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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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