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!)