We stopped for lunch at the home of the extended family of the director of WARC, who doubles as my African Lit professor. The meal was uneventful (monstrous platters of ceeb u jen (an alternate spelling of thieboudienne), force feeding) except for the cashew apples served as desert. The best description I can think of at present is an apple with the approximate consistency of a marshmallow (perhaps a better analogy will present itself later). Their flesh was inordinately difficult to chew, they released obscene quantities of juice that pooled on the floor below, and they left your mouth ridiculously dry.
After lunch we were herded outside where a circle of women and children were making music from dried and hollowed gourds and plastic water tanks and metal bowls and flip flops and shotgun shells. A woman would enter the circle alone, show off some moves, and select one of us to drag in as her dancing partner while everyone else stared and laughed and maybe applauded if the person was sufficiently embarrassing himself. Sitting, dreading being tugged out and knowing I inevitably would be was excruciating. Hearing afterwards that my hitherto unsuspected Senegalese dancing skills were the surprise gem of the day only made me feel worse.
Again on the road to Toubacouta, the bus passed a brush fire and the Senegalese fire department, which was extinguishing the fire by smacking it with branches. We did see a fire hose, but no water. We considered donating our bottled water to the cause but decided against it.
The fire had recently passed by our hotel, so there was a lovely smell of campfire in the air when we arrived and ashes in the pool. But we were given two-person bungalos with toilets that flushed without waiting for the tank to load and toilet paper kept in holders actually attached to the wall and plump pillows and I realized that all was pretty ideal and that our field trip to Toubacouta was basically a vacation.
The village of Toubacouta was a fascinating mix of thatched roofs and corrugated tin, occasionally in the same building. The neighboring village was practically identical but inhabited by a different ethnic group. That’s how it’s apparently done in rural Senegal. Different ethnicities live as neighbors but each in their own town. In Toubacouta we visited a middle school that crammed 700 students into seven concrete buildings, each one or two roomed. A sign outside the compound displayed the Japanese flag to signify that Japan had funded the school’s construction. The town’s medical clinic bore the Belgian flag. The one classroom we visited had notes from a lesson in basic trigonometry and some phrases in English about American rappers on the board.
We rode back to the hotel on the back of motorbikes driven by Senegalese men. I freaked out a bit about having to wrap my arms around the driver’s waist (there’s something about clutching a man on a motorcycle that screams “Sexually harass me!”) so Alice let me ride behind her. The ride was exhilarating, especially the (false) sense of authenticity that came from riding on the back of a motorbike driven by a Senegalese man, waving at the kids we passed as though they were my neighbors, too.
That night we drive on dirt roads through the bush in the dark to a traditional wrestling match. The arena was a dust patch, the spectators, locals and us. The wrestlers were twenty or so guys in their twenties wearing black speedos and loincloths and dousing themselves in water and juice before sprinkling dirt all over their bodies. When they fell, they looked like dying insects. The fights were brief, accompanies by drumming and singing and dancing from the spectators, in large part women with babies strapped to their backs. Before the final, six preteen boys (future wrestlers?) had a dance off that the crowed judged through cheers. We, the visitors, awarded the prize money (2,000 CFA) but I don’t think we provided it. We didn’t get back to the hotel until 1:00 am.
Friday morning there was Nesquick hot chocolate mix and real milk at breakfast. The baguettes in the village were also significant better (and significantly more French) than those in Dakar. After breakfast we toured a fishing and oystering village to see the economic opportunities afforded to rural women, although almost half of those working were men. (The same was later to happen when touring a streamside onion garden.) We then clambered in perogues (long brightly colored canoes with outboard engines) for a boat tour of the offshore mangroves. Being on the water for two hours was wonderful, with sing-alongs and four-foot lizard spottings and getting scraped by branches when the passage was thin.
In the afternoon class we had a music and dance class. We learned the drum rhythm traditionally played post-circumcision, so if any of you guys (girls need not apply, FGM probably has its own soundtrack) would like to get circumcised in the bush, I can provide the musical accompaniment to your recovery. We also learned that traditional Senegalese dancing seems to essentially involve bending over, sticking out your butt, and going crazy. Needless to say, we obliged. After class, we saw a monkey, which, we decided, was confirmation that we were in Africa. Because learning the proper drum beats to play for someone recovering from circumcision was not proof enough.
That evening we went to a spectacle in town with drumming and singing and dancing (yours truly featured in part, in my third dance performance in two days – two more are to come) and a fire eater and a man eating razor blades and pulling three-inch-long nails out of his nose and a man on stilts dressed strikingly similarly to member of the KKK. But what really held my gaze were the dust clouds that rose around the dancers’ bare feet.
That’s all for now folks. Coming soon: In part two, I am placed with a family that speaks only Wolof and left there for twenty-three hours.
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