4th of July Weekend

Volunteers got a three day weekend because of Independence Day, and I ended up spending a part of the weekend with another volunteer (Midd grad!) whose father (also a Midd grad!) works with the UN in Dakar and has a house here. It was nice to have a break from the volunteer house, which (as usual, lately) has nine people and no running water. The house had the awesome perks of running water, a hot water heater, a generator for the constant mini-blackouts, and air conditioning in some rooms. Crazy, right?

I went with her family to "The American Club" for the 4th, an interesting place that I probably wouldn't have been caught dead at on principle in most other circumstances. It was fun, though--hamburgers, potato salad, a pool, and more toubabs than you could shake a stick at. Thankfully it was not exclusively American, though the lunch was sponsored by the embassy.

The next day we took a crowded pirogue to the beach on N'Gor Island. From the island, facing Dakar:

On Sunday, I went into downtown Dakar. My first stop was the museum of African art, which consisted of dusty hallways filled with masks and baskets, and about a dozen life-sized dioramas of paper mache people in traditional ceremonial dress. The artwork was from around West Africa, including Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Cameroon.

I strolled around downtown for awhile and was scolded by a guard for attempting to take a picture of a church within a block of the heavily-guarded American embassy. (As one of the volunteers put it, "Um, can't we just look at the embassy on Google Earth?" The answer is yes, yes you can.) I hung around near Independence Plaza in central Dakar for as long as I could stand the constant stream of vendors, then headed back to get my laundry off the line.

Incidentally, this is the neighborhood where I live:

View Larger Map
The apartment is one building left of the whitish building at the 4-way stop at the top of the frame. The dirt road of the 4-way stop is the one I follow to get to work. The curve of the paved road at the left is where we have to direct taxi drivers to turn right at the cow; it's one of the most noticeable landmarks in the neighborhood.