Île de Gorée

Above: A 20 minute ferry ride from Dakar, Goree Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Below: Vendors sell artwork on the path up to the Castel, an old military fort dotted with rusting cannons.
La Maison des Esclaves is a house that was used for processing slaves. The many small downstairs rooms were marked by the slaves that were housed there: Men, Women, Young Girls, and Children. There were also tiny rooms under the stairs for "les récalcitrants," or the resistors. The rooms upstairs were for the slave traders. The house's role in the slave trade was probably tiny, but it is one of the few remaining buildings of its type.
Uptairs:
On the street:
The quiet island was a nice change of pace from Dakar; there are no vehicles on Goree, and it is filled with French colonial architecture that is surprisingly lacking in Dakar. The island is also filled with museums and historical monuments: one of the oldest stone mosques in Senegal, two forts, a church, and so on.

There some good pictures of Goree here if you're so inclined.

Baffling

There is a four lane road bordering the neighborhood where I'm staying that has safety walls being built on both sides of its small median. The walls are 3.5 - 4 feet high and are at least a kilometer long. They might be an attempt at increasing safety or--more likely--to thwart the cars that would otherwise do U-turns across the median. The baffling thing is that not once in the length of the wall is there an opening in the wall for pedestrians, despite the fact that people are constantly crossing the road here. The walls have been finished off in the last week, and now every time I walk down that road I see dozens of people boosting themselves over the walls--not too difficult but certainly irritating.

?????

Ker Simbara

On Tuesday, another volunteer and I finally had an opportunity to go out to do interviews in a village. It was a nice change after a couple of weeks of reviewing research papers in the Dakar office. Ker Simbara is located just outside of Thies and was one of the first villages who benefited from Tostan's education program. I interviewed two prominent villagers about their role in the program and how the information spread. My research is on social networking and how it ties into social changes, including villages' decisions to declare female genital cutting abandonment. The other volunteer I was with took a tour of their successful health hut to see how it was set up and how the setup could be applied to other villages.

Recording the translator's version of the imam's response to my interview questions. My vague squint here is from, first, my brain translating French to English, and second, wishing it wasn't rude to put on my sunglasses when talking with people. Strong sun, even in the shade. :)

Some of the kids. There were at least 8 clustered around one of the interviewees, who was having her hair braided as I spoke with her:

The imam and some of the village girls:

***I didn't have my camera with me, so these are another volunteer's pictures; please don't use without asking and all that good stuff.

A Creative Outlet?

Despite the very basic format of the typical Senegalese dish--rice with stuff in sauce--the specifics of the dish can change quite a bit. Yesterday's meal included shredded okra, clams, and beef. A particularly memorable meal last week included corn, pickles, and olives. Shrimp, black-eyed peas, cabbage, sea snails, and hibiscus stems have all also made appearances--often together.

Yassa is another often-seen dish: chicken in an onion and lemon sauce.

Dakar in the News

Seeing news about Africa in the papers is rare enough, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the main stories in the New York Times today was not just about Senegal, but about problems in Dakar! You can find the story here.

Some highlights (or lowlights, rather):

• Dakar will soon have a glut of five-star hotel rooms, but rising rents have pushed the city’s poor and even middle-class residents into filthy, flood-prone slums. Shortages of fuel mean daily blackouts.
• Mr. Wade, [the president], an indefatigable octogenarian who was re-elected last year for a five-year term, has in many ways staked his legacy on the rebirth of Dakar from a quaint colonial city to a major regional center, a kind of mini-Dubai for West Africa.
• A Gallup survey completed here last year found that only 29 percent of respondents said they had a job, down from 35 percent the previous year
• To his critics, Mr. Wade has sullied Senegal’s reputation and has consolidated power within his own family.

All focusing on the negative aspects of Senegal, of course, but fairly true as far as I know. On a related note to the mini-Dubai comment, people here were recently horrified to find out (well, the people I know were horrified) that Dubai World recently made a deal to develop on Gorée Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Update: Pretty much everyone I've mentioned this article has a) loved that Senegal/Africa is in American news and b) agreed with pretty much everything it says.

Some more declaration photos

Women who used to do the cutting, right after finishing the traditional circumcision song.

A village leader states his support for abandonment.

The crowd listens to speeches of support for abandonment.

Adolescent girls demonstrate one of the lessons they received as part of the Tostan's non-formal education classes.

More dancing and music.

A Few More

The office building where I am working in Dakar. Tostan just moved into it a short while ago.


Schoolgirls on the market street in Thies. We bought cloth there last week, then went to a tailor's to have traditional clothing made for the Segre declaration.


Local women helping one of the other volunteers tie her headscarf before the declaration ceremony.

Water, Water…Nowhere.

Water has already manifested itself as a major problem. In the three places I have stayed at so far, the water has been off at least as often as it has been running. The Dakar apartment is particularly bad: lately, water has been running only a few hours in the middle of the night once every few days. Whoever wakes up to check if there is running water will run a length of hose from the faucet to one of several large blue plastic barrels, which act as reserves until the water is running again. When that water runs out, we use 10 liter drinking water bottles that have been refilled elsewhere, and when that runs out, we buy drinking water to use. This weekend, the problem expanded to most of the city, apparently, and it doesn't look like most people will have any water for at least a week. Symptoms of a city that grew way too fast!

Wolof lessons

Wolof is the main tribal language is Senegal, and is spoken by about 80% of the population I believe, even more widely than French. We had several language lessons during orientation.

Greetings:
There is a more or less prescribed dialogue for greetings, which can take awhile. There are about a dozen phrases exchanged back and forth, beginning with:

Asalaam Maalekum.
Maalekum Salaam.
Na nga def? (How are you?)
Maa ngi fii rek (I am here only.)

And ending with the all purpose phrase, Alxamdulilaay (I am thanking God).

Just as often with tubaabs (white people), though, the exchange is a simple ça va (literally, it goes in French), repeated over and over again (ça va? ça va. ça va? ça va. ça va? ça va bien.) and accompanied by shaking the hand of everyone in the vicinity. Greetings are very important.

Counting:
Wolof counts on a base five system, so once you know 1-5, 10, 100, 1000, etc, you can count anything. So:
Benn=1
Juroom=5
Juroom-Benn=6
Fukk ak Juroom-Benn=16
Juroom-benn fukk=60
Juroom-benn fukk ak juroom-benn=66
And so on.

It gets more complicated with money, since there is also a system called dërëm, where the amount of CFA francs is divided by five. So if a vendor says 100, he could mean either 100 francs or 100 dërëm, which is 500 francs. I haven’t run into a problem with this, but it’s a little something extra to watch out for.


Names and Introductions:
Oumou Diop laa tudd. (I am named Oumou Diop.)

Volunteers were bequeathed with Senegalese names by office women in Thies, who mostly named us after themselves. I was named Oumou Diop (ooh-moo-johp), and was informed that now I would have to take after my namesake and “run like a horse” in the way she does. (This comment was followed by laughter; there is a good deal of insulting humor here.)

Another common question from men when introduced to female tubaabs is “Am nga jekker?” which means “Do you have a husband?” Most serious answers to this can cause trouble, especially since many men are on the lookout for either a green card or a second or third wife (and yes, polygamy is pretty obvious and open here). The best response is a joke, either “Waaw, am naa ñeent”—Yes, I have four—or “Deedeet, Danga ñaaw, begguma doon yu ñaaw”—No, you’re ugly, I don’t want ugly children. The latter seems a bit harsh, and I haven’t tried it yet, but apparently it’s taken in stride and is a pretty common joke.

Harassment:
By far the most common things I say in Wolof (after greetings) is “Ba beneen yoon, incha’allah”—next time, God willing. This is incredibly useful for children, beggars, vendors, and the like.

Mangoes!

It's mango season here, and the fruit is everywhere. Going back and forth from Thies to Dakar, one passes through Poot (sp?), a small town famous for its mangoes. The highways is lined with dozens of stalls attended by women and girls. Cars will stop on the side of the road and they will come running from all directions, swarming around the car with plastic buckets full of mangoes. There are many types of mangoes, apparently: red ones, green ones, small ones that look like papayas. The going rate at the moment is 1000 CFA francs, or about $2.40, for a pile of perhaps 10 good sized mangoes. That's cheap even by African standards, and is due to the sheer mango abundance at the moment.

Declaration

Yesterday the other new volunteers and I went to a village about four hours from Thies, near Kaolack, to witness a declaration to end female genital cutting, forced marriage, and child marriage. The FGC work is what Tostan is probably most well known for, though it tends to be more of a side effect of the health and human rights education they receive from Tostan programs. That certainly doesn't lessen its impact or importance, but it's certainly a good indication that the educational programs have an excellent outcome.

We reached the village (Segre Bambara) by taking two sept-places, which are station wagons that have been converted to have seven passenger seats. Usually they act as a communal taxi: as soon as there are seven people that want to go to a certain destination, the car leaves the garage. Thankfully, we had 7 people in our groups, so the car was more of a private taxi ride than a sweltering waiting room.

On the way to the village, on increasingly difficult roads, we were able to see some areas that had received rain recently. The area we had been traveling through had been dry and completely covered in orange sand, but the areas that had received rain were covered in a sparse green fuzz of new vegetation. We passed herds of goats and cattle, giant baobab trees, and increasing numbers of village compounds with thatched huts.

We split up once we got to the declaration, and another volunteer and I were gradually herded by various people to the front row on under one of the open tents that formed a square around the performance and declaration space. I ended up sitting in the speakers section, surrounded by the village chief, imam, governor's representative, the national director of Tostan, a representative from Amnesty International, and a delegation from Sierra Leone. There were perhaps a dozen white people present in total, half of whom had come in my group.

The event was half solemn declaration and half entertainment. Speeches of support for ending FGC were interspersed with songs, dancing, and skits. Groups of children dressed in white teeshirts did a song and dance, accompanied by a speech by one of the village women. The children had ribbons in the colors of Senegal--green, red, and yellow--tied to their wrists. There was also a performance group which included (in addition to the band) a man on stilts, another man in a beastlike costume (think Cousin It with dreadlocks and fangs), and dancers with white stripes of paint on their faces and arms.

Representatives from some 46 villages lined up to show their decision to end female genital cutting in their communities (the signs they carry have their village names written on them):


One of the village religious men who I was sitting next to (don't be fooled by the dignified appearance; he kept asking me for money or my sunglasses and laughing uproariously when I responded in Wolof "Another time, if God wills it").


One of the performers, dressed in the national colors of Senegal, and some of the crowd:


Part of the village of about 600 people where the declaration was held:


We were wearing traditional Senegalese clothing for the ceremony, making us approximately 2% less noticeable but much more accepted.


Some of the dancers who performed in between speeches and statements:

Pictures!

Just a few because of the relatively slow internet here: two of the Yoff beach that I mentioned, and one of the highway and Dakar as seen from the Tostan rooftop.