Only in Senegal...

Monday, February 27

I wrote the last post anticipating being able to post it using the internet on my roof.  Unfortunately, that has decided to stop working.  Instead of re-writing what I wrote so that it's current, I'll just post again right now.

Elections were yesterday but it was kind of anti-climactic.  Out of the 14 candidates, it was narrowed down to 2.  Abdoulye Wade (the current president) and Macky Sall.  I think that there will be another round of elections in a couple of weeks to settle this once and for all (hopefully!).  It was really interesting last night listening to the radio though.  Starting around 6PM and going until at least 10:30 (when I went to bed), they have people reading off all of the votes for each candidate from each "bureau de vote".  It seems like a slightly unconventional way to go about it to me, but it works for them I guess!

It's been nice to have time off, for sure, but 4 days with no school and being confined to my neighborhood is a little much.  I did a lot of homework, so that's good! Yesterday I spent the day at Camille's.  She bought the kids Monopoly and we played for hours.  They had a good time.

I'm sorry I don't have more pictures to post!  I'll work on that for sure.

Saturday, February 25

I haven’t been writing in as much detail lately because life is pretty much school and home.  Sometimes we have 8 hours of class a day and it’s exhausting! The stuff we’re learning is generally really interesting, but I’ve just had no energy to relay that info these days.  But now it’s the weekend! Woohoo! Elections are tomorrow and they’ve pretty much got us on lockdown.  That, plus the cold I’ve recently developed, has pretty much sentenced me to a day inside my bedroom.  Earlier I met up with Camille and we went to get coffee and use the internet, but other than that, it’s been a pretty lazy day.  I’ve made several attempts at socializing, but my whole family is just sitting around, watching TV or cleaning or whatever.  It’s kind of boring around here, which is too bad.  I think someone said something about me helping cook dinner tonight though, so that’ll be cool.  Today, Mariama cooked the cebu jen for lunch and it was quite good!  Adja, my host mother, kept making sure everyone was saying how delicious it was and Mariama was very proud of herself. 

The political stuff is more of the same as far as I know.  I usually get most of my information from school, so I feel out of the loop over the weekend.  They watch the news a lot, but half of the time it’s in Wolof and the other half of the time it’s in French, so I really only pick up about a quarter of it haha.  I have one little story about the news though.  There’s one channel that will just show images and video of protesting or whatever with the song from Chariots of Fire playing over it.  No commentary, just the song.  It’s quite odd.  Camille and I were discussing it, wondering if that song is associated with something different than what we associate it with.  For us, it’s most of triumphant and positive, but here it’s not used very positively.  Later that night, the song came on again and one of my host brothers said, “c’est le chanson de tristesse!”  (the song of sadness).  So there was our answer!  Can you even imagine?  That song is so completely associated with something that is essentially the opposite of what an entire society of people associate the same song with.  It blows my mind.

Here’s another little anecdote.  The other day in Wolof class one of the guys that works at the center brought package slips for Sarah and Camille.  We found out that Sarah’s package had been at the post office for a couple of days and was at risk of being sent back soon.  It was full of presents for her host family and she’d been waiting for it for weeks.  The post office is downtown and there was supposed to be “a big march” that day (there’s a “big march” everyday though, so who knows).  Our wonderful Wolof teacher Abdou said that we could all go together during the class period to fetch the package, but we had to practice our Wolof with the taxi man.  It was so fun! A little adventure.  It was a good thing Abdou came with us too because picking up a package is a process! Not only do you have to pay to receive it, you have to have all the right kind of ID and everything.  It was nice to have a native Wolof speaker to lend a hand.  Wolof has been really fun to learn.  Our teacher is awesome (obviously), and I’ve always loved learning languages.  This semester our program decided to frontload our Wolof, which has been excellent, but it also means that we’re going to be done taking Wolof in a week or too.  It will be very nice have one less class, but, déggumaa wolof (I don’t understand Wolof).  Oh well! I’ll just have to do my best.

I’ll try to talk a bit about what we’ve been learning in some of our classes.  In Senegalese Art and Society the other day, we learned all about this ceremony called Ndoep.  It takes place only in a small sub community of the Wolof people called Lebu who are traditionally fisherman.  Ndoep is similar to the idea of an exorcism.  I’m going to do my best to explain this; it might sound a bit rambley, so bear with me.  Every individual has what’s called a rab.  A rab is essentially an invisible spirit and it can be positive or negative.  If you go out too late at night or to places you shouldn’t be, you can risk having a negative rab attack you (aka mental illness).  What we call mental illness can be caused by a rab attacking you, an evil curse, or an evil sorcerer turning into wind and then eating you (yeah…I’m not sure about that one either…remember, this is being taught to me in French, so I’m doing my best here).  If the medicine man diagnoses the source of the mental illness as a rab attack, Ndoep takes place.  The whole community is informed and preparations take place.  There are a lot of details I missed here, but either a cow or a goat is chosen for sacrifice (depending on what the rab demands…not really sure who’s talking to the rab, but I’m not going to start getting picky with specifics).  During the ceremony, somehow or another, the spirit in the person leaves and goes into the sacrificial animal.  The animal is then killed and the sick person drinks it’s blood (I’m not even kidding, we watched a video of the ceremony…let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend the film, not in my top 10).  As if drinking the blood isn’t enough, the person is also bathed in it.  During the ceremony (I think it can last up to 8 days), there is tons of music and dancing.  Remember how I said every individual has a rab? Well, each rab takes a specific form I guess.  For example your rab could be a snake, or a lion, or a drunk person.  Anything really.  When all of the craziness and dancing and singing goes on, people fall into trances and take the form of their rab.  Even people that aren’t sick.  If the tam-tams (drums) play your specific rab’s “song” you can easily go into a trance.  Fascinating.  Once the ceremony is over, the sick person is required to return to a small room called an “autel” to pray and make offerings every week.  Now, not to doubt or question ancient tradition (well, maybe a little questioning), we had to ask the question, “what if it doesn’t work?”  The answer is, “it always works.”  It “always” works in the sense that if the sickness comes back or the person is not healed somehow, it is because they are doing something wrong and not making the right offerings.  I’ll leave it to you all to make your own opinions on whether or not it really works…Definitely interesting though!

Phew! I hope that made sense haha.  I was going to write up some stuff we learned in History of Islam too, but I think I’ll just let Ndoep sink in for a bit.  It’s been really cool to take these classes while living with a Muslim family.  I’m forming opinions I never knew I’d have.  Strong ones!  It’s good, but it can be hard not to judge sometimes too. 

Still safe!

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to say that I'm still safe.  There will be manifestations all the time all over the place until (and after?) the elections this weekend.  It's hard to get a clear answer to the question "what's going to happen?" still.  I talked to my host brother Mohammed who said that if Wade wins (which he will if he wants), the Senegalese people will storm the presidential palace and kill him.  That is in contrast with what my French teacher said, which is basically that the Senegalese are too peaceful a people for anything like that to happen and that Wade probably won't be president.  There's just a big question mark over this whole country.  We feel like there has to be a chance that they'd send us home, given that, worst case scenario, it ends up being like the Ivory Coast.  That being said, no one has really mentioned that sending us home would be an option.  So who knows?!

Life has been pretty busy here so I have lots to say!

When we have class the days are very long.  Some days we have class from 9-11, 11-1, then go home for lunch, then more class from 3-5, then from 5-7.  It’s a lot.  Luckily, there isn’t too much homework because I don’t know when I’d do it!

I’ll go ahead and cut right to the chase and talk about the manifestations and political stuff that’s happening.  The elections are this coming Sunday (the 26^th).  From what I know at this point, Wade has not stepped down, even though many important leaders have asked him to do so (the US included).  The Senegalese choose to combat this with manifesting and demonstrating all the time.  When asking the question, “what will happen if Wade wins?” I’ve heard a range of answers including: “oh that’s impossible, he’ll step down”, and “there will be civil war,” (don’t worry, I think the latter is a bit of an exaggeration).  Until tonight though, I haven’t actually seen any of this manifesting.  Tonight, my host sister Mariama took me up to the roof and pointed out some protesters.  They were maybe 4 blocks away, burning things and yelling.  It was quite a sight to see!  I took a couple of pictures, though they don’t quite capture the whole feeling of the situation.  Despite the fact that this is going on in my neighborhood now, I still feel safe, so don’t fret Mom!  My family is very protective and I’ll be just fine.  Since all of this is going on, I’ll do my best to keep updating this blog more frequently.

Here is my attempt at taking a picture of some of the manifestations going on by my house.  The tree is not on fine, but there is a fire going on the road right behind the tree.

On a completely different note, this weekend was awesome.  We took a little road trip north to the city of Saint Louis.  When the French first colonized Senegal, Saint Louis was the capital.  It is quite close to the boarder to Mauritania and is situated at the mouth of the Senegal River.  The drive was about 5 hours total.  We went with our Islam professor, Babacar Ba, and the assistant to one of our program coordinators, Aida.  About 3 hours into the drive, we had to stop because there were a bunch of students blocking the road.  I guess the professors have all been on strike for something like 10 weeks and the students are not too thrilled about it anymore.  We made the wise decision to pull off the road and try to go around the road block.  Surprise surprise, our giant, 12-passenger, 1-wheel drive van got stuck in the sand.  It is, after all, the desert.   After about a half an hour (the road block was already dispersed), a bunch of Senegalese students came to help us dig out.  It was quite the ordeal.  Pretty comical though.  We got to Saint Louis at around 2 PM and had lunch at a restaurant.  They had a long menu with lots of choices, but there ended up only being the choice between 3 traditional Senegalese meals.  It was pretty good.  After about two and a half hours at the restaurant, we had until 6 PM to rest and take it easy (that’s Senegal for ya!).  The hotel was very fancy.  It was right by the water, and, best of all, there was hot water in the shower!  Best showers of my life!  The guy from UPenn that was with our group for the first month, Ryan, had gone up to Saint Louis the weekend before because that’s where he’s spending the rest of his semester, so we were able to meet up with him for a little bit and walk around town.  I really enjoyed Saint Louis!  It had a sort of Caribbean/New Orleans feel to it (from what I know about New Orleans at least).  Lots of fishing boats and colorful houses.  It was nice.  In the evening we took a tour in horse drawn carriages (fully embracing our touristy selves) around the town.  We had a very engaging tour guide.  No pun intended…he kept asking which four of us would be his wives.  He was very funny.  We got back to the hotel and had dinner at another restaurant around 9 PM.  After that we were all completely beat, plus we had to get up at 7 for the next day’s activities!  Breakfast was wonderful.  Real baguettes and croissants and coffee.  REAL coffee!  There was also bissap and bouye jam.  Bissap is made from hibiscus flowers I believe.  We drink the juice a lot here and it’s very sweet, the jam was quite delicious.  Buiye is made out of baobab fruit.  We also drink bouye juice too.  I hope I’m able to find a way to bring some back to share with people in the US because it’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted! So good.  We took a drive through a wildlife reserve type area.  Imagine a safari, but without any zebras, giraffes, lions, and whatnot.  Replace those with the occasional warthog and one or two monkeys.  It was fun though.  Relaxing.  Within the big park we took a boat tour and saw TONS of birds.  It was fun!  I’ve never seen so many pelicans in my life!  After the tour we went back and had lunch at the same restaurant, then rested some more.  In the evening we went to “La Langue de Barbary” which turned out to be some sort of sand spit.  I’m unclear as to what body of water we were on, but I think it was where the ocean met the Senegal River.  We watched the sunset and it was beautiful! There was a ton of trash on the beach though, unfortunately that’s just something we’re getting used to.

More photos! (words to come soon!)

This weekend we took a trip to Saint Louis in the North part of Senegal.  It was very beautiful and I'll tell you all about it soon!  Here is Sarah, Hannah, and Rosa in front of the bridge

A "pirogue" (fishing boat)

Hannah standing on the balcony looking over the courtyard of our wonderful hotel!

The Mosque on the island of Saint Louis.  According to our tour guide, it's the only Mosque that uses a clock and bell to call for prayer rather than the typical praying through a speaker.

We took a very "toubab-y" tour of the island via horse drawn carriages.

 

We were told that this was an area of Saint Louis with lots of polygamy (and therefore lots of children running around).  The guide said that each antenna was for a TV so that the "other" wives could be occupied and not get jealous.

Hundreds of ducks in flight

Pelicans

All of those little black specks are pelicans! Tons of pelicans.  They are hunted by jackals

A little crocodile

The view from our WONDERFUL hotel in Saint Louis

Here is my blurry attempt at capturing Gamou on my camera. This was during the midnight meal time.