Postcards from Dakar: Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras in Dakar is a pretty big deal for Catholics, and even for Muslims sometimes. Little kids always have school parties where everyone dresses up, like Halloween. Katie and Patrish had a party at their house that night, which was a lot of fun. Their host mom was really into it and made a whole bunch of food in addition to all the food Katie and Patrish were planning to make, and told Katie that “il faut déguiser!” (Everyone has to wear a costume!) My family had told me this too, and they said that cross-dressing is a pretty standard Mardi Gras “déguise.” Moussouba told me about wearing her father’s suit once and Kiki was basically in stitches talking about fake breasts. With that in mind, I dressed up in some of Danny’s clothes to go to this party. Moussouba and Anita took one look at me, though, said I looked ridiculous and that they were going to put me in something nice. They gave me the outfit that Anita had worn to the wedding, which was a dark green pagne (wrap-around skirt) with a light green top and headscarf. The outfit is really gorgeous on its own and Anita looks fantastic in it. I was torn between feeling a little bit like Chiquita Banana, a little bit like a pretentious toubab who should just stick to her own clothing, and also a little bit pretty.

The party was a lot of fun. There weren’t too many people who had dressed up, but another girl from the MSU program, Alice, was forced to both cross-dress and go traditional by her family, so she was wearing an absolutely enormous man’s boubou. It was great. We looked awesome together. There was lots of food, lots of people, and lots of dancing, which are all the ingredients for a successful Senegalese shindig.

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Postcards from Dakar: Family Structure

So I’ve learned a little bit more about how my family is structured, though all that’s really done is raise more questions for me. Out of the blue, my host mom told me that my host dad is living in Casamance (southern Senegal) right now because he found some work there. I have a few suspicions that there might be a little bit more to the story than that, and that my host dad isn’t on great terms with the rest of the family at the moment, but I don’t know for sure and I certainly don’t feel comfortable prying into that.

Around the same time that I found out that this man does, in face, exist, someone brought out the photo albums from his and Mama’s wedding. As it turns out, they only got married in 2002, which is certainly after Kiki and Fatima were born. I already knew that Danny, Moussouba, and Anita came from my host dad’s first marriage, but now it appears that Kiki and Fatima are from another marriage as well, and that none of my five siblings actually share any blood. I have never heard anyone mention Danny, Moussouba, or Anita’s real mother, or Kiki and Fatima’s real father.

In addition to all that, I think there are other siblings that don’t live in the house. I know for sure that Kiki and Fatima have an older brother named Blaise who is living at the school in Thiès that Kiki dropped out of, and I think that I have been introduced to other people who have been called “big sister/brother” by the Danny-Moussouba-Anita set. I can’t know for sure because I have a tendency to immediately forget names and relationships when new people are introduced to me here, and the relationships are so complicated that it’s hard even for them to keep straight who’s an uncle and who’s a cousin and who’s a sister and who’s just a friend.

In illustration of that, I went to a wedding party last weekend with Danny, Moussouba, and Anita. The groom was somehow related to them on their dad’s side, but Moussouba had trouble deciding whether or not he was her uncle or her cousin. I think the verdict was that he was some sort of cousin, but that they all called him “Tonton,” or uncle. Okay, got it.

I was excited to go to a “real Senegalese wedding,” but in all honesty, it wasn’t the cultural experience of a lifetime. The actual ceremony had been the night before, which I’m pretty sure would have been, at least structurally, a pretty standard Catholic wedding. The party the next day was a chance for all the family and friends to get together, eat, hang out, and probably dance, but we left before the dancing started. We basically went, waited for the food to be ready, ate, digested a little, and left right before the dancing would have started because Moussouba thought the music was too loud. At least I got to see an absolutely gorgeous baby and some pretty spectacular traditional outfits.

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Postcards from Dakar: Trip to Lac Rose

I had an uneventful Thursday and Friday and then a group outing on Saturday that was pretty good. We piled on a bus and headed out of the city to Keur Moussa, which is a Catholic monastery. We got a tour of the grounds, where we saw lots of orchards and gardens, workshops where the monks make koras, (traditional African stringed instruments made from calabashes), and a brief glimpse of some crazy awesome blue bird that gave me Australia flashbacks. After that we went to mass, which was all in French and Wolof, but the music was nice and there was a very cool painting behind the altar in the sanctuary. After mass we were supposed to have lunch, but it wasn’t ready yet so we went on a little tour of an agricultural school associated with the monastery to kill some time (more orchards and gardens).

Lunch was totally worth the wait, though. I ate my very first pamplemousse (grapefruit), and it was quite tasty. Lunch itself was rice with meat, onion sauce, and baguettes, which is a very common meal here, second only to ceebujen, but this place did it up right. We were all stuffed and satisfied after eating all that, but then they brought us dessert, which is not something that usually happens at lunch. We had a kind of sorbet, which was really just frozen pineapple and ditkah juices, and some kind of chocolate oatmeal cookies that were probably made by Nabisco. It was great because one was really fresh and local and the other was really comforting and familiar, and both were delicious. I ate so much that afternoon that I skipped dinner that night.

We left Keur Moussa after lunch to go Lac Rose, or so we thought. We ended up making a pit stop at Le Village des Tortues, which means “Turtle Village” and which is basically a zoo for turtles and tortoises. None of us had any idea that we were going to be stopping there, and it was sort of bizarre to find yourself face to face with an enormous tortoise when you thought that you were going to be chilling at a pink lake, but it was pretty cool. The teeny tiny baby turtles were cute, and one of the big older ones (the oldest one? Maybe?) was hilariously named Bill Clinton.

After Le Village des Tortues, we finally made our way to Lac Rose. Lac Rose is a super-salty lake, and because of all the salt and minerals and probably algae in it, it looks pink in high sunlight. The water sort of feels sort of oily, or like lotion or something, because there’s so much stuff in it. We didn’t go swimming in it, but that is something people do. Because it’s so salty, you float without having to make any effort, like in the Dead Sea. Lac Rose is also an important place for salt mining, and we saw a few people with their boats and their piles of salt on the beach.

We didn’t stay for very long because Lac Rose attracts tourists, which in turn attracts pushy souvenir salesmen. It’s sort of off-putting to try and take in this cool natural phenomenon with a guy shoving cheap jewelry and sand paintings in your face, and Awa, Josephine, and Waly were like, “Get off the bus, take your pictures, and get back on.” Which was okay, because if you’re not going to go swimming or start haggling for souvenirs, there’s not much more to do at Lac Rose.

Our last stop was at these sand dunes on one side of the lake, where were took a bunch of pictures that made it look like we were stranded in the middle of a desert and where, if you’re willing to shell out some dough, you can take camel rides. After a little while there, we emptied out our shoes and headed back home. I was exhausted and spent the rest of the night at home, where I fell asleep on the couch watching the truly awful movie “Underworld: The rise of the Lycans.”

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Postcards from Dakar: What I’ve been up to

The last two weeks have probably been the best I’ve had since I’ve been here. I’ve been a lot busier, gotten out a lot more, seen a lot more, and done a lot more, which is great for me, but means that I haven’t had a lot of time to update my bog. My apologies, dear readers. I’m trying my best to catch up.

On Monday, I went to talk to Waly about finding something extra to fill my time, and he basically handed me an internship on a silver platter. I started doing some work for an online newspaper called pressafrik.com the next day and was joined by another WARC girl, Sara, on Wednesday. Essentially, pressafrik is supposed to be in both French and English, but they don’t have the staff or the English proficiency to maintain both sites. As a result, the French site is about 10 times bigger and better than the English site. Sara and I have basically been handed the English site and told to make it better by keeping it updated with articles taken from English-language news sources and by translating articles written by the pressafrik staff.

In all honesty, that’s not really what I’m looking for. Re-posting articles from other sources seems a little dubious to me on a few different levels, and translating, which could be a really useful skill to learn, is tedious and much more difficult than I would have thought it would be. It’s also done without any instruction or editorial review. I asked the editor if he wanted to read the articles over after I translated them, but he said that his English wasn’t good enough for him to be able to tell if they were well done or not and that I should just post them as soon as I’m finished. And maybe this is a two-way street, and my French isn’t good enough to tell whether or not the staff articles are well done, but I sort of feel like I’m doing a poor job of translating articles that aren’t particularly well written in the first place, so my name ends up attached to something that doesn’t quite smack of quality journalism. This has the potential of being a very short internship.

In addition to working at pressafrik, I got around with some friends and saw some things in and around Dakar. On Wednesday, my Islam class was cancelled, so I spent the afternoon with Katie, Jenna, and Hanna. We went to the Village des Arts, which is a sort of campus up near Yoff where a bunch of artists have their studios. We met a couple artists and spent time in the gallery, but things there were a little sleepier than we thought they would be, so we left and headed to where we knew we would find a good time: Les Almadies Casino.

Casino is the supermarket chain in the greater Dakar area, where the foreigners go to pay more for things that come wrapped in comforting layers of plastic and cardboard. Les Almadies is the northwestern-most part of the Cap Vert peninsula and the westernmost point of Africa as a whole. It’s also the most upscale neighborhood in Dakar, and the Casino is part of a mall that also contains Guess, Diesel, City Sports, and lots of white people.

We were there because at breakfast that morning, Katie and her roommate Patrish, both vegetarians who have basically been filling the protein vacuum with peanut butter, had polished off the jars of Skippy that Katie had brought from the US. Not satisfied to wait for a shipment from home, Katie was on a quest for a suitable Senegalese substitute. What she found was pâte d’arachides, which is not quite peanut butter but not that far from it either. It’s a darker color, not quite as thick and creamy, and not as sweet. It sort of tastes like its made with peanuts that have been roasted almost to burning. The people here use it to make peanut sauces and things like that. Spreading it on bread or fruit would never occur to them.

Katie was delighted to have found a suitable fix for her PB addiction, but as usually in Senegal, there had to be a complication to make everything just a little more interesting. In this case, the issue was that the smallest container of this pâte d’arachide was a 5 kilogram tub. That’s 11 pounds. It came in this white industrial bucket that looked like it could have contained spackle or paint or something you get at Home Depot, not Stop&Shop. That was sort of amusing, but the real issue is that it’s not really kosher to bring home a lot of food (or any food, really) unless you can share it with your whole family. Katie would of course offer it, but eating it daily is sort of a weird American thing that her family doesn’t participate in. Bringing home so much of something only Katie and Patrish would eat could easily be interpreted as a message that they weren’t being fed enough or that they didn’t like the food they were being given.

Not wanting to insult her host mom, but also not wanting to go another hour without her PB, Katie made the obvious choice: buy Tupperware, stand in the Almadies parking lot spooning industrial strength pâte d’arachide into the containers among the fancy cars and their fancy European drivers, and return home with a much more acceptable quantity of food from the outside world. Hanna thought her host mom would not freak out about the bucket, so she took the rest of it.

In addition to the peanut butter, we got ourselves some other essentials (Jenna got a pillow, which is apparently not a given in Senegal. She’s not the only one who was presented with a pillow-less bed), and then we caught a car rapide back down towards where we all live. So yes, I have at this point ridden on a car rapide. It is indeed thrilling. There are often holes in the floor, in case you want to see what’s going on on the road underneath you, and you sit very close to lots of strangers (like, on top of or underneath them). But it’s cheap and it’s quick and it feels like an “experience,” so I’d give it a positive review overall.

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Sara Mitra’s Bon Voyage: Neige, Montmartre, et Ballet

As I ascended to the top of la Tour Eiffel, I couldn’t see the view of Paris from the fogged up windows of the elevator. Where were those Parisian rooftops, the dome of the Panthéon, or the flowing Seine? Once the large group of tourists filed out of the elevator, the view outside was densely foggy and a wintery mix of slushy snow and rain rested on the steel beams of the Eiffel Tower. It was an ice queen that day, and so was I.

Being cold and wet, I was relieved to hear that we would be leaving the tower and going to an overpriced café to warm up. Our director Anne-Marie bought us all hot drinks and crêpes au chocolate! Who knew that Boston weather existed in Paris? Let me assure all you New Englanders that the weather is just as brutal here.

I took advantage of a clear sunny day this past Wednesday by walking around Montmartre with my friend Liz, an NYU student studying in Paris. The hill of Montmartre and Sacré Coeur are still my favorite places to visit. We walked up the hill and went to Chine Machine, a funky vintage store where I’ve found quite a few unique pieces, including a satin fuschia 1960s dress made in Poland. Later, we got some dessert at a cute little bakery, and my tarte au chocolate noire was more than blissful.

On Thursday evening, API took us to l’Opéra National Garnier pour le ballet des chorégraphes Lifar/ Petit/ Béjart. When I entered the opera house, I was mesmerized by the grandness of the building. My pictures will portray the wonderful architecture better than any description I could give.

C’était ma première fois que j’ai vu le ballet. There were three different ballet performances, and each section had a specific theme with coed dancers. The first performance was very traditional and the woman wore lovely white tutus, the next one reminded me of a Puritan love affair, and last was a modern interpretive dance. The latter was the only one I snuck a picture of, since photography was prohibited. Our box seats gave us a bird’s eye view of the dancing composition, and I was intrigued by the symmetry in the movements of the numerous shirtless male dancers surrounding the sole female dancer.

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Shelby Landeck: Finally Ready for My Trip Around the World

The trip I have been talking about for the past year is finally here. New Zealand.  27 hours of travel begin tomorrow morning at 4 a.m:

2 hour drive to Logan International air port in Boston, Mass,

6 hour flight to Los Angles, California,

7 hour layover in LA,

12 hour flight to Auckland, NZ.

3 hour bus trip to Routura, NZ (where our orientation will be held).

A lot of travel, but I have a feeling that spending four and a half months in one of the most beautiful places on earth will be worth the hassle…. photos and stories of adventure and mischief to follow.

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Sara Mitra’s Bon Voyage: Institut Catholique

Recently, API has informed us that we have to transfer to Institut Catholique, a private university that does not have striking and will grant us college credit. The grève at Paris VII has been highly disappointing and hindered our ability to start classes. Like most college students, I was initially very enthusiastic about not having classes, but now I am just frustrated.

From what I have seen it seems to be just as much of an inconvenience for the French students, who have started teaching their own classes, and some of the French professors think striking faculty is hardly progressive and have continued teaching classes. Unfortunately, I did not have any of these professors. In the past month, I attended three classes at Paris VII; the James Bond cinema class, a French writing class, and a French grammar class where the teacher only came for five minutes to tell us apologetically that she would not be teaching class.

For the record, I really tried to hold back from ranting on this subject (most evident in my last post being February 4). I have accepted that I have no other choice but to attend Catho, since attaining college credit for this semester is my highest priority.

I will start classes on February 23, and one of my classes is Les Médias en France. There were no journalism classes offered at Paris VII so I am excited to have this new opportunity. My program has also insisted that Catho is a much better school, describing it as the equivalent of Boston College in Paris. Since higher education is free in France, only those who are higher middle class attend private colleges.

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Postcards from Dakar: Stories About Animals

Animals are a reality in Dakar in a way that they certainly are not in American cities. In places like Boston and New York, the fauna is pretty much limited to pigeons and squirrels. My very first day in Dakar, I was woken up to the sounds of roosters crowing, and not long after that, I saw a man drive two dozen cattle down the street past the hotel where we were staying. I haven’t seen that since then, but on a daily basis I can definitely count on seeing horses, goats, and chickens, in addition to innumerable stray cats and dogs. Sometimes these animals clearly belong to a person, but sometimes, especially in the case of the cats, dogs, and goats, they just wander in the streets, eating trash.

I’ve come to understand just how pampered and spoiled American pet animals are. I realized several weeks ago that I had never really been in the presence of an ugly cat before. The cats that I have experienced at home have usually been selected to live among people expressly because they were almost painfully adorable, and they’ve always been well fed and cared for. Here, the cats fend for themselves and no one is taking pains to breed cute kittens to sell to suburban families, so the cats are all basically just . . . ugly.

City people here live a lot closer to their food than American city people do. Sometimes it feels sort of like a bunch of farmers got dropped off here and no one bothered to tell them that this was an urban center, where meat comes shrink-wrapped and labeled. There is a story that goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was an American exchange student living with a Senegalese family in Dakar. This family had a goat or a sheep that just sort of hung out behind the house. The student was surprised in the beginning, but got used to it, and maybe even came to think of it as a plaything or a pet. Then, one night at dinnertime when the student was eating with his/her family, the student realized that he/she hadn’t seen the goat at all that day. The student asked his/her family, “What happened to the goat, my lovely little pet goat?” The family members smile, laugh, and say, “It’s right here in front of you.”

I’ve heard this story, or variations of it, at least two or three times. It’s not a super common experience, but I guess it happens to about one kid a semester. This semester, it was Andrew, a guy on the MSID program that lives across the street from me. Thanks for taking that one for the team, buddy.

I have learned, however, that not every goat becomes food when it disappears. Not far from my house there’s a little hardware shop that always had a goat tied up outside it. I used to walk by it everyday on my way to and from school, and I would notice it all the time because it was always bleating. It was a very vocal goat. One day I didn’t hear the bleating as I approached, and sure enough, the goat was no longer there. Having heard the goat story several times by this point, I was sure that this goat was now chilling atop some rice and onion sauce on someone’s dinner table. I resigned myself to the fact that the goat was no longer going to be a presence in my life. Several days later, however, the goat was back! And it, or I should say, she had a little baby goat with her! It was adorable, and I’m pleased to say that the two of them have been there every day since then. Let’s hear it for the good, happy parts of the circle of life.

Even without the realization that you’re eating something that you used to feed and pet like a golden retriever, there can be some moments where the connection between what you’ve just learned and what you know you’ve been eating or will soon be eating are pretty shocking. For instance, I was waiting for someone one day across the street from a stall where a guy was setting up shop for the day. I watched as a taxi pulled up and another guy got out and started helping him set up. The second guy then went over, opened the trunk of the taxi, and started unloading pieces of butchered animal from the trunk onto the stall table. It appeared that a mat had been put down between the floor of the trunk and the raw meat, but that was as far as the “packaging” went. At no point did anyone wear gloves. Once all the animal parts had been taken out of his taxi, the driver left and the guys at the stall started butchering the meat into smaller pieces to get it ready for sale. I watched and laughed and tried really hard not to think about the fact that the meat I had eaten the night before could very likely have come out of the back of a taxi. Similarly, it only takes one trip to a market to realize that there is not a single space on the exterior of the fish that you eat that has not had a fly land on it.

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten chicken with my family, so I don’t really know the condition in which they would a purchase a chicken to cook for dinner, but I do know that if you’re looking for a live ‘un, you can certainly get it. My guess would be either that most Mamans and maids here know how to get a chicken from clucking to cooking themselves, or that you bring your live specimen to the neighborhood butcher to get it ready to go. Guys sell live chickens off of blankets on the side of the road as if they were shoes, and once or twice I’ve seen a dude strolling nonchalantly down the street with a wheelbarrow full of feathery squawking merchandise. I was on a bus in a traffic jam this weekend and after several minutes of looking out the window, completely spaced out, I realized that I was staring into the back seat of a station wagon that had probably about forty chickens in it. I averted my eyes so that I wouldn’t burst out laughing, but I averted them onto the roof of the car, where, as it turns it out, it’s a good place to put the other twenty or thirty chickens that won’t fit in your trunk. Just tie a net over them so you don’t leave a trail of McNuggets behind you, and you’re good to go. Awesome.

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Postcards from Dakar: Maids

Just a quick note about maids: lots of families here have them, or at least, lots of host families have them. In some families, the maid lives in the house and is there every day, all the time, and in others, the maid comes for the day and goes to her own home at night. The WARC staff told us that lots of live-in maids in particular are women from rural villages who have agreed to work for city families in exchange for food, shelter, and probably some money to send home.

It’s sort of hard for me to figure out what having a maid says about how well off a family is. In the US, if you have a live-in maid, you probably also have a mansion, 7 cars, and a yacht. Here, that is definitely not the case. My family does not have hot water, flushable toilets, a landline telephone, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, stereo, toaster, washer or dryer, refrigerator, microwave, computer, cable, or the Internet. They don’t have nice art or fancy furniture, but they do have a car, a food processor, a five bedroom house, and Tenny.

I don’t really know that much about Tenny (again, that name/spelling is just a guess). She understands some French but only speaks Wolof, so she and I have some trouble communicating. I don’t know where she comes from or where her family lives. My guess is that she’s in her mid-twenties and that she’s not married, or else she’d be living with her husband. She’s Muslim. She wasn’t hired until a week or so after I first arrived, and I suspect that the money my family gets from Wells in order to cover the expense of keeping me plays an important role in keeping her, too.

When we first got here, the WARC staff told us that many of us would likely be living in houses with maids, and that this has been a problem for some of their more socially sensitive students in the past, who have thought that the maids’ work package seemed awfully close to slave labor. They emphasized that no, the maids are not slaves and are free to go whenever they want, but that especially for rural girls, domestic service like this is a pretty good gig. I trust that they know what they’re talking about, and Tenny certainly isn’t abused here or anything, but there are aspects of the situation that make my sense of social justice tingle. Tenny puts in long hours, and although I think a lot of those hours are spent watching TV, the majority of them are spent cooking and cleaning, and there are none of those fancy modern appliances that make housework such a joy these days. My siblings can also be pretty liberal with the criticism sometimes, and have no qualms about telling Tenny that she’s stupid or disrespectful, and a terrible cook (though no one ever leaves any food uneaten and it all seems good to me). They also are perfectly comfortable changing the channel on the TV when Tenny is watching something, whereas they always ask me if I’m watching whatever is on, even if its all in Wolof and there’s no way I could be following what’s going on. I’ve also never seen her get paid, although that’s not necessarily a transaction that I would expect to happen right in front of me.

All that said, there are times when it seems like Tenny is part of the family like Fatima or Moussouba. She always eats with us, and she laughs and jokes with everyone much more often than she gets reprimanded for doing something wrong. The kids all do decent portion of the housework, too. Everyone will do some of their own laundry during the week as they have need, though someone comes every week or two to do the bulk of it at once. Everyone picks up after themselves, too. Mom, if the Sagna family lived in our house, the kitchen counter would always be spotless and there would never be socks or newspapers all over the den (the fact that no one reads the newspaper or wears socks might have something to do with this). Everyone knows how to cook, too, and Moussouba and Kiki sometimes help to make meals or just do the whole thing themselves. It’s true that my host mom is sort of imperious with Tenny, but she’s kind of like that with all the kids too.

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Postcards from Dakar: Keeping Clean

Senegal is a dusty country, and the Senegalese are engaged in a constant battle to keep the dust and the sand off of themselves and their stuff. Every morning, if the call to prayer isn’t enough to wake me up, I can count on the neighborhood housewives and maids to do the job with the sound of their sweeping. Everyone comes out in the morning and sweeps their front steps clean of the sand that’s accumulated there overnight. Sometimes they even sweep the street in front of their houses, which mystifies me. At least in my neighborhood, the streets are made of sand! It’s a nice effect though; all the streets look like well groomed ski trails in the morning. If the sound of the sweeping isn’t enough, there’s a guy who comes around in the mornings selling brooms, who shouts “Balaibalaibaliabalai” to alert people that he is, in fact, selling balais (brooms). You see broom guys all over the city, especially in the residential areas, selling either short brushes made of straw or full-sized plastic brooms in pan-African yellow, red, and green.

Washing the floors is a daily chore in my house. The maid, (whose name I don’t know how to pronounce or spell properly, but is something like Tenny or Tchenning), sweeps the floors every morning with a straw brush and then mops them with a rag. When I first got here, I thought that my family was just freakishly concerned with cleanliness, that my host mom had OCD or something and forced poor Tenny to do this tedious chore that can’t be good for her back, but after a few evenings of walking around the house barefoot, I see why (I also see why no one walks around barefoot). If the floors weren’t at least swept everyday, dunes would form in the corners of the rooms.

Aside from the floors, the other thing that I see people washing all the time is their car. I walk back from school at around the same time that the daytime taxi drivers are done with their shifts. The taxis will be parked on the sides of the roads getting their daily scrub down, either from the driver or from a young kid that the driver probably tossed some change to. Kiki, too, will wash the family car fairly often (it doesn’t get driven around as much as a taxi, so it doesn’t get dirty enough to merit daily washing), and if you’re just walking around the neighborhood, you will inevitably see someone with a bucket and a rag. Because I don’t know anything about cars, I don’t know if the dust is damaging to the cars and therefore needs to be washed off, or if the people here just like to have really shiny clean cars. Neither one would be surprising to me.

The next thing that it is important to keep clean in Senegal is your self. Actually, this is probably the most important thing, but since the bulk of this task is done in private, it’s less obvious that everyone is doing it. At our orientation, the staff told us that we MUST take AT LEAST one shower every day, or our families would be totally grossed out and horrified. Problems had arisen in the past with students who were spacing their showers out over several days because they couldn’t stand washing with cold water, and their families complained about their bad hygiene.

Showering was something that was sort of a question mark before I got here. We were told that we would have access to a shower everyday, but I was concerned that using that much water would be an expensive burden for my family, or that it wouldn’t even really be available at all. This is Africa after all, it’s mostly poor and desert-y. At least in Dakar, though, water is not a big problem, as far as I can tell. Everyone’s very careful not to waste much water, but the tap always works, and if something needs to be washed or rinsed or boiled, go for it. I have seen news reports on TV of villages and cities a little deeper into the bush that have water shortages (Touba in particular is notorious for water shortages), but in Dakar, everything seems to be in decent shape.

What you certainly don’t get is hot water out of a tap. The last time I had hot tap water was in the hotel the very first night I got here. At home, if you want hot water, you have to heat it on the propane tank. The first few weeks that I was here, someone in my family would heat water for me and then pour it into a bucket for me to wash with. I would stand in the bathtub in the bathroom and wash by pouring water from the bucket over myself with a cup. This was okay, and having hot, or at least warm, water was certainly nice, but it was really hard for me to wash my hair well like that, so I’ve since switched to showering with the cold shower head. It’s certainly bracing in the chilly mornings, but you get used to it.

You definitely understand why people here wash sometimes even two or three times a day. The dust that gets on the floors and the cars gets on you too, in addition to all the pollution in the air and whatever sweat you produce when it gets warm in the afternoons. When it gets to be really hot here all the time, it’s going to be pretty gross. At least then a cold shower will feel really good.

In addition to daily full-body washing, you’ll often see people washing their hands, head, and feet in the middle of the street in the middle of the day. Just about every market stall or cart or shop will have what looks like a plastic teakettle stashed in a corner somewhere, which people use for more targeted washing throughout the day. I think being clean, and having clean feet in particular, is very important before you pray. You’ll see people washing with the teakettles in big groups all at the same time, and there are often tiled benches with spigots outside of mosques where people wash their feet before they go in to pray.

In the US, we have a different soap for every task, but in Senegal, soap is marketed by how many different things it can be used for. Dishes, laundry, and body, all in one? Great!

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