Where to begin...

Dakar is an incredible city. The more I follow the agendas written out in my guidebook, the more I'm realizing just how cosmopolitan a place it is. My experience at the Lonely Planet locations is almost a separate experience than my average life here, and it's wild to think of how different an experience I would be having if I was here for a week as a tourist. Take my day yesterday, for example. Or the past two days. Friday night I went to La Maison Culturelle Francaise Douta Seck, which is a hidden oasis near the University of Dakar Chiekh Anta Diop (all of this in the neighborhood of Point E, which is the same neighborhood of my school.) My friend Rachel had heard earlier that day that a Mandink (local ethnic group) folk singer was going to be performing at 21:00 in the cafe there, and so we agreed to buy dinner out as our ticket into the show. After visiting her house (which is so different than mine -- I definitely need to spend more time visiting other people's houses... One of the weirdest details was that her house has a ballon in the middle, which seems like a cement dome potentially remniscent of a hut. Then there's a big courtyard around it, and then there's a small three story house that's very long and not very deep. She was explaining that the subsection of her neighborhood is called Le Ballon because all the houses have them, and that apparently they were built by Americans. Which is odd because they are really small, maybe two rooms with a divider in the middle, and an external bathroom. Her current theory is that perhaps they were built by Americans who assumed that since rural Senegalese live in huts, in Dakar people would want something similar to that cultural legacy... Of course what happened is that people built houses around the ballons and use them as an oddly separated room.) But yes after visiting her house we set off via taxi to la Maison, where we stumbled upon a cultural festival celebrating la Francophonie, or all the places in the world outside of France where French is spoken. There was a live band, as well as stations (booths) from a variety of different countries, all serving little plates of local food. Of particularly memorable cuisines were the Congo, Switzerland, Canada, and Cameroon, but it was all delicious and really fun to see. There were women in fancy traditional outfits dancing with husbands and friends, lots of people standing around in suits watching with huge smiles on their faces. A huge buffet table in the back of traditional Senegalese dishes and every kind of local juice, including my favorite: bissap. It was just incredible, exhilerating, and hugely local and obscure. I was so pleased we stumbled upon it. Then we walked out of this hanger-like space towards the cafe, where there was no food to be had at all (or wine, which had us a little bummed) but a few more friends came to meet us and the six of us had truly enormous beers as we listened to this man with an incredible voice (think half way between the classic American pretty boy with a guitar and African folk music) serenaded us in an intimate setting -- palm trees, few others around, his guitar strumming through huge speakers and another man drumming on a calabase (hollowed out gourd which is a bowl/drum) with rings on to give it a particularly metallic clicking... It was just breathtaking. If it hadn't been a little cold, though in fairness I was only wearing a light sweater over a tank-top and jeans, I easily could have stayed there for hours.

Then yesterday, I did a grand tour of Dakar following highlights from the guidebook. With my friend Erin we visited the Grande Mosequee and climbed to the top of the tower for a small fee, perused the Marche Chinois or the Dakar equivalent of Chinatown, walked a couple of miles into the center of downtown Dakar through endless stall-lined streets and down random alleys, only to end up in the Institut Culturelle Francaise which is like a strange paradise in a fancy section of downtown. Huge and lush trees, an art gallery where Erin and I ended up talking to the artist of all the beautiful recuperation work (art made out of garbage) on display in French/Wolof for an hour, touring around the gift shop and eating fancy pastries in the shadow of a baobab tree. Beautiful, but highly touristy. If not touristy, than the toubab crowd at least (toubab = white person, usually though not necessarily referring to a tourist.) We then went searching for a movie theater that apparently no longer exists, and wandered around the jewlery market in the guide book and another market highlighted in the guidebook only in respect to the building it's located in. Which to begin with is pretty rare for Dakar, to have a market inside a building. While outside the vendors were catering almost exclusively to tourists, and nearly accosted me as I was looking at new shoes since the flip flops I bought (for 2.000 CFA = $4) at a market last week are kind of giving me blisters, inside the building were fruit and vegetable vendors, flower vendors (also rare for Dakar,) and the unmistakable smell of fish that's been sitting out all day and has filled the air. Sadly it was starting to close and so we didn't get to see the market in action, but it seemed beautiful and strangely local and touristy at the same time. Perhaps the least touristy part of the day was that we took car rapides to get to and from downtown, which are kind of like Dakar's buses except that they're 40 year old vans and unregulated. Also they are painted in crazy colors with random Wolof and English phrases on them, as well as random images like eyes, American flags, mouths, triangles and striped, etc. They cost about 100 CFA (25 cents) if you get charged the actual price, but sometimes as a toubab you have to pay more (125 CFA) just because.

While I had a fabulous day, and it was wonderful to see so much of downtown and feel confident doing so (especially as compared with how I used to feel wandering around downtown... I'm really starting to learn the geography of the city which is wonderful,) but I couldn't help but feel like my day was not at all what an authentic Senegalese experience would be. And part of that I think is that no matter where you are, when you are seeing the sights you are not tapping into the culture of the quotidienne. I'm certainly thrilled to be hitting all the must-sees, but I'm pleased to be exploring Dakar in a tourist sense in the context of a bigger cultural understanding. I didn't even feel like a tourist for most of yesterday (a lot of that is the fact that I can speak some elementary Wolof -- I'm floored by how much of a difference just the greetings and a few sentences or words can make) and that was a really proud feeling.

For the sake of an update on my home life, I feel like I should mention what happened last night. Though I preface this story with a few important considerations. 1: this may sound very inappropriate, that I am living in this house. I do not feel uncomfortable (well, most of the time) living here, and certainly have no desire to switch homestays for the really only 2/3 weeks I have left in Dakar.) Please do not be worried for me. 2: Bashir and Aby are, to the best of my witnessing, excellent parents. Though to be sure parenting seems very different in Senegal, given that there are a number of different cultural values that begin to be instilled at a young age. 3: recounting this story to "strangers" on the internet seems to me a little voyeuristic, and I'm not sure that I am comfortable airing out other people's private lives in my own personal blog. However, because Bashir and Aby's relationship is such an integral part of my homestay experience, I think writing about it and talking about it is helping me better process the situation. I'm certainly learning about myself on this trip that I am really good at going with the flow and accepting things that challenge me, but mostly because I don't process the things that are difficult until I've exhausted my emotional space for putting things aside. In an attempt to do that less, I now discuss the ongoing saga of life in the Gueye residence.

To start, I don't know exactly what happened. I was watching TV with Bashir, talking about how he had made a joke that he wanted to take me out clubbing this weekend to the places where he and his friends go. I told him that I thought he was kidding, since even he admits that he's a pretty bad dancer. I had accidentally made other plans to go to my favorite live music place (Just 4 U) in Point E, but the plans weren't final by any means so I told him we should discuss it after dinner when I could call my friends. Then something happened, Soukeyna did something, and nobody would explain to me what had happened. But for about five minutes she looked like a ghost and kept hiding behind me or Aby saying that she thought Bashir was going to hit her. I was completely confused, and nobody would explain anything to me so I went back into Bashir and Aby's room to watch more Latin American soap operas (they're ridiculously addicting, even if the dubbing into French is awful.) The next thing I know, Bashir is following Soukeyna into the girls' bedroom with his belt off, and closes the door behind them. I hear the light cracks of the belt and Soukeyna screaming and crying, and though she cries easily and often my jaw just about hit the floor. I didn't know what to do. I've heard Aby spank Soukeyna before, which was awkward enough and certainly prompted an internal discussion in my head about the purpose of and problems with spanking, but this immediately struck me as child abuse. I had no idea what to do -- I completely froze. After a few minutes and really only a few "hits," none of which seemed super loud, Bashir opened the door and they left the room. Soukeyna's face is covered with tears, Bashir looks as serious and upset as I've ever seen him. Aby immediately calls us all to dinner, where Bashir sits for the entire meal looking incredibly upset and disappointed, (really in himself it seems, though I could easily be creating this idea,) and barely looking at anyone except Aby. After half of the meal in silence (not so weird in Senegal generally but very weird at our house) it becomes so awkward that Aby and Awa (the bonne or maid) and I start talking just for the sake of talking. Dinner seems to end fine, but Bashir is still obviously upset.

I ask him a few minutes later if he's not going to go out now, since he seems so obviously not in good humor. He instead tells me that he is absolutely going to go out, that he can't stay in tonight for sure. I start texting with my friends to try and figure out what our plans for the night are, but I'm kind of drifting in and out of sleep in front of the TV. I definitely remember though hearing Bashir tell Aby that he was going out, and hearing her say that he couldn't go. They were arguing about it a little in both French and Wolof, and then eventually they went outside and I lost the rest of the conversation. The next thing I know I had fallen asleep in Aby and Bashir's bed in front of the TV and it's 1:30 AM; Bashir is gone. I get up and go take out my contacts and brush my teeth, upset that I've blown my opportunity to go out and see one of our drumming teachers at Just 4 U (though as it turned out my friend hadn't gotten my text expressing interest until 1:30, and she was up and still interested then, too! If only we both had known... Dakar nightlife really doesn't end until 5 or 6 so we would have had plenty of time, though I suppose Just 4 U closes around 3... Anyway, I digress.) As I'm hopping into my own bed, I send Bashir a text (texto) saying that I'm sorry tonight didn't work out but that next time I would love to go out with him to his favorite salsa places and other clubs. He almost immediately calls me back. "You're still up?" This is all in French, of course. "Sort of, I fell asleep and now I'm heading to sleep for real." "Oh, okay, I thought you might be going out." "You're not already at a nightclub?" "No, it's not too late if you want to meet up with me and Djibril (Bashir's best friend.)" "No, I'm already in my pajamas, but thanks. Next time, for sure." "Next time, absolutely." I go to sleep.

Next thing I know it's maybe 3:30 AM, and the doorbell is ringing. I have immediate flash backs to last weekend, when Bashir went out on a Saturday night and Aby stayed in. He must have come home at 5 in the morning, and he's ringing the doorbell and nobody is getting up to let him in. Eventually I get out of bed and open the door, unbolting it with the key that is left in the lock overnight and walking over to the front gate to unhook the part at the bottom that can't be opened from the outside. He's incredibly apologetic to wake me, but I keep saying that it's not a big deal and I'll go right back to bed. Then I hear him yelling at Aby about how when he rings the doorbell she has to go answer the door, she can't just leave him outside for minutes and minutes in the dead of night. He sounds livid. The next night, when he's out of the house (read: at his other house,) Aby tells me that if that ever happens again I'm not to open the door for him. She says to me, "We're both young. But I don't go out with my friends on the weekends, even though I'm only 29. Because I'm a mother and I have these girls and I want to be home for them, and I have a job that's exhausting and demands that I talk all day long and so I need to be well rested. And it's completely unfair that he goes out on the weekends and expects me not to care, when he's already only around 50% of the time. So the next time he wants to go out like that, he can go to his other house or he can stay overnight with Djibril. But he can't come back here." At the time I remember hoping dearly that this situation would never happen again. And then here we are, a week later, in the same situation. Even before this story starts I had been talking to Bashir last night about life in general, and he made a comment about Aby being crazy. I said someting like "Well that's love!" and he shook is head in a way that wasn't quite joking, saying that it's not love and that both of his wives are crazy... This doesn't really translate into English clearly, but it was sort of cluing me in to Bashir's own thoughts about his marriages without really saying anything explicit. I felt really bad for him -- here is a man who is tired, who's in a life he can't get out of really in any way, and who is dealing with at least one marriage (maybe two?) tangled in a complicated web of love and history and frustration and growing apart. And he's really a great, playful, kind guy, I truly believe. And now he's standing outside his house in the middle of the night, in need of somebody to open the gate for him.

Right away I get out of bed and walk the four steps towards the front door. But the lock is bolted shut and the key's not there. It's as if Aby knew that I would get up to open the door for him, despite her having asked me not to, and she's taken precautionary measures. I'm standing there looking at the lock, having no clue what to do, and Bashir keeps ringing the doorbell. I don't want to yell through the door and the little front courtyard -- the girls (and maybe Aby, for all I know) are sleeping! But I have no clue where the keys would be; they're always left in the door overnight. So I start to head back to bed, as the idea of asking Aby for the keys seems like a mess I don't want to involve myself in. But as I turn around to head back into "my room," Aby walks out from behind the curtain that serves as a door to her bedroom and puts the keys in my hands. Then she walks straight into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. I open the door and go to unlock the gate for Bashir, apologizing that it's taken so long. "Sorry, I couldn't find the keys." "What do you mean you couldn't find the keys?" "They were somewhere else." "Where were they?" "Somewhere else." I don't know what to say or do -- I'm obviously in the middle of something that has nothing to do with me. "Where's Aby?" "In the bathroom. Did you have a good time dansing?" "We never went to a club, after all." "Oh. Well, I'm going back to bed, see you in the morning!" "Good night Elena, thanks." A minute later Aby comes out of the bathroom (Bashir's been awkwardly waiting for her outside the door, and pacing around the small floor space in their room -- I can hear him) and Bashir starts yelling at her. Not incredibly loudly, but it's a heated fight. He sounds incredibly upset, as does Aby, though her voice sounds half way between anger and tears. They're switching back and forth between French and Wolof so I can't really follow what's going on (most of the time this kind of switching seems to occur when something is easier to say in French than in Wolof. In general this might include numbers, days of the week, expressions, contextual things, professional remarks,) but I can tell that this is tense and personal. So I try to zone it out and quickly fall back asleep, despite the fact that my door doesn't close all the way, and litterally making a 90 degree angle with my door is their "door," which again is only a curtain.

This morning I woke up early and went to the lighthouse in Oakam (another neighborhood, just north of Mermoz where I live) with two friends. It was beautiful, and a lovely respite from the tensions of the house. When I got back, Aby and Bashir were by themselves in the girls' room having what seemed like a much calmer but still very personal conversation. All day today they seem to be in the kind of peace you feel when you had a really rough night the night before, and even though it's a new day you're still feeling beaten up and uneasy. They were a little physical with each other during lunch, but definitely not the way I've seen them other days. I'm so overwhelmed by the situation that I can tell I'm not really processing it. It's hard for me to think about it in any way other than to recount it without choosing sides and putting my own values into the situation, and then it's really exhausting for me to live here. It's much easier just to see and engage and not process, even if I know that's worse for my longterm mental health. After all, I do really like and care about both Aby and Bashir, and both girls as well (adorable and terrible as they are.) Of course no house is perfect, no marriage is perfect, and again the cultural life that is just beneath the surface here is where I'm learning the most about Senegalese values and beliefs. But it's hard, and I'm very unsure of my footing. Being out of the house a lot is good, necessary even. I don't know, it just is, it's my experience and it's hard to imagine it being anything other than this right now, I'm so far "in it."

I need to go do some homework now, both on my Field Study Seminar methods presentation and on my French presentation on tontines (small networks of usually women who serve as almost a bank or microlending organization for each other.) Plus I just need more sleep here -- less than 8 hours and I'm exhausted the next day. The days are just so full here, and every day has new and unexpected cultural challenges. It's strange to feel very at home and very not at home here all at the same time. And then I'm leaving Dakar on Thursday for almost two weeks! But no worries, by then I will have given my tailor a final answer on his marriage proposal offer. I'm picking up my altered clothes from him (hopefully they'll be cute... fingers crossed, as really only half my stuff was at all attractive on the first round) on Wednesday, inchalla. (God willing.)

A parting Wolof lesson, which I hope all readers of this post will accept in lieu of me proofreading this entry for grammar and/or content: Informal Salutations, the ones that I encounter most frequently.

Yaangi noos? Literally, "Are you having a good time?"
Possible responses: • Waaw, mangi noos bu baax. "Yes, I'm having a great time."
• Tuuti tuuti / Tuuti rekk. "A little, a little."
• Noosumadara. "Not at all."
• Yow yaay noos. "It's you who are enjoying yourself!" (Playful.)

Lu bees? (This is my favorite.) "What's new?"
Possible responses: • Dara beesul. "Nothing is new." To which the other person says, Ca degg degg? "Really?" To which you respond, Waaw, ca degg degg. Or waaw, degg la.
• Yow ya bees. "You're what's new!" (Also playful.)

Naka suba si? "How the morning?" That one translates pretty badly into English...
Possible responses: • Suba saangi nii rekk. "The morning goes okay."
• Ni rekk. "Okay."
• Mungi dox. "It's walking."
• Maangi ci kawam. "I am on top of it."

Ba beneen yoon! Until next time! (Hopefully at least one more post before Thursday... inchalla.)

Mangi dekk Mermoz ci Dakar leggi

...meaning I am living in Mermoz in Dakar right now. Things are progressing along smoothly. This week we're doing workshops, and I'm spending the afternoons at the Village des Arts doing sous-verre painting, otherwise known as glass painting. It's unique to Senegal, and incredibly challenging, but a huge amount of fun. The process begins with a drawing, which is the first place where I begin to suck. Then you trace your drawing onto wax or tracing paper. Cutting the drawing to the size of your plate or glass sheet, you tape the wax paper to the front of the glass. Then flipping it over, you trace your lines using a caligraphy pen and ink, thus creating a mirror image drawing. Then you paint the colors on, the only difference from other kinds of painting being that you can layer the colors without them mixing. Only the bottom coat will show through. You have to keep flipping the glass around to see what it will actually look like--it's pretty wild. The past two days I've been painting a traditional boat found everywhere in Dakar called a pirogy, which looks like a long canoe and has bright patterns in primary colors painted all down the sides. I named my boat Oumy Gueye, my Senegalese name, which is perhaps conceited but seemed appropriate. Nothing I will make this week will be good enough to give as gifts even to my mom, so it may as well have personal significance for me!

The weekend was pretty chill -- reading abridged versions of Disney stories and fairy tales to Soukeyna, chilling at a patisserie downtown and visiting the jewelry market, writing a paper on my village stay experience. Sunday night I had a long conversation with Abby where she basically told me she is planning to get a divorce because of Bashir's second wife. She can't live like this anymore, with him gone 50% of the time, and the double standards in terms of how they both can act are pretty horrifying. For example on Friday night Bashir was out with his buddies until about 5 in the morning, while Abby was home after a long day of work with the kids. I mean there's live in help, but Awa is not the same as a parent by any means... It's tricky. But it was heart breaking to see Abby so upset, she started crying even. And it puts me in the incredibly bizarre situation of being simultaneously her close confident / daughter cousin neice... And Bashir doesn't know; he knows that she doesn't like the situation but he doesn't know that a divorce is coming. I don't think it will happen any time while I am here, as Abby said the house in Mermoz is too expensive for her salary (which shocks me given how tiny the house is! It must be because of the neighborhood, Mermoz is adorable and very cutesy) so she is starting to search for other housing alternatives. She and I had talked about Bashir's other wife a couple of weeks ago and she had commented that while she was livid with the situation, she didn't believe in getting a divorce when there are young kids in the house. Especially since Soukeyna at age 5 becomes attached to everything that smiles back at her. But she's clearly reached her wits end. Bashir sometimes jokes that I like Abby more than I like him, that I side with her all the time because I'm a "feminist," but the truth is that I really like them both at times and am beyond frustrated with them both at times. It's like I'm living in a fishbowl of their marriage but I'm not allowed to affect the outcome in any way... That's an awkward metaphor, I apologize.

More later in the week. Hope all is well in the States, and that nobody is relying on an AIG bonus...

Long Overdue! Kedougou and Life Back in Dakar

Time is speeding by these days. Two weeks from today we depart for our next trip -- another village stay and a week in Saint-Louis, the former capital of Senegal under colonialism -- so it's been hard to find a moment to do anything besides keep up with my classes. And play with my younger sisters, of course...

Kedougou was... I don't know what to call it. Incredible would be an overstatement. it was certainly formative! It's good to get some perspective on general poverty here. On different urban areas and different ways of life. As the expression goes here, Dakar est l'arbre qui cache le foret. (Dakar is the tree that hides the forest, with respect to Senegalese poverty.) Over 50% of Senegalese people live on less than $2 a day, but of the 12ish million in the country around 3 million live in Dakar and someone told me that more than a million, or I wanna say close to two million others live abroad working. Of the rest, Kedougou doesn't even rank as one of the top four largest cities by population. (It might be fifth or sixth, though...) It's much more calm and quiet than Dakar. The one main market in the city is easily managed without merchants swarming you, and buying the indigo fabrics and shea butter that Kedougou is renowned for was shockingly cheap (I purchased two yards of a cool indigo print for about $3 US.) Otherwise the city seems quiet. They have electricity and internet cafes, restaurants and the same food/general store boutiques that are everywhere in Dakar, but it's evident that the cost of living is much lower. We all noted that the beer was cheaper by almost $1 US, not that we got to do much drinking. It took over a day to get there because the roads were so awful. On the way we popped a flat tire in a tiny village, where we spent an hour playing soccer and talking to dirty, tattered-clothes-wearing children. We would puncture two more tires on the way home, and one other in a 4x4 down a super bumpy and fun dirt road jeep adventure on our way to a beautiful waterfall. The state of the roads here is something I had known would be awful, and I wouldn't say it's any worse than I expected, but they're bad for sure. Huge pot holes everywhere. Frequently it's easier to drive on the deep red dirt by the side of the road than to drive on the pavement itself. It's clear that if the roads were fixed it would be fabulously helpful to the Senegalese economy -- almost all the agricultural products come from south of the Gambia, an area called Kasamance that wants to secede, but that's for another day. For products like peanuts an extra 10 hours drive may not be a problem, but for tomatoes or mangos where too much time in a hot truck can be the difference between sell-able and rotten, it seems like road repairs would be a top priority of the government! Some sections of the road we did see being repaved, but the construction seems to be slow going.

Driving across the country was almost as eye-opening than the poverty we saw in our village stays (more on that in a moment.) There are expansive stretches of the country where there is absolutely nothing. No people, no animals, and absolutely nothing green. For large areas, not even anything brown. Just gray, and a straw-yellow color. Absolutely no water. Sometimes we would pass little villages, maybe a dozen or two dozen cement huts with straw thatched roofs, and there would be nothing nearby. No river, no hills, maybe a tree or two, and a herd of cows or goats or donkeys. I kept asking myself why on earth these communities would stay in the middle of nowhere. Even if they had no money to move to a city, why wouldn't they at least wander to find more arrable land? Speaking with my French teacher Keba about it this week (he spent most of his life in Kasamance) he said that it comes down to two main factors. To start, there's a strong tie to the physical plots of land that ethnic groups have lived on for centuries. The idea of moving, especially when there's no guarantee that they will find anything else, may not be in the least bit appealing. Secondly, these communities often live with strong religious convictions that any suffering in this life will be rewarded in heaven, and that dealing with poverty may just have been the hand they were dealt. Hard to imagine communities choosing to stay in drought-stricken areas, but it clearly happens. In the rainy season I guess it's not as hard, too. That's been a common theme of this semester for all of us though, I think: where do you draw the line between poverty and other cultures that don't appreciate the same values we do in the West? Like I guess the luxury of easy access to water... Which is actually an excellent segway into my village stay experience. (Though my village didn't have a major problem with access to water, it should be noted. They had plenty of wells, including a new one built by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last year, pump and all! It's incredibly easy to use and greatly appreciated by the entire community. Anyway, let me start at the beginning.)

I spent three days and nights in the Diakhanke village in Samecouta, which is about 9km outside of Kedougou, which is in the south east corner of Senegal in case I hadn't mentioned that already. The village is about 500-600 people, but it's hard to get a definitively accurate sense. A road is currently being built right through the center of the village, which the residents of Samecouta agreed to because the construction company promised to employ locals, which they have only minimally and reluctantly done. Because of this though the village is incredibly dusty, and I was so dirty the entire time that by sundown each night I couldn't tell the difference between my marroon toe nail polish (thanks again for the pedicure in January, Aunt Jerri! I think of it fondly frequently!) and my skin. The village is situated next to the Gambia river, which is essential to the general functionings of the village. The Diakhanke settled there after leaving their home in Mali centuries ago because of the fertile soil by the river, which allowed the community to continue their cultivating practices. Some men work what we would call regular jobs -- my host uncle for example worked cleaning gold that Gambian miners bring across the border, and the father of my friend Clint worked as the security guard for a cell phone tower being built in Samecouta -- but many of the men are unemployed or work in the fields. Corn fields and peanut fields are the most demanding, and they are seen as too hot for women to work in. Women instead tend to the house (or compound, as might be more accurate,) do the laundry, and work in the gardens. Samecouta has incredible garden patches. The women till the soil, plant the vegetables from seeds from last year's crop, water the plants, pick the vegetables, and clear the plots at the end of the crop cycle--everything in the growing process from start to finish. The irrigation method is particularly impressive: they carry water from the river in buckets on their heads, and then disperse it using a metal or plastic saucer/dish, generally throwing it over the small plants. Our mother (Aminata Kaba, the president of the local women's group) was growing onions, bissap, green beans, eggplants, and tomatoes. The plants seem to be thriving, and what they don't eat the women sell in Kedougou to contribute to their family incomes or strive for some financial independence.

Speaking of food in the village, it was certainly different from Dakar. While everything in Dakar seems drenched in oil or deep fried, we had almost no meat or oil at all in the village. We ate a lot of maffe, which is a classic Senegalese dish with rice and a thick peanut sauce. We also ate a lot of corn derivative meals, from a tapioca-like corn pudding in the morning that mostly tasted like watered down condensed milk with chewy balls floating around, to a mix between polenta and cream of corn one night with green bean leaves that I really liked. There was a fair amount of food that I found near inedible, though: perhaps the most foul pieces of beef I've ever put in my mouth, and a millet dish with a green bean leaf sauce that was bland and dry. The highlight of my entire stay food wise was a pre-lunch snack one day, where the teenage girls in my compound diced up a kind of mango that is okay to eat green (not normal mangos, though there were large and beautiful mango trees in our compound that looked lovely and will have lots of delicious fruit come April!) They added to the mango pieces salt, pepper, and a spice blend that most reminded me of onion salt. It was delicious, like a wet and semi-fruity potato chip. AH just thinking of it makes me smile again. We also drank incredible amounts of attaya, which is basically a national drink. It's a sweet black tea with lots of sugar mixed in, served in rounds in little shot glasses and poured back and forth between the glass and the teapot half a dozen times to attain ideal frothiness. (Certainly made me thinking about all my mornings making Starbucks foam, in particular how much faster that was than the 20 minute attaya prep process...) The teapot is tiny though, maybe only containing 4 to 6 glasses at most, so it can take an entire afternoon to serve everyone in the compound two or three glasses. The teapot in our compound was heated on a little wire/metal stand that propped up a bowl of coals, onto which the ceramic teapot was directly placed. A lot of my friends drink attaya frequently in their homestays in Dakar, but we were all shocked by the pervasiveness of its presence in our village stay experiences.

Let me back track and explain the set-up of the village stays a little. Our group of 21 was divided randomly into 6 smaller groups, each group being assigned a different village and ethnic minority. In Samecouta with me was Clint and my friend Whitney, who actually lived in the same hut and compound as me! It was an incredible way to experience village life, in a small group like that, speaking lots of french but also experiencing as a visitor in a small group the incredible language barrier that exists when there are more people who don't speak your language than there are people who do. Samecouta, like all the villages my friends stayed in, has no electricity, and while I think my family wished they had more flashlights they certainly don't go to bed as soon as the sun sets. For one thing, during this season it's simply too hot! But the light of the moon is very strong, and there are rarely any clouds, so it's not hard to get around.

I was thrilled to bond with my 17 year old home-stay sister, Fanta (in blue on the far right,) and her friends. I was in fact given a Diakhanke name -- Fango -- after one of Fanta's best friends. Fanta and her friends welcomed me into their little clique, which provided me with a fascinating look at the strange reality of 'poor' villages. Fanta does not want to leave Samecouta. She was educated through the equivalent of middle school, mostly because there is a middle school within easy biking distance of the village so there were hardly any obstacles to keep her out of school. Because of this she speaks excellent French, which is not uncommon for girls in Samecouta but certainly many of the older women don't. Her fiance, whom she met in Samecouta and has been dating for 6 years, is currently a high school student in Kedougou where the nearest high school can be found. She hopes that when he finishes, he will move back and they will get married. If he asks her to move to Kedougou with him, she would like to be a hair-braider there with her best friend, Doussou (whom Whitney was named after.) Doussou is also waiting on a fiance from Samecouta currently in high school. Another girl in their circle of friends, Fango (my namesake) is engaged to a school teacher in Kedougou. The rest of Fanta's friends, including her cousin, were all still in secondary school. One can stay enrolled in primary school until the age of 14 if one doesn't pass the culminating exam, and the age to complete secondary school must be around 20 because a 21 year old boy was still attending. Of the teenagers and twenty-somethings who were students though, none wanted to remain in Samecouta after finishing their studies. They appreciate how helpful electricity would be, and they want it. After all, they have cell phones (!) but as there is no electricity in Samecouta, they have to bring them to Kedougou to charge them. Fanta, Doussou, four other friends of theirs, and Aminata even all had phones, as well as Aminata's brother in law. He explained to us that the most important reason to have a phone was in order to call friends or relatives in Europe in case somebody got really sick. Doctors fees can cost 25.000 CFA ($50 US) just for the consultation, so having a contact who can send money when the times are tight can be a life or death difference. It was hard to gauge how big a problem health care was. I mean, there is no health care, let me be clear. But most people seemed pretty healthy, surprisingly enough. Of course, many people have rotting or missing teeth, or rotting sections of a tooth, or visible cavities. And many of the children have little coughs or runny noses. Aminata's husband, so I guess my home-stay father though I never spoke to him myself, has complete cataracts in both eyes and is effectively blind. Aminata herself has a semi-serious foot injury which bothers her constantly. She saw a doctor about it over a year ago, and he didn't know what was wrong and couldn't help her. It's completely internal, so I couldn't even guess at what exactly she had damaged, but wearing a sock along with her flip flop was not providing her with the kind of support she needed. She asked me to buy some thicker shoes for her when I went to Kedougou, which I happily did at a cost of about $1.75 US, but even the thickest shoes in her size were not nearly as thick as she would need to reduce the pain of that injury... It was hard to watch, to be sure.

I spent a lot of time in Samecouta thinking about cultural preservation. Aminata hopes that her children wont leave the village, and clearly many of the adults in the village feel the same way. (About half of the village is primary school aged, to put that in perspective. Infant mortaility is not uncommon, though it's not as high in Samecouta as in other places.) I couldn't rectify the notion of "development" with many of the cultural attitudes I witnessed. There is an incredible lack of working that I think is both due to lack of job opportunity and lack of cultural stress placed on working, mainly on the part of the men, which would never work in a more forced capitalist system--if more of their life depended on cash. And the Diakhanke are very proud of their traditions which seem highly dated in a Western context, from animal sacrifices at weddings and funerals to how gender roles play out in the daily routines of life. But the one thing I kept coming back to was that who would like knowing that there's a doctor in Kedougou that can't be afforded, and so a loved one will die. Access to medicine or medical attention seemed to be worth obtaining money for, and in whatever ways it could be obtained, though I guess truth be told I'm speculating on this point.

There's so much more to say -- I could talk or write about Kedougou and Samecouta for hours, and I have to some extent, but I brought my computer back to my house in Mermoz (the neighborhood in Dakar I live in) to finish this, and my 2 year old sister Djara is screaming about a pair of scissors Soukeyna just ripped out of her hands... I don't know, it's hard to follow. Generally though life back in Dakar is good! It's great to see the girls, even if they continue to be exhausting. I'm continuing to get closer with Abby, who told me in an intense heart-to-heart that she's incredibly unhappy that Bashir has a second wife and that she wants a divorce. She would ask for one I think except that she doesn't believe in getting divorced when you have young kids, and so she feels incredibly conflicted. But I'm definitely starting to see that some of their playful banter masks deep conflicts and resentments that exist between them. They're fascinating though... The other night Bashir drove us all (Abby, the girls, me, the live-in help or la bonne) to an ice cream parlor called N'Ice Cream (yes, in English) downtown. I didn't even know Bashir had a car! And it's a big, beautiful, white SUV that seats 9 in total. After ice cream, Bashir, Abby and I went cruising around northern Dakar for an hour playing American rap songs and Mbalax (Senegalese music -- I wish I had a better description than that, but perhaps another time.) There's no greater point in that anecdoate, except that I still haven't reconciled the incredibly Western life they are living with the fact that he has a second wife. Clearly neither has Abby, as she told me she didn't believe he was actually going to marry again (even after he had said he would) until the day he actually did it.

This week has been normal classes, as well as another week for me of djembe drumming workshops. It's surprisingly meditative, to let my hands develop intense muscle memory for so far 8 different rhythms and just to jam for two hours. It hurts a little bit, and I'm developping semi-serious callouses on the pads of my finger tips, but it's neat to be drumming on real animal hides with intricate wooden carvings in the side of the drum -- and our drums from school aren't even that fancy. Our instructor really likes me because I sang a song in Mandink that I had learned in my African Dance class last semester at Barnard, and now he thinks I have musical skills because I was previously exposed to someone Senegalese. Pretty funny. It's a great escape for the afternoon, and it's wild to still be learning from such a nationally prominent musician. It would be kind of like taking a music lesson from someone in the Philharmonic, as a student who just happens to be studying abroad and has no talent in music. Anyway.

Enjoy the pictures. I apologize that they don't have captions, but I'm uploading them well after writing most of this post. Ba beneen yoon!