I'm back with more anecdotes (blame the hiatus on the JP)

At least six girls in my group have been groped on the street. Whenever I start to feel comfortable walking home by myself, I learn fun facts like that and swear to never walk alone again.

My host mother shouted at the three-year-old that if she vomits again, she will kill her.

A neighbor of my two friends who live in Baobab (a district of Dakar) has told them she wants to drink their blood.

Me: My dad has orange skinny jeans and my mom has purple ones. My parents are so much cooler than me.

Alice: Clearly.

Alice: (talking about a sixteen-year-old wearing bright green pants and no shirt and standing in the middle of the VDN trying to direct traffic) It was like he was Jesus.

Marie Sophie has spent the last week blasting Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and singing along.

We were in a taxi with our African Cinema professor driving to a film screening at the Institut Français and Senegalese popstar Viviane Ndour’s “Waaw” came on the radio and we all started singing along to the chorus. The professor and the taxi driver were probably less than impressed. 

Watched a Nigerian movie in my African Cinema class. Apparently Nollywood (because having Hollywood and Bollywood already wasn’t enough) puts out 1,800 movies a year. The one we saw had about five murders, five rapes, ten sex with prostitute scenes, and one backstreet abortion. Our professor told us afterwards that it was the most ‘tolerable’ Nollywood film he could find. 

Alice’s host family installed solar panels in their house. Now they will always have power. 

My host father was holding 150 10,000 CFA notes in his hands in the car on the way to school last week.That’s the equivalent of $75,000. $75,000 in $20 bills. 

The three-year-old is learning English. She likes to interview herself: “What’s your name? I’m fine.”

Every day for a week, my host father bought ten loaves of bread at the boulangerie down the road for the group of women and children who sit on the side of the street. Then he stopped.

My host aunt and two of her children spent the weekend at my house. My host mother referred to me in conversation with her sister (sister-in-law?, other random relative they kids just call ‘aunt’?) several times as the ‘tubab’. That’s the first time anyone in my family has used that word. She was speaking Wolof, so I don’t think she thought I understood. But when you barely know a language, the few words you recognize tend to stick out.

I always thought the commercialization of holidays was an American thing, but my host family bought an Easter cake and Easter eggs even though they’re Muslim. They also love to look at Christmas lights. And buy Christmas presents. 

Sunday morning, Marie Sophie and I were told to carry a crate of juice and a large box of rice as a gift to a neighbor who celebrates Easter. I love random acts of kindness, Senegal style.

Over breakfast on Sunday, we watched ‘Holy Week: The Cartoon Musical’. When I left, Pontius Pilate was singing in French.

Earplugs are officially the greatest invention of life. There were five kids in the house under the age of twelve all weekend. They were loud. There was also unexplained construction Monday morning, and my host parents had an argument Monday night. My JP (junior paper) was due Tuesday. I spent the entire three-day weekend editing it in my room. If I hadn’t had earplugs, I would have gone mad.

Saint-Louis

Saint-Louis was Senegal’s capital for centuries during colonization. It’s in the north of the country, four hours from Dakar, just below the border with Mauritanea. The twenty WARCers road tripped here for the weekend, our last group excursion before flying home. But there’s still four weeks until we get to that. 

Our hotel in Saint-Louis is in the old town, an island five blocks wide connected to the mainland and the rest of the city by bridge. The hotel was once barracks for French troops. It’s very old colonial, with a grand wooden staircase and shutters opening onto shabby back streets. I feel a bit as if I’ve stepped into Pirates of the Caribbean. The whole old section of town remindeds me of the British Virgin Islands, with all the concrete houses in pastels with wooden shutters and second-storey balconies. But instead of the vibrant blues and pinks of the Caribbean, the housepaint here is peeling or smudged black or entirely worn off. 

Saint-Louis is far past its prime. Our hotel must once have been beautiful, but now there are cracks in the walls and paint drips on the moulding and exposed patches of concrete in the stairwell. The city may be more picturesque than Dakar, but the dulled colors of once vibrant buildings just make me feel sad. 

Yesterday we took horse-drawn carriages through town, the sides of our seats painted with ads for restaurants and discotheques. We embraced our inner tourists (three months in Senegal and we still little more than tourists), snapping pictures of boabab trees growing up through house walls and a mother shielding her daughter’s face from the tubabs’ cameras and a seaside market that stunk of urine and salted fish. And as we rode around I started wondering how much the average Senegalese’s life has bettered since independence. Not much, it would seem. 

Today we visited a bird reserve, traveling by boat through of river flocked with thousands of pelicans. On the way to the reserve, our bus pulled off the road so that we could wander by foot into Mauritania. On the way back to Senegal, I stopped off in the one-room customs house to use the the bathroom and ended up drinking attaya (tea served in shot glasses) with the border guard. 

After a lazy afternoon of three naps and a philosophical debate, Alice and I snuck out for stealth crêpes (banana for me) for dinner while most of the others went out as a group. They might be at a discotheque dancing by now. I’m writing this post from a patisserie, where Alice and I are both drinking hot chocolate made with real milk, not powdered, and typing away on our Macs. I’ve missed this these past three months, missed being able to go out at night without being scared of the dark and of Dakar. I’ve missed walking across campus by lampost light to Nassau Street to grab hot chocolate from Small World before setting myself up to work in Chancellor Green. I would love to be back on campus.

I didn't realize that yesterday marked the end of my third full month in Dakar because I was too focused on the fact that as of tomorrow, it's only one month until I go home (and other anecdotes)

Attaya should always be drunk on the beach. You might not think you’d want to drink hot tea from shot glasses by the beach, but you do. Especially after you’ve been bodysurfing and need to get the tast of salt water out of your mouth. 

Great as beach attaya is, piña coladas would be better. I wonder where I could find a blender.

Made a Senegalese friend who works near WARC. Bumped into him Monday morning outside the egg man shack. Bumped into him there Tuesday morning, too; he mentioned he’d seen me walking by the previous afternoon as well. Dakar can be so small sometimes. 

Went to a concert at the Institut Francais with a 30-year-old grad student who’s in Dakar doing disertation research. I’ve missed being overwhelmed by brilliance in everyday conversation. 

For example: after knowing me for all of four days, Casey (the grad student) linked my compuslion to compare myself to others to my training in a comparative discipline. (I’m a Comparative Literature major.) I’ve known myself for nearly twenty-one years and have been a comp lit major for months now. Why did I never make the connection?

The lead singer of the Ugandan band playing at the Institute Francais wore a dark vest, a white Oxford, and khakis. Why do I feel a deep connection to everyone whose preppy dressing reminds me of home? I passed a guy at the university wearing white jeans, a white button-down, and a purple sweater. I wanted to run up and become his friend. 

Every time I saw a tubab my first few weeks here, I wanted to dash across the street and say ‘hi.’ Fortunately the urge had passed by the end of the first month, but still, I hate the idea that I would feel I had something in common with strangers simply because they and I were both white and in Dakar.

Chatted in Casey’s dorm before the concert. All his hallmates are Senegalese. His room held two beds, one mattress, and a closet. There was barely space to move. He guessed six guys normally piled in there to sleep. Never have I more appreciated living with a host family.

Someone is reading my blog from Iran. Senegal suspended diplomatic relations with Iran several weeks ago. I feel so subversive. And yes, Zach, so cool.

Booked an apartment for this summer in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Goodbye Sacre-Coeur 3.

My (real) dad sent me a picture of a fox in my backyard at home. Alice sent me a picture of a monkey on top of a store in Sacre-Coeur 3. Which location has more impressive animals: New Jersey or Dakar? 

This one’s for Liz: learned in my African lit class that the scientific term for cannibalism is anthropophagie. 

If I read Wikipedia instead of going to History of Islam in Senegal, I would learn just as much. 

My African Cinema professor spent much of one class explaining the works of Frantz Fanon. I’ve read both Peau Noir, Masques Blancs and Les Damnés de la Terre. I got the impression my professor had read neither. 

In African Cinema this past Monday we watched a Wolof-language adaptation of Der Besuch der Alten Dame, a play I read last year in German 102-5. Officially the weirdest cross-culteral experience of my life.

My Wolof professor has realized that by next week we’ll have had fifty hours of class, so he’s cancelling our last two weeks of classes because he thinks fifty hours is enough.

In Wolof, ‘rasta’ can be a verb meaning to have one’s hair done in dreadlocks. A hairdresser who rastas one’s hair is a ‘rastakat.’ Some days I think my Wolof professor just makes words up as he goes along.

Fun Wolof phrase of the day: Jëng uma. I am not circumcised. A guy in my class tried to say he hadn't learned anything yesterday and this came out by mistake. Whoops.

Second fun Wolof phrase of the day: Soo ko naanee, dangay màndi. If you drink that, you’ll be drunk.

Man ak sama yaay, nungi dem Saly.

My mom landed in Dakar’s Leopold Sedar Senghor airport Friday morning around 1:00 and left Wednesday morning a little after 5:00. In between, she and I spent a chaotic day in Dakar (visiting Universite Cheikh Anta Diop and Marche HLM and my host family in Sacre-Coeur 3 and the best patisserie in the city) followed by four idyllic days in Saly, a beach resort town one to three hours south of Dakar (depending on traffic) and apparently the top tourist destination in Africa.

The four days I spent in Saly were without doubt the best four days I’ve had since arriving in Senegal. There were hot stand-up showers and melon served at every meal and toilet paper dispensers in each bathroom. There was also an idyllic beach and waiters proffering glasses of fruit juice and flowers and grass and palm trees. So I could recline on a chaise lounge under an thatched umbrella and read or do crossword puzzles or listen to music or just lounge and wonder why in Dakar doing nothing was stressful when doing nothing in Saly, I felt at peace.

When I felt less lethargic, my mom and I would takes walks on the beach, passing multicolored pirogues anchored beside white, modern boats and donkeys bearing seaweed on carts across the sand. Or we would play ping pong or she would swim laps or once I even joined a group doing water aerobics. Evenings we would watch Sherlock (a BBC TV show with which I’ve recently become obsessed) and search for apartments in Paris. On evening I even took a bubble bath.

Food at the hotel Palm Beach was a further delight. Meals were buffet-style, which meant that I could have four or five vegetables and potatoes or pasta and maybe, if there was room left on my plate, a bit of fish, already deboned. Then I would have a (small) portion of both creme caramel and chocolate mousse after both lunch and dinner, as well as three types of melon. Breakfast included crepes and bacon and mango juice and hot chocolate with real milk.

Until two days before leaving for Saly, I had been unaware that my host family would also be spending the weekend there and would in fact be staying at the same hotel. Had I known, I probably would have booked a different hotel. But as it turned out, apart from yelling my name and waving frantically each time they saw me, the kids left my mom and I alone. Still, the way my mom tells it, I was the hotel’s visiting rock star. My mom bumped into a little girl while she was swimming laps and when she surfaced to apologize, the girl asked her if she was the mother of Megane.

We were also beloved of the hotel staff as the pet Americans, as all the other guests either lived in Senegal (although few were Senegalese) or flew in from France. So many came directly from France that people working at the hotel kept giving my mom and I prices for items in euros and we had to keep saying that we only had CFA. Many of the vacationers who seemed to live in Senegal permanently were of Libyan origin, we were told by a member of staff, which clarifies why my mom overheard two men talking about a friend of theirs who was ‘a leader in the resistance’.

The unadulturatedly fantastic time I spent in Saly forced me to realize that I’ve been in denial these past few months about my feelings for Dakar. I keep saying I’m doing ok here, that everything’s ok. I’m just going through life. I’m dealing. But facing every hour with the mentality that I’ll just get through it and be done with it and then it’ll be over is not being ok. Being ok is neutral. What I’m experiencing is negative. What I’m trying to say is that spending the long weekend in Saly forced me to realize that I do not like Dakar. I dislike Dakar. I don’t hate it here. I worried I did when I almost cried as my mom and I left the Palm Beach hotel, but I don’t. I’d just rather not be here. That’s all.