around 7am, and as soon as my taxi stopped I was swarmed by Senegalese men desperate to know where I wanted to go. Once I admitted that I was looking for a sept-place to Mbour, I ended up following a man through the crowd, filled with other men also desperate to find out where I was headed, men and women selling everything from cups of coffee to oranges to sunglasses, and small boys in ragged clothes begging for money. Eventually my guide led me to a line of battered rusty white hatchbacks, which is what a sept-place is, the name referring to the fact that it can fit seven passengers. After a bumpy and stuffy ride, I got out in Mbour, where everything followed basically the same formula. While sitting in the car waiting for it to fill up, the other passengers would signal to the vendors to come over, and then pass forward their money so that the transaction could be handled by whoever was closest to the open door or window. Talibé would also come up to the open hatch, either singing in Arabic or just jingling their buckets, looking for contributions. The ride between Mbour and Djiffer was quite a bit bumpier than the first, seeing as for large portions of the voyage there didn’t seem to be any road involved; instead we were hurtling over plains of cracked dried mud, and though the driver clearly knew where he was going, there was nothing to tell one stretch of dirt from the one next to it. When I arrived in Djiffer I got completely ripped off for my pirogue to the island, partly because I didn’t have any Senegalese with me, and partly because I had no idea what a good price was.

When I did get there, I called my contact, and his son, Lamine met me at the docks and led me back to the house. The streets were paved with shells, with large piles of them off to the side once in a while. Home turned out to be a large compound with several buildings and no clear boundary, with a tree in the middle housing numerous rowdy birds.

One thing I hadn’t fully considered when choosing my rural stay was that this was a Serere village. This means that everybody spoke an entirely different language. This doesn’t mean I couldn’t communicate, most people spoke at least some French or Wolof, but all of the street cred I had earned from knowing the local language was gone; is didn’t matter that I was at a point where my Wolof was actually understandable, I couldn’t speak any Serere, and I was back at square one. The first thing I did on arrival was pull out my notebook and have Lamine give me a Serere lesson, but it never really took. By the time I left I could get through the greetings OK, but after that I was all sheepish grins until someone informed my integrator that no I didn’t speak Serere but I could speak a little Wolof. Plus I could never talk to any of the kids, which was a major blow to my ingratiating strategy.

My days quickly fell into a routine. In the mornings I would get up around nine, take a bucket shower (no running water) and get dressed and eat breakfast. Coumba, whose room I soon figured out I was staying in, would help me with all of these things, since I was pretty much incapable of doing anything alone. After I finished breakfast the two of us would go to thee kitchen, a thatched roof hut, with uneven slats for walls, where I would “help” cook. Though I spent much of that time sitting next to the women and daydreaming, I did more than I’m usually allowed to do, a crushed all the pepper, garlic and onion, cut potatoes, peeled cassava, and fetched water. The kitchen had three little fire pits, each comprised of three legs for the pot to rest on, with a fire of palm fronds nestled between them. I came to know those women pretty well, considering that we could only communicate in Wolof, which was all of our second or third language. Developing a friendship with Coumba in particular was wonderful; she was sweet and funny, and always patient with the toubab who had been placed under her care. It was also the first time that I was in a situation where I really need to use Wolof to communicate, and I was surprised by how well it worked. Our conversations never got particularly deep, but nevertheless, we had conversations—in Wolof. I was proud of myself.

After eating the food we had prepared, I would take a nap, and then in the afternoon, someone would have decided on some excursion for me. One day Lamine took me to the place where they supposedly found the bones of the first people to live on the island, and then to their family’s coconut tree, which a young boy Lamine had enlisted climbed so that I could try a fresh coconut. Another day I went for a walk to an adjascent island connected by a bridge with Coumba and Nafi, another one of my cooking friends who was eight months pregnant, and told me that if the baby is a girl she will name her Mariam, after me. Lamine promised to take me to l’ile de coco, a neighboring uninhabited island, but we had to wait a while, because the first day the tides weren’t right, and then it was Thursday, which was the day that the spirits forbid anyone from visiting the island. He got another friend with a pirogue to take us out, and we paddled as close as we could get, then waded in the rest of thee way through the mangroves. I took an obscene number of sunset pictures while I was on the island, mostly because I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was.

My last day there Nafi decided that she was going to braid my hair. That afternoon I met her by the side of the road, where she worked selling doughnuts, candy, flip-flops and all sorts of other odds and ends. I sat in front of her until the sun went down, responding as best as I could when people talked to me, and catching snatches of conversation when people were remarking on the toubab getting her hair braided. (I don’t speak Serere, but toubab is the same word, and laughter pretty universal.)Nafi kept asking me if it hurt, and even though I felt like she was ripping my hair out, I responded, “only a little” or “it’s all good.” She couldn’t finish my braids before she had to go, so she put my remaining hair in a side-ponytail so we could leave. A very good reminder not to take myself too seriously.

I had to leave at six the morning to catch the pirogue, and quite a bit of the family walked me to the dock. I was pretty sleepy, and had to be prompted to offer my hand for them to shake. We pulled away just as the sun was coming up, so that I could just see my family silhouetted on the dock, waving goodbye.

This past weekend, I went to Toubab Diallo with my program. I didn’t get much prep for the weekend; I thought it was going to be a relaxing couple days of lounging on beaches, but when I got there I found out that we were scheduled for drum lessons, dance lessons and a baobab ropes course and climbing. I did not miss my relaxing weekend at all. Learning some Senegalese dance is something that I have wanted to do since I got here, but I had resigned myself to it never happening. Of course I looked like an idiot for a lot of it, and couldn’t do some of the moves because my little white girl body just doesn’t move that way, but it was a blast. We went with a larger study abroad group who got to Senegal about a month ago. I’ve been a little put off by the swarms of new toubabs around the baobab center, but it was great to get to know them better this weekend. We stayed at Ecole de Sable, a dance school that I later learned is usually reserved for professionals, and doesn’t take in raw beginners like us. I could see some of the instructors getting exasperated, but on the whole I was impressed by how patient they were with our lack of skill. We learned a Sabar dance that mimics the movements of a woman preparing millet; sometimes it was easier to see the connection than others.



On Sunday, we went to AcroBaobab, which has a ropes course ranging from several baobabs. I’ve never done anything like it before, but since I’ve always liked climbing and heights, I wasn’t surprised that I loved it. One of my favorite parts had a pirogue hung between trees, that swayed in the breeze or when I moved, the nose pointing into open air. At the end of the course we zip-lined to the ground from about 40 feet up, and when we sped past the guys who worked there doused us with water—and then let us do it to the next kid who came careening down. After that we climbed the trees, which was a lot like a rock wall, except, you know, in a tree, with footholds nailed in. It was hard to get to the top, and my arms and legs were shaking, but when I scrambled off the pegs and onto the branch at the top, it was the most amazing feeling.

Now I have less than two weeks before my program is over, and less than three before I leave. I’ve been trying to avoid the countdown, even though a couple of the other girls on my program keep giving my countdown updates. I have very mixed feeling about going home soon, there is so much I miss there, but so much I will miss here. What’s that phrase again? Oh yes: one day at a time.

Paris and Morocco

I never meant to let a month go by before I posted again, but somehow it just got away from me. My last week in Dakar was hectic, with a finals atmosphere that actually reminded me quite a bit of K, and after that I was traveling, with little to no internet access. But still. Over a month. Sorry about that.

Finals week was, while insanely eventful from my perspective, none of it was the kind of eventful anyone really wants to be hear about. A few days after classes were over I flew to Paris to meet up with my mom for Christmas. My host family was really sweet when I left; they all walked me to the main road to help me with my bags, bargained for a taxi for me, then all gave me big hugs before I got in and drove away.

Paris was beautiful. My mom and I spent our ten days in an apartment that my aunt, who makes regular jaunts to Paris as a tour guide and French cabaret singer, had set us up with. It was in a fun funky immigrant neighborhood (that my aunt says is getting more gentrified every year) and up three flights of stairs, looking out over the apartment building’s cobblestone courtyard. Every morning before I got up, my mom would go out and get fresh bread, and we would have bread and cheese and café au lait for breakfast. For Christmas we bought two little Cyprus branches and put them in a Bell Jar on the mantelpiece, and then decorated them with paper snowflakes, foil stars and one long tin-foil chain.

We did a lot of the touristy things in Paris, some of which were less interesting than others, but the highlights include…
Going to Notre Dame for Christmas Eve, which was the first time I had ever been, hearing the choir which was spectacular, and watching the slightly Monty Pythonish animated power point on Christmas, narrated by Gabriel.

The Orsay, and the Oragnerie, which had boatloads of beautiful impressionism.

Taking the train to Chartres the day after Christmas, and spending hours in the cathedral staring at the windows (which my dad described as the most beautiful thing he has ever seen made by humans, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I have to admit he has a point). We sat by one of the enormous rose windows and watched the sunset though it, the windows changing drastically every couple of minutes until they finally went dark.

Being at the top of the Arc de Triomphe at sunset, and watching the light change that way, with a blaze of color in the clouds instead of stained glass.

The flight from Paris to Casablanca was insane, mostly of my stop over in Dakar. I had planned the two trips separately, and so had two different plane tickets, but since I had brought a bulky rolling bag to Paris which wouldn’t work too well in Morocco, I didn’t just stay in the airport for the five hours between flights but instead got a cab to Shani’s house, said hi to her family, tried to repack my Morocco bag since it was too heavy (and stayed too heavy, I am a terrible packer) helped Shani get her stuff ready, and then left my big Paris bag there to take another cab back to the airport. It was a little exhausting.

We got to Casablanca around 7 in the morning on New Year’s Eve, but had to wait around until our friend Leah’s flight came in from Egypt around noon. In the meantime, Shani and sat down at a café, pulled out the pocket guidebook from ’97 my mom got me for Christmas, and realized we knew absolutely nothing about Morocco. Going based on the advice we had gotten from various people (including the random girl I met in the airport on the way to Paris, we were obviously very discriminating) we decided to do a loop around the north of the country, from Casablanca to Marrakesh, to Meknes, to Fes, and back to Casa for our flight out. In a week. And even though I thought it was probably crazy, that’s what we actually ended up doing.

Shani and I had been set on going out in some fashion for New Year’s, but by the time the evening rolled around, jet lag and sleep deprivation (is on just part of the other?) were having their say. Shani finally dragged Leah and I out of bed to a quiet if slightly sketchy café, where we toasted the new year with tea and hot chocolate, while the Moroccans around us completely ignored the beginning of a new decade. We judged midnight by my watch because it was a few minutes faster, then paid the bill, walked through the rain to our hostel, and fell into bed around 12:25. Despite the anti-climax, a very good new year.

The next day we took the train to Marrakesh. I have to say; Morocco’s idea of cheap, comfortable, reliable trains that can take you from any major city to any other in the country struck me as a great idea. Better than Amtrak by a long shot, and a drastic change from getting around in car rapids. One of the big attractions is Djema el Fna, which is a big square in the center of down, where you can find henna artists, food stalls, drummers, dancers, and snake charmers, all dependant on the time of day. We stayed in hotel overlooking the square, which meant, among other things, that it was easy to get our dinner from hopping from one food stall to another. In one night we went to five food stalls and had for dinner: snails, tajilla (a sort of sheep stew), a pigeon pie called pastilla, roasted pepper, spiced spinach, Moroccan soup, sheep brains, bread soaked in sheep fat, rum cake, and ginseng tea. Now might be a good time to mention that despite the sheep brains, I loved the food in Morocco.

Our first day in Marrakesh, we had several palaces we wanted to visit, so we left the hostel, walked purposefully through the square, and got completely lost. We ended up in front of a primary school asking directions, while the kids teased the confused white people wandered around, while their mothers tried to give us directions while laughing at us, which didn’t work very well since they didn’t speak French or Egyptian Arabic, which was about all we had going for us. Eventually a young guy who spoke French figured out what we were looking for (we were drawing quite a crowd by then) and pointed us in the right direction. We found a beautiful garden in front of a guarded walled area, which we assumed was one of the palaces, but when we tried to approach the guards would shake their heads and their fingers at us, and shooed us away. Eventually the guards who would talk to us sent us along a street lined with lights, until we got to the other side where those guards sent us right back to the other side. We did eventually find what we were looking for, and the tomb, the ruins and the palace that we were looking for were worth it, though we had to wait until after the lunch break to get in. The ruins had huge storks living in mountains of twigs at the top of its dilapidated retaining wall. They would strut around moving branches, and fly in 10 feet over our heads. The tombs and the palace were both the perfect example of intricate Moroccan architecture, with stylized Arabic writing praising Allah along the edges of the walls, simple colorful geometric mosaics that become intricate by the sheer scope of it, and the wood and stone detailing ornately and carefully carved.

After Marrakesh we went on to Meknes and Fes. We didn’t stay in Meknes very long, since were anxious to get to Fes, and we were staying across the street from the Imperial Door, the ornate and opulent entrance into the old Imperial City. (I wonder how many more ways I’ll be able to find to say big and fancy?) We did wrangle our way into a meal at a very fancy restaurant we never could have afforded without the “student price.” (People in Morocco have obviously heard the “I’m just a poor student!” argument many times before.) We not only got a lot of fancy sides with our Tajine (which is the most common Moroccan dish, meat and vegetables cooked forever in a clay vessel) but we got a view of the city at sunset from their rooftop terrace.

Fes, which is lauded as one of Morocco’s most beautiful cities, lived up to its name. The city rests in a bowl shaped valley, climbing up the hills on wither side, so that every time you turn a corner there is another spectacular view. We did a lot of our souvenir shopping in Fes, since it was close to the end of our trip (I say we, I had already blown most of my money on the plane ticket) and it was difficult to switch from Senegalese to Moroccan bargaining. In Senegal the best way to get a good price is to be very friendly, use as much Wolof as possible, maybe even flirt a little, and if the price isn’t going down pretend to walk away. Moroccan bargaining seemed so angry. Vendors would act insulted and huffy after you gave your opening bid, yell that the reason you had seen the same thing at a lower price was because this was quality, not the crap the other guys had, and most of the time when we tried to walk away, they would just let us go. We had come in thinking it would be no problem since were so used to haggling in Senegal, but I think we probably got ripped off a couple times, just because we were so unprepared for how different it would be.

Our last full day in Morocco we went hiking in the cedar forests in the mountains south of Fes. The whole time we were in Morocco, I was set on going to the Sahara and spending a night camped out there. Eventually I had to let it go; it was expensive and time consuming, and we didn’t have the equipment. But I still wanted to do something fun and outdoorsy. Leah and I found a travel agency who could do a day trip into the cedar forests and surrounding towns for something we all could afford, so we sprang for it. Unfortunately, I forgot one of the basic laws of physics: the higher you go, the colder it gets. None of us except Leah had really been prepared for how cold and rainy Morocco would be, and didn’t have the right clothes. The cedar forests were beautiful, and magical, like something out of Narnia or Lord of the Rings—and also very cold and very wet. One of the main attractions of the forests is the barbary apes who live there, but unfortunately for us they seem to be smarter than to be traipsing around on the cold and rainy days, and had found somewhere else to be. We did see one ape before even reaching the forests; our driver pulled off the road to some small huts, where berber vendors were selling jewelry and fossils we had been told may or may not have been real. While we were looking at geodes when a little furry monkey with his front paw bandaged, about knee high ambled into the shop. (Side note: I do know that ape and monkey or not synonymous, and he was in fact a barbary ape, but the word ape has all the wrong connotations for the cuddly looking fuzz-ball I’m trying to decribe.) The vendor told us that his paw had been hurt when a car ran over it. Since it was clear he had no problem with people, I knelt down next to him, and he hopped up onto my lap. His fur was damp from the rain. He almost absent-mindedly grabbed for the zipper of my coat, and looking around with eyes so big that he seemed forever slightly perplexed and apprehensive. Shani knelt down too, and the vendor shooed him over to her knee, then after he decided we had had enough monkey time, we shooed him back into the rain and tried to get us interested in his wares again. As we were leaving, I saw our friend’s silhouette against the sky, hopping from the roof of one hut to another.

Our last day in Casablanca was a bit of a letdown after that. We were there because the city had the cheapest airfares, but as a tourist destination the city doesn’t actually have much to offer. We walked to the city’s Grand Mosque, which while is supposed to be the world’s second largest mosque after Mecca but didn’t look nearly as big as the Mosque in Touba. On the way there we passed Rick’s café, which Shani had been set on going to until she learned that the place had only been opened in 2004, and that all of the movie Casablanca was in fact filmed in Hollywood. She said that it looked nothing like the café in the movie.

And now I’m back in Dakar. This week has been pretty uneventful, both because my internship hasn’t started yet and because I’ve been sick ever since our last day in Morocco. As some of the other girls keep reminding me, I only have 7 weeks left here. I am determined to make them phenomenal.

Tabaski and Our President

So Tabaski turned out to be fantastic. Tabaski is not the Islamic New Years, which I thought before, but the day to remember a story that happens to show up in the Koran the Bible and the Torah, when God told Abraham to kill his first son, and after Abraham had shown his devotion to God by clearly intending to do just that, an angel appeared praising Abraham, and providing a sheep to be killed instead. To honor this day, every full-grown (i.e. married) man is required to kill a sheep, which means (by one estimate) about 650,000 sheep lost their lives lost Saturday. (There are of course more married men than that in Senegal, but not all of them can afford their own sheep, as they can get quite expensive, about 600 US dollars.)

For Tabaski my family went to Koalack, because that’s were the majority of my host father Mohamed’s family lives now, and where he grew up. So last Thursday my host mother, father, sister, niece, two brothers and I all took the bus, along with all of our bags—and of course our sheep. At one point we took a taxi, crammed with seven people, all our bags, and the sheep in the trunk. The bus ride was cramped and hot and long, but nothing too bad, the most startling part (for me, the Senegalese didn’t bat an eye) was the number to sheep strapped on to the roof, their feet tied together and ears flapping in the wind.

When we got to Koalack we rested for a while at one of Mohamed’s sister’s houses (we stayed several hours because they insisted on making an elaborate meal for us) before venturing to the big house, where the majority of the family activity took place. Since we got there around 10:30, the majority of the household was asleep, but we tramped around anyway ferreting out every conscious person so we could all exchange formal greetings and shake their hands. After that we went to yet another sisters house where I immediately fell into bed.

The day before Tabaski, our first full there, I had a paper I needed to write for my Islam class, which turned out to be a bit of a blessing because it gave my a legitimate reason to hide from the family until I was feeling a little less overwhelmed. My family in Dakar had hinted that everyone hadn’t necessarily liked all of the past students who had come to visit, and they hoped that it would be different with me. I was feeling the merest bit of pressure to be charming, which always makes me edgy. It turned out that they did like me (alhumdililah!) and I figured out the best way to get a very large Senegalese family to like you is 1) eat a ton whenever food is out in front of you and explain loudly about how wonderful it is, 2) use whatever Wolof phrases you know over and over again (and over and over) again, and 3) make friends with the kids. There was a four year old there named Adja, who spoke no French at all, but for some unknown reason adored me, and would spend a lot of time sitting on my lap, playing peek-a-boo, laughing, and just generally being adorable. She won me all kind of points, as well being a lot of fun.

The day of Tabaski, we had to get over to the big house early, so that everyone could start cooking. (I wasn’t allowed to help on the grounds that I might have hurt myself.) By everyone I of course don’t mean everyone, I mean the women. The men and also the children got dressed up and went to the Mosque. After the Mosque, all the men changed out of their boubous and into their gross grimy clothes, and started getting ready to kill the sheep. Since the family was so big (somewhere between 40 and 50 people) we had nine sheep to kill. Nine. We dug a hole in the middle of the compound for the blood, and then the men would bring the sheep out one by one and hold their necks over the hole. The entire family stood behind the men, as if they were posing for a picture, presumable to see the sheep get killed without being in the way. Even though in theory each man is supposed to kill his own sheep, Amate, who was the oldest brother and thus the chief of the family since their father had died, decided it was better if he killed them all himself. It was hard to watch, especially when they got to our sheep. Yawu (he was named after a famous Senegalese wrestler) has lived with the family since I got here, so not only do I know his name, I know which family members he liked best, and where he liked to be scratched behind his ears. I couldn’t watch them cut is throat, but instead hovered near the back, where the women all gently made fun of me for being scared. It wasn’t entirely true, but since I don’t know the word for “traumatized” in French, I just went with it. The sheep would flail a little after they were dead, until one of the younger boys cam over and would yank its tail.

After all the sheep were dead, everyone got along with the business of butchering them. Someone tied their sheep up in a tree right next to where I was sitting, and so I watched the whole process, fascinated and mildly horrified. I took a bunch of pictures of the process, not because I thought anyone would really want to see them (I don’t know what I’m going to do with them now) but to prove to myself that it was really happening. The women set up several little grills and were cooking meat as soon as the men cut it off of the carcass. They all started with the liver (took me a while to remember the word, and thus understand what part of the animal I was eating) and Astou handed me a morsel and said with great solemnity “this is Yawu’s liver.”

After the big midday meal (of sheep of course) the children put on their fancy Tabaski outfits. It’s tradition on Tabaski for children to go around to houses demanding money, which adults are obligated to give them, and my little sister Coumbis was anxious to go out and collect her loot. The adults had fancy Tabaski clothes too, but didn’t wear them until the next day, as they was still a great deal of gross dirty work to be done. The next day when we finally did get dressed up, we went visiting all around Koalack, which took about 4 hours, and involved maybe 4 miles of walking. Astou told me that you could tell how much the economic troubles were affecting people, because in years past you would be given drinks (probably soda, maybe local juice) at every house, no matter how many glasses you had just had, whereas this year we were only given drinks at a handful of houses. It was clearly painful to people that they couldn’t afford to offer the kind the kind of hospitality they prided themselves for.

Before I went to Koalack, most of the Senegalese I talked to about it (who weren’t part of my family) told me that it would be awful. “It’s much hotter than Dakar, there are a million mosquitoes, it’s so dirty…” And it was all true. Koalack was hotter (though not nearly as hot as Dakar in September) the drinking water has salt in it, so that I don’t understand how everyone doesn’t shrivel up from dehydration, and there’s trash everywhere, including floating in the open sewers. But being part of such an enormous, friendly and welcoming family, and feeling closer to my Dakar family than I have before made me love Koalack.

We took a bus back to Dakar on Monday, this time with a great deal of meat instead of a sheep. I had been feeling a little listless since then, probably in large part to the lack of sunshine. I had assumed that the dry season, when it never rains would mean no clouds, but it’s been overcast most of the time lately. Friday however, the sun did peak through a little. We didn’t have any class in the morning, and so when Shani called me and suggested we go on an adventure, I took her up on it. We took a car rapid to Oakam, which is a village that has been swallowed by Dakar, and wandered around the windy dirty roads. The president recently commissioned an absurd and expensive statue of “The African Renaissance” (which most of the Senegalese view as an uncalled for tribute he is making to himself) to be built in Oakam. We decided we wanted to go to the beach, or at least see the water, and since the statue (which has just been finished) is the biggest landmark around, and since it’s on the ocean, we made for the statue. After several sketchy wrong turns (where we followed a random woman into what looked like an industrial site until thee guard told us we weren’t allowed and pointed us toward what looked like a goat-path through the brush) we emerged in front of the statue, where there was music, lots of people in their best clothes, and guards surrounding the area. We went over to talk to the guard, and he told us that the President was there, inspecting the statue before its grand opening on the 12th. “Ok, so it’s a private event then,” we said. “ “Oh no, of course not, go on in!” We made friends with some of the women dancing to the music, and the stunningly beautiful little girl they had with them, until eventually the president rode by in his car, standing in the sun roof and waving to the crowd. Shani was a bit more exciting about seeing him then I was (I think he’s a pretty awful leader, all things considered) but I what was so excited about was that we stumbled across it; that our random foray led somewhere so wild made me feel like it truly was an adventure.

After the president had driven away, Shani and I continued our search for the beach. We ended up on another small footpath through the bushes, and over hills (one of the only hilly places in Senegal) until we got spit out at the beach. The sand was black and we were flanked on either side by sheer cliff faces, edged by huge black rocks at their base, where the waves were crashing in. Neither of us had brought out swimsuits, but we ran into the water in our clothes anyway, laughing and running with the waves buffeting us about.

It was, all in all, one of my best days in Senegal.

Last weekend (or weekend before last by now) our program took us on a trip to Sokone. It’s a big village/small town close to Koalack, near the center of the coast, just north of The Gambia. It was one of the most touristy thing I had done in a long time. We stayed in an auberge of little huts with concrete walls and straw roofs, and ate together under an open straw roof structure. The mosquitoes were awful, reminding me that the really wonderful thing about frosty Novembers is that absolutely all of the mosquitoes are dead. Our first day there, we ventured into the mangrove swamp, a trip for which they advised to bring plastic shoes, because we might get “a little muddy.” The swamp had a damp briny smell to it, but it didn’t line up with my idea of a swamp, which is probably based a little too literally on the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride. The mangroves trees were bright shiny green and grew in clumps, with fresh-bread colored sand in patches between them, and crab scuttling in and out of their holes. The mud looked like sand until you stepped in it—and squelched all the way down until you were knee-deep. “A little muddy” turned out to mean that by the end I look like I was wearing big brown, slightly slimy cowboy boots. I will admit that I didn’t pay as much attention to the lecture of the mangroves as I could have; I was too entranced by the stillness of the mangrove swamp, the sound of the crabs underfoot and the birds overhead, and the feeling of mud squishing between my toes.

The next day, we went to a very different part of the mangrove swamp, where the spaces between the clumps of mangroves are not mud/sand, but water. We took a pirogue (a Senegalese fishing boat roughly the shape of a canoe, but larger) to a small village, and then walked about a mile to what for a lack of a better word I’ll call a resort. I am loath to call it that, because resort implies luxury, and this place was not for that kind of tourist, it was for the kind of tourist who doesn’t mind going for several days without showering, and doesn’t shriek at the sight of a cockroach in their bed. Like many places in rural Senegal, it was a collection of small buildings rather than one large one; several small huts for guests to sleep in and a larger area that served as a restaurant. I wasn’t sure what we were doing there until we arrived, a travel factor that I am getting more and more used to. When I did figure it out, I got excited; we were there to go kayaking in the mangroves. They had three person kayaks, with the people in front paddle, while the person in the middle gets to play at being royalty. Maneuvering the kayak was much more difficult than I had expected (we had to fire Shani as our front paddler, when it became clear that we might never leave the shore) but it was amazing. The other skill I’ve been cultivating is laughing when everything is going the opposite of how I want it to, and it was a useful skill to have in a on a windy day, trying desperately to go in a straight line which instead veering into the branches of the mangroves on either side. At one point we followed our guide into a place where the mangroves were closer together, so that they formed a sort of glade. The light the trickled through the mangrove branches was muted and slightly green, and the mangrove roots reached out of the water in graceful arches like Greek architecture, or a million Jewish wedding hupas. I felt like we were in a magical otherworldly haven, like the set of Mid Summer Night’s Dream, and I kept getting frustrated that pictures couldn’t capture how beautiful it was.

After we got back, I coerced my brother into teaching me to make attaaya. Attaaya is Senegalese tea, and aside from being delicious, it has enormous cultural importance. Many if not most Senegalese drink attaaya almost every day. It’s one of the only things that the men reliably do around the house, no matter what the political leanings or modernity of the family is like. I asked one of the brothers in the village about this, and he looked at me like I was stupid. “Well the women do the cooking and the cleaning and take care of the children, so it makes sense for the men to make the tea.” Clearly. Attaaya has a tradition of being three cups of tea (though most people don’t make more than two) and what with the book of that title that so popular lately about a completely different culture, it makes me wonder if three cups of tea isn’t some trans-cultural phenomenon. But it is hard to think of it that way, as attaaya feels very Senegalese. They use Chinese green tea to make it, which is interesting because it tastes absolutely nothing like green tea, and a little bit of mint and a LOT of sugar. It’s served in little glass cups, and the most important factor of the presentation is getting a good head of foam in each cup, which you do by pouring the tea back and forth between cups for as long as it takes. This means my brother Gallo pours the tea back and forth (there’s a great wolof term for it which I have of course forgotten) for about five minutes and gets great foam, where as when I try I spill tea everywhere, and can keep going forever without creating more than I thin scum of bubbles. My brother Amadou kept taunting me every time I started pouring, “Hey Robin, your phone is going off, hey Robin, there’s a mouse! Whoa! Robin!” My family said that my tea was wonderful, and then laughed at me because I didn’t give tea to the oldest people first, and kept forgetting who had already had some.

It’s amazing how much my emotions and reactions fluctuate here. One moment I’ll be walking to school in the blistering heat, or using a toilet with no seat or paper, or waiting on an internet connection that takes 5 minutes to load anything, and I will moan and pout and think longingly of sweaters and Charmin and hi speed. And just hours later I’ll be sitting joking with my family, or be squished into a car rapid with a friend on my way to the market, or walking home at night with a perfect breeze, staring at the stars, and think, “I love Senegal.”

This weekend Shani and I were determined to find live music. We had seen Youssou Ndour already, but no other live music. Friday night we went with my brother Gallo and Amadou to My Shop. Amadou is 18, and is in his second to last year of lycee—high school—since people usually finish around nineteen here. He is a character, who likes to get up and dance to music on TV when the family is all together, and tells me to get out my camera so he can pose for pictures. Gallo is twenty-one and much quieter; he will sometimes text me to ask me questions eve if we’re both home. My Shop is the sort of convenience store and fast food place near Mermoz, kind of like the 7-11/pizza-pizza sort of place you can find at rest-stops on the interstate. The front wall is all windows, some of which open into doors, and there are tables and chairs clustered around inside and on the terrace directly outside. When we first got here and heard about how much time last year’s students spent there, we all thought it was a little lame. Why, when you have all of Dakar to explore, would you spend all your time at a Senegalese 7-11? I’ve finally figured out exactly you would do that: anytime we hang out with Senegalese around our age they always want to go to My Shop. It is The Place to Go. When Shani, my brothers and I got there, they knew about half of the people there, which makes sense since they know almost everyone in Mermoz. Even Shani and I knew some of the people there, a couple of the other students on our program were there with there Senegalese brothers and friends, getting ready to go too Voyager, the most popular nightclub around here.

They tried to convince is to go with them, but I had been sick that day (run-of-the-mill diarrhea, all of us have been sick at least once in Senegal) and even though I felt well enough to go out, I didn’t quite feel ready to be out dancing until 4 in the morning, which is how it goes when your out with Senegalese guys. I wanted to go to Just 4 U, which is another club, where, as one of my friend’s brothers said “where the old people go”. It’s a place where you can sit and listen to live music without having to move much. My brothers were not into it at all; they wanted to go to Voyager with everyone else. I tried to convince them that they could go to Voyager, but Shani and I want to go to Just 4 U, but that was clearly not going to work. We decide that we’ll go to just for you, and if there is a live musician. My brothers said if there isn’t live music, then we can go to Voyager, and I figured, OK we’ll deal with that idea when we get there. They told us it wassn’t far, so we walked, and got there while they were telling us “it’s not far, only 3 more kilometers.” The performer (yes there was a live musician) was Cheikh Lo, who I’ve heard of before (my dad really like him) and I want to go in. My brothers basically said (in French so it was a little different) “pffft, Cheikh Lo? He’s old!” They shook our hands in turn (thank you so much for such a pleasant evening, which was a very cordial end to some scandalous
conversation) and Shani and I went into the concert. It was exactly the speed I was hoping for, little tables and chairs scattered around in the courtyard, small stage, great music. We found a table near the back. Cheikh Lo was amazing, he had a band with him: a saxophone player and two guitar players and two drummers. It’s evenings like this that make me wish I knew more about Senegalese music: unlike most Americans I grew up with Senegalese music all around me, so I don’t have an excuse for being as ignorant as I am. Much of the time when I hear music here, what gets me really excited about is thinking about how exciting my dad would be to be there and hear what I was hearing.

Shani and I weren’t as attentive as my dad would have been; we spent a good chunk of the evening telling each other embarrassing stories. We did see the director of our program there, which proved all our brothers right. (Sorry Tricia.) The set ended around three, so very early by Senegalese standards.

Sunday evening, most of the students in our program ended up at the football game. (I’m sorry, soccer in the states, right?) Mermoz, our quartier, was in the finals for our zone, who then plays against the other zones in some other sort of finals until someone wins for all of Dakar, and I didn’t quite understand it but anyway it was clearly a very big deal. People in our neighborhood painted all over the streets about it the week before, and half the quartier seemed to be going to the game. I had told several people that this was my first soccer game before I remembered that no, I had gone to one in the village too, but the point is that I do not have a lot of experience in the sports game arena (no pun intended). We (being Shani, Christie and I) went with my brother Amadou, and several of our other Senegalese friends, all of whom have varying degrees of unclear or unreciprocated romantic involvement with the students in our group. I felt a little bad for Amadou, as these guys were all several years older than him, but they all spoke the same language which was more than we could say, and it seemed to work out OK.

One of the most amazing things about the game for me was that in general, everyone ignored us. As a toubab, I’ve gotten used to whistles and honks and “I love you baby”s pretty much everywhere I go, but since the match was far more interesting than a couple of measly toubabs, we got to be treated, for once, just like everyone else. There was a cheering section for each team, and instead of just screaming they had percussion and were singing and chanting the whole time.

The match was (everyone said) an exciting one, it was tied so we had to go into overtime, and it was tied at the end of overtime too. We were just about to go into “sudden death” (people were explaining the finer points to me as went along) when the other team starting beating up the ref. I’m sure there was a very good reason for this, I think it had something to do with a red card, but all I really understood was suddenly all of the Zone B team seemed to be fighting and everyone was screaming (I mean a bit more than they were before) and that’s about the time that the police showed up. Now I would have thought they thing to do would be to address the situation on the field, but the police thought that the things that the spectators were yelling at the players were exacerbating the brawl (my Wolof isn’t good enough to know what these things were) so they decided that the best solution would be to gas the crowds. I saw the smoke/gas bombs fall on the other side of the stadium first, and then is was like smoke rings around an explosion, as all the people starting running away as fast as they could in every direction. I had the foolhardy thought of “gee, I’m glad we’re not sitting on that side” before the grenades landed on our side. I didn’t get much of the smoke, though my friend Emily was very close and said that it hurt a lot. All I really understood was that everyone was running toward the exits, but the exits lead to a fairly narrow passageway around the edge of the stadium that goes for a while before you get to the real exit. And first it didn’t seem like it was so bad, but once I got to the passage way, there were several people yelling “deucement, deucement!” (careful, careful!) which was exactly the opposite of what everyone was doing. We became this madly stampeding crush of people (I was reminded of the stampede scene in the Lion King when Moustapha dies) and I was being battered about this way and that, and had almost no control over where I was going. The Senegalese guys we were with were trying so hard to shepherd us out of the crush; I found out later that Dogo actually picked Shani up and carried her to safety. My feet got stepped on pretty well, and I almost lost my shoes a couple of times, but we all got out of there in one piece. As soon as I got out of the mass of people I got a call from my host family, who had been watching the game on tv, and told me to come home right now. I got home half expecting to be lectured or yelled at for not being safe (thought I don’t know what else we could have done) but once Amadou and I came in and it was clear we were OK, my host mom told me that it was such a shame, because with the other team’s goalie out of commission with no replacement, Mermoz would certainly have won the sudden death, but now we would have to replay the entire match.


I’ve been doing a lot of planning for my Christmas break lately. (If you think that it’s odd to have a Christmas break in a 95% Muslim country, I have to say I agree with you.) I’m going to Paris a couple days after classes end to meet up with my mom and spend Christmas (and a pretend Hannukah, since it’ll be over already) with her, and then if everything goes as planned I won’t even leave the Dakar airport for my flight back, but meet Shani and hop a plane to Morocco for a week. I’ve been feeling a little guilty for spending such an absurd amount of time planning and fantasizing about these trips, since I am already in a foreign country for what is, as everyone keeps mentioning to me, a once in a lifetime experience. But after two months here, I’m finding myself longing for a vacation frame of mind. (I am also insanely excited to see both Paris and Morocco, as they are both places I’ve never been before.) When you go somewhere for a week, or 10 days or whatever, you can show up, look around, wander down the streets a little, taste the food, maybe go to a museum if there are any good ones in the area, and then you’re good, you’ve gotten what you’re expected to get from being there (by anyone who might ask, but much more importantly, by yourself). You can probably even sit around in some sort of central location, drinking coffee or whatever the local equivalent is, and chat with your travel companion, who is likely to be someone very familiar to you. In other words, it’s a way to experience another country that’s not quite so much work. Don’t get me wrong, I feel incredibly lucky to be here in Senegal for so much longer than 10 days; to have the chance to take classes, live with a family, learn the language, make friends, find an internship, grow to understand the city. It’s a chance that I wouldn’t want to give up for anything. But after two months of foreign study that have been amazing and heart-breaking and heart-warming and frustrating and hilarious and terrifying and fascinating and exhausting and just generally good but very hard, I am looking forward to two weeks when I can take some pictures, see some art or architecture, eat some good food, and call it a day.

I think if I’m not careful, this blog could easily become an account of my weekends in Dakar. My daily routine has become so familiar that I forget that I wasn’t always this used to it. I’m taking five classes now… sort of. There is a class on AIDS and activism which was designed for the Beloit students, but since my friend Shani, who is also a Kalmazoo student, came here in large part to learn about AIDS, they changed the the schedule so she could take it. Sometimes it’s very interesting and I’m glad I’m there, but every time we do some sort of meaningless busy work, I find myself wondering what I’m doing there, since I don’t have to be. Class in French in general isn’t as hard as I thought it would be (which is good since before I got here I was imagining it as impossible) but it is still plenty hard. I can usually understand most of it, but it takes a lot of concentration, and my mind wanders much more than it ever does in classes back home. It can feel a little silly to drag myself out of bed to audit a class when I spend most of it staring off into space wondering about how all of my friends from elementary school are doing these days.

We also have History of Islam with Kalamazoo and Beloit students, because we’re in a joint program. The professor is erratic and ridiculous. Some of the material is interesting, but we cover it so slowly that it gets tedious very quickly. I think because our French isn’t great (or at least mine isn’t) he thinks we’re actually as stupid as we sound, and teaches accordingly. We have a class called Dakar in Transition, with a professor who I like a lot, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s about, since there is no continuity between classes. The K students have a “cross cultural seminar” which we started after St. Louis, which I have taken to calling our sheep in the road class, because on the first day of class, when we had been here for 6 weeks already the professor said “look, there are sheep in the road. That doesn’t happen in the US. See how it’s different? (By the way, yes, there are sheep in the road, who hang out on the medians of the larger streets and eat the grass there, and yes, they were a bit startling at first, but after six weeks of walking past them everyday, we’ve gotten used to it.) The class is an utter waste of time, which is frustrating since I’m just starting to realize that we really don’t have that much time left, when all is said and done.

All of the students also take Wolof, the local language here, which is the one class that feels really useful, even if the methods are sometimes a bit perplexing.

We go home for lunch everyday, which is a little unfortunate sometimes, just because it means walking close to 2 kilometers in the heat of the day (it’s still sweltering here) which isn’t great, but that’s the way it’s done here: lunch is a big meal and you go home to eat it, and while I don’t like walking in the hot sun, I do like eating around the bowl with my family. Have I explained eating around the bowl? For meals we don’t have a table, plates, forks, etc. We put a cloth down in the middle of the living room floor, and a huge bowl of food goes in the center. We all sit around the bowl and eat together, everyone eating from the little slice in front of them. If it’s rice or couscous my family uses spoons, but if it’s eggs, or pasta or potato based, we each get a small loaf of bread, and use that instead of silverware. When I stop eating they normally say “lekkal lekkal!” (eat, eat) until I insist that no I really am full, and it really was delicious.

Anyway, weekend adventures. Saturday we all got up early and trucked over to Tricia’s house, the director of our program at the baobab center. She had told us months ago that we would have a homesick breakfast in October, but I’d forgotten about it. But this breakfast! We had pancakes (which I made, and quite well thank you very much) with fruit and cinnamon, and eggs with cheese, and bacon and banana-chocolate muffins and fruit salad and real coffee (the Senegalese only ever drink nescafe) and it was so amazing. Afterwards we lay around groaning about how full we were while helping ourselves to thirds our fourths.

When we finally left Tricia’s house Shani, Christie and I went to HLM, the fabric market, because Christie hadn’t bought fabric for Tabaski yet. We took car rapids there and back, which wasn’t the first time, but it’s still new enough that I feel very intrepid when I do it. Car rapids, since I realized I haven’t described them yet, are public transportation in the form of vans that vary in both size and dilapidation. The smaller ones are very colorful, they say “transport commun” on the side, and “alhamdulilah” across the nose, which is the Arabic for “thank God” which, since most people are Muslim, is used all the time here. They never have windows. Instead there are holes where the windows should be, which is in fact much better, because if I was ever enclosed in a space that small with that many people, moving that erratically, I’m completely sure I would either faint or throw up.

On our way home from the market, we stopped by a patisserie, so that I could buy a cake. Saturday was both my host father and sister’s birthday, and since things had been a little rocky with my family lately, I had decided to make a big deal of the birthdays, as a sort of peace offering. Also, all of the students are constantly hearing about how great past students were, and what they had done for birthdays etc, there was a bit of something to live up to. It was fantastic, they loved the cake and the cards and Coumbis (who is 8 and adorable) got very excited about her present, and kept playing with the balloons I had found in my luggage and brought out, and the atmosphere in my house has felt much easier since then.

Since Saturday was Halloween, the students decided to go to a Halloween party, which is how we learned that celebrating American holidays is a bad idea. Or at least when you go out in public wearing costumes, follow people who have no idea where they’re going and end up at the US Marine house, which is probably the closest thing to a frat that exists in Senegal. We all got culture shock from our own culture.

Sunday morning I made mafe (tomato peanut stew) with my host mom. She didn’t actually let me do much of the cooking, since much of the time when I tried she would say “no, that’s not right, watch me.” But we sat together in our house’s little closet of a kitchen, and she played me her favorite music on her cell phone, and translated the lyrics from Wolof into French so I could understand. I invited Shani over to help us eat it, and played with Coumbis before lunch. She agreed that Astou’s mafe is indeed the best in Senegal.

buying fabric, Youssou N'dour, and PANCAKES

This weekend was certainly eventful.

Saturday morning I went with Shani and her mom (who's name I don't know because Shani never calls her anything except "my maman") to buy fabric for my Tabaski outfit. Tabaski is the Muslim New year, known as Eid al-Adha in other muslim countries. (And yes, I had to look that up to tell you, everyone here calls it Tabaski.) It's a very big deal, even more important that Korite, the Senegalese name for the festival at the end of Ramadan that the Arabic world calls Eid. For Korite, all of the American students had been expecting a huge party, so all of us were a little confused when everyone got dressed up and then sat around all day talking, just like they do everyday. For Tabaski, my host family is taking me to Kaolack, a city in the interior of Senegal, where we have even more family.

Getting dressed is a big part of both Korite and Tabaski (even if it is hard for us Toubabs to understand, since we don't seem to do much once we're dressed up) so you have to get nice clothes made, and get them made far in advance, because everyone else in your neighborhood is doing the same thing. In Senegal, there is no such thing as buying nice clothing. You can buy jeans, t-shirts, skirts etc, but for nice clothes you go to the fabric market, pick out the tissue you want (fabric, sorry, there are some french words creeping into my english vocabulary) then take it to the tailor and describe the outfit you want, with the help of several glossy magazines, which look like catalogs to me, but seem to be more like suggestion guides.

In Saint Louis, I got an outfit made at a good price because the tailor was the brother of one of the Senegalese students in our program. (Later we found out brother actually meant cousin, but it's best just to go with these things.) Shani, Lauren, Emily and I wore our outfits to school last Friday. I had thought I drew a lot of attention on the streets just by being a toubab, but it's nothing to how much attention we got by being toubabs in Senegalese clothing. We were hilarious.

Anyway, buying anything in a Senegalese market goes much better when you have someone Senegalese actually helping you. Last weekend Shani and I went to Sandaga so I could buy some earbuds, and we could look around. We made a friend as soon as we got out of the car rapid, and he was a great help with my earbuds, but afterward insisted we come to his shop, an adventure which ended with us in a sketchy upstairs office bargaining for purses that we weren't sure we wanted and really couldn't afford. Shani's mom however, is large and impressive and in control at all times, and no one bothered us when we were with her. We went early, because she said we could better prices if we went to the distributors instead of the stalls. We found fabric we liked, but since the distributor woulkd sell us 30 meters of it or nothing, we ended up having to find something similar in the stalls after all. My fabric, in case you're curious, is royal purple and slightly shiny, with designs on it. (I have yet to sucessfully load any pictures on to the internet, but I'm trying I swear, it'll happen one day.) We went to the tailor after the market, and hopefully will get our clothes before too long... but it's Senegal, so we'll see. I'm learning not to expect puncuality.

That night Youssou N'dour was playing at his club, so we all went to see him. A lot of the Senegalese we told about it before hand laughed at us, I guess it's a bit of a stereotypical thing to do, since he's so well known, and by their reactions I was excpecting it to be a major toabab scene. There were certainly more toababs than in some places, but it was still at least a 90% Senegalese crowd. we got seats in the balcony when we got there (around one) and watched the opening act and chatted. Around 1:40 people started crowding the stage even though nothing new was happening; we figured it meant he was coming on soon and a few of us went up to the front too. My personal bubble (which I'm learning is very American) was certainly challenged by that concert, there wasn't space to move your feet, and if your fell, you'd only go about 6 inches before you hit someone. When Youssou N'dour came on, the crowd went nuts. He had a guy with him, dressed all in white (who is apparently very famous too, which makes it embarressing that I can't remember his name) who revved the crowd up before Youssou N'dour actually came on. He had a pretty big band with him, nine people all told. There were four percussionists besides the trap player, one playing the tama, and three playing drums a bit like jembes, though I think they have a diferent name. There was a lot of call and response through out the concert, which was cool even if I knew none of the responses. (At one point, he yelled "Est-ce que vous etes fatigue?" (are you tired) to which of course the audience responded "Non!!" but I couldn't help thinking, well yes actually.) The audience went wild, every so often someone would jump on stage and dance mballax, until they either jumped off themselves, or got pulled off the stage by the bouncer, who sat on the side of the stage waiting for such an occurance. One guy gave him money, another jumped on stage and got Youssou N'dour to try on his glasses. We got really close to the stage, and at times he was no more than maybe 6 feet away. In some ways it was a boon that I had no room, because it was easier to get away with just swaying in place and calling that dancing: no matter how I try I will never be able to dance like the Senegalese. Eventually we all got tired of being bandied about by the crowd, so we went back to the balcony to sit. It was harder to get back than it had been to get to the stage, instead of a crowd in front of the stage like it had been, the club was solid people. I stepped on quite a few toes to get back to the other students and when I got there I realized I was in fact, exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open. He finished around 4:40, with no encore.

The next morning Shani had all the students in our program over to her house, and we made pancakes with real maple syrup, and scrambled eggs with tomato and green pepper and only a little bit of oil. I'm almost emabrressed to admit how happy something that American made me.