It's raining, it's pouring

Yep! You heard it right folks!

I woke up this morning to the loudest thunder I've ever heard, a flash of lightning, and then it was like the sky opened up and let out months and months worth of rain.  I had the goofiest of smiles on my face.

The power was out and when I walked into the living room everyone was curled up on couches around a single candle stick listening to the radio.

My Wolof professor said that it never rains in March and that it rained today because Senegal is changing.  Wade is being washed away with the mud. (It sounded very poetic in French).

So I whipped out my raincoat, which until now has just been the joke taking up room in my closet, and us Northwesterners joyfully reminisced about rainier times in our life.

The sun is out again though.  I guess that's good, right?

Side note...

Macky Sall is the new president of Senegal! Yesterday was the second round of elections and Wade finally conceded after it was clear that he was going to lose.  So that's good.

Also, I saw Wade the other day! I was in a taxi on the way to the post office and he was just there, on top of a truck, surrounded by a bunch of people.  It was pretty crazy.

And here is the link for my pictures from The Gambia:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150764405303125.463381.704873124&type=1&l=277e2adccb

Smiling Coast

For spring break last week we went to The Gambia.  The Gambia is the weirdest place I’ve ever been to.  It was fun though! A day before we had planned on leaving, we discovered that we would need a visa to get into the Gambia.  We sort of panicked a bit, but then learned that you could just go down there and pay for a little pass to get across (basically a bribe).  Our awesome Continuity and Change professor happened to have a brother who drives a “sept place” (a taxi like form of transportation that fits 7 people), so he arranged to have a couple of sept places meet us at ACI to take us to the border.  There were a total of 10 of us, our group of 9 girls, and then our friend Nico who goes to Evergreen and has been doing an individual study abroad at ACI.  Getting to the boarder was very smooth, everything went as planned.  While we were figuring out all of the visa and passport stuff, our sept place drivers hooked us up with some Gambian taxi men to take us to Barra.  The weirdest thing off the bat was that we had to switch our mindset back to English.  Other weird things (weird now is relative to the “normal” that Senegal has become): there’s grass in some places, you are required to wear seatbelts in the front seat, there are sidewalks, their president has been in office for 17 years and they still love him (the elections are coming up from them and they already have posters us saying “Congratulations Mr. President, super weird).  Gambia is the smallest country on continental Africa.  It was colonized by the British and is only a tiny sliver of land surrounding the river.  There’s one traffic light in the entire country.  It’s in a town called “Traffic Light”. No joke.

                So after we paid the people at the border, we took the taxis to Barra where we would catch a ferry to the capital, Banjul, across the river.  From Banjul we’d take more taxis to Cape Point where we were staying.  Thank goodness we had super helpful taxi drivers to Barra because we got there right when the boat was leaving.  We had to wind our way through a market and then ran to catch the ferry.  Just a bunch of silly toubabs chasing a boat.  We probably looked pretty cool.  The boat was rough.  A bunch of us felt kind of sea sick.  We had just been on the road for 6 or 7 hours, it was super hot, we hadn’t had enough water or food.  Recipe for disaster.   One of our group members actually passed out.  Another puked off the side of the ferry.  We were kind of a mess.  When we got to Banjul we were able to find water and we took a little breather.  Cape Point turned out to be pretty touristy, but we didn’t mind so much.  We stayed in a really nice guest house that was a five minute walk from the river.  We had a kitchen and bathrooms with warm water!  It took us very little time to hop into our swim suits and into the water.

                I’m not sure if this is true of all of the Gambia or mostly because we were in such a touristy area, but everyone there is a “guide” of some sort.  They were all just so helpful.  Too helpful.  Too friendly.  Everywhere we walked we were greeted with, “where are you going?  I’m a guide.  How far are you going?”  It got old very quickly.  They did show us a restaurant for the first night.  Pretty much every other meal we made ourselves though, which was really fun.  Another thing that makes the Gambia super weird is that they have the (valid) reputation of a sex-trade that is essentially young male prostitutes and old toubab ladies.  Super creepy stuff.  We saw it a couple of times.  It was just kind of sad. 

                We spent most of our time in the Gambia at the beach.  We also visited a crocodile pool and a monkey park, which were both pretty cool.  One day we were walking around Cape Point and Bakau, looking at the market and getting a lay of the land.  We were joined by a band of children at one point and just started walking with them.  One of our “guides” (aka one of the guys that was following us) said that we were taking the kids to school.  Before we knew it, we were walking them into their one room school house and the teacher invited us to sit in on a little lesson.  It was pretty cool! One night we decided to go swimming super late and there were bio-luminescence in the water!  It was absolutely beautiful.  All in all, the Gambia was really fun.  I’m glad it worked out.  I wouldn’t necessarily go back, but it was definitely worth seeing it once!

Sokone

Now that it’s been nearly a month, maybe it’s time to update this old thing huh?

The weekend following Toubab Dialao we went to Sokone, a village about 5 hours south of Dakar.  We travelled there with our Continuity and Change professor, Moustapha Sall.  We arrived in Sokone in the late afternoon and were greeted with bissap juice.  We had cebu jenn for lunch followed by fresh fruit.   Senegal is called “the country of Teranga” which means hospitality.  This is definitely apparent in Dakar, but the teranga in the village was amplified.  Everyone was so warm and giving.  After lunch we went and visited a group of women who made pottery.  We even got to participate, which was fun!  The whole point of our trip to Sokone is that we are returning there next weekend to do individual “research” projects.  Our first trip out was so that we could get an idea of things we are interested in studying.  At first I was thinking about going to a school there for my individual project, but considering we’re going to be there on the weekend, I decided it might be more beneficial to do something else.  My friend Sarah and I have decided to work with and find out more about the women who do the pottery.  Even being there for that short amount of time, we could already pick up on some interesting social dynamics.  I think it will be really great.  After visiting the pottery ladies we went out to see where they’ve been doing some mangrove restoration.  The whole area down there is built around the mangroves, which is a very fascinating ecosystem.  That night, the entire village put on a “soiree culturelle” for us.  Everyone was circled around the drummers and the dancing was incredible.  At first it looked almost random and sporadic, but the more we watched the more evident it was that there are precise moves.  It was pretty amazing.  We danced too, which was slightly embarrassing because we were just this silly group of toubabs in the middle of the entire village, trying to find rhythm in the unfamiliar beats.  That being said, it was really fun. 

The next day we went out to see more mangroves.  One of the main sources of income in the area comes from oyster harvesting, which is interestingly enough exclusively the work of the women.  The oysters grow naturally on the roots and stems of the mangrove trees and the way that they are harvested is by cutting the roots off.  Obviously, this causes problems because it kills the trees.  The women have found a way to combat this problem.  They take a long stick and hang string from it into the water.  Now, the oysters grow on the strings instead of on the trees.  It’s really quite brilliant.  Another source of income in Sokone is the harvesting of mangrove honey.  They have hives located all throughout the trees.

After visiting the oysters and the bees, we took our little bus out to where we could take a pirogue tour of the mangroves.  It was very very hot out, so it was nice to rest a bit on the boat.  We arrived at our destination and walked for a while until we reached a little beach side restaurant where we would have cebu jenn for lunch again.  It’s a good thing that everyone likes cebu jenn!  Before lunch we hopped into some kayaks and kayaked through the mangroves.  It was incredible!  We were even able to jump out of the boats and swim for a bit.  The water was absurdly salty.  As soon as we were out of the water and dry, you could see the salt all over our bodies.  After lunch we went swimming again.  Apart from being salty, the water was the perfect refreshing temperature.  After our swim we walked back to the pirogue and took the boat to an interesting little island.  Not all of the details about the island are clear, but I’ll do my best.  At some point a long time ago (very specific, I know) this island was essentially built out of shells.  There are many different ethnic groups in Senegal and some of them, including Wolof, have a caste system of sorts.  The low working class in the Wolof ethnic group includes the “griots”.  Griots are musicians and are responsible for recounting stories and family histories.  A different ethnic group (I believe the Sereers, but I’m not entirely sure) wanted to use the griots for their storytelling and music abilities, but they also thought that the griots were terrible luck (I think? Sorry, this is the best I can do considering it was a month ago and in French…). Anyway, the Sereers would not allow griots to touch their land, so they were confined to very specific areas.  This superstition even extended to death, thus, griots were buried inside baobab trees instead of in the Sereer cemeteries.  All that is to say that on this strange little shell island, there was a baobab tree that was the ancient grave site of a griot.  So that was pretty neat.

We got back in the pirogue just as it was starting to get dark.  There’s a little island of mangrove trees where, at nightfall, all of the birds in the area go to sleep.  ALL of the birds!  It’s hard to explain how insane that was in words, and the pictures I took didn’t show anything.  But we took our little pirogue to go look at this small group of trees and it was incredible.  Many of the birds were hard to see because it was so dark, but the noises were unbelievable.   Dad (cough, wannabe-nature-boy, cough) you would’ve loved it so much!  My friend Maya took a video so hopefully I can get that from her so that I can share the bird noises.  It was way cool.

It was so long ago now I can’t even remember if anything cool or exciting happened in the week following Sokone.  Classes are good.  They’re just so long! It also doesn’t feel like real school because essentially the only homework we have is reading.  Unfortunately that is going to change drastically in a very short amount of time.  We have to write two papers and prepare for two presentations that all happen in the last week of being here.  It’s terribly unfortunate because somewhere along the line, ACI and Lewis and Clark mixed up their dates.  LC told us that our program ended the 21^st of April, which is the day after classes end.  ACI seemed to think we had another week after classes ended, which would have been set aside to give us time to do all of the work we need to do.  So essentially we were cheated out of the one week we had to work on all of the work that constitutes our grade for the semester.  On top of that, we have class basically from 9am to 7pm three days a week and we travel nearly every weekend.  There was just some terrible planning that went down.  Oh well! We can do it!!

My lovely parents will be here in two weeks and I can hardly wait! I’m really going to have to step up my game and not be afraid to speak French though.  It’ll be a good challenge.

More pictures!

It turns out there's a link you can use on facebook albums to share pictures even when people don't have facebook! I figured that would be easier because uploading photos takes quite some time.

So here's the link to my Senegal album!

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150640878083125.446844.704873124&type=3&l=4e92323253

I'll work on a new post soon because I've been a bit lame about it lately.

For now, enjoy the pictures!

Toubab Dialaw-Neex na!

This weekend we took a trip to a town called Toubab Dialaw.  Like most everything we do here, we didn’t really know what it was going to be like before we left.  Pretty much all we knew was that Toubab Dialaw was an artsy, touristy town an hour south of Dakar.  We went there with our Senegalese Art professor and Pape Samba (the guy that works for ACI that is sort of like the camp counselor that does everything).  We left Friday morning and rolled up to the shabby looking beach town early in the afternoon.  At first it didn’t look like anything special.  More dirt, garbage, stray dogs, and empty buildings.  Then we drove into the little hotel/community, called Espace Sobo Badé, where we were staying and it was like entering through a portal to another world.  All of the buildings are artfully designed with shells and rocks pressed into the walls and thatched roofs.  The best way we settled on describing it was that it is as if the hobbits and elves compromised and moved to the Caribbean.  After settling in a bit we went to have lunch.  It was without a doubt the best food I’ve had in Senegal so far.  Some type of delicious fish kabobs with rice and onion sauce and lime.  Did I mention that this whole place was on the top of a cliff looking over the ocean?  Yeah.  Amazing.  We had a couple of hours after lunch and in no time, we were on the beach.  The more time we spent there, the more we were able to start figuring out what the place was all about.  In order to fill you in, I have to start with a short history of Islam lesson…

                Over time, Muslims have divided themselves in multiple ways.  There are several different sects, a few different schools of thought, and hundreds of different brotherhoods.  The way people are divided has to do with how the Koran is interpreted and, in turn, how it is decided that the religion should be practiced.  From what I understand at this point in my studies, each brotherhood is headed by a Marabout, who is essentially very well-studied in the Koran.  One of the most popular brotherhoods in Senegal is known as the Murids (mouride in French).  It was started by Amadou Bamba in the late 1800s.  The Murids are known for being hard working, peaceful, and very faithful Muslims.  I’ll spare some details here, but a sub-group of the Murids was formed and became known as the Baye Fall.  I’m not entirely sure why the Baye Fall are a sub-group of the Murids, because from what I can tell, the two groups are completely different.  In contrast to the hard working Murids, the Baye Fall seem relatively lazy in life and in faith.  They’re “thing” is that they place full confidence in their Marabout, so they just live their lives.  They don’t even pray.  Before going to Toubab Dialaw, we’d only seen a few Baye Fall around.  They wear distinct clothes that are made out of a bunch of different types of fabric sewn together and they occasionally walk around Dakar collecting money for their Marabout and singing.  They don’t have the best reputation

                Well, it turns out that Toubab Dialaw is Baye Fall heaven.  And it turns out that Baye Fall are exactly what you picture when you think of “Rasta”.  In Dakar, they’re kind of weird, but at Toubab Dialaw, they are pretty freaking cool.  They just hang out all day playing music and doing art.  I’ve never been asked so many times in my life if I was feeling calm and tranquil during my stay.  Everything was chill.  They just wanted us to be happy and relaxed.  It was so weird because I just never wanted to leave.  The place was magical!  After the beach on Friday we went to do Batik, which is sort of like tie dying.  You paint wax over the cloth where you don’t want the dye and you can make really cool patterns (I’ll post pictures soon!).  After Batiking, we had a dance class and learned some traditional African dancing.  It was really fun!  Missa, if you’re reading this, I kept thinking of you this weekend! You would absolutely love it at this place (though I’m convinced that everyone would because it has magic powers).  If Missa isn’t reading this, Mom, can you tell her about it? Thanks!  The only complaint I had about Toubab Dialaw was that the mosquitoes were horrible.  Luckily we did have mosquito nets in our rooms, but they have their ways…I got over it pretty quick though when I was able to wake up early and go read on a terrace looking over the ocean.  Saturday morning, we finished up with our Batiking and then had a drum class! It was SO cool! I could’ve stayed there all day.  We learned a rhythm known as Syntay that “everyone in Africa will know”.  Sometimes people exaggerate, but who knows.  We were playing drums called Djembe.  After our drum class, we had the rest of the day free!  We went to the beach again, hung around, looked at some of the things being sold, met some cool people.  Ah! It was just so great there!!  We walked into the town a little bit, but it wasn’t anything too special.  As we were leaving to walk around town, a few of the guys that taught us the dance invited us to have attaaya (traditional Senegalese tea, but it’s really all about the process, I’ll have to explain it in another post because it’s pretty cool).  We should’ve gone to have attaaya right then and there, because we couldn’t find them when we got back.  Oh well!  Saturday night there was a concert playing.  It was a little mix between traditional music and contemporary music.  Pretty cool stuff!  There were a ton of white people there, but it wasn’t touristy in the sense that you’d normally think of a touristy spot.  For example, there was a group of French women who had been there for quite some time learning dance.  Toubab Dialaw is definitely all about art and relaxation.  Even the stray animals there were in excellent shape!  They looked healthy and happy.  More than once I saw dogs and cats lying next to each other.  I’m telling you, the place is paradise. 

                Now I’m back in Dakar (which I do love!).  Unfortunately our 50 hours of Wolof class is up on Tuesday, which also means our Wolof final is on Tuesday.  That is a terrible terrible thing.  After lunch today, we’re all meeting up to study.

Also, I skyped my dear mother this morning and got a surprise conversation with one of my best buds...