Il faut eat bu bax!

Towards the end of a long wedding I attended recently, as dinner was being served at 1 am, someone who swore he spoke English shouted this across the room at me. In fact, he combined French, English, and Wolof. It's a good example of the confusion regarding languages I still constantly feel here and it's meaning, you must eat a lot!, also summarizes how it goes during Senegalese dining.

These days I often find myself spending a lot of time with people who don't speak English. This is great, because it means I'm forced to practice speaking in French. And sometimes I leave feeling wonderful because I was able to communicate and understand more than the simplest of things. But I also often leave feeling so confused and wishing I could somehow be fluent in not only French, but Wolof too, because some people don’t speak French at all and just about everyone prefers speaking in Wolof. So why have I spent so much time and money learning French and have only learned very simple phrases in Wolof? And it just takes so long to learn languages! Oh the frustration!

Anyway, one great thing about this fact that I spend time with non-English speaking people means that I have branched out on my own. I’ve become more involved with the dance community here and have made many friends and acquaintances. I’ve had some wonderful opportunities to dance with beautiful dancers, to collaborate with them, and perform with them. I’ve also watched some inspiring dance performances and discovered that modern dance and improvisation, which I value greatly and thought existed mainly in the Western world, exist here as well. All that said, my patience is constantly being tested as everything here is, as one friend often says, “Senegalese style.” What does this mean? It means things such as rehearsals and performances are unorganized, planned at the last minute, then changed at the last minute, then changed again at the very last minute. It means that people don’t always respond to my calls and texts about rehearsals. It means that even if a time and place are set for a rehearsal, people may show up 2 hours late or not show up at all. And it means that sometimes I just don’t hear from dancers for a long time and I do a lot of waiting, not knowing what’s going on. And to top it off, the language barrier makes everything more confusing for me. So I just asked Ewan, is there a point when I just can’t be patient anymore? Will I burst? Can I just keep waiting and relying on other people like this?

I guess this is what it means to be a dancer here, or maybe to be an anything here. It requires patience and it requires being ready for anything, always.

And to bring things back to the title of this post, at every meal with Senegalese people, they do a good job in making sure I eat a LOT. Recently someone informed me of how important it is that I gain weight here so that when I go home, people will know that Africa was good for me. If I go back skinnier, people will think that Africa was not good for me. I’ve had many conversations about the different outlook on body image here with other Americans. It’s a compliment here to tell someone they’ve gained weight, and I’ve noticed that all body types seem to be good body types. I love this outlook, and whether I get fatter or skinnier here, I’m pretty sure that Africa is good for me. :)

Foo nekkoon?

“Where’ve you been?” The question everyone’s been asking me for the last few days. It’s not an easy question to answer.

When people ask this, it’s a little bit of a provocation. It’s a cultural theme in this part of West Africa that you shouldn’t reveal too much about yourself in public - You never know who might be listening, and you don’t want others to be jealous. The unsaid implication is that jealous people can resort to traditional medicine (of the nasty kind) to bring you bad luck. I don’t know how many people here in Dakar still believe that is a threat, but the tendency remains. So when an acquaintance asks me where I’ve been (and acquaintances here include the guy I bought a banana from three months ago), I need to come up with a way to explain it without revealing that I have the luxury of spending a thousand dollars on a plane ticket, just to attend a conference.

My pitiful excuse usually goes: “I’ve been around.” or “There’s been a lot of work.” White lies, which people see right through: “Have you been travelling?” “Um… just a little bit.” If the person is really bold, they continue: “Where did you go?” “You know, the town.” (this implies my home town.) The next question is either “Los Angeles?” or “Paris?” or “Was your father there?” (i.e. Was he well?)

It feels strange to be back in Senegal. It felt like I was away for much longer than just two weeks. It felt strange to be back in Urbana too, but not for the reason I expected. It was strange because I could just show up and more or less go back to doing what I did before I left on the big ‘Fulbright.’ I got home, pulled my bike out of the basement, pumped up the tires, and biked off to a coffee shop to work on my computer. Two things reminded me that I’d been gone: Spring was absolutely beautiful – but I didn’t feel the desperate relief of having survived a winter. Secondly, when I saw someone I knew, she or he stared and said something like “Whoooh. Aren’t you in Senegal?” or “Aren’t you in Africa?” “Aren’t you in… aren’t you gone?” (depending on how well we know each other) Other than that conversation, everything about being home for a week was very reassuring. Contrary to what my ego tells me, everything about a place doesn’t dramatically shift course just because I leave it for a while.

Surprisingly, being in Washington, D.C. hardly felt strange at all (I spent the summer of ’09 there as well). Maybe there just wasn’t time. I spent mine staring at the map to find the right room for the next two-hour research talk session (there were hundreds of sessions going on at the same time). In between talks I was trying to jump-start conversations with other students, or with our academic idols, and buying coffee as often as possible. I also enjoyed marveling at the several thousand professors and students who were doing the same thing as me, all in one giant, luxurious hotel. I also spent a good portion of the first two days (and nights) adding paragraphs to our paper and slides to the powerpoint. I was surprised to see colleagues who I assumed managed their time much better than I do doing the same thing. Once we finished our papers, we spent the evenings at bars and restaurants.

Direct flights are a scary thing. One minute I was standing on a long escalator down into the D.C. subway. Twelve hours of magazines and movies later I was 4000 miles away haggling over an early morning taxi outside Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport. Surprised by how unused my mouth was to forming sentences in Wolof.

Now I’m faced with what to do with my remaining 6 1/2 months. Continue working on the theme of ‘institutions, adaptation, and climate change’? Work on the forest management projects I originally planned to study? Continue taking the overnight bus to Tambacounda? Work somewhere closer to Dakar? Find an organization or another student whom I can collaborate with? On the plane I sat next to a friendly Linguistics professor from Ghana who made me question why I find the researchers I know in Senegal so intimidating.

This is new from me: I learned enough from study abroad to know that the reverse culture shock of coming home is the real threat. It’s more subtle and constant than the dramatic shock of dealing with new foods, new languages, new gastro-intestinal fauna. On this trip, home felt good to me. Now I’m back in the ‘foreign’ environment and in between big deadlines. Making the most of the time remaining here is looking to be a complicated thing to figure out.

Happy Tourism in the Gambia

A few weeks ago when an American studying abroad in St. Louis (about 5 hours north of Dakar) was couchsurfing with us, I impulsively invited myself on a trip she was taking with some friends from her study abroad program to the Gambia. I guess I really needed a change, and perhaps more than that I needed to spend time with English speaking women. I find myself almost constantly around men here, and, well, that needed to change, if only for a week. My impulsive decision turned out to be a great decision! I had a wonderful trip.

Now how to summarize an eventful week in a different country? What sticks out the most is how much I laughed during the trip. This was due in part to being with girls who like to laugh a lot, but also the Gambia is just goofy. It’s called the Smiling Coast of Africa because it’s shaped like a smile, but I think also because it’s so laid-back and everything is funny! The people there had me laughing until I was crying all the time, whether it was the men we met named Captain Aladdin, Foxy Brown, Bob the Builder, or Alex the Juice man who we had a silly half hour bargaining session with on the beach before he brought us delicious fresh squeezed orange and lime juice. All of the men are not shy and hit on us but not in a creepy way as I perceive men to be here in Senegal, always in a goofy way. I think I fit in well there because everyone seems as if they’re about to start cracking up, which is often how I live my life. Even the animals are goofy. At the beach, I stood up from my towel and a dog immediately took my place and sunbathed on my towel with a goofy expression on his face.

We spent most of our time on the Western coast, starting in the small capital city of Banjul. Then we spent a few nights in Bakau, taking day trips to surrounding towns. On our last day, we spent many hours at Makasutu Culture Forest, an absolutely stunning place, and then spent the night in the closest town, Brikama. A lot of the time, we had activities planned out based on the Lonely Planet Guide book, but more often than not, places we looked for were closed or we never found them at all. Thus our trip ended up being unpredictable, figuring out what to do on the spot.

I will post pictures so please look at those via the link to our picasa album on the right, as they will better show the events of our trip than a description I can fit into a readable blog post.

Here is a small example of the happy, goofy, hospitable Gambian people. At Makasutu Culture Forest, this wonderful musician played his Kora for us while we rested between events. Here he went from playing a piece in Mandinka into this lovely little welcoming song.

Home Sweet Home

It has been a long time indeed since a post has happened here. This is because Ewan is in the US for 2 weeks, maybe you saw him there with your own eyes, and why would he post on a blog about senegal while not in Senegal? I just returned home (our home in Liberte 1 truly feels like home now) after a trip to The Gambia with some lovely Americans, one of who I had met just before the trip, the others I met as we began our voyage. I do not have the time or patience with French keybourds to write anything else now but plenty to come about the Smiling Coast of Africa and lots of pictures to come (I think I took more pictures there than I have in Senegal so far) as soon as Ewan returns with his American computer!

Buy - Fruit de Baobab

Sticking with Ewan’s obsession with food, there are many additional foods that are worth writing about! I’ll stick with my current obsession: baobab, the magical fruit.

My first week here I was introduced to the variety of sweet, satisfying, delicious tropical fruit juices widely available. My favorite immediately became bouye, made from the fruit of baobab trees. It’s so thick and creamy, it’s more like a milkshake than juice. It has a wonderful, refreshing taste. Nothing leaves me more satisfied when I’m hot, dehydrated, and fatigued after dancing.
All over Dakar, independent vendors sell goodies on the street. Most of these goodies are local products, such as peanuts in all sorts of varieties. I always noticed little plastic bags with small white rock-like objects. Having no idea what it was and too timid with my limited vocabulary to ask, I went on buying peanuts and other familiar snacks. Recently I found out that these little white rocks were the fruit from baobabs, those monumental trees. And that they are delicious. It’s a dry fruit with a texture unlike any other I’ve ever had, which you suck on and then spit out the seeds. It has a tart, unique flavor. When I started eating these I couldn’t stop, but figured it had to be healthy. It’s fruit after all.
As it turns out, healthy was an under-exaggeration. After doing a little research I found out that this fruit has:

-Six times the vitamin C as an orange
-Twice as much calcium as a glass of milk
-Loads of antioxidants
-Iron and potassium
-It’s good for your stomach when sick (when I went to buy a large quantity of it, the vendor asked if I was feeling okay)
-The seeds you spit out can be roasted, ground, and boiled into a coffee-like drink (I’ve been saving my seeds and plan on trying this if I can figure out a way to grind them here)
-You can make ice cream out of it (one lady selling the stuff had a recipe for this; one ingredient was a bunch of kids in the neighborhood to run back and forth to bring enough ice)

Needless to say, I’ve eaten a ton of it since figuring out what it is. My bones, immune system, and stomach have felt great every since! Did I mention that it’s ridiculously cheap?



While on the topic of fruit, I should add that the long-awaited mango season is approaching. I love mangoes. I’ve been excited about mango season since I arrived. The other day I bought ripe mangoes for 10 cents each. This is a sure sign that mango season is coming. It shouldn’t be long before mangoes are falling from the sky (or at least from the giant mango tree in our neighbor’s yard, much of which is hanging over our back courtyard). :)