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.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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.”
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.”
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Under African Skies
So my village stay.
I’ve talked to several of the other students about writing blog posts on the village stay, and we were all talking about how difficult it is to write about so anyone would actually be able to understand what it was like. This is less a teenage angst “no one ever understands me!” sort of statement, and more because first I have little faith in my ability to articulate what that nine days was really like or meant to me, and second, because I’m not sure that I entirely understand yet what happened there, or what it meant, or how it affected me.
My family was great. It was huge, which was a nice change from my Dakar family, which for a while after Korite was down to just Astou and me. My mother, or yaay as you say in Wolof was a wonderful regal matriarch sort of figure, who seemed to rule over the rest of the family. My father was the president of the village, and seemed really interesting, even though he was never there so I never got to talk to him much. My family DID for the most part speak French, so my biggest fear was assuaged as soon as I got there, though they spoke Wolof to me much more than my Dakar family. We lived in what was not so much a house as a compound, with several buildings surrounding a sandy courtyard area where we spent most of our time. And I have to say, I think I preferred it to sitting in front of the tv all the time like we do in Dakar, we would sit on mats in the sand surrounded by cats and chickens and the occasional frog, and once the sun set, with an astounding tapestry of stars overhead. The electricity cuts would mean the fan in my room wouldn’t work, so it was difficult to sleep, but it also meant that the street light (I can’t think of a better word for it, though it is difficult to have a street light without streets) would stop working, and the stars were more brilliant there than anything I’ve seen before.
My sister Fatou, was really sweet and took me under her wing for the week. The first day, we arrived around eleven, and at three or so Shani showed up at my house with her little sister; she was exhausted because her family didn’t speak French and she had already used up most of her Wolof vocabulary. Fatou took us on a walk to the river (or “un bras de le fleuve” an arm of the river) and then to her friend’s house where they tried to teach us to dance. As we were being dragged around, we hit upon what turned out to be the theme of the stay “xamuma” which means “I don’t know” in Wolof. So much of my time there was learning to go with the flow in a way that I don’t think exists in the US, in a “I don’t know where I am or where I’m going or the names of any of the people I’m with or what you’re trying to say to me” kind of go with the flow. “Xamuma” became a bit of a talisman, (a gris-gris, as our Islam professor would say, which are the amulets that many of the Senegalese wear) to deal with the absolute uncertainty of every situation, and to find humor in it.
My birthday was good, nothing like any birthday I’d had before, but I had a really good time, mostly because I was determined that I would. I was staying in the rural village with a really big family (who did speak some French after all) and they threw me a party. We had these pink shrimp-flavored chip things that are really good (you might have had them before, you can get them sometimes at Thai restaurants) with sauce, and they sang me happy birthday in English, which was pretty funny, and then we danced to Senegalese music. The other students had a competition over who could make me the best card out of things they found in the village, so I got a lot of… interesting birthday cards (no really they were great) and Shani, came to the party with my family, which made it less awkward than it could have been. We walked to the market in the town where we met for lunch everyday, and we went in the hottest part of the day, when none of Senegalese are stupid enough to be out. While we were walking, I said to Emily, who had her birthday a day before mine, “I think this is the first sweltering hot birthday I’ve ever had.” October in Michigan is rarely t-shirt weather, let alone hot. It was unlike any birthday I’ve had, and probably unlike any I’ll have again, but it was good. For a while I was a tiny bit bitter about having my 21st birthday here, since I can’t exactly do any of the traditional things, but then I thought “how many chances will I have to have people throw me a Senegalese birthday party?”
Now we’ve been in St. Louis for four days, but I still feel like we just got here, because I’ve been sick and spending most of my time lying in bed listening to The Golden Compass on my computer. Thanks mostly Deborah, I will have an outfit made here, which I’m pretty excited about. Getting clothes made in Senegal deserves it’s own post and might even get it one of these days.
I had to wait to post this because I couldn't get internet in Saint Louis, so I'm back in Dakar. It funny how much like home Dakar feels now.
I’ve talked to several of the other students about writing blog posts on the village stay, and we were all talking about how difficult it is to write about so anyone would actually be able to understand what it was like. This is less a teenage angst “no one ever understands me!” sort of statement, and more because first I have little faith in my ability to articulate what that nine days was really like or meant to me, and second, because I’m not sure that I entirely understand yet what happened there, or what it meant, or how it affected me.
My family was great. It was huge, which was a nice change from my Dakar family, which for a while after Korite was down to just Astou and me. My mother, or yaay as you say in Wolof was a wonderful regal matriarch sort of figure, who seemed to rule over the rest of the family. My father was the president of the village, and seemed really interesting, even though he was never there so I never got to talk to him much. My family DID for the most part speak French, so my biggest fear was assuaged as soon as I got there, though they spoke Wolof to me much more than my Dakar family. We lived in what was not so much a house as a compound, with several buildings surrounding a sandy courtyard area where we spent most of our time. And I have to say, I think I preferred it to sitting in front of the tv all the time like we do in Dakar, we would sit on mats in the sand surrounded by cats and chickens and the occasional frog, and once the sun set, with an astounding tapestry of stars overhead. The electricity cuts would mean the fan in my room wouldn’t work, so it was difficult to sleep, but it also meant that the street light (I can’t think of a better word for it, though it is difficult to have a street light without streets) would stop working, and the stars were more brilliant there than anything I’ve seen before.
My sister Fatou, was really sweet and took me under her wing for the week. The first day, we arrived around eleven, and at three or so Shani showed up at my house with her little sister; she was exhausted because her family didn’t speak French and she had already used up most of her Wolof vocabulary. Fatou took us on a walk to the river (or “un bras de le fleuve” an arm of the river) and then to her friend’s house where they tried to teach us to dance. As we were being dragged around, we hit upon what turned out to be the theme of the stay “xamuma” which means “I don’t know” in Wolof. So much of my time there was learning to go with the flow in a way that I don’t think exists in the US, in a “I don’t know where I am or where I’m going or the names of any of the people I’m with or what you’re trying to say to me” kind of go with the flow. “Xamuma” became a bit of a talisman, (a gris-gris, as our Islam professor would say, which are the amulets that many of the Senegalese wear) to deal with the absolute uncertainty of every situation, and to find humor in it.
My birthday was good, nothing like any birthday I’d had before, but I had a really good time, mostly because I was determined that I would. I was staying in the rural village with a really big family (who did speak some French after all) and they threw me a party. We had these pink shrimp-flavored chip things that are really good (you might have had them before, you can get them sometimes at Thai restaurants) with sauce, and they sang me happy birthday in English, which was pretty funny, and then we danced to Senegalese music. The other students had a competition over who could make me the best card out of things they found in the village, so I got a lot of… interesting birthday cards (no really they were great) and Shani, came to the party with my family, which made it less awkward than it could have been. We walked to the market in the town where we met for lunch everyday, and we went in the hottest part of the day, when none of Senegalese are stupid enough to be out. While we were walking, I said to Emily, who had her birthday a day before mine, “I think this is the first sweltering hot birthday I’ve ever had.” October in Michigan is rarely t-shirt weather, let alone hot. It was unlike any birthday I’ve had, and probably unlike any I’ll have again, but it was good. For a while I was a tiny bit bitter about having my 21st birthday here, since I can’t exactly do any of the traditional things, but then I thought “how many chances will I have to have people throw me a Senegalese birthday party?”
Now we’ve been in St. Louis for four days, but I still feel like we just got here, because I’ve been sick and spending most of my time lying in bed listening to The Golden Compass on my computer. Thanks mostly Deborah, I will have an outfit made here, which I’m pretty excited about. Getting clothes made in Senegal deserves it’s own post and might even get it one of these days.
I had to wait to post this because I couldn't get internet in Saint Louis, so I'm back in Dakar. It funny how much like home Dakar feels now.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Dakar is hot. It’s hard to think of much else because it is so freaking hot. The program requires the families to give us fans in our rooms, and which is invaluable, and most of the time feels completely inadequate. I’m just starting to gear up for a full scale freak out about next week, because that is when we’re heading for a rural village, or rather several rural villages, there will be two students staying in each village. There may or may not be electricity, and because it’s inland it will be at least 20 degrees hotter (I think those degrees are Fahrenheit but I’m not even sure about that). The timing of this trip is interesting, because it’s coming when we all seem to finally be more comfortable in Dakar, but we’re also talking more and more about everything we miss at home. Our study abroad handbook talks about the first three weeks as the honeymoon stage, when everything is new and exciting and you just can’t get enough of it. We all seem to have skipped that stage, because for our first three weeks were too busy being overwhelmed and confused by how different everything was that I don’t think any of us could muster the energy to be that excited about any of it. However, after replacing the honeymoon stage with the oh-my-god-how-the-hell-does-anything-work-here stage, we seem to be right on time for the (and I’m paraphrasing here) this-is-way-too-hard-and-I-miss-macaroni-and-cheese-and-I-want-to-go-home-now stage. I don’t actually want to go home of course, but I do find myself spending a lot time missing things that I didn’t even realize I liked.
Don’t get me wrong, some things are great. This weekend several of the other K students and I went to a club, which was fantastic. We met Shani and Emily’s gorgeous Senegalese guy friends there (both of whom they met on street, yes you can do that kind of thing in Senegal) and after excitement when our taxi driver took to the opposite side of the city because he didn’t know where the club was, we had a great time, and danced until 4. The next morning I went with Shani and her friend Lea to a Senegalese gospel church, which was absolutely incredible, the singing was beautiful, and everyone seemed completely full of joy, even if they maybe did want to convert me.
I just had mafe (a peanut tomato stew dish) for lunch, which is delicious, especially when I was expecting ceebu jen (fish and rice) for the umteenth time. My family is very sweet, and I get so excited when I understand a word of Wolof in their stream of conversation.
We got more information about our village stay today. I will be from Saturday to Monday a span of time that includes my 21st birthday, which should make for some a unique story. I’ll be staying in a tiny village I can’t pronounce the name of, with the family of the President of the village, who is also the president of the River Delta Coalition. It’ll certainly be an interesting trip.
I didn’t realize until recently, but I am so much more acclimated than I was when I got here. We went on a tour de ville on Sunday, and looking out the window, I realized I was seeing the same things I saw on the ride from the airport. Everything looked so alien and dirty and crazy, and it’s a good feeling that I understand so much more now. Yes there’s trash everywhere, but it’s not a big deal, and those guys hanging out of the car rapids are not passengers and that will not happen to me if I ride one. Very slowly, it’s all starting to make more sense.
Don’t get me wrong, some things are great. This weekend several of the other K students and I went to a club, which was fantastic. We met Shani and Emily’s gorgeous Senegalese guy friends there (both of whom they met on street, yes you can do that kind of thing in Senegal) and after excitement when our taxi driver took to the opposite side of the city because he didn’t know where the club was, we had a great time, and danced until 4. The next morning I went with Shani and her friend Lea to a Senegalese gospel church, which was absolutely incredible, the singing was beautiful, and everyone seemed completely full of joy, even if they maybe did want to convert me.
I just had mafe (a peanut tomato stew dish) for lunch, which is delicious, especially when I was expecting ceebu jen (fish and rice) for the umteenth time. My family is very sweet, and I get so excited when I understand a word of Wolof in their stream of conversation.
We got more information about our village stay today. I will be from Saturday to Monday a span of time that includes my 21st birthday, which should make for some a unique story. I’ll be staying in a tiny village I can’t pronounce the name of, with the family of the President of the village, who is also the president of the River Delta Coalition. It’ll certainly be an interesting trip.
I didn’t realize until recently, but I am so much more acclimated than I was when I got here. We went on a tour de ville on Sunday, and looking out the window, I realized I was seeing the same things I saw on the ride from the airport. Everything looked so alien and dirty and crazy, and it’s a good feeling that I understand so much more now. Yes there’s trash everywhere, but it’s not a big deal, and those guys hanging out of the car rapids are not passengers and that will not happen to me if I ride one. Very slowly, it’s all starting to make more sense.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Hi everyone!!!
The reason I haven't posted since I got to Senegal is becauase not only do I have limited access to internet, but for some strange reason blogspot won't work on my computer here. So here I am on Shani's computer, and hopefully I will be able to post this before the power goes out again, for the 5th time today.
I'm here for another 4 days or so, until I go to live in rural village for a week. Wish me luck.
Here are copies of the emails I've been writting since my blog hasn't been working. If you want me to send them to you, leave a comment and say so, since I'm likely to continue to have better luck with emails than with this blog.
We started classes two weeks ago, which are a lot harder than I was expecting. The classes are in french of course, and two hours long each, which is just too much for me. My professor who teaches both my Dakar in Transition and Senegal River Valley course is almost impossible for me to understand; I think I only know what he's saying when he's telling me information I already know. Yesterday was Korite, which is the Senegalese name for Eid, the festival at the end of Ramadan. It was a little anti-climactic; my host brothers were gone so my family was much smaller, and even though I thought it was customary to go out, we didn't and I ended up sleeping most of the day. I am excited that Ramadan's over, becuase it means I can eat with my family during the day, and my host brothers said that after they get back they'll take me out a lot dancing and to concerts.
I learned this week that part of my program is that in two weeks I will be leaving to live in a rural village for a week with a family. We'll be in the same village with one other student, but that's it. The family will speak Wolof, but probably not french, which is putting a fresh urgency on my wolof classes. After the rural village, we'll all be living in an auberge in Saint Louis, which I will probably needing some creature comforts.
I'm contantly amazed by how little things can become these ridiculous adventures. A couple days ago Shani and I went to exchange money and get some lunch, and while we were in the restaurant, it started to practically huricane outside, light disapeared, trash cans hurtling along the street and sheets of rain. When we tried to leave we discovered that the street had become a river, and so we had to walk through a river of sewage water to get to the bank and then back to school. A man we passed on the way said we might do better swimming there.I've been a bit more homesick lately, dreaming of toilets with seats and food that I can make myself. But I'm still glad to be here, I know even the parts that are so hard they make we want to cry will probably be the things that teach me the most that I will be most grateful for later.I love you all, hope life is treating you well. If you want to send me any mail, I would love to get it, and will try to send you a post card back. My address is-
Robin Greenwood
c/o Dr. Tricia Lawrence-Savané
Africa Consultants International
B.P. 5270
Dakar-Fann, SÉNÉGAL
I'm attaching the first email I wrote, which I know got sent to a lot of people, but I wrote it before I managed to get an email list together; part of being in Senegal is everything, especially anything with internet takes 7 times longer than they do in the states.
Love,Robin
Hello all!
I arrived tired confused and jet-lagged at 6am on Monday morning, where I sat on the conveyor belt while two other students reported their lost luggage and watched the stray cats wondering around the airport. It's been a bit of a whirl-wind since then, buI haven't been thrown in the deep end nearly as much as I expected. The people at the Baobab center. where my program is based are wonderful; they coach us on all of the daily tasks that are so different here, they encourage us to ask as many stupid questions as we like, and they are conducting our orientation in english, for the most part.
It's been harder than I expected in some ways. Our bathroom in my host family's house is very different from anything I'm used to, and I'm beginning to realize how much I like my creature comforts. It is not hotter than I could have imagined, as some people said it would be, but it is way too hot, and I'm trying to get used to being sweaty all the time, since there's no way around it. As predicted, my french is not where I would like it to be, and I spend a lot of my time saying "Quoi?" staring blankly, or saying yes to who knows what.
Despite all of the difficulties, I am so glad to be here. I love the senegalese tradition of greeting everyone, and the looks of pleasure and surprise I get when I, a toubab, greet someone in Wolof. Kids will run after me calling "toubab!" the wolof word for foreigner, which stopped bothering me after the first day. As my friend Shani said, "it's like they're just naming another noun in their world, there's a car, there's a sheep, there's a toubab." Sheep are everywhere, along the side of the road, eating the grass on the medians, in people's houses. I couldn't figure out where the baaing in my house was coming from until Mohamed, my host father took me up to the roof so I could help feel our two sheep. He told me we will have one for Tabaski, probably the male since he is the biggest.
My host family has been good,for the most part. We live in Mermouz, in a quiet, (for Dakar) safe and friendly neighborhood a ten minute walk from the baobab center. There are a lot of people in my house, and I don't quite have them sorted out. I seem to be part of the family who spends all their (our) time upstairs, while another life takes place in thefamily room below. Mohamed, my host father speaks english better than my french, which can be very nice, though I'm a little worried itwill make it more difficult to learn french. His wife Astou speaks only french and Wolof, and she is very patient with my french. There are three boys/young men also who I think are their nephews. We spend most of our time in the same room, which acts as a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom for Mohamed and Astou, in short everything but the washroom. We watch tv a lot, often in wolof so don't understand and they will speak to each other in wolof. I think the homestay may get easier the more wolof I know. Mohamed and Astou also have a seven year old daughter who will be here soon, and I am very excited to meet her. There are of course a million other things I could write about--Sandaga market, my Wolof class, the students in my program, the Senegalese values we've been learning... but this email is probably long enough already. Being here is making me think about my own cultural assumptions a lot, which can be uncomfortable, especially when I recognize American values or traditions I miss, or Senegalese customs I cannot understand. But I think I will take it as a sign that there is a great deal I can learn here.
The reason I haven't posted since I got to Senegal is becauase not only do I have limited access to internet, but for some strange reason blogspot won't work on my computer here. So here I am on Shani's computer, and hopefully I will be able to post this before the power goes out again, for the 5th time today.
I'm here for another 4 days or so, until I go to live in rural village for a week. Wish me luck.
Here are copies of the emails I've been writting since my blog hasn't been working. If you want me to send them to you, leave a comment and say so, since I'm likely to continue to have better luck with emails than with this blog.
We started classes two weeks ago, which are a lot harder than I was expecting. The classes are in french of course, and two hours long each, which is just too much for me. My professor who teaches both my Dakar in Transition and Senegal River Valley course is almost impossible for me to understand; I think I only know what he's saying when he's telling me information I already know. Yesterday was Korite, which is the Senegalese name for Eid, the festival at the end of Ramadan. It was a little anti-climactic; my host brothers were gone so my family was much smaller, and even though I thought it was customary to go out, we didn't and I ended up sleeping most of the day. I am excited that Ramadan's over, becuase it means I can eat with my family during the day, and my host brothers said that after they get back they'll take me out a lot dancing and to concerts.
I learned this week that part of my program is that in two weeks I will be leaving to live in a rural village for a week with a family. We'll be in the same village with one other student, but that's it. The family will speak Wolof, but probably not french, which is putting a fresh urgency on my wolof classes. After the rural village, we'll all be living in an auberge in Saint Louis, which I will probably needing some creature comforts.
I'm contantly amazed by how little things can become these ridiculous adventures. A couple days ago Shani and I went to exchange money and get some lunch, and while we were in the restaurant, it started to practically huricane outside, light disapeared, trash cans hurtling along the street and sheets of rain. When we tried to leave we discovered that the street had become a river, and so we had to walk through a river of sewage water to get to the bank and then back to school. A man we passed on the way said we might do better swimming there.I've been a bit more homesick lately, dreaming of toilets with seats and food that I can make myself. But I'm still glad to be here, I know even the parts that are so hard they make we want to cry will probably be the things that teach me the most that I will be most grateful for later.I love you all, hope life is treating you well. If you want to send me any mail, I would love to get it, and will try to send you a post card back. My address is-
Robin Greenwood
c/o Dr. Tricia Lawrence-Savané
Africa Consultants International
B.P. 5270
Dakar-Fann, SÉNÉGAL
I'm attaching the first email I wrote, which I know got sent to a lot of people, but I wrote it before I managed to get an email list together; part of being in Senegal is everything, especially anything with internet takes 7 times longer than they do in the states.
Love,Robin
Hello all!
I arrived tired confused and jet-lagged at 6am on Monday morning, where I sat on the conveyor belt while two other students reported their lost luggage and watched the stray cats wondering around the airport. It's been a bit of a whirl-wind since then, buI haven't been thrown in the deep end nearly as much as I expected. The people at the Baobab center. where my program is based are wonderful; they coach us on all of the daily tasks that are so different here, they encourage us to ask as many stupid questions as we like, and they are conducting our orientation in english, for the most part.
It's been harder than I expected in some ways. Our bathroom in my host family's house is very different from anything I'm used to, and I'm beginning to realize how much I like my creature comforts. It is not hotter than I could have imagined, as some people said it would be, but it is way too hot, and I'm trying to get used to being sweaty all the time, since there's no way around it. As predicted, my french is not where I would like it to be, and I spend a lot of my time saying "Quoi?" staring blankly, or saying yes to who knows what.
Despite all of the difficulties, I am so glad to be here. I love the senegalese tradition of greeting everyone, and the looks of pleasure and surprise I get when I, a toubab, greet someone in Wolof. Kids will run after me calling "toubab!" the wolof word for foreigner, which stopped bothering me after the first day. As my friend Shani said, "it's like they're just naming another noun in their world, there's a car, there's a sheep, there's a toubab." Sheep are everywhere, along the side of the road, eating the grass on the medians, in people's houses. I couldn't figure out where the baaing in my house was coming from until Mohamed, my host father took me up to the roof so I could help feel our two sheep. He told me we will have one for Tabaski, probably the male since he is the biggest.
My host family has been good,for the most part. We live in Mermouz, in a quiet, (for Dakar) safe and friendly neighborhood a ten minute walk from the baobab center. There are a lot of people in my house, and I don't quite have them sorted out. I seem to be part of the family who spends all their (our) time upstairs, while another life takes place in thefamily room below. Mohamed, my host father speaks english better than my french, which can be very nice, though I'm a little worried itwill make it more difficult to learn french. His wife Astou speaks only french and Wolof, and she is very patient with my french. There are three boys/young men also who I think are their nephews. We spend most of our time in the same room, which acts as a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom for Mohamed and Astou, in short everything but the washroom. We watch tv a lot, often in wolof so don't understand and they will speak to each other in wolof. I think the homestay may get easier the more wolof I know. Mohamed and Astou also have a seven year old daughter who will be here soon, and I am very excited to meet her. There are of course a million other things I could write about--Sandaga market, my Wolof class, the students in my program, the Senegalese values we've been learning... but this email is probably long enough already. Being here is making me think about my own cultural assumptions a lot, which can be uncomfortable, especially when I recognize American values or traditions I miss, or Senegalese customs I cannot understand. But I think I will take it as a sign that there is a great deal I can learn here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)