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!

La Jeûne

Today was the second day of Ramadan, and it was just as beautiful as the first. Fasting was particularly difficult because of the heat, but still yesterday was worse due to the fact that I had the great idea to wash clothes on the roof on an August day. It was both torture and heaven taking a late-afternoon shower but not being able to drink after scrubbing clothes in a bucket, sweeping my room with a bundle of hay, and tidying up my few material possessions, with the cold water running down me and pooling on the floor of the dark, cool cupboard-turned-bathroom under the concrete staircase (no homo). But, alas, I knew it was worth it when after the call to prayer issued from the nearby Mosque de Mermoz no longer echoed in the tall, cinderblock walls of my family’s courtyard, we all felt further satisfaction as we downed sticky dates, cups of sweetened coffee, and a half of a buttered baguette each. Later we would sit side-by-side in middle of the room again, with the cool concrete walls and rooms and balconies of the house rising around us, and eat from a substantial platter of rice and fish with serving-size metal spoons.

Now, as I sit three stories up on the roof, the sun has fully gone down and after an incredibly warm and uncomfortable day, the night breeze is blowing. I hear the small family of cats whining (a mama and two tiny babies) who live in the space where an old wooden door leans against the short wall that separates our flat roof from our neighbors. I can pick out my eldest brother amongst the many people below shuffling from their homes towards the mosque down the dark, dusty street; he’s wearing a long, breezy blue and white pinstripe robe, with the hood up and is carrying his string of shiny black prayer beads wrapped around his wrist. Again, as it does five times a day, a man’s voice is broadcast from the mosque and his longing, indebted prayer resonates in the brick-laid alleyways, in the swaying Baobab trees, in the ears and souls of the patrons of the city.

In Senegal, right now on this roof, I feel peaceful, softened, at ease while completely submerged in a culture that is anything but familiar. More than feeling alienated or aware of the disparate separation from who I am and where I am, I’ve been feeling like I could live my life out in this place and that these people are already my neighbors and this place could easily become my home. But, right now, I feel a tinge of desperation because even if I am successful with my month-long restraint from eating or drinking water from sunrise to sunset, even if I improve my French and Wolof enough to communicate whole heartedly with my Senegalese friends, even if I learn the ways and means of cooking and dress and acceptable gestures, I sit alone on the roof as almost every Senegalese hurries to give penance to the thing that consumes them, impels them, and ordains every piece of their sensibility.

Far from converting to Islam, I long for the same peaceful spirituality that sews me into the world and wonderfully furls what now is the fragmented, agitated way that I comprehend my being. No longer will I dismiss an enduring faith in some incorporeal, perhaps divine force as a lapse in rationality, as incompatible with the material and measurable laws of science and nature that apparently conduct my days. Right now I feel the man’s song echoing from the tall minaret of the Mosque de Mermoz as a oneness, a washing away of the little fragments of rock that continuously scour against each other in the furthest reaches of my mind. It brings only a wave of harmony, dreariness, and a heaviness that settles itself down on my eyelids.

Poésie Sénégalaise

A poem

Just sittin’ on the roof, washing my underwear in a bucket.
These days life got me feeling whiter than if I came from Nantucket.
Like a Supreme Court Justice, I stand out for being fair,
But we still eatin’ chebu jën together because terangas in the air.

Come with your host brother and your mother to the grand marché,
Cuz’ bitches tryna give me shit like it’s my damn birthday.
Well, tuey nangi ataya, bring your mint to the front deck,
Americans got 99 problems but here all we know is jáam rek.

Oh Waaw!!!

The spelling of “wow” there was an intentional pun, as in the indigenous Senegalese language Wolof, waaw means yes. Alors, je suis arrivée au Sénégal et c’est une expérience nouvelle bien sûr ! My flight went well, under 8 hours. After meeting/playing UNO with the rest of the MSID students in the Dulles airport (introductions to come), I sat next to Griffin for the flight (who goes to Northeastern in Texas but in an it’s-a-small-world moment also was in my post-Katrina cooking class in Evanston). He and Lucretia (quiet girl from University of Illinois) were both worrying beaucoup that they forgot their cartes jaunes, the yellow cards detailing your immunizations that are required by the immigration checkpoints of any African country, however, when we arrived at the Leopold Senghour airport in Dakar, they asked us for little more than our name. We fumbled over French with the immigration officers when they inquired about the address of our destination but they eventually got frustrated and stamped our passports when we mumbled something about the University of Dakar, with which in reality we have no affiliation. Leaving the airport was ridiculous though and even the reviews online that describe the Dakar airport as a “disgrace” could not begin to explain the beggars and riffraff that swarmed us and tried to “help carry our bags” even after incessant “NOOOOO”s and “Bouge-toi!”s. In fact they did not se bougé, but instead continued to talk to us in a combination of Wolof, French, and English (Ça va? My sister! No toudou? - How are you? My sister! What is your name?) as we dragged our bags to the van. There was even a guy who pretended he was part of our group and helped instruct the driver on how to pack the suitcases on top of the bus until someone shooed him away. We were met by two of the members of the MSID équipe, Waly (a very nice and funny if not bossy and talkative guy) and Korka (a smiley, beautiful Wolof princess). At the hotel we would meet Adjii (Ad-gee) who is Senegalese, of a Muslim brotherhood who wear the headscarf, and sometimes sounds American and has American mannerisms when she speaks English.

However, sleeping was not in the cards for us young Toubabs, for our plane landed at 5:30am and by the time we had brought our valises to our rooms, the sun was rising. I actually witnessed the rising of my first African sun standing on our balcony, overlooking a dirt road, an Arabian-inspired three story house, an incomplete cinder-block shanty, and an alleyway decorated with a delicate mix of domestic trash and a pile of moldy ottomans. Standing next to me where two other girls from the program who lacked a balcony in their own room, Sydney, a funny and intelligent Penn State student who as they say runs on “sénégalaise time” (she’s always late), and Keianna, a Colombia student who has Jamaican roots. When my own roommate Kenzie arrived, the four of us plus Griffin and Joe (a skinny guy with an accent from the University of Minnesota) ate breakfast (bread, croissant, butter, jelly, coffee) in the hotel lobby. Kenzie explained to us that she had been living in Dakar for a month already, getting her fourth semester of French as per required by the program, and that she could bring us around. Kenzie maintained this tour guide-like conversation skill until, well, it’s still going. She did manage to lead us to the beach, through heap of trash and busy interstate alike, twisting her blond dreadlocks the whole way.

The beach of Youff (this particular district of Dakar) as I would find out, is a very cool place. There were hundreds of colorful flat fishing boats and the accompanying ladies and girls who were there to pick out from them the catch of the day to sell in the market. As for any other animal life, if you were wondering, we saw a couple herds of nappy-headed goats, a dying kitten, a stray dog that followed us, and a boxful of grilled sea urchins. With that and the trail of trash and fish bones along the beach, I’m kind of regretting not getting my rabies shot. At one point we stopped to help pull in one of the boats after being asked by one of the very, very few people there who spoke French, fewer of which had creepy milky white retinas like him. He kept pointing to a boat out in the water and saying we were pulling in that one but after ten minutes of pulling and not seeing it move, I really think it was all just a big Senegalese joke and there were really some dudes in the water pulling back. Anyway, no one really cared to see us white people there it seemed, as per African history goes white people (toubabs- really means foreigners) haven’t always been the bearers of good news. That being said, I have to note that before coming to Senegal, all of my MSID packets and reading material commented extensively on the willingness of Senegalese men to whistle, request your hand in marriage, or at least try and get your phone number. Feeling slighted, I later asked Kenzie why this was and she explained it was because we were with two guys and so they didn’t care to bother us. This came as good news to me. And so, we returned to the hotel, navigating through a shanty-ish neighborhood with dirt roads and unfinished cinder-block houses with fresh laundry or wooden fruit stands out front.

For me, I could have called it a day right then, but this day was far from over. It became a reoccurring impression that I had been there for a couple of weeks, or at least it was our second day due to the fact that when we arrived and entered our hotel rooms, it was still night, and when we left them an hour later, the sun was out, blazing. So at noon we were picked up in a van by Waly, Korka, and Adjii to have a short orientation and eat lunch at Houdrine’s (a program director) house. Her house was very fancy for Senegal and had a small courtyard decorated with foliage behind the gate, three stories, and a flat roof with a little gazebo, bathroom (with a washing machine!), and African paintings hanging in the sun. Lunch smelled almost as awful as the fish stank of the beaches while it was being prepared, but the Cebu Jën (Cebu = Wolof for rice, Jën = fish) was soooo delicious. The nine of us in the summer session sat on the ground around three large platters and rolled up the rice, veggies, and fish into little rice-veggie-fish balls and shoved them into our mouths. Sydney had the orange-colored oil from the rice all over her face, but don’t tell her. The rules are you can’t use your left hand because you wipe your poop with it and you can’t reach over and grab the tasty morsels in front of others. I was delighted to find that the weather in Senegal is as hot and humid as New Orleans; read that as sweat was pouring from every crevice of my body as I was wrapped in an African-print pagne and drank steaming ataya tea on top of the roof.

After a couple hours of orientation (all in French and I understood!), we took a walk through the area in the late afternoon, down through the meandering streets with their packs of stray dogs, goat, cats and little children shouting “Bon soir, toubab! Toubab! Toubab!” through the market lined with stalls of plump boubou-donned women selling a plethora of fish, along the beach lined with the same multicolored boats. Drink. it. in. We then made our way to a rock sequestration where I played with Houdrine’s children, catching hermit crabs and small poissons. After returning a different way, passing an intensely spectated neighborhood soccer match and other groups of people (everyone is on the streets and everyone is wearing a Kobe Bryant or other bootleg soccer/basketball jersey) we ate again on the rooftop. This time we had chicken, french fries, this oniony sauce, and baguette and needless to say it was also very good. I think I like Senegalese food more than any of the food I eat at home. Thank god, what felt like three days of my life was over, and after we helped ranger, bringing the platters and cloths down to the servants on the first floor, we all piled back into the bus. A short car ride and shower later, I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.

Pictures!!!
More to come!