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). :)

Jën yu bari - Lots of fish

Continuing my current food obsession...

This morning I woke up with a taste in my mouth like a hangover. A hangover that comes from grilled fish, skin crisp in its own oil, with raw onions.

This is probably the fourth day I've suffered from such a hangover. Each time I swear I've had enough. I'll never eat that much fish again.

But I haven't learned my lesson yet.

Naka lañuy lekk dugup - How to eat sorghum

Back in Dakar for the past week, I've been thinking more and more about food. In fact, I think about food constantly now. Finishing lunch, I start scheming about the next coffee break or street food. I make mental checklists of all the stalls, tables, stands, and restaurants open at each mealtime (and between) in the neighborhood. I go to bed happily anticipating porridge, or bread and jam with kenkiliba tea, powdered milk and dark honey.

Partly I'm responding to stress - food is something I can plan out and control. It's also a handy distraction from figuring out my next difficult research question. But food is also cheap and universally available - in Dakar, you're never more than 50 m from a Nescafé coffee cart or a lady selling peanuts.

Maafe tiga, a village meal of rice and thin peanut sauce. I didn't always look forward to the same meal each day, but I eat better than anyone else in the village. The jaxanke custom is to leave guests (especially white-skinned ones) to eat on their own, and serve them ridiculous portions (in the bottom picture I set two thirds of the rice aside so I won't mix it with the sauce as I eat).

And there are so many variations. I thought I pretty much knew Senegalese food the first time I came. It turns out I was totally wrong. This year, I learned that ceebu jën can have whole fish in the middle of the rice plate and also hand-rolled balls of rice, fish, and spices scattered around the edges. I learned that half the coffee sellers have fresh lime to squeeze into your street espresso. I learned there are at least three types of batter used to make beignet doughnuts (wheat, sorghum, condensed milk with vanilla essence). Just tonight we ate at a small table up the street where Jeanne, a sweet Mankañ woman, chats with her sisters and grills fresh fish on demand. She explained the names of fish I'd never heard, and laid out our morsel on huge plate of salad, dolloping on sharp-tasting, green sauce I'd never tasted. The sauce was her 'secret.' Was it mustard, jalepeños, parsley?

But there is one African food I fantasize about hopelessly, and it's something almost never seen in the States: sorghum. Every culture creates hosts of foods from its staple grains. It's disquieting to realize about  how much we make out of wheat. But even though the end results might not be quite as diverse, sorghum is impressive to me. Maybe it's because for the most part it remains outside the processed food chain. You don't buy sorghum shrink-wrapped in supermarkets. Instead, women carry it into your neighborhood in calabashes wrapped in cloth, or sell small bags on rickety tables along the roadside.

Different varieties of sorghum are grown all over Senegal and West Africa; there are slower- and faster-maturing types depending on how long the rainy season lasts in the region. Sorghum and millet were the 'original' staple grains in the Sahelian and Sudanian zones of West Africa. And although imported rice dominates urban food in Senegal, farmers across the country still grow these dryland grains mostly to feed their families, but also to sell to urban markets (eventually reaching the women who carry it in calabashes).

People here tend to associate sorghum with 'traditional' rural culture. When I tell strangers that I ate sorghum porridge for breakfast, they turn  to each other, laughing and back-slapping: How 'African' this toubab has become! In today's Wolof slang, "I swear by sorghum and yoghurt!" (War na cere ak sow!) mean's you're really serious about what you're saying. (Maybe it's like swearing to the foods of your ancestors, which demand respect?) Eating sorghum also tends to be associated with the more 'peripheral' ethnic groups - especially the Serer from west Senegal and the Fulbe (Fulani) from the center and north of the country. Maybe because these groups are considered more rural and traditional?

The sorghum family, from right to left: sorghum flour (sunguf, dugup bu soq), cere, caakary, suusël. Behind, a bag of ngalax, sweet ground peanut sauce.

I admit I am extremely ignorant about how raw sorghum grain becomes food. I used to think cere porridge was the whole grain. Now I'm pretty sure it first has to pass through the flour stage. You need to remove the chaff, either by pounding the whole grains in a mortar (and then tossing the mixture in a basket to remove the lighter particles?) or by grinding them in a machine. Next you sprinkle water over the flour and toss it so the droplets form into evenly covered balls (I've seen this done with corn). This is the stage where sorghum divides into different kinds of food - large balls will become one kind of porridge; small ones another. Next you cook the balls by steaming them, then dry them completely so they can be stored.

So, on to the foods:

1) Cere [pronounced "cheré"] is a famous bland porridge made of small balls. Cere comes with and without laalo. Laalo is both the name of a slightly bitter sap mixed with the cere and the tree the sap comes from. Cere with laalo is especially good with meat and tomato sauces. Cere without laao is good with milk, hot or cold. The Serer neighbors who sell small bags of sorghum products in their living room remind us every time we visit that "Cere must be drank with milk, not yoghurt!" Right now, I'm hooked on hot cere in the mornings with fried apples or bananas.

2) Caakary [spelled thiakry in French, and pronounced "chakry"] is made of slightly larger balls, and often perfumed with some sort of essence.

3) Lax [the 'x' is pronounced with a throaty "kh" sound, like a French 'r'].
CORRECTION: I initially reported that caakary  took on different names depending on which milk product you eat it with. When eaten with a thin, sweetened and perfumed yoghurt, I said it was called lax. Luckily enough, our neighbor Maggate stopped by this morning to offer some lax brought by a neighbor who just hosted a baptism. I told him: "This doesn't look like caakary!" It wasn't. So I learn that there is yet another kind of sorghum balls - lax sticks together as a soft mush. I still suspect that these same sorghum balls might be called fonde (porridge) when in a sweet watery soup, but Maggate insisted they were just lax.

4) Fonde. In Dakar, people especially like fonde as an evening meal during Ramadan, to break the day-long fast. Sharing a communal bowl, you slurp steaming hot fonde from small dipping ladles.

5) Ngalax. During the Muslim holidays Korite and Tabaski, sorghum (I'm guessing the same kind used in lax) is mixed with incredibly sweet yoghurt, ground peanuts, and vanilla to make the drink ngalax. One cup of this stuff and you're so full you have to skip a meal.

Ngalax made the thick sow  we like best.

6) Beignets. More like doughnut holes than the delicate French beignets Amy taught me how to make, these are often made out of wheat. But the darker, denser, heartier version is made from sorghum flour, and I buy this type whenever I have the choice.

7) Pain riche. I could write another post about the variations on French bread here (boulangerie baguettes, dense village-oven loaves, "diabetic" bread with whole wheat flour). When we want to feel a little healthier (we eat a lot of bread here), we buy sandwich-sized baguettes of pain riche at the nearest boutique. The fluffy inside is speckled dark with sorghum flour.

8) Suusël. My newest discovery. Crumbly little cakes made from sorghum flour, ground peanuts, and sugar. Perfect with a rich, milky café au lait on the street.

Addition: I just thought of another famous type of sorghum food: to ["toe"], a national dish in Mali. I have never had the pleasure of tasting it myself, but one Peace Corps volunteer said to alone was responsible for him losing 50 pounds over the course of his assignment. No matter how hungry he became, he could not bring himself to eat more than a handful of this dense, sticky substance.

These two images of to are courtesy of the extremely well-done illustrated Bambara-English-French dictionary.

Mi yahay haa ara – I’ll go and come back

I got back to Dakar last Thursday afternoon. I spent almost one week in the village of Medina, a few hours south of Tambacounda, and night stopped in the city of Kaolack on the way home. I’ve been mulling over a blog post since the hours spent squeezed in a hot sept-place coming home. But I put off writing because I haven’t felt ready to capture the experience of my first trip outside Dakar. I felt the same way when I had just arrived in Senegal in early January. It’s not going to get any clearer if I put it off, so I’ll just jot down a couple things that happened now.

The amazing thing about the traveling is that it went off without a hitch. The sept-places didn’t break down. The bus didn’t happen to be carrying Tambacounda’s weekly supply of fish. I never even waited more than thirty minutes for my next ride. But I was reminded that traveling is uncomfortable in the best of circumstances – thin cushions produce to aching sit bones, packed legroom lead to bruised knees. There is always at least one baby in a nearby seat. Fortunately there are also three experienced mothers, each with her trick for getting a hysterical baby to slip back into slip. Fortunately the discomforts of travel are quickly forgotten, at least while you’re young.

To get to Medina, I passed from tour bus to village-hopping minibus, then jumped on the back of an all-terrain Guinean motorbike driven by my friend Bara Sané. And all of a sudden I was standing in the dusty courtyard of the same compound I’d lived in for six weeks, almost five years ago. And towards me came a second Bara (Bara Touré) grinning and shouting my Muslim name: “Assane has come! Assane has come!”

I was shocked by how little had changed. In my first stay, I saw how much labor went into literally keeping a rural household together. The biggest difference between modern materials (concrete and tin sheeting) and traditional ones (hard banco clay, thick branches, and thatch) is durability. But I found the same five red huts I’d last seen (although a sliver of wall and caved in inside my former hut, so it was left for the chickens). There was the same roofed shelter covering the raised bench/bed built of twisted poles.

I want to say the reunion with old friends was dramatic, that the odors and sounds renewed an old connection, that I suddenly grasped the significance of having stayed, left, and come back to this small, remote place. But honestly, after about half an hour, it felt mostly normal. Sort of like continuing where I had left off. In part that’s how people treat one another in Senegal (or at least how they treat me). Guests are incredibly important, and welcomed back with long greetings, asking after every family member back at home. You are fed incredibly well. But once you get past that, people seem to treat you in the same low key way as those they see everyday. They don’t expect much. And that’s comforting.

(Although it is important for a guest to bring gifts, this process is also laid back. It literally does not matter whatsoever what types of gift you give, so long as they are of some monetary value. You don’t have to careful calibrate your offering to the recipient’s personality and your interpersonal history like you might when birthday shopping in the West.)

During my week in Medina, I mentally noted thousands of details. Tried to memorize snapshots of dozens of interesting scenes. Somehow none of that is coming back to me now. It’s bad writing to summarize, but probably better than not to write at all.

So over six days in Medina, I conducted ten interviews, recorded fourteen-some hours of talk, and wrote eighty-some pages of notes. I tried to be a lot more detailed and inclusive than before, and write in full sentences. (My first visit resulted in 49 pages of notes over seven weeks) I tried to have more of a sense of what I wanted to learn, and just where the actual collection of data fit into the bigger picture of the research I want to construct, and the education I’m trying to get. And though my mood swung high and low each day – that part was very consistent with my first visit too – overall I started to think that I am extremely lucky. Lucky to have found such a place as Medina to work, and lucky to know the incredibly generous people I do.

I listed the ways I am lucky: I have one of the finest huts in the village: a concrete floor, sturdy bed and table, wooden doors (with keyed locks!), and a well-drained, private bathroom. The women in the village chief’s household cook and delivery to me three heaping meals a day. There may be a heavy presence of rice and thin peanut sauce, but there are also beans or spinach stew some nights, and there’s no way I could cook for myself on an open, wood-fire hearth. As soon as I showed up, I had willing understanding research partners, who know exactly what researchers want and were happy to help me. I realized the first day that I could ask Bara Touré, the main resident of the compound where I stay, to be a research assistant. He was born blind and, perhaps because he is the son of the village chief, spent several years studying and job training in Dakar.

Bara T. is exceptional. Fluent in Wolof, and damn good at French, he has an urban familiarity that allows me to communicate and relate with him closely. And, because he’s blind, he doesn’t undertake dry-season work that takes up most men’s days – watering fields in the banana plantation, gathering timber, traveling to meetings and weddings and funerals. He runs a business based on a solar panel acquired from an old German development project. Together with a used car battery, a series of voltage converters, and power strips, he recharges the village cell phones for about 20 cents a pop. But most of the time, he was happy to help me plan and carry out interviews, translating my clumsy Wolof to one of three languages – even creating a daily schedule of whom to visit at what times!

So although my feelings about returning to Medina (and about my research in general) still swing from morning to evening, when I’m able to step back I feel lucky I can come and go to such a place. Now I’m trying to figure out how best to sort through the details and decide what I need to do next. I’m going to a conference in April, and I want to get the most from the next month in Senegal. When I left Medina, people joked that I was in a hurry to get back to ‘my wife’ in Dakar (mostly true). I told everyone “I’ll go and come back soon.”

Merci de lire!

I wanted to write a quick note to thank everyone for reading, and for all the comments which people have left, either here or via email. It's good to know that people are reading this blog! It's also nice to hear from family and friends while I'm so far away.

Also, a quick note on how much I stand out here! I knew before coming of course that I would stand out, but I was actually surprised when I arrived at how many toubabs (white folks) I saw. However, I stand out in so many ways! In some ways, it's annoying. I have never had anything stolen from me in the US, but within 2 weeks here my cell phone was stolen while on a bus, and I've heard much worse stories of crimes happening to white people here. (Don't worry concerned family members reading this, I've learned how to be very careful since then...) We are targets for criminals. And then there are the taxis who honk at me if they're searching for a client. Taxi after taxi will honk at me while I'm walking or waiting for a bus. Do they think that toubabs never walk or take public transportation? Or more likely that they'll make more money off of me than a Senegalese person? And then of course there are the men who see me as a ticket to the US, women who see me as someone in search of a maid, and who knows what else people want from me (half the time I don't really understand what one is saying).

In some ways standing out is amusing and sort of endearing. A few nights ago I went to a café touba vendor who I had been to once before during my first week here. He remembered that I wanted a little bit of sugar in my coffee. How many cups of coffee does he serve each day to how many different people, and yet he remembered what I'd had the one time I'd gone there over a month ago? Similarly, I ate breakfast at a little stand yesterday which I'd only been to once before, weeks ago, and the woman running it knew what I wanted based on what I'd had before. If I go to one of these breakfast stands, coffee vendors, a patisserie, etc, people never forget. One woman stopped me on the street and knew my name, and it was half-way through the greeting process before I realized she works at a boulangérie I'd been to once. Occurrences like these happen all the time, and if I was with Ewan the last time I'd met the person, they always ask how he is and where he is. Ewan has said that he'll go to a gas station he'd last been to 4 years ago and the staff will remember his name and ask where he's been. People here never forget a toubab.

J'aime beaucoup ma vie ici!!

This is a phrase which comes up a lot in my beginning French class as many assignments involve writing a carte postale to a friend about life in Senegal, as everyone in the class is foreign. Simply, "I like my life here a lot!"

I wanted to take this entry to brag about my life, I guess. Or really to speak honestly about how much I love my life right now. Living in the US, I couldn't say that I loved my life everyday, perhaps because I was living in the "real world," meaning I had normal responsibilities. Right now I feel like I'm taking a break from that and it's worth talking about how wonderful it is because it won't last forever! Not that this isn't the "real world," it's very real, but somehow not because I'm living off my savings. I do not need to work for money right now.

Most importantly, I've fallen in love with this dance and music form which I'm studying. I decided I wanted to come here to study Guinean and Senegalese dance this past summer. At the time, I was dancing in Urbana with Djibi (my teacher there) and a solid group with whom I rehearsed and performed at various places. I've danced since I was a small child, but this summer was the first time in a while that I was always excited about the next class, rehearsal, or performance, even five minutes after the last one ended. I feel the same way now. I'm dancing (or drumming or singing) maybe 2-4 hours a day 6 days a week and, after I've had something to eat and lots of water, I can't wait to do more! I can't pinpoint exactly what it is I love about it, especially not in a blog entry, but it'll suffice for now to say that it's wonderful. Besides loving what I'm doing, I love where I do it: in an open building (no walls, but a roof for shade) on the beach away from the loud city; and the people I'm working with: an excellent teacher, awesome drummers, and often visitors who feed me or otherwise humor me. For instance today two very young boys amazed me with their drumming skills, even though the drums were 3 times the size of their bodies, and their family shared their lunch with us and gave us attaya in the middle of my lesson (when I happened to be very hungry). I don't even mind the hour it takes to get there and get home, during which everyday between 2 and 5 men propose a relationship or marriage or at least a visit to his family in Mali. C'est la vie.



Outside of dance, my daily interactions keep life exciting. People here seem to value human interactions much more than people in the US. Just walking down the street, it's important to greet many people. If you want to buy an orange, you must first go through a series of greetings. Whenever someone enters or exits a room, he or she will greet and shake hands with each person present. If a group of people are having attaya (tea involving a long ritual and 3 different cups everyone drinks) on the street and you greet them as you walk by, they often insist that you sit down and have a cup (or 2 or 3) with them. People are outside all the time. Many people's businesses are outside. Life here is rarely boring. It's full of cheerful greetings, cheerful goodbyes, cheerful people. Besides keeping life happy, this is helpful for learning languages as it forces me to converse with people all the time. It's also helpful that people here are very forgiving about my lack of communication abilities.

That said, I could easily write a blog entry about the frustrating aspects of living here and the challenges I face each day, but I think I'll save that for later.

Yoon bu bes – The new road

In a few hours I’ll finally be on the road to Tambacounda in eastern Senegal. (Scroll to the right on the map on our blog to see where I'm headed.) Weeks ago, I decided that this past Monday was my final deadline for going to Medina, the village where I hope to do my research. Of course nothing happens on time (I’ll leave it to you to determine whether to blame me or the environment I’m working in). But today, after rushing around town in taxis looking for the bus station, I finally have a ticket stamped with a departure time (an approximate one). That’s a good feeling.

Note: There are lots of options for traveling between towns in West Africa, including sept-place (seven seat) station wagons, mini-buses, and lumbering 1960’s Mercedes buses called Jaaga Njaay after the guy who owns most of them. All of these methods work on the principle of maximizing the amount of money made on passengers. That means packing people in. (Although at least the sept-place in Senegal cap it at seven. In Guinea they supposedly hold nine, including one straddling the stick-shift and sometimes someone on the roof.) They also wait to be full, for as long as it takes – days sometimes. Another model of transportation employs used tour buses from Europe, and tickets are sold in advance for a fixed (more or less) departure time, generally sometime around 3 in the morning. These buses depart from various marked or unmarked corners around Dakar. It seems no one can tell you which buses leave from a given station until you show up and start asking around.

Senegal is an emotional roller-coaster for me: I can swing from home-sick to jubilant and back from morning to evening. My day can suddenly brighten if I meet an especially street-side coffee-seller. Lately, I’ve been swinging about just how far away Medina really is (in an emotional sense). If it feels a long way away, being there means adjusting to a whole other world. I’ll be out of touch, I’ll be isolated. On the other hand, if it feels close it’s not such a big deal. Just like going on a weeklong work trip. I debate with myself whether it’s one way or the other, marshaling facts for each side:

• “It’s far! - They speak Pular and Jakhanke, so it will be much harder to communicate.”
• “It’s close! – They say there is cell phone reception in the village, so Dakar is just a phone call away.” (The village was in a network black hole when I was last there in 2006.)
• “It’s far! – They say it’s so hot in Tambacounda now, people have to soak their mattresses in water before they go to bed. That will make it hard to accomplish anything.” (Today’s high: 45 C = 113 F)
• “It’s close! – They just re-surfaced the road from Kaolack to Tambacounda. Now it supposedly takes only eight hours to get there!” (This section of road was memorably awful during my last visit. The trip to the city of Tambacounda used to involve twelve hours of erratic pothole-dodging. The road was so bad in some stretches that the drivers gave up on the road and drove in the dust alongside.)

The last point is important. I feel way more confident thinking about continued trips to and from Medina knowing that it takes less than a day to get there. It’s not a physical emergency I’m scared of; it’s a psychological one – the desperate need to escape the hot, dusty world of Tamba. Now I’ll have an out. With a new road, Medina sounds like less of a different world.

Also different is the purpose I’m going there with. In my previous visit I just showed up and prayed that if I talked to enough people, research would happen. Today I feel better prepared, more humbled, and more goal-oriented. Amy has been reminding me that this is just work, and that it can feel routine. If I focus on what I want to accomplish, and the details I need to work out to get me there, this seems much more manageable.

Meanwhile, Amy will be sticking around Dakar. Her work with her teacher is going so well, she’s taking advantage of every hour she has to dance. She’s also starting to handle Dakar like a pro – knowing the buses, bargaining with taxis, and speaking some impressive French.

In Senegal, it’s important to give blessings, when someone is leaving on a trip, so here’s one: Yalla nanu yalla jaapante. May God help us all out. I’ll let you know how my visit goes in about a week.

Shopping in Dakar

I used to think that clothing store staff in the United States hassled shoppers too much. Obviously, I had never been to Dakar.

Today I decided to go shopping, as I lost a white shirt I brought with me during our first week here. Having brought a very limited quantity of clothes, I missed this shirt a lot especially because not having it meant I couldn’t wear a dress I brought. Since I was downtown for my French class, Ewan suggested we go to Sandaga Market, which is I think the busiest, most touristy market in Dakar. As we began wondering the streets of Sandaga, wearing our backpacks in front and trying to sneak past the numerous men hassling us constantly, I noticed that all of the clothing stands seemed to sell men’s clothing only. We eventually asked someone where we could find women’s clothes. He led us into a shop which sold only men’s clothes, had us sit down and wait while he went to find what I was looking for. Apparently, you can’t exactly browse in Sandaga. The first person you describe what you want to will do what he can to find it while you wait, meaning getting many other sellers involved. As we waited, men brought in white shirt after white shirt. The first was too thick, so the next one was a very thin XL kids t-shirt. They brought shirts glittering with rhinestones, shirts with ridiculous buttons, shirts in every color of the rainbow even though they knew I wanted white only! Eventually when nothing worked and I was convinced I wouldn’t find a white shirt, we were led to another place and went through the same ordeal there, looking at shirt after shirt, led to a third place with many more shirts, and when I was about to give up someone finally showed up with a plain white, fitted women’s shirt. It seems that every western clothing item for women here is size small, so as the shirt was too small, I realized I wouldn’t find anything better.

When I decided I wanted it, the next step was settling on a price. The crowd of men who had helped look for shirts now numbered around 10, and they all took part in this bargaining session. At this point, I had decided to buy 2 shirts, hoping that at least one of them would work, and they originally asked for the equivalent of $48. For 2, cheap, small, plain, boring t-shirts. After much arguing (Ewan did this part), after we pretended to forget the whole thing and leave empty-handed, we settled on about $9 for both shirts.

By this time, I was famished and happy to find the first Lebanese restaurant I’ve been to yet here. I excitedly ate a falafel sandwhich, possibly my first vegetarian meal outside of my house, even though the sandwich consisted of about equal parts greasy french fry and deep-fried falafel. :)

Ko weli warataa - What's pleasant won't kill you

When I first heard this Pular expression, I thought: “Well that definitely has it’s limits.” But sometimes this kind of thinking helps me look at the big picture when I’m doubting myself. Once again, the phrase is courtesy of Sadio, who always has an idiom on hand, whatever the language, whatever the situation. On Sunday, we were digging a garden out of the square of dust that makes up a corner of the courtyard. Sadio reminded me that even though I haven’t jumped on a sept-place station wagon heading to Tambacounda to start doing interviews, I’m still more or less on track. One week’s delay in Dakar won’t kill my research ambitions. A political scientist I met at a Fulbright potluck this weekend put it another way: No matter how long you’re in the field, at least a fifth of the time will be a total waste. Ko weli warataa doesn’t have much else to do with what I'm writing about today, but it’s a nice expression.

 
Dirt is a phenomenon I’ve been thinking about since we first looked at our house in Dakar. The dirt in Dakar comes in at least two varieties: First, the gray sand that makes up most of the city streets, and finds its way into even the very few paved neighborhoods such as Liberté 1. The second type of dirt is a fine red dust deposited by the Harmattan, the dry-season winds that blow off the Sahara. This dust is nefarious stuff – it clings to the floor in long streaks when you try to move it, and at the same time flies into the air when you sweep to be redeposited everywhere. Given enough time, the dust even accumulates on walls and ceilings.

This makes cleaning in Dakar very different from in 'the North.' It isn’t just that Dakar is dirty, although the urban waste of fish spines, batteries, and plastic bags does confront you on a daily basis. It’s also a matter of attitude: rather than conquering dirt (or ignoring it) you have to manage it, continuously and conscientiously. You can’t distractedly run a vacuum cleaner across the floor. You have to strategize: Where is the dirt concentrated? (there are no dust bunnies here) Where will you take it?

Sadio and our neighbor Maggat showed me how this is done: First, sweep the larger sand particles, bent over double with a hand held, straw broom (“balé”). To tackle the dust, you have to fill a bucket with water – add all-purpose powdered soap (“omo”) if you’re really serious. Start at a corner and work your way downhill towards the drainage point, pouring water, scrubbing with the broom bristles, and sweeping to keep the dust-filled water going where you want it to. If you’re really good, you won’t get too wet, or tread too much dirt up-hill where you’ve already cleaned. It took me about an hour to clean the tiled front garden when we first arrived. Rose, the mother of six who we hired to clean for us once a week, accomplished it in about ten minutes.

Which points to a larger issue related to dirt and cleaning. Although infamously dirty, the existence of any clean space whatsoever in Dakar is due entirely to the daily labor of literally a million women. When we get up early - the sun doesn't rise until 7 right now - in front of every house we see a teenage girl (the maid) bent over, her seer skirt folded up at her knees. They are scrubbing the tiled front stoops, and sweeping up the candy wrappers in the cobbled alleys in our middle class neighborhood. In neighborhoods that lack the infrastructure of Liberté 1, women sweep the sand back into the deep, red potholes that it creeps out of during the day. When we were staying in Village Ngor, we noticed spider-web patterns in the sand streets as we walked to the taxi stop in the morning. Then one day we saw an elderly lady with a broom, scooping up the pile of detritus she'd gathered. Every morning, Ngor women sweep the streets clean of yesterday's litter.

I complain about littering here - most people's attitude is buy it, unwrap it, and drop it where you stand. People also complain about the State's lack of investment in public goods - paved roads, sidewalks, reliable trash collection. (Although to be fair, I often see men in uniforms sweeping up along major streets.) Could men's lax attitude towards cleaning, or even the negligence of the entire government, stem in part from the assumption that women will do the work for you? A million women work hours a day to provide clean space in Dakar. Their labor used to be invisible to me, but now I see it everywhere.

Bienvenue a notre maison!

A note on the following: We had a housewarming party this past Sunday. A wonderful way to serve dinner to a group of people is to grill some fish, throw them on a tray and top it off with onions. Delicious! I never knew, living in Illinois, how good fresh fish is, without any seasoning. Yummmmm. Although we don't have very many friends here yet, our party was a huge success with good fish, good music, good dancing, and great company.

Magalee ak jam - Have a safe pilgrimage

Today is the Maggal, the annual pilgrimage undertaken by members of the Mouride brotherhood to the city of Touba in Senegal. It's been the talk of the town for the past week. Members of the brotherhood have been preparing to leave (and asking us why we're not going) and everyone else has been talking about how hard it is to get around Dakar.

It seems like a good majority of all automobiles make their way to Touba this week. These include privately-run Car Rapide and Njaganjaay buses, potentially private (I'm not sure) TATA buses, taxis, and apparently even public Dakar Demm Dikk buses. And if the cars and buses haven't gone, then their drivers have. That's because people are paying to cram into any moving vehicle available to make their way to Touba, the holy city.

This leaves Dakar feeling like a different town entirely. It feels a little desolate. There are still plenty of people around, and cars on the street, but somehow the in-your-face, overwhelming energy isn't quite there. Half the storefronts have their metal doors rolled down. Wind gusts through town and sand slithers across the street. The buses don't come - Amy waited more than an hour each way going to her dance lesson yesterday. When the buses do come, they inexplicably refuse to stop to let you on, or they're already so full, people are hanging out the door almost dragging their toes on the road.

I haven't got much done today - it took an hour just to find an open cyber café - but I feel like I don't have to accomplish much. It's a pilgrimage for the Mourides, and a sort of laid-back early Sunday for everybody else. As for what's happening in Touba, I can only guess.

The grand mosque in Touba, built by several generations of Mouides.

Note Mouride members make up a huge portion of Senegal's population, making the brotherhood hugely influential, politically, economically, and culturally in Senegal. It's said they control almost the entire peanut production chain in Senegal (peanuts are the primary export crop). The city of Touba is governed autonomously by the Qadifa leadership. It's also often quoted that a NYPD survey found that Mourides sell over 90 percent of watches and perfume on the streets of New York.

Ñewuleen por dëkk. Ñew ngeen por ligee. – You didn’t come [here] to live. You came to work.

OR:
Parfois, gayne yi… Dangay ree ba tas. – Sometimes, [dealing with] these guys… You’ll laugh yourself to pieces.

Both of the above quotes come from Sadio Diallo. He’s the friend I’ve spent most time with here. And sometimes I feel like I can’t accomplish anything without him.

The past few days I’ve been working on a research grant application and I’ve realized I haven’t written anything directly related to my ‘work’ in over a month. Instead of dealing with the nebulous long-term goals of Fulbright and grad school, I’ve been checking off small tasks on an endless list of things we need to set up the house we’re renting. ‘Small’ is such a relative term in Senegal. I’m bad at knowing how long things take me in the U.S. Here, my rule of thumb for small tasks is: quintuple how much time you think it will take, then add a couple days for good measure.

Here’s an example of my mental process on a given day:

- Get money at ATM to pay deposit on house
- Call property manager about starting the electricity
- Pay Amy’s dance and drumming teachers
- Find out where to buy a used fridge and some chairs

My brain cycles through these lists of tasks, trying to find the best angle of attack. I try to come up with a logical order in which to start. Then reality intervenes:

Task 1 The first ATM froze in the middle of the transaction. We spent fifteen minutes trying two other ATMs, then realized we needed to use both of our cards to take out enough to put down a deposit for the house we’re renting. Still only a trifling inconvenience. In my first stay in Senegal, I arrived in Tambacounda (a city in the southeast) and couldn’t find the one ATM that was supposed to be in town. Each time I asked someone, I got directed to the same pile of rubble. It took me an hour to put two and two together and realize the bank had been demolished.

Task 2 We asked the property manager (via my Fulbright contact who owns the house) to do everything to get the electricity on before we moved in. He achieved this by having somebody hot-wire the lines together. He also agreed to start the electricity bill in his own name because, to paraphrase, when the people at Senelec (the national electricty company) see a foreign name, your application goes on the slow pile until you chip in a little something. Which probably stems from employees' understandable desire for security in an office where the State can’t always afford to pay your salary. Anyway, the problem with the property manager’s approach to electricity was that when the Senelec guy showed up (on time and very professionally) to remove the old meter, he had to let me know taping the lines together constitutes stealing and is illegal. The next step was to call our manager’s friend at Senelec, Monsieur Sané. He told the workmen that it was okay to come by and install the meter, and never mind the electrical tape. That added a couple more little tasks to the list.

Task 3 Amy’s teachers are fabulous and unbelievably talented instructors. But Amy and I have different instincts with how to deal with them. To oversimplify, she’s both deeply grateful to them and concerned about inconveniencing them; I am a bit weary of promises and less concerned about things happening on time. My attitude comes from feeling like I “know how things work here.” What that really just means is I have no idea how the line between friendship and paying transactions is drawn, but it seems totally different from what I expect in the U.S.

Negotiating a deposit with Amy's teachers made for an interesting scene. I asked Sadio to come over and talk it through beforehand to get a local opinion. He couldn’t fathom how much Amy was paying (of course, compared to what it would cost to work individually with a world-class dancer AND a world class musician in the U.S., Amy has an incredible deal). My position was that it was better for Amy to pay week-by-week, just in case there were any misunderstandings. The teachers had asked for a month-and-a-half in advance. Sadio’s guessed they must have a project in mind on which they want to put a down-payment. (Perhaps adding an extra room to the house or applying for a travel visa.) The negotiations were held in our front courtyard, sitting on our haunches and speaking in low voices, looking at the ground in front of us, rather than each other's eyes. The drum teacher, the oldest among us, sat on our rusted, child-sized chair frame with no seat or back. Each side of the 'table' offered our explanation and counter explanation for why things had to be the way we wanted. Sadio served as  intermediary – a role well recognized in West Africa – helping to elaborate my points when I couldn’t quite get them across in Wolof. Amy sat on the front step watching. I think she was bemused by it all. I didn't realize until half-way through that I should have been translating for her! In all the negotiations lasted one hour, including imbedded jokes and pleasantries. In the end we settled for one month’s advance. The pressure of it left me feeling so giddy I had to hold in laughter.

Task 4 Finally, the furniture. This is where the second quote in the title comes in; it refers to the men who run used furniture 'shops,' selling sand-embedded 1980’s items bought at garage sales in Europe and shipped down. I’ve spent two full days with Sadio, and another couple by myself, finding, ordering, haggling over, transporting, and repairing various items for the house. When we first got the place, it constituted a dusty concrete floor, smudged black walls, and a swarm of hungry mosquitoes (unfortunately we forgot to take “before” pictures). Since then we’ve augmented it with classy linoleum flooring, cushioned porch furniture, a hand-made wooden bed with foam mattress, a mini-fridge, a battered stove, and a built-to-fit kitchen table, among other things. For a while, I was discouraged – I didn’t know how many more hour-long haggling sessions I’d have to endure. I was sick of the old salesmen who lounge around their sandy junkyards. And half the time we had to abort the whole thing (and send Sadio back later under cover) since the salesmen wouldn’t come down to a reasonable price for a toubab. But finally, after a long week, our little place is starting to look nice!

Now the other quote in the title. All that effort spent on little tasks and, as Sadio reminds me, I haven’t got to the real work yet. I knew that would be one of my biggest challenges: I can live here, make friends, and enjoy it. But can I do some useful work?

firebirds in the front garden

Adjusting...

Adjusting to life in Senegal has been easy in some ways, but difficult at times. I’ve gone through wide ranges of physical comfort. Yesterday I woke up feeling exhausted, I couldn’t focus in French class, and came home completely drained of energy, my entire body aching, and spent the rest of the day in bed with a fever. The day before that though, as I finished a dance lesson on the beach followed by a swim in the ocean, I caught myself thinking that I had never felt so good in my life.

Adjusting to food here might be the trickiest part for me. It’s just different. It seems that everything is either full of sugar or extremely oily. Simple things like yogurt are extremely sweet, and it’s hard to find a cup of coffee without sugar already mixed in at about a 1:1 ratio with the coffee. It’s nearly impossible to get a meal without meat or fish which I very rarely eat at home. I haven’t yet figured out what times certain foods are available, as street vendors and stores will close for a few hours in the middle of the day or will only sell during a particular time of day. I’m slowly learning what kinds of local foods I like and which I don’t like. The other day I was extremely hungry and the idea of anything sweet sounded horrible to me. We found a local restaurant and had what they served that day, ceebu ñeebe, only to discover that I hated it. I forced myself to eat it hoping it would taste better as I got used to it but it only got worse and I hardly made it through a third of my portion when I had to hand it over to Ewan who seems to love anything and everything here. However, I’ve also been to restaurants where I’ve liked the food, and I loved the meals I ate with Bassilo’s family. Apparently home-cooking is always better than restaurant food here.

We moved into our house at the beginning of this week and are working on getting it set up. Very soon we should have a working kitchen, and I think it will be easier to eat well when we can cook for ourselves and keep food in our mini-refrigerator.

Another interesting aspect of life here: the sense of time. When figuring out how to spend my time, I thought I’d have too much free time, taking a French class in the morning and then a dance lesson in the afternoon. It turns out that when I leave for a two hour dance lesson, I don’t return home for at least 6 hours, and that’s if I rush home. This is in part due to how long it takes to get around Dakar, considering that I’m still figuring out which buses to take, where to get off, etc. But it is largely due to a lack of regimented, precisely scheduled lifestyle as I’m used to in the U.S. The lesson typically means I’ll arrive at Bassilo’s house and we’ll hang out there for about an hour. Someone will immediately give up his or her chair for me and we’ll watch T.V., have a cup of café touba, or wait for someone (my teacher or a drummer) to show up. Then we’ll make our way to our practice location for the day, which often means long walks including running across highways and jumping over boulders separating the two directions of traffic to find the correct bus. The lesson itself is never timed, we basically dance and drum until we’re all thoroughly exhausted. If we’re practicing on the beach, which is becoming our regular rehearsal space, we’ll then swim in the ocean, hang out with people there, and eventually make our way back. It is then expected that I go back to Bassilo’s house to have lunch or to watch T.V. before heading home.

I have no complaints about this lifestyle. In fact I think it is much more human than planning every event to the minute. It’s very conducive to forming relationships and relishing in the things you want to be doing rather than rushing to finish “on time.”



Here is my little friend Angie who loves to watch my dance lessons.

Fëcckat bu magg - Great dancer

Amy's first lesson with Ablaye Keita Soumah, at the home of djembefola Bassilo Camara, in Grand Yoff.

Petit à Petit – Ndank Ndank

That’s a phrase I learned my second day here and I realized this is the description of my life while here. Little by little. Everything I learn, everything I do will happen little by little, and there is SO much to learn and do. It’s not just important to learn one language here, but you need to know two, and if you learn both French and Wolof, then people will still ask why you don’t speak Pular. What I’ve learned is that languages are hard to learn (and people speak so fast, even when someone says something I know, it takes me a while to realize that I know what they said and to come up with a response!). But I will learn, I am learning, petit à petit. I’m currently taking a French class at L’Institute Francais, a very nice place in downtown Dakar with a wonderful restaurant, and yesterday I had my first Wolof lesson while sitting with Ewan’s friend Sadio while he worked. He insisted that I learn Wolof here and had me sit down, get a notebook and start learning! People are always shocked and awed when they hear Ewan speaking Wolof, and immediately ask if I speak Wolof. When they learn that I do not, they ask why. This happens many, many times a day with nearly every interaction we have. It’s made me very determined to learn the language.

Besides languages, there is so much else to learn. How to greet people, buy food, bargain with taxi drivers and salespeople, take buses…. I’m slowly doing these things more independently but it’s hard. For instance, today on a very crowded bus, a man handed me money to hand back to the ticketer. I thought, “this is easy, I just hand it to the next person and eventually it’ll reach who it needs to.” But no one would take it from me as I tried handing it back. Not being able to ask why, I tried motioning whose it was and who it was for. Eventually I realized that they just needed to know where the man was going to determine how much change he should get. I thought I understood the system but misunderstanding one small part of it and then not being able to speak with people turns a little thing into a long and confusing process.

Since I first learned “petit à petit,” things truly have been happening little by little. Yesterday, we signed a contract and paid a deposit for our house, which we may be able to move into this weekend or early next week! It’s a very cute house and happens to be right in the middle of the two locations I will likely be dancing at, with a bus running through to all three of these! Today we decided to call Bassilo, a drummer and good friend, or "bruddah" of Djibi’s. Djibi told us to call him as he would be a great person to take drumming lessons from, and a wonderful friend of theirs and excellent dancer was staying with him and was excited to teach me. We had Bassilo’s son’s and wife’s numbers, so eventually got a hold of his wife, Koumba, and she immediately knew who we were, knew we were connected to Djibi, and told us to come to Grand Yoff Marche where lots of chickens are sold.

We arrived at the chicken stands and soon a few kids came over to us and led us to Koumba’s house. From there, everything that I could have hoped for happened. Bassilo wasn’t there but soon two young men came in with djembes. One of them was Bassilo’s son. Then a man poked his head in, saw us and said “Amy?” It was the dancer Djibi recommended, Ablaye. Soon Koumba arrived with a communal dish of ceebu jën, and, amongst dancers and drummers I enjoyed my first communal family style meal here. Delicious! To simplify what happened next, we spent the next few hours with Ablaye, he showed me where I’d have lessons in Grand Yoff (a nice, spacious room) and then we went to Centre Cultural Blaise Senghor, a place I’d heard so much about. There we met Bassilo who was thrilled to meet us, said Djibi had been talking about us for months and that he would have picked us up at the airport and if his cousins weren’t visiting now we could have stayed at his house. I briefly met another dance teacher who was very highly recommended, watched two incredible dance companies practicing, and set up my first lesson for tomorrow. Blaise Senghor was all I had dreamed of and more. The groups practicing there were thrilling to watch. Such energetic dancers and incredible drummers, including two kids aged maybe 2 and 4! The place was full of such kind people, there’s a café, and a huge courtyard. I wouldn’t mind hanging out there all the time, and it happens to be only about a mile from our house.

It’s hard to simplify everything that is happening and my thoughts into a blog entry. Simply put, I’m very happy to be here and so excited to start dancing tomorrow. My first impressions of Ablaye and Bassilo were very positive and erased any concern I’d had about finding good instructors here. I can’t wait to get moving to the rhythms of Senegal and Guinea right here in Dakar!

Moonte géj naa fii yagg – You know, I haven’t stuck around here in a long time…

OR:

Man maa jëkk ñëw wante moom moo jëkk jottali xibaar yi – I was the first to arrive, but she was the first to report the news

Amy beat me to writing a first entry, even though I arrived here almost a week before she did. Since I needed a little bit of inspiration, I thought I might as well write about why it is that I’m struggling to put down words about what it feels like for me to be back in Senegal for ten months after having been mostly away for five years.

I’ll start with the obvious details: in the six days before Amy got here, I stayed with Sadio Diallo [pronounced “Saa-joe Jaal-loe”], my closest friend here. Sadio doesn’t have a lot of money. (One thing I’ve been reminded of is how different that definition of ‘a lot of money’ can be here compared to in the U.S., and not just in the sense that most people here are much poorer – but more on that in another post.) He and I shared a single room he just rented in a compound in Ouakam, a diverse and busy neighborhood north of Dakar. The house was basic, and probably squarely in the middle of the range of housing conditions in Dakar. The toilet involved squatting, the shower involved a bucket and a little dance to chase away the cockroaches, and we needed a key to unlock the shared water faucet outside the house. Still there was reliable electricity, water, and plumbing, a very safe neighborhood, and a tiled courtyard that the women renting the neighboring rooms swept sparkling clean every morning.

I was reminded how much longer basic tasks take without many modern conveniences. I was also taken aback by how strongly I reacted to ‘going back to basics.’ I thought: “I’ve done this before. This is supposed to be the easy part. If I’m freaked out by this how am I going to spend time in villages?” I thought: “What kind of place are we going to stay in when Amy gets here?”

And these worries reminded me of another fact of my life here: So much of how you perceive the world comes from your attitude and how comfortable you feel at a very basic, physical level. One of my best friends says that nearly every time he feels pissed off or depressed, it can be linked to being hungry or needing to find a bathroom. Here, I totally agree with my friend. If my stomach is feeling a little weird after taking a malaria pill, a set of simple tasks can seem utterly overwhelming. The to-be-determined storyline of ten months can seem like a depressingly foregone conclusion. Forty minutes later, after a refreshing bucket shower and a spicy bean sandwich, the possibilities can feel thrilling.

So it’s been hard to write because it’s hard to figure out how I really feel about things.

Worries aside, I think my first week here has been successful. One of my professors from Illinois was in Dakar, and he introduced me to two Senegalese researchers who work on forestry issues. They both seem like they will be kind and supportive contacts, although both are incredibly busy. (That's a very consistent element of life!) One of these researchers is my professor's best friend, and has a small house that he offered to rent to us. Two simple rooms, the house needs a little work to get it up to scratch. But we'd have a lovely space to ourselves, a reliable landlord, and very affordable rent. The house appears to be the best deal we could have hoped for! (More on housing as it unfolds) This goes to show how in Senegal, it always helps to know someone.

In the meantime, Amy and I are staying in Village Ngor, a seaside neighborhood and fishing village in the far north of the city. We connected through couchsurfing with an American who teaches at an English-language school in Dakar and are staying in her beautiful apartment – with internet! Couchsurfing is apparently thriving in Dakar, although for some people it’s more of a dating service than a housing search.

It's amazing how much brighter things seem with Amy here! She showed me another reason I make it hard to write about Senegal: I try too hard to find something 'interesting' enough to write about, while taking too many details for granted. On Amy's first morning in Dakar, we strolled out of our host's apartment for a walk. We were stopped by flock of dusty sheep hustling across our path. Right away, Amy looked at me and started laughing giddily. It's so refreshing to be here with someone who sees Senegal as totally new.

A few pictures

Typical pile of sheep outside our apartment.




Ngor beach!









Yup, we're both here.










Desolate area where people dump their garbage for the goats and sheep to pick through.






Courtyard and front door of our couchsurfer's apartment.











Ngor from our couchsurfer's apartment.