Dakar is empty. I've seen Lexington Center more busy. It's the day before Maggal, the annual pilgrimage to Touba, which is an inland city and the religious center of the Mouride brotherhood. Muslims in Senegal affiliate themselves with a brotherhood, which is a practice particular to Senegal and not particularly supported by other Islamic leaders outside the state. The Mourides are one of the numerically large brotherhoods and they control much of the economy and politics of Senegal. The founder of the brotherhood was expelled from the country in the early 1900s and this day commemorates his return to Senegal. So, a couple million people voyage to Touba and pray together. However, there's only one autoroute between Dakar and Touba, and the drivers are always looking to make extra money by doing multiple trips so they speed, and there's almost always accidents. Also, even though Touba is a very wealthy city because the Mourides have put a lot of money into it, it has a poor septic system and weak infrastructure, so periodically during Maggal or during the rainy season there's a cholera outbreak in Senegal and it often starts in Touba. Some of the students on the other programs have chosen to participate in the pilgrimage - i just hope for them that it's not too physically taxing and that they don't get sick. Meanwhile, there are very few people working the boutiques and food stands on the street in Dakar and much of the public transportation has gone missing. Dave and I went to Ngor this weekend, which is a fishing community on the northern side of the Dakar peninsula. You can take pirogues on a short trip to an island just off shore, which is only inhabited by people working the hostels and tourist shops as well as a handful of free-minded artists. The island itself is beautiful - there's no roads, just paths between houses with stone walls and flowers. One side of the island, facing the bay, has sandy beaches, while the other side has taller cliffs an rocks which have been pounded by the waves into Dr Seuss-like shapes. Mantou would like to go back with me sometime to the mainland side, which I'm looking forward to. To get home, we walked through the residential part of the town, looking very conspicuous as the only toubabs there, but we didn't get lost and made it to the bus stop. We took the most rickety, creaky, held-together-with-string-and-spit minibus. Pretty much, they cram as many people as physically possible into each of these vans - usually about 20 or 25, and then 3 or 4 people cling to the top while hanging out the back door. It's only 100 FCFA or 150 FCFA for the trip - which is about 25 cents. But, despite the aging vehicles, Senegal has an awesomely efficient public transportation system and I am in no way complaining. I'm actually impressed. I've been having a number of political science-oriented conversations with my family, their friends, and others, and I've started to understand a bit more of the reasons why the Senegalese - and people of other nationalities - tend to be more politically aware than the average American. (Setting aside the notion that Americans don't need to be politically aware because they live so comfortably that they have very little stake in the outcomes of political arrangements and issues.) I asked one of my brother's friends if he had studied political science in university and he said no, he would have liked to, but he didn't have the means to continue his studies. However, he said that if one person learns an interesting tidbit regarding politics, he will share it with his friends (over attaya, for example) and they will discuss it, form their own opinions about it, and maybe pass it on. People say that the Senegalese love to talk politics and love to argue. I would say that that's partially true, and that most of the people I've met have open minds and are interested in accumulating more knowledge, particularly in areas in which they are not well-informed. For instance, one of my friend's brothers didn't know anything about MAssachusetts so he asked me a bit about its geography and its food. It seems to me that most Americans are more tempted to just throw up their hands and say that it's too complicated, they can't approach issue X, because they don't know enough already about it. Take the conflict in the Middle East, or Darfur. The graffiti in Senegal is something else - I saw some at Ngor scrawled on a concrete wall saying that President Wade, instead of spending the state budget on the APEs and other international trade agreements that put Senegal at a disadvantage, should put money towards building local factories and supplying agricultural materials. We would never see that in the States. They're kicking us off the internet, so that's all for now.

Ana sa jumbax?

"Ana sa jumbax?" is my new favorite phrase in Wolof.... it means "Where is your bellybutton?" I still can't ask for directions without hesitating, but at least I've got that important piece of information taken care of. Anyway. Good morning from a really hot day in Dakar. Apparently it's pretty unusual that the weather's been as warm as it has this week and there's talk of the local impact of climate change. Pretty much between 11 and 3 it's sweaty-sticky hot as soon as you step into the sun. Not too much news to share. Toubacouta was an interesting and informative four-day trip to the Petit Cote region with the entire MSID program. We had a chance to speak with a lot of locals including a representative of an artisan fishing organization, the (only) health clinic nurse (a man), the heads of the local government, a schoolteacher and his hundreds of students, women farmers, a women's organization, a youth association, and university students. We actually gained a lot of information that I wouldn't have otherwise known, but I still felt uncomfortable traveling in our big group. Not only is it hard to have a conversation of any depth with someone local when there's so many of us students that every moment of communication has to be highly orchestrated... but also the expectations, needs and approaches of many of the students on the program are divergent from my own. I don't know how to put this more precisely in this particular (open) forum, but sometimes I feel rather skeptical of the group and I'm trying not to. I guess it's something to work on, for myself, and not to be too frustrated by. Now we're back in class and learning Wolof rapid-pace which is nice, and I've warmed up to our Country Seminar which teaches us about the inner workings of Senegalese political systems and the threat of anti-feminist religion and so on. She's a very outspoken feminist, which is refreshing, to have a teacher who's that passionate and opinionated. This weekend will be around Dakar, probably including an evening game of ultimate frisbee at a friend's house. Mantou finally came back from the Casamance after being gone for almost two weeks, and she's doing well. I bought some fabric the other day and did some drawings of it and I'm having it made into a sundress. Can't wait. Also, Nicole and I are trying to find the right public transportation to get us to an artists' village in Yoff, a northern suburb of Dakar. There's supposed to be a couple dozen artists who just rent small studios up there and I think it would be interesting to get to meet them. We tried today but couldn't find the bus. Maybe next week. That's all for now, hope it's not too cold back in the States!

sunburns, chocolate, and development theory

Hi everyone ! A couple reassurances and answers: Yes, I’m eating fine. I’ve taken it upon myself to carry around snacks with me to munch on throughout the day like pumpkin seeds, halva, crackers, and chocolate. Mom, I broke into the chocolate bars that I had brought as gifts. There are so few people in my family that it didn’t make sense to give them so many gifts, and I don’t want to create expectations that future students should be as over-generous as that would have been.... plus Trader Joe’s chocolate is just so good. I’m still saving the truly excellent chocolate covered cherries for my second host family. There are 23 people in the MSID program and we all take classes together, but we break down into smaller groups for Wolof. Only MSID students take our classes because we have a really specific and rigid curriculum. Other study abroad programs permit students to direct-enroll in certain courses at UCAD (Universite Cheik Anta Diop) but we can’t do that. It’s okay, because it keeps our schedule nice and stable, even when the university’s on strike.

Joal-Fadiout is beautiful, and we had so much fun there this weekend. It was me, Dave, and the other two Macalester girls on our program. It’s about two and a half hours south of Dakar, but still north of the Gambia, and it’s Senghor’s home town so it’s a big tourist attraction. Apparently as he gained prestige and entered office, he put a lot of money into the town’s infrastructure.... it’s caused a lot of positive development there but it’s really just pork barrel politics, which is how most African politicians seem to operate. We took a sept-place down there, which is really just a station wagon with a fold-up third row of seats. It’s pretty cramped, but it’s only 2000 CFA, which is about $4.50, and it’s direct. We got dropped off in Joal and crossed a long wooden bridge over to the island called Fadiout. You could see the Milky Way and I saw a shooting star. Fadiout is a low, flat island who’s population is mostly Serer and they’re almost all Christian. We stayed in a campement (hostel) for $10 (5000 CFA) a night, which was a good deal because the beds had good mattresses, clean sheets, (partially) running water in the bathrooms, and breakfast included. Saturday we took a pirogue tour around the mangroves and sandbars near Fadiout, which was beautiful. It was so good to be on the water. We saw a couple different kinds of herons, pelicans, loons, small birds, and seagulls as well as carp and little flying fish. There were fishermen all over the place. We stopped at a sandbar for a picnic lunch with our guide, and it was just as the tide went out so we spent a few hours exploring the tidal flats for clams, conchs, crabs, hermit crabs, sand dollars, and lots of perfectly formed white shells. Our guide scraped up two fistfuls of clams and boiled them right there, so we had a little impromptu feast. The swimming was good too, but we all got really sunburned. Our guide was awesome, he was a young man who was really friendly and casual and spoke good French as well as Wolof and Serer.... he made us tea and explained everything to us without being aggressive or flirty. He also knew everyone on the island because he grew up there, and he took us to meet his mom and his sisters. That night we went to Josh’s house in Joal, who’s a year-long MSID student from the University of Minnesota who’s staying with a family there for the semester and teaching English. His family prepared us a dinner of hard-boiled eggs wrapped in fish patties and fried (sounds weird, but delicious), with potatoes and a spicy red onion sauce, with French bread. I don’t know what I’ll do back in the States when I don’t eat French bread with at least two meals every day. The next day we wandered around Joal, took a horse-drawn flatbed cart to a huge baobab tree that you can climb inside, had sandwiches, and caught a mini-bus back to Dakar. We also met this awesome old guy who’s an artist in Joal. He paints murals and fabric and does postcards with ink. I bought two postcards from him. He seemed very centered and joyful and was very excited to hear that Nicole and I are both artists too. We took pictures with him, which will be great to look back on. In the end, the transportation for the weekend ended up working out really well, which I think is pretty remarkable. Senegal has a great system to keep up with a mobile population, and it’s all pretty informal. Mantou’s gone until Thursday or so (there was a second death in the family, a niece who passed from complications of surgery in the Casamance, so I don’t know if she’s going to that funeral too) so we’re eating dinner at their brother’s house each night this week. Then this weekend MSID is taking us all on a four-day field trip to Toubacouta, down in the Sine-Saloum Delta. It’s supposed to be more lush than the rest of the country, I think, at least ecologically interesting. I’m strating to understand a little more spoken Wolof, and I’m hoping that one day I’ll make the jump into being able to speak it back. Cool people keep popping up at pretty unexpected moments. This morning I woke up and there was a guy in the kitchen chatting with Patrick. He asked what Emily and I were studying and we ended up debating strategies of economic and social development over our coffee. He was clear in saying that you can only develop a country if the people change their mentality and their “esprit” which doesn’t translate very well into English, but it means something like a mix of personality, willpower, and spirit. I also told him that I was studying the intersection of development and immigration, or conflict-related displacement, and he got very excited and said that that was a very important subject. People love to debate about immigration here because the younger generation is looking to either live in Dakar or sneak into Europe but that’s pretty much suicide (it’s like the boats from Haiti to the States) so it’s also looked down on. He also asked me if I was "metisse"(mixed heritage, part black) which I thought was interesting. I explained that my family doesn't come from Western Europe. I hope that he sticks around for a while so we can continue the conversation. There’s a chance that he’s staying with us for a couple days because Patrick was making up the extra bedroom last night. People in general here are not big on using names to introduce people, so a lot of times at the house people come and go and we talk with them but never learn who they are exactly. Which makes it a little harder to keep track of them when they come back. I’m sure I’ll be taking more photos at some point, especially of my family and my neighborhood, but for now I’m also counting on the fact that we’ll all share our photos. I know that everyone else got great photos of Joal so I’ll get my hands on those at one point or another. Ba beneen yoon! (Until next time!)

exploring the markets

Yesterday was probably the best day I've had so far in Dakar. I can't believe everything actually worked out. I feel so accomplished and even a little bit integrated. I didn't have class until 3, so Nicole and I decided to explore the market on our own. We met at the bakery in between our houses, where the sell the most buttery, delicious pastries I've ever had. I had never noticed before, but their security guard carries a short whip. Most security guards have billy clubs and the ones outside President Wade's son's house have M16s, but I'd never seen a whip before. I hope it's not for the talibes (little boys allegedly studying the Koran) who beg outside the shop. I got a really big pain au chocolat and we walked to the Marche HLM, the fabric market in the neighborhood next to ours. WE got there at 9 and most stores hadn't opened yet so we took a quick walk around and then sat with some goats until 10. We got up our courage and went into a boutique with dozens and dozens of batik fabrics hanging on the walls. We made friends with the two women there, one of whom is an international buyer who speaks English. She gave us her name and cell phone (she lives in Yoff, a suburb of Dakar) and said we should call her if we have any questions about traveling in Senegal. I chose a fabric that's blue and yellow/orange and off-white with a nice pattern, and paid $2 American per meter for it. I was surprised that it wasn't more expensive. I'm going to have it made into a dress by a local tailor, which is how most Senegalese have their clothes made. We then figured out which bus to take to downtown Dakar and hopped on. It was very slow as we sat in traffic in the Medina, one of the more poor neighborhoods. "It was nice to be on the bus, though, to be standing or sitting quietly crowded together with Senegalese passengers, taking it all in and looking out the window without feeling bad or ashamed or guilty. In contrast, it is AWFUL to travel with the whole MSID group on a chartered bus because you're really just 23 privileged (mostly) white Americans staring at people going about their daily lives, who are staring back at you. WE finally made it to Centreville (Downtown) and got off at Marche Sandaga, the biggest market in Dakar. I've never been to a place that was simultaneously so exhilarating and so overwhelming. IF you thought Manhattan was crazy, think again. It's dusty and sweaty and a taxi's about to run over your feet but there's nowhere to walk because there's a stand selling boxers in front of you and a boutique selling pointy shoes next to you and one person shoves a begging bowl in your face while a guy is grabbing your arm and telling you you're racist because you won't acknowledge is most recent marriage proposal and you want to stop and look but you can't because he'll keep talking to you. that's Sandaga. And it's great. We wandered around for a bit by ourselves and stopped at a bookshop stand where they literally just have books stacked on a little cart and they're all used copies. I made friends with the older man working the stand and bought Saint-Exupery's "Vol de Nuit" (night flight) and a book called "Le baobab fou" (the crazy boabab) by a Senegalese woman who writes under a male pseudonym. I was their first customer of the day. After a bit more exploring / being aggressively pursued by a guy who thought Nicole was beautiful, we stopped at a teeshirt shop. We made friends with an old guy who took us to his brother's shop across the street and then to a fabric gallery where two guys gave us a tour. In this one studio, they have a dozen guys on sewing machines making clothes. I asked if women do this kind of work too and then said no, women don't do commercial work. A sharply dressed friendly young guy then offered to take us on a tour of more of the artisans' studios in the market. This sounded a lot more awesome to us than just walking around and thinking about buying stuff, so we did. Every place we went, they welcomed us and told us to feel at home and look at whatever we want and we didn't have to buy anything. And it was all in French. We went to a shop where they sell wood carved sculptures and learned the significance of the features of each mask. They have a mask for each day of the week to hang up in your house. Thursday the figure wears a hat because that's the day you go out and celebrate a marriage. Sunday has legs and arms stretched out because it's the day of rest. Then we went back behind the boutiques, beyond some children playing on the path,past small homes jumbled together to the shop where 8 men or so were carving wood into sculptures by hand on the floor. We watched every stage of production and met a lot of teh artists then looked at some more art on display there. They had some of the 'families' of small animals, like turtles or elephants, lined up in size order. Sometimes they like to reverse the order of the children elephants so that the baby is closest to the mama. The guy I was talking to said that when the animals are lined up, it brings good luck to your house and your family. I settled on buying a small 'water carrier' woman while Nicole chose a larger, unfinished mask representing the 3 months of the rainy season (june, july, august). We bargained them down and spent about $15 American on mine and $35 on hers (20,000 CFA total in Senegalese money). WE found out also that they give 10 percent of their monthly profits to a home for handicapped children - who you see begging on the street in my neighborhood most days. After that, we went to a few shops where they make soda cans into art, then we hopped a taxi to WARC and I sat through 3 hours of microfinance class. Then I picked my way through puddles of raw sewage overflowing from the drain on my way home. Every day is full of contrasts here.

I haven't taken many photographs since I got here because I feel uncomfortable about what kind of impact my photos would have back home on supporting stereotypes about what "Africa" is and how people live here. At home we are so addicted to presentation and packaging, while here as in most of the world and in my personal preferences, functionality is more commonly valued over visual beauty. So I feel that by taking photos you only transmit the visual/material aspect of living here, while you can't capture the more intangible aspects like social interactions. It feels disrespectful, like a violation of people's dignity, to take photographs of their lives here, even if they give permission for me to do it. On the other hand, I'd like to capture a bit of what Dakar looks like to share with everyone back home.There's a choice that you're constantly making, about how much to reflect and absorb your experience here. But our program is so short and our time is so precious that I usually opt for LIVING MORE of the experience, rather than reflecting or recording it.

the beach is better in winter

Hi everyone! First of all, Patriots suck. Dave even got to watch the game at the residence of the Marines who guard the American embassy, and because of the time change it went on past 3 in the morning. Not worth it. Moving on. I had the most awesome weekend. On Saturday I took a boat out with some friends to this small island just off the coast of Dakar called Ile de la Madeleine. It's a low, flat island made of volcanic rock that's home to hundreds and hundreds of birds. Once you go around the main strip of land, there's a small cove that's probably one of the top ten most beautiful places I've ever been. It's surrounded by pillars of basalt that form a natural barrier from the Atlantic waves, and inside is a calm, deep pool that you can swim in. It's full of little fish and crabs and coral. We spent all afternoon there, then we took naps for a bit and went out dancing all night. It's a little weird to be taking classes in development here. I'm pretty well-covered in terms of my Senegalese history, because Iv'e already written some papers on it, so a lot of what we study is review for me. We haven't had many debates about the different perspectives and possible courses of development, which is what interests me, and the ones we have had are pretty mundane, like is globalization good or bad. I'm definitely not here for the classes. But Wolof and Microfinance are each really good. We don't have much homework, but a lot of writing assignments and a lot of class hours every week. I'm starting to shadow one of my friends, who's here on a Fulbright, as she interviews women involved in microfinance around Dakar. I'm really excited for it. Also, this weekend, Dave and I and another friend are thinking about taking a shuttle car down to this small fishing town on the coast south of here, just to explore. Apparently they have tours (by boat) of the mangroves there, and you can stay in a hostel on the island itself. In other news, I'm not sure what the situation will be with my host family in the next few days. Everything's fine on our end, but Mantou's cousin died in the Gambia suddenly of an illness, and she needs to go down for his funeral. I don't know if Patrick will go too, but if he does I imagine that they will find us a temporary host family. I don't think they'll let us stay on our own. We'll figure it out. I think it's time for class, so I'll talk to you later. Ciao!