Vacance Citoyen de Sokone

Salam mallakum, mes xarit! I just returned yesterday afternoon from an enlightening vacance citoyen in the village of Sokone, just above the Gambian border! It was an amazing five days filled with laughter, swimming, new friends, and the occasional agonizing chemical burn! The village was a five hour drive from Dakar, give or take three-four hours if one is to account for traffic or the relative muddiness of the dirt paths that account for one half of the roads leading there. The time in our large, airconditioned bus passed by quickly though as I played UNO with the accompanying students from the University of Dakar who argued loudly in Wolof, cuddled with Sydney and Griffin under a shared blanket, or bobbed my head (unintentionally) to Jane’s Addiction as our bus dipped through the numerous potholes and danced with oncoming bygone stationwagons on the paved parts of the road or swerved off through the brush to avoid the crumbling “highways” all together. All in all, I enjoyed the view from the lumpy, orange mud detours (expansive fields of corn or brush with the occasional Baobab tree, dispersed thatched-roof huts, and the intermittent post-pubescent boy riding a small, bony horse or pre-pubescent boy wielding a rusty machete) more than the view from the actual highways in the surrounding banlieues of Dakar (a giant concrete factory, dirty settlements and stores, and what have you).

After arriving in Sokone, we played games with a gaggle of local Wolof children while waiting for a little bit (an hour) for the key to our home for the week, which was a cross between an inner-city middle school gym, an abandoned crack house, and the Alamo. The first night we wouldn’t really do anything but eat dinner the usual way (the girls brought out multiple giant plates of food- rice and fish, rice and beef, couscous and fish, etc. for everyone to eat with a large metal spoon or their hands) and set up our stained, torn foam mattresses in the large room that the housed the females for the week. At the time I was enthused that we were each given a chemical-treated mosquito net to hang over our mattresses, so enthused in fact that Sydney and I ripped open the blue plastic bags in which they came like an eighth day of Hanukah present and continued to do impressions of Madonna in her emblematic Lolita lace, reenact the pinnacle scene of the 2001 box office thriller The Others staring Nicole Kidman, and press our faces up against the nets that served as a border between our beds, softly speaking of possible match making with the Senegalese boys and giggling earnestly at our own jokes well into the night. Two hours later we would both wake up in the dark room of snoozing females, me weeping and itching my arms, legs, and neck and her with blood-shot, burning eyes, too uncomfortable, too miserable to even contemplate a restful slumber. Perhaps a side effect of the malaria medicine I take daily (which makes me tan within minutes in the sun, has given me a weird breakout on my right shoulder alone, otherwise makes my skin extremely sensitive, as well as has provided “esophageal swelling” that makes me feel as if I have a chunk of plastic in my stomach when I swallow), I am apparently allergic to whatever chemical they douse mosquito nets in, so much so that it probably was the worst idea I could have ever had to wrap myself up like a chuckling idiot 5-layer burrito from Taco Bell. To make things worse, when I jumped in the shower (didn’t help) in an attempt to ease the relentless itching/burning that made up the most agonizing discomfort I’ve felt in some time, my bar of soap leapt from my hand onto the floor of one of the three bathroom stalls and glided into the poop-hole of the squat-style toilet like a gold-metal captain of the Jamaican bobsled team, never to be seen again.

And so, I scratched, I burned, I was up at 5am when the students of the University of Dakar aka Université Cheikh Anta Diop (plus me, Sydney, and Griffin- the Americans still holding out with the fast) rose to eat pain du chocolate and drink warm powdered milk with sugar in preparation for another day of Ramadan, and the week went on. Fatigue finally enabled me to go back to sleep for a few hours but the following nights, I traded my chemical burns for a false case of the chicken pox and moved my mattress outside of the nets and into the center of the room. The following days we (the nine people from my program, fifty students from the University of Dakar, and six non-French speaking peeps from a Boston community college) would get into a routine of waking up, breaking into our groups and spending a couple of hours at our jobs, then convening in the shade on the front porch of our building to converse in French, eat lunch and dinner around the large platters, make ataya tea, kick around a soccer ball I bought for $2, or go to the “beach,” a stagnant water source surrounding an expanse of mangroves whose depth varied with the tides and whose cleanliness most likely varied with whatever runoff came from the village that week.

My absolute favorite part of the week was playing a card game called (whatelse) Blood with a ridiculously confusing set of rules and another complex set of strategies, made more difficult by the fact that there are ten to fifteen guys surrounding the table, arguing emphatically in Wolof, whispering directions at you in too fast French, slamming their hands on the table if you don’t play fast enough on your turn, and throwing down their cards and walking away if you as their partner made a false move. That being said, even though I had to sit by the table and watch for five hours before being able to even attempt to play alone, five days of playing BLOOD well into the night (with a headlamp when the power went out or with swarms of helicopter-sized bugs when the lights were on) was the most profitable experience I probably have had in Senegal thus far. My ability to understand spoken French improved hugely, my speaking and interacting progressed 50 fold, and on top of it all I made very good friends with a buttload of very friendly, chatty, sarcastic Senegalese peeps as a result of this week. More so than from the handful of French lessons Waly continued while we were in Sokone, substituting our WARC classroom with a dry erase board placed in front of a row of plastic chairs in a field of goats.

My relationship with Senegalese females would develop differently, and notably due to the attention it brings to a major difference with American/Western gender relationships. After first arriving, I thought our group was provided with a couple of professionals to supervise meals because the women immediately took to the cooking and cleaning for everyone. While the men (twenty-one to twenty-seven year old college students) leaned back in their chairs, gazing lazily at the hand of cards they were dealt, the women (although students of medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, journalism, economics themselves) skated around in t-shirts and jeans or full flowing skirts and headscarves alike to distribute spoons and the large silver platters to everyone, then sweep away the piles of spilled rice and bones from the tables and floors, wash the dishes in large plastic buckets, and finally bring everyone tea, bissap juice, or water. Without exception the men would never, ever clean or even be expected to clean during the week. That being a provoking reality for me, the girls were not discontent or even flinched when a guy, equal in age and apparently any other gauge save gender, would literally snap his fingers and point in front of him to signal that he was ready for her to refill his drink and then take away his plastic cup to have it washed and dried. And so, the group was generally naturally separated by males and females in a way that notably would not be at all present in a group of American college-students of the same age sharing a building for a week without supervision. Therefore, I made good friends with the Senegalese girls in the same way I did with the guys, by partaking in their respective interests during the week, whether it was helping cook and clean in the kitchen, have my hair braided by a cutie named Coumba (it took hours), laying/dancing/listening to music on the mattresses in our room, or laughing while they taught me various critical phrases in Wolof (Jai fondey - You gotta big ass, or literally, You are a porridge seller).

While I could go on forever, I’ll end this entry by talking about the actual purpose of the vacance citoyen, to do a big community service project for the village of Sokone. The various options one could choose each day were medical consultations, reforestation, teaching the basic functions of computers to those who’d never used them, or teaching French to Wolof speakers. Given my merry experience with the mosquito nets, I was not up for spending hours in the sun and dirt planting trees, although this seemed to be the most popular and social option. And so on my first day, on my way to the hospital to help with medical consultations, I found myself in the bus among ten of the Senegalese students, Kiki, Sydney, and Korka tearing pieces of white printer paper into squares without explanation. Later I would find out these rugged-edged scraps would be the pieces of paper on which prescriptions would be given by the doctors, who turned out to be the twenty-something year old kids around me. After arriving at the hospital, I was assigned to “help” those specialized to work the dentistry ward of the hospital (a room), but immediatly felt like a huge noob, awkwardly shuffling around the room in my Saints Superbowl Championship t-shirt and jeans as the Cheikh Diop students/official dentists immediately got to work, sticking their ungloved-hands in the mouths of a line of patients after putting on their stark white lab coats monogrammed with their full names and titles. Sydney and Kiki worked next door, writing names on a list of people and their children waiting to get checkups and diagnoses from the other official teenage doctors, who waited in their monogrammed coats with stethoscopes around their necks and serious expressions at old wooden tables in some outdoor pavilion of the hospital. I ended up just standing by to watch after completing the strenuous work they assigned me of drawing lines on paper for people to write their names, dissecting a peice of fruit from a tree in the courtyard as three girls in matching white silk headscarfs and lab coats swooned through the dirt and up the unairconditioned halls of the hospital like unearthly ghosts. I am such a toubab. The rest of the week I settled in to work in the small bibliothèque municipale with my new crush Fofana, stresslessly teaching young children, teenagers, and some adults in French how to use the basic functions of a computer.

Now that I am back in Dakar, I have this weekend and this week until Wednesday to read a 200-page book in French ( Les familles dakaroises face à la crise) that I forgot to bring with me to the village and write a 5-page paper also in French. However, after Wednesday I have a week of vacation before my other classes at the WARC begin and the MSID participants who did not opt for the summer session come in, hopefully to relax, shop, hang out with my family and new Senegalese friends, and maybe travel to the southern/tropical Casamance region of Senegal.

Hope all is going well with you! À la prochaine fois! Ba baneen yo!