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.