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!