On Mission 1

So I'm finally "on mission" this week, having had my departure time and travel information changed a good half dozen times in the last week. I'm in Thies right now, since the first two of the seven villages where I'm interviewing people are very close, so I can stay at the volunteer house here. There is only one other volunteer here at the moment and running water--luxury!

I'm traveling with a man from the Dakar office who is acting as my Wolof translator and is also doing research for a film. He treats me a bit like the incompetent toubab female that I am, but we basically get along. Especially since we're about the same age and I'm half a head taller than him, so he really can't act too macho. :)

Yesterday we went to Ker Simbara to interview the imam again. (See the earlier post for a photo.) They brought us tea during the interview, and while we were speaking, there were two boys who passed by: the first riding a horse, and the second guiding a row planter.

This morning we went to Baliga, which was a somewhat less idyllic village due to the industrial-looking buildings on its outskirts. To get there, we:

1) Went to the usual bus stop, where there were 8 or so women waiting around who had come into Thies for the market. They were surrounded by baskets and buckets of food, including a bucket of dead fish, all swarmed by flies. They said that the bus driver was sleeping in the front and no one seemed to want to wake him up, so we went to another stop.
2) At the second place, we boarded a crowded bus--a battered, boxy white vehicle for maybe 30 people. We crept down the road out of Thies at the pace of a Model T. One woman in the front was selling bags of golf ball-sized frozen juice for 25 CFA, or about seven cents.
3) We got off at a junction and waited for awhile for another bus by the side of a dirt road under a baobab tree with two other women. We sat on our sandals and one played a form of jacks with rocks.
4) We saw the bus, but it turned on the next dirt road down and didn't see us all running after it and yelling. We got to the second road and sat for awhile under another tree with a guy (maybe a guard?) who was sitting there with a radio. He got up and shooed me into his seat, which consisted of a bicycle seat on top of a cement block. One of the women practiced writing the alphabet in the sand. Three more women stopped to wait with us.
5) We saw a taxi and all seven of us piled in, two in the passenger seat and five in the back. After dropping off the women in various places and having a stand off with a donkey who liked the middle of the road, thank you very much, we got to the house of the interviewee. Welcome to Africa.

The village chief:

I'll be in villages in Mbour (a bit south) for the next 4 or so days, providing the interview schedule doesn't change again.