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.

The Sixty Cent Shave

What is this, I come back from a week long trip traveling through places that most people only see in those exoctic magazines. Places that remind you bitterly of that friend, you know the one whose parents are doctors, businesmen, anything that lets them travel, that went to some exoctic far away location, some place that's more of a story than a place. So then why do I choose to write about something as typical, boring, unattractive and, if I may, personal (people don't usually talk opening about their shaving habits, and if they do it is never in a wanted conversation) topic.

The sixty cent shave, it took just enough time for the short, white bearded Senegalese man less than one minute to use his electric clippers to cut off my beard, my mustache. What does the sixty cent shave mean? Is it a social commentary? I mean those booths were old men sit you down and give you a haircut and a shave still exist, think about all of those movies with old men sitting around barber shops, with the straight razor and the strop were they wet the razor before they shave you. These things exist here, in fact many people set up little informal shops on the street, things like a chair, a mirror and a small sign showing the same typical haircuts. On top of all of this the fact that it costs only sixty cents, (300 F CFA). Or is it just a rhetorical devise, a literary form, kind of like Proust's cookie (how is that for a literary reference), that allows me to talk about other things, a way to look through a situation without really touching it, using it like a window, like a ledge to dive into other areas, areas much more exotic, dark and as of yet unexplored.

Palmeran, even the name of this place gives you this thought about it. I mean "palm" is in the name, it seems almost gawdy it works out so well. Palmeran, where in fact there are lots of palm trees, sand, small African children wrestling ("la lutte" in French, "beri" in wolof, a typical type of wrestling that involves usually more dancing than actual wrestling), fish, fishing boats and the enourmous sun that just seems to tan these memories with brightness. This place is the palm wine capital of Senegal, although we never actually saw any palm wine here, it makes sense. Its exotic, typically exotic, with the large beaches, wavy ocean, the sun, oh god the sun is always out, always hot. This was the first stop on our trip, the first step in a large stride across islands, much of the middle part of the country, until we ended up sitting on a beach with the wind clifss and a hotel that seemed much to expensive to cost only 8 dollars a night (but we will come back to this later).

Palmeran, getting there was an adventure in itself. Sitting in the minicar, basically a smaller version of a Jegan-Jay. The minicar to Samba Dia, a garage town, like so many of the slightly larger towns in this area, built up around a garage, around an area where cars stop and let people off, people get on, but its rare to see people stay, and the people you see sitting, the residence seem more like characters than people, they are the typical mother selling peanuts and home made baked goods, the small girl asking for money, the old men sitting with their aviator sunglasses and large boubous, sitting staring at the world thinking whatever old thoughts happend to compel them to stare at the world from behind those dark frames. Samba Dia to Palmeran in the same Minibus and then we get off as a random Palmeran. There are four! Four cities with the same name, and they aren't necessarily within walking distance of each other. The only difference is the nicknames that are attached to each of them. Palmeran geej, Palmeran ngaleen.

We don't know these things, we get off at the first one, squinting into the sun that seems so much brighter than Joal. Is this exotic, there is a road, the typical red dust that characterizes all of the roads in Senegal, this rust color that stains your clothes, covers your face, and clogs your nose so that every time you sneeze this red blood color covers your kleenex. We can hear the beach though, and we feel the wind from the ocean. Its shooting through narrow alleys of the city, seeming to whisper to us from behind this wall of a city that is hiding something much bigger than itself, hiding this ocean that is so impossibly big, something that can't stay hidden. So we need a room, a place, some sort of base camp.

The campement has been shut down. The government shut it down due to its old age, the lack of running water (at least not in the majority of the buildings). It does look old, the painted animals on the side of the little huts are faded, polkadotted with decay. We bribed some local children (using the cookies I bought in Joal) to show us here. "The next campement is a half hour walk down the road". Luckily one of the men there shows us to a Frenchman's house that operates as an auberge when his family isn't vacationing there. "Robert Toubab", the eccentric French man, grandpa age, who mumbles but laughs, talks constantly, mostly about nothing. I feel like I am staying at a grandparents house. He rents us all rooms, the same price as would be the cost of the campement. Seperate rooms with sinks in the rooms, and RUNNING WATER. I forget the comfort of things like this, the creature comforts of getting your water from a faucet instead of taking a cup full our of a basin or bucket. We sink right into these things, we are thirsty with change, thirsty with acting as toubab as possible. This trip is a new one, a trip to forget, to act ridiculously American, be selfish, intentionally not talk to Senegalese people, not have to tell someone to come eat with us if they pass. We are tired, I am tired, but right now we are sitting and relaxing letting the salt air push all of these worries out of our air, letting the breeze help us laugh this fatigue out burst by burst.

We head into village for provisions: cookies, wine, soda. We horde these things, speak quietly to everyone we see, we don't want them to catch on, don't want them to know too much, then they'll be interested. They'll invite us over for dinner, we'll stay for hours, have to spend the night, wake up shower with a bucket, drink tea, eat lunch, watch T.V. Instead we go back eat our cookies, drink the soda, save the wine for later and head to the beach. The sun shoots into us, it shoots through our skin and warms our blood. We mostly sit on the beach, venture into the water occassionally, but sit and stare at the ocean. We have no obligations, we have nothing to do but breathe in a scene, to wait for nothing elese to happen.

Palmeran. Two days with "Robert Toubab" and his house, where wasps build nests on the bathrooms, where the Senegalese people pass just to ask us if we want to buy ANYTHING, they will go and search for it for us. The first two days of speaking English, speaking Serer, which although it is Senegalese it is better than Wolof, it is new, exciting. We stumble over these things, they bring back memories of Marlodge, the small Serer village I visited a long time ago, of Simal, another small serer village. For the others they think of Mbamb, a small village where we will end up watching some festival appear out of nowhere, but for now we are in Palmeran, where we do nothing particularly extraordinary, we do typical things, lay on the beach, don't necessarily act like tourists or like Senegalese. We are lying on this beach between two bodies, between the ocean that brought us here (well not actually the ocean, more of an airplane, but hell it sounds so poetic), and the land that we've come to know. Like usual we are lying right in the middle of these two extremes.

It is out of this that shoots us to Marlodge, well first to Samba Dia again and then to Dangan, and then a three hour wait for the boat leaving to Marlodge. We wait, like usual, sitting on a bench in front of a store, on a bench with some Senegalese women selling cashews and cashew fruits (I never knew there were fruits that came from the same tree as cashews), these Doctor Seuss like creations, these bizarres pepper like monstrousities that cost less than 10 cents each (although I never got the courage to try one). We have to deter the local canoe men, they try to get us to take their boats which are easily three times as expensive, because "time is money". They assume we are impatient tourists, that we will wait but eventually come around, after the first hour huff and walk back and forth scanning the horizon for the next boat. Instead we sit and wait, talking amongst ourselves and letting the delta breeze blow on.

Marlodge is an island, there is no way there except for boat. There is no bridge. There is no spot where one can walk because of a sand bar. We have to wait, we have to wait to take a boat through the delta, which seems more like a string of rivers than a delta, than the ocean pushing into the continent. These long windind arms that are lined with mangroves. The birds. The small men (small because they are so distant) paddling around their hand carved canoes, pulling their fishing nets from the water. This is just getting to Marlodge. This is just crossing the delta. Once we are in Marlodge, things stay surprisingly the same, you see all the pirogues literring the shores, the horse carts (because there are no cars on Marlodge). Marlodge is cut off, no cars, no roads (at least not in the normal sense, more liek paths), no noise after dark. All the electricity comes from solar panels, and at night you can see all the stars.

Here we stay with a friend of the family, a Senegalese man that was dating a 60 year old French women, a women easily twice his age. He brings us to "his" house, which is the house that the French women constructed here, so that when she was done working she could retire to Senegal. The friend, Ferdinand, tells us that he broke off his relationship with the French women, the "Française" as I call her, because of problems, namely that he couldn't have a real family with her. He still watches over her house though, still lives like he used to, as if he had half a share in this house.

We do pretty much the same things here, just sit around and try not to do much. We go swimming, this time not in the ocean with its giant waves and hot sand, but on a small river, where we pluck mussels from the river bottom to cook later (which we do!). The current pushes us down the river, its surprisingly strong. We swim and then wait, wait through the night, stare at the stars and get ready to continue, to take the next step in our journey towards Mbamb, a trip that will take more time than it should have.

Mbamb and Toubab Diallo, the next step in our week long journey, but not now, a little later, I have run out of time at the cyber.

Let's hope that it is sooner than later.

Sorry

I am currently traveling.

All of the towns I am traveling in don't have electricity, let alone internet.

I'll update this thing later.

Stay tuned.

Loud Voices

Do I repeat myself? I am not sure, I would like to believe that each of these blog entries is a new and completely independent topic, idea, etc. but I am tempted to think this is not the case. I guess I should not be concerned, my life does not occur like this, even my thoughts. Things are intermingled, interdependent, and thus so are these blog entries. So, sorry if I repeat myself but...

People here talk very loudly. Not in the American sort of way, no, in fact people are very quite if we were to compare them to Americans. People talk loudly when they want to be heard, not just when they are excited. The men will outright scream, or appear to do so, in order to get their point across, which is more often than not. In the U.S. we talk loudly in public places, make loud gestures, and keep doing so. I think the key thing here is longevity. An American will talk for 45 minutes on a cell phone in a public place, often exposing very intimate details, in a loud and flambuoyant manner. A senegalese person will argue loudly until they feel the argument is over, and then remain silent. Argument don't last long here.

Even if they do, they are usually organized arguments, like the sort of village meeting kind. You know, lets talk about if we should send out children to French school kind of thing. People speak very loudly in these cases. Not only will they speak loudly they will gesture, flail their arms around, point at the person they are responding too, and distort their face as if the person that just made the comment was actually causing them physical pain.

This is all very dramatic.

Yet true. They do these things. Its a daily reality, even the taxi men do these things when you argue over 100 CFA, the equivqlent of 20 cents in the US. Its almost like a game, to try to see who can act more hurt, who can seem more pitiable. When a taxi man tells you his first price it is completely normal to act shocked, if not downright amazed. "WHAT!". I often pretend to lose the ability to speak I am so shocked. This works, at least it starts the game, each of us trying to pretend like we are getting the absolute worse end of this deal. Ultimately we both end up relatively well off, I will pay this taxi driver three times as much as I would pay a taxi driver in the country side, but I still get a taxi between two destinations for less than three U.S. dollars.

Theatrics its such an important part of daily life here, making things appear worse or better than they are. This is why on religious holidays every seems rich, because even the poorest people have on the nicest clothing (and honestly it is hard to tell the difference, the clothign is so similar). This is like Magal, the yearly pilgramage to Touba, where people will spend as much money as they can so that they can cook enough food to feed anybody they meet. A friend that went to Magal actually told me they beg, they beg you to eat their food. This makes them look good towards others, and since giving alms is part of Islam, one of the five pillars, they take this as an alm, although most of the people that made it to Touba have a relatively large amount of money.

We won't talk about this though.

Even at our school, or the Catholic school I work at, the Principal, the teachers, everyone with authority, or the semblence of authority, speaks loudly. Just now the Principal is scolding a child outside of the computer lab and I can hear him clearly, almost uncomfortably so, he is that loud. His voice isn't soft or unsure, it is loud and clear and angry. People have mastered these sort of things here. The teachers too, they have mastered this Teacher's are the masters and students the lesser mentality. It seems to work though, because for the most part the problems that exist in the U.S. don't seem to exist here. Or at least appear hidden. I recently found out their is a school for all the kids that were kicked out of all the other public and private schools in the area. I think a lot of the times the directors of schools will expell children if they cause problems, whereas in the U.S. expelling a child is the last and final step. We tolerate more misbehavoir, which actually might reinforce it, but we also give them more chances. Children don't need to be kicked out of school in places like this. School is often the only chance that children here have of getting out of their social environment. School is such an opportunity, even if many college students can't find jobs, yet its the possiblity. Without this first possiblity they have even less chances. Without a college degree, even if it does mean you have to become a teacher because that is the only job that is hiring, you can't do much other than farm, fish or sell things (either in a store or as a street vendor). All of these choices don't bring in much money. I recently spoke with an ederly women who makes treats to sell at our school and she said she makes less than 500 CFA each time she sells a batch of here donuts. This is less than 1 dollar in profit every time she sells almost 35 bags of donuts. She can't raise the price either because all of the other women sell their donuts at the same price, so if she raised the price the children simply would wait till after school to buy them from another women.

Oh, and stay out of Dakar. The OCI is going on, an islamic conference, and Dakar is like a military camp right now. I have never seen so many police officers and soldiers in my life, one would think Dakar was being occupied by a foreign army.