What I've Been Up To

The last two weeks have probably been the best I’ve had since I’ve been here. I’ve been a lot busier, gotten out a lot more, seen a lot more, and done a lot more, which is great for me, but means that I haven’t had a lot of time to update my bog. My apologies, dear readers. I’m trying my best to catch up. As a result, this entry is really really long. I hope you're comfortable.

The following events took place between February 16 and 24:

On Monday, I went to talk to Waly about finding something extra to fill my time, and he basically handed me an internship on a silver platter. I started doing some work for an online newspaper called pressafrik.com the next day and was joined by another WARC girl, Sara, on Wednesday. Essentially, pressafrik is supposed to be in both French and English, but they don’t have the staff or the English proficiency to maintain both sites. As a result, the French site is about 10 times bigger and better than the English site. Sara and I have basically been handed the English site and told to make it better by keeping it updated with articles taken from English-language news sources and by translating articles written by the pressafrik staff.

In all honesty, that’s not really what I’m looking for. Reposting articles from other sources seems a little dubious to me on a few different levels, and translating, which could be a really useful skill to learn, is tedious and much more difficult than I would have thought it would be. It’s also done without any instruction or editorial review. I asked the editor if he wanted to read the articles over after I translated them, but he said that his English wasn’t good enough for him to be able to tell if they were well done or not and that I should just post them as soon as I’m finished. And maybe this is a two-way street, and my French isn’t good enough to tell whether or not the staff articles are well done, but I sort of feel like I’m doing a poor job of translating articles that aren’t particularly well-written in the first place, so my name ends up attached to something that doesn’t quite smack of quality journalism. This has the potential of being a very short internship.

In addition to working at pressafrik, I got around with some friends and saw some things in and around Dakar. On Wednesday, my Islam class was cancelled, so I spent the afternoon with Katie, Jenna, and Hanna. We went to the Village des Arts, which is a sort of campus up near Yoff where a bunch of artists have their studios. We met a couple artists and spent time in the gallery, but things there were a little sleepier than we thought they would be, so left and headed to where we knew we would find a good time: the Les Almadies Casino.

Casino is the supermarket chain in the greater Dakar area, where the foreigners go to pay more for things that come wrapped in comforting layers of plastic and cardboard. Les Almadies is the northwestern most part of the Cap Vert peninsula and the westernmost point of Africa as a whole. It’s also the most upscale neighborhood in Dakar, and the Casino is part of a mall that also contains Guess, Diesel, City Sports, and lots of white people.

We were there because at breakfast that morning, Katie and her roommate Patrish, both vegetarians who have basically been filling the protein vacuum with peanut butter, had polished off the jars of Skippy that Katie had brought from the US. Not satisfied to wait for a shipment from home, Katie was on a quest for a suitable Senegalese substitute. What she found was pâte d’arachides, which is not quite peanut butter but not that far from it either. It’s a darker color, not quite as thick and creamy, and not as sweet. It sort of tastes like its made with peanuts that have been roasted almost to burning. The people here use it to make peanut sauces and things like that. Spreading it on bread or fruit would never occur to them.

Katie was delighted to have found a suitable fix for her PB addiction, but as usually in Senegal, there had to be a complication to make everything just a little more interesting. In this case, the issue was that the smallest container of this pâte d’arachide was a 5 kilogram tub. That’s 11 pounds. It came in this white industrial bucket that looked like it could have contained spackle or paint or something you get at Home Depot, not Stop&Shop. That was sort of amusing, but the real issue is that it’s not really kosher to bring home a lot of food (or any food, really) unless you can share it with your whole family. Katie would of course offer it, but eating it daily is sort of a weird American thing that her family doesn’t participate in. Bringing home so much of something only Katie and Patrish would eat could easily be interpreted as a message that they weren’t being fed enough or that they didn’t like the food they were being given.

Not wanting to insult her host mom, but also not wanting to go another hour without her PB, Katie made the obvious choice: buy Tupperware, stand in the Almadies parking lot spooning industrial strength pâte d’arachide into the containers among the fancy cars and their fancy European drivers, and return home with a much more acceptable quantity of food from the outside world. Hanna thought her host mom would not freak out about the bucket, so she took the rest of it.

In addition to the peanut butter, we got ourselves some other essentials (Jenna got a pillow, which is apparently not a given in Senegal. She’s not the only one who was presented with a pillow-less bed), and then caught a car rapide back down towards where we all live. So yes, I have at this point ridden on a car rapide. It is indeed thrilling. There are often holes in the floor, in case you want to see what’s going on on the road underneath you, and you sit very close to lots of strangers (like, on top of or underneath them). But it’s cheap and it’s quick and it feel like an “experience,” so I’d give it a positive review overall.

I had an uneventful Thursday and Friday and then a group outing on Saturday that was pretty good. We piled on a bus and headed out of the city to Keur Moussa, which is a Catholic monastery. We got a tour of the grounds, where we saw lots of orchards and gardens, workshops where the monks make koras, (traditional African stringed instruments made form calabashes), and a brief glimpse of some crazy awesome blue bird that gave me Australia flashbacks. After that we went to mass, which was all in French in Wolof, but the music was nice and there was a very cool painting behind the altar in the sanctuary. After mass we were supposed to have lunch, but it wasn’t ready yet so we went on a little tour of an agricultural school associated with the monastery to kill some time (more orchards and gardens).

Lunch was totally worth the wait, though. I ate my very first pamplemousse (grapefruit), and it was quite tasty. Lunch itself was rice with meat, onion sauce, and baguettes, which is a very common meal here, second only to ceebujen, but this place did it up right. We were all stuffed and satisfied after eating all that, but then they brought us dessert, which is not something that usually happens at lunch. We had a kind of sorbet, which was really just frozen pineapple and ditkah juices, and some kind of chocolate oatmeal cookies that were probably made by Nabisco. It was great because one was really fresh and local and the other was really comforting and familiar, and both were delicious. I ate so much that afternoon that I skipped dinner that night.

We left Keur Moussa after lunch to go Lac Rose, or so we thought. We ended up making a pit stop at Le Village des Tortues, which means “Turtle Village” and which is basically a zoo for turtles and tortoises. None of us had any idea that we were going to be stopping there, and it was sort of bizarre to find yourself face to face with an enormous tortoise when you thought that you were going to be chilling at a pink lake, but it was pretty cool. The teeny tiny baby turtles were cute, and one of the big older ones (the oldest one? Maybe?) was hilariously named Bill Clinton.

After Le Village des Tortues, we finally made our way to Lac Rose. Lac Rose is a super-salty lake, and because of all the salt and minerals and probably algae in it, it looks pink in high sunlight. The water sort of feels sort of oily, or like lotion or something, because there’s so much stuff in it. We didn’t go swimming in it, but that is something people do. Because it’s so salty, you float without having to make any effort, like in the Dead Sea. Lac Rose is also an important place for salt mining, and we saw a few people with their boats and their piles of salt on the beach.

We didn’t stay for very long because Lac Rose attracts tourists, which in turn attracts pushy souvenir salesmen. It’s sort of off-putting to try and take in this cool natural phenomenon with a guy shoving cheap jewelry and sand paintings in your face, and Awa, Josephine, and Waly were like, “Get off the bus, take your pictures, and get back on.” Which was okay, because if you’re not going to go swimming or start haggling for souvenirs, there’s not much more to do at Lac Rose.

Our last stop was at these sand dunes on one side of the lake, where were took a bunch of pictures that made it look like we were stranded in the middle of a desert and where, if you’re willing to shell out some dough, you can take camel rides. After a little while there, we emptied out our shoes and headed back home. I was exhausted and spent the rest of the night at home, where I fell asleep on the couch watching the truly awful movie “Underworld: The rise of the Lycans.”


Family structure, wedding party

So I’ve learned a little bit more about how my family is structured, though all that’s really done is raise more questions for me. Out of the blue, my host mom told me that my host dad is living in Casamance (southern Seneagal) right now because he found some work there. I have a few suspicions that there might be a little bit more to the story than that, and that my host dad isn’t on great terms with the rest of the family at the moment, but I don’t know for sure and I certainly don’t feel comfortable prying into that.

Around the same time that I found out that this man does, in face, exist, someone brought out the photo albums from his and Mama’s wedding. As it turns out, they only got married in 2002, which is certainly after Kiki and Fatima were born. I already knew that Danny, Moussouba, and Anita came from my host dad’s first marriage, but now it appears that Kiki and Fatima are from another marriage as well, and that none of my five siblings actually share any blood. I have never heard anyone mention Danny, Moussouba, or Anita’s real mother, or Kiki and Fatima’s real father.

In addition to all that, I think there are other siblings that don’t live in the house. I know for sure that Kiki and Fatima have an older brother named Blaise who is living at the school in Thiès that Kiki dropped out of, and I think that I have been introduced to other people who have been called “big sister/brother” by the Danny-Moussouba-Anita set. I can’t know for sure because I have a tendency to immediately forget names and relationships when new people are introduced to me here, and the relationships are so complicated that it’s hard even for them to keep straight who’s an uncle and who’s a cousin and who’s a sister and who’s just a friend.

In illustration of that, I went to a wedding party last weekend with Danny, Moussouba, and Anita. The groom was somehow related to them on their dad’s side, but Moussouba had trouble deciding whether or not he was her uncle or her cousin. I think the verdict was that he was some sort of cousin, but that they all called him “Tonton,” or uncle. Okay, got it.

I was excited to go to a “real Senegalese wedding,” but in all honesty, it wasn’t the cultural experience of a lifetime. The actual ceremony had been the night before, which I’m pretty sure would have been, at least structurally, a pretty standard Catholic wedding. The party the next day was a chance for all the family and friends to get together, eat, hang out, and probably dance, but we left before the dancing started. We basically went, waited for the food to be ready, ate, digested a little, and left right before the dancing would have started because Moussouba thought the music was too loud. At least I got to see an absolutely gorgeous baby and some pretty spectacular traditional outfits.


Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras in Dakar is pretty big deal for Catholics, and even for Muslims sometimes. Little kids always have school parties where everyone dresses up, like Halloween. Katie and Patrish had a party at their house that night, which was a lot of fun. Their host mom was really into it and made a whole bunch of food in addition to all the food Katie and Patrish were planning to make, and told Katie that “il faut déguiser!” (Everyone has to wear a costume!) My family had told me this too, and they said that cross-dressing is a pretty standard Mardi Gras “déguise.” Moussouba told me about wearing her fathers suit once and Kiki basically in stitches talking about fake breasts. With that in mind, I dressed up in some of Danny’s clothes to go to this party. Moussouba and Anita took one look at me, though, said I looked ridiculous and that they were going to put me in something nice. They gave me the outfit that Anita ad worn to the wedding, which was a dark green pagne (wrap-around skirt) with a light green top and headscarf. The outfit is really gorgeous on it’s own and Anita looks fantastic in it. I was torn between feeling a little bit like Chiquita Banana, a little bit like a pretentious toubab who should just stick to her own clothing, and also a little bit pretty.

The party was a lot of fun. There weren’t too many people who had dressed up, but another girl from the MSU program, Alice, was forced to both cross-dress and go traditional by her family, so she was wearing an absolutely enormous man’s boubou. It was great. We looked awesome together. There was lots of food, lots of people, and lots of dancing, which are all the ingredients for a successful Senegalese shindig.