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.