june 4 (i think)

firstly, let me say that i hate senegalese keyboards. they took an american keyboard and randomly changed the positions of about a third of the letters. so about half my keystrokes are typos. pretty annoying.

secondly, i miss sarah a lot. okay. that's out of the way.

today i went to the sandaga market to buy a boubou (sp?). it's like a really long shirt with pockets (notice how i artfully avoid comparing it to a dress) and some loose fitting pants that you wear underneath. all this, including tailoring, cost me about USD$19. it was a pretty good price, by senegalese standards. it should be ready by friday.

my family has many members. it's bad luck here to count people, so i won't, except to say that i always have someone to talk to when i'm at home. they are all friendly to an extent that is sadly unknown in the united states. they have accepted me readily as their son, and have sacrificed that i might have luxury.

i'd say most senegalese are quite friendly like this; it's deeply embedded in their culture. on the street, anyone will talk to anyone else. it seems there is no such thing as hate here.

other than that, i didn't really do much today. it takes a long time to walk through sandaga, especially for whites, who are immediately accosted by countless street vendors. also, the car rapide doesn't go exactly by our neighborhood on the way back, so we have to walk a little. more on the car rapide later, hopefully with a better keyboard.

june 5

today was a normal day. i woke up, went to class, came home, ate lunch (the big meal of the day) with my family, and then had a sort of siesta with my siblings before heading back to the baobab center for a meeting on the trip to diagan nyaw (sp?).

lunch is sitting around a bowl with spoons (i'm not sure if my family uses spoons out of deference to my american chauvinism or because they do so normally. tradition decrees eating with the right hand only.). it's always good. today was fish. the meat is always in the middle of the bowl, in a bed of rice or couscous; everyone then takes portions of the meat as he or she desires and mixes them with the rice to eat.

class for the past couple of days has been basic wolof, the official traditional language of senegal. the wolof lessons are about to yield to classes in french on senegalese literature, though, as well as (i think) a course on senegalese culture and its history.

tonight i'm eating dinner out with all the kids who came with me. i hope this isn't being impolite to my family, but we haven't seen each other in a long time. it'll be good to speak some english for a change.

June 8

This past weekend we went to two villages, Ndiaganao and Joal. In Diagan Naw, Dr. Fontenot and his wife got remarried in a traditional Senegalese ceremony. There was lots of drumming and dancing, and I learned how to make Senegalese tea, a process which, correctly done, can take up to three hours. It was fun.

The rainy season started that night, Saturday. The first rain of the year broke up the dancing, and now it looks like it will probably rain every day, in the early afternoon and evening. This should last until about October, according to people here. I guess it'll be good to experience both Senegals: dusty and muddy.

We spent the night in Ndiaganao.. by the way I probably butchered that spelling (pronounced djagan nyaw). This morning we went to Joal, the home village of poet and ex-president of Senegal, Leopold Sanghor. We read some poetry in front of his house and then came back here.

june 10

since not much is happening today, i'll explain a little bit about the car rapide:

the car rapide is a public transit system here in Dakar that i'm told has been replicated in some fashion in every third-world tropical country. it consists of a network of hollowed out full size vans with metal bars and padding for seating. unseated passengers can hold onto the bar which runs along the roof of the car. at maximum seated capacity, each car holds 25 people. of course, they are often filled to greater than capacity.

the car has two operators: the driver and the apprenti. the apprenti rides on the back of the car, holding on to a bar that is vertically welded into the always-open back doorway. passengers get on and off through this door. when the apprenti sees people waiting to be picked up, or when someone on the car tells him they need to disembark, he taps on the side of the car with a coin or ring. the driver then finds a place to pull over. once the new passengers are in and seated, the apprenti takes their fare. they pass it via the other passengers to the back of the car, and then their change (if any) is passed back to them the same way. everyone trusts each other throughout this process.

a car rapide has no glass in its windows. some of the nicer ones have mats that roll down to cover the gaping holes in the event of rain. most have floors made of plywood or 2x4's. through these the street can be seen underfoot. the apprenti and drivers work all day, following routes described by their union. they get (according to a local) about three or four hours of sleep every night. this does not include the time they spend napping in the back of the car while parked at the "station," a place downtown where columns of cars rapides await passengers. based on nothing but pure speculation of transit times, city size, and number of cars, i'd guess each car gets about a twenty minute break every four hours or so.

the thing which excites me the most about the car rapide system is the way in which they are maintained. when i got on a car rapide leaving the "station" for the first time, i was surprised to find that the driver roll-starts the car. for the automatic-transmission drivers out there, roll starting consists of taking off the parking break, putting the car in neutral, letting it coast for a while until it's going about 15-20 mph, and then putting it in first gear. this has the effect of starting the engine using the transmission, rather than with an electric starter. for this reason, the cars are always parked on a downhill incline at the station.

the reason the cars are roll-started is that they have no batteries. a battery costs perhaps 25,000 francs CFA here, which i'd guess to be roughly a week's wages for the driver of a car rapide. the system saves money by just roll-starting all the cars. when they stop to get gas, they leave the engine on. it's a slightly unnerving experience to be sitting in an idling car rapide while the apprenti is filling it up. i think the calculated risk of pumping gas into a car that is running is less than other risks people here take every day: crossing the street, for example, or drinking the water. one learns to trust in Allah's benevolence.

june 15

this weekend was quite an anticultural experience. we (the mercer group, with the exception of dr. harshbarger) went to toubab diallo (sp?), a resort village which was very much unlike anything truly senegalese. it was quite european/american, in the sense that it was not overcrowded, it was quiet, it had a beautiful stretch of unpolluted beach, and it was devoid of beggars. it almost felt lonely.

while it was nice to have a break from the noise of dakar, the resort made me feel vaguely wasteful and unappreciative. i was actually glad to get back to my family this afternoon. i missed them. the trip was fun; there were really awesome waves and great rocky outcrops, but it was a bit weird to be experiencing the life of a wealthy first-world citizen in the midst of poverty and strife. it's an uncomfortable feeling.

so now we're back in dakar, and in a week we'll be coming home. there are those of us here who would like very much to stay, and i can't say i don't love the culture here. there is so much that the people of the united states (myself included of course) could learn from the senegalese. i hope that, upon my return, i'll help to share the teranga (hospitality), good-will, and universal love that these people display so easily. but paradoxically, it will be nice to exploit once more the luxuries that we americans take for granted, like the electricity it costs to heat a warm bath, or the knowledge that most of the people around you have easy access to an extensive and superior healthcare system. and i'll be happy of course to see a certain person for whom i've been longing for twenty long days :)