Prairie Girl Abroad

Looking toward leaving

2006-05-08T03:57:00.000-06:00

My time here is quickly wrapping up, just as the Dak'art Biennal of contemporary African art is opening here. Duma is interning with them, which means that I have an in to all of the opening events, and may be able to crash the big gala on Wednesday, right after my program's farewell dinner.

I'm thinking daily about what I've accomplished here, and what I've learned, split between excitement to be home and inability to comprehend the fact of being gone. I will be departing from Senghor airport at 2:45am the morning of May 24th, arriving JFK at 7:10 the same morning, then transfering to LGA to fly to Toronto that afternoon. Will arrive in Edmonton after a short stay in the land of the CN tower on May 29th.

Am trying to eat up every last second of being here, so this may be my last posting before arriving on the other side of the ocean.

Dahira El Hajj Abdoulaye Sow Gamou 2006

2006-05-08T03:53:00.000-06:00

Last saturday morning, Duma and I departed with our older sister Fama (early thirties, secretary to the Minister of Urbanism), Doudou (older brother who wanted to convert me to Islam, also early thirties, about to be married to some poor cousin who will have to deal with how spoiled he is for the rest of her life) and a family friend to Dagana, a mid-sized town along the Senegal river, half way between Saint-Louis and Matam, just across from Mauritania. We travelled in a government-owned quatre-quatre (4x4), with driver, on gas paid for with government vouchers. In other words, Fama hooked us up.

Let me pause a moment to describe how Fama is really all that. She is a queen of San-sai, the practise of dressing up, that is part of the very aristocratic habit of la femme sénégalaise, or rather the urban woman, possibly really no more than la Dakaroise that one learns early: eg. Our little cousin Ndeye Fatou, aged three, gets her hair breaded with a weave every three weeks, always wears earrings, is dressed up every morning and lathered with lavender water to make sure that she is appropriately dressed for nursery school. As I was saying, Fama is a queen at this. Never have I seen her when she didn’t have a bag to match her shoes, which match her outfit, so that if the dress is gold, so is everything, if the dress is coral, the same principle follows. Her sunglasses are Dior, her hair is delicately twisted so that it looks and behaves like straight toubab hair, her nails are french manicured, and she travels in style.

The journey was to celebrate the life of El Hajj Abdoulaye Sow, our host mom’s grandfather who was the marabout to Abdoul Aziz Sy, founder of the holy city of Tivaouane, whose lineage now call themselves the khalifs générals of the Tijannia sufi order. As the story goes, the father of Abdoul Aziz heard that there was a wise man in Gayé who could teach him the Koran, and became the disciple of Abdoulaye Sow. Before he departed, he fell in love with Abdoulaye Sow’s younger sister and the two were married. Not long after the marriage, Sy left Gayé and told Abdoulaye Sow that when his child would be born, he should carry his marabout’s name, and so it came about that the child was named Abdoul Aziz Sy.

What this means for the lay person is that the Tijani order in Senegal owes great respect to the family who are the marabouts to the khalif général (ie. The spiritual leaders of the spritual leaders). Essentially, I live in a family that is like an obscure religious royla family. These facts are largely forgotten, however, especially as some of the Sow lineage have come to bow themselves down to Tivaouane, to the fury of Fama and my mother. During the celebration, which is an all night affair, the singing of histories and praises were coopted by the Tivaouane camp, prompting my family to leave early.

When I was told that the gamou was an all-night singing of prayers, I don’t know why, but I imagined a tchourai-incense-filled mosque, dark and contemplative, and was surprised that I would be allowed to go. How wrong I was - the event took place under a concrete arcade outside the mosque, bathed in white, green, blue and red neon lights, with flashing Christmas lights strung between the pillars, and foldable chinese-lantern-style, shiny new years decorations hanging from the roof. We sat in the front row (!!!) of the women’s side, where everyone was dressed to the nines in fancy boubous (in yellow, hot pink and royal blue, and especially white and gold), foulards masterfully tied on their heads, matching shoes and bags compulsory, and of course big bling gold earrings and bracelets, minimum three per arm. Most of the young men joined into the group of singers in front of us, chanting “la illaha illalaaa, la illaha illalaa” for hours, at times reaching high points of energy when even the demure dames waved their arms and snapped their fingers alongside. The event started at half-past midnight and we left at around four when it was in full swing.

Wassadou-Dialacoto and Touba

2006-04-25T12:07:00.000-06:00

Reading over my blog a bit, I find it funny that I talk very little about what I do most, but classes being as they are, I don’t get excited enough to talk much of them.

Two weekends ago now, for the Easter long weekend (yes, it’s a holiday despite the fact that less than 5% of the country is Christian), my environment and development professor took us to the region where he did his masters research, in Senegal Oriental, near the Parc national de Niokolokoba. We stayed at a surprisingly gorgeous campement (I suspect that it was the only place that could fit 25 students in the area, and only for that did we get the royal treatment).

We went to document the degradation of protected forests by bush fires, illegal farming, migratory herders and honey-gatherers, as well as to talk to the local residents about the challenges they face with agriculture given an ever-increasingly dense population and greater dependence on natural resources.

There being no monitoring in the protected forests, and with local residents having the impression that the forest is the property of the state in Dakar, and not their own, there is a lot of abuse of the land. We saw fields cleared for growing cotton in areas that were meant to be protected. We saw the remnants of honey collection from the hollow of a tree that was chopped up badly enough to be killed by the next season’s bush fires. We also saw more than one tree killed for marketable wood, but not yet removed from the forest.

In Senegal the government has begun a program of “community forests” where the government will sign over an area to the local community under a contract with usage regulations, developed in consultation with the village and enforced by them. The forest is then signed over to the control of the local direction committee. I was skeptical that giving this type of communal ownership would be sufficient to overcome the abuse of the forests, especially because there are many users of the forest who are foreign to the direction committee, but in our discussions with village chiefs and local members of the “friends of nature” society, it really does seem that the authority of the local committee is respected, even by migrant herders.

We also visited a sharecropping banana plantation, right on the banks of the Gambia River. The plantation is owned by a private individual, and the farmers, of which there were 528 receive 40% of the selling price of what they grow every six months, from which is deducted any credit given for food. The local residents were happy with the plantation nonetheless, because the money it brought in was much better than what traditional agriculture affords them. However they did mention that they were trying to get together enough credit to try to purchase land to develop themselves, but that the bank would only finance 50% of the project, and they were not willing to sell their entire cattle herds to risk on the project. The current plantation was bought with a loan from the government and was subsidized during three years of flooding with lower interest payments and food aid to the workers, making me think that the owner must be very well connected with a few ministers in Dakar. The village would certainly not be able to swing getting their risks absorbed by the state.

This Saturday, we also visited Touba, the birthplace of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood. The Mourides have the largest following of all the brotherhoods in Senegal and a very recent history. Bamba founded the brotherhood around the idea that physical labour could help spiritual growth (very Gandhi-ji!), though cynics say that this ideology was nothing more than his way of making a killing through peanut farming and commerce with proto-colonialists. The currently popular historical reading is that Bamba was not only a religious leader but also a fighter against colonialism, an interpretation backed up by his exile to Gabon, his return from which is celebrated by a huge pilgrimage.

The mosque itself was begun after C.A.B.’s death in 1927 by his eldest son who became the first Khalif of a legacy that today rests under Cheikh Mbacke, Bamba’s fifth son. It’s really not like any mosque I’ve ever seen, with big purple domes, which their guide said was a colour chosen only for its beauty, and a huge minaret that was built with an elevator. It is the biggest mosque in West Africa, excluding Morocco.

We had the opportunity to visit one of the great granddaughters of Bamba and to talk to her about her position as a woman in this dynasty. She starting learning the Koran at the age of 7 at the Koranic School, and now is the teacher to many talibés, children and adults included. Her first and strongest comment was that in Islam, women can do anything men can do and more, an assertion she said was based in the Koran. Regarding polygamy she gave a very typical answer that there are more women than men in the world and that polygamy is therefore important so that no women get left without husbands.

Sine-Saloum and Saresonia

2006-04-13T08:00:00.000-06:00

It’s now two Saturdays ago that I sat with a sleeping child in my arms inside an arena formed of sewn-together rice bags in front of a village mosque, watching young men in bright pink hot-pants wrestling à la sénégalaise. The lutteurs made tours of the arena to the sounds of jembe playing and singing mothers picking up bits of the sand said to contain the essence of their ancestors and mixing them with water to wash themselves and to drink. Had the feeling that the event was the sort of thing that a girl of my age should have used as a means of distinguishing the pecking order for husbands.
This episode was from an exchange program organised weekend get-away to an island in the Sine-Saloum river estuary, home to pretty pelicans and supposedly also to baricudas.

This holiday was cleverly designed to ensure we were all at maximum strength for our departure to our village stays Monday morning. As planned, I departed with Duma and three other exchange students at 7am on our way to Kolda via Tambacounda (the faster road through The Gambia we were told not to take because the Gambian president accused Senegal of being behind the recent coup d’etat attempt, causing some hassles on the border and the withdrawal of the Senegalese ambassador). The journey itslef was eventful – we tore our tire in the middle of nowhere, where the hot sun beat down on us as I guiltily looked on at our driver replacing the tire by himself, and thinking one the one hand that I should learn to do useful things like that, and on the other hand that this was not the time to learn. We also overheated a few times, had to push the car, and when we seemed finally to be getting on our way, hit a goat crossing the road.

I arrived at my village stay of Saresonia around 11pm, to a crowd of children, clapping and singing, excited at the prospect of a guest, and the peace corps volunteer hosting me, Allison Arnold a.k.a. Kajjatou Teli Balde. Saresonia is a village of approximately 200 people, 15 compounds or 18 households, depending on how you’d like to look at it. There are two wells in the village, one near the compound of the chef du village (with whom I was staying), and a new one financed by the peace corps near a not-as-yet well accepted fenced in community garden. There is no electricity, one shopkeeper, and the nearest telephone is 2km down the road in the bigger village of Bagadadji.

The livelihood of the village surrounds a few cash crops and subsisdence agriculture. Rice is grown exclusively by the women of the village in a wetland area not a kilometer from our compund, peanuts are grown in the fields ajacent, cashews are grown in the forests to the opposite side of the village, mango trees flourish, and market vegetables are grown in the off-season in the wetland. Kajjatou Teli is trying to get concrete beehives for her village, where they already collect honey from wooden hives that quickly become obsolete due to monsoon rains or annual bush fires.

Unlike some of my fellow students, I found my stay in the village to be quite a natural episode. I was too excited to be shocked that what I took to be like camping was actually a week much cushier than the everydya life of my hosts, who did not have the luxury of flashlights, filtered water, vitamins to suppliment their diet and energy, and who had to work while I rested the afternoon heat away with the three-year olds under the mango tree, drinking tea.

I beg you to forgive my necessary brevity in listing some of my comments:
1. Women work very hard, from gathering wood in the morning from the forest, to hauling water from the well and carrying it back to the village, to tending their fields, to grinding millet and corn into couscous, to cooking and caring for their children. My host’s namesake was apparently in the process od trying to convince her husband to take a second wife to share the work.
2. There were tons of children! 18 households means 18 father figures, which means that it takes quite a few kids to come to 200 people.
3. People in the south of Senegal are generally less intensely religious than up north. No one greeted eachother by “Assalam Alaykum” in the village, nor did i hear prounced alxamdulilla, inshalla or bismilla even once. During my séjour I saw only one person pray once, and the village mosque is nothing but a storage-shed-like building erected the year before by an NGO who put up half the funds.
4. On the 4th of April, the fête de l’Indépendence, there was a bicycle race and a soccer match in Bagadadji, but no flags waving or anthems sung.
5. The food we ate with my host-family made me feel malnourished very quickly. We ate rice with a peanut sauce for breakfast (a special treat for guests), couscous with a mucous-like sauce of okra and pounded eucalyptus leaves for lunch, and finer couscous with a watery sauce made from wild clovers called gersogal faaro.
6. a kilo of cashew nuts raw and still inside their toxic coating sells for as much as a kilo of rice. They are mostly exported to India to be roasted and shelled. The honey sells for 500 fCFA/kg (~$1) totally raw, while cleaned honey sells for 300fCFA/kg according to the producers.
7. There was only one adult woman in Saresonia who could read Pulaar, though most of the children now go to the French school until 5th or 6th grade. A high school was just recently built in Bagadadji and is taking their first class of students.
8. Roles seem very clearly defined in the village. There are no unmarried adult women, work is divided by age group and gender, and there do not seem to be any need to discuss who will take up what task.
9. families do not usually work the same market garden. Each wife will have her own garden, separate to her husband’s and her co-wife’s, and will be in charge of the income it generates
10. My first day in Saresonia, I saw a young man get off his bicycle, fall to the ground and go into convulsions. The chef du village said that it was a djinne (a spirit, the koran says that there are on this earth as many djinns as people) that descended upon him. He said that it sometimes would come to him, and he knew just before and could either lay down and wait or fall in convulsions. I do not know how to diagnose epilepsy.
11. My host became chief of the village not by being the most wealthy or strongest member of the community, btu because it was his father that founded the village. A rather unimposing man, from what I could tell, the title meant little more than that he recieved guests and strangers, and that he was in charge of the marriage rituals for any girls with absent parents.

There are so many thoughts that I have left, but as this is already getting too lentghy for bullet form I will save them until I see you all next.

Instability, Solar Eclipse and Rural visit

2006-03-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention in the last posting a note on instability in the region. During my spring break, around the 13th of this month, there was firing across the southern border with Guinea-Bissao in the region of Casamance, which is cut off from the rest of Senegal by The Gambia, a former British colony that runs along the river Gambia. Salif Sadjo, the most intransigent of rebel leaders from Guinee-Bissao is being saught inside Senegal by the Guinee-Bissaoan and Senegalese armies. Also in the region, last week there was an attempted coup in The Gambia while the President was out of the country, the leader of which also fled to Casamance, and is the second target of the army's man hunt.

In recent class discussion with Koumba Toure, a key figure involved in educational advocacy, a disquieting notion came out that people are losing confidence in the value of education because of the high levels of unemployment here (approximated as 48% by the CIA), and that certain quarters are turning to careers in politics as the fastest way to get rich. In the context of regional instability, if true, this is a very disconcerting trend.

Politics aside, I probably burned my eyes this morning looking up at a partial solar eclipse. The total eclipse of the sun happened in Libya, and here it looked like a little bite taken out of the side of a cookie. Nonetheless, the sky had an eeriness about it, and there was a larger than usual conglomeration of vultures on the school's soccer field.

Next week, all the students on our program will be dispersing on rural visits. I am heading to the southeast and will be staying with a peace corps volunteer in her village and following her project. The instructions given me are as follows:
"Meet at Suffolk University at 7:00am on Monday morning. Go to the Gare Routiere Pompiers where you will find a sept place (read: old Pugeot station wagon that has seven seats, a.k.a. bush taxi) to Kolda (about 12000cfa). Ask to get out at Bagadadji, whcih is 30km before Kolda. Call the telecentre from around Velingara to let Allison (the PCV) know your ETA. Allison should be waiting for you there. If not, tell them you are the guest of Kajjatou Balde and they'll help you find her. The village is 2km from the main road. Bring a kilo of kola nuts."

Coupures and St Louis

2006-03-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Poor governance has been the cause of much frustration and some loss in Senegal in the past week. Senelec, the state-owned electrical company had been in back-payments to their petrol suppliers, such that these companies were no longer able to buy crude oil from abroad, and the country has for a week now been left with uncertain electrical supplies. My house was out of power Monday and parts of Tuesday, while campus was out of power for most of the week, excepting a few mornings and evenings. President Wade has freed up funds in large amount recently to pay the bills, showing that it was certainly not the complete incapacity to pay that caused this crisis (note that consumers do pay for electricity, and therefore funds are coming from somewhere), but sheer mismanagement. There has been no talk of anyone being compensated for the "coupures."

I profited from a weekend where it was not certain that I'd be able to accomplish much to take a trip to Saint Louis, a colonial city in the north of Senegal, capital until 1904 to all of L'Afrique Occidentale Francaise. The city was the first established by France on the African coast, nestled on an island at the mouth of the Senegal river, prime location for insularity/protection from locals who will have to attack by boat, and commerce. The main sight to see is the pont Faidherbe, a bridge first constructed over the Danube and moved to Saint Louis under the direction of the region's former military Governor whose name it retains.

The weekend was for me a great chance to relax, be outside of the city's bustle, and enjoy some wonderful scenery in the company of two friends, Courtney Keene and Jini Kades. We saw some Jazz at a little "tapas bar," the city being known for its Jazz musicians and festival which takes place in May, enjoyed a great meal at La Saigonnaise, a Vietnamese place run by the slightly egotistical Madame An, whose photos adorn its walls, and got some rest.

Séjour au Mali

2006-03-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Being someone to forget quickly passing hardships, it's hard for me to begin writing about my recent trip to Mali, which did not turn out the way planned to say the least.

The difficulties got underway Saturday night around 3am, when I was awoken on our bus to Bamako to find that we had pierced a tire. It was magical to walk out in the haze of a foggy night and realise that not 50m away was a village worthy of a fairytale or national geographic article. There being no possibility of finding our way out but by doing it ourselves, everyone who could did not hesitate to help with the bus jack, the tools, etc. and we were out of there in 45 minutes.
Yet this was not the end of our trials.

At the border with Mali in the morning, we passed 2 separate check points on the Senegalese side, and then two on the Malian side, where each of us was obliged to pay an "administrative fee" of 1000fCFA ($2), thus racking up a pretty sum for the border official who did not dispense a single reciept.

The road from Kayes, near the border in Mali to Bamako was finished according to my guidebook in 2004, but in actuality was not paved, but merely packed with fresh dirt, and replete with detours onto the gravel road beside due to work that was to be accomplished soon. The countryside is severly dry in Mali, and through the drivers window and the door which remained open while we drove along the highway to permit some wind to enter into the otherwise smolderingly hot bus, through these openings the red dust of the soil kicked itself in and promptly clung to all exposed skin and clothing like a terra cotta film. The infrastructure in this area seemed rudimentary at best, the villages we past exhibited few brick or cement buildings, and water was collected from wells. Think of the last time you saw a picture of a young girl carrying a huge bucket of water or a woman with a big pile of wood on her head and baby on her back crossing a desolate-looking plain being used as an advertisement for charitable cause, and that would not be a bad starting point for what the paysage seems like from the road.

Our bus went on to have 4 more tire-related breakdowns, and we arrived in Bamako after 38 hours of hot, sweaty travel to find ourselves unable to make it to the market in Djenne before the set of sun on Monday. We elected therefore to rearrange our plans and push our stopover in Bamako forward.

Bamako, the capital, is not at all like Dakar, lacking place as the former capital of Afrique Occidentale Francaise, and the international commercial presence and cosmopolitan urbanism that seems to accompany it here. The city seems much more like a provincial town. There are but two buildings that stand out in the sky - the central bank building along the Niger, and interesting, though not fantastic 60s building, and the sombre Sofitel. The streets are often lined with trees, and the river is a beautiful green that reminded me of the Rockies, but the 40 degree Celcius heat, the red dust, and the lack of wind, coupled with the exhausts of old, poorly maintained vehicles burning leaded gas, made the air unbearable.

What is remarkable, however, is the Musée Nationale du Mali. The collection includes some truly extraordinary pieces, which are preserved remarkably when compared to the IFAN museum in Dakar, in a new building built to copy the Sahelian style in 2003. The museum is truly worthy of the heritage of remarkable art and archeological wealth it holds, and would be able to properly care for more pieces that may one day be given back from museums abroad, such as several in France that have repatriated objects pillaged under the colonial yoke.

Taking up the bus story once again, our trip to Djenne was no less trying. Told that we would depart at 9am, we realised that we were flat-out lied to by the ticket salesman when the driver told us at 10 o'clock that we would be leaving at 11. Hotter, drier, noisier than the last ride, exhaustion and menstrual stress made this journey terribly trying for me emotionally. The buses here run such that after having loaded passengers, you drive immediately to buy gas with the money just garnered from their fares, then stop 10 minutes later to pick up other provisions, so that you're not on your way truly for at least half an hour after leavign the bus statrion. When you're already two and a half hours late according to your expencations, this can be source fo just that extra amount of frstration needed tp push one over the edge of utter disappointment. Our fellow passengers were nonetheless terribly welcoming. Whenever we stopped and were bombarded by vendors, they would offer us some of their exotic fruits and unknown snacks. And when I thought we were lost for certain, two lovely people helped us make arrangements on our way.

We were told we'd arrrive at the Carrefour de Djenne around 5pm, when in actuality we arrived there much past nightfall, and were only lucky enough to have been able to call our hotel and arrange for a car to come pick us up to take us the 30km from the highway turn-off to Djenne proper. The ride went past picturesque villages at 80km/h, and involved fording a river (water reaching our feet, and mechanical messing under the hood!), since the moveable bridge is out of operation.

Djenne itself is beautiful. The mosque was so impressive upon arrival as we looked at it from our hotel terrace under the light of the not-quite-full moon. In the day, the town was quiet, the kids pushy to ask you to take their picture so that you will be obliged to give them some change for it, and the older men are just as quick to yell at them in a manner that made me understand that an exapseration about how well behaved their (grand)children might be if it weren't for all these toubabs coming through.

Faced with the choice of going on to Dogon solo, since my companions were returning to Dakar Friday night, or coming back with them, I chose the second. I have no regret of not pushing forward alone to see Dogon, as the trip has given me the feeling that quick travel has given me no insight that a good photo book, documentary or academic paper could not give me from the confines of Dakar or New York.

So last night I flew back on Air Senegal from Bamako Sedou Airport to Leopold Sedar Senghor airport Dakar, and was happy to find people speaking Wolof and a cool breeze off the ocean obliging me to put on a sweater.

Spring break approaches

2006-03-10T04:53:00.000-07:00

Dear all,

Summer arrived a few days ago, by which I mean that the winds have been coming not over the Atlantic from Europe, but over the Sahara from Libya, bringing with them heat and sand. In geographical terminology, the Alizé Maritime has been replaced the by Alizé Continentale, a.k.a the Harmattan. The sky is now dusty, and the winds have ceased to be refreshing.

Tomorrow I will be leaving on Spring Break to Mali with my roommate Duma and her friend Zoe from Barnard. We are taking a 25 hour bus to Bamako, then catching another immediately overnight to Jenne, so that we can arrive in Jenne on Monday for the weekly market. Jenne is the site of a fantastic sahelian style mosque, rebuilt under French support at the end of the 19th century, and the source of some stylistic controversy. ( http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ind/hd_ind_1.htm )

Tuesday we will be travelling to the Dogon country, where we will be meeting a guide to take us trekking around the cliff villages of this fragile, relatively protected traditional society. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon )

We will return to Bamako on Friday early morning, and spend a couple days in the capital before making our way back to Dakar on Sunday.

In local news, the President of the Republic threatened the student's union with cancelling the school year if they did not cancel the strike. The students will be going back to class on Monday, which is great for me since I will be able to take my course after all, though it seems that their issues are not going to be resolved any time soon.

Best wishes to all.

Mega Concert

2006-03-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Last night, at around 11:30pm, I was not alone in screaming at the arrival on the stage at Stade Leopold Sedar Senghor of Lauryn Hill. Actually, even right now, I'm still so excited that I am tempted to randomly fill this posting with exclamation marks. (!!!!!)

The occasion of said concert was a benefit for Plan International, and their campaign to encourage people to register their children in the national records, ie. to get their birth certificates. Very strange cause for a concert, and even stranger line-up.

Pre-concert, there was a friendly soccer match Senegal v. Norway, really nothing to speak of. The moment the crowds were let down onto to field, though, people began jumping 4m down from the stands, and heading into full sprint to reach closest possible to the stage (I myself climbed over the fence between the 2nd and 1st class seating areas to get to the stairs). The crowd was about 40 000 people, and I would say the average height of men on the floor around me was 6 feet.

First on stage was Norwegian one-hit-80s-wonder Aha (Take on me, and The Living Daylights)- very strange, made me wish I were wearing a miniskirt and brightly coloured pumps. Later came a reggaeton group who I'm sure had never had a motionless audience before. No one was danced, as all eyes were glued to the half-naked dancers on stage. Alpha Blondie sang out against Cote d'Ivoire's failed political class, moving me into political furvour right before the entrance of the night's big American star.

Lauryn Hill (!!!!) came on wearing an awesome peacoat, huge gold earrings and Afro. With a mini big band playing disonnantly behind her, she rapped out her politics and blew me away with the power of her voice, meanwhile her backup singers rocked the boubous, huge earrings and sunglasses style behind her. I am basically now in raving awe of her.

She was not the last, and the concert went on late into the night, with Angelique Kidjo, Patti Smith (that was really wierd! Old American Folk music in a stadium full of young Senegalese guys who don't speak English), Viviane Ndour, and finally Youssou Ndour who didn't get on stage until 1:40am Thursday morning.

Best moments:
- Just before the end of the football match, the power went out in the stadium, and not thirty seconds later the stands filled up with the lights of everyone's mobiles, like thousands of stars in the crowd. I so wish that I had a video camera for that moment.
- Lauryn Hill singing Beautiful Child, loaded with the baggage of benefit concert and Maman Africa, made at least one sentimental Karen teary.
- Being part of the mass of hundreds of people climbing the fence and running onto the field after the game.
- Angelique Kidjo, this great Dame of African music ruling the stage with her simple voice.

A comment on the whole benefit concert thing:
The concert was really not thought of by anyone as an important benefit concert. In the background, everyone knew that Plan International was the organizer, but all the stage signage and the little clips that were played during the concert talking about children and the importance of registration were in English, therefore reaching maybe 1% of the audience. The stage was clothed in photos of African children smiling next to the statement "Football for Africa," both of which would seem really appropriate if the concert were not itself in Africa, where I felt the statements laden in this image were either null or condescending. "Football for Africa- football as salvation for the poor starving children... look at them in these pictures and how happy African children can be!" This is a facesious portrayal, but represents how a planning process that is very out of touch with its subject can come across on the ground. I got the distinct feeling that teh concert was produced for people abroad much more than the 40 000 of us in the stade itself.

But, I'm not complaining: the rush of being part of that huge crowd, listening to amazing performers, and dancing with just enough room to move was phenomenal.

Racism

2006-02-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

Friday morning, I was meant to learn from my cousin-sister Fatou Sow to cook a nice Senegalese lunch, but things did not quite work out as planned. The argument started with Maman Fatou Sow expressing her outrage at some news that came over the radio (I did not understand it), about a boat of Senegalese migrants bound for Spain arrested by the Moroccan government and basically left for dead. The accuracy of this account is les important than the discussion which followed.

Maman Fatou Sow commenced with how unwelcoming people outside Africa and outside Senegal are. In Senegal people are very proud of the fact that no one is starving, and that if you are hungry you can ask at any stranger's home and they will feed you, and even house you. I have tried to explain that this is totally abnormal for my North American culture and what I understand about the cultures of Western Europe and Asia, but my cousin-sister insisted that the less than warm welcome Senegalese recieve in other countries, including African countries is first and foremost because of racism.

She escalated very quickly to the statement that all white people are racist. This was not the first time I had heard something to this effect here, but it was the first time I had heard it from someone of my generation, with whom I identify strongly and am good friends. In fact, previously Maman Fatou Sow had told me that all Americans are racist, and that black Amreicans are more racist than white Americans, which I let slip without comment, because arguing with her is always a lost cause, given that she can never seem to listen to me for more than about 5 seconds at a time. But with my cousin Fatou, I was not ready to let that kind of comment slip, especially since she has dated toubabs before, has contemplated marrying a toubab, and is trying sincerely to obtain entrance into a university in France or Switzerland.

Our argument did not find any good resolution, and I did not succeed in pushing forward the idea that statements such as "All ___ are ___" are often the conduits of more serious forms of racism. When I put forward that I am personally offended by this comment, she felt in no way that I should be so, since there are always exceptions and that being racist does not prevent me from being a kind and genial person. Indeed, she argued, her cousins have married toubabs who are very sweet and kind, who she likes very much, but who she deems nonetheless racist.

What has disappointed me most is that Fatou Sow does not seem to have been shocked in any way out of these perceptions by my arguments or by her experiences with American, Swiss and French people that she has known personally. To her credit, racism in Europe (where most Senegalese migrants are destined) seems to be reaching a crisis point, and she and her parents' generation have never known the freedom to cross borders that I have, being always percieved as engaged in whatever form of nefarious activity, or simply not trustworthy enough to enter Canada the way I enter Senegal. This is undoubtedly frustrating, yet it cannot constitute a satisfactory basis for a statement that all white people are racist.

Our conflict is not resolved, though I have recieved an apology. I did not make lunch on Saturday.

2006-02-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

*For news articles on the University crisis, read the comment I posted on the last entry.*

2006-02-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

To follow on my last posting, I will try to elaborate on the crisis at the university of Dakar, a.k.a. U. Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD).

As I mentioned the students have been on strike for two weeks already, arguing against the horrible conditions in the residences where it is said that 12 students will not uncommonly be sharing a room with 3 beds. Friday's violence was prompted by accusations that the campus restaurants (dining halls privatised under Structural Adjustment, responsible for providing 2 meals a day to the student body) served students rotten meat.

One restaurant, l'Argentin, was ransacked by students, who also clashed with police, burning two cars and damaging 4 public buses. The police reacted violently, with many students injured (though I believe no shots were fired, nor rubber bullets) and the aforementioned residences raided by police. There have been many accusations of theft by policemen of mobile phones and other valuables during these raids, and my sister claims that one student was seriously injured jumping out of a third story window for fear of the gendarmes, which, if it is true would suggest a situation much more gravely disordered.

The campus is now a quasi-military base, where tanks are stationed and identification is being checked at the entrances. Many of the students have moved out of campus, and I, not obliged to go there, have been steering clear, though there has been no recurrence of violence in Dakar.

Monday, however, in Saint Louis, at the country's only other public university (a much more elite, and therefore much smaller school), a demonstration of solidarity ended with 12 students injured.

The scandal is rampant among political circles: the president accusing the oppositions parties of fomenting the violence, their denunciation of such accusations, protest against the government, debates amongst the university faculty, etc. To be clear, I do not wish to portray a situation of total chaos. Rather I think it an accolade that such incidents are a major scandal for the nation. I am trying my best to follow the news, though finding information can be very difficult. For those of you who are interested, I am collecting articles and will try to post them here.

2006-02-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

So there are many things to discuss:
1. Pressingly in my mind, yesterday there was a big demonstration at the University here. The students in the faculties of Law, Arts and Letters, and Human Sciences have been on strike for three weeks now, since the anniversary of the death of a student in a similar demonstration several years ago. The big thorougfare near my house, Av Cheikh Anta Diop, aka the Route de Ouakam, was closed unexplectedly, such that I was stuck in the largest traffic jam I have every seen in my life, with traffic coming from every direction - big municipal busses, car rapides (cheap and fast transport en commun, of which all of the vehicles are at least 30 years old and many no longer have solid floors, nevermind really properly functioning breaks) like the one I was in, taxis, beemers, horse carts - directed only by a few brave street dwellers. As I returned home in the evening, I got a rare glimpse close up in my taxi (by that time I was tired and willing to pay what would cost me a subway fare in NY to take some calmer transportation), of the scene of the demonstration. The road was still closed but we did not know and got up close to see the empty, glass-covered streets, flanked by riot police. In the middle of the road stood an armoured car.

My family has been arguing all day about the incident, in which I'm not sure how many, if any, people were hurt, but unfortunately my cousin, who is a student at the University and also my pal, has been too flurried to stop and translate for me into French. Hoping that tonight I can get more of the skinny.

2. There was just a power outage, and am only too thankful that we have backup batteries on the computers in the school lab.

3. I have a wierd rash on my fingers and toes, that the lovely born-and-raised in Senegal, Lebanese dermatologist I went to see told me was a nonallergic reaction to either citrus or plant matter complicated by sensitivity to the sun. Anyway, it was quite unpleasant - itchy toes and a blister on my right index finger! - but seems to be reacting well to the treatment dear Dr. Chekadi prescribed.

4. My family is getting a bit better. I think this is partially a matter of me reforming my expectations, and me taking out my frustration through the harsh teasing relationship that I have with the older brother of the family. It's a great relief to be able to say what I think really meanly and then be laughed at and applauded by my host mom.

5. I am going to be babysitting tomorrow morning for a few little American babies who live here, in exchange for the privilege of sitting in soft couches, snacking out of a fridge that has things in it, and having a quick wash with hot water. The kids Dads are in the US Army, here training Senegalese peacekeepers for regional work. The moms are particularly fascinating with their so precarious positions as completely dependent on their husbands. I can't imagine moving away from your job, family, everything to a place that is totally not of your choice, where you can't work or speak the language, and where you will nonetheless attempt to raise your children. It's really amazing to me that they manage to survive here without speaking French, nevermind Wolof.

6. Those of you who are interested in giving me a call anytime can do so at home at +221 868 40 35 (Hallo. Puis-je parler avec Karen, then just repeat my name frantically if that doesn't work), or on my roommate, Duma's mobile phone +221434 93 35. Keep in mind that I am GMT.

This is all I have time for today. Sorry for the lack of pictures.
Love to everyone.

2006-02-13T02:52:00.000-07:00

Egypt won the Coup d'Afrique in Cairo on Friday, after a long match against Cote d'Ivoire. The game went into overtime, and finally Egypt won in the free kick series, 4-3.

This weekend I got some much needed R&R at a little beach town/fishing village at Toubab Diallao. We stayed at this beautiful, boho resort-on-the-cheap, designed in a style I'd like to call Africa Gaudi (photos to follow). On Saturday I sat out on the beach diligently, despite the cold wind and the lack of sun, because I would not have it that I was at the beach and not going to enjoy it. Unfortunately, this provoked me, I became cocky, and yesterday when the sun did come out I promptly sunburned every inch of exposed skin (except my face, of which I have been taking extreme care and sunscreening multiple times a day).

Met a few Peace Corps volunteers who really were not the amazing, idealistic, hard-working bunch that I was hoping they would be. Mostly they seemed rather snotty to the people coming to talk to them on the beach, and were very much into getting a tan and drinking beer on the beach.

Took a dance workshop on Saturday as well, and have decided that ballet has ruined me for African dance. I was horrible - trying to count out groups of 8 (I'm not at all able to hear the cues in the drumming), starting everything on the right foot, rather than the left, trying to be precise, not able to handle moving every part of my body at once in a fluid movement. Unfortunately, I think that I was caught on video, and am still hoping that those red tapes are not released publicly.

Coming back into the city was a bit hard, and spurred a little existential crisis. Nothing serious, just a bit of wondering what this city is teaching me, and whether I'm on path to achieving my objectives. Writing these words, they are glaringly foreign to the general attitude pervading this culture: time-pressure and goal-based activity are just not the norms around here. They may not have been my norms either before I started at Columbia, but I am feeling a bit lost without their structure.

2006-02-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

Senegal lost yesterday to Egypt, 2-1, to the joy of 100 000 Egyptian fans in the stands, kicking us out of the final match for the Coup d'Afrique. There is some resentment of a penalty that was not called, but mostly just a resounding disappointment, especially from me - no more cancelled classes or opportunities to witness a society-wide cathartic excitement at each goal. No more children running into the empty streets to scream and run around with each other and pick up the littler kids and chear together before play resumes; no more groups of twenty people outside every shop that sells televisions; and no more 40-something in-laws dancing in the living room.

2006-02-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

Garbage Dump

2006-02-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

At 9:30 this Saturday morning we departed on our little safari bus, under the direction of Professor Cheikh Mbow, to Mbeubeuse, the garbage dump for Dakar. Field study mission to look at the community of recyclers that pull pieces of fabric, glass, cardboard, iron, wood, aluminum and paper out of the completely unregulated dumping site.

According to the estimates of the head of the worker’s association based out of the maison communautaire in the middle of the dump, there are about 800 récupérateurs, of which about 120 are children. The community centre is very well connected, with programs funded by Belgian, Italian, and Senegalese groups as well as L’Organisation de la Francophonie. Among the workers, diarrhea and malaria are the most common health problems, and there is very little incidence of cholera, a recent problem elsewhere.

The dump is located at a depression point on Cap Vert, where the water table is only 2-4m below the surface level, which means that flooding in that area is a problem, and the water, still used as a valuable agricultural resource, is contaminated with particulates and some biotoxins. Methane released during the decomposition process starts little fires all around the area, adding to the smell and fumes from burning tires.

Walking around the site was odd. Our professor warned us not to take any photos of the people working in the area, and anytime someone took a photo of the collected garbage, someone would yell at them not to take their photo. Although it’s easy to assume that people do not want to have their photo taken and published without their consent, and want even less to be recorded engaged in degrading work, I’m not sure if that is their reason for being so sensitive about photos.
Walking in a group of 20 American, 20-something women with white masks on our faces, taking notes, at a place that is both home and work to many people, made me feel like I should have been less comfortable than I was in actuality.

It was worse when we went to look at the site of a recent flood, in an irregular settlement at Yeumbeul. Yeumbeul was a lake before the severe drought of the 1970s, when the drying coincided with a large rural exodus. Local landholders sold the land to newcomers who did not know that the place was a floodplain, and who were in no position to buy homes in regulated development zones. Consequence: this year’s rains forced thousands into tent camps, and their homes block water flow, so that the stagnant water becomes a breeding ground for mosquitos.

Visiting the floodzone and the tent camps, we were flogged by groups of little children in awe of the toubabi. Again, not uncomfortable, I did feel like I ought to have been much more concerned about my role and my actions. This disparity between the ease of walking around in a conspicuace group in the process of inspection and unpreventable judgement, and the more strenuous processes of behaving in a socially acceptable way (which we did not much encounter), was the mainstay of the day.

2006-02-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

Eventually, I knew I would have some difficulties adjusting, and it seems the moment has come. I am totally over my family here, and sort of wish I could just hide from them. But I feel this compulsion to make my family like me, and therefore to spend 2-3 hours of the evening just sitting around while they chat in wolof and watch TV. Basically, it drives me bonkers and I force myself to stay there. Since compulsions take effort to break, it may be a while before I find a balance.

Thursday morning I met with Mame Saye Seck, the director of RAFET, a 10,000-strong union for women employed in the informal sector in Senegal, who I met through the contact of Eric Verhoogen. I will be meeting next week with one of the group's local leaders, Ramata Ba, to check out their activities in Pekin, a poor area on the outskirts of town. This group is among the best organised of the Dakar area, and hopefully I will be able to spend some time with them learning about their methods of organising and advocacy and education initiatives.

By invitation to my friend Courtney, a family friend of the designer, I partook in a runway fashion show last night as a member of an odd grouping of Dakar haute society people, and a random selection of toubabs like me who really had very little idea of what they were doing there. The clothes were pretty hideous and not very well made, but more interesting was the pseudo-primitivist theme. The designer, Claire Kane, French, has been living in Dakar for at least 10 years, and I guess that permits her to think that putting shirtless male models with war paint on their faces and ebony knives tucked into their headresses on her runway is not vulgarly exoticist.

There are 50,000 Europeans, almost all French, living in Senegal, mostly in Dakar, and many of whom for periods of 15 years or more. The community is totally not integrated, and I have a hard time understanding exactly what these people think about their position in society. It's especially the artist-type community here I find difficult to respect because they seem to do little more than ensure the continuation of colonial presence in their lifestyle and in their artwork.

Senegal beat Guinee today 3-2, qualifying for the Africa Cup semifinals.

My house, and photos from the roof

2006-01-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

Academic Safari, etc.

2006-01-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

Today I got to take a big fancy tour bus around town to visit all of the academic resources that we can access- The University library, the CODESRIA (council for the advancement of social science research in africa), the West African Resource Centre, and a fascinating media centre that trains young filmmakers to make filmes du quartier, which will hopefully try to show a picture of life in Dakar, and in Africa more generally as it really is, not as certain interest groups would like it to be seen. They are a fascinating organisation - Raz, Lynne, Boogie, Julie, Nayeem I wonder if you've already heard of them? You would be very happy to talk with the director I think. They have a film festival every December, which makes me quite sad to miss it.

Also today, my first trip to the big university campus, which is overflowing with students. The government funds the school quite a bit, but because it is one of only two public universities in the country, the other at St Louis, the funding comes out in the end to be only 7000 francs CFA per student, which is maybe $15 each for their full year tuition. Students only pay a 5000 FCFA registration fee. In other words, when walking through the library, there were students sitting all on the side of the steps for lack of desks and the school corridors had students crowding around doors because there is not enough space in the classroom. It kind of reminds me of the first day, trying to register for Rashid Khalidi's class ont he Modern Middle East, only here there is no larger lecture hall to find, and they will register more students than fit the room. This, and the fact that the residences are about triple capacity is the reason student strikes are not infrequent, and the reason that I am taking classes taught by these professors at a different site.

Duma and I got wierded out by older brother Doudou yesterday. He wants us to write him letters of recommendation to immigrate to Canada/US. I asked him what he wants to do in Canada, and he said that he would like to come and convert people to Islam. I tried to suggest that that was not a great tactic to take with the immigration officers, but I'm not sure if he agreed. I didn't say this earlier, but the first dinner I had with the family he asked me whether I was going to convert to Islam. I'm wondering if he might be a jihadist (yikes!)

Finally, we stopped in at this fascinating weaving factory, which brought to mind a silk factory I had been to in Mysore. What is emblemmatic, I think, is the rudimentary technology that people are using here compared with what they would use even in India. The weavers here were using really basic tools - unfinished pieces of wood, and sticks in the ground - and the factory really wasn't much to speak of, just a lean-to with a corrigated metal roof. Not that I want to say that the conditions were bad, but I wanted to comment on the dramatic difference of production here. I'm not sure how this follows through to consumption, but things here are really not much cheaper than in the US, except food, and basic goods and services. I would say that things here are twice as expensive as in India, for example, though I haven't found any good data to make this comparison. (For those interested there is some neat data on PPP and market exchange rates from the World Bank - http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/Table5_7.pdf)

Also, Indiaphiles may not that the public busses here, all bought last year and still holding their pretty blue coats of paint, were made by none other than our dear mega-corporation, TATA (a company that started making tractors, and now does everything from owning and operating the hydroelectric dam that was near MUWCI to running a big financial group partnered with TD Waterhouse).

Okay, must run home for lunch!
Karen

Time passed, and I moved in

2006-01-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

Time has passed, and I moved into the house of Adjou Fatou Sow. I am living with a fellow CU (Barnard) student, Duma, on the second floor of an unfinished house behind the basketball court of the local Lycee in the neighbourhood of Mermoz.

The family is very religious - Fatou Sow went on Hajj to Mecca a few years ago, my house-brother, Doudou, 30-ish, spent all of Sunday reading the Koran in his room, and is going to teach me more of it in the coming months. My family is also very big - there are 9 people living in the house including Duma and me, two of whom are Fatou Sow's children, and two of whom are students that are boarding with her. I'm noth sure whether my younger brother, Aziz, 13, is actually Fatou Sow's child; because I know for sure that Fatou Sow has raised a few children who are not her own including my cousin sister, Fatou, who is in 1st year at University Cheikh Anta Diop in law. It's a bit confusing, especially since it's considered rude to ask questions like "how many children do you have? what do you do for a living? how exactly are you related to the family? etc."

I am awaiting classes to start Wednesday, so for now it's mostly just easing into the family scene. Finding having to tell someone when I'll be home and whether I'm eating with the family quite difficult. I'm expected to spend a lot of time with the family, sitting in the living room with everyone, even if I'm just reading there. This is a bit difficult because there's no way to concentrate on anything since the television is ALWAYS on. Favourite these days is of course the Coup d'Afrique in soccer. Senegal is playing Zimbabwe tonight, so hopefully they win. Guinee made a surprise win against South Africa, and Egypt beat Libya. That I know any of this should eb some indication of how intensely my family is into this. Otherwise, we watch a lot of "Love and Marriage" (I find it really interesting that the ridiculousness of how people dress and talk does not come across at all here) and "Dallas" dubbed in French.

I will write again soon, I hope, but know that I am thinking of you guys.

Bienvenue!

2006-01-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

Stepping onto the tarmak at Leopold Senghor International Airport at 7:15 in the morning last Sunday, the warm breeze was a welcome change to the not-cold-enough-to-be-a-real-winter-but-still-dry-enough-to-ruin-my-skin weather in Edmonton, and the why-has-spring-come-in-January day that I spent in NYC.

The airport here is wonderfully tiny - one luggage belt (which it turns out is a problem if you're not the only flight arriving that hour), some nice customs agents who don't really ask you any questions, and a calm segway into a minibus a la the Volkswagen that we had as kids that took me past a lightouse and fancy suburbs onward to my little neighbourhood. I have yet to see anything resembling a bidonville, and am surprised at the relative prosperity. That being said, I have not travelled around the city much - my days are full and it's not a good idea to go out after sundown.

I have been staying in a gorgeous little auberge with yellowish (almost safrony) walls in a neighbourhood called Mermoz, after the moqsue that is around the corner. The quartier is very quiet and reasonably posh, as far as the Boulangerie, the cars and the Pakistani embassy I pass on the walk to school make me think. The campus for my program is right near the ocean at a partner school for kids who will study business in America. The water is warm and clean, and the walk along the rue de le Corniche is spotted with unsavoury building developments(ie. Plaza Hotel and government party headquarters on what used to be public land), huge Baobab trees and the odd toubab (white person) riding a bike or jogging.

They feed me meat twice a day here - beef or goat in the afternoon, chicken or fish in the evening, and I'm trying to devise a plan to be served smaller portions so that I don't feel constantly over-full. My health is well, though the jetlag remains.

I apologise for my dryness, but I'm not yet feeling sentimental about what's going on, and I know certain people are craving info.

I have enrolled in 6 classes through the program, taught by professors but not at the university, and am trying to get into a 7th course at the university. Obviously some will have to be dropped. Classes are:
1. Wolof (local language),
2. Senegalese Society and Culture (the mandatory course),
3. l'Economie du developpement,
4. Reglement des crises en afriqe et la droit internationale,
5. French (boo! I didn't place out of the highest level),
6. Environment and Development in Senegal and Sub-Saharan Africa
7. trying to enroll in "commerce et commercants en afrique de l'ouest au 19e et 20e siecles", taught by Boubabcar Barry.

The trouble with classes at the University is that each department runs their own show including the beginning and end dates of semesters, and classes do not meet regularly, despite what the schedules may say. Also, should there be a strike in my faculty, my chance of getting credit is gone.

Also, today I went to my first market here. In general the similarities with India have prevented me from having any culture shock. I went to a second-hand market, where a lot of what they sold were unsold goods from North American thrift stores (I even saw one thing with a Value Village tag on it saying 99 cents). It's funny, though, the things that are cheap in NY and Edmonton are expensive here - shampoo, Old Navy pullovers, etc. - but other things, like tailor-made, special-designed clothes, and cell phones even, are relatively cheap.

Let this suffice for now. Tomorrow I will move in with my homestay family, and then the juicy postings will start to flow.

Ukrainian Christmas

2006-01-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

The larger, perhaps more boisterous side of my family; aka the Choms, or those without perfect pitch.

First posting

2006-01-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

This is the first posting to what I expect to become a weekly journal of my trip to Dakar for the enjoyment of my family and friends, which may or may not have further life once this prairie girl returns to her home continent.
To clarify, this is NOT
a) a place where I will pontificate about the glory of my everyday thoughts,
b) me trying to become a journalist,
c) me trying to make friends on the internet.

Enjoy!