Faits divers

My birthday

Tuesday was my 21st birthday. I had tentatively planned to spend the day at the beach drinking cocktails in observance of that auspicious occasion, but through an unfortunate combination of circumstances (laziness the weeks before, horrible headache the night before), I had a lot of homework to get done for the next day and ended up spending the day at home working on a paper. That and laundry, which, when you have to do it all by hand, is no joke.

Usually the WARC staff buys a cake for people’s birthdays you just share it around with who ever is there at the time that they bring it out for you, but since I didn’t have class that day, I wasn’t going to go to WARC. I got a call from Josephine at about 6:30 wishing me happy birthday and asking me why I hadn’t come in today. I told her I didn’t have class and I had things that I needed to do at home, and she said, “Oh, okay, see you tomorrow then.” About an hour later, she showed up at my house with cake. It was totally sweet.

I didn’t think my family was going to do anything for my birthday. I had gotten text messages from Moussouba and Habibou earlier in the day, Danny wrote on my Facebook wall, and Anita sang “Happy Birthday” to me in English when she got home from school (which is a big deal for her; she hates English), but Kiki’s birthday had gone by unobserved the Thursday before, so I wasn’t hoping for much more than that.

So I was surprised and delighted when Moussouba knocked on my door at about the same time she does every night when she gets home from work, and instead of the regular, “Bonsoir, comment tu vas,” all my siblings were at my door. They presented me with a big cake that said “Joyeuse Anniversaire Kiersten et Kiki,” complete with candle, turned off the lights, and sang “Joyeuse Anniversaire” to me. It was great. I made a wish and blew out the candle, and then we all went and ate cake (before dinner) in the living room. Someone even went out to buy soda, which is something that only every happens for parties and special occasions (though when I’m at school or out and about, I’m practically hooked up to an IV of orange Fanta). We had a nice time eating cake together and taking pictures and talking. It didn’t turn out to be a totally lame 21st birthday after all.

The Beach

A few weeks ago, I finally got to the beach for the first time. As I was preparing to come here, I had head from several sources that Senegal had great beaches, so I was really looking forward to some sand and sun. Unfortunately, all those great beaches that I heard so much about are not in Dakar. The Dakar coastline is mostly rocky cliffs, which means either no beach at all or beaches with pounding waves. This is good if you’re a surfer, but bad if you’re a swimmer. You're not even allowed to go into the water on many beaches because the riptides are so strong. Also, some of the beaches are sort of unofficially designated as “work-out” beaches, meaning that they’re packed with guys lifting weights and doing crunches, which is not necessarily the kind of environment that a girl wants to put herself in if she’s clad only in a bikini and shades (or anything, really).

So, if you’re looking for sun and sand in the Dakar area, your best bet is to go up to Ile de Ngor. Ngor is a village sandwiched between the swanky Les Almadies and the traditional Yoff, and there’s an island just a short pirogue ride away. This island has a few small beaches and lots of resorts and houses belonging to rich people, including, I think, Akon. It kind of feels like the Nantucket of Dakar. But it’s only a dollar to get there, and if you cave in to the pressure of the guys working on the beach and pay for a mat-and-umbrella set up, its only another two dollars, so you can totally get the feeling of being at a resort without having to pay for it.

The beaches are really small compared to what I’m used to at Cape Cod and Rhode Island, and I’ve heard that they get really crowded and insane when it gets hotter, but in the middle of March, its still too cold for the locals to have any interest in swimming or sun bathing, so the only people there are the toubabs on vacation and the people trying to sell things to them. Men and women selling scarves, woodcarvings, and jewelry walk from mat to mat, greet you in French and English, and if you show anything even resembling interest, they’ll set up shop at the bottom of your mat and give you a full tour of their wares. I was there with Miranda and we spent probably half an hour talking to a woman selling jewelry. She told us what everything was made out of, and some of it was actually kind of pretty, so we bought things. I can’t remember what I paid, but I know that it was dirt cheap compared to what I would have paid in the states and exorbitantly expensive compared to what any Senegalese person would have been willing to pay.

The beach is lined with little kitchen shacks that sell food and drinks and have tables and chairs on the sand, so we had lunch there too. It was quite lovely. You can watch people fishing on the jetties, which is cool because you know that the seafood that you’re eating is as fresh as it could get. We also saw a guy bring in three huge marine creatures that were probably some variety of shark. That was interesting. No one seemed to be in any rush to bring these into a kitchen and cook them, so I don’t really know what happened to them. One minute, the guy who caught them was showing them off to all the vacationing French families, and the next minute they were gone.

That was a really nice day. I read, I napped, I swam, I got a safe, protected tan in some places and angry red sunburns in others, and had a general good time.

Packages

When us WARC kids get sent packages, one of two things will happen. Either the package will be deemed worthy to be sent to Poste de Fann, the post office down the street from WARC, or it will need to stay at Colis Postaux, central post office for packages in Dakar. I have no idea what factor it is that determines where the packages go. At first I thought it was size, and that the small packages would go to Fann and the big ones would stay downtown, but now I’ve had big packages come to Fann and small ones go to Colis Postaux, so I have no idea.

Wait, brainwave. It depends on what kind of customs form you put on the package. If it’s the little green one, it goes to Fann. If it’s the big white one, it goes to Colis Postaux. Perhaps there world is a logical place after all.

If the package is at Fann, you get a yellow slip at WARC and just have to take a lovely stroll down the street in order to get your goodies from home. Poste de Fann can be a little nuts if you’re trying to do something like buy stamps, in which case you have to choose a window to wait at, determine if there is a line (which you think wouldn’t be that much of a challenge, but which oddly often is), and then stand in it assertively so that people don’t step ahead of you (usually this means keeping little to no space between you and the person in front of you. No one’s really big on “personal space” in Senegal). When you’re next, you then have the challenge of communicating with the person on the other side of the window. You know in some places with windows, like banks and movie theaters, there will be glass separating you and the teller, and a little device thingy in the glass at around mouth level that makes it so the teller can hear you and you can hear the teller? Yeah, that’s probably what they were going for at Poste de Fann, but they’re missing the little device things. There’s a small cluster of holes in the glass at about mouth level, but they’re not enough to facilitate communication. The teller is seated so that their mouth is closer to the hole where the letters and stamps and money are passed back and forth, so more often than not, you find yourself bending over to talk through there. It’s a good system.

If, however, you’re picking up a package, you get to go to the lovely window number 8, where for some reason, order prevails. The line is easy to find and place yourself in, and the window is a sliding glass door, so there’s a wide open space to talk through. You present your package slip, hand over a tax of 1000 francs, and receive your box of delights.

If you’re picking up your package from Colis Postaux, it’s a whole different story, beginning with the fact that your slip is white instead of yellow (I know, it’s insane). CP is a bus/taxi/car rapide ride away from WARC, in another neighborhood called Medina. Once at CP, retrieving your package is an exercise in Senegalese bureaucracy. You go to the package window and present your slip. The guy then picks through a pile of customs forms and finds the one that goes with your package. You leave the slip with the guy and take the customs form into the next room to the customs guy. The customs guy looks at the form, stamps it, and then sends you into the next room to the next guy, who stamps it and then sends you in to the next room, where another guy retrieves your package and puts it on a table. He, or you, then goes back and gets the last guy, who holds your customs form while the present guy slices the box open and rifles through all your stuff to make sure that there’s nothing dangerous or expensive in there. The guy with your customs form then tells you to stay there and wait for the other guy to tape your box up again. When he’s done doing that, you go back to one of the other rooms, leaving your package on that table in the last room, and get your customs form back. Then you go all the way back out to the main room and present your customs form back to the guy who gave it to you in the first place. He looks at it, gives it back to you, and then sends you to the window to your left to pay the taxes on it. If they guys who searched your package didn’t find anything expensive in it that they could get you to pay more for, you pay your 1000 francs and wait for the guy at this window to write out your receipt. You then return to the original window and present your customs form once more. The guy will then ask you for some ID, make you sign the back of the top sheet of your customs form, which he will rip off and keep, and then give you back the bottom 3 sheets of the customs form. Then he will go into the back room where your package is waiting on the table, bring it back, and finally relinquish custody of your package to you. At this point, you can scarcely believe that you actually have your package in your hands, and you flee the building in fear the someone is going to tell you that you need to get 8 more stamps and see 14 other guys before you can enjoy the contents.
New Clothes

I have new clothes. I few weeks ago I went shopping with Moussouba and Kiki and bought fabric to get clothes made. I got some wild African prints that I picked because I really liked the way they looked hanging on the walls of the fabric shop and not particularly because I thought I would look good clad in them from head to toe, which is probably something I will try to take into consideration next time.

The next week, I went with Moussouba to the atelier (workshop) where she works, which looks like it specializes in really fancy silk and bazin (a rustling, shiny, almost papery fabric for more formal clothes) outfits, and not so much in the casual clothes I was looking for, but whatever. A guy named Ass (yeah) took my measurements, and Moussouba set me up with some catalogues of what looked like Senegalese wedding parties so that I could choose my modèles (styles). Most of the outfits were either too formal or completely ridiculous, so I gave a vague description of what I wanted and hoped for the best.

A few days later, I got what I had asked for: one dress, in a style that I would describe as “sack-like, but still cute,” and a two-piece outfit consisting of a tunic/shirt and a pagne, which is the African word for wrap-around skirt. I can’t even describe what the fabrics look like, except that the dress is mostly red and the outfit is mostly yellow, but they really need pictures to do them justices. I’ll try and get some up soon. I like them, but I think I will put a little more thought into it next time.

Local Elections

March 22nd was local elections in Senegal. I don’t feel like I ever got complete answers to my questions about what was going on and how the elections worked, but I figured some things out. The elections were for positions like mayor and city council kind of people, I think. In presidential elections, you vote for candidates, but in local elections, you vote for parties/coalitions and get the whole ticket of which ever party wins. During the campaigning, posters went up on all the billboards and basically every stationary fixture with the names and faces of all the parties and some of what they were promising to do. There would be neighborhood rallies and sort of like parades, lead by pickup trucks full of people and speaker systems that would play music or shout things in Wolof that may have been encouragements to go vote, explanation of the party’s platform, or denunciation of the other parties. It was also very common to see posters defaced and political graffiti go up over night.

I asked all my voting-aged siblings if they were going to vote and if they did, who were they going to vote for, but they all said that they probably weren’t going to vote and didn’t know much about who was running and why. Danny said he might vote for the sake of voting against the President’s coalition, which was in the majority (of what, I don’t really know) and not really because he felt strongly about any of the other parties.

The weekend of the elections came, and we were all warned not to go out on Sunday because of the possibility of violent demonstrations. Also, no one in all of Senegal was allowed to travel between two cities that day because it could be potentially dangerous. Things don’t usually get out of hand during elections in Senegal, but, as Danny said, “In Africa, you never know.”

Nothing bad happened, and as it turned out, my host mom, Anita, and Moussouba all voted! Why did they tell me they weren’t going to when they actually were? I would have liked to have gone with them. They were all proud of it too. They showed me their little fingers that had been dipped in bright pink into to show that they had voted, and told me “J’ai voté!” with big smiles on their faces. Well, good for them, I guess. Danny, who was the only one who had expressed the possibility of voting, hadn’t voted at all. He said he’d lost his voter ID card (which is a card that looks practically identical to the other ID card that everyone has to have here).

The results of the election were apparently a huge upset for the President, Abdoulaye Wade (who’s in his 80s), and the Sopi coalition in power. In Dakar and other big towns like Saint-Louis and Louga, an opposition party called Bennoo Siggil Senegaal got voted into power. People here are saying that that’s a good thing, because it means that there will be a more equitable sharing of power in the government now, and because it sends a message to the President that the Senegalese people aren’t pleased with how he’s handing things. It also reduced the chances that his son, Karim, will succeed him as president in 2012.