Pictures, Daras and a little conflict

First: what the pictures are: a) view of hazy Dakar from Ile de la Madeleine, with Cormorants taking off.

In Toubakouta, one of the two boats we took into the mangroves - we were having a competition between the boats as to who could sing louder and have more people standing up at once.

Also at the mangrove park - two friends from the trip.

I hope this picture shows up better on your computers than mine, but it's me on the beach at St. Louis.

A picture of the roadside scene on the way into Dakar - you can see people selling fruit and these buses waiting to fill up and go somewhere. This picture doesn't quite do the chaotic scene justice.

A very quiet, colonial St. Louis street - Dakar does NOT look like this.

Well now that I got some more pictures up, a little more news. Yesterday for our Senegalese culture class we got to take a field trip to a Dara - a Koranic school for young boys. These schools are all over Senegal, and they are run often in a pretty horrifying way. The basic idea (and this was the case in this one) is that kids are sent by their parents for a minimal fee (about 2 dollars a month) and they live with the marabout (koranic scholar) and study constantly. However, this doesn't include food and doesn't cover the expenses of the Daara. Therefore, the kids from the Daara (talibés) spend hours every day on the street holding empty cans (usually of tomato paste, for whatever reason), and begging in order to get their food, and get additional money for the marabout. They are at every major corner and often will follow you for a while. People will give them money or food.
The place we visited was in a poorer suburb of Dakar - almost no paved roads, mostly very tight alleys. The daara itself is a small courtyard with only about two or three rooms off of it - somehow 60 barely clothed boys live there. We got to ask the Marabout questions for about 45 minutes and interact with the kids a bit. We learned the most though from just observing and from what wasn't said. The boys all clearly have pretty significant health problems - we could see various swellings, open sores, and chronically runny noses (a sign of malnutrition, not just a cold). I asked the kids (in front of the marabout) what they wanted to do when they left, the only person who was allowed to respond said he wanted to teach the Koran. Afterwards another friend asked another of the boys and he responded that he wanted to get out of Senegal and move to France. Anyhow, not all Daaras are like this, but it was a sobering look at this phenomenon that we have been seeing here every day.

St. Louis and Mardi Gras

Well we successfully had our first weekend trip without the group or guide. Six of us left Dakar at 7 on Friday night and took a sept-place up to St. Louis - a city on the coast that was the first capital of Senegal. The way up was a typical Senegal transportation experience - we got the gare routiere, which is basically a huuuge parking lot, and were accosted by people who then found us a driver and negotiated the price (for a small commission of course). A sept-place is basically a station wagon with three more seats in the back - so eight people in a station wagon can be pretty cramped, not to mention the fact that the car couldn't go above maybe forty miles per hour at its absolute best (this is the estimate given that no dashboard indicators were working). All in all it took six hours to get there, though its possible for it to take as little as three and a half. In St. Louis we met up with my room mate's friend who is studying there and she showed us to our cheap but quite nice hotel. From there we went out to a bar around the corner and had a good time dancing, also discovered that there are lots more europeans and Americans here than in Dakar!
St. Louis is really different from Dakar - particularly the main touristy island, which is very quiet with grid streets and lots of colonial architecture. We really enjoyed being able to enjoy just sitting in a cafe - something you cant find in Dakar, not to mention that there were good bakeries. There are some in Dakar as well, but nowhere ever has seating where you can just hang out. We also walked around the fishing village area and the market, which were naturally much more lively. That night we went out for a nice dinner too, which meant getting vegetables, something I miss a lot here! We left Sunday afternoon and successfully got back in only four hours. We were shocked :)
In other news, yesterday was Mardi Gras, our sister's birthday aaand the day we had promised to cook for our family. We decided to make tomato soup, grilled cheese and salad (previous Americans staying with them seemed to have taken a lot of our ideas). We went to one of the big, intense and cramped vegetable markets to get the vegetables, and then to the main supermarket to get things like sliced bread, cheese and ham (family is catholic, but ham is still very hard to find here). The cooking went well except that we failed to realize exactly how different their tomato paste is until it was too late. The stuff here is very dark and VERY bitter. We managed to salvage the soup so it was acceptable, but still wasn't the best. The sandwiches were a hit though, and afterwards we all had beignets and cookies for mardi gras. Most importantly, they seemed to appreciate it, so phew. It was also fun throughout the day to see all the little kids who go to school: it seems like their version of halloween, with lots of little superheros, princesses and peter pans etc. all over the place.
Finally a note on birthdays: even though Fifi was turning 17, they barely acknowledged it. It seems like people celebrate their birthdays (if they know them) very selectively: you decide to fete it one year, and then not for a few more. I think the only people who I heard wish her happy birthday were me and Vanessa.
Well, off to class, and then off to find out what lent is like in our house!

Photos

Finally a few pictures though this has to be very quick because my internet cafe time is almost up. The first is the little street where I live. My door is just behind the little orange bread stand. The second is my host mother proudly showing off a massive meal, then a picture of a village hut in the mangrove park we visited and then an island we went to ( its a bad picture but I accidentally clicked on it and then didn't have time to change). So although my time is almost up here, I now know that I can add pictures in the future - tomorrow or after the weekend. much love!

Weekend and Streets

So I figured I'd put in a little something about what the streets are like here, but first a little about the weekend. It was nice to have a quiet Dakar, and made exploring a little easier. On Friday night, we went to a dance/party of sorts at a community center put on by a church called something along the lines of "Church of the Martyrs of Uganda." It was good dancing to Senegalese music and we were with several host siblings, so that was nice. On Saturday we had a cooking observation day followed by a family meeting. We got to peel vegetables and watch the different stages of making our lunch - a tomato sauce on rice with beef. Then we watched some of the making of the food for the family meeting in a massive pot. We had been excited for the Reunion, which, though I knew it meant meeting, would be a general get together. However, it seemed to be an actual business meeting - all the adults went into the salon and talked business almost the entire time while we watched tv with the other kids, three of whom were very sweet girls who had grown up in the U.S. Also - it was valentines day on Saturday and surprisingly, though there's no hallmark stuff here, everybody celebrates it! We kept on being asked if we were going out to celebrate it.
The next day, we got up very late and most of the day was relaxing, although we did take our first solo car rapide trip downtown and explored all over the place, which was nice. It seems like most if not all of Dakar is pretty safe during the day and people don't harass you for the most part. This brings me to the idea of what streets are like. I'll start with sidewalks. There are a few different varieties: the sandy shoulder, the "this was at one time a sidewalk but now it's mostly sand," the cobblestones, and occasionally an actual sidewalk. To add to this, sidewalks can be obstructed by a few different things: trees, cars that park there, and a few different kinds of shops (among other things). Shops along the street can be as simple as just selling shoes or cell phone covers. There are also women who sell little bags of peanuts and the local oranges. Then there are the slightly more permanent fruit stands that sell what looks like imported fruit (bananas, oranges, melons, tangerines etc.). Finally there are the little "alimentation general" stores that are tiny and yet seem to contain everything - they sell bread, candy, and then if you look closer they have eggs, and all sorts of general cooking supplies. There's one every couple of streets even in the very residential neighborhoods - we have one right next to our house where we buy our bread every morning. Sometimes they're in a building, sometimes they're just their own stall sitting in the sidewalk. Regardless they spill out and tend to be local hangouts.
All this to say that most of the walking happens in the streets. This also means that traffic is pretty slow, given that cars have to share not only with other cars (without the idea of traffic laws, signs, or a single stop light in the entire city), but horse drawn chariots that pick up trash, and people and the occasional goat. While this is totally hectic and accidents clearly do happen, it seems like for the most part no one's ever going fast enough to actually get hurt. They also use horns a lot more just to let pedestrians know that they're here. Taxis also honk whenever they see us as well, since there's a chance, as a westerner, that I'm totally lost. Of course there's much more to say about the experience of walking around here (particular examples come to mind), but I have to get offline soon. It's been great to hear from people lately, so keep that up :)
Sonya

Food! (no pics)

First: about pictures. Maybe this weekend I'll be able to get something to work from an internet cafe, but for the moment, no one I know has had any luck with pictures, regardless of their size, in days. So sorry about that! Otherwise, I thought I might do a more subject related post.

I've mentioned a little bit about food, but since it's what I smell right now, I thought I'd add in a little more detail. Senegalese meals are always eaten out of a communal dish (for lunch or dinner, unless it's soup). The typical meal is rice (or cous-cous or sometimes pasta) with either fried fish or beef in a spiced sauce over it. Sometimes these sauces have vegetables - which almost always means carrots and potatoes and onions. While we're talking about vegetables (or the lack thereof), we are fortunately in green bean season, which means that we'll get some very oily beans as the basis for a meal sometimes. Every once in a long time there will be a salad - though often with french fries on top. We eat on low stools around a low table, though some families sit on the floor, and occasionally some eat only with their hands (we use forks in mine).
Breakfast is always the same: it's set out and everybody eats when they get up. We have cocoa mix and nescafe crystals (all coffee here is nescafe), bread and their version of nutella. Senegal is a peanut producing country - peanuts are sold by women on the street all over, they have a peanut sauce they eat frequently, and so what they spread on bread is basically nutella but a little more liquid and with peanuts instead of hazelnuts - really pretty good. Interestingly enough, despite being huge on peanuts, there is NO peanut butter here - even in the western supermarket, it cannot be found.
Since the dinners are so heavy and intense and oily/fatty, most of us have taken to pretty modest lunches from the street food that's nearby. There are fruit vendors and little stands that sell all types of bread and candy all over the place. I usually get fruit or a piece of baguette with cheese or peanuts, because the idea of getting an actual sandwich (usually composed of schwarma and often with french fries in it) is just too much, and more rice doesn't seem like a possibility.
Overall, the food is really good - and I'm definitely going to be much more tolerant of spicy food when I get back. However, it can be so overwhelming, particularly since there is always a lot of pressure to eat a lot. We don't ever really do dessert, but sometimes we get juice - either Bisab (made from hibiscus flowers) or a combination of pineapple and the baobab fruit, which is more like a smoothie and really good.
I'm off to do some of my actual homework, though there are very few of us here. There's a HUGE muslim festival happening in the religious city (Touba) this weekend, and many of the group have left. This weekend will feature a pretty empty Dakar, though I already know of one Catholic block party - seems they like to party during religious festivals :)

Toubakouta!

So I wrote this post last night thinking "oh I'll just put in a few things about the trip" and believe it or not, this feels like it's just a few things, though it's still really long. Basically, we had a great time and it was good to get out of Dakar and out of our routine.


Well! We had a fantastic weekend in Toubakouta and environs. There's so much to tell, but I'll try to give a few highlights here. We stayed at a “campement,” which was basically a few (very nice) huts around a courtyard with an open air restaurant type place. We actually brought all of our food and our own cook with us, so all our meals were provided and that way we didn't risk getting really sick. We also took six Senegalese university students who study with the head of WARC down with us, and they were a lot of fun to have around (and helpful for translating Wolof as well).
First night: a traditional wrestling competition. Wrestling is huge here and watching a competition is QUITE an experience – lots of music, singing, dust in your mouth instantly, dancing, etc. Someday I'll describe it more fully.
The first full day was mostly environment related things: we spoke with the director of a fishing center about the way that they help local fishermen, and the problems with fishing shortages. Then we got to talk with a technician who helps local farmers and learned about agricultural issues. Then in the afternoon we went to a protected area. As it turns out, a lot of the senegalese coastline has mangroves, and so it's a pretty complex and important ecosystem. We got to take these small-ish fishing boats out to the area (featuring lots of singing and careful dancing – the Senegalese students taught us well) and then walked a ways to talk to the park ranger (actually an army technician, but surprisingly welcoming and not very “army”). It was a beautiful area, though sad to see where sea-level rise is intruding into the mangrove areas and causing some of them to recede.
Saturday: village visits. First we went to one village where we got to talk to two “groupement de femmes” - these are women's collectives that pool resources to make extra money through selling things at markets or through vegetable cultivation. One had been receiving some microfinancing help and the other had not. We had to work entirely through translators, but it was really fascinating. Then we got to go to an even smaller village to tour. We got there and were completely engulfed by kids (actually, we're engulfed every time we get off our bus – between 5 and 30 just come out of nowhere, in fact 47% of the population is under 15 here - crazy). Then we sat and talked mostly to the village elders with the entire village watching about what their lives are like and what problems they face. In the 105 years since the village was founded, this was the first time that anyone had come and asked them any questions, they said. We got to tour a few houses as well – each house is a group of huts with places for sleeping, for storing food and keeping animals and common cooking areas. There is almost no electricity and two village wells. However, during our time with them, the main elder's cell phone kept ringing to the tune of “we wish you a merry christmas.” Go figure. While it was a positive experience in terms of people being welcoming, it was sobering to see the need for health care particularly.

Sunday morning we saw another pretty incredible thing. Every Sunday, the village where we were staying gets together to clean common village areas. It sounds sort of mundane, but it was one of the most dramatic things I've seen here. First off “cleaning” in this case means a type of slash and burn of their forested areas where they leave the big trees but burn all fallen branches and take off all the branches of any smaller trees. The image is this: all the boys and younger men of the village are starting fires all over the place and running around hacking at things with machetes. Girls are around with pails of water in case things get out of hand. To keep everybody motivated, drummers were playing and then there was the “concurrent.” The concurrent can best be described as a man in a Chewbaka costume: From the distance I saw, he looked about that furry and he runs around with a rope to hit anybody who isn't working. It certaintly adds an element of excitement – people run around and work really hard any time he comes here, and so you can hear screaming kids, crackling fire and banging drums the whole time. It's amazing, but also painful to see this kind of habitat destruction when there is trash all over the place that really actually needs to be cleaned up.
Overall though, the weekend was great – the group bonded a lot, and we got to see so much more than we've seen in Dakar thus far. It makes us all really look forward to our internships and to traveling around more.

Off for the Weekend

First, in answer to the Amiga comments: Nafë is pronounced nafee and basically every family gives their student a Senegalese name - in my case there were a few pieces of paper in my host sister's hand and I chose that one. It's basically used by anyone who doesn't want to bother having to learn a foreign name - my host family still calls me Sonya.

Just so you all know, this weekend (starting tomorrow), we are going on an extended four day field trip to an area just north of the Gambia. It should be really cool since we'll be getting to go to a national park and a few villages and we'll be hearing from people working in the health, environment, and microfinance fields and getting to go to some sort of storytelling performance etc. I'll definitely have a lot to update on then, and I probably won't be back online between right now and Sunday night or Monday morning. It will be nice to have a change of pace though and get to see more than just the immediate area around where we live.

Also, as for pictures, they will come. Thanks to Uncle Dave (Thank you! I'll try to reply soon, but I may be out of connection for the next few days), I now know how to take smaller pictures, so I may have more luck uploading them. It's hard to take pictures though - it's already so apparent being white here, so stopping to take pictures of the street also seems like it's pushing it. While I'm on the topic, whites are "Toubab" here, which is what all the kids yell when you're around, and all the taxis (of which there seem to be millions) beep to see if you need a ride.
Must go figure out how to print out a paper though (I'll comment more on the academic situation here later, but it's ... interesting at times).
Best!

So much weekend!

So this weekend was (okay not that crazy) but still very stimulating. We had a number of extra cousins and an aunt around the house, and so there was a lot going on. On Saturday morning we were allowed to have a cooking lesson of sorts - i.e. watch our aunt make ceeb-u-jen (pronounced cheebujen), which is the national dish: it's rice in a spiced tomato sauce with fish and vegetables on top. The idea of tomato sauce however, just doesn't really give you the right feel for it. But it's really good. The cooking here is over cans of natural gas, very close to the floor, though they have a stove that they use for heating water sometimes. As a side note, there's actually a bit of a natural gas shortage here right now, so by later in the weekend, the family was cooking over charcoal.
After lunch (which is usually about two thirty or three), we decided to go to one of the big markets here. We were accompanied by our host brother and it was quite the experience: so much fabric and color! We took the Car Rapide there - which are brightly painted crammed buses where you hop in the back, tell the driver where you want to go and then he signals to the driver by tapping on the outside when to stop and go. They are everywhere, I'll try to post a picture later in the week.
Yesterday we also had lots of people around, and though it was more relaxing (watching silly movies, cleaning out our room etc.) we still wound up with lots of cousins and some informal dance lessons in their living room. We were all trying everything from Mbalax (the national dance style) to tupac. It was really hilarious for everybody, even though the fact that they speak amongst themselves in a mix of wolof and French makes things a bit tricky to fully grasp.
There were other things too, but I want to quickly get some spiced coffee before my next class (ten cents at the stand across the street), so I'll leave you all now.
Ba beneen Yoon (see you later),
Nafe (my Senegalese name)