Sortie Pédagogique: Ville de Dakar

Hello from sauna-like conditions of my living room, I hope your week is going well. Today marks the first day of the new year according to the Muslim calender, and it is celebrated as Tamharit here in Senegal. In light of that, today is also a public holiday observing the new year, otherwise known as Hari Al-Hijra. Celebrations technically start the afternoon of the last day of the year and end the next day.

As part of traditional customs here, my host family cooked a dish of chehh, which is a red oil sauce made with sheep organs and a side of couscous. Usually the whole sheep head (from Tabaski celebrations???) is used to make the sauce, but my family only cooked it with kidneys (which I avoided) and some questionable pieces of sheep I choose to be ignorant about. Neighbours started coming in around 6 pm with homemade chehh, as a courteous offering. We had a really awesome spread of tomato and carrot salad, grilled chicken, and chehh. It was great. The following day (today), some of my family members fasted, so things were slow around the house, as was my progress with getting work done. I made egg sandwiches in the afternoon for myself and kids though, so at least I get to say I did something.

Adding to that things-accomplished list, I am sitting down to blog. Yes. Actually. Uploading pictures take up a lot of time and patience, so it is a feat that I'm proud of accomplishing today. Compared to almost-instant AirDrop functions, this is old tech. But still, it's good tech. So segway-ing into the meat of this post, some of my classmates and I went around Dakar on a Sunday morning to check out different neighbourhoods of the city. This field trip was part of my Urban Landscapes class, which is highly interesting. We have been covering history and origins of some of West African cities like Dakar, Saint Louis, Abidjan, Timbouktu, etc. for the past few weeks. Now, we're diving into Senegal's development since independance. I enjoy the class a lot, because it's just a fascinating way to learn a country's functions and cultures by looking at its cities and its characteristics.

Dakar on a Sunday morning is basically me on a Sunday morning, very much asleep. There was no traffic and the streets were close to being empty. It was a refreshing sight to take in, as I got pretty used to constant bottle-neck traffic and people on sidewalks shoving past car rapides. We went past Point E and ended up in one of the older neighbourhoods. Our professor gave us a bit of context of the architecture and housing planning situation. We then made our way (in our air conditioned private van lol) to the Medina quartier, which is one of the older and poorer neighbourhoods in the city. We went past informal Quran classes, shoe vendors "opening shop", washing ladies gathering piles of dirty laundry of the day, and informal fruit and peanut stands.

Next, we passed through a well-to-do neighbourhood and it was just a drastic change from cramped quarters to double-storied houses with lawns. All this was happening right next to Senegal's largest prison and a dangerous neighbourhood (in the words of my professor! Also he mentioned most people who get out of prison take up residence there..). A little further down the road, we were in the heart of Dakar's city center. We stopped and walked around a bit, while my professor pointed out certain features of the city.

We then headed past everything back into Ouakam, a neighbourhood in the north of Dakar. We stopped by Le Phares de Marmelles, which is Dakar's lighthouse. The view was amazing, overlooking the Renaissance monument, Almadies, and Yoff. Our professor also allowed us to take a tour of the lighthouse, which ended up being the highlight of this trip. The person in charge was extremely friendly, taking tourist money shots for us, and answering every question we threw at him. Definitely a place to check out, tourist or otherwise, when in Dakar!

After leaving Ouakam, we drove into the Almadies, which is the expat to-go place in Dakar. It was definitely gentrified and modernized, also with Senegal's poshest hotels. The Western-most point of the African continent is in this section of Dakar, located in the Sheraton hotel. We continued past Ouakam into Yoff, where the airport is located. We ended our trip at the beaches in N'gor, where traditional fishing activities are still practiced.

This coming weekend, we'll probably be taking a second field trip with this class to the outskirts of the city. Definitely snapping and writing up on the trip as well. I will be posting another post sometime over the weekend, about our visit to Toubab Dialow. Until then!

 Tabaski mutton leftovers

 One of the many many car rapides

New wing of a public hospital

 Overview of Ouakam and the Renaissance monument 

 View of Almadies from up top. Spot the Western-most tip!

 Lighthouse reflector thing-a-ling from down-under

 Plage @ N'gor

Football friendly: Senegal vs Namibia

Hello tout le monde. I hope your weekend has been well so far. I have two posts in store this week to make up for some lost time. The first entry - a friendly match I attended, courtesy of CIEE. The match of Senegal vs. Namibia took place on the 3rd of September. It was my first time attending a game outside of college, so I was excited about being in a larger atmosphere. We got to the Stade Leopold Senghor early at 3.30pm to get good seats. The game started at 7pm, and quite honestly, I did not know how we passed our time.

As people moved into the stadium, a brief drizzle came round. It went away before the teams arrived. Different groups of supporters started setting up at their chosen areas of the stadium and each had their own display of support. It was an incredibly lively atmosphere, with music and singing from each group overlapping the other. Vendors moved their way through the slowly growing crowd, selling benyets, soft drinks, and Senegalese gear.

The game started after the teams' formal entries and national anthems. It progressed very quickly and at times, I could not keep up. There was no clock display nor commentary, so I could only react to how the crowd reacted. Being a person who does not really know anything about football, let alone either teams, I was really there for the experience. Of course, I enjoyed immensely.

Senegal ended up scoring two goals, the latter being at 90th-minute penalty kick. The best parts of the game was when we (group of CIEE students) started an ole-ole chant after the first goal (which only really diffused to the fringes of our seating zone), and when a double rainbow revealed itself over the stadium. By the end, I was tired, sweaty, and very hungry. However, it was just amazing to be a part of the crowd, cheering on Senegal in solidarity with all the people around me. As I am writing this, Senegal is playing Cap Vert for the world cup qualifier, leading with a score of 1-0. I'll get back to that, and another post tomorrow. Until then!

Week 5 and pensive of some sorts

Salaam aleekum from Dakar, Senegal! It's about 9pm and I'm in my favourite quiet corner of the house, a beautifully arranged living area with soft carpets beneath my feet. There are about 9 people in the next room - kids parked in front of the television watching Disney Channel in French, and extended family catching up on their week with a cocktail of perfume in the air. My host-brother who is visiting from the US just joined us (me + my other host-brother who lives with his family of 4 in Dakar), turning on the lights and breaking the quiet whirring of the electrical fan. Somehow, their quiet chatter of commercial kitchens in Wolof is comforting, because I have grown to appreciate unfamiliar things, and the strange (relative) concept of feeling at home. 

It's the 24th of September, officially marking the end of my fifth week here in Senegal. Somehow, my feelings have shifted from oh-my-goodness-there-are-4-months-left to oh-wow-this-threefold-is-not-long. There has been a lot of going-ons in the previous month, and the coming weeks are going to be mundane in the sense of routine class-internship-homework schedule. Of course, I will be learning new things. But, I have gotten used to going out and seeing things that this seems like an abnormal turn in the past few months of venturing. 

I just came back from a week-long rural visit, arranged by the program of course. There will be a separate post with pictures in it, but I feel like doing a detox/reflection post while the experience is fresh in the grey folds of my brain.

*flow of writing paused here due to rapid callings of May, kai reer (May, come eat dinner) where I had wonderful lamb curry couscous and carrot-cucumber salad* 

The purpose of the visit was part of culture immersion, and to get to know more interior/authentic (not that Dakar is inauthentic in anyway) parts of Senegal. I was paired up with another girl from my program to a peace corps volunteer (PCV) site about 30km away from a town called Ndioum, which is about a 6-7 hour drive away from Saint Louis. We were placed in Mbantou, with a small population of around 500. Our PCV’s host family did not have running water nor electricity, but that did not bother us as much as we thought it would.

The largest shock was definitely way of life and culture. The use of “shock” here does not harbor any underlying negative feelings towards the overall experience, but rather the active realization of differences between experiences, expectations and reality of elements we were exposed to. The community mainly speaks Pulaar, which is a dialect of a long-standing ethnic group that migrated from East Africa and has settled in many countries across the continent due to their farming/herding history. Futa (?), which is what the Northern region of Senegal is known as, is home to mostly conservative Muslim communities. From the short 6 days spent in the region, I’ve come to realize how customs and traditions shape a culture and lifestyle. It's not like I've never been exposed to this idea before, but juxtaposing my norms with the very different norms of others put the context in my reality. We don't really control our identity, really.

Reading about feminism and patriarchal societies, classicism, and development is nothing new. To have observed and linked these theory/writings to reality was an awakening. Not speaking for the whole Senegalese society, or even the Futa region, but women are definitely central characters in families, but occupy an inferior position than men. I don't want to go into the whole essay-rant about ménage vs work vs importance vs power, but it seemed clear that in general, women are seen in a different light than men. One of the incidents that has etched itself in my mind was this wedding ceremony I attended in another PCV's village. She's a 16 year old girl who was in her second-to-last year of her baccalaureate studies, and he's a 24/25 year old removed cousin who is a student in Saint Louis. Theirs is an arranged marriage. The second day of their marriage, she moved to his village which is about a 13 hour drive East. She will not be coming back to her home in the near future, nor complete her studies, because her husband has refused to. I don't know her personally, or what autonomy she has in her life, but 16 year old me would never have to do that. It's this stark contrast between her life and mine that struck me. It's this absence of empowerment that upsets me. The conversation is more than this, and beyond me. Perhaps I will continue on this train of thought in a future post, because my mental and physical condition after my 12 hour travel today has left me pretty drained.

On another note, I am very thankful for calling Dakar home, and having Mam Fat Sow and her family who has accepted me with warmth and good food. The visitation has definitely put reality into perspectives, and I feel more grounded as a being. Being immersed in a Pulaar-speaking community with only Greg (our PCV) as our translator has been confusing. It has certainly given me a push in the "if only I could communicate in Wolof or French, however little knowledge I have of the two" direction. I now have a newfound appreciation for being able to learn them both. 

So before I crash, I do not want to apologize for my rant, because these opinions are my own and I just want to put them somewhere. I also thank you for reading so far down in this post and sitting through my awkward syntax and proses. I will now proceed to take a refreshing shower (running water and a shower head!) and love my hair with some much-needed conditioning. Bed will definitely follow in suite. The next post will be short write up on a football match I attended in my first week. Toodles and much love!