That's all folks

What an anti-climatic end to a blog. My program is over and I am already out of the country, in fact in a completely different environment, sitting around Copenhagen for a while. I am tempted to try to go back, to log all of those missed logs, to write about all of the experiences, but I also feel like I should try to move ahead. Its so strange to be done already, but I am glad the wait is over. The last two weeks were nothing but waiting. Senegalese people don't make farewells easy. They remind you every half hour that you will be gone soon. Plus they stop talking to you, really, as if you are already gone. They say things like "Don't go stay and live here", or "You'll be back right?" Nevertheless, its just this quite sadness, they won't ever admit that they are sad, they just won't talk, which is a sign that there is a problem in Senegalese culture.

Silence characterized two of my departures. First from Joal, I remember the taxi ride to the garage, the area where all of the buses and cars going to other towns wait, with one of my neighbors. He just stared out the window, didn't say a word. A few times I tried to talk but got only one word responses. "Waaw", "Daydet", "Inch'allah". He did stick his head into the cab once I got in, the cab going to Dakar. He just held my hand and thanked me. Then he left.

Dakar was similar. The night I left (my flight left at 2 in the morning so I left the house around midnight) barely a person said a word. Most of them just continued to watch T.V. Finally around midnight I decided to leave by saying "Well, I guess I'll go". They followed me to the door, first splashing water in front of me (a good luck gesture in Senegalese custom) and then everyone shook my left hand (a gesture that signifies the hope that you will meet again soon in the future). No one made miraculous speeches, no one even said much. I just kind of disappeared into the darkness, shifting through the somber streets until I came upon the main road, hailing a taxi.

I guess I was sad as well, I mean I didn't necessarily try to initiate any conversation. It was interesting, watching Dakar one last time, going over the newly paved roads, seeing Dakar in this mess it is. I don't know if the taxi man sensed the finality of it but he seemed to drive much longer than necessary, taking turns down side streets, going in front of buildings that weren't necessarily on the way. He seemed to loop around the city, creating a web back and forth across a city that I would soon leave.

What does it mean to live somewhere? I know, it means to be there, to hear the sound, but I want to know is there a difference between just being there and being a part of 'there'. I remember how comfortable I had grown, being able to understand the conversations on the bus, being able to watch TV and know what they were saying. The way that responses just rolled off my tongue.

I barely looked out of the window when we left. The lights were the same, that strange contrast of brilliance and darkness, the shadow of a world ending. Taking off from Dakar you shoot directly over the Atlantic, the divide between two worlds, the end of a continent. I remember seeing those lights for the first time, like some signal on the horizon. Coming into Dakar for the first time, these lights seemed like a beacon, life exists here, there is something pouring out of this darkness. Leaving, I have trouble thinking of what the lights could mean, of what they are illuminating?

I don't talk to the person in the seat next to me. I put my head against the back of the headrest and close my eyes, just so I can pretend to be asleep.

The sun bleaches out this darkness as we reach Portugal. The Portuguese were the first to reach Senegal, brushing against its what must have been frightening shores, a world so foreign, so bizarre. I feel like I am discovering this process in reverse, the red roofed villas catching my eye with a twinge. What happened to the decaying cement, the typical black birds? We get off the plain and it smells like spring. You can still see the ocean, the great ocean that never changes, only just reflects through people's minds differently. Another continent. Another world.

What else can I say?

I seem to have held my breath since we took off and when I release a whole world floods out and mixes with this one. How long will it take for my expressions to not be laced with Senegal, how long will it take before I can't think of it so easily. I shouldn't ask these questions. I should step into the bus, wait in line, almost miss my plane and think about Denmark. I should.

P.S. I have uploaded a whole ton of new pictures, pass your eyes over their content immediately!:

http://community.webshots.com/album/563209529YdnmhW?vhost=community

Research

Means no time. Means no creativity. Means no blog posts right now.

I have way way way to much to do so I can't blog.

Imagine what I am doing.

That's an order.

Pictures of my work

I teach computer classes
I teach English classes

I helped establish an in-school library

Pictures

Yeah boy!

That is the name of a fish, or at least its pronounced that way. It is also an insult, meaning a skinny, good for nothing loser who has neither a job, nor any sort of future. Weird.

Fish. These things remind me of Joal. We only eat fish at my house in Joal, only. The only expectation is when relatives come over and then we get meat. To think that I was a vegetarian before I came here.

This has nothing to do with anything, so I will start talking about Easter, because its so much more interesting.

So people talk Easter up, they talk about it months in advance. The old people talk about the Galax, this peanut butter like yogurt that all the christians make in mass quantities to give to their muslim neighbours. They make tons of this stuff! I came home one night to find two tubs filled with the sauce, the peanut sauce with sugar, Bwee (or monkey bread, a fruit from the boabab tree) and water. Two tubs, I mean I could have sat in these tubs and had it come up to my waste. Along with that they had two tubs of millet, these small balls of millet that would be added to the Galax later. My host mother said she bought 15 kilograms of sugar, 20 kilograms of Bwee, and a ridiculous amount of other ingredients. They used a hose to fill up the basins, like a garden hose because the basins couldn't fit under the faucet.

They spent three days making the Galax, spending the first day buying all the ingredients and then putting them all in a bowl together. The second day they started making the sauce and the millet seperately. The third day they mixed them together and dished some into little bowls to give to all of the neighbors. This whole holiday is about solidarity, showing the muslims that even though it is a christian holiday that they are involved too. It is also an expectation, since during Ramadan, the holiday that ends Korite (the month long fast for muslims), all of the muslim families give out Soow (pronounced "so"), a yogurt like milk drink, to Christian families. Its weird too, how all of the christians fast during Lent, like actually fast. Some don't even drink water during the day. Its nothing like in the States, we choose one thing to give up. They say that they fast during the day, give gifts to the poor and pray. The idea behind the fasting is to give the food you normally would have eaten to someone with less than you. Despite their insistence on fasting, I know no one that actually did this, that gave anyone anything out of the ordinary.

This could be the reason that people got excited about the Galax, because they made so much of it that you could pig out on it for hours and never eat it all. Its funny though, because sometimes people actually do this, just eat cup after cup continuously and then end up very sick the next day. The peanut sauce isn't the easiest thing on the stomach.

Galax. That was it. For talking the holiday up so much, and mostly the young people who talk about how drunk they get each Easter (a common way to celebrate holidays among the catholics here), nothing much happened. I went out but no one else in my family did, they just watched T.V. and acted like normal. Everyone just seemed bored. We went to church, then came home and lazed around.

People talk. There is a word for it in Wolof: Waxtu. It means talk for the sake of talking. Talk in circles.

The sixty cent shave, part 3

Coming over the hill, getting the first glimpse of Toubab Diallo caught me off guard. Maybe it's the nostalgia more than what I actually felt, or it could have been the fatigue, but I remember just being struck by the sight of all these hills, the cliffs, the ocean and the houses that were perched on the edge of this, the city rolling over the landscape like some giant wave. It felt like I'd crossed some border, like I'd found a part of Senegal that was unknown, hidden. I guess Toubab Diallo is kind of like this, it's no Sally (the real tourist area, with giant five star hotels and all). I think the LonelyPlanet guidebook describes Toubab Diallo as a quaint place, like Sally but still unnoticed by the majority of tourists. That would make sense, despite all the white people, all the Europeans that did live there, they weren't ridiculous, at least not on the outside, they were all holed up in their houses, behind their high courtyard walls.

There were hotels, lots of hotels, in fact beautiful ridiculous hotels with a Senegalese staff that didn't expect you to say hello to them, they didn't expect you to acknowledge their existence, they just sat and figured you were European, that you didn't care about them or their experience. They didn't automatically say hello. I shouldn't complain, after all, this is what we were looking for, a little escape from this ever present conversation, a little silence as oppossed to being expected to carry on a conversation well past your interest.

The hotels. My god the hotel we stayed in was beautiful, this sea shell ridden, Disney Land like structure. Grass roofs. Wild flowers planted everywhere. Everything looked rustic, like it had been there forever, as if the rocks just formed in these ways. When we got here we thought this must have been a mistake. The guide book said we could find rooms for 4,000 CFA a night (8 dollars), but this place is exotic, wild, closed and cloistered. We thought for sure something had happened, the hotel had upgraded, they were now hosting only the elite Europeans, the business men that come to Senegal for a little relaxing, sit on the terrace and read a book, drink a cup of coffee and watch the tide role in and out. Despite this, we got a room, a beautiful masoleum like room, that you had to step down into, and it only cost us 5,000 a night (10 dollars). It was the dorm room, they would rent out beds as opposed to the room.

This room was like a tomb, like some exoctic burial site, especially my bed which looked just like a rocky ledge with a matress on it. You can see the ocean from the window. These things seem to good, their must be some catch, maybe we have to buy dinner, or maybe they'll come in a steal everything we own during the night.

Yet, they didn't, nothing happened, the only thing we would have had to deal with was the minor inconvience of having a fourth person stay in the extra bed that was in the room, but when we asked if the lady at the front desk wanted the key, she told us she wouldn't book anyone in the extra bed.

So we had a room. The beach was right outside our window. That is how the story starts.

We hit the beach soon enough. First to get something to eat and then later to swim. The ocean water was like any ocean water but to the backdrop of these cliffs, to all the ritzy European summer homes it didn't feel like Senegal. I guess the inebriation of it all stopped us from criticing it. It had a way of not upsetting us, despite all the weird things about it, the gitchy hotels, the Senegalese people that told us outright that they depended on tourists for EVERYTHING. This culture of expectations. Europeans need to come. Europeans need to spend their money, buy a house here, employ people, buy food at the super market, give to beggars, build hotels, create revenue, consume, eat, feed. These things only appear in retrospect, all these criticisms that live just next to the memories.

We didn't do much but relax, take in the sun, walk down the beach and sit on the terrace at night at feel the strong ocean wind blow over us. Every so often people would pop into this imaginative little world, like the Senegalese man who popped his head over the veranda and asked us if we wanted fish, a fire, anything? The senegalese women who sold jewerly just outside the front gate of the hotel, always asking us to just look, and then asking us what we will buy. These things litter the memories of the scenery, the beaches, the clear nights, and the quite days sitting on a hammock doing nothing but thinking. This was what we needed, time to think, time to do nothing, be expected to do nothing, and just think. Not think about something specific, not brood about our jobs, not plan out our next step in our research, just time to let our mind wander, contemplate nothing and come back to the world through this.

We ended up meeting some other students there, just by chance, they were out for a weekend, just visiting a beach town. We hung out, hit the beach together, took naps. Did things unextraordinary, even if it was in an extraordinary place, at least on the outside, at least the first time you come over the hill and the city seems like some Greek scenery, like some Mediterranian village, with the red clay bricks on every roof and the roads that never run straight. We climbed hills to go to stores (we asked for directions to a supermarket, well any place we could buy beer, and the man on the street told us to "climb the mountain", which when we did climb the hill, which he refered to as the mountain, magically we found a suprette, a toubab market that sold beer). The hardest part was leaving, not because I didn't want to leave, I mean I didn't want to leave, I didn't want to have to start doing work, to think about my research, but it was because we were caught in the two faces of this place. We couldn't find a cab that wouldn't charge us 5 times the normal price. We ended up paying, I guess overall it works out, the cab only cost 30 dollars and there were seven of us and it was an hour and a half car ride.

That is the end of the story that was inspired by the sixty cent shave. My beard and mustache are coming in again, a fact that the small bearded Senegalese man that shaved my beard, commented on when I walked by his booth the other day. "You beard is coming back, are you sure you don't want another shave?" I feel like ending this post with something sentimental and sappy like, "Not until I have some more memories to sift through."

Instead I will end it with a word, some random phrase, like Pickle.

Just like Richard Brautigan, ending his book with Mayonaise, just because he had never read a book ending in that way. Except I don't want to forget, and let myself end talking about something else, finding something more important to say, and let everyone down when I don't say the word pickle.

The sixty cent shave pt. 2

Mmamb (pronounced bomb), I am tempting so say something like "Man, that place was the BOMB!" Get it? Even if it wasn't the best place, didn't draw more tourists than anywhere else, didn't have the most exciting beaches, or any that I saw, it was the bomb. Not in some crazy-wild-party-beach-madness-running-adjective sort of way, it was chill, cool, relax, in a way only a small Serer village could be. Our descent into mbamb was the end of this choatic trip, this trip that took a whole day to travel the distance between Milwaukee and Madison (usually a two hour trip). It took us one day, and I had to hold a rag against the roof of one of the buses we took in order to avoid getting soaked from some brown colored water that poured in from who knows what on the roof. When we finally got to Mbamb, it was dark and we were tired and hungry and I didn't know what to expect.

Walking through Foundioune, the bigger tourist village just on the outskirts of Mbamb, reminded me so much of Joal. Things were lively, and people spoke more Wolof than Serer. We headed through this choas, these mad streets, walked through the darkness down a long road that led nowhere, and at some point in this nowhere we arrived at point.

We, but for the others this was a return, a sort of homecoming, both Ellen and Madelyn had been here, had lived here, so for them the giant trees, the fields, all of this was a memory. We marched through this darkness and they pointed to a tree: I sat under that tree and read. They pointed to a fence: In that fence I helped herd the cows. I don't know these things, these things are like the shadows all around us, these indistinct blurs that you can never fully see, that always exist because of the abscence of clarity.

We wake up and the village is exploding, at least that is what it sounds like, this machine gun fire like procession choking the air. We head off into the midst of it, walking closer and closer to this commotion. We stumble upon a herd of humanity, the whole village is assembled in a circle under a giant mangoe tree, all staring at the old women dancing. The same bullhorn loudspeaker is set up and high pitched singing along with metal toned guitar music drowns out any thoughts, its surprising how people still are talking through all this sound. The drums. The guitars. The singing. The excited cries of the old women as they dance in a circle. We get special seats.

Its a celebrationg, and its Serer style. A French foreign aide organization just finished constructing additional classes at the local middle school. The military is there. The village chief is there (who Madelyn makes the impossibly hillarious comment that his voice sounds exactly like the puppet, the old female one, from Mister Roggers). We are led to seats among the old men with their boubous, dark glasses and scarves despite the warm weather. We just laugh and watch the music, and watch everyone come and go, people pushing their way closer, pushing their way through this circle. We leave once the speeches start.

We head off into the sun, out of the giant shade of the mangoe tree. We leave this vibrant circle of pulsing humanity and head into town. Mbamb is Serer and you can just feel it by being there. Things take on a more basic form. Most of the houses are fenced off with the branches that have fallen from palm trees. Most of the compounds don't hold one giant house but a series of smaller huts, with grass roofs and twisted branches holding them up. Just like Marlodge, this place has a feel that is Serer, a sight that just inspires a lifestyle. We spend the day touring the town, Madelyn and Ellen catching up with all their old friends in town. When I say old I mean old,most of them are old women, joyously crying about how great toubabs are. We walk around this place, sputtering Serer and just living in it, speaking with Djin Thiarry, a Senegales man that never stops smiling and refers to me constantly as his big brother. There are more mango trees than I have seen anywhere else, and you can see all of the small mangoes ripening on the branches. The second mango season is coming, or at least they tell me.

Describing places like this is so hard, I tend to leave out so much detail. People come from thousands of miles away to see places like this, to live exoctically, but after seeing it so much it doesn't shock you. Seeing donkeys, horses, chickens roaming around the courtyards, often into the houses, have ceased to surprise me. The houses, which are often put together with any used material they can find, all of this seems so hard to describe. Once you have seen a small Serer village you have seen them all. That doesn't mean that you know them, that you can write all of the other ones off, its just seeing grass huts looses its appeal after you see them weekly, if not daily.

Even though most of the time in Mbamb is spent catching up, or is spent on Ellen and Madelyn catching up, we enjoy ourselves. Mbamb is an eco-village, a village that is dedicated to using agriculturally sustainable techiniques to develop. They reuse everything, have a string of meetings about new initiatives, about new ideas, about their future. Its all about organizing, organizing and trying to change their state. They have a biomass project, solar ovens, solar panels, and a whole new string of ideas. This is Mbamb, and the funny thing about it is things like this are typical of many villages, even if they don't call themselves eco-villages. The reuse, the fact that everything short of plastic bags, and even those most of the times, can be reused is a reality of most small villages here.

More to come on Toubab Diallo.