I've spent the bulk of the afternoon sitting on the dock outside my hotel looking over the river at the coastline on the other side, admiring palm trees and mosque towers. I successfully managed to read two chapters of my book, which only puts me about 80 pages behind where I need to be by Tuesday. This would sound completely reasonable, if the book wasn't in French, super hard, and I wasn't completely exhausted from sleep deprivation. While I imagine on study abroad programs other people go out and party all the time, that has certainly not been my semester. Sure I've checked out the local bars and jazz clubs, but it takes a full night's sleep every day to make the exhaustion of cultural immersion here enjoyable. However, being in a hotel with 20+ friends has encouraged all of us to hang out a little later, even if it's just watching Mean Girls and talking. Between less sleep and this wretched sunburn though, I'm finding myself a little worn down, and the prospect of an exhausting philosophical journey exploring the tensions of French colonial rule is completely unappealing to me. Oh well -- c'est la vie, quoi, as one of my favorite staff members Bouna would say.
Keur Sedaro. Keur Sedaro is about a 10 minute drive from Thies, which is one of the largest cities in Senegal (maybe the 2nd or 3rd? I don't remember.) Thies seems much calmer than Dakar to be sure, if only because in the marketplace the merchants don't step out of their booths to swarm or surround you. It also has a much smaller urban center it seems, and the entire city feels more residential and spread out. Also of importance, there is significantly less garbage all over the streets/sand. I know the Peace Corps has a large presence in the villages around Thies, but it's not like I saw that many garbage cans in my 30 hours there... Hard to tell why it's so much cleaner, but I noticed it the moment our tour bus entered the city limits. Dakar is just so incredibly dirty -- it's really gross. Black plastic bags hanging from trees, dried up streams covered in garbage, sidewalks with plastic cups and bags and papers strewn everywhere, in places inches deep. I was especially comforted about this aspect of Thies since the village where I will be doing my ISP is just outside of Thies, so I will most likely be living in an apartment there or in Thies proper. There's even a pizza parlor/restaurant with wifi! I didn't get to do a lot of exploring, but what I saw I definitely liked.
Keur Sedaro itself is a village of maybe 500 or 600 people. I was living in Wadde, a "suburb" village of Keur Sedaro, where there were perhaps 100 people? Fewer? Only a couple of families, and they all seemed to have moved from Keur Sedaro to this next-door location, legitimately no more than a three minute sand/dirt path from the Keur Sedaro marketplace. (Don't think of anything extravagant though when I say "marketplace" -- instead imagine a cement gazebo with a flat roof, almost a covered pavilion, with a cement floor. Women (or their husbands and brothers, frequently) go into Thies to buy vegetables, and then back in Keur Sedaro women sell them at a small markup to other locals in order to make the day's meals. I watched my homestay mother in Wadde shop at this market at 10 AM every morning, from the same vendor out of the back of a station wagon. We would buy tomatoes, fish (sometimes dried, sometimes fresh,) carrots, parsnips, eggplants, bitter eggplants, cabbage, spicy peppers, and I'm sure a few other things that I'm forgetting now... Tomato paste one time, I think. Overall I had an incredible experience in Wadde, living with the Mbengue family: mother Aida, father Ndiaye (though he wasn't around all that much, and barely spoke any French -- I was so lucky that Aida spoke enough to communicate well with me!) and the 5 children, 4 boys and a girl. The girl (age 9) is named Ada; I was her homonym and therefore called Ada for the duration of my stay there. The boys are named Mohammed (age 11,) Mbay (age 8,) Mada (age 6) and Moudou (age 4.) Truth be told, I hadn't even realized until I wrote those names down just now that they all start with the letter M... Though it doesn't surprise me terribly: one of the villages outside of Kedougou only has families where their last names start with the letter B. Aida was basically my main informant into village life, though Mohammed and Ada engaged with me a lot, too, as both of them are studying French hard in school. Mohammed told me he wanted to be President Obama, to which I responded that he should start by trying to become President Wade (the president of Senegal) and that if he studied hard, I was sure he could make it happen. Aida however completed the first 6 years of school here (through some middle school) and so her French is pretty decent. She's hosted students every semester for maybe half a dozen years, plus the president of World Learning (the company that runs SIT) a few years back. She was incredibly kind and generous with her time, her insight, and her thoughts on her life and challenges. When I first walked into her home, I was impressed by how cute it looks truth be told! A two-room cement building with a tin-roof, with another three room cement building (about the same size) a little to the side. In the front lawn (which is sand) are three trees surrounded by cement brick circles about 2 feet fall, and tied to the largest tree are the goats. In the back is a chicken coup, and the entire compound is surrounded by a branch fence about 8 or 9 feet high. In front of the main house (the two-room building) is a cement porch of sorts, where on the last night I taught my "siblings" how to play hopscotch. One I saw them writing things with the charcoal pieces left over from cooking lunch, and we started drawing together on the stones outside the kitchen, it occurred to me that hopscotch was a perfect game for the porch. But I digress: I first walked into the room where I would sleep and was stunned. It looked nicer than my room in Dakar! Large wooden bed frame with built-in bedside tables and a mirror in the center of the large head-board, wooden shelves in the corner with photographs of the kids and lotions, a huge wooden bureau/dresser on the side of the room. No electricity, but that wasn't obvious at first. The double bed was covered with a shiny blue comforter equipped with pillows and little decoration doilies that sat at the foot of the bed... It was beautiful, and I was shocked, truth be told. A little later I put together that this was the master bedroom not a guest room -- that I was displacing Aida and Ndiaye for the duration of my stay. They would sleep in the other room, which had no furniture at all. A closed cement room (maybe one window, but if so it was always closed so I don't think so) with a thin/medium thickness mattress in the corner where all five children normally slept. For my three nights in the house, Aida would spread out a second foam piece next to the mattress for herself and Ndiaye. I felt horribly uncomfortable about this, and tried to protest, but the concept of teranga (hospitality) is so important here that I didn't want to seem ungrateful, and she assured me that every student has slept in her bed. In hindsight I'm glad I didn't push too hard -- the mattress on her bed was caving in in the middle and was pretty uncomfortable, in addition to which she removed the fancy comforter (though that word suggests a thickness and warmth that is incorrect... perhaps decorated sheet is a better term, think silky satin) so it didn't seem too fancy when I was trying to sleep there. In addition, I was usually up for at least half an hour (if not three times that) after they had all gone to sleep just writing down my thoughts in my journal, and since my headlight is ridiculously bright I feel like a total tool using it in front of villagers... Seriously, they have no electricity and only dinky or old flashlights, but here comes this toubab student with a super bright light that she wears on top of her face! It's awkward. But it was actually lovely to feel like I really had my own space for a few days -- again, what a wonderful break from my life in Dakar! Right away Aida sat down with me and showed me pictures from past students (they develop them in the States and send them back to Senegal to be delivered by the director of our program) and told me about herself. She's 32 maybe, and while she is Ndiaye's only wife she tells me that he hopes to get a better job and take a second wife. (Something about me and the polygamous men!) Because of this I am immediately predisposed to dislike Ndiaye (I haven't met him yet) and it takes me a few days to realize that I actually kind of like him. Sure he seems to favor his youngest son above all the other children, and like most of the men in traditional Senegalese society he doesn't share any of the domestic work with his wife or daughter, but he works hard as a cab-driver in Thies and provides enough food for all his children and his wife every day. They can even afford "running water" -- a faucet that comes off the side of the house, but at least they don't have to walk to the well! Just this, not even a faucet for the kitchen and no plumbing or running water in either the toilet room or the shower room, costs 4.500 or 5.000 CFA a month ($9 or 10 USD, and in case you can't tell I'm writing money with the European/rest-of-the-world usage of the period rather than the comma.) Seeing him come home every day tired though made me feel bad about fighting so hard with taxi drivers over a few hundred CFA every time I negotiate cab fare. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me that even taxi drivers probably have small kids with mouths to feed and in need of notebooks... After all, there are so many kids in this country and especially in rural villages. It's hard to tell though how much his income can provide, as I learned that a lot of the school supplies and clothes for the kids are gifts post-stay from past visiting students...
At the end of my stay (to throw this in out of order) I learned that to install electricity in every room (the bedroom, the second room, the kitchen, the shower room, the toilet,) plus one extra street lamp type fixture outside, would cost 100.000 CFA ($200.) Of course this was incredibly expensive for Aida and Ndiaye, though they were talking about it and hoping it would be feasible at some point in the future. It was in these moments, as I felt very close to Aida and the kids by this point, that I most felt the difference between my economic standing and theirs. This family of 7, who bought me small custard snacks and shared their green mango slices with me, who let me sleep in the only real bed they own, who taught me Wolof words and played with me every day, who bought me as well as the other kids banana bread corn muffins and sent me away in the end with a huge loaf of bread -- I could easily just pay the cost of their electricity installation. So that the kids could study at night, so that they wouldn't have to walk home from their neighbors' houses (where there are TVs sometimes) in the pitch black, so that nobody would get burned knocking over a candle that is providing the entire light for the room after 8 PM... At the same time that's not my job, and it's not as if I feel so wealthy in the States where the cost of living is higher! And paying for the installation doesn't change that the electricity charges monthly would still be expensive, that I can't guarantee if I wired them $200 it would even go to that and not something else, that there will always be more problems and more families that need electricity... But it's not as if every little bit doesn't help! Every jeans jacket sent my a former student, every pen and pencil and notebook and crayon... Lots to think about.
One of my most memorable moments with the Mbengues was on my second day in Wadde. Aida was cooking (as she spends the entire day doing every day) and I spent the morning talking with friends who were either staying in Wadde (two others) or in Keur Sedaro and the other surrounding villages, all within a 15 minute walk of each other. When I came home and was waiting around for lunch to be ready, Aida pointed out to me that Mbay had hurt his foot and maybe I could take a look at it. I was distracted by the other Wadde students for a while, and Bouna (one of our staff members) came by to visit and check in on me from Thies for no good reason, so it took about 45 minutes for me to finally sit down and take a look at the problem. To preface this story, and maybe I said this when I was talking about Aminata's foot in Samecouta, but I am absolutely not a doctor. I'm not even pre-med! Every time (and I mean every time) I get sick at school, I call my mom and I call Ruthie for immediate advice. But here I am, sitting with this 8 year old and looking at a half-dime-sized hole in his foot. He tells me in very broken French (or more that it's being translated for me from Wolof into French by his friends and older siblings) that it was an insect that ate it's way into his foot -- my best guess is ring worm since there's a huge ring around the hole. It's painful to the touch, and covered in sand and dirt and pus. He can't walk flat-footed because the ring around the sore has spread onto the bottom of his foot, so with the left one he walks on the outside only. I have no idea what to do for this child. He needs to see a doctor, that's pretty clear to me. But doctors are expensive, and I was specifically asked to help. Aby and Bashir had been having what appeared to be a serious talk the morning I was leaving (and maybe a serious fight the night before when I was packing,) and so in the uncomfortable maneuvering around the house I had decided not to walk into the girls' room and grab my small medical kit from the cabinet there. Because of this I only have with me moist toilettes, neosporin, and a box of different sized bandaids. Again, my medical knowledge is awful, but I know that neosporin wont fix this. Even so, I sit down on a small (1'x1'x1') stool and rest Mbay's foot on my leg while he sits in a plastic chair. I clean the area with three different wet wipes, and then cover the area in disinfectant. I try to put bandaids over that, but his skin is so dirty that the bandaids dont seem to stick. I manage to hold on the largest bandaid with two other small bandaids, but I know right away that all three will fall off before bed that night. Even when I tie a strip of extra fabric around his foot to hold the bandages on, it's clear that this is not a functional solution. Moreover Mbay doesn't always wear shoes (most of the children don't all the time) and there is sand everywhere, it's unavoidable. The front lawn is basically a beach, and the boys all play active games and get dirty just like boys do anywhere. Mbay is beyond appreciative to be sure, but as soon as I finish with him a family friend who must be about 12 who lives in Wadde as well asks me if I can help him, too. He rolls up his pant leg and shows me huge sores, many of which have scabbed over and are at least as big as quarters. There are a few on his feet too, though more on the top that on the sides or bottoms. He says these were also insects, though I have no idea what kind of insect eats at flesh like that. My bandaids wont even work on these -- they're already scabbed over. I'm a little queezy as I look back and forth between this leg and this boy's dirty, hopeful face. I tell him that all I can do is clean them and put on the cream, but again I have no idea what to do to make them better. Another half hour goes by as I clean and dab on neosporin. I'm almost besides myself, overwhelmed by frustration and my own lack of knowledge and supplies, by my own weak stomach about blood and gore and at the awful reality that these sores are completely preventable and avoidable with some bug spray and rapid treatment before they get big! But I didn't have anywhere to go and cry or yell, so I take a short walk around Wadde (5 minutes, tops) and come back to sit down and play with the kids again. This is the reality of their life, after all. I tell Aida during lunch that if at all possible Mbay should see a doctor (she nods her head in approval but starts talking to Ndiaye in Wolof, and I understand the word money being used a couple of times...) In the meantime, I tell her that when I come back to visit when I'm near Thies during ISP period (I really became quite fond of the whole family, and was thrilled that my goodbyes were only for a few weeks) I would bring Mbay some close-toed shoes so that at least he could keep his foot clean. And hopefully more support on the bottom of his foot (more than a flip-flop, at least) would be of some assistance in terms of the pain....
There are so many stories I want to share here but I'm only going to write for a few more minutes (without proof-reading again, my apologies) before I head down to dinner with the group for our final meal in Saint-Louis. (The restaurant here is so fancy, and super delicious! Plus we get to sit on the dock by the water... it's beautiful.) But let me run through some highlights I guess. On the last night the entire village and surrounding villages of Keur Sedaro through a dance for us, with tama and djembe drummers, and a huge percentage of the population turned out to watch and participate. All of us students were dressed in our parents' traditional outfits -- when I can, back in Dakar, I'll post some pictures of me wearing a coral colored boubou, hair wrap and all. If I do say so myself, I looked impressively good. Another memorable moment was learning how to cook cebu jen with Aida all morning on my last day, in the hot-box of a kitchen she uses. Imagine a small metal burner-like structure, where one burns wood underneath and puts the pot on top. But there's no chimney, it's just a cement room with a door and a window. Why the "stove" isn't put near the window I have no idea, but the entire corner of the room is charred black and the room fills with smoke. I'm floored that Aida doesn't have lung cancer from all the smoke she breathes in. But after an entire morning of cooking, trying to take good mental notes on her recipe, I ate what is easily tied for the best cebu jen of my entire stay. I also have vivid memories of my last night, standing outside the house and looking up at the incredibly bright stars just singing to myself and feeling very at peace with the world. Then, when Ndiaye heard me and started laughing at me, I was beckoned inside to sit with the family on the crowded mattress and natt (plastic mat) until bed-time. I fell asleep there beside them all as we all reposed together... Anyway.
I'll try and add to this another time. Tomorrow I head back to Dakar -- will try to update in a couple of days. More promptly than these two today, to be sure. Ba beneen yoon!
