Postcards from Dakar: Being Muslim

Islam in Senegal is a lot different from the Islam in the Middle East and places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, so a lot of the things that Americans “know” about Islam don’t even apply here. Sometimes I’ll learn something that clarifies things that have confused me, but nearly as often, I will learn something that contradicts what I thought I already knew and which just leaves me more confused. So take this with a grain of salt. The chances that I don’t always know what I’m talking about are pretty good.

The Islam practiced in Senegal is a very particular brand. Most Americans now know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims (or at least know that there is a difference). Technically, Senegalese Muslims are Sunnis, but they are much more accurately described as Sufis. Sufism is a form of Islam that emphasizes mystical aspects and allows for the charismatic style of leadership exercised by the marabouts. African animism found common ground with Muslim mysticism, and as a result, Senegalese Islam is deeply infused and entwined with ancient practices and beliefs. My literature professor likes to say that Senegal is 95% Muslim, 5% Christian, and 100% animist. By way of illustration, he told us a story about an old man that he picked up on his way back Dakar after visiting his parent’s village. To show his gratitude for the ride, the old hitchhiker gave my professor the words to an incantation that would protect him from car accidents. Senegalese wrestling matches are also a good place to observe traditional practices in action. I watched some on TV once. Some of the wrestlers doused themselves in oil that had been blessed by their marabouts to ensure their victory.

Muslims here belong to brotherhoods. There are four major brotherhoods in Senegal, but the overwhelming majority of people belong to either the Mouridiya and the Tijaniya. The Tijaniya was founded by Moroccans a long time ago, but the Mouridiya was founded by a Senegalese, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, during the height of French colonialism in the 19th century. Its early history is closely tied in with the popular resistance against colonial rule. Today, the Mouridiya is the most important brotherhood in Senegal.

Cheikh Amadou Bamba and a devoted student of his, Cheikh Ibra “Lamp” Fall, are highly revered figures for Mourides. During his lifetime, there was only ever one photograph taken of Amadou Bamba, and it’s probably the most recognized image in Senegal. Towards the end of the 19th century, France was feeling threatened by how popular Bamba was getting, so they exiled him from Senegal. In 1907, they let him come back, and this event is celebrated every year by the Mourides by a huge pilgrimage to Touba, the seat of Mouride power.

This year, the pilgrimage, called the Magal, was on Valentine’s Day, and I already know that my biggest regret about my semester in Senegal will be that I didn’t go to Touba for the Magal. I had a few friends who went and who invited me to come with them, but I was overwhelmed at the idea of all the crowds and traffic jams. I then spent a monumentally boring weekend in an empty city, wishing I was in Touba with the rest of the world.

There are a lot of little things that let you know that you’re in a Muslim country. There’s a big mosque on just about every major road, and you’ll see the smaller minarets of neighborhood mosques poking up between the houses in the more residential areas. I am woken up before dawn when the muezzin starts calling everyone to the first prayer of the day. I think the prayer times are figured according to where the sun is in the sky, so they might change slightly every day. The first prayer, for instance, is a several minuets earlier now that it was when I first got here.

Sometimes people will go into the mosques for the prayers, but if there isn’t one handy or the person can’t stray too far from their job or their companions, they’ll pray wherever they are. You’ll see brightly colored teakettles next to every shop or market stall, which people use for ablutions before they pray. The demarcation of a sacred space is very important. Tening, our old maid, was Muslim, and I don’t think she had a prayer mat but would pray on her shawl, and once I even saw her use an empty rice sack.

Islam gets into everything here. Even the language is infused with it. The future tense in Wolof is pretty much just present tense with an “inshallah” (or “God willing”) attached to it, and people even toss it in when they’re speaking French. If you pay attention to a Wolof conversation, especially if it’s just getting started and there are lots of salutations to get through (salutations are very important in Senegal), you’ll hear “Alhamdoulilai” (or “Thanks be to God”) as the response to lots of questions. The car rapides have blessings written all over them. People walk around with chapelets, or rosary-like prayer beads, either wrapped around their hands or dangling loosely so they can flick through the beads as they whisper the prayers to themselves or say them in their heads.

Women wearing burkhas and Muslim headscarfs is rare. Wearing the scarf is definitely a personal choice and not a cultural norm in Senegal. Also, the women who do wear the scarf tend to choose scarves that are neon pink and/or covered in sequins.

Marabouts of any brotherhood are very powerful, and the head marabouts of each brotherhood, or caliphs, are enormously powerful and wealthy. The brotherhoods have control over the vast fields of peanuts, which is Senegal’s cash crop. People also pay their marabouts to pray for them. The marabouts are widely criticized (at least, among my Catholic family and my professors) for amassing such staggering individual wealth while huge numbers of their followers are experiencing economic hardships if not downright poverty.

When a caliph dies, his son becomes the next caliph. Because of this, certain surnames in Senegal carry a lot of weight. For the Tijanes, the caliph’s family is Sy, for the Mourides, it’s Mbacké. You see these names everywhere: on signs, shops, car rapides, t-shirts. If people can claim a connection to these families, they will. I’ve heard that there’s a lot of intermarriage in these families, and powerful marabouts can sometimes have dozens of wives (though technically you’re only allowed four, according to the Coran and Senegalese law).

Even though the Senegalese people are all very devoted to their religion of choice, Senegal is a religiously tolerant country. According to the Senegalese constitution, Senegal is a secular state. There’s no sharia law here, although some things have a Muslim flavor, such as the allowance for men to marry up to four wives and the option of unequal inheritances based on the sexes of one’s children. No political parties can be founded along religious lines (or ethnic ones, for that matter), and religious discrimination is also illegal. There is little friction between Catholics and Muslims and between the brotherhoods. The different religious groups like to make public signs of their solidarity. The different brotherhoods will send delegations on each other’s pilgrimages, and the Catholics will too. Muslims and Catholics are friends with each other, and intermarriage is not unheard of. Senegal’s discrimination problems fall more along the lines of gender, class, and sexuality (being gay is actually illegal here).

All that said, Islam is pretty bound up in Senegalese politics. It is impossible for anyone to get elected in Senegal without the support of the marabouts. The caliphs have the power to issue what’s called an ndigël, which is essentially a command. When people join the brotherhoods here, especially the Mourides, they take an oath of allegiance to their caliphs and swear to follow the commands. The leadership of the brotherhoods has been instrumental in some of Senegalese policy-making. For instance, the government of Senegal passed a law banning excision, or female genital mutilation, which is an important traditional practice among several ethnicities within Senegal. One of the caliphs objected to the law and it was suspended.

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Postcards from Dakar: Easter

This weekend I celebrated Easter with my host family. I started off Holy Week by forgetting that it was Palm Sunday and not realizing why my host mom seemed especially annoyed that I said I wasn’t going to Mass as opposed to any of the other times when I say I’m not going to Mass. Whoops.

On Good Friday, I participated in a Senegalese Catholic tradition that even Muslims look forward to, and that is ngalax. Ngalax is a really . . . interesting dish that Catholics make for Easter weekend in ridiculously enormous quantities and then distribute to everyone in their neighborhoods, even the Muslims. When I had class on Friday afternoon, all of us Americans with Catholic families were talking about how much ngalax was in our house and alerting those of with Muslim families that in all likelihood that’s what would be for dinner in their houses too.

Ngalax is kind of like soup, only it’s served cold. Its primary ingredients are bouye (called pain de singe in French, which is “monkey bread” in English. It’s the fruit from the baobab trees), pâte d’arachide (not peanut butter, but close), and mil (millet). On Thursday night, Moussouba and someone who I think is an aunt produced a couple huge sacks of pain de singe and put them in huge buckets of water to soak overnight. (Huge buckets, I’m telling you. We do laundry in these buckets. And there were three of them). Pain de singe has this weird Styrofoamy texture, and it dissolves in water, leaving behind a ton of big brown seeds, like beans, and a bunch of pink stringy stuff. In the morning, Moussouba and the Aunt sifted out all the seeds and strings and added sugar at least and maybe milk.

To the huge buckets of bouye they added proportionally huge globs of pâte d’arachide, which they mixed with their hands. They then poured it all through a sieve, several times, until it had a smooth, uniform consistency and was almost as thin as water. Because there was so much of it, this sieving step took hours. I had to go to class before they were finished, which bummed me out because I wanted to go delivering with them. Judging from the final product, the last step just involved stirring in ton of cooked millet. It looks like tomato soup with couscous in it, sort of.

What does it taste like? Well, everyone here LOVES it, and you could tell that Moussouba and the Aunt, even though it was a lot of work, really enjoyed making it. Just like it wouldn’t be Easter for me without some baklava and day-old Peeps, it wouldn’t be Easter here without ngalax.

So that was the thing that happened on Friday. On Saturday, everyone went to midnight Mass, but everyone left at a different time and went to a different church. We got very dressed up for this. Anita and Fatima both replaced their braids with long, straight weaves, and Effie even did me up in some braids. My sisters have been planning to me tresser for Easter for months now, and I was a little nervous to let them take another stab at beautifying me after the Moussouba-does-my-makeup incident. But all they had Effie do were short cornrows not even half way back from my forehead, with the rest loose, and I like it. Alhamdoulilah.

Anyway, we got all dressed up and then took pictures together, like it was prom instead of Easter, and then went to church. Mass got out at about 1 a.m., and then we said hello and Alleluia to a lot of people. We also did les bises a lot more often than usual, which is always sort of a problem for me. Les bises is the French cheek-kissing thing, which is a really common form of greeting in Senegal, particularly among Catholics in my experience. In addition to the fact that kissing strangers can be a little awkward for Americans in the first place, les bises are also dangerously unregulated in Senegal. You kiss people anywhere from zero to four times, and I also never know which way I’m supposed to go first. This means I often end up continuing to kiss people after they’ve finished kissing me, or pulling away before they’re done, or kissing parts of their face that I had no intention of kissing. I’m always so relieved to see a hand extended towards me, because I can usually be trusted not to look like an idiot shaking hands. Sometimes, however, I do get teased for my firm American grip.

After church we walked to Habibou’s house and had a snack of reheated meat and goat-foot soup, and after that we took a taxi to a community center in another neighborhood where there was a big dance party going on, which we stayed at until around 5 a.m. It would appear that in Senegal, spending the night partying with your friends at Easter is just as important as spending the day visiting with your family.

All in all, it was a very different Easter weekend than I would have had at home. I spent a lot of quality time with my host family and did new and different things, which was good, but I will be happy to be home for Easter next year. I missed the Anglican hymns and the baklava and the egg game and the jellybeans and the people a whole lot.

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Postcards from Dakar: Local Elections

March 22nd was local election day in Senegal. I don’t feel like I ever got complete answers to my questions about what was going on and how the elections worked, but I figured some things out. The elections were for positions like mayor and city council kind of people, I think. In presidential elections, you vote for candidates, but in local elections, you vote for parties/coalitions and get the whole ticket of which ever party wins. During the campaigning, posters went up on all the billboards and basically every stationary fixture with the names and faces of all the parties and some of what they were promising to do. There would be neighborhood rallies and something like parades, lead by pickup trucks full of people and speaker systems that would play music or shout things in Wolof that may have been encouragements to go vote, explanation of the party’s platform, or denunciations of the other parties. It was also very common to see posters defaced and political graffiti go up over night.

I asked all my voting-aged siblings if they were going to vote and if they did, who were they going to vote for, but they all said that they probably weren’t going to vote and didn’t know much about who was running and why. Danny said he might vote for the sake of voting against the President’s coalition, which was in the majority (of what, I don’t really know) and not really because he felt strongly about any of the other parties.

The weekend of the elections came, and we were all warned not to go out on Sunday because of the possibility of violent demonstrations. Also, no one in all of Senegal was allowed to travel between two cities that day because it could be potentially dangerous. Things don’t usually get out of hand during elections in Senegal, but as Danny said, “In Africa, you never know.”

Nothing bad happened, and as it turned out, my host mom, Anita, and Moussouba all voted! Why did they tell me they weren’t going to when they actually were? I would have liked to have gone with them. They were all proud of it too. They showed me their little fingers that had been dipped in bright pink into to show that they had voted, and told me “J’ai voté!” with big smiles on their faces. Well, good for them, I guess. Danny, who was the only one who had expressed the possibility of voting, hadn’t voted at all. He said he’d lost his voter ID card (which is a card that looks practically identical to the other ID card that everyone has to have here).

The results of the election were apparently a huge upset for the President, Abdoulaye Wade (who’s in his 80s), and the Sopi coalition in power. In Dakar and other big towns like Saint-Louis and Louga, an opposition party called Bennoo Siggil Senegaal got voted into power. People here are saying that that’s a good thing, because it means that there will be a more equitable sharing of power in the government now, and because it sends a message to the President that the Senegalese people aren’t pleased with how he’s handing things. It also reduced the chances that his son, Karim, will succeed him as president in 2012.

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Postcards from Dakar: New Clothes

I have new clothes. I few weeks ago I went shopping with Moussouba and Kiki and bought fabric to get clothes made. I got some wild African prints that I picked because I really liked the way they looked hanging on the walls of the fabric shop and not particularly because I thought I would look good clad in them from head to toe, which is probably something I will try to take into consideration next time.

The next week, I went with Moussouba to the atelier (workshop) where she works, which looks like it specializes in really fancy silk and bazin outfits (a rustling, shiny, almost papery fabric for more formal clothes), and not so much in the casual clothes I was looking for, but whatever. A guy named Ass (yeah) took my measurements, and Moussouba set me up with some catalogues of what looked like Senegalese wedding parties so that I could choose my modèles (styles). Most of the outfits were either too formal or completely ridiculous, so I gave a vague description of what I wanted and hoped for the best.

A few days later, I got what I had asked for: one dress, in a style that I would describe as “sack-like, but still cute,” and a two-piece outfit consisting of a tunic/shirt and a pagne, which is the African word for wrap-around skirt. I can’t even describe what the fabrics look like, except that the dress is mostly red and the outfit is mostly yellow, but they really need pictures to do them justices. I’ll try and get some up soon. I like them, but I think I will put a little more thought into it next time.

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Postcards from Dakar: Packages

When us WARC kids get sent packages, one of two things will happen. Either the package will be deemed worthy to be sent to Poste de Fann, the post office down the street from WARC, or it will need to stay at Colis Postaux, central post office for packages in Dakar. I have no idea what factor it is that determines where the packages go. At first I thought it was size, and that the small packages would go to Fann and the big ones would stay downtown, but now I’ve had big packages come to Fann and small ones go to Colis Postaux, so I have no idea.

Wait, brainwave. It depends on what kind of customs form you put on the package. If it’s the little green one, it goes to Fann. If it’s the big white one, it goes to Colis Postaux. Perhaps the world is a logical place after all.

If the package is at Fann, you get a yellow slip at WARC and just have to take a lovely stroll down the street in order to get your goodies from home. Poste de Fann can be a little nuts if you’re trying to do something like buy stamps, in which case you have to choose a window to wait at, determine if there is a line (which you think wouldn’t be that much of a challenge, but which oddly often is), and then stand in it assertively so that people don’t step ahead of you (usually this means keeping little to no space between you and the person in front of you. No one’s really big on “personal space” in Senegal). When you’re next, you then have the challenge of communicating with the person on the other side of the window. You know in some places with windows, like banks and movie theaters, there will be glass separating you and the teller, and a little device thingy in the glass at around mouth level that makes it so the teller can hear you and you can hear the teller? Yeah, that’s probably what they were going for at Poste de Fann, but they’re missing the little device things. There’s a small cluster of holes in the glass at about mouth level, but they’re not enough to facilitate communication. The teller is seated so that their mouth is closer to the hole where the letters and stamps and money are passed back and forth, so more often than not, you find yourself bending over to talk through there. It’s a good system.

If, however, you’re picking up a package, you get to go to the lovely window number eight, where for some reason, order prevails. The line is easy to find and place yourself in, and the window is a sliding glass door, so there’s a wide open space to talk through. You present your package slip, hand over a tax of 1000 francs, and receive your box of delights.

If you’re picking up your package from Colis Postaux, it’s a whole different story, beginning with the fact that your slip is white instead of yellow (I know, it’s insane). CP is a bus/taxi/car rapide ride away from WARC, in another neighborhood called Medina. Once at CP, retrieving your package is an exercise in Senegalese bureaucracy. You go to the package window and present your slip. The guy then picks through a pile of customs forms and finds the one that goes with your package. You leave the slip with the guy and take the customs form into the next room to the customs guy. The customs guy looks at the form, stamps it, and then sends you into the next room to the next guy, who stamps it and then sends you in to the next room, where another guy retrieves your package and puts it on a table. He, or you, then goes back and gets the last guy, who holds your customs form while the present guy slices the box open and rifles through all your stuff to make sure that there’s nothing dangerous or expensive in there. The guy with your customs form then tells you to stay there and wait for the other guy to tape your box up again. When he’s done doing that, you go back to one of the other rooms, leaving your package on that table in the last room, and get your customs form back. Then you go all the way back out to the main room and present your customs form back to the guy who gave it to you in the first place. He looks at it, gives it back to you, and then sends you to the window to your left to pay the taxes on it. If the guys who searched your package didn’t find anything expensive in it that they could get you to pay more for, you pay your 1000 francs and wait for the guy at this window to write out your receipt. You then return to the original window and present your customs form once more. The guy will then ask you for some ID, make you sign the back of the top sheet of your customs form, which he will rip off and keep, and then give you back the bottom three sheets of the customs form. Then he will go into the back room where your package is waiting on the table, bring it back, and finally relinquish custody of your package to you. At this point, you can scarcely believe that you actually have your package in your hands, and you flee the building in fear the someone is going to tell you that you need to get eight more stamps and see 14 other guys before you can enjoy the contents.

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Postcards from Dakar: The Beach

A few weeks ago, I finally got to the beach for the first time. As I was preparing to come here, I had heard from several sources that Senegal had great beaches, so I was really looking forward to some sand and sun. Unfortunately, all those great beaches that I heard so much about are not in Dakar. The Dakar coastline is mostly rocky cliffs, which means either no beach at all or beaches with pounding waves. This is good if you’re a surfer, but bad if you’re a swimmer. You’re not even allowed to go into the water on many beaches because the riptides are so strong. Also, some of the beaches are sort of unofficially designated as “work-out” beaches, meaning that they’re packed with guys lifting weights and doing crunches, which is not necessarily the kind of environment that a girl wants to put herself in if she’s clad only in a bikini and shades (or anything, really).

So, if you’re looking for sun and sand in the Dakar area, your best bet is to go up to Ile de Ngor. Ngor is a village sandwiched between the swanky Les Almadies and the traditional Yoff, and there’s an island just a short pirogue ride away. This island has a few small beaches and lots of resorts and houses belonging to rich people, including, I think, Akon. It kind of feels like the Nantucket of Dakar. But it’s only a dollar to get there, and if you cave in to the pressure of the guys working on the beach and pay for a mat-and-umbrella set up, its only another two dollars, so you can totally get the feeling of being at a resort without having to pay for it.

The beaches are really small compared to what I’m used to at Cape Cod and Rhode Island, and I’ve heard that they get really crowded and insane when it gets hotter, but in the middle of March, its still too cold for the locals to have any interest in swimming or sun bathing, so the only people there are the toubabs on vacation and the people trying to sell things to them. Men and women selling scarves, woodcarvings, and jewelry walk from mat to mat, greet you in French and English, and if you show anything even resembling interest, they’ll set up shop at the bottom of your mat and give you a full tour of their wares. I was there with Miranda and we spent probably half an hour talking to a woman selling jewelry. She told us what everything was made out of, and some of it was actually kind of pretty, so we bought things. I can’t remember what I paid, but I know that it was dirt cheap compared to what I would have paid in the states and exorbitantly expensive compared to what any Senegalese person would have been willing to pay.

The beach is lined with little kitchen shacks that sell food and drinks and have tables and chairs on the sand, so we had lunch there too. It was quite lovely. You can watch people fishing on the jetties, which is cool because you know that the seafood that you’re eating is as fresh as it could get. We also saw a guy bring in three huge marine creatures that were probably some variety of shark. That was interesting. No one seemed to be in any rush to bring these into a kitchen and cook them, so I don’t really know what happened to them. One minute, the guy who caught them was showing them off to all the vacationing French families, and the next minute they were gone.

That was a really nice day. I read, I napped, I swam, I got a tan in some places and angry red sunburns in others, and generally had a good time.

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Postcards from Dakar: My Birthday

Tuesday was my 21st birthday. I had tentatively planned to spend the day at the beach drinking cocktails in observance of that auspicious occasion, but through an unfortunate combination of circumstances (laziness the weeks before, horrible headache the night before), I had a lot of homework to get done for the next day and ended up spending the day at home working on a paper. That and laundry, which, when you have to do it all by hand, is no joke.

Usually the WARC staff buys a cake for people’s birthday and you just share it with whoever is there at the time that they bring it out for you, but since I didn’t have class that day, I wasn’t going to go to WARC. I got a call from Josephine at about 6:30 wishing me happy birthday and asking me why I hadn’t come in today. I told her I didn’t have class and I had things that I needed to do at home, and she said, “Oh, okay, see you tomorrow then.” About an hour later, she showed up at my house with cake. It was totally sweet.

I didn’t think my family was going to do anything for my birthday. I had gotten text messages from Moussouba and Habibou earlier in the day, Danny wrote on my Facebook wall, and Anita sang “Happy Birthday” to me in English when she got home from school (which is a big deal for her; she hates English), but Kiki’s birthday had gone by unobserved the Thursday before, so I wasn’t hoping for much more than that.

So I was surprised and delighted when Moussouba knocked on my door at about the same time she does every night when she gets home from work, and instead of the regular, “Bonsoir, comment tu vas,” all my siblings were at my door. They presented me with a big cake complete with candles that said “Joyeuse Anniversaire Kiersten et Kiki,” turned off the lights, and sang “Joyeuse Anniversaire” to me. It was great. I made a wish and blew out the candle, and then we all went and ate cake (before dinner) in the living room. Someone even went out to buy soda, which is something that only every happens for parties and special occasions (though when I’m at school or out and about, I’m practically hooked up to an IV of orange Fanta). We had a nice time eating cake together and taking pictures and talking. It didn’t turn out to be a totally lame 21st birthday after all.

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Postcards from Dakar: Making change, or how I got 30 bucks stolen by being an idiot

Making change in Senegal is a constant battle. When you go to the ATM and take out money, it comes in 5,000 and 10,000 CFA bills. Unfortunately, the most common expenses in Dakar are things like snacks and bus fares, so like 25 to 250 CFA. Presenting a 5000 to a guy in a boutique for your Biskrem cookies would be like walking up to a vending machine with a fifty-dollar bill. The guy won’t take your money because he won’t be able to make the change, which means no delicious Biskrem for you. This means that having 10,000 CFA (about $20) and having no money at all are often basically the same situation.

The easiest ways to break your “gros billets” are to go to places that actually have cash registers, like supermarkets, gas station convenience stores, and western-style restaurants. In the WARC environs, this means going to My Shop (a convenience store/pizza place), La Gondole (a chain restaurant that does burgers, pizza, paninis, crepes, etc), or a grocery store that we don’t know the actual name of but that we called the Toubab Shop (it caters to all the foreigners living in the Fann neighborhood, which is where half the foreign embassies in Dakar are located). These places are nice because that’s where we get all our comfort food, but they are way more expensive than any Senegalese establishment, meaning that breaking your big bills requires a bit of a spending spree. We’re always looking for better ways to get small change.

This obsession with change, coupled with a strategically parked taxi and my own incredible stupidity, lead to my loss of 15,000 CFA ($30).

I was sitting at My Shop by myself having a snack before I started walking home. A guy came and sat down at the table with me and started talking to me. He said he recognized me because he owned the boutique next to my house. His name was Ousman. He said he was at My Shop because he needed change. I started to actually participate in the conversation because needing change is something that I, too, can understand. As it turns out, he has the opposite problem with change. He gets all his money in little coins and bills but in order to pick up what he orders from the grande boutique, he needs to pay in big denominations. He told me that I should come by whenever I need change because he would make it for me, which, to me, the idiot, seemed like a very generous offer from one neighbor to another. I should have known, however, that that was totally bizarre. The idea that a boutique owner would be happy to be presented with large bills is completely laughable.

I got up to go back home, and he said he would come with me. For once, it didn’t bother me to have a companion, because he was nice enough, apparently knew my family, and hadn’t yet asked me any of the usual obnoxious questions. We were having a pleasant conversation about my family’s maids, who he knows because they would come into his boutique all the time. He said that Tening (who vanished about two weeks ago and has been replaced by Effie) went back to her village, which is somewhere near Thiès, but that she would be back. Then, he asked me if I had any big bills on me that I needed to get change for, and I was like, uh, yeah, actually. He was like, great, I’ll take them in here to the grande boutique because I need to pay for an order I put in and the guy here will make the change for me. He seemed really happy that I was going to help him make the change that he needed. He kept telling me that I was really nice and that he would give me some free phone credit because I was being so nice to him.

We got to the grand boutique, and he asked me how much I had one me. I had three 5,000s. He told me to stay here on the corner while I go inside with your money. I didn’t quite just hand the money over, and he didn’t quite just snatch it out of my hands, but somehow he ended up with my cash and I ended up waiting on the corner.

I stood on the corner for a few minutes thinking that there was no way he was going to come out of the boutique, but then he did and my faith was restored a little. He then spoke very very fast to me and I didn’t catch everything he said, but I understood that we needed to go to the bank and then go back. So we got in a taxi and went to the bank down the street, where he opened the door to the ATM and was said, “Go ahead.” I asked him what he wanted me to do, and he said, “Take out 100,000 francs.” I refused and said that I thought he was the one who had business here. He said that the guy at the grand boutique will only make change for 100,000 francs. If you give me that, I’ll go back with it and get the change for you. I said no, there was no way I was going to take that much money out (that’s $200 US), give me back the money I already gave you. He said that he had left it at the grand boutique, but that we could go back and get it. I’m not sure he was being entirely truthful about that because I could see a suspicious flash of green in the breast pocket of his shirt, but I said okay. We got back into the taxi and drove half way down the street before he said, “Or, I can just go back to the ATM, take out 15,000 francs and give it to you.” This was a totally stupid idea, but he had gotten the taxi driver to pull over in such a way that he could get out of the front seat, but I couldn’t open the door to the back seat without cracking it into another car. He hopped out of the taxi, told me to wait, and disappeared down the street, leaving me trapped and sure that my money had vanished with him.

When the car next to us finally moved, I got out and walked back down the street to the bank, but sure enough, Ousman was gone. I went back to the taxi to explain to the driver that the guy who had hired him was a thief and not coming back, but he didn’t understand French and my Wolof is totally inadequate for situations like that, so I abandoned him. I felt bad, but I was annoyed that I had just lost all the money and I was not going to pay for the taxi that was all but an accessory to the crime.

When I got home that day, I asked Danny if he knew of a guy named Ousman who worked in the boutique next to our house, and he said no. It then occurred to me that all of the things that he seemed to know about my family I either supplied to him, like the names of the maids, or I didn’t know and couldn’t have verified, like what happened to Tening, so he very easily could have been making it all up as he went along.

So yeah. I’m pretty embarrassed that I let this happen to me, but now I’ll know for next time, right?

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Postcards from Dakar: Meet me in Saint-Louis, Day 2

The next morning after breakfast and no showers, we piled onto the bus and headed even farther north up the Senegal River (which forms the border between Senegal and Mali) to the Parc National des Oiseaux du Djoudj. Even the bus ride there was like a mini-safari along a dirt road so narrow and precarious at one point that we didn’t think the bus was going to make it. We saw monkeys, lots of families of warthogs, and two huge pythons on the side of the road. The park itself is on the river and is a wildlife reserve for lots of wetlands birds. Pirogue (boat) tours are given by the local park rangers and a nearby private hotel.

It is forbidden to fish and to hunt in the park, which makes it rather difficult for the people of the seven villages enclosed within the park to earn a livelihood. To try and compensate for that, the government (I think?) gave the villagers several pirogues and trained them to be the park rangers so that they could make some money off the tourism. This is why we waited a very, very long time for the local boats to show up instead of taking the hotel boat, which was sitting there empty the whole time we were waiting. There would have been more local boats, but apparently, not that long ago, a villager was found dead in the park. The other villagers blamed the rangers for his death and burned a lot of the boats in retaliation. That was another moment of mixed feelings, when we found that out. It seemed like it was a good thing to support the local people, but the local people don’t seem to be particularly in favor of that kind of support. The tour was a nice leisurely river cruise. We saw lots of birds, pelicans in particular. They would swim around in little groups and dive for fish at the exact same moment, like synchronized swimmers. We also saw lots more warthogs, some huge lizards, and a couple of crocodiles.

At the end of the tour, we bused back to the University and had a very late lunch. After that, pretty much everyone else made an impromptu visit back into Saint-Louis, but I stayed at the university. I had been sort of sick but still functional since Wednesday, but by Saturday night I really needed to spend some time working on getting better. All I had was the obligatory gastrointestinal complaint that everyone who comes here has to have at least once, and I was fine by Sunday morning, but it was really bad timing. I missed getting to spend more time in Saint-Louis, which I desperately wanted to do, eating a dinner that I ordered off of a menu instead of just one of 30 identical meals, and going out dancing afterwards. I did, however, manage to scrounge enough water together to take a bucket shower, so that was a big plus.

On Sunday morning, we packed up and headed back towards Dakar. We took a sort of random pit stop at an old baobab tree on the side of the road. The whole center of the tree was missing, but it was still alive, so that was kind of cool. I’ve heard that baobabs just don’t die, and this one seemed to be living proof of that. We had lunch in Thèis and got back to Dakar in the early evening. Overall, it was a pretty good weekend, but if I get the chance, I’d like to go back and spend a little more time in the city. It seemed like we didn’t quite do it justice.

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Postcards from Dakar: Meet me in Saint-Louis, Day 1

This weekend was our group trip to Saint-Louis, an island city in the north of Senegal that used to be an important colonial city. It was the capital of French West Africa, which was the federation of French colonies (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Cote D’Ivoire, and Benin) that existed up until everyone started getting their independence. It’s famous for its colonial architecture and its jazz festival.

We left on Friday and drove all morning through barren Sahel landscape. We saw animals, like donkeys, goats and cattle, that were seemingly wild and unattended. Every now and then you’d look out and see people walking through the bush even though there was no sign of a settlement anywhere. What could they possibly be doing out there? Sometimes we would see little groupings of huts made out of branches and dried palm leaves and there would be people working around the huts. We also saw a lot of dead cattle carcasses. In one case, it must have been a fresh one, because it was absolutely covered in gigantic scavenging birds with incredible wingspans. I don’t know if they were actually vultures, but they were certainly something in the same vein.

We finally got to Saint-Louis in the afternoon and then promptly drove right by it without stopping. That was a little disconcerting. As it turns out, we were staying at the University of Saint-Louis, which isn’t actually on the island of Saint-Louis- it’s farther north. Waly later explained to us that Saint Louis has lodging shortages because it’s a small city with a large tourist appeal. It’s also election season in Senegal, and all the politicians are campaigning in the bigger towns and filling up the hotels with their entourages.

Those are all good reasons, but nevertheless, it was a little disappointing to not be right in the city. It meant that whenever we had free time, and which there seemed to be a lot of in the schedule that they gave us, we wouldn’t be able to go explore the city on our own. The real bummer about the university housing, however, is that for most of the weekend there was little or no running water. Apparently the university area is growing faster that the infrastructure can be modified, and the water mains are now hooked up to more places than they can really supply. So sometimes the water would run and sometimes it wouldn’t, and there was certainly never enough pressure to take a proper shower.

When we got to the University, we settled into our rooms and had lunch, and then headed back to the city to take a tour, which had its pros and cons. WARC had hired four horse-drawn buggies with tour guides that belonged one of the hotels to take us around the city. It was nice to be in a reasonably comfortable carriage with a friendly tour guide, a horse named Barak Obama, and an explanation of the history and what everything was. Saint-Louis is a very beautiful city, or at least it would have been in its hey-day. The buildings are all painted bright, beautiful colors and have pretty wrought iron balconies on their second stories. There are also some interesting sights, such as the Point Faidherbe, which is named after Senegal’s most famous French colonial governor, was designed by Gustave Eiffel and must be the only mosque in the world that has a bell and a clock in the minaret. Apparently, although Faidherbe was an understanding governor who ate ceebujen, spoke some Wolof, and loved the Senegalese women, he couldn’t stand the call to prayer five times daily and had the bell installed so that he wouldn’t have to listen to it.

There were moments, however, that were a little less comfortable. The tour took us through the quartier where the local fishermen live, which was very busy and crowded with lots and lots of children in particular. The tour guide explained to us that there were so many children because pretty much all the marriages in this part of town are polygamous. We stopped and got out and walked around the fishing beach for a while, where the women make smoked and salted fish from whatever the men can’t sell to the merchants who come from out of town to take the fish all across Senegal and West Africa. The beach was covered in piles of fish heads, scales, and innards. As we were walking through here, women and young boys asked us for presents and money, and some played bait-the-toubab by shoving dead fish in our faces. That didn’t really bother me so much as the feeling that we were just a bunch of rich white people coming to gawk at a bunch of poor black people in their “natural habitat,” and that we probably deserved to have dead fish waved in our faces.

After our tour in Saint-Louis, we were taken back to the University. We had some time to rest, then dinner, then we headed out for our “cultural evening.” We went to a house somewhere not that far away with a large courtyard where we sat and watched a show. There were musicians, dancers, singers, actors, and a fire-eater, who each got up and did an act. They were all really good, but our enjoyment was somewhat hindered by the fact that we were all exhausted and terrified that they were going to make us dance at any moment, (which they did, at the beginning and end and once or twice during the middle for the unlucky people sitting up front). Watching Senegalese people dance is awesome because they move like no one in the US ever could, and dancing with them often totally fun as long as you don’t get too self-conscious, but it’s an activity that requires a lot of energy. Senegalese “cultural experiences” like that are always cool, but we were all pretty happy to crawl into bed at 1 a.m.

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