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.