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.