A few weekends ago, I went to see Orchestra Baobab at Just 4 U, one of the clubs in the area. Shani assured me that they she had heard them before, and that they were some of the founders of mbalax, one of the most popular genres of music here, and thee music that Youssou Ndour plays. However, Orchestra Baobab, it soon became clear, is a Senegalese salsa band, though she was right in that they were as old as dirt. However, they could still play like nothing else. It was wonderful to be able to dance again; much of the time when I go out dancing in Senegal, guys will be so all over me that it’s not fun anymore, but apparently salsa draws a different crowd. The men I danced with were respectful of my space, and patient with my total lack of salsa skills. Plus salsa music in Wolof was pretty wonderful to hear, especially sasla that was played with this much soul behind it. All in all, the night restored my faith in going out in Senegal.
The week after that, I had another village stay to complete. My second village stay was very different from the first one. While I was overwhelmed by my first village stay, it was actually pretty tame, I was walking distance from one of the other girls in my program, and spent every day with my class, only returning to the village at night. On top of that, we got there by way of a chartered bus with air-conditioning.
The idea of the second rural visit is for the students to have the chance to be more independent, and see another aspect of Senegal all by themselves. Our program director gave us a list of possible rural sites, each with their own specialization, and the idea was for us to choose somewhere off the list based on our interests. Since environmentalism is a very different animal in Senegal, I decided that I wanted to go somewhere related to ecology and the environment, thinking it would bee a good chance to get to know this animal a little better. However, the process of finding a village stay was very Senegalese: the first three or four options I tried couldn’t work, either the people who would host me were busy, or in Dakar that weekend, or maybe just wouldn’t answer their phones at all. Eventually I picked a village off the list that had nothing to do with ecology, but looked interesting and different from where I had been before, and once it was clear that the contact there was the family of one of our Wolof teachers, it became relatively simple to arrange for me to go there the next day. Which is how I ended up going to Ndiondior.
Ndiorndior is a village island in les Iles de Salum, a group of islands in the river delta just north of the Gambia. In order to get there I had to take a sept-place to Mbour, then another one to Djiffer, and a pirogue (a boat a little like a canoe with a motor) to the island itself. I took a taxi to the garage (not the greatest translation of gare, which is also the word for a train station) around 7am, and as soon as my taxi stopped I was swarmed by Senegalese men desperate to know where I wanted to go. Once I admitted that I was looking for a sept-place to Mbour, I ended up following a man through the crowd, filled with other men also desperate to find out where I was headed, men and women selling everything from cups of coffee to oranges to sunglasses, and small boys in ragged clothes begging for money. Eventually my guide led me to a line of battered rusty white hatchbacks, which is what a sept-place is, the name referring to the fact that it can fit seven passengers. After a bumpy and stuffy ride, I got out in Mbour, where everything followed basically the same formula. While sitting in the car waiting for it to fill up, the other passengers would signal to the vendors to come over, and then pass forward their money so that the transaction could be handled by whoever was closest to the open door or window. Talibé would also come up to the open hatch, either singing in Arabic or just jingling their buckets, looking for contributions. The ride between Mbour and Djiffer was quite a bit bumpier than the first, seeing as for large portions of the voyage there didn’t seem to be any road involved; instead we were hurtling over plains of cracked dried mud, and though the driver clearly knew where he was going, there was nothing to tell one stretch of dirt from the one next to it. When I arrived in Djiffer I got completely ripped off for my pirogue to the island, partly because I didn’t have any Senegalese with me, and partly because I had no idea what a good price was.
When I did get there, I called my contact, and his son, Lamine met me at the docks and led me back to the house. The streets were paved with shells, with large piles of them off to the side once in a while. Home turned out to be a large compound with several buildings and no clear boundary, with a tree in the middle housing numerous rowdy birds.
One thing I hadn’t fully considered when choosing my rural stay was that this was a Serere village. This means that everybody spoke an entirely different language. This doesn’t mean I couldn’t communicate, most people spoke at least some French or Wolof, but all of the street cred I had earned from knowing the local language was gone; is didn’t matter that I was at a point where my Wolof was actually understandable, I couldn’t speak any Serere, and I was back at square one. The first thing I did on arrival was pull out my notebook and have Lamine give me a Serere lesson, but it never really took. By the time I left I could get through the greetings OK, but after that I was all sheepish grins until someone informed my integrator that no I didn’t speak Serere but I could speak a little Wolof. Plus I could never talk to any of the kids, which was a major blow to my ingratiating strategy.
My days quickly fell into a routine. In the mornings I would get up around nine, take a bucket shower (no running water) and get dressed and eat breakfast. Coumba, whose room I soon figured out I was staying in, would help me with all of these things, since I was pretty much incapable of doing anything alone. After I finished breakfast the two of us would go to thee kitchen, a thatched roof hut, with uneven slats for walls, where I would “help” cook. Though I spent much of that time sitting next to the women and daydreaming, I did more than I’m usually allowed to do, a crushed all the pepper, garlic and onion, cut potatoes, peeled cassava, and
fetched water. The kitchen had three little fire pits, each comprised of three legs for the pot to rest on, with a fire of palm fronds nestled between them. I came to know those women pretty well, considering that we could only communicate in Wolof, which was all of our second or third language. Developing a friendship with Coumba in particular was wonderful; she was sweet and funny, and always patient with the toubab who had been placed under her care. It was also the first time that I was in a situation where I really need to use Wolof to communicate, and I was surprised by how well it worked. Our conversations never got particularly deep, but nevertheless, we had conversations—in Wolof. I was proud of myself.After eating the food we had prepared, I would take a nap, and then in the afternoon, someone would have decided on some excursion for me. One day Lamine took me to the place where they supposedly found the bones of the first people to live on the island, and then to their family’s coconut tree, which a young boy Lamine had enlisted climbed so that I could try a fresh coconut. Another day I went for a walk to an adjascent island connected by a bridge with Coumba and Nafi, another one of my cooking friends who was eight months pregnant, and told me that if the
baby is a girl she will name her Mariam, after me. Lamine promised to take me to l’ile de coco, a neighboring uninhabited island, but we had to wait a while, because the first day the tides weren’t right, and then it was Thursday, which was the day that the spirits forbid anyone from visiting the island. He got another friend with a pirogue to take us out, and we paddled as close as we could get, then waded in the rest of thee way through the mangroves. I took an obscene number of sunset pictures while I was on the island, mostly because I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was.My last day there Nafi decided that she was going to braid my hair. That afternoon I met her by the side of the road, where she worked selling doughnuts, candy, flip-flops and all sorts of other odds and ends. I sat in front of her until the sun went down, responding as best as I could when people talked to me, and catching snatches of conversation when people were remarking on the toubab getting her hair braided. (I don’t speak Serere, but toubab is the same word, and laughter pretty universal.)Nafi kept asking me if it hurt, and even though I felt like she was ripping my hair out, I responded, “only a little” or “it’s all good.” She couldn’t finish my braids before she had to go, so she put my remaining hair in a side-ponytail so we could leave. A very good reminder not to take myself too seriously.
I had to leave at six the morning to catch the pirogue, and quite a bit of the family walked me to the dock. I was pretty sleepy, and had to be prompted to offer my hand for them to shake. We pulled away just as the sun was coming up, so that I could just see my family silhouetted on the dock, waving goodbye.
This past weekend, I went to Toubab Diallo with my program. I didn’t get much prep for the weekend; I thought it was going to be a relaxing couple days of lounging on beaches, but when I got there I found out that we were scheduled for drum lessons, dance lessons and a baobab
ropes course and climbing. I did not miss my relaxing weekend at all. Learning some Senegalese dance is something that I have wanted to do since I got here, but I had resigned myself to it never happening. Of course I looked like an idiot for a lot of it, and couldn’t do some of the moves because my little white girl body just doesn’t move that way, but it was a blast. We went with a larger study abroad group who got to Senegal about a month ago. I’ve been a little put off by the swarms of new toubabs around the baobab center, but it was great to get to know them better this weekend. We stayed at Ecole de Sable, a dance school that I later learned is usually reserved for professionals, and doesn’t take in raw beginners like us. I could see some of the instructors getting exasperated, but on the whole I was impressed by how patient they were with our lack of skill. We learned a Sabar dance that mimics the movements of a woman preparing millet; sometimes it was easier to see the connection than others.
On Sunday, we went to AcroBaobab, which has a ropes course ranging from several baobabs. I’ve never done anything like it before, but since I’ve always liked climbing and heights, I wasn’t surprised that I loved it. One of my favorite parts had a pirogue hung between trees, that swayed in the breeze or when I moved, the nose pointing into open air. At the end of the course we zip-lined to the ground from about 40 feet up, and when we sped past the guys who worked there doused us with water—and then let us do it to the next kid who came careening down. After that we climbed the trees, which was a lot like a rock wall, except, you know, in a tree, with footholds nailed in. It was hard to get to the top, and my arms and legs were shaking, but when I scrambled off the pegs and onto the branch at the top, it was the most amazing feeling.
Now I have less than two weeks before my program is over, and less than three before I leave. I’ve been trying to avoid the countdown, even though a couple of the other girls on my program keep giving my countdown updates. I have very mixed feeling about going home soon, there is so much I miss there, but so much I will miss here. What’s that phrase again? Oh yes: one day at a time.
