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 t
he 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, gene
rally 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 w
ith 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 w
ere 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!
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