I've gotten into a pretty regular rhythm here at this point. I have a daily routine and classes and things that used to be really difficult are becoming habit.
So it's now that I'm realizing that I don't really have Senegalese friends, here.
I mean, I have plenty of friends at WARC, and I get along great with my family, and there are friendly neighbors and Hadi and I get along (la bonne) just fine. But I don't have any friends my own age that live in this country. And what I realized pretty early on is that I can't. For one simple reason- well, two.
1) All the women are too busy, and not interested in making friends with the random toubab chick
2) All the men are all too willing to be friends, and they never leave it at that.
I'm one of the girls here who has accepted this early on, because I've seen other girls here fall for it time and time again. Yes, he's the friend of your host brother, and he's really cool and he speaks English so you can communicate without misunderstandings. He hasn't tried to hit on you or anything like that. He's not being creepy, he just asked for your phone number so he could tell you what time tomorrow to meet him at the market, of course you can bring along your friends, no problem. And then he starts texting you three times a day. And he says things like "I know it was fate that we met, you are beautiful, I don't know, but I think I need you" (which may or may not be a direct quote from not-my-phone).
And you think, where the hell did that come from? We were friends. He wasn't hitting on me at all in person. And you realize, yes he was, of course he was, you just couldn't tell because guys here have a completely different concept of how to talk to girls. And you think well maybe I can just be friends with this guy, I'll tell him I'm not interested but we should really hang out sometime.
How often does that work in the States? Sure, in America it works maybe HALF the time, to say "let's just be friends" and have it be not-awkward. Maybe. Maybe if you're already friends, share a common first language, have no cultural barriers and the same priorities in life. Here? That doesn't go down so well. And it's not like you can blame them, the way our two cultures try to fit together. After all, if a woman's past the age of 18 it's only normal that she starts thinking about marriage. A man can marry whenever he wants but a woman's getting desperate at 25. And why else would a huge group of single American women be traveling abroad, and why else would they want to hang out with single men? Especially because the only American women they've seen so far have been tourists and celebrities. It just makes sense.
But I would like to have a friend who doesn't at some point start hitting on me. I would like to have a friend who can have my phone number without using it at least three times a day. I would like to have a friend with whom I can spend time without anticipating exactly when he'll start steering the conversation toward theoretically *if* I were looking for a boyfriend in Senegal, or isn't it a coincidence that we both have names that start with J, or when I'll be coming back or if I can stay longer or how easy is it to visit the United States, is it expensive? I would like to have a female friend, but that's not happening. I would like to have the boy that comes up and says "hello", to have a polite conversation, and it would be nice for him to me leave after that, and not follow me for three blocks at least.
It really is a shame. And it's something I need to get over, really, since it's not going to change. I need to get used to accepting that here, in my situation at least, friendship and courtship are one and the same. And if there is ever, ever, and exception to that, I can't try and make that the rule. If course there will be guys who come up to chat who are simply curious as to why an American student would travel to Senegal. But I can't be surprised or disappointed when they invite me over to dinner. And I can't be disappointed that I have to say no, I need to go home now, I already have plans, I lost my phone, sorry. And then I call one of my fellow American friends and we talk on the way home from school about all the phone numbers we've collected over the weekend, laugh over the latest outrageously mushy text ("I'm not thinking just about your stay here, I'm thinking about our life together, I can't live without you") whoever it was received from the soccer player she met two days ago. The guard at the bank winks at me. I've stopped smiling at strangers.
And for crying out loud, even if I *were* interested in anyone here, how in any realm of reality would that be mutually acceptable? Unless I were planning on getting married, it would be stupid to start something. Really really really stupid. "Hanging out as friends" is just a step towards dating, which is just a step towards getting more serious, which is just a step towards walking down the aisle. There is no comfortable stopping point, and guys here do not understand the meaning of "taking things slow". Being alone is an invitation. Being friendly even more so.
A student who was with the MSID program a few years ago, got engaged and married this guy from the Baobab neighborhood. Then she moved back to the states. She probably visited quite a few times in the last two years, I think the plan was to eventually get him a visa to move with her to the States. As it was she hadn't seen him for a long time. She just came back a few weeks ago because he died in a car accident. She went to her husband's funeral last weekend.
I'm going on spring break in a few weeks to St. Louis, I need to remember to call my friend's fiancé so I can deliver the CDs and flash drives and letters she sent over with me. She's in Madison now. He's from the Casamance. I wonder how much they understand each other. If you're reading, I really really would like to know, in a completely neutral and non-judgmental way, the dynamics of dating while functioning in second-and-third languages. I want to know how you understand each other. And not only how, but what you understand in each other.
Mortimer:
I understand thy kisses and thou mine,
And that's a feeling disputation:
But I will never be a truant, love,
Till I have learned thy language;
In the states it's easier to be "just friends" because everyone's so scared of saying something wrong, everyone's so scared of The Awkward that we all just politely ignore it and keep our mouths shut. After all, you couldn't say anything, that would require using words, and then you might be misunderstood or even worse, understood, and then- what?
This rant is going nowhere.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Driving to Hohocus, keep your radio in focus...
Okay, guys. I need to learn salsa. And I mean I need to be amazing at salsa, the way everyone on the dance floor was amazing at salsa on Friday night when we all went to the party at Bar New Africa (same place we take classes)
Oh man. So there's the DJ who recognized Kaela from the first lesson we took, let us in even though I forgot our dance card (that proves we paid), and the floor was PACKED with dancers. First, there are five teachers who are probably there all the time, and a handful of women who'd take turns dancing with each of them, and then a handful of other men who you could tell were regulars, and good friends of the teachers. The whole room was basically an even split of toubab tourists who'd get drunk and try to dance, and the regulars who looked incredibly intimidating until you realized they were having a blast and weren't performing for anyone, they were just there to have fun like anyone else. Kaela was dancing a bunch, watching her made me just ache to be that good.
I wanna do *that*, so much! I mean, I got pulled into a few dances- three, I think. The same guy, one of the teachers was a real sweetie and taught me basic steps and didn't mind when I would stumble or trip or spin too wildly, but honestly I was perfectly happy watching everyone else. I got a few weird looks being the girl who stood on the sidelines the entire night without dancing at all, I barely even went to sit down at the table with some other friends, I didn't order a drink or anything. I was fascinated, though- by the end of the night I could tell how White-Pants-Suspenders' style was different from Showoff-Booty-Shake was different from Dreds-and-Eyelashes, and I started picking up on how flawlessly Bearded-Teacher and Fedora would switch partners mid-step. I saw how Sweetie pretended to be a beginner when he was dancing with newbies like me but then how when no one was looking he'd break out some fancy steps.
I really want to be that good. They did a salsa mixer, in a circle, with Dreds-and-Eyelashes calling out what to do next, and as it got later and later Bootyshake and Suspenders got more and more competitive, jokingly kicking each other or trying to outdo or throw off the other. DJ was dancing behind the bar. Awkward Polo Shirt could move his hips but not his torso and looked very very focused on his tipsy partner who wanted to be anywhere else. A group of middle-aged toubab men, balding, beers in hand, obviously on vacation, started wriggling in a circle, thrusting themselves shoulders first onto the floor and laughing. And a few girls with no rhythm took the night as an excuse to gyrate their scantily-yet-fashionably clad asses nonstop into what they assumed was a Latin dance step.
That night I dreamed the entire evening over again. It really was exactly what I remembered, which means that everyone's faces were perfectly clear, and in my dream all their legs were blurry. Even my subconscious was trying to remember every single moment of what I saw, and failed.
We're going back this week, lessons on Wednesday and party on Friday. I need to get good at this. It is now an actual need of mine. Because although last Friday I was feeling more mesmerized than left out, I realize how awesome it would be to actually, you know, DANCE.
Saturday we spent the day at the market, I got some fabric for a dress, now I just need to ask around and find a tailor who's not trop cher/jafe. We ate at a fancy french bakery/cafe/restaurant, all seven or nine of us, and then headed over to the national theater to see this free modern dance performance.
It was sponsored by the American Embassy and was this dance troupe from Brooklyn who was going on this world tour, performing for American citizens abroad? Which was weird to begin with. So the theater was filled with Americans, also really really weird. The guy who got up to introduce the event was reading this speech in french with the most awkwardly American accent I've ever heard, stumbling over words and gesturing stiffly with his free hand for no apparent reason. Then, after signaling from the stage for a few minutes for the light guy to wake up, turn off the house lights, turn on the stage lights, no turn off the house lights, no keep the stage lights on, no turn off the balcony lights too, okay who's taking the mic off the stage, no you don't need to follow it with a spotlight, okay who's opening the curtain, left side opened much faster than the right....
it was a big ordeal but finally the opening act started playing. And the *opening* act was like the Troupe Allah Laké but not as cool and with more expensive costumes. But it was still incredibly impressive traditional African dance. Then we waited while the techies sorted out how to transition to EVIDANCE, from Brooklyn.
When you compare modern dance to African dance, modern dance just looks lame. That's the problem. It just looks silly and boring. And it was. This group was made up of almost entirely androgynously-ethnic-looking purposefully-diverse cast. I couldn't get over the fact that one of the women looked like this woman Cheryl I used to work with, if she had my grandma's haircut. Doing modern dance. She was very distracting. They weren't very good.
And the thing is, I'm used to dance being an expression, not a conversation. This was a conversation, and I have to say I understand Wolof better. I mean, it was clear the dancers/choreographer were trying really really hard to communicate something, and I was resorting to linguistic strategies to try and understand. See, I could sometimes figure out African dance cognates, and certain patterns were repeated over and over again, certain gestures were more literal than others. And sometimes two dancers would be facing each other, doing sort of a call-and response. And sometimes they would look like they were holding guns. And sometimes they would spin, and always their faces were very grave, very focused. It was like poetry, people are always comparing dance to poetry, and this poem was written by someone with a very limited vocabulary who didn't know the meaning of metaphor or meter. Who understood rhythm but not alliteration. And I realize at the end that I was using the exact same mental process as I do to try and understand Wolof.
Which, by the way, is going swimmingly. I've got the greatest teacher ever, Sidy ("C.D."), who tells us stories of when he taught Wolof in the Peace Corps and how his students nicknamed him Q-tip because he's so skinny... this man is literally the greatest and most efficient teacher I have ever had for anything, and that is saying a lot. I mean, I've had lost of wonderful teachers. Absolutely great. And after seven hours a week of class, after five weeks, I can have a basic conversation. I can understand the gist of what my family's talking about most of the time, and sometimes can even respond! And greetings and small talk are becoming easier and easier. I can form complex sentences, even. For example:
Lan téere Shakespeare bind?
- Téere yu bare la bind, wanté bëgg na fukk ak ñarreel guddi.
What book did Shakespeare write?
- He wrote a lot of books, but I like Twelfth Night.
Okay, so probably that's not entirely gramatically correct, but it does mean that I can be understood. And I love it. lovelovelove it. It's not that I show off in class, not really, but I do always try and see, if he asks a simple question, if I can give a more complex answer. It's fun! It's like a game. Take what cards you've got, play them off each other. Plus, it's the one class I'm good at. And you can get much cheaper taxi fares if you start off greeting them in Wolof. Usually.
PS. I would like to make a clarification. This is ME writing this. I am not off on a Grand African Adventure to Find Out Who I Am, I will not return to the States a Changed Individual full of Worldly Knowledge. I am writing what is in my head. Exactly how it is. I'm not writing ALL of what is in my head, that would be boring and scary, alternately. But I am not trying to be a Writer. I'm not trying to write pretty, or philosophical, or amusingly. Or anything like that. This is ME, and that means JOHANNA, not Aminata, and don't worry I'm not going anywhere. Besides, y'know, Africa.
Oh man. So there's the DJ who recognized Kaela from the first lesson we took, let us in even though I forgot our dance card (that proves we paid), and the floor was PACKED with dancers. First, there are five teachers who are probably there all the time, and a handful of women who'd take turns dancing with each of them, and then a handful of other men who you could tell were regulars, and good friends of the teachers. The whole room was basically an even split of toubab tourists who'd get drunk and try to dance, and the regulars who looked incredibly intimidating until you realized they were having a blast and weren't performing for anyone, they were just there to have fun like anyone else. Kaela was dancing a bunch, watching her made me just ache to be that good.
I wanna do *that*, so much! I mean, I got pulled into a few dances- three, I think. The same guy, one of the teachers was a real sweetie and taught me basic steps and didn't mind when I would stumble or trip or spin too wildly, but honestly I was perfectly happy watching everyone else. I got a few weird looks being the girl who stood on the sidelines the entire night without dancing at all, I barely even went to sit down at the table with some other friends, I didn't order a drink or anything. I was fascinated, though- by the end of the night I could tell how White-Pants-Suspenders' style was different from Showoff-Booty-Shake was different from Dreds-and-Eyelashes, and I started picking up on how flawlessly Bearded-Teacher and Fedora would switch partners mid-step. I saw how Sweetie pretended to be a beginner when he was dancing with newbies like me but then how when no one was looking he'd break out some fancy steps.
I really want to be that good. They did a salsa mixer, in a circle, with Dreds-and-Eyelashes calling out what to do next, and as it got later and later Bootyshake and Suspenders got more and more competitive, jokingly kicking each other or trying to outdo or throw off the other. DJ was dancing behind the bar. Awkward Polo Shirt could move his hips but not his torso and looked very very focused on his tipsy partner who wanted to be anywhere else. A group of middle-aged toubab men, balding, beers in hand, obviously on vacation, started wriggling in a circle, thrusting themselves shoulders first onto the floor and laughing. And a few girls with no rhythm took the night as an excuse to gyrate their scantily-yet-fashionably clad asses nonstop into what they assumed was a Latin dance step.
That night I dreamed the entire evening over again. It really was exactly what I remembered, which means that everyone's faces were perfectly clear, and in my dream all their legs were blurry. Even my subconscious was trying to remember every single moment of what I saw, and failed.
We're going back this week, lessons on Wednesday and party on Friday. I need to get good at this. It is now an actual need of mine. Because although last Friday I was feeling more mesmerized than left out, I realize how awesome it would be to actually, you know, DANCE.
Saturday we spent the day at the market, I got some fabric for a dress, now I just need to ask around and find a tailor who's not trop cher/jafe. We ate at a fancy french bakery/cafe/restaurant, all seven or nine of us, and then headed over to the national theater to see this free modern dance performance.
It was sponsored by the American Embassy and was this dance troupe from Brooklyn who was going on this world tour, performing for American citizens abroad? Which was weird to begin with. So the theater was filled with Americans, also really really weird. The guy who got up to introduce the event was reading this speech in french with the most awkwardly American accent I've ever heard, stumbling over words and gesturing stiffly with his free hand for no apparent reason. Then, after signaling from the stage for a few minutes for the light guy to wake up, turn off the house lights, turn on the stage lights, no turn off the house lights, no keep the stage lights on, no turn off the balcony lights too, okay who's taking the mic off the stage, no you don't need to follow it with a spotlight, okay who's opening the curtain, left side opened much faster than the right....
it was a big ordeal but finally the opening act started playing. And the *opening* act was like the Troupe Allah Laké but not as cool and with more expensive costumes. But it was still incredibly impressive traditional African dance. Then we waited while the techies sorted out how to transition to EVIDANCE, from Brooklyn.
When you compare modern dance to African dance, modern dance just looks lame. That's the problem. It just looks silly and boring. And it was. This group was made up of almost entirely androgynously-ethnic-looking purposefully-diverse cast. I couldn't get over the fact that one of the women looked like this woman Cheryl I used to work with, if she had my grandma's haircut. Doing modern dance. She was very distracting. They weren't very good.
And the thing is, I'm used to dance being an expression, not a conversation. This was a conversation, and I have to say I understand Wolof better. I mean, it was clear the dancers/choreographer were trying really really hard to communicate something, and I was resorting to linguistic strategies to try and understand. See, I could sometimes figure out African dance cognates, and certain patterns were repeated over and over again, certain gestures were more literal than others. And sometimes two dancers would be facing each other, doing sort of a call-and response. And sometimes they would look like they were holding guns. And sometimes they would spin, and always their faces were very grave, very focused. It was like poetry, people are always comparing dance to poetry, and this poem was written by someone with a very limited vocabulary who didn't know the meaning of metaphor or meter. Who understood rhythm but not alliteration. And I realize at the end that I was using the exact same mental process as I do to try and understand Wolof.
Which, by the way, is going swimmingly. I've got the greatest teacher ever, Sidy ("C.D."), who tells us stories of when he taught Wolof in the Peace Corps and how his students nicknamed him Q-tip because he's so skinny... this man is literally the greatest and most efficient teacher I have ever had for anything, and that is saying a lot. I mean, I've had lost of wonderful teachers. Absolutely great. And after seven hours a week of class, after five weeks, I can have a basic conversation. I can understand the gist of what my family's talking about most of the time, and sometimes can even respond! And greetings and small talk are becoming easier and easier. I can form complex sentences, even. For example:
Lan téere Shakespeare bind?
- Téere yu bare la bind, wanté bëgg na fukk ak ñarreel guddi.
What book did Shakespeare write?
- He wrote a lot of books, but I like Twelfth Night.
Okay, so probably that's not entirely gramatically correct, but it does mean that I can be understood. And I love it. lovelovelove it. It's not that I show off in class, not really, but I do always try and see, if he asks a simple question, if I can give a more complex answer. It's fun! It's like a game. Take what cards you've got, play them off each other. Plus, it's the one class I'm good at. And you can get much cheaper taxi fares if you start off greeting them in Wolof. Usually.
PS. I would like to make a clarification. This is ME writing this. I am not off on a Grand African Adventure to Find Out Who I Am, I will not return to the States a Changed Individual full of Worldly Knowledge. I am writing what is in my head. Exactly how it is. I'm not writing ALL of what is in my head, that would be boring and scary, alternately. But I am not trying to be a Writer. I'm not trying to write pretty, or philosophical, or amusingly. Or anything like that. This is ME, and that means JOHANNA, not Aminata, and don't worry I'm not going anywhere. Besides, y'know, Africa.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Un-deux-trois, cinq-six-sept
I went salsa dancing last night.
.......Salsa dancing!
It was fabulous. A little expensive, totally worth it, in a tiny room in the back of "Bar New Africa" with lovely (recorded) music. It was a class, too, beginners on one side and advanced on the other, I really really really wanna get that good. All the men there were teachers, at least five of them, Latino-African speaking French and English teaching a bunch of toubab girls (and not hitting on a single one) the mambo, rumba, salsa, tourne à gauche, à droight, un-deux-trois, cinq-six-sept it was easy and I caught on fast so I got to dance with the teacher in my group. We are *so* going back. Friday, I think. Classes are every Tuesday and Wednesday, ten bucks each but I can be back in time for dinner.
Why oh why didn't we start doing this a month ago? I didn't realize how much I missed dancing, *really* dancing, with a partner I mean. Ohhhh what a great night.
But when I got home I found out that Yacine, our bonne/maid, my friend and Wolof teacher, isn't coming back. She didn't arrive on Tuesday, never showed up, and yesterday asked Hadi the other maid to bring her her clothes that were still drying. She's fifteen, and probably found another job, better paid maybe, and didn't want to say so. My parents say that's how all maids are, they just want fancy clothes and don't care about keeping a job, they take money and go, you can never trust one to stay, she doesn't realize there's a social system here in the city, you can't be a city girl just by buying fancy clothes, all maids are like this, they're lazy. Don't want to work at all. That Yacine, she was always lazy, listening to music, wanting to dance all the time. Sereers are like that too, you can't trust them, right when you start to trust them they up and leave. Lazy, that's what she is.
I hadn't realized how much I considered her a friend, but realized last night that I'm really sad she's gone. I'm gonna miss Yacine, and hanging out making fatayas (of course for me it's something fun to do after school, not my 15-hour-per-day job) and learning wolof and teasing and laughing and singing quietly, maybe dancing a little in place. I hope she found another job, and that everything's okay.
.......Salsa dancing!
It was fabulous. A little expensive, totally worth it, in a tiny room in the back of "Bar New Africa" with lovely (recorded) music. It was a class, too, beginners on one side and advanced on the other, I really really really wanna get that good. All the men there were teachers, at least five of them, Latino-African speaking French and English teaching a bunch of toubab girls (and not hitting on a single one) the mambo, rumba, salsa, tourne à gauche, à droight, un-deux-trois, cinq-six-sept it was easy and I caught on fast so I got to dance with the teacher in my group. We are *so* going back. Friday, I think. Classes are every Tuesday and Wednesday, ten bucks each but I can be back in time for dinner.
Why oh why didn't we start doing this a month ago? I didn't realize how much I missed dancing, *really* dancing, with a partner I mean. Ohhhh what a great night.
But when I got home I found out that Yacine, our bonne/maid, my friend and Wolof teacher, isn't coming back. She didn't arrive on Tuesday, never showed up, and yesterday asked Hadi the other maid to bring her her clothes that were still drying. She's fifteen, and probably found another job, better paid maybe, and didn't want to say so. My parents say that's how all maids are, they just want fancy clothes and don't care about keeping a job, they take money and go, you can never trust one to stay, she doesn't realize there's a social system here in the city, you can't be a city girl just by buying fancy clothes, all maids are like this, they're lazy. Don't want to work at all. That Yacine, she was always lazy, listening to music, wanting to dance all the time. Sereers are like that too, you can't trust them, right when you start to trust them they up and leave. Lazy, that's what she is.
I hadn't realized how much I considered her a friend, but realized last night that I'm really sad she's gone. I'm gonna miss Yacine, and hanging out making fatayas (of course for me it's something fun to do after school, not my 15-hour-per-day job) and learning wolof and teasing and laughing and singing quietly, maybe dancing a little in place. I hope she found another job, and that everything's okay.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Sa ndey jaay fondé.
Saturday I helped with fataya again- it beats just sitting. And Yacine and Amas and I are really getting along, Yacine's teaching me more Wolof, and Amas is acting as a translator- we were working on numbers this weekend, and the names of various kitchen tools (spoon- kuddu) and food (chicken- ginaar) and I was teasing her about her Valentine and she was teasing me, asking for a present, asking for chocolate.
We stopped laughing when a far-off crying child started screaming. The neighborhood's so echoey I couldn't tell where it was coming from, but this was not just the usual bustling city noise. This was a child screaming. It sounded frightened and in pain, and Mama Binta told me to stay here, and she and Pascal left. After a while I heard the screaming mix with raised voices, all women, and after a while it stopped, or calmed down, or went inside I'm not sure which. But Mama Binta came back mad. And Pascal told me that it was one of his friends, a boy that had a bloody arm, from his shoulder to his elbow, and Mama Binta started telling me that his mother shouldn't let the uncle do that, not in the street at least, that she's not going to tell anyone how to raise their child but you just don't hit a boy like that. If he plays too much, she says, you take him inside maybe, to "tappe" and to teach them a lesson, but then once they've learned their lesson you let them go back outside to play. This was too much, it isn't natural, it isn't right, she says. Mama Binta says you know Pascal, I'll shout at him, I always shout at him and I have a loud voice but I don't touch him and he knows that. And other families "tappe" their children but not like that, and not in the street. It isn't natural.
I'm glad I stayed inside. I'm very glad I stayed inside. Because I don't know what I would do if I had seen an uncle beating a child in the street. I have no idea what I would do, because I'd like to think that I couldn't just stand there and let it happen. But I'd also like to think that a group of mothers, of neighbors, couldn't just stand there and let it happen. But I don't think I could stop it from happening, and it would be very wrong in this society to get between a parent/uncle and child. And at first I disagreed with how as far as I can tell what my mother was complaining about was as much the fact that it was out in the open in the street- that was as big a problem as the act itself. But now? In a culture where you can't do anything I can see how a mother who lived next door would want to avoid the fact that she can't do anything. I'm glad I stayed inside.
When the fatayas were done I went with my mom to get ingredients for dinner tonight, potatoes and carrots and onions and black pepper and eggs- it's my night to cook and I'm making latkes. After all, we only cook on gas stoves and there's no end of oil. The carrots here are bigger than the potatoes. I hope I got enough.
And then I meet up with some friends and we go to la Plage Ngor which is much more touristy than the Mermoz beach, this one has expensive restaurants and people selling trinkets and blue water and smooth sand and lots of trash just underwater where you can't see it. And this group of musicians that plopped down their instruments right in front of us and started chatting. I was the only one in my group who would talk to them, I said we were students, we weren't in town for long, and then I made the mistake of telling them my name. As soon as I did, they launched into song, of course I have no idea what the hell they were singing, they could have been saying "here's Johanna/Jwanna, she'll give you money, she's such a toubab, we're not leaving until she gives us money" but at least it was a nice tune. And I tipped them the average of a dime. And they were nice and eventually left, so I took it as a nice touristy event.
And we did our best to ignore the man in the windbreaker and running pants, who shuffled up to us, with three empty cigarrette boxes in one hand and an empty bottle of booze in the other, he was limping and I think there was something not quite right in the brainpan and he didn't say anything he just stared at us but in a way that made me think he wasn't really seeing us, just staring, and occasionally he'd wander off to look at the ocean, and he always stayed at least ten feet away, but it was a very very long time and he didn't really leave. Eventually we got used to him. It made me miss Felix, though.
Before we left I realized that my phone, my new cell phone, that I had bought from my sister exactly a week earlier, was gone. I couldn't find it. It wasn't in anyone's bag, or under anyone's towel, or anywhere. And this was the one I had just gotten. Darnit. In the taxi though Kaela called my cell, and someone picked up, I talked to her saying "I think you found my cell phone" and she replied that yeah, this morning her mom found my phone near a pile of trash in the street, she lives in Liberté 1, do I know the Casino supermarché? Of course I do, I walk past it every single day, so she met me and Kaela in front of the Casino and we walked to her house a few blocks away. I met the family, the whole family, sat down in the living room, and we chatted about school and one of the men said he recognized me since I walk by every day on my way to school. The old grandmother brought out my cellphone, scolding me for having lost it, asking for un cadeau before she'd give it back to me. I felt like an idiot, and took out the 2000 CFA bill I had with me- of course I was willing to pay, and of course I was thankful- see, I was expecting to have to pay lots and lots of money to get my phone back, or maybe just have to buy a new phone. The entire family, though, laughed, and explained that she was joking, they didn't want any money. I insisted, I wanted to thank her, but stopped when she refused again because I didn't want to insult anyone... again, feeling like an idiot. How Embarrassing. And then we thanked them, said goodbye, maybe see you next time, be sure to keep hold of that phone, thank you so much, ba beneen yoon.
I came home and started making latkes, grating everything by hand- I asked Mama Binta to help me chop onions since I'm scared to use the huge knife without a cutting board. The power went out three times while I was grating the potatoes. It took forever to cook, though, since I could only do one at a time on the burner. My sister was sent out to help me but it's not like she could have made the process go faster, and I could hear them all inside talking in Wolof, and I do now know the words "Kañ" (when) and "Lekk" (eat) and even though at home I normally make waaaaay too much, I forgot that this is Senegal and therefore I made not nearly enough. But I left them in the pan outside to warm up while I went to get some bread at the boutique, when I get back my mom has them on the plate on the table, she told me that I can't leave food outside, the cats will get it. Which is a phrase I'd never heard before, made me think of the sphinxes from Mirrormask, they're everywhere.
But the latkes were a hit. Gone in no time, I ate mostly bread and applesauce since I already know what they taste like. My dad wants to learn how to make them, he wants to watch me next time so he can see how. My mom wants to make some for her own mother, thinks she'll like them (Grandma, by the way, is blind and bedridden and always sitting on the same couch, she moves herself into a chair that faces Mecca to pray several times every day, she does this herself and without any help and it looks like the most painstakingly slow process ever. Her name is Aminata, and my family calls me Aminata too, I'm named after her while I'm here.) They said it would make a good appetizer, and asked why I didn't make more. I said it was because they take so long to cook, I couldn't make more and have them be done in time. Not so smooth, Jwanna, but they let it rest.
At midnight I met some friends, we took a taxi to this club, Just4You, (http://www.just4udakar.com/) which is the favorite of all the students here. We'd never been before, but Omar Penn was playing and I guess he's really famous, the Lonely Planet guidebook had him as one of the 3 listed must-sees at this club. We payed 5000 CFA to get in, and it's a really really swanky place as it turns out. Everyone there was dressed up and sitting at tables listening to the opening act, which I don't know who it was but the music sounded very traditional, and it was an open-air place so we sat down at a table where we could look up at the stars through the leaves of the palm trees that were growing right out of the middle of the floor... we're in Senegal, you guys. It was slightly chilly so I had a sweatshirt and jeans and flipflops, the music was great and we ordered the girliest drinks we could find on the menu- between the four of us there was a ti punch, a daiquiri, a gin fizz and a piña colada. When they arrived the only one we could recognize was the piña colada because it looked like it had milk in it. Everything else was in a glass you'd expect to be used for some sort of gin and tonic, and each glass was filled with about three shots of booze, two ice cubes, and a slice of lime. And what they tasted like was death, that might have been scared by a sugar cube and sent on its way. We didn't finish them. Kenta's Long Island Iced Tea (I'm not sure he knew what he ordered in the first place) was, needless to say, untouched.
But the music was amazing and we found a cab ride home no problem and I called my mom to let me in at about a quarter past three, and the next morning was Sunday so I could sleep in!
And I did. I slept in and when I woke up I looked at my feet and thought I had chicken pox. My groggy mind was trying to figure out what these (34, I counted) tiny red bumps were that covered my feet. It wasn't until they registered as "mosquito bites" that they started to itch. And then yes, they started to itch. I've been trying to ignore them ever since. See, I'm used to midwestern mosquitoes that are the size of small birds and sound like motorboats and when they bite you, you know right away. Dakar mosquitoes are tiny and silent and leave tiny silent bites that can kill you but I've been taking my huge blue malaria pills so we'll see, I feel fine so far. And, after all, it was Valentine's day. Which means Yacine teased me even more about giving her presents, and I teased her even more about being Amas's Valentine and because it was Sunday, Mama Binta taught me how to make another traditional Senegalese dish- and it's the best thing I've eaten here so far.
CEBB U YAPP (Rice and Meat)
Cut up small pieces of meat, even smaller pieces of onions and green pepper, and cook them in a pot with salt and oil.
Cut up more green pepper and onion, and mash that with a little bit of piment (hot pepper) and a few Maggi (bullion cubes), we used the huge wooden dëbb (mortar and pestle), the idea is to make a sauce-ish mixture, that you add to the meat when it's done cooking.
In that same pot you cooked the meat in, and put the sauce in, you add some water to let it cook like a stew (this might be a good crock pot recipe), and then a little while later add rice and enough water to cook the rice, right in with the meat so it all cooks together, with a few bay leaves and thyme as well.
The rice should turn brown from cooking with the spices and meat and vegetables, and leave it still a little wet so it's easier to eat with your hand, shaping it into little balls (I'm so good at this now!)
Serve with piment sauce and/or squeezed lime.
Oh! and when you're almost done, scrape the almost-burnt bits from the bottom of the pot- apparently that's the best part of the whole thing.
PS- if I'm being unclear about anything, feel free to email me with questions... I'm probably not explaining some things that I take for granted here...
We stopped laughing when a far-off crying child started screaming. The neighborhood's so echoey I couldn't tell where it was coming from, but this was not just the usual bustling city noise. This was a child screaming. It sounded frightened and in pain, and Mama Binta told me to stay here, and she and Pascal left. After a while I heard the screaming mix with raised voices, all women, and after a while it stopped, or calmed down, or went inside I'm not sure which. But Mama Binta came back mad. And Pascal told me that it was one of his friends, a boy that had a bloody arm, from his shoulder to his elbow, and Mama Binta started telling me that his mother shouldn't let the uncle do that, not in the street at least, that she's not going to tell anyone how to raise their child but you just don't hit a boy like that. If he plays too much, she says, you take him inside maybe, to "tappe" and to teach them a lesson, but then once they've learned their lesson you let them go back outside to play. This was too much, it isn't natural, it isn't right, she says. Mama Binta says you know Pascal, I'll shout at him, I always shout at him and I have a loud voice but I don't touch him and he knows that. And other families "tappe" their children but not like that, and not in the street. It isn't natural.
I'm glad I stayed inside. I'm very glad I stayed inside. Because I don't know what I would do if I had seen an uncle beating a child in the street. I have no idea what I would do, because I'd like to think that I couldn't just stand there and let it happen. But I'd also like to think that a group of mothers, of neighbors, couldn't just stand there and let it happen. But I don't think I could stop it from happening, and it would be very wrong in this society to get between a parent/uncle and child. And at first I disagreed with how as far as I can tell what my mother was complaining about was as much the fact that it was out in the open in the street- that was as big a problem as the act itself. But now? In a culture where you can't do anything I can see how a mother who lived next door would want to avoid the fact that she can't do anything. I'm glad I stayed inside.
When the fatayas were done I went with my mom to get ingredients for dinner tonight, potatoes and carrots and onions and black pepper and eggs- it's my night to cook and I'm making latkes. After all, we only cook on gas stoves and there's no end of oil. The carrots here are bigger than the potatoes. I hope I got enough.
And then I meet up with some friends and we go to la Plage Ngor which is much more touristy than the Mermoz beach, this one has expensive restaurants and people selling trinkets and blue water and smooth sand and lots of trash just underwater where you can't see it. And this group of musicians that plopped down their instruments right in front of us and started chatting. I was the only one in my group who would talk to them, I said we were students, we weren't in town for long, and then I made the mistake of telling them my name. As soon as I did, they launched into song, of course I have no idea what the hell they were singing, they could have been saying "here's Johanna/Jwanna, she'll give you money, she's such a toubab, we're not leaving until she gives us money" but at least it was a nice tune. And I tipped them the average of a dime. And they were nice and eventually left, so I took it as a nice touristy event.
And we did our best to ignore the man in the windbreaker and running pants, who shuffled up to us, with three empty cigarrette boxes in one hand and an empty bottle of booze in the other, he was limping and I think there was something not quite right in the brainpan and he didn't say anything he just stared at us but in a way that made me think he wasn't really seeing us, just staring, and occasionally he'd wander off to look at the ocean, and he always stayed at least ten feet away, but it was a very very long time and he didn't really leave. Eventually we got used to him. It made me miss Felix, though.
Before we left I realized that my phone, my new cell phone, that I had bought from my sister exactly a week earlier, was gone. I couldn't find it. It wasn't in anyone's bag, or under anyone's towel, or anywhere. And this was the one I had just gotten. Darnit. In the taxi though Kaela called my cell, and someone picked up, I talked to her saying "I think you found my cell phone" and she replied that yeah, this morning her mom found my phone near a pile of trash in the street, she lives in Liberté 1, do I know the Casino supermarché? Of course I do, I walk past it every single day, so she met me and Kaela in front of the Casino and we walked to her house a few blocks away. I met the family, the whole family, sat down in the living room, and we chatted about school and one of the men said he recognized me since I walk by every day on my way to school. The old grandmother brought out my cellphone, scolding me for having lost it, asking for un cadeau before she'd give it back to me. I felt like an idiot, and took out the 2000 CFA bill I had with me- of course I was willing to pay, and of course I was thankful- see, I was expecting to have to pay lots and lots of money to get my phone back, or maybe just have to buy a new phone. The entire family, though, laughed, and explained that she was joking, they didn't want any money. I insisted, I wanted to thank her, but stopped when she refused again because I didn't want to insult anyone... again, feeling like an idiot. How Embarrassing. And then we thanked them, said goodbye, maybe see you next time, be sure to keep hold of that phone, thank you so much, ba beneen yoon.
I came home and started making latkes, grating everything by hand- I asked Mama Binta to help me chop onions since I'm scared to use the huge knife without a cutting board. The power went out three times while I was grating the potatoes. It took forever to cook, though, since I could only do one at a time on the burner. My sister was sent out to help me but it's not like she could have made the process go faster, and I could hear them all inside talking in Wolof, and I do now know the words "Kañ" (when) and "Lekk" (eat) and even though at home I normally make waaaaay too much, I forgot that this is Senegal and therefore I made not nearly enough. But I left them in the pan outside to warm up while I went to get some bread at the boutique, when I get back my mom has them on the plate on the table, she told me that I can't leave food outside, the cats will get it. Which is a phrase I'd never heard before, made me think of the sphinxes from Mirrormask, they're everywhere.
But the latkes were a hit. Gone in no time, I ate mostly bread and applesauce since I already know what they taste like. My dad wants to learn how to make them, he wants to watch me next time so he can see how. My mom wants to make some for her own mother, thinks she'll like them (Grandma, by the way, is blind and bedridden and always sitting on the same couch, she moves herself into a chair that faces Mecca to pray several times every day, she does this herself and without any help and it looks like the most painstakingly slow process ever. Her name is Aminata, and my family calls me Aminata too, I'm named after her while I'm here.) They said it would make a good appetizer, and asked why I didn't make more. I said it was because they take so long to cook, I couldn't make more and have them be done in time. Not so smooth, Jwanna, but they let it rest.
At midnight I met some friends, we took a taxi to this club, Just4You, (http://www.just4udakar.com/) which is the favorite of all the students here. We'd never been before, but Omar Penn was playing and I guess he's really famous, the Lonely Planet guidebook had him as one of the 3 listed must-sees at this club. We payed 5000 CFA to get in, and it's a really really swanky place as it turns out. Everyone there was dressed up and sitting at tables listening to the opening act, which I don't know who it was but the music sounded very traditional, and it was an open-air place so we sat down at a table where we could look up at the stars through the leaves of the palm trees that were growing right out of the middle of the floor... we're in Senegal, you guys. It was slightly chilly so I had a sweatshirt and jeans and flipflops, the music was great and we ordered the girliest drinks we could find on the menu- between the four of us there was a ti punch, a daiquiri, a gin fizz and a piña colada. When they arrived the only one we could recognize was the piña colada because it looked like it had milk in it. Everything else was in a glass you'd expect to be used for some sort of gin and tonic, and each glass was filled with about three shots of booze, two ice cubes, and a slice of lime. And what they tasted like was death, that might have been scared by a sugar cube and sent on its way. We didn't finish them. Kenta's Long Island Iced Tea (I'm not sure he knew what he ordered in the first place) was, needless to say, untouched.
But the music was amazing and we found a cab ride home no problem and I called my mom to let me in at about a quarter past three, and the next morning was Sunday so I could sleep in!
And I did. I slept in and when I woke up I looked at my feet and thought I had chicken pox. My groggy mind was trying to figure out what these (34, I counted) tiny red bumps were that covered my feet. It wasn't until they registered as "mosquito bites" that they started to itch. And then yes, they started to itch. I've been trying to ignore them ever since. See, I'm used to midwestern mosquitoes that are the size of small birds and sound like motorboats and when they bite you, you know right away. Dakar mosquitoes are tiny and silent and leave tiny silent bites that can kill you but I've been taking my huge blue malaria pills so we'll see, I feel fine so far. And, after all, it was Valentine's day. Which means Yacine teased me even more about giving her presents, and I teased her even more about being Amas's Valentine and because it was Sunday, Mama Binta taught me how to make another traditional Senegalese dish- and it's the best thing I've eaten here so far.
CEBB U YAPP (Rice and Meat)
Cut up small pieces of meat, even smaller pieces of onions and green pepper, and cook them in a pot with salt and oil.
Cut up more green pepper and onion, and mash that with a little bit of piment (hot pepper) and a few Maggi (bullion cubes), we used the huge wooden dëbb (mortar and pestle), the idea is to make a sauce-ish mixture, that you add to the meat when it's done cooking.
In that same pot you cooked the meat in, and put the sauce in, you add some water to let it cook like a stew (this might be a good crock pot recipe), and then a little while later add rice and enough water to cook the rice, right in with the meat so it all cooks together, with a few bay leaves and thyme as well.
The rice should turn brown from cooking with the spices and meat and vegetables, and leave it still a little wet so it's easier to eat with your hand, shaping it into little balls (I'm so good at this now!)
Serve with piment sauce and/or squeezed lime.
Oh! and when you're almost done, scrape the almost-burnt bits from the bottom of the pot- apparently that's the best part of the whole thing.
PS- if I'm being unclear about anything, feel free to email me with questions... I'm probably not explaining some things that I take for granted here...
Friday, February 12, 2010
Vois sur ton chemin...
(Things that don't exist here: Stoplights. And Brownies. Things that do exist here: Pineapple Soda in thick glass bottles)
Yesterday I felt very French.
After a very lively Country Analysis class (see: A Rant about fish), a trip to the one bank that accepts my ATM card and the man there is very nice even if he winks at me to the point where it looks like he's got sand in his eye which is entirely possible but unlikely given his huge carefully-not-more-than-helpful grin, a conversation with the fruit seller (he's got pears today! Forty cents, and they're ripe, unlike last week.) and on the way back I decided to finally try this Café Touba thing- it's coffee brewed with spices, but it's the strongest coffee ever and tastes like absolutely nothing familiar, like spices and fermented something and it's so strong my face tenses up every time I take a sip and it takes about four sips for me to decide not to put myself through any more of that, thank you very much- and a good long blogging session, we decide to go check out the French institute- they're showing a movie tonight, le Petit Nicolas which I remember reading the book in high school French class, so we absolutely *have* to go.
It was me, and Kaela, and Laura, and Kelsey. We successfully negotiated a cab ride into centreville- he started at 3000CFA, which is just crazytalk, and we started at 1200, and managed to talk him down to 1700! Hint: it helps if you pretend to walk away. We got dropped off at the French Institute and walked around a bit- we had two hours before the film started and wanted to go somewhere to eat. Of course, we acquired plenty of "guides", and one even followed us into a restaurant where he then argued with the waiter over whether or not he was with us. We'd found a table with four chairs and insisted that there were four of us, I'm sorry we can't pull up another chair, we're eating here, and we have enough friends with the four of us, no sir we don't know him he followed us here, no sir we don't need a guide we know where we're going. It took a lot of negotiating to get him out of the restaurant so we could order.
It was a tiny place, really- down some small street, had those old-west-bar swinging doors to get in and a chalkboard over the doorway with dishes and prices written on them. There was a British couple that walked in a little while later that tried to ask about vegetarian options and ended up with a plate of rice and tomato sauce. I had grilled fish skewers and fries- real, greasy, salty fries that I couldn't possibly finish, and a tiny cup of ataaya tea and then we walked down the street to N'Ice Cream for some overpriced gelatto (the "obama" flavor is chocolate with chocolate fudge cookie pieces) before the movie.
Okay, you guys. Anyone who has read le Petit Nicolas in french class, or who has seen les Choristes, or who has any kind of appreciation for adorable French children, you need to see this film. We were in an air-conditioned tiny theater with squeaky seats filled with French people, or swiss, either way even though it was a room full of toubabs we were the only ones speaking English, which was strange. Adorable film, it's on DVD now, so I'd advise you all to check it out. And if you can understand all the French in the movie, you're a better speaker than I. Personally, I think the Africans are easier to understand.
This morning they cut the power to our neighborhood. I heard Devyn explaining later that the government actually decides where and when to have power outages, because there simply isn't enough electricity to go around. So instead of just letting blackouts happen, they schedule power outages and cut the electricity to certain areas of Dakar for a while. Lately Liberté 3's been hit pretty often- it's a good thing I brought a flashlight- I'll probably leave it here before going back, give it to the family because this morning we had three small candles and my torch. The lights go back on eventually, though, after an hour or so.
Wolof class went slower than usual because it was the only class I have on Fridays and even though I love it and Sidy (the teacher) is great, I couldn't wait for noon so we could go to the BEACH! It's a pretty long walk away but I hadn't been yet and wanted to check it out.
On the way there we got sandwiches at this place that lately we've been calling Subway: Senegal. It's a shack made of pieces of cardboard boxes flattened and nailed to some random bits of wood, the nails go through bottle caps so they won't just fall through the cardboard, I think someone lives there 'cause there's a box of clothes in the corner. But the whole rest of the shack is taken up by a picnic-size-table and three benches. The table is covered with bowls, baskets, and bags of bread, eggs, there's a bucket of potatoes and peels under the table, he's got a bucket of water and a cup and a stack of dirty dishes and some newspaper and a few knives, some onions, it's a mess. There's a man sitting on the bench behind the table, next to a gas burner, who cooks eggs and tomatoes and onions, reaches into a paper bag for a baguette to put it on, wraps the "sub" in newspaper and hands it off to one of the men sitting on the second bench, who tosses him a coin and chows down. They're lazily chatting, someone asks for an omelette, or a cup of instant coffee, or café touba, he sends one of them to the store for bread or eggs when he runs out. The only light is coming through holes in the rusty cardboard, and there's a radio playing static in the corner. There's a calendar from March 2007 on the wall, but it might just be to cover a hole or something. There's three of us girls who just sort of sit on the bench watching him accidentally slice his finger along with a tomato, wrap it in newspaper, and keep on cooking- one of the guys hands him a strip of greyish ripped fabric but he turns it down. After all the men have been served and he can't ignore us anymore, he looks over, holds up three fingers, and we nod. He grabs a handful of fresh tomatoes and cracks some eggs into a pan. 600 CFA (a dollar and five cents?) later we duck out of the shack and quickly down the equivalent of half an onion, half a baguette, three eggs and two tomatoes each. I'm starting to love fresh tomatoes.
The walk to the beach is along the highway, there's embassies on one side (United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Benin) and they're constructing a huge shopping mall next to the Radisson Inn (which has a beach-side pool) on the other. The beach itself, though, is tiny and secluded, there's a futbol team working out on one side and a bunch of us students on the other. They're used to us by now. The water is freezing and the waves come in with pebbles but the sun's so hot I don't care and it's so mesmerizing just standing there knee-deep (in sharp sand)- I shouted hello to you all, did anyone hear? And my legs, which haven't really seen the light of day since the fifth grade, are vaguely crispy but nothing too bad.
And on the walk home, we got chased by a cow.
So Julia and I are walking down the road, right? On the sidewalk, there's highway on one side and ocean on the other. And I just lazily look behind me, only to see this trotting towards us:
http://eng.gougram.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/kankrej-bull-copy.jpg
This is not your average midwestern holstein. What you can't see from the picture is that his eyes are red. Like, genetically, this kind of cow has orangeish reddish eyes. And he's not really running, so much as jogging just fast enough to stay out of reach of the five or six men running after him with ropes, shouting and waving at us. Now, I can't tell what they're saying at this distance, whether they want us to keep it from running into the road or to get the hell away, and the last thing I want to be is a moving target, and Julia and just freeze, jaws wide open, as this thing trots past us. Taxis are honking, one of the men with a rope flags down a guy on a moped and jumps on the back, and they're hardcore chasing this cow down the highway. Julia and I decide to cross the road. About forty feet ahead, so does the bull. It turns around and heads back toward us, not really aiming for us but just deciding to come back in our direction, and again we freeze as it goes by, it heads down a side street into the rich and relatively hygienic Mermoz neighborhood. Julia and I keep walking, checking every once in a while behind us, peering down side streets, but the thing's gone.
When I get home the Bifals have blocked off the street in front of my house, and are having a drumming-dancing-singing-prayer-circle thing, and the whole neighborhood's pissed off. Apparently they do this every once in a while, without warning, and cars can't get through, and you don't know when they'll stop. And the only problem with that is that they're LOUD. All the neighborhood boys are running around them, daring each other to run into the middle of the circle, or pretending to dance alongside them. I go out and watch for a bit, only because it's fascinating to hear this crowd of men (no women, though, I wonder are there women Bifals?) singing in a strange language, but then I leave because it's really loud. And I mean really loud. And in a city full of concrete walls and open doors and windows, it just echoes. My mom tells me that they could go on until dawn- no one's going to sleep tonight. I ask do they spend all night praying? She shakes her head and corrects me that those Bifals don't pray, they're crazy, if this were Europe the police would have shut them all down by now. I'm not sure whether she means the singing or the religion. She tells me yet again, like she does whenever Bifals come into conversation, that they're up to no good, not a real religion, and I should have nothing to do with them.
Fish for dinner. Fish and lettuce and tomato, but the only fish available is this tiny kind, so there's about ten the size of my palm, cooked whole of course, bones everywhere, my mom and sister chow down and I really am doing a good job (for me) getting out all the bones so I can eat, but my mom when we're done eating tells my sister to make me some eggs because i can't eat the fish, so my sister goes out and fries up three eggs and some tomato and some maggi, I thought for me and my brother 'cause he didn't eat either but no, just for me. So today I have eaten- and pretty much all I have eaten, considering breakfast and lunch- a baguette and a half, six eggs, three tomatoes, and an onion.
I fall asleep at eleven, despite the fact hat the Bifals kept going until midnight.
Yesterday I felt very French.
After a very lively Country Analysis class (see: A Rant about fish), a trip to the one bank that accepts my ATM card and the man there is very nice even if he winks at me to the point where it looks like he's got sand in his eye which is entirely possible but unlikely given his huge carefully-not-more-than-helpful grin, a conversation with the fruit seller (he's got pears today! Forty cents, and they're ripe, unlike last week.) and on the way back I decided to finally try this Café Touba thing- it's coffee brewed with spices, but it's the strongest coffee ever and tastes like absolutely nothing familiar, like spices and fermented something and it's so strong my face tenses up every time I take a sip and it takes about four sips for me to decide not to put myself through any more of that, thank you very much- and a good long blogging session, we decide to go check out the French institute- they're showing a movie tonight, le Petit Nicolas which I remember reading the book in high school French class, so we absolutely *have* to go.
It was me, and Kaela, and Laura, and Kelsey. We successfully negotiated a cab ride into centreville- he started at 3000CFA, which is just crazytalk, and we started at 1200, and managed to talk him down to 1700! Hint: it helps if you pretend to walk away. We got dropped off at the French Institute and walked around a bit- we had two hours before the film started and wanted to go somewhere to eat. Of course, we acquired plenty of "guides", and one even followed us into a restaurant where he then argued with the waiter over whether or not he was with us. We'd found a table with four chairs and insisted that there were four of us, I'm sorry we can't pull up another chair, we're eating here, and we have enough friends with the four of us, no sir we don't know him he followed us here, no sir we don't need a guide we know where we're going. It took a lot of negotiating to get him out of the restaurant so we could order.
It was a tiny place, really- down some small street, had those old-west-bar swinging doors to get in and a chalkboard over the doorway with dishes and prices written on them. There was a British couple that walked in a little while later that tried to ask about vegetarian options and ended up with a plate of rice and tomato sauce. I had grilled fish skewers and fries- real, greasy, salty fries that I couldn't possibly finish, and a tiny cup of ataaya tea and then we walked down the street to N'Ice Cream for some overpriced gelatto (the "obama" flavor is chocolate with chocolate fudge cookie pieces) before the movie.
Okay, you guys. Anyone who has read le Petit Nicolas in french class, or who has seen les Choristes, or who has any kind of appreciation for adorable French children, you need to see this film. We were in an air-conditioned tiny theater with squeaky seats filled with French people, or swiss, either way even though it was a room full of toubabs we were the only ones speaking English, which was strange. Adorable film, it's on DVD now, so I'd advise you all to check it out. And if you can understand all the French in the movie, you're a better speaker than I. Personally, I think the Africans are easier to understand.
This morning they cut the power to our neighborhood. I heard Devyn explaining later that the government actually decides where and when to have power outages, because there simply isn't enough electricity to go around. So instead of just letting blackouts happen, they schedule power outages and cut the electricity to certain areas of Dakar for a while. Lately Liberté 3's been hit pretty often- it's a good thing I brought a flashlight- I'll probably leave it here before going back, give it to the family because this morning we had three small candles and my torch. The lights go back on eventually, though, after an hour or so.
Wolof class went slower than usual because it was the only class I have on Fridays and even though I love it and Sidy (the teacher) is great, I couldn't wait for noon so we could go to the BEACH! It's a pretty long walk away but I hadn't been yet and wanted to check it out.
On the way there we got sandwiches at this place that lately we've been calling Subway: Senegal. It's a shack made of pieces of cardboard boxes flattened and nailed to some random bits of wood, the nails go through bottle caps so they won't just fall through the cardboard, I think someone lives there 'cause there's a box of clothes in the corner. But the whole rest of the shack is taken up by a picnic-size-table and three benches. The table is covered with bowls, baskets, and bags of bread, eggs, there's a bucket of potatoes and peels under the table, he's got a bucket of water and a cup and a stack of dirty dishes and some newspaper and a few knives, some onions, it's a mess. There's a man sitting on the bench behind the table, next to a gas burner, who cooks eggs and tomatoes and onions, reaches into a paper bag for a baguette to put it on, wraps the "sub" in newspaper and hands it off to one of the men sitting on the second bench, who tosses him a coin and chows down. They're lazily chatting, someone asks for an omelette, or a cup of instant coffee, or café touba, he sends one of them to the store for bread or eggs when he runs out. The only light is coming through holes in the rusty cardboard, and there's a radio playing static in the corner. There's a calendar from March 2007 on the wall, but it might just be to cover a hole or something. There's three of us girls who just sort of sit on the bench watching him accidentally slice his finger along with a tomato, wrap it in newspaper, and keep on cooking- one of the guys hands him a strip of greyish ripped fabric but he turns it down. After all the men have been served and he can't ignore us anymore, he looks over, holds up three fingers, and we nod. He grabs a handful of fresh tomatoes and cracks some eggs into a pan. 600 CFA (a dollar and five cents?) later we duck out of the shack and quickly down the equivalent of half an onion, half a baguette, three eggs and two tomatoes each. I'm starting to love fresh tomatoes.
The walk to the beach is along the highway, there's embassies on one side (United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Benin) and they're constructing a huge shopping mall next to the Radisson Inn (which has a beach-side pool) on the other. The beach itself, though, is tiny and secluded, there's a futbol team working out on one side and a bunch of us students on the other. They're used to us by now. The water is freezing and the waves come in with pebbles but the sun's so hot I don't care and it's so mesmerizing just standing there knee-deep (in sharp sand)- I shouted hello to you all, did anyone hear? And my legs, which haven't really seen the light of day since the fifth grade, are vaguely crispy but nothing too bad.
And on the walk home, we got chased by a cow.
So Julia and I are walking down the road, right? On the sidewalk, there's highway on one side and ocean on the other. And I just lazily look behind me, only to see this trotting towards us:
http://eng.gougram.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/kankrej-bull-copy.jpg
This is not your average midwestern holstein. What you can't see from the picture is that his eyes are red. Like, genetically, this kind of cow has orangeish reddish eyes. And he's not really running, so much as jogging just fast enough to stay out of reach of the five or six men running after him with ropes, shouting and waving at us. Now, I can't tell what they're saying at this distance, whether they want us to keep it from running into the road or to get the hell away, and the last thing I want to be is a moving target, and Julia and just freeze, jaws wide open, as this thing trots past us. Taxis are honking, one of the men with a rope flags down a guy on a moped and jumps on the back, and they're hardcore chasing this cow down the highway. Julia and I decide to cross the road. About forty feet ahead, so does the bull. It turns around and heads back toward us, not really aiming for us but just deciding to come back in our direction, and again we freeze as it goes by, it heads down a side street into the rich and relatively hygienic Mermoz neighborhood. Julia and I keep walking, checking every once in a while behind us, peering down side streets, but the thing's gone.
When I get home the Bifals have blocked off the street in front of my house, and are having a drumming-dancing-singing-prayer-circle thing, and the whole neighborhood's pissed off. Apparently they do this every once in a while, without warning, and cars can't get through, and you don't know when they'll stop. And the only problem with that is that they're LOUD. All the neighborhood boys are running around them, daring each other to run into the middle of the circle, or pretending to dance alongside them. I go out and watch for a bit, only because it's fascinating to hear this crowd of men (no women, though, I wonder are there women Bifals?) singing in a strange language, but then I leave because it's really loud. And I mean really loud. And in a city full of concrete walls and open doors and windows, it just echoes. My mom tells me that they could go on until dawn- no one's going to sleep tonight. I ask do they spend all night praying? She shakes her head and corrects me that those Bifals don't pray, they're crazy, if this were Europe the police would have shut them all down by now. I'm not sure whether she means the singing or the religion. She tells me yet again, like she does whenever Bifals come into conversation, that they're up to no good, not a real religion, and I should have nothing to do with them.
Fish for dinner. Fish and lettuce and tomato, but the only fish available is this tiny kind, so there's about ten the size of my palm, cooked whole of course, bones everywhere, my mom and sister chow down and I really am doing a good job (for me) getting out all the bones so I can eat, but my mom when we're done eating tells my sister to make me some eggs because i can't eat the fish, so my sister goes out and fries up three eggs and some tomato and some maggi, I thought for me and my brother 'cause he didn't eat either but no, just for me. So today I have eaten- and pretty much all I have eaten, considering breakfast and lunch- a baguette and a half, six eggs, three tomatoes, and an onion.
I fall asleep at eleven, despite the fact hat the Bifals kept going until midnight.
A Rant about fish.
I’m only speaking generally of course, but I don’t understand why people get so worked up about how life is here. I’m referring here to People, and by people I mean CENSORED. We spent a good hour in class yesterday debating the fact that here, the needs of the community always come before the needs of the individual. Waly was explaining that the community is always right- if you act against society you’re wrong. The elders always know what’s right, they decide things to protect the individual. CENSORED was arguing that isn’t there some time when the social norms are unfair, can’t they change? Waly says that those things change naturally. She asks but waht if someone gets cast out of a village because they believe something different? Waly says that serves them right for not following social rules. She gets mad and he gets excited and he starts spitting blood because he just came from having his tooth pulled and it hasn’t healed yet. She’s getting so angry and I feel so fed up with being American and she doesn’t realize that we’re coming from a country that has had more than a few civil rights movements, but that is not this country’s history! This country has not had a giant overturn of social norms, not really. If anything they’re about to go through it with women but so far they’re still blaming women’s lib for the rising divorce rate as if it were a bad thing.
And SOMEONE ELSE’s sitting next to me eating a sandwich, he came to class late because he was going out to get lunch and he comes back with a baguette wrapped in newspaper and it smells delicious. There’s no food allowed in the classroom, by the way, I think we all knew that, and it smells amazing and we’re all so hungry looking at the clock when is this class going to be over, maybe Waly and CENSORED can just start arguing by themselves none of us are really involved anymore so we should just go out and get lunch and they can resolve their cultural differences. SOMEONE ELSE isn’t sharing. This community of students needs to finish class and go eat lunch. The needs of SOMEONE ELSE who is personally hungry and is seeming very selfish right now, and the needs of CENSORED to be right and force our teacher and host to believe in her way of life is just ridiculous. I start laughing. We’re in Africa to study, not to start a revolution. I’ve got enough to worry about just trying to buy a bottle of water, how can she spend so much energy resisting the culture that’s hosting her?
This is a woman who starts her blog post with “how did everything from plastic bottles to dead animals end up in the road”. She is constantly asking us how many pages our papers were, when exactly on Friday is the assignment due, what should our class presentation cover and how thoroughly, and you can tell she’s the person who agonizes over how to format a table of contents according to which addition of the MLA handbook. She’s writing a paper on how the system of talibés is child abuse or at least child abandonment. Because in the U.S. sending children/students out to beg for money for you, sending them without supervision into the dangerous dirty streets and then taking the money they worked so hard to collect. It violates workers’ rights and endangers poor helpless children. This is all true, of course, of course it’s true. I wouldn’t deny that. But it is also very narrowsighted to see children everywhere and jump immediately to “how could they, this is child abuse”. I mean, it is. But it is also the result of an evolved system of mentorship that, although it has changed, remains a strong part of traditional Koranic education. To these students, and probably their parents too, this isn’t robbing them of education, it’s just a different schooling system. This is their education.
In her internship, Kaela’s going to work at a center for street children. She’s going to be teaching or playing games with all these children who before only would beg on the streets. She’s going to help the children, but not by arguing the system. Because here, you don’t help out by imposing our own Western way of life as “better”, even if scientifically speaking it is. You help out people, on their terms.
You don’t give a man a fish, and you don’t teach a man to fish. You ask a man how to fish, and you have him teach you how. And then, if he uses nets you give him a net. And if he doesn’t use nets, you ask him what he does use instead. Because if you give him a net that he doesn’t want to use, even if it would help him catch more fish, if he doesn’t want to use a net, then he won’t use it, and he won’t catch any fish. And he’s a fisherman. He knows how to catch a fish.
In Which Johanna Has Four Adventures in One Day, Part Two (Mashallah)
After dinner, we piled into the bus (of course) and drove of to the middle of Toubacouta, and this is after dark, maybe around 9 or 10, to see the "theatre folklorique" which I guess means DANCE PARTY. Some local kids were playing usher, taking us by the hand as we got off the bus, leading us to plastic chairs that were set up in a huge circle around a dusty lot outside, there was one very bright light coming from the corner boutique (this is the Senegal version of side-lighting)(the light went out a few times during the night, someone would get up, walk inside, and after lots of comical mechanical sounds and buzzing, it'd flicker back on.)
And then they started drumming. Ohhhhh wow did they start drumming. Lots of drums. Lots of sound, lots of very muscular men with neatly trimmed dreads and baggy pants. Their hands were a blur, you couldn't even make out individual movements, it was like the musical equivalent of cardiac arrest and an epileptic seizure, but in a good way, and I have never been so awesomely intimidated in my entire life. And then they started dancing. Sorry, not the drummers. They kept going, and then two women and two men started dancing and I realized my jaw had dropped open sometime in the last I don't know how much time had gone by since they started playing, but it was a long time since I had last been calm and composed. And it didn't stop. They kept drumming and dancing and occasionally the two women would stop to sing and their voices were about an octave higher and two notches more nasal than any kind of singing I'd ever heard, it was piercing and yes foreign and yes powerful and these girls were tiny, they looked like acrobats and the way they threw themselves into the air it was no wonder.
And then they brought out the fire.
Yeah, one of the drummers started breathing fire. It looked like a stick wrapped in a rag doused in lighter fluid that started the giant fireball that issued from this man's mouth, and we could feel the heat. Then he very slowly showed us exactly how tolerant of the heat these dancers can be, running the flame over his hands, and arms, and feet, before dousing the flame in his mouth. A while later these tiny balls of I don't know what were also lit on fire, a few were swallowed, one of the women even swallowed one, letting it rest on her tongue for what seemed like forever beforehand. The last flaming ball went down the male dancer's pants, which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever write on a blog or anywhere else. And then they danced some more. One woman had braids down to her waist, started flipping her head around in a way that makes heavy metal fans just look lazy.
This is Troupe Allah Laké- in mid-March I'm starting a six-week internship with them.
There were about eight drummers and four dancers, and they were doing flips and jumps and even if you slowed them down it was still such a different way of moving, they were so grounded you could tell but then the way they were moving their arms and legs and backs and necks was so unlike anything I've ever seen before, it was like fire, it was exactly like fire, and I am so excited and so scared and I realized this is why I came here, this is why I'm here, I haven't even been here that long but I'm sitting in a village watching the dance troupe that Waly found me an internship with. Inshallah.
Well, after a while they stopped to make room for the next group which when I say they weren't as impressive as the first group, means nothing really because they were also incredible. It was a less formal performance, and while the musicians were playing (all drums, it was all different sized drums and a few women singing, maybe the drummers would sing a call-and-response for a while too) anyone could get up, run into the middle of the circle, and start dancing. And they did, all sorts of people, old women would hike up their skirts and prance with more energy than the groups of laughing children that would follow, a couple young women pulled an old man onto the floor to dance, it was all the same kind of amazingly energetic movement, few people danced for long, but there was always someone else running up when they couldn't just watch anymore. And yes, we toubabs did dance. We got pulled up a few times, where we would crowd en masse into a small corner and giggle nervously and fail miserably and it was so much fun and again, this is why I'm here, this is why I'm here.
This is why I'm here.
On the bus ride back to the hotel Waly told us that the local students had invited us to a party. We asked when. He said now. A dance party. Near the hotel, so if we wanted to go one of the students would come walk us over.
Now, at this point I'm already falling asleep where I sit. It is at this point that I'm very glad to have the friends I do. And by that I mean all of you. See, at this point a few voices popped into my head- Linda said "are you KIDDING? You're in AFRICA! Go to the frikkin dance party already!" and Julie agreed, in French, and then Disa just threatened to smack me if I turned this down, Addy just gave me a look, and even Becca told me to go out which I took as a sign that I better go to this soirée. So thanks, you guys, and many others who I polled in my head, because then at what was about two AM, Karamba and Idy met us at the gate of the hotel and we walked in the PITCH BLACK, you could see so many stars on the way there, to the military base that was hosting this regular Saturday-night dance party. You pay a dollar to get in the door, they play everything from Youssou N'dour to My Humps. And there are twelve of us, I know because every few songs I look around and count to make sure there are still twelve of us, we're all dancing in two circles, making sure that if someone's dancing with a guy that she *wants* to dance with that guy, and Karamba's making sure we each have partners for what I guess is a slow dance. He introduces me to "Wonderful Ibou" who is very very very tall and I wouldn't mind dancing with him except for the fact that after a while my neck hurts so I excuse myself and go out for some fresh air- with a friend, of course, we don't even go outside without a friend because this is after all a military base and we have been warned about I don't know what but we're being smart after all, and outside I meet this Swiss woman who's taking a vacation through francophone Africa.
And I get a lot of practice saying "oh, you're very tall, just like my husband" or "oh, your name is what? Mar? Mor? Mërr? (whatever he said) oh, I can remember that, it's like my boyfriend's name" and of course "no, I don't want someone to show me around, I don't need a Senegalese boyfriend" because for some reason even if you say you're unavailable, if your improvised husband or boyfriend or fiancée isn't here in Senegal, you still need someone. But it's all good, we're used to that by now, and the party was so much fun, and after a while I start to get really really tired, not just the really tired I was before I started dancing, and we do still need to get up by eight tomorrow, so I tell Karamba that we need to leave by three, which he takes to mean we need to leave *now*, and with a lot of confusing exchanges in French in a very loud crowded room, we get everyone together and after a lot of talking and confusing looks and getstures somehow all walk out the door, and back to the hotel.
Dear Felix. Just because I went to a party, that doesn't mean you get to throw a party in our room. And by our room I mean MY room, because it isn't yours. We don't share this room, and we certainly don't appreciate you leaving a friend behind in what I guess is the arachnic equivalent of "passed out on the couch." He looks to heavy to carry outside, but seriously. Stop bringing friends over. Love, Johanna.
There are a few other days to this trip that I may or may not blog about later. They weren't as interesting to write about, though very interesting to live through, in which we visited more villages, swam in the pool some more, and drove back seven hours to Dakar. Maybe later.
And then they started drumming. Ohhhhh wow did they start drumming. Lots of drums. Lots of sound, lots of very muscular men with neatly trimmed dreads and baggy pants. Their hands were a blur, you couldn't even make out individual movements, it was like the musical equivalent of cardiac arrest and an epileptic seizure, but in a good way, and I have never been so awesomely intimidated in my entire life. And then they started dancing. Sorry, not the drummers. They kept going, and then two women and two men started dancing and I realized my jaw had dropped open sometime in the last I don't know how much time had gone by since they started playing, but it was a long time since I had last been calm and composed. And it didn't stop. They kept drumming and dancing and occasionally the two women would stop to sing and their voices were about an octave higher and two notches more nasal than any kind of singing I'd ever heard, it was piercing and yes foreign and yes powerful and these girls were tiny, they looked like acrobats and the way they threw themselves into the air it was no wonder.
And then they brought out the fire.
Yeah, one of the drummers started breathing fire. It looked like a stick wrapped in a rag doused in lighter fluid that started the giant fireball that issued from this man's mouth, and we could feel the heat. Then he very slowly showed us exactly how tolerant of the heat these dancers can be, running the flame over his hands, and arms, and feet, before dousing the flame in his mouth. A while later these tiny balls of I don't know what were also lit on fire, a few were swallowed, one of the women even swallowed one, letting it rest on her tongue for what seemed like forever beforehand. The last flaming ball went down the male dancer's pants, which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever write on a blog or anywhere else. And then they danced some more. One woman had braids down to her waist, started flipping her head around in a way that makes heavy metal fans just look lazy.
This is Troupe Allah Laké- in mid-March I'm starting a six-week internship with them.
There were about eight drummers and four dancers, and they were doing flips and jumps and even if you slowed them down it was still such a different way of moving, they were so grounded you could tell but then the way they were moving their arms and legs and backs and necks was so unlike anything I've ever seen before, it was like fire, it was exactly like fire, and I am so excited and so scared and I realized this is why I came here, this is why I'm here, I haven't even been here that long but I'm sitting in a village watching the dance troupe that Waly found me an internship with. Inshallah.
Well, after a while they stopped to make room for the next group which when I say they weren't as impressive as the first group, means nothing really because they were also incredible. It was a less formal performance, and while the musicians were playing (all drums, it was all different sized drums and a few women singing, maybe the drummers would sing a call-and-response for a while too) anyone could get up, run into the middle of the circle, and start dancing. And they did, all sorts of people, old women would hike up their skirts and prance with more energy than the groups of laughing children that would follow, a couple young women pulled an old man onto the floor to dance, it was all the same kind of amazingly energetic movement, few people danced for long, but there was always someone else running up when they couldn't just watch anymore. And yes, we toubabs did dance. We got pulled up a few times, where we would crowd en masse into a small corner and giggle nervously and fail miserably and it was so much fun and again, this is why I'm here, this is why I'm here.
This is why I'm here.
On the bus ride back to the hotel Waly told us that the local students had invited us to a party. We asked when. He said now. A dance party. Near the hotel, so if we wanted to go one of the students would come walk us over.
Now, at this point I'm already falling asleep where I sit. It is at this point that I'm very glad to have the friends I do. And by that I mean all of you. See, at this point a few voices popped into my head- Linda said "are you KIDDING? You're in AFRICA! Go to the frikkin dance party already!" and Julie agreed, in French, and then Disa just threatened to smack me if I turned this down, Addy just gave me a look, and even Becca told me to go out which I took as a sign that I better go to this soirée. So thanks, you guys, and many others who I polled in my head, because then at what was about two AM, Karamba and Idy met us at the gate of the hotel and we walked in the PITCH BLACK, you could see so many stars on the way there, to the military base that was hosting this regular Saturday-night dance party. You pay a dollar to get in the door, they play everything from Youssou N'dour to My Humps. And there are twelve of us, I know because every few songs I look around and count to make sure there are still twelve of us, we're all dancing in two circles, making sure that if someone's dancing with a guy that she *wants* to dance with that guy, and Karamba's making sure we each have partners for what I guess is a slow dance. He introduces me to "Wonderful Ibou" who is very very very tall and I wouldn't mind dancing with him except for the fact that after a while my neck hurts so I excuse myself and go out for some fresh air- with a friend, of course, we don't even go outside without a friend because this is after all a military base and we have been warned about I don't know what but we're being smart after all, and outside I meet this Swiss woman who's taking a vacation through francophone Africa.
And I get a lot of practice saying "oh, you're very tall, just like my husband" or "oh, your name is what? Mar? Mor? Mërr? (whatever he said) oh, I can remember that, it's like my boyfriend's name" and of course "no, I don't want someone to show me around, I don't need a Senegalese boyfriend" because for some reason even if you say you're unavailable, if your improvised husband or boyfriend or fiancée isn't here in Senegal, you still need someone. But it's all good, we're used to that by now, and the party was so much fun, and after a while I start to get really really tired, not just the really tired I was before I started dancing, and we do still need to get up by eight tomorrow, so I tell Karamba that we need to leave by three, which he takes to mean we need to leave *now*, and with a lot of confusing exchanges in French in a very loud crowded room, we get everyone together and after a lot of talking and confusing looks and getstures somehow all walk out the door, and back to the hotel.
Dear Felix. Just because I went to a party, that doesn't mean you get to throw a party in our room. And by our room I mean MY room, because it isn't yours. We don't share this room, and we certainly don't appreciate you leaving a friend behind in what I guess is the arachnic equivalent of "passed out on the couch." He looks to heavy to carry outside, but seriously. Stop bringing friends over. Love, Johanna.
There are a few other days to this trip that I may or may not blog about later. They weren't as interesting to write about, though very interesting to live through, in which we visited more villages, swam in the pool some more, and drove back seven hours to Dakar. Maybe later.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
In Which Johanna has Four Adventures in One Day, Part One (Mashallah)
Dear Felix, I don't think I was quite clear in my first few messages. I am not okay with us being roommates, which means that I am VERY not okay with you biting me three times in one night. I was not okay with you biting me once in one night, or any time, at all. Felix, you have violated my trust. Please stop giving me spider bites. Love, Johanna
Yeah, Felix was still there Saturday morning. And I have two itchy red spots on the back of my left knee, and one on my right arm. I think that spider got fresh with me despite the 98% DEET I doused myself in before bed. Breakfast, though, was delicious- nice hearty rolls and real jam and butter, with coffee that at least tasted better than the Nescafé and real, not powdered, milk. And then we piled into the bus (a common theme) to head off to the mangroves. We picked up the Senegalese students on the way, but came to a screeching halt when Karamba realized we left the djembe behind. We then waited, in the bus, in the middle of the road, while someone walked back to the hotel to get the drum, while we all were left wondering why it was worth the time to go get a djembe when we were just going to see mangroves.
It's interesting how abruptly, on the drive there, you go from brown grass savanna to GREEN. And I mean, there was a straight line between "Dry" and "Delta". We had to wait for the tide, we couldn't head out right away, but our guide took us along the coast where we could see the group of women who were gutting and preparing fish to be dried, the immense drying racks, the piles of oyster shells that would be ground up to reinforce cement, the huge fires where women were roasting and shucking oysters... we were followed by a few children who would pose every other step- in an eco-tourism community, they knew how to spot a digital camera, and would run up to see the picture after the camera flashed.
And then we all, drum included, piled into two boats and zoomed into the mangrove forest. Does anyone remember playing Amazon Trail in grade school? The computer game where you're in a boat and have to hunt for fish and trade with natives? We didn't do any of that, of course, but it was the same feeling, of a winding narrow blue path through dense green branches. we couldn't get too terribly close considering our boats had motors, and one of the things we were learning about was how boats wreck the root systems. Also I did not see any manatees. Or monkeys, though I guess there's this kind of monkey that only lives in mangroves because the way it's evolved it can't support itself to walk on the ground. I did see a few herons of various colors though mostly white. And more baobabs which have ceased to be exciting but remain amazing and immensely entertaining.
And there, in the middle of the mangroves, on the other boat, Karamba started playing that drum. And all the other African students started singing, and we all started clapping along. And then they started standing up and dancing. In the middle of a boat. In the middle of a mangrove delta, on the edge of Africa. The song would call for people to stand up and dance, something along the lines of "and now it's so-and-so's turn to dance, hey, they're dancin', look at them dance, now we return to the refrain before we end up shouting out someone else's name to stand up and dance!" Of course I couldn't understand a word but it was that kind of song you could tell. And there was no way I was standing up in that wobbly old plastic boat, but Waly started prancing at one point, and Kenta even jumped up and stood on the seat to dance which scared us all and thrilled the guides and we passed around bottles of water and clapped and laughed and when they stopped playing the drum we broke out in American church camp songs (Rise and shine, and give God your glory glory...) and bad classics (Ain't no mountain high enough...) and sang all the way back to the shore.
And back to the hotel for lunch.
Dear Felix, I'd apologize for the maids scaring you away but I'm actually glad they did. Please don't come back. Love, Johanna.
They tidied the room and made the bed and even folded the clothes I left on the floor which was kind of odd but whatever. We didn't get new towels, though. And some people jumped in the pool, and a few learned how to make attaya which is the special kind of brewed tea here. I also forgot to mention that the previous night, by the pool, Karamba taught Joey how to play the djembe and then taught about eight of us girls this song and dance that is really simple but meant to be sung under speeches or something? He said we'd perform it as a surprise for the dance troupe and the performers we'd see Saturday night. He kept checking throughout the day to make sure I remembered the tune. Which I did. I couldn't forget it. It was firmly implanted in my skull, which would be exciting except that when I get back I'll sing it for you and you'll see how mindnumbingly simple a song and dance it is to have stuck in your head. You'll see.
After lunch was our visit to the first village. Once again, pile into the bus, bring along the drum and now we know why. Bump-and-jostle and zigzagg down the road, drive on the sand and grass and potholes and then head cross-country on a sand road, how they know which turns to take is beyond me because we're outside the realm of signs or arrows or electrical wires or anything that would give any indication of where we are. There's lots of goats, though. And the occasional waving child. When we arrive at the village the amount of waving children increases exponentially. And by that I mean we were instantly surrounded by waving chattering curious kids, some with even smaller kids on their backs, maybe younger siblings or cousins or perhaps just friends. They're followed more slowly by their mothers, women who shake our hands and offer us places to sit under the giant tree, the "arbre de palabre", the tree-under-which-people-meet-and-discuss-things, the center of the community, as it were.
We sat in a circle, it took me a while to notice that all the men were on one side and the women on the other, we were all interspersed with our hosts, guests and elders sitting on the benches and more sitting on buckets or standing behind us, with children filling in all the gaps. It would have made a wonderful picture but there was something very wrong-feeling about taking out a camera, not that they would have minded perhaps- or they might have- but more that I wanted to see everything with my eyes, now, here, completely. A lot of the kids were sitting on the ground, or leaning against the tree trunk, one of the boys was wearing a pair of yellow pants- there was no seat or front to them. An old woman was sitting behind me, I didn't know whether I should move to the ground so she could have a better seat or stay in the seat I was given. She kept smiling whenever I caught her eye, she had a squirmy little toddler in her lap. On my other side were two girls, I wasn't sure if one kept tapping me on the shoulder or if it was an accident and she was just trying to see. One of the African students kept dozing off. We sat there for a long time, discussing various problems and difficulties they had in the village.
Waly acted as an interpreter, speaking to us in French and to the chef du village in Wolof (and actually Waly is Sereer, not Wolof, so he speaks both indigenous languages plus French plus English), and he introduced us all as a group and thanked the chef for having us, and explaining to us that this village was unique because the leader was so young, usually it's an elder who is in charge but this guy's father died young? So it was an interesting point of view, because even he asked the elders if they wanted to speak first, and we always asked the elders, not the chef du village, he actually did very little speaking. Instead, the elders spoke, and sometimes the teachers. We discussed how far away the latest health post was (7 kilometers) and how by the time you got there the one or two workers would be so tired they'd have to turn away patients. We discussed the Italian solar panel that a government program put up but failed to provide a battery to collect the energy. We talked about how the only source of water was a 100 year old well, and how difficult it was to transport goods to sell in the larger towns when the roads were in such poor shape. We talked about how their school, built in 2006, only has two classrooms and how the closest high school is in the city, too far away.
And then a few women brought out some plastic tubs, squatted behind them, and started beating on the bottoms with their flipflops. Karamba brought out the drum, and the women pulled us all into the middle of the circle to dance. So, in a village of four hundred people, in the middle of Senegal, we had a dance party.
And then a tour of the town, which was more like a parade, since all the people walked with us, to see the well and show us how it worked, and then back on the bus, back to the hotel for pool time, and even though there were bees everywhere I happened to look out into the trees beyond the hotel to see TWO MONKEYS sitting on the fence. Next was dinner, which was delicious, followed by dessert which was a mixture of melted chocolate and honey, which explains the bees. There's a Wolof proverb that says that if you like eating honey, you can't be afraid of bees. I'm not sure I agree with that, but dessert was awesome.
Dear Felix. It is very bad manners to invite friends over when you're not going to be there. Not that I want you back, but your two cousins are even bigger and scarier than you are, and you never even introduced us. Please make them leave. Love, Johanna.
(again, breaking up the posts so they don't get too long, but remember that this Saturday still has two more adventures to go!)
Yeah, Felix was still there Saturday morning. And I have two itchy red spots on the back of my left knee, and one on my right arm. I think that spider got fresh with me despite the 98% DEET I doused myself in before bed. Breakfast, though, was delicious- nice hearty rolls and real jam and butter, with coffee that at least tasted better than the Nescafé and real, not powdered, milk. And then we piled into the bus (a common theme) to head off to the mangroves. We picked up the Senegalese students on the way, but came to a screeching halt when Karamba realized we left the djembe behind. We then waited, in the bus, in the middle of the road, while someone walked back to the hotel to get the drum, while we all were left wondering why it was worth the time to go get a djembe when we were just going to see mangroves.
It's interesting how abruptly, on the drive there, you go from brown grass savanna to GREEN. And I mean, there was a straight line between "Dry" and "Delta". We had to wait for the tide, we couldn't head out right away, but our guide took us along the coast where we could see the group of women who were gutting and preparing fish to be dried, the immense drying racks, the piles of oyster shells that would be ground up to reinforce cement, the huge fires where women were roasting and shucking oysters... we were followed by a few children who would pose every other step- in an eco-tourism community, they knew how to spot a digital camera, and would run up to see the picture after the camera flashed.
And then we all, drum included, piled into two boats and zoomed into the mangrove forest. Does anyone remember playing Amazon Trail in grade school? The computer game where you're in a boat and have to hunt for fish and trade with natives? We didn't do any of that, of course, but it was the same feeling, of a winding narrow blue path through dense green branches. we couldn't get too terribly close considering our boats had motors, and one of the things we were learning about was how boats wreck the root systems. Also I did not see any manatees. Or monkeys, though I guess there's this kind of monkey that only lives in mangroves because the way it's evolved it can't support itself to walk on the ground. I did see a few herons of various colors though mostly white. And more baobabs which have ceased to be exciting but remain amazing and immensely entertaining.
And there, in the middle of the mangroves, on the other boat, Karamba started playing that drum. And all the other African students started singing, and we all started clapping along. And then they started standing up and dancing. In the middle of a boat. In the middle of a mangrove delta, on the edge of Africa. The song would call for people to stand up and dance, something along the lines of "and now it's so-and-so's turn to dance, hey, they're dancin', look at them dance, now we return to the refrain before we end up shouting out someone else's name to stand up and dance!" Of course I couldn't understand a word but it was that kind of song you could tell. And there was no way I was standing up in that wobbly old plastic boat, but Waly started prancing at one point, and Kenta even jumped up and stood on the seat to dance which scared us all and thrilled the guides and we passed around bottles of water and clapped and laughed and when they stopped playing the drum we broke out in American church camp songs (Rise and shine, and give God your glory glory...) and bad classics (Ain't no mountain high enough...) and sang all the way back to the shore.
And back to the hotel for lunch.
Dear Felix, I'd apologize for the maids scaring you away but I'm actually glad they did. Please don't come back. Love, Johanna.
They tidied the room and made the bed and even folded the clothes I left on the floor which was kind of odd but whatever. We didn't get new towels, though. And some people jumped in the pool, and a few learned how to make attaya which is the special kind of brewed tea here. I also forgot to mention that the previous night, by the pool, Karamba taught Joey how to play the djembe and then taught about eight of us girls this song and dance that is really simple but meant to be sung under speeches or something? He said we'd perform it as a surprise for the dance troupe and the performers we'd see Saturday night. He kept checking throughout the day to make sure I remembered the tune. Which I did. I couldn't forget it. It was firmly implanted in my skull, which would be exciting except that when I get back I'll sing it for you and you'll see how mindnumbingly simple a song and dance it is to have stuck in your head. You'll see.
After lunch was our visit to the first village. Once again, pile into the bus, bring along the drum and now we know why. Bump-and-jostle and zigzagg down the road, drive on the sand and grass and potholes and then head cross-country on a sand road, how they know which turns to take is beyond me because we're outside the realm of signs or arrows or electrical wires or anything that would give any indication of where we are. There's lots of goats, though. And the occasional waving child. When we arrive at the village the amount of waving children increases exponentially. And by that I mean we were instantly surrounded by waving chattering curious kids, some with even smaller kids on their backs, maybe younger siblings or cousins or perhaps just friends. They're followed more slowly by their mothers, women who shake our hands and offer us places to sit under the giant tree, the "arbre de palabre", the tree-under-which-people-meet-and-discuss-things, the center of the community, as it were.
We sat in a circle, it took me a while to notice that all the men were on one side and the women on the other, we were all interspersed with our hosts, guests and elders sitting on the benches and more sitting on buckets or standing behind us, with children filling in all the gaps. It would have made a wonderful picture but there was something very wrong-feeling about taking out a camera, not that they would have minded perhaps- or they might have- but more that I wanted to see everything with my eyes, now, here, completely. A lot of the kids were sitting on the ground, or leaning against the tree trunk, one of the boys was wearing a pair of yellow pants- there was no seat or front to them. An old woman was sitting behind me, I didn't know whether I should move to the ground so she could have a better seat or stay in the seat I was given. She kept smiling whenever I caught her eye, she had a squirmy little toddler in her lap. On my other side were two girls, I wasn't sure if one kept tapping me on the shoulder or if it was an accident and she was just trying to see. One of the African students kept dozing off. We sat there for a long time, discussing various problems and difficulties they had in the village.
Waly acted as an interpreter, speaking to us in French and to the chef du village in Wolof (and actually Waly is Sereer, not Wolof, so he speaks both indigenous languages plus French plus English), and he introduced us all as a group and thanked the chef for having us, and explaining to us that this village was unique because the leader was so young, usually it's an elder who is in charge but this guy's father died young? So it was an interesting point of view, because even he asked the elders if they wanted to speak first, and we always asked the elders, not the chef du village, he actually did very little speaking. Instead, the elders spoke, and sometimes the teachers. We discussed how far away the latest health post was (7 kilometers) and how by the time you got there the one or two workers would be so tired they'd have to turn away patients. We discussed the Italian solar panel that a government program put up but failed to provide a battery to collect the energy. We talked about how the only source of water was a 100 year old well, and how difficult it was to transport goods to sell in the larger towns when the roads were in such poor shape. We talked about how their school, built in 2006, only has two classrooms and how the closest high school is in the city, too far away.
And then a few women brought out some plastic tubs, squatted behind them, and started beating on the bottoms with their flipflops. Karamba brought out the drum, and the women pulled us all into the middle of the circle to dance. So, in a village of four hundred people, in the middle of Senegal, we had a dance party.
And then a tour of the town, which was more like a parade, since all the people walked with us, to see the well and show us how it worked, and then back on the bus, back to the hotel for pool time, and even though there were bees everywhere I happened to look out into the trees beyond the hotel to see TWO MONKEYS sitting on the fence. Next was dinner, which was delicious, followed by dessert which was a mixture of melted chocolate and honey, which explains the bees. There's a Wolof proverb that says that if you like eating honey, you can't be afraid of bees. I'm not sure I agree with that, but dessert was awesome.
Dear Felix. It is very bad manners to invite friends over when you're not going to be there. Not that I want you back, but your two cousins are even bigger and scarier than you are, and you never even introduced us. Please make them leave. Love, Johanna.
(again, breaking up the posts so they don't get too long, but remember that this Saturday still has two more adventures to go!)
Quick Post
Hey, so while I'm writing about Toubacouta, here's a few bits and pieces in general... okay, I'm cheating a little. These are two official journal entries- a "personal observation report" and a "field observation report"... so I'm following criteria here. But since they're already written I figured they'd buy me some time to collect my thoughts.
Johanna Gorman-Baer
Johanna Gorman-Baer
Country Analysis FOR #1
12 February 2010
Follow Through
On the class field trip to Toubacouta, the strongest example of development that really stuck with me was the solar panel in the first village. Someone from our group asked about it, and if the village was thinking about environment or alternative energy- just a pretty basic solar panel sticking up out of a rooftop on the side of a building, next to what looked like an electrical antenna made of twigs. From what I understood of the reply, an Italian program that partnered with the Senegalese government made it possible for any town or village that wanted a solar energy panel to get one- but they didn’t come with batteries.
So, essentially, everyone can have free access to electricity in an environmentally sustainable way- but no one has any way of storing or using it. You can see the panel, count how many have been sent out, congratulate the Italians on reaching out to a developing country. You can salute the government for being able to provide each village with electricity. But the solar panels just sit there, visible signs of a system that has invisibly failed to reach its goal.
I was reminded of this when we were talking with the groupement des femmes, visiting the fields and the marigot the next day. Once again, the most prominent fixture in the fields was a giant water storage tank, and once again it was provided in part by some European country (probably Italy- but I’ve forgotten by now), made possible by the globalization of our modern world. And once again, the pump didn’t work. There was no way for this village to use the resources that had been so “generously” provided. We stepped over what seemed like miles of bunched up, cracked, dry plastic tubing that now served as a boundary line between plots of dry land, to see the wells that actually were in use, and making our way to the wetland and natural source of water only a few yards away.
This idea of working despite development rather than working because of development really stuck with me. It seems that everywhere we went there were signs of well-intentioned but abandoned projects. So much energy, it seems, is poured into starting a project, but the energy drains away before reaching completion. It’s relatively easy for a developed country to buy a bunch of solar panels, stick them in small villages, and never think about it again. But for those panels to work, they need the resources to collect and maintain that energy. An organized group of women certainly deserve a pump to make watering their vegetable plots easier, but those women instead use the wells that have worked for them even when the mechanical pumps fail. And even if the pump worked, the condition of the roads, and the available transportation for their crops makes the whole system difficult from start to finish.
In the end, the only thing that stays the same throughout the villages, and the work these people do, is their own hard work and motivation- humans work, and keep working until the job is done. Despite development.
Country Analysis POR #1
12 February 2010
Secrets and Strangers
I still can’t figure out how I feel about Raïssa’s secret boyfriend. To begin at the beginning, she apparently for the last three or four weeks has had a boyfriend that she talks on the phone to every night, they text constantly, she’s always running out of credit. They sometimes see each other at school, but he’s eighteen and she’s fifteen. And because she’s only fifteen, her mother still sees her as a child and absolutely too young to be in a relationship. She can’t imagine her daughter having a boyfriend yet, and that’s the end of it.
Or rather, it should be. But Raïssa continues to see him in secret, and talks about him to me whenever we’re alone. She is always asking to borrow phone credit, transfer it to her phone and she’ll pay me back later, so she can finish talking to him before bed. According to her, they’re going to get married as soon as they’re both old enough that our family will approve. His family already does- she’s spoken to his mother and sisters on the phone, and they like her. I asked if anyone in her family knows- she told me of course, there are cousins who know. And Honorine knows, and Honorine’s sister knows. I figured, if family and friends know about this guy, then at least she isn’t doing anything dangerous, and if it were a serious situation they’d do something by now. So I thought nothing of it. This was the only reason I agreed to sneak out of a family party with her to meet this secret boyfriend.
Let me explain. What I understood, based on her hurriedly whispering to me that morning, was that she had a petit copain, whose name was Papis, who had seen my profile on facebook because I had posted pictures of Raïssa. I understood that this petit copain, whose name was Papis, wanted to meet me because I was her sister now and seemed nice. What I understood was that we’d leave the family gathering in Baobab that Sunday, an all-day event, go meet this petit copain, whose name was Papis, and then come back to the party. This was what I understood.
What happened was that we left the all-day family gathering and walked to her school, where we met two teenage boys. One was her petit copain. The other was named Papis. My sister and her petit copain walked into a classroom, closed the door, and left me and Papis to talk and get to know each other while our respective friends were talking alone in the classroom. It was, in a word, an awkward misunderstanding to realize I had made. After what probably seemed like longer than it actually was, Raïssa and I walked back to the family gathering, which was a celebration for a baptism which I had been glad to take a break from, actually, because it was exhausting to be around so many family members that were welcoming but ignoring me.
The following week she asked to borrow 500 CFA to take a taxi that weekend to see her boyfriend’s family. I lent it to her, hesitantly, because I was going to be gone on a field trip to Toubacouta that weekend and wanted to make sure she had a way to get home if it was late. But to meet his family? They’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks, and they were still teenagers! Does she really believe that she is going to marry this guy? And if so, does his family also believe that they’re going to get married? Why does his family take this adolescent relationship so seriously? Or maybe, I should be more worried about where this is going. I figured they were just texting “I love you” and maybe holding hands- I try not to worry about things like unwanted pregnancy in this case. But should I? I couldn’t imagine my fourteen year old American sister back home planning the rest of her life with someone, but the way my fifteen year old African sister was talking, they were deeply in love. (Of course, any hormonal adolescent first relationship is probably like that).
In Toubacouta, I remembered that she told me Honorine knew about this boyfriend. I asked her after lunch one day about it. She told me what I had felt I should be doing all along- she told me to do nothing. To not get involved. To not be responsible if anything happened. I replied that that’s what I thought I should do- I want to help my sister, but I’d never want to get between a mother and daughter, especially on such a topic as this. Especially with so much secrecy involved.
But at the same time I wondered, if Honorine knew and didn’t approve, why didn’t she talk to Mama Binta, or at least talk to Raïssa? Isn’t knowing, and doing nothing, also a way of being responsible, of being involved? I wouldn’t want to insert myself into the situation of course, but to know, and not approve, and do nothing made me uncomfortable too. Is this an example of the lie that unites is better than the truth that separates? After all, Honorine by not doing anything is helping a mother and daughter get along, and also helping two young people have a relationship. And she’s also very conveniently not accountable for either.
This is an uncomfortable situation, and I guess doing nothing is the lesser of two sticky situations. Especially since I’m an outsider. But I’m glad I asked Honorine about it- after all, I don’t know the cultural norms regarding how old someone has to be to start having relationships, or how secrecy is treated regarding these kinds of things. I know that in Midwestern America a mother would know right away if her daughter had a secret boyfriend- that’s what neighbors are for. Witholding the truth, I was always taught, is lying. And don’t parents in this culture as well have an overwhelming right to know what their kids are up to- even more than in the United States? I doubt this would ever happen in a smaller, more traditional town.
This is to tough a knot for me to untie. I’m not covering for her again, that’s certain, and I’m not telling Mama Binta about this whole affair, that’s also certain. I’m doing nothing, which is what I wanted to do in the first place but was convinced to help anyway because I’m a confused toubab who wants to be nice and help. If she’s old enough to have a boyfriend, she’s old enough to take her own taxi, and she’s old enough to call him on her own phone. I just hope, for her sake, this doesn’t explode in her face. Because at this age, in this culture, I can only imagine the consequences. ***
*** This is a Personal Observation Report that, even though it happened before the field trip, was haunting me the entire weekend, and was resolved with my discussion with Honorine that Sunday- even though it was about an experience I had in Dakar, the Personal Observation happened in Toubacouta.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Frapping la Rue
Friday morning I woke up at quarter to six in the morning, to the sound of a taxi honking. My mom had spent nearly an hour the previous night hunting down a taximan that would pick me up at 6:15, she'd finally found one, and he's half an hour early. I call Kaela, wake her up, we both rush out to the taxi, still early, it's pitch dark out. I call my mom from the taxi, then promptly leave my cell phone on the seat as I collect my stuff and we get out of the car. We arrive at WARC at 6:20, maybe, thank goodness the bus has already arrived because not even Waly's there yet. I am now without phone and without money and without sleep, but the third makes me too tired to be angry yet, just really really annoyed, and once Waly opens the gate we hang out in the courtyard and help load the fifty billion bottles of water onto the bus.
And then we're off. The whole way out of Dakar we're passing around little bags of pastries (three each) and fruit ( a banana and an apple and an orange each) and yogurt and juice (the kind that comes in a can and has little pieces of fruit in it... guava's my favorite so far) and we're all full to bursting which by this point is a constant. The drive takes six hours. At first, driving through the cities, I can sleep, or at least doze off. Once we get farther south though, the road gets bumpy. And by bumpy, I mean that first, the bus is bucking up and down. Then, we're zigzagging all over the road to avoid potholes, coming to abrupt stops to avoid other cars. Finally we end up driving half-on-half-off the road, or just on the grass half the time, because it's smoother and in better shape. Which is not, believe me, saying much.
Devyn threw up. (in a bag) There were a few students from Dakar who came with us, to visit their families and hang out with us at the hotel. A few were trying to practice their English. I was busy looking out the window at the African Savanna, because that's exactly what it was. Well, I'm no ecological expert. But lots of brown grass and the occasional baobab tree as far as you can see, with goats hangin' out in the brush? I think that's a savanna.
We drove by some villages, some bigger towns, a few cities. Saw lots of goats and sheep. Here the only difference between both cloven-hoofed animals is that the goats are cute and brown and the sheep are ugly and black and white. In my opinion. They don't have fluffy wool, they just have long necks that point their blunt heads toward the ground. (I wonder if sheep can look up...) Saw grass roofs and sand-brick walls and fences made out of branches bundled together. Kids waved at us wherever we went. Old men did too, from their benches in the shade.
The hotel in Toubacouta looks brand-new. And by that I mean they're still building some of the rooms. And by rooms I mean that each "room" is its own six-sided hut with whitewashed walls and an awkwardly-shaped bathroom with a shower that isn't exactly heated but not freezing cold, so it works. They also have air conditioning and a television, and WiFi (but no one brought their computers, of course). There's a pool and a full kitchen staff and a bar and a short retired frenchman named Phillippe from Bordeaux and Charles, the go-to for anything you'd need who has a brilliant smile and is always ready to cheerfully get towels or water bottles or a broom to kill the latest spider in your room.
And there was a spider in our room. Kelsey and I named it Felix. He was on the wall, shaped like a crab but flat as a tick and moves lightning fast when you try and catch him in the plastic cup we found in the bathroom that wouldn't have worked anyway because his legs were too long. Felix's body was about as big as a quarter maybe bigger and looked wicked. We composed letters to him aloud, in our spare time:
Dear Felix, please go away not quickly but slowly and with no sudden movements. Thanks! Love, Johanna.
Dear Felix, it isn't that you're unwelcome, it's that your welcome is imposing on our welcome. Please be gone when we get back. Love, Johanna.
And so on. It was endless fun, if you ignore the fact that there's a huge bloody spider on the wall. We went to see the town of Toubacouta, which is also the town of Soukuta, they sort of grew together into the same place which is nice because my internship is in Toubacouta and my friend Renee's is in Soukouta, which means we'll be in the same town. yaay! Oh, and we're so lucky to be going back there. Everyone says so, and I'm the first to agree. It's beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. We went to see the maire/mayor/chef du village/president of the area government first thing, as one does, to formally introduce ourselves and greet the representative of the population. Then walking around the town, taking pictures and getting waved at and followed around by children.
Visited the school, and across the street the dormitories for children who have too far to travel from the villages to go to school and back home every day. I'll go into more detail on that later. Back to the hotel for a lovely wonderful dinner, hanging out at the pool, etc. I'm gonna post this now and pick up later so my posts don't get too long!
And then we're off. The whole way out of Dakar we're passing around little bags of pastries (three each) and fruit ( a banana and an apple and an orange each) and yogurt and juice (the kind that comes in a can and has little pieces of fruit in it... guava's my favorite so far) and we're all full to bursting which by this point is a constant. The drive takes six hours. At first, driving through the cities, I can sleep, or at least doze off. Once we get farther south though, the road gets bumpy. And by bumpy, I mean that first, the bus is bucking up and down. Then, we're zigzagging all over the road to avoid potholes, coming to abrupt stops to avoid other cars. Finally we end up driving half-on-half-off the road, or just on the grass half the time, because it's smoother and in better shape. Which is not, believe me, saying much.
Devyn threw up. (in a bag) There were a few students from Dakar who came with us, to visit their families and hang out with us at the hotel. A few were trying to practice their English. I was busy looking out the window at the African Savanna, because that's exactly what it was. Well, I'm no ecological expert. But lots of brown grass and the occasional baobab tree as far as you can see, with goats hangin' out in the brush? I think that's a savanna.
We drove by some villages, some bigger towns, a few cities. Saw lots of goats and sheep. Here the only difference between both cloven-hoofed animals is that the goats are cute and brown and the sheep are ugly and black and white. In my opinion. They don't have fluffy wool, they just have long necks that point their blunt heads toward the ground. (I wonder if sheep can look up...) Saw grass roofs and sand-brick walls and fences made out of branches bundled together. Kids waved at us wherever we went. Old men did too, from their benches in the shade.
The hotel in Toubacouta looks brand-new. And by that I mean they're still building some of the rooms. And by rooms I mean that each "room" is its own six-sided hut with whitewashed walls and an awkwardly-shaped bathroom with a shower that isn't exactly heated but not freezing cold, so it works. They also have air conditioning and a television, and WiFi (but no one brought their computers, of course). There's a pool and a full kitchen staff and a bar and a short retired frenchman named Phillippe from Bordeaux and Charles, the go-to for anything you'd need who has a brilliant smile and is always ready to cheerfully get towels or water bottles or a broom to kill the latest spider in your room.
And there was a spider in our room. Kelsey and I named it Felix. He was on the wall, shaped like a crab but flat as a tick and moves lightning fast when you try and catch him in the plastic cup we found in the bathroom that wouldn't have worked anyway because his legs were too long. Felix's body was about as big as a quarter maybe bigger and looked wicked. We composed letters to him aloud, in our spare time:
Dear Felix, please go away not quickly but slowly and with no sudden movements. Thanks! Love, Johanna.
Dear Felix, it isn't that you're unwelcome, it's that your welcome is imposing on our welcome. Please be gone when we get back. Love, Johanna.
And so on. It was endless fun, if you ignore the fact that there's a huge bloody spider on the wall. We went to see the town of Toubacouta, which is also the town of Soukuta, they sort of grew together into the same place which is nice because my internship is in Toubacouta and my friend Renee's is in Soukouta, which means we'll be in the same town. yaay! Oh, and we're so lucky to be going back there. Everyone says so, and I'm the first to agree. It's beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. We went to see the maire/mayor/chef du village/president of the area government first thing, as one does, to formally introduce ourselves and greet the representative of the population. Then walking around the town, taking pictures and getting waved at and followed around by children.
Visited the school, and across the street the dormitories for children who have too far to travel from the villages to go to school and back home every day. I'll go into more detail on that later. Back to the hotel for a lovely wonderful dinner, hanging out at the pool, etc. I'm gonna post this now and pick up later so my posts don't get too long!
Waking Up in the City
I was ready to take a break from Dakar.
It's not that I don't like the city- on the contrary, I'm getting more and more fond of it. But the walk home on Thursday was an interesting wake-up call to the fact that I'll never be fully used to life here.
We always leave from WARC in a big group, stopping by the street vendor to buy fruit or Biskrem (TM), cheap packets of tiny chocolate-filled cookies. He knows us by now and every week we can understand more of what he says- he quizzes us in Wolof, chatting with the group while we debate if the pears have been washed in tap water or whether to bring home oranges or bananas for the family. We cross the street by the MyShop- I tried to use the ATM. It didn't work. Rejected my card which is slightly worrying but later I'll try the first bank we went to since that worked just fine. You have to use the ATMs that have guards sitting outside, and we always go in groups.
Then we walk down the street, past men shouting "bonjour toubabs!", every block there's another hiss or bad attempt at English, a few boys walking by just started singing "Ameeerican ladieeees, American laaaaadies..." I do realize that we are here in this country as strangers, and we are speaking quite loudly in English, but just shouting "Hey white girls!" from cars or doorways is less than convincing as a pick-up line. We were talking about how women are treated in this country, how you go straight from "daughter" and "little girl" to "wife", there is no in between, how women whose husbands leave to work in other cities or countries try to ignore the fact that they might have found another wife, because of the money that gets sent home and the shame that would accompany a divorce. Our teachers blame the rising divorce rate on how many women are becoming independent, but it seems like no one is realizing that while that is an important connection, it means that the women who don't have that freedom still might be unhappy.
We discuss our role as students here, whether or not we have a right to take offense on the behalf of a culture that surrounds us. The line between cultural difference and universal rights. Whether that changes from country to country, depending on how much money you have. What the difference is between discipline and abuse, if a child refuses to do his homework. We walk around the other side of the stadium, to the patisserie for a snack. The lady asks if we're Italian, which I find flattering, sort of. The chocolate croissant is delicious, we'll have to remember this place. I cut back through a few neighborhoods to the main road home, the sky's bright pink but not yet dark enough to worry, and two skinny kittens are playing by the curb. They're adorable, why aren't there any pets here?
Stop to chat with a neighbor I met the other day, his name is Pierre Sow and he's a retired agricultural engineer. Looks like an African Ghandi with the little glasses and big smile, and talking to him you can tell immediately he's been to at least a few universities, which is stereotyping but it's true nonetheless. He's very polite and speaks clearly, with an obviously French accent. Of course I play it safe, no I have to get home it's getting late but say hello to your family for me perhaps I'll meet your kids another time. But it's nice, talking to someone who asks about what I'm studying as apposed to who I'm marrying, discussing the environment and issues of overfishing and global warming without asking how long I'm staying in Senegal or when I'm coming back.
I start walking home and haven't gone ten feet before I see Bad News. He may be drunk, or a Bifal, or just unsteady on his feet, and if his face always looks like that then it's nature's warning to others. I don't make eye contact but he still sees me, throwing his arms wide and shouting "Ma cherie! ma femme!" and I can't make out the rest of what he says but I can't get by without getting close to him and as I pass he grabs my free arm and holds my wrist- tight. I'm so startled I pull and jerk and tell him in French that I don't want to talk, I tell him in English to get off me, I can't hear what he's saying but he hasn't stopped talking and hasn't loosened his grip and when I switch to Wolof finally my voice rises and by this time poeple on the street are staring and they hear me shout "baayi ma" and they also shout at him to let me go and in ten seconds it's all over and I'm scurrying away, only one more block till my house and my wrist is red and I'm shaken but didn't have time to think and as I go over it in my head I wonder what he was trying to say to me and I know I shouldn't always go by first images but I don't care what language you speak you don't grab my wrist that hard without letting go, and if it was culture shock then it was well justified even if it was a misunderstanding, although I think we understood each other just fine thank you.
I came home, washed my feet, wrote an essay for my Country Analysis class, had dinner, went to bed.
The next morning I automatically start walking faster as I round the corner. He's there, sure enough, not Pierre but Bob Marley Shirt, starts mumbling at me and I can't understand him but he doesn't follow me for more than a half a block. The dog with the chewed ear is looking the other way. He's looking at what I'm guessing is a stinking pile of intestines at the curb. I also later on see a kitten in the road, but it isn't playing and has been there for a while and is no longer interested in the fish bones that, were it alive, it would be eating. I see firsthand why the supermarché parking lot smells like piss, there's a man urinating quite publicly on one of the potted plants near the road.
Dakar is a city. It's just a city. There are people and animals and buildings and some are beautiful and some are reeking of fish and they turn pink at sunset and are dangerous after dark. I am not regretful but I am certainly not euphoric, I am content but never comfortable.
And if the powdered milk doesn't spill over the plastic basin and turn the crow's vest white, I'll tell you next about my trip to Toubacouta.
It's not that I don't like the city- on the contrary, I'm getting more and more fond of it. But the walk home on Thursday was an interesting wake-up call to the fact that I'll never be fully used to life here.
We always leave from WARC in a big group, stopping by the street vendor to buy fruit or Biskrem (TM), cheap packets of tiny chocolate-filled cookies. He knows us by now and every week we can understand more of what he says- he quizzes us in Wolof, chatting with the group while we debate if the pears have been washed in tap water or whether to bring home oranges or bananas for the family. We cross the street by the MyShop- I tried to use the ATM. It didn't work. Rejected my card which is slightly worrying but later I'll try the first bank we went to since that worked just fine. You have to use the ATMs that have guards sitting outside, and we always go in groups.
Then we walk down the street, past men shouting "bonjour toubabs!", every block there's another hiss or bad attempt at English, a few boys walking by just started singing "Ameeerican ladieeees, American laaaaadies..." I do realize that we are here in this country as strangers, and we are speaking quite loudly in English, but just shouting "Hey white girls!" from cars or doorways is less than convincing as a pick-up line. We were talking about how women are treated in this country, how you go straight from "daughter" and "little girl" to "wife", there is no in between, how women whose husbands leave to work in other cities or countries try to ignore the fact that they might have found another wife, because of the money that gets sent home and the shame that would accompany a divorce. Our teachers blame the rising divorce rate on how many women are becoming independent, but it seems like no one is realizing that while that is an important connection, it means that the women who don't have that freedom still might be unhappy.
We discuss our role as students here, whether or not we have a right to take offense on the behalf of a culture that surrounds us. The line between cultural difference and universal rights. Whether that changes from country to country, depending on how much money you have. What the difference is between discipline and abuse, if a child refuses to do his homework. We walk around the other side of the stadium, to the patisserie for a snack. The lady asks if we're Italian, which I find flattering, sort of. The chocolate croissant is delicious, we'll have to remember this place. I cut back through a few neighborhoods to the main road home, the sky's bright pink but not yet dark enough to worry, and two skinny kittens are playing by the curb. They're adorable, why aren't there any pets here?
Stop to chat with a neighbor I met the other day, his name is Pierre Sow and he's a retired agricultural engineer. Looks like an African Ghandi with the little glasses and big smile, and talking to him you can tell immediately he's been to at least a few universities, which is stereotyping but it's true nonetheless. He's very polite and speaks clearly, with an obviously French accent. Of course I play it safe, no I have to get home it's getting late but say hello to your family for me perhaps I'll meet your kids another time. But it's nice, talking to someone who asks about what I'm studying as apposed to who I'm marrying, discussing the environment and issues of overfishing and global warming without asking how long I'm staying in Senegal or when I'm coming back.
I start walking home and haven't gone ten feet before I see Bad News. He may be drunk, or a Bifal, or just unsteady on his feet, and if his face always looks like that then it's nature's warning to others. I don't make eye contact but he still sees me, throwing his arms wide and shouting "Ma cherie! ma femme!" and I can't make out the rest of what he says but I can't get by without getting close to him and as I pass he grabs my free arm and holds my wrist- tight. I'm so startled I pull and jerk and tell him in French that I don't want to talk, I tell him in English to get off me, I can't hear what he's saying but he hasn't stopped talking and hasn't loosened his grip and when I switch to Wolof finally my voice rises and by this time poeple on the street are staring and they hear me shout "baayi ma" and they also shout at him to let me go and in ten seconds it's all over and I'm scurrying away, only one more block till my house and my wrist is red and I'm shaken but didn't have time to think and as I go over it in my head I wonder what he was trying to say to me and I know I shouldn't always go by first images but I don't care what language you speak you don't grab my wrist that hard without letting go, and if it was culture shock then it was well justified even if it was a misunderstanding, although I think we understood each other just fine thank you.
I came home, washed my feet, wrote an essay for my Country Analysis class, had dinner, went to bed.
The next morning I automatically start walking faster as I round the corner. He's there, sure enough, not Pierre but Bob Marley Shirt, starts mumbling at me and I can't understand him but he doesn't follow me for more than a half a block. The dog with the chewed ear is looking the other way. He's looking at what I'm guessing is a stinking pile of intestines at the curb. I also later on see a kitten in the road, but it isn't playing and has been there for a while and is no longer interested in the fish bones that, were it alive, it would be eating. I see firsthand why the supermarché parking lot smells like piss, there's a man urinating quite publicly on one of the potted plants near the road.
Dakar is a city. It's just a city. There are people and animals and buildings and some are beautiful and some are reeking of fish and they turn pink at sunset and are dangerous after dark. I am not regretful but I am certainly not euphoric, I am content but never comfortable.
And if the powdered milk doesn't spill over the plastic basin and turn the crow's vest white, I'll tell you next about my trip to Toubacouta.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Ndank, Ndank
Grammaire. Le sens masculin. Les noms d’hommes et les noms devant lesquels on peut mettre le ou un sont masculins. Example. Pierre, Bachir, Abdou, le bonbon, un crayon, le préfet, le camion, un pot.
I’ve started to get into a daily routine. I wake up at seven, turn on the flourescent light to stay awake, the lay in bed for a few more minutes while I wait to hear my sister to get in the shower. This means that the narrow hallway will be open so I can get through without running into anyone. I put on a skirt over my pajama shorts, it takes five tries to light the gas burner to boil a pot of water for my shower, and walk to la boutique to pick up the morning’s 1 kilo of bread- one baguette. Three paquets of dried milk/lait en poudrière, three paquets of instant Nescafé, one of hot chocolat. Three wedges of laughing cow cheese, it’s all been paid for the night before. This morning Mama Binta went with me and there were so many people there, and the man behind the counter was so busy, she went and helped herself to various shelves and cupboards, climbing up on the stepladder to reach the box of powdered milk, grumbling at him the whole time. I pour the now-boiling water into the bucket that I take into the shower, rinse my hair while the cold water from the showerhead mixes so by the time the bucket’s full the water’s pleasantly warm. Bring yesterday’s underwear into the shower, wash that and hang it with my washcloth on the line to dry, get dressed and brush my hair. Yacine and Amas arrive just as I start eating breakfast. The pot on the stove/burner is now boiling water for coffee. I have café blanc, that is to say, a whole packet of milk and two or three cubes of sugar with what ends up only slightly tasting of coffee. Also about five inches of bread, which is just enough to balance out the cheese. Don’t forget to bid everyone a bonne journée before leaving.
I turn right out the door, right at the street, past the group of what look like refugees but are really all Muslims waiting for the bus to take them to Touba- a huge festival/celebration/holiday, they spend the night sleeping on the street on their prayer mats reading beautiful books, clustered around the speaker that blares the call to prayer. Bear to the left, don’t get hit on the blind-turn intersection, pass the dog with the chewed ear, a few cats, one’s skinny and white with a few brown spots, piles of stinking garbage. Right at the stadium, the sidewalk is covered with drying bricks, walk in the road or on the curb, there’s a woman and her five children selling and roasting peanuts from a cart, cross in front of the store that sells pristine school supplies, always tempting but I never remember the names for “notebook” or “mechanical pencil” to ask how much they cost, hard left until the Casino Supermarché and the parking lot that smells like piss. Meet Kaela, or Laura, 8:15, cross busy streets, meet a few more at the boys that sell colored baskets hanging on ropes from the trees’ branches, find a way to cross the street before reaching the colored tires. Taxis stop, I’m not looking for you, I’m looking for a gap between yellow cars and blue busses, try not to but always end up stepping out in front of traffic and hoping for the best. Shortcut past the closed amusement park by garish bumper cars that look like ghosts live there, through a pink neighborhood filled with flowers and left on the main road and play Don’t Die Crossing the Street and meet up with a few more students. Right at th’école prescolaire, here’s the street of ambassadors, a bunch of Romanians and Egyptians live here, rich but they all park their BMWs on the curb so we walk on the road, quickly as we pass the boutique “Chez Ass”, don’t look in the window, the owner’s been trying to follow Laura to school all week. The expensive café where all the rich kids hang out is on the right. The overpriced MyShop and ATM are on the left. Across the busiest intersection I’ve ever dared to traverse with one overworked traffic cop directing about eight lanes of traffic, head towards the warty troll of a baobab tree, past the crowded gas station (there’s a gas shortage because of all the traffic to Touba) past men and boys selling phone credit and a few fruit stands, the vendors know us and quiz us on our Wolof after school. This is the rich Fann neighborhood, where on trouve the hospital, university, ambassades, a curve right and a quick turn left-then-right and we’re at WARC, 9-6. And it’s totally different walking home. (Another time).
Yesterday I got home from school fairly early, but it was still only a few hours before dark. I tried to do homework, couldn't concentrate. Pascal asked me to help him with his recitations. He had to memorize two lessons and one poem for the next day. The poem was simple enough, and I tried to teach him how to pay attention to the rhythm, since he recited it all as one long get-it-over-with sentence. His next lesson was much harder for him to learn:
"L'homme mange les aliments (fruits), legumes, poissons, eau, jus, lait, pour grandir, pour avoir de l'énergie (force), et pour être en très bonne santé. Quand j'ai faim, je mange. Lorsque j'ai soif, je bois."
We went through it so many times I learned it too.
But after a bit my uncle came over and there was a huge fuss. Turns out the outside light for the jardin had burnt out, which wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that the whole fataya operation takes place in the jardin and lasts until well after dark, and while you'd hope that this would be a good excuse to end early what would be a 15-hour day, there was still work to be done. I ran and got my flashlight from my bag, fished out some batteries, and handed it to my uncle so he could see what he was doing. He was saying something about the fuse and my mom was getting upset and they argued for a while over what exactly the problem was and how it could be fixed while Pascal fidgeted his way through Quand j'ai faim, je mange. Finally it was admitted that there was nothing to be done. Mama Binta and Amas kept working, in the dark, and since Djouma had to leave to take care of her mother back in the village (for a while, actually- she's not working here anymore) and Yacine had to leave early (it's not safe for her to walk home alone after dark) they were one person short. I started helping Amas fold fatayas- he had my flashlight held like a phone between his ear and shoulder, and I used the flashlight on my phone, holding it in my mouth to light up the worktable.
We worked like that for a while. I'd switch between folding/filling, counting, and holding the light for Mama Binta. She kept leaving to call someone else who might know or be able to help with the light situation. Pascal would come outside once in a while to try again with les aliments, fruits, legumes, poisson, eau, jus, lait and kept getting sent back in to re-learn it. I looked up over the corrugated iron, saw two sharp silhouettes on the roof of the house across the street. In the window of sky, one lean-muscled shadow gestured vaguely, the other was absolutely still except to light a cigarette, the lighter flashing briefly at his face, before the tiny ember and the smoke almost glowed. They looked to be cut out of paper, the contrast between their bodies and the sky was so clear. I looked down to count fatayas, move uncooked pasties from one table to the other, when I looked back they were gone.
I tried to help Pascal, asking him questions about the text he had to learn, did he understand it, suggesting tips for memorization. Mama Binta just told him to go back inside, he didn’t understand it yet, go read it over again. I wonder how this kind of memorization works, if it really leads to understanding. Say it say it say it and then you’ll understand. If you learn the words, you learn the lesson. I would disagree, normally, at home. But I’m working so hard to say “mangi fi, jerejef, yow nak?” “maangi tudd Johanna, Aminata laa tudd ci Dakar”. I’m folding fataya and folding fataya and folding fataya, and learning that what goes into it is giant onions and green onions and black pepper and a little parsley with la viande. Pour grandir, pour avoir de l’énergie, I’m reciting and I don’t know if I’m understanding or if I need to read it again. The words are there. Et pour être en très bonne santé. Amas says I’m nice, none of the other Americans helped with the fatayas. Mama Binta says I should find a nice husband and stay here in Sénégal, she’s my maman, she’ll find me one. A nice hardworking husband, not one of those Bifals, I’m such a nice girl I should stay here in Sénégal I’m such a big help. She fries an extra fataya for me to take to school tomorrow, it’s time to clean up I should go back to helping my brother with his homework, what did my uncle think breaking the light like that, he shouldn’t be allowed in the house he’s so clumsy. I walk back inside, I’m speaking French and speaking French and speaking Wolof and speaking Wolof, telling my brother to read it five times, recite it twice, it’ll go easier that way. I wonder does Pascal really understand that he eats when he is hungry, when he hesitantly drones quand j’ai faim, je mange. You are learning that when you’re thirsty you drink. That’s all the lesson is, Pascal. It makes sense, you just need to memorize the words. Lorsque j’ai soif, je bois.
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