On Mission 2

I’m back in Dakar after being gone for over a week, sleeping both in Thies and the villages while doing interviews in 7 different villages. I already mentioned the first two villages in the previous post.

Our first of the overnight village stops—and my favorite—was at Soudiane. We were greeted by women and dozens of children, and as with the other villages, we dropped our bags off at the host’s common room, then took a tour of the village, both so that we could see it and so that the village could see us. We briefly visited most of the compounds in Soudiane, where I was informed a number of time that there was another woman in the village with the same name as me—Oumou Diop—but that she was huge and I would have to do a lot more eating to be like her. We interviewed our contact in the village health hut:

I also met several people with the family name of Njaay, whose family is apparently in a joking relationship with mine, so that every time I meet a Njaay, they comment on how I have a bad name, how I like to eat, and how they are my master. I am supposed to do the same, though I generally just look confused because they say all these things in Wolof.

Oh, no, a runaway goat!

My translator and I spent most of our time in our host’s courtyard, minus when we were interviewing and when we took a stroll through the peanut and millet fields to look at the community well setup. The area around the village was really quite beautiful—fields of low plants with occasional baobab and palm trees. At sunset, with a half-moon above, the lightening started in the pink clouds overhead, reminding me of the closing stanza of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra (yes, I am that much of a nerd):

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Trust me, it was very appropriate to the moment. :) It was further improved by the fact that the only lights in the compound were from several small cookfires and cell phones that the villages women were using to test and change their ringtones in the dark.

We spent the night in spare room in the schoolhouse, and I was awakened by the sound of chewing. I investigated by the light of my cell-phone (my translator had forgotten his flashlight and borrowed mine). I suspected a mouse or (shudder) a cat-sized rat like the one that had been run over in the alley near the Dakar house, but found instead a beetle. It was the size of my thumb and was apparently feasting on the linoleum floor. I later saw the same type of beetle rolling and burying balls of dung in the fields, so I tentatively think it was a dung beetle.

The next day, after being awakened again by the downpour that the lightening had foretold, we headed off to the next village of Diabougou by horsecart. Horsecarts are much more available in the villages, and rather more reliable besides. I loved it, though I think my translator thought what he called “chariots” were provincial and beneath him (thankfully, he mostly kept quiet about it).

The horsecarts here are basically platforms—maybe 4’ x 6’—covered by a plastic mat and attached to a car axle. I hopped up easily to sit sidesaddle, much to the delight of the village women. It was a very pleasant hour-ride through the fields to Diabougou, though the strength of the sun made me break down and bring out my Smurf-colored canvas monstrosity of a hat. Our horse, though, seemed to not be having such a good time: he had a lot of gas and farted with every bounce.
Diabougou was nice, though larger and dirtier than the idyllic Soudiane. As with Soudiane, I made friends with the Bambara-speaking children through a combination of digital pictures, ridiculous face, and drawing in the sand. My host mother gave me a carved wooden elephant who I’ve decided to call Al—an acronym for artistic license, since there aren’t any elephants in Senegal!

On our way to the next town by horsecart, our hosts insisted that we stop at the largest baobab tree in Senegal, which was a minor tourist attraction. We gained an unsolicited guide, who informed us that it was 850 years old, hollow, and sometimes used by members of the art caste as a spiritual spot. He dragged the unwilling me through a two foot in diameter hole in the tree trunk about 3 feet off the ground, ripping my ankle-length skirt in the process (which was the reason I was being unwilling in the first place). The inside of the trunk was cool and dark, with the squeaking of a colony of 30 or 40 bats above us. My translator started taking photos of the bats with flash, causing them to fly around and drip a liquid that I strongly suspected was bat pee on us. I drew back to the side of the tree, causing my macho translator to ask in a condescending tone if I was scared. ‘No,’ I answered mentally, ‘I just don’t consider urine to be a good shower substitute.’Outside of the company, the tree was pretty cool, and the rest of the ride, though fields and floodplains, was pretty uneventful.

***The new blog banner is of the girls who followed me into the peanut fields around Soudiane.