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.