Multi-cultural day

I volunteered to help out with a multi-cultural day that ISDD (the law school we share a building with) was hosting. Normally the ISDD students from abroad will give speeches and prepare activities representing their country, so this year they decided to invite an American student from CIEE to participate. To be honest it was a lot more work than I had hoped for, especially because my partner got sick and I had to plan it on my own. In the end though it was a really fun day. 

For my speech I had planned a nice little cultural blurb about the States and pop culture and the media, only to find out that every other country had just prepared a list of statistics about the countries geography and political system. They liked my speech anyway though. The activity I planned was bingo, and it was pretty hilarious because everyone got super into it. I started withe rule where you only had to get a row of words to win. They seemed to get that but then I switched to saying that you had to get the whole board to win, but they kept shouting bingo after only getting a row and running up to me yelling "i want a fish!" (the prize for the winner was a fish - not my idea). 

The best part of the night though was the Sabar. I had already been to one sabar and knew that it was an intense circle of drumming and dancing. I also knew that they were gonna make me dance. So before the Sabar me and a friend went to get smoothies before the inevitable humiliation. I came back with the full anticipation of a huge party of dancing, only to walk into a room of 5 Senegalese students playing scrabble. Probably the last thing on earth I would have expected, but I was quite pleased I didn't have to dance. When I asked about the Sabar he said "oh well start setting up soon." A perfect example of Senegalese time - it was 7:30 and the Sabar was supposed to start at 6:00. 

Second to the left is Danny, the ISDD president who planned the event and who I collaborated with.

One last visit to Papa's

I had to visit one more time before heading home. This time though I brought a sufficient number of friends for papa to be satisfied. 

I also met Papa's brother, who I had talked with a couple of times on skype while at his house but didn't get to meet until now because he works in Japan. He came home to visit for two weeks and I managed to see him just before he left to go back. I also took a picture of every single other member of papa's family, which was a lot - of course they all came out again to say good bye to me. Samba's grandma gave me a wonderful prayer before I left where she basically told me over and over again what a wonderful family I have, and so I told her the same.

Malang's house

I met Malang through a friend of a friend of my brother. For such a small connection, he became my best Senegalese friend outside of my family. His house also became my favorite hang out spot. There's nothing really special there, its just a small apartment where he and his friends hang out, but me and my friend Emily always had the greatest time teaching them english, drinking attaya and learning how to play the guitar. We never hung out at his house without laughing hysterically at something.

 

This was probably due to the fact that his friends were all such characters - it was impossible to be bored at his house. For example, this is a picture of Ousman. This was one of like 20 photos I took of him posing with different accessories and facial expressions. He also loved to wear sparkly pants and was always putting on cologne. 

Malang was also the manager of a band called Sur L'arbre, which two girls from CIEE ended up being apart of. It was a great connection to have though cause we always knew when and where concerts would be.

Wolof

Wolof is a very interesting language. When I first came here my host family and friends all told me “you gotta learn Wolof, it’s so easy.” In fact, it is kind of easier. The grammar is really way simpler than French, it’s just that French is easier to learn from my perspective because the grammar is more similar to English than Wolof grammar is.

For starters, Wolof has no adjectives. Anything that would be an adjective in English is a verb in Wolof. For example, “muus” is the verb for “to be intelligent” and “tayal” is the verb for “to be lazy.” Because of this, there is no verb “to be” in Wolof. If you want to say you are somewhere, you use the word “nekk” meaning “to be located.” The whole language is simplified to eliminate the most commonly used verb in the English and French language.

Another simplification is that verbs don’t conjugate. When you are fluent in a language, conjugating verbs is no big deal. But when you are learning a language, memorizing chow to conjugate verbs, especially with so many irregulars, is a huge pain and I am thankful without it.

There are some parts of Wolof that are more complicated than English and French though. For example, there three different types of pronouns you use depending on where you want to put the emphasis on in the sentence. In English, you could say “I like cats” as a simple informative statement. But if someone asked you “what animal do you like?” you would say “I like cats.” The sentence is the same you just change your intonation to emphasize the object in the sentence. If some asked “how do you feel about cats?” you would respond “I like cats.” In Wolof, a different pronoun would be used in each of those three sentences. And it gets even more complicated than that – if you are talking about your habitual day you use one time of pronoun, if you are talking about something as a condition you use a different kind of pronoun, if you are presenting yourself or a friend you use a different kind of pronoun, etc. And to top it off, there are static verbs and active verbs, and you use different pronouns for each type. So the lack of complication in verb conjugations is made up in the pronoun part of the language. I still think it is simpler than French, but because I am used to verb conjugations and not pronoun conjugations, I find the French grammar easier to get used to.

Another interesting aspect of Wolof is perhaps more of a cultural difference than a language difference. In the US, when someone asks how you are you always say “I’m good” and if someone asks how school is going  or how your day has been, you usually say “good” and if someone asks if you’re having fun you say “yes.” In Senegal, these responses are far too positive. If someone asks if you’re having fun you are supposed to say “only a little.” In the village my Peace Corps volunteer told me that saying you is having fun is a sign that you are showing off your wealth. In Dakar people don’t necessarily make that assumption, but they still always respond with “only a little” because as my Wolof professor puts it “it is rare that someone is completely and totally happy.”  The answer to “how are you” is “I’m here only,” which is really a quite cynical view of your life status. Even if they ask “how is your family” the correct response is “they’re there.” If someone asks you how your day has been or how school is you normally say the equivalent of “it’s going” or “it’s been alright.” The most positive response that is acceptable to give is “I’m on top of things.”

There are also some words in Wolof that just don’t exist. For example, the word cute doesn’t exist, so they just use the French word. One really interesting one is that the word sad doesn’t exist in Wolof. There multiple ways of saying “I am sad,” in Wolof, such as “my heart is not at ease.” But there is no direct word for it.  Also instead of saying “best friend” in Wolof, they say “my friend of the same nose,” which I think is really cute. Also the word for head is Bop in Wolof, which is also really cute. And the word for cat is Mousse, which is quite a coincidence because of mom’s cat named Moose.

The language used to talk about family also has some differences. For example, there is a different word for your aunt on your dad’s side and your aunt on your mom’s side. My Wolof professor said that is because those two people have different roles in your life, which shows the influence of cultural differences between Senegal and the States because family roles are much more important in Senegal. Also, a girl will call her brother’s wife her wife, rather than a sister in law. This is interesting because being homosexual is not only unaccepted in Senegal but illegal, so a girl calling someone their “wife” would not lead people to assume they are married to another girl because that is not a part of their culture (especially in the villages). Another wording difference is that there are two words for family. The most commonly used is “wa ker” which means everyone you are even remotely related to. The second “mbokk” refers more to the people who depend on you, as my Wolof professor puts it. This normally means kids, but it could also mean the people you support financially because in Senegal if you have a job and your siblings don’t, it is your responsibility to financially support all of your siblings and their families. There is no word that directly translates to “immediate family” because in Senegal people rarely live with just their immediate family, they live with anyone who is remotely related to them who lives in the same city. That is why my family is so big – most of the people living there are not just my mom’s kids, but also her nieces and nephews that live in Dakar for school or work.

Names also have some cultural differences. There are a lot of people in Senegal named “papa” and “mama” and I always just assumed that those were just Senegalese names, since the word for mom and dad are completely different in Wolof. As it turns out, it is tradition that if you are named after your granddad you are called “papa” and if you are named after your granda you are called “mama.” Another interesting thing is that last names in Dakar repeat a lot. For example, my family is a “Diop” which is a very common last name, and there are also a lot of “faye’s” and “Sene’s.” Each of the last names has some historical connection with a certain village/ethnicity in Senegal. For example, Faye is a Pular name. In Senegal they have something called “joking cousins,” which is where two people who have a certain pair of last names are cousins meaning they are immediately allies. For example, “Diop” and “Ndaiye” are joking cousin names, so if I met someone named Ndayie they would get really excited because we were now like family. Another interesting fact is that when kids are called by their parents, the appropriate response is the shout their last names. So if mom or dad called to me from upstairs, rather than responding with “yeah” I would say “Korein”

My last note about Wolof is the fact that it is not a written but a spoken language. All schools in Senegal are either French or in some rare cases another language like English or Spanish, but kids never learn how to read or write Wolof, even if it is their first language. This is a very weird phenomenon for me, the idea of speaking English fluently but knowing how to read and write in only French. When I asked my brother to help me with Wolof homework, he had a harder time reading the Wolof than I did, just because I actually learned how to spell the words in Wolof while he never did. It also makes spelling very interesting. Non one ever knows how to spell anything in Wolof - people will always just have to sound things out if they want to write it cause they never learned how to spell even the most common words. I’ve even seen billboards that have spelled things wrong in Wolof. This concept would make for a good potential thesis project, because there are many studies already about the representation of language in people’s heads, and I think purely oral languages would be a good addition to this field.  Plus that would allow me to get a grant to go back to Senegal, which would be awesome. 

Sine Saloun

For our last mini travel vacation all of us took a Pirog to an Island in Sine Saloun called Mar Lodj.

Victoria's really cute kids came with us.

We took a Charrett ride through the village. At one point about 50 kids randomly started chasing us yelling "cadeau" which means "gift"

Then we watched a wrestling match. It started 4 hours late (typical) so we were waiting around for a while, but it was worth it. The matches were super intense and everyone in the village was there. The kids were also super friendly and outgoing and wanted to play with us the whole time. At one point the wrestling match just randomly went into overdrive and everyone just started cheering super loud and dancing and people were running through the rink and giving money to the drummers. It was crazy but so fun to watch.

We also met with a peace corps volunteer who was about to finish her two years. She worked with the village women to create their own business where they sold things like jam and batik, like in the picture.

My friend tried to climb a palm tree and did really well for her first attempt (I couldn't even get my arms around it)

But she was still showed up by a local senegalese boy

On the way home we stopped to look at the biggest Baobob tree in west africa.

We even got to go inside it. It smelled bad but was really cool to see. Especially cause there were hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling which was crazy cool.

More on Arame Yvone

Here are some more great Arame Yvone moments:

She kept asking me if she could use my camera and my phone and I kept saying no, so she asked for less valuable things like my floss and toothbrush. Finally I said she could have a squirt of hand santitizer, which she was really excited about. Her response was: "Oh Emma, you are very tolerant!"

We went for a run, which is always a fun experience with Arame Yvone because she will continuously talk the whole time, usually about how strong we're gonna get because we're exercising. She also will often ask for a break, and then when we stop tell me that we can't stop we have to keep running. So then I make her stop to catch her breath, and then she gets mad at me and says "don't lie to me Emma, I know you want to run." One time we ran to the monument and climbed the stairs so we could see all of dakar. When I said it was time to go she took a deep breath and said "I couldn't possibly. How could I ever leave this view!"

My favorite moment was one morning at 7 am when I dragged myself out of bed and left my room to go to the bathroom. Arame Yvone was in the hallway. I was wearing PJs and had bed head and said bonjour to her in a really sleep voice, and she responded "Emma you are so pretty. When you sleep, you sleep profoundly." This was definitely not a true statement, particularly at that moment in time, but I appreciated the compliment none the less.

Back to St. Louis and Lampoul

Two weekends ago the environment class went on a field trip to St. Louis and Lampoul, but a lot of people not in the class, like me, tagged along. In St. Louis we visited a damn and learned about all of its environmental benefits and downsides.

The story of this plant is pretty cool. I forget most of the details, but I think the plant is causing a lot of problems for the environment, so this Senegalese women found out how to the use the plant to make fuel and is making a huge difference for the entire city while also making quite a profit.

We crossed the boarder and entered Mauritania! We were only there for about 5 minutes, but I'm still going to tell everyone I've been to Mauritania.

The we re-took the lovely off road adventure to the desert.

The other truck got stuck in the sand.

And they had this cute little dinner tent set up where they made us a really really good Yassa Poulet, which is one of my favorite dinners here. It is chicken with rice and this really good sauteed onion sauce.

And of course I rode a camel again :)

And then at night we made a camp fire and told riddles and jokes which was really fun.

The next day we woke up early for the sunset, but it was so foggy that we could barely even see the sun, let alone the sun set sky it usually lights up. We also went on a surprise 5 km hike through the desert to the beach. He told us it would be about 2 kilometers there and back, but that was not at all the case. It wouldn't have been too bad but my flip flop broke. It was fine for the deserty parts because you don't need shoes for sand anyway, but then the terrain turned to spiky plants and cactuses, like shown below, which was not fun. We came up with an inventive way to fix my shoe with a hair tie, but it was still hard to walk fast. When we reached a village, the professor literally bought the shoes off of a random woman in the village. I felt really bad at first, but the woman was very happy to sell her shoes and I realized we were probably paying way more for them than she bought them for anyways.

Given that the hike was so much longer than we thought, the beach was a perfect break to relax and cool down.

Shopping

HLM is the best place to go for buying fabric. My sister Therese is a really good tailor, so I have gotten plenty of clothes made here. Its also a good place to go for fo dem (henna). Someone offered to do our hand for free and I said no. Then another guy came up and did Emily's hand, and it was so good that we payed him to do our nails and feet too. Then the first guy came and was upset because he offered first, so Tomomi said he could do her nails.

The best place to buy anything other than Fabric, is the Ouakam Market that comes to my neighborhood every thursday. You can get really really cheap things there, like a nice pair of shoes for 6 dollars or a scarf for one dollar. Most of the stuff is used, but its even cheaper than good will so its pretty hard to resist. The only downside is its super crowded and people are constantly trying to get you to bargain for things you don't even want - though it's still better than the touristy markets.

Recent internship activities

I did two different Juggling workshops  at my internship. My supervisor is really cool because if you suggest a project she will always say yes and follow through and make it happen. So I told her I can juggle and i could teach the kids and so she scheduled me in for two different days. They both went really well, the kids did better than I expected. They didn't make it to three balls (we lost the third ball anyway when someone threw it on the roof) but I was just impressed they could do it with two balls. They got pretty board of it quickly though and moved onto playing soccer or their own random games. At one point in the first session half the kids randomly took off their pants. I looked at my supervisor and she just laughed. The weirdest part was when we still had an hour left in the session but had already finished all our activities, so my supervisor just said we could leave and the kids would play soccer until their parents showed up. This is something that would NEVER fly in the States. If someone came to pick up their kids form camp to find there was absolutely no supervision, there would be a big problem. Yet here we just casually left and no one seemed to have a problem with it.

One day I came into my internship as usual an my supervisor showed up two hours later (compared to the usual one). She said "sorry i'm late, I was dancing." she then took me next door to where there was a break dancing competition, which was really fun to watch.

Rural Visit

Unfortunately my camera card is having issues and I lost all my pictures from my rural visit, but it is an experience definitely worth describing. As part of our program everyone spends a week in a rural area in Senegal, either with a host family or with a peace corps volunteer, who also has a host family. Me and my friend Emily went to stay with a Health peace corps volunteer named Faith in Kaolack, the region highlighted below.

The first memorable experience started before the trip even began. Every single person who I told I was going to Kaolack responded by saying "oh it's really hot there." And when a Senegalise person thinks it's hot, it is hot, because they think 75 degrees is cold. They were correct, Kaolack is hot. At one point it got up to around 115 degrees. Without electricity there was no fans or fridge to freeze some ice (though if we were lucky someone would come from the city selling ice some days). So basically mid day, when temperatures were at their highest, we had to just sit in the hut fanning ourselves because we could not handle any physical activity, including walking anywhere. The one time of day it wasn't hot was about 6 am which I would purposefully wake up for just to enjoy the only moment in the whole week where I could be cold.

The adventures of Kaolack really began with our sept-place ride there. Out of Dakar and for the first few hours it was a smooth easy ride. Then at some point the roads just turned awful. There were pot holes about every 3 feet, so that cars couldn't drive straight but they actually would drive zig-zag, just weaving in and out of pot holes. It became just one big game of chicken because if two cars were going in opposite directions, there would only be one strip of the road where they could go through without hitting a pot hole, so they would just drive straight at each other until one car gave up and drove over the pot holes. Multiple times our driver decided it was quicker to off road it through the sand next to the street than to swerve back and froth across the street. This is why a journey that should have taken 4 hours took about 7. 

As bad as this sounds, it was worse going from the city of Kaolack to our actual village. The roads weren't any worse, but the driver decided the best strategy was to just drive straight over the pot holes as fast as possible, making it quite a bumpy ride.

When we finally arrived at our stop, we still had a 25 minute walk to get to the village. Our peace corps volunteer, faith, said we could either walk or take a Charette, as shown in the google image below:

Charettes pass through Dakar all the time but we're not aloud to take them, so we happily jumped at the opportunity to go to our village by Charette. This was the first experience we had with Faith speaking Wolof, which was really cool to hear because she was basically fluent after spending just one year in Senegal. The Charette driver was joking with her that we had to pay, so Faith said that they must not be friend then if they were trying to charge her. Then the other lady on the Charette said we didn't have to pay, so Faith joked that they were now best friends. I could pick up a few words in the conversation but it was pretty fast. While on the charette I successfuly said "can I take a photo" and understood the response "yes" or "waaw" as it is in wolof. '

Little did I know that would be one of the most sophisticated conversations of the entire trip. Here are some of the most common conversations I had with people:

Them: "You're sitting?" 

Me: "Yes, I'm sitting" 

Them: "That's good"

Them: "Where do you live?"

me: "I live in Dakar"

"Is it nice?"

"Yes, it's nice"

"That's good"

Them: "Is it hot?"

Me: "yes"

Them: "your braids are pretty. who did them?"

Me: "My sister's friend"

Them: "That's good. They are pretty"

Them: "Are you going home"

Me: "no"

(every time we walked anywhere in the village their first question was always if we were leaving already. Faith said this is probably because we were the longest staying guests she's ever had, so after the first day they just kept expecting that we would leave at any point. She also said that the villagers remember and ask frequently about every guest she's ever had, so they would probably be asking about us long after we left, even till the end of her service.)

As basic as these conversations were, the repetition of them actually did really help me improve my wolof. Mostly because the problem is not that I haven't learned the words they're saying, but that they say them too fast for me to process and then give a quick enough response. So the repetition basically just helped me automatically recognize certain phrases. 

I especially improved on greetings, because in the village you say hi to everyone. Whenever you are walking some where you have to say hi to people passing you or people you pass on the side of the road. Even if the people are sitting really far away from where you're walking, you have to shout hello to them or you are being really rude. And you don't just say hi, you have to fully greet them, meaning you say "Hi, how are you, how's your family, are you in peace, how's the day been, are you in good health, are you having fun, etc.?" And then you also have to respond to their string of questions, and at the end of the greeting you usually say "Alhamdililey" which means "thank god." 

I also got used to saying my name is Kumba Diop. Many peace corps volunteers don't go by their real name in the village (or just 'in village' as the peace corps people say) but their Senegalese name. It does make things simpler because it is easier to pronounce and remember a Senegalese name for our host families and all the other villagers. One day some random person at my internship gave me the Senegalese name of Kumba, which I liked so I decided to go with that. And my host family in Dakar has the last name of Diop. So for one week, I was Kumba Diop. I've now started telling people in Dakar that's my name too. They seem to appreciate it when we have Senegalese names which makes sense because it shows were integrating into the culture. Emily's Senegalese name is Aida, which also happens to be the name of a near by volunteer. So every time she said her name was Aida they would say "oh Aida Champ." She would say "no Aida Faye." And then they would respond "Oh, where's Aida champ" which we never really had an answer to. They tended to assume we knew all of the other peace corps volunteers, because they would always ask us where they were.

While we were there we got done fo dem (kind of like henna) and my friend got her hair braided. These were the times where we got practice wolof the most because the people doing our hair/henna would ask us questions. It sometimes got uncomfortable though. They would keep asking us why we don't speak as much wolof as Faith no matter how many times we explained that we'd only been here 2 months versus a year. Also one girl who spoke french critisized us for not drinking their water, saying we though they were "dirty." We tried to explain that we didn't think that its just the water made us sick, but she seemed to be set on the point which was very upsetting.

One highlight though was the food. Faith does not like couscous (which is for dinner every night in the village) so she makes her own dinner. She is a really good cook, so we enjoyed stir fry, spegetti with tomato sauce, fahitas, and breakfast for dinner (my favorite). The other great thing about dinner was that because there was no electricity and no lights, there were always tons of stars by the time we ate dinner, which was a great view. And there were barely any mosquitos! 

We helped Faith with several of her projects. One was painting a mural in the local elementary school. She is in the health sector, so she recently taught the kids at the school about health, particularly hygiene and the importance of washing your hands. So we took a charette to a city just bordering the Gambia to buy paint. We got some people in the village to help us paint a mural showing a person washing their hands with soap, and said "wash your hands" in both french and wolof. None of us were good painters so one of the guys in the village painted the picture, and he was super particular and perfectionist about the painting, which made it take a while but it looked really good in the end. 

The other project we helped with was the "girls club" that Faith just started. The first meeting was the friday we we were there, so she needed help making notebooks and planning. She got the idea of the club from some previous volunteers who had done similar things. Basically it is a once a week meeting for some girls in the village who had not gone to school, to teach them to read and write. Its also supposed to be more than just learning though, but a space for the girls to talk and hang out and share jokes and just generally have fun. The gender roles are very traditional in Senegal, particularly in villages. Elementary school is free and this village even has one, so there isn't even a cost for transportation, yet still an enormous amount of girls don't go to even elementary school. The reasons of course vary by family, but in many cases it's because they think the girls should stay at home to help their mom do housework. For some people its also a resistance/protest to colonialism. Secondary school isn't free, though it's only 10$ a year. Though this is a lot of money for most villagers, they will spend 10 times that on weddings, which just shoes where they're priorities are. Though all of this obviously goes against my morals, we also had a lot of discussions with our peace corps volunteer about the fact that as westerners we don't have the right to tell the villagers how to live. That is the biggest dilemma that peace corps volunteers face - it is hard to find the balance between challenging the villager's beliefs/telling them to give up their cultural practices yet still trying to guide them in the direction of gender equality and whatever other customs you personally believe are right. I personally think faith's choice of a girls club is the perfect balance. You are not telling their parents what to believe or do for their child and you are not asking them to pay for school, you are simply offering a small but hopefully effective alternative to full time schooling.

So, Faith invited 8 girls in the village who are approximately ages 16-19 (they don't keep track of birthdays in the village so their is no way of knowing exactly how old they are. one girl we talked to didn't even know what a birthday was, or a month for that matter) who have not received any schooling but are dedicated and hard workers. At the club they learn how to write and read and we also did some fun activities like drawing and making beignes (really good pastry things). the club will also become a space for the girls to talk about whatever they want, specifically topics that are normally not talked about much with their families. This way they can share stories and emotions towards their lack of education without being criticized by anyone. 

We also went to visit the village farm, which Faith had heard a bit about but never been to. The farm was really big and well run, there tons of tomato and herb plants growing everywhere. All of the villagers contribute to the farm and in tern get to come and pick their fair share of plants. Faith was extremely impressed with the farm. She had previously tried planting a garden in the village of a plant that can help children with malnutrition. The mothers in the village were at first very into it, but after a while just stopped watering it and said they didn't really have the time or energy to keep it up. Faith didn't want to be the only one taking care of the garden because she wanted it to be a sustainable project that lasted after she was done with her service. So now she thought if the garden was with all the other plants it wouldn't be too much extra work to water it. 

We also helped faith's mom teach an adult education class teaching some of the villagers how to read and write. There were many problems with this class. One, faiths mom barely knew how to write and read herself. Two, everyone showed up at least an hour late. Three, no one had brought notebooks or pens and most people didn't really pay attention. Faiths mom was really too sweet for the job, so luckily there was another woman who stepped up and lectured everyone on how they had to take the class seriously or they were never going to learn.

Overall, the I learned an enormous amount about the peace corps in just the week that I was there. The independence of the volunteer was something that shocked me, nothing she did was decided or regulated by the peace corps administration - she was completely on her own to come up with projects and apply for grands and follow through with them. The independence is really cool but intimidating. She also said that it took her until now to actually really start doing any effective projects. The first year of peace corps is more about learning the language, the culture, and getting to know your village and establishing a trust between you and the village. The second year is when stuff actually starts happening. I got this sense when Faith would talk about how productive we were on a day where we did one thing and then slept and read the rest of the afternoon. After this experience I think the peace corps is definitely something I could do eventually, but I am not quite ready to go from the overly stimulating college life to the isolated and tons-of-free-time life of peace corps.