moving forward

So this is it, my last day in Dakar. I packed up my things last night, bought phone credit, changed my absurdly large bills from the ATM into smaller change, and repaired my worn-down sandals. My stuff is all ready to go, but I don't know if my head is yet. Tomorrow morning, I leave WARC with two-thirds of the other students to be dropped off at our internship sites. The students who are interning in the northern "Grand Cote" region of the country left today, headed toward Saint-Louis. The rest of us leave tomorrow to go south, down the Petit Cote, toward Toubacouta where we spent our four-day field trip earlier in the semester. We'll drop some students off near Fatick on the way down, and then we'll spend the night at a youth hostel in Toubacouta. On Thursday morning, we'll drop Dave off at his village so that he can start working with the National Park Service to preserve the delicate mangrove ecosystem of the Sine-Saloum Delta. From there, we'll head north-east through Kaolack, dropping off Nicole, who will be working with an organization trying to get kids off the streets. I'm the farthest out in that direction, in Touba, the religious center of the Mouride brotherhood of Islam, where I'll be working with Senegalese emigrants and their families. There was an interesting article in the New York Times on March 17 about the role of remittances in development (thanks Mom), which is pretty much exactly the kind of work I'll be doing with ASCODE (Association for Co-Development), the NGO who I'll be interning with. I'll have access to cyber cafes while I'm in Touba, but I don't know how often I'll be online.

I'm looking forward to the internship and I'm sure it will be incredible, but I'm also nervous that it may be a challenging and frustrating experience. I keep reminding myself that this is why I came, this is why I chose MSID in the first place, and that working with NGOs has been my focus and passion for the better part of three years now. I know that I was nervous coming to Dakar and this has been some of the best times of my life. I think the difference is knowing that there will be a more significant language barrier since most everyone in Touba only speaks Wolof and studies only at Koranic schools. Also, knowing that I will have less access to my support network, the other students, is challenging, although we can always call each other. Also, since I've been living with a Catholic family, I will need to learn a lot of the social etiquette in more observant Muslim families and society. There's a lot that I don't know. Dakar is pretty liberal, on the liberal-to-conservative social scale, while obviously countries that live under Islamic law have much more stringent social practices regarding women. I don't know where Touba falls in between the two. Can I wear knee-length skirts or do they have to be ankle-length? Can I walk around town by myself or is that too bold? How do I greet men who are so observant that they don't shake women's hands or meet their eyes, when every greeting I know starts with a handshake? Will anyone speak French? All of these concerns may prove to be unnecessary, but I want to keep them all - and more - in mind until I have it figured out. I've been talking with friends, and we've concluded that the highs will probably be higher and the lows will be lower than they've been in Dakar.

We've been out of school for a week and a half with vacation, and we had a great time with Dave's parents. We made a lot of memories this week, mostly awesome. The only challenges were negotiating with really hostile cab drivers, dealing with insistent merchants at the market, and
riding in the back of a mini-pickup truck for over an hour to a Catholic monastery only to sit through a long monotonous Palm Sunday service with little in the way of music or singing. Everyone put up really well with that one, but it wasn't what we were expecting. The highs, on the other hand, were great. We went up to Saint-Louis, which is a coastal city at the mouth of the river that demarcates Senegal's northern border. The historic portion of the city, which used to be the capital of all of French West Africa, is an island that measures a mile and a half long by half a mile wide. It was a fascinating piece of history, and not nearly as built-up or Europeanized as we had been told. Most of the buildings are crumbling because the Senegalese owners don't have the resources to keep them up. Much of the cement has a high percentage of salt, because there are salt flats nearby and people thought it made good cement. Now, with the humidity and the rainy seasons over the years, the salt inside the blocks has dissolved and it's all pretty precarious. They've banned heavy trucks on the island because the vibrations of the vehicles can cause the buildings to fall down. On the northern side there was some construction at one point and a man turned on a jackhammer. A few seconds later, a building nearby collapsed. People think this is a shame because the architecture there is French colonial, and therefore rather unique. The UN has designated the city as a historic site to be preserved, but even that choice has its ups and downs. First of all, of all the places, natural and man-made, in the world among which we have to choose to preserve, why are we preserving this old remannt of colonial domination and exploitation? As a memorial, a testimony, a warning? Or out of nostalgia? Let's hope not. And if the place is a memorial and it's meant to be kept up, where is the money coming from? The UN body charged with designation and presrvation of these historic sites doesn't have enough money to do it all themselves. Also, since the island has been designated as a historic site, prices have jacked up and many Senegalese residents have been forced to move off the island for economic reasons. So, all these preservation efforts will hopefully lead to more tourism and a thriving economy, but the trade-off is gentrification and local displacement. It's not a clear choice, with a right or wrong option.

Just off the island is a long thin peninsula that's been settled by a fishing community, where men launch their pirogues in the evening, pass the night fishing at sea, then come back the next day and ship their catch inland. The issue of biodiversity and species preservation on the coast of Senegal is paramount, for fishermen and conservationists alike, and a lot of effort has gone into imposing regulations. Yet while we were there, we looked offshore and saw a great big Korean ship. Apparently it had docked at Saint-Louis to hire 50 to 100 local fishermen to work on the boat, taking in big catches and possibly violating regulations. These East Asian and European boats come in, devastate the environment, and take it all back. Senegal sees very little profit from these excursions, and much in the way of a decrease on local fishermen's yields. Walking back to the main road, we saw a building housing a women's organization, funded by the Japanese government (another over-fisher). This humantarian effort, a pittance relative to what is being harvested and carted away offshore, seemed relatively lame and bitter. Tragic, even, if it's not too strong a word, like tossing crumbs.

The next day we went to the Djodj National Bird Park, which is apparently ranked the third-best bird park in the world. The park sees hundreds of different species of migrating birds, which travel across Africa and even down from Europe. Coming from the north, Saint-Louis is the first waterway, the first refuge, for birds crossing the Mediterranean and traveling across the Sahara. So it's a prime stopping point. We took a pirogue tour through some of the lagoons there, and saw tons of pelicans, little yellow weavers, cormorants, gulls, and other birds. We also saw a few crocodiles (one with a baby on its back), a four-foot-long monitor lizard (kind of like Komodo dragons), and some warthogs and wild boar. Apparently there wasn't much in the way of diversity or rare species, although we all thought it was still pretty great, because the park rangers had just changed the settings on a local dam to divert additional water into the park. What had happened was that the water level had decreased to less than a meter in most lagoons, which made it hard to launch pirogues for tourists. They added more water so that they could lead the tours. However, most of the birds that come to the park prefer low water so that they can wade and peck at the fish below, so when they raised the water level many of the birds moved on. Irony, that this decision promotes tourism but gives the tourists less to see.

I received a present the other day, a dress made by one of my tailor friends who works with Tida at their ready-to-wear seamstress shop. It's a simple dress, ankle-length with slits up each side to the knee, fitted, with a wide neck and sleeves. I like the cut, but it's made in the single weirdest fabric that I've seen in the markets here. If I could choose one fabric NOT to have clothing made out of, it's this one. The background is brown but the design is lime green, red, dark blue, and yellow. But it's growing on me, and it'll be great for Touba. While I was at the tailors' shop, this older woman came in with a bucket of ngalax, which is this traditional food that Catholic families serve to their Muslim neighbors for Easter. On Tabaski, a Muslim holiday, the families who are celebrating will slaughter goats or sheep and share the meat with their Christian neighbors. Easter is when those neighbors share back, with this ngalax, which is a cold soup of sorts made of liquid peanut butter mixed with bouille, which is a thick white juice made from the fruits of the baobab tree (monkey fruit, in English). This mix is actually delicious, when they add sugar, and they mix in small balls of millet couscous. It's an experience. We didn't do much that was special for Easter, except to serve chicken instead of beef (chicken is more expensive than either meat or fish here). I went dancing at a friend's house where they were really having a party, which was fun.

Mantou says hi to the family, and Patrick is getting nostalgic that I'm leaving. I think this is all the news I have for now and it's time for lunch, so I'm heading out. I don't know how much I'll be able to post in this second half of the program, so we'll see. Take care, much love!