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.