ENDA-Ecopole (and a cross-dressing fete)

This week I’ve been a part of two different social events here, each from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.

On Tuesday I went to a Mardi Gras party with Nogaye and Illy (the maids who work at my house). Apparently the Mardi Gras tradition here is to cross-dress. Unfortunately, Illy and Nogaye weren’t up for putting on men’s clothes, so I didn’t either, which I regretted as soon as I arrived. The party was basically a dance, and it’s really something to see people dancing in couples, each dressed and acting as the opposite gender. There were a lot of girls walking around like rappers, and a few guys sporting thong underwear sticking out over the top of their skinny jeans. (In the Muslim community here the cross-dressing holiday is New Year’s . . . I think I may have to introduce this tradition at any New Year’s parties I have in the future.)

The last night I went with Illy to a memorial mass and then her family’s gathering to commemorate the anniversary of her cousin’s death. Outside of Illy’s family’s house, plastic chairs were set up in the street and all rooms of the house were also filled with family members and visitors. In addition to the family and friends, neighbours and anyone else involved in the life of the family is welcomed. We were all served food and beverages (baobab juice, bissap juice, soft drinks, beer, mixed drinks, wine . . . they had it all – note that Illy’s family is Catholic, at Muslim funerals there is no alcohol but the gathering is quite similar). While I think it would be difficult to be surrounded by so many people while mourning, it also gives a really strong sense of community and support network which must be comforting.

Now as promised, the educational portion of my blog (I am here to be a cultural ambassador and pass on information after all . . .)

As part of my classes, I’ve begun visiting different charity organizations in the city. The first of these visits I took part in by chance when one of the short-term students, an employee of Medecins Sans Frontières, mentioned it to me in passing. The organization that we visited was ENDA-Ecopole, located in downtown Dakar next to the Khadirmore Rassoul neighbourhood which is one of the poorest in the city. These makeshift neighbourhoods (or quartiers flottants) of tiny wooden buildings are formed when villagers come into Dakar in search of work during the dry season. Dependent on subsistence agriculture in their villages, during periods of drought many try to find work in cities to be able to send money back to their families. Arriving in Dakar with little money and no acquaintances, people make a home where they can – some even sleeping on the side of the road where by day they sell peanuts or wash laundry. The laundry seen hanging here in the quartier probably doesn't belong to the people who live there - it's brought so they can wash it and return it to the owners.

ENDA (Environmental Development Action) is an international organization created in 1972 by Jacques Bignicour. ENDA-Ecopole is one of its facets was created in 1996 when an agreement was reached between ENDA and the owner of the Khardirmore Rassoul land. In this agreement, ENDA has become the “landowner”of the neighbourhood for 50 years, ending in 2046. Some of ENDA-Ecopole’s basic work in the neighbourhood has been to work with residents to improve the layout of buildings so that now all mechanics are located next to each other, instead of being dispersed among other houses, and there are communal toilets available for the community. Here's a view of the neighbourhood from ENDA-Ecopole's office. All of ENDA-Ecopole’s activities focus on development while protecting the environment. They run a recycling program where artisans are taught how to make products from recycled cans, bottle caps, and iron recovered from the dump. Classes include education of children with emphasis not only on regular school subjects but also on environmental and social responsibility. And one simple project they have is to make candle holders out of the recovered iron. These candle holders are then given to households in quartiers flottants and play a role in preventing fires in homes where candles are the only source of light. As you can imagine, fires in such neighbourhoods of wooden shacks are absolutely devastating.

At the end of our discussion at the centre, we were able to walk through Khadirmore Rassoul. Upon entering, we saw the medical office, an empty room containing a sink, some soap, a few medical tools, and a woman who works there to treat minor wounds, accompanying patients to a hospital if the injury is too extensive for her to treat. Next we visited a preschool where all of the students were singing when we arrived, but soon stopped to hold out their hands while yelling “Bonjour!”. While the tour was brief, I felt very welcomed in the neighbourhood by its friendly residents and in meeting them appreciated more fully how important it is that ENDA-Ecopole works with the residents of the neighbourhood, not for them. Here's one of the local women making ceebu jen in front of her home (mmmm, bowl of steaming vegetables).

To learn more about ENDA’s involvement in Senegal, check out http://www.enda.sn/english/equipes.htm.

Carbs! Fish! (and Rotary update!)

I’ve now been in Dakar for almost 6 weeks, which is really astonishing. I have a feeling that the rest of my time is just going to fly by – while we Rotary students are here longer than most of the other students at the Baobab Centre, 6 months really isn’t that long in the realm of study abroad, so I’ve got to make sure I take advantage of every opportunity!

Just a quick update on Rotary-related activities: I’ve attended a few meetings of my host club and they seem to be quite welcoming. They are the Rotary Club of Dakar, and their current project is to construct a maternity building in a village in central Senegal. In the village there is a hospital, but it is difficult to get to and thus most women do not make it to the hospital in time to deliver their baby, which can obviously have devastating consequences. The maternity building will be staffed by people trained in delivery, and if complications arise, they will transport the mothers to the hospital as quickly as possible. On Friday I was also able to attend a Rotaract meeting here in Dakar, and I felt very welcomed there, so I think that the 4 Rotary students here, myself included, will continue to go to those meetings on a regular basis. One of the big things we’re looking forward to here is to go to the Rotary District Conference from April 16-18. This year it is in Lome, Togo, so we will likely fly there and may extend our stay a bit to see more of Togo.

Also on the Rotary front, Ellen, Cody (other Rotary students, the third being Lucy), and I met with Ann Dillard, a member of the Plymouth Rotary Club in Minnesota. Ann has been involved for over a year in setting up a Rotary Foundation Matching Grant proposal to provide mosquito nets and school supplies in Rufisque, a village just outside of Dakar. The Rotary Foundation offers these grants to certain types of projects involving cooperation between the district where work will be done and another district as an international partner If you’d like to hear more about her work, you can visit http://www.projectsafetynets.org/. Below is a picture of (left to right) Cody, Ann, Ellen, and me.

Now for the thematic portion: meals! Basically, I eat a LOT of carbohydrates, and a LOT of fish. And most of it is delicious, so I’ve been getting along just fine. A typical day of meals includes:

Breakfast at 8 am: Breakfast is left on the table for me, and consists of a large piece of baguette, chocolate spread, Laughing Cow cheese (the non-perishable kind in little triangles, kinda like tangy cream cheese), milk (I’ve bought powdered skim milk to try and get more protein), and tea. Everyone eats the same thing for breakfast, every day, in every house. Note that the breakfast here includes goat cheese from Keur Moussa (the monastery that was one of the destinations of my 11-vehicle saga). The cheese made everything worth it.

Lunch at 2 pm: Lunch is the largest meal, and is usually a fish or meat dish with sauce served on a bed of rice. I eat around a communal plate with Nogaye, Illy, and Bamba (the two maids and nephew). Everyone eats from the pie-piece in front of them, and all of the goodies (vegetables, meat) are in the centre. In order to take some vegetables or meat, you break a piece off and pull it into your pie-piece, sometimes distributing food to others if you don’t feel like they’re getting enough. We eat sitting on a mat on the ground, and if you get any fish bones etc in your mouth, you drop them or spit them out on the mat.

The typical Senegalese dish is ceebu jen, which is wolof for “rice fish”. I took a class on how to cook it and it’s quite complicated. First, the fish is gutted and cleaned, then stuffed with a mixture of parsley, garlic, chiles, and other spices. It is then fried in a couple of cups of oil, as seen here:

After the fish are cooked, they’re removed, and vegetables (carrots, cassava, cabbage, okra) are added to the oil, along with tomato puree and eventually water. This is left to cook for a long time, and rice is placed in a basket above to steam cook for a while, then is added to the tomato sauce mixture after the vegetables are removed, and is allowed to finish cooking. A typical plate for four people will have one or two fish on it (with heads etc still attached), a carrot, half of a small cabbage, one piece of cassava, two okra, and about 10 cups of red rice. We eat a lot of rice. There is a 50 kg bag of it in the kitchen, and Illy said that will last for about a month and a half. We are only a household of 6 people. You do the math.

Dinner at 8:30 pm: This is the most variable meal, but is generally a bit lighter than lunch. Sometimes we have vegetables with fried fish, potatoes, a tomato-onion sauce and baguette. Other times it’s pasta with meat. On days where I’m really lucky it’s beans! And on Friday, it’s always lait caillé with millet or rice. Which tastes more like dessert than dinner . . . a welcome change since we never eat dessert. Lait caillé is essentially sweetened slightly-curdled milk. And is way more delicious than it sounds (kind of like yogurt). To prepare lait caillé, you boil water, then wait for it to cool slightly and add powdered milk, whisking to remove any lumps (I made it last week and definitely didn’t whisk enough, oops). Then you add a small amount of yogurt, cover the container, and leave it at room temperature for two days. After it’s been left for this time, you add sugar and sweetened condensed milk, stir it up, and voila: lait caillé, ready to top your millet or rice porridge.

That’s all for today . . . you can expect another post soon about some of the NGOs that I’ve been able to visit. Ellen and I have set it up with our French teachers so that outings to different community organizations comprise part of our class time, and afterwards we make presentations about them and answer the questions of our teachers, also composing documents so that future students can be informed about what volunteering opportunities are available without having to go search everything out themselves. And since I’m gathering all of this information, I might as well share it with you as well!

A bientôt.

11 Vehicles in 13 Hours: The Joys of Transit in Senegal

And now, introducing . . . thematic blog posts!!! I realized that there was a lot of my daily life that was getting left out of my other blog posts, and I also figured that a catalogue of my weekly activities would soon grow tired, so I’m going to try out a new tactic of exploring an aspect of life in Dakar through each post.

Yesterday, I took a “simple” trip on Sunday to a monastery and then to lunch, returning to Dakar 13 hours later having ridden in 11 different vehicles. Inspired by this experience, today’s post is going to focus on transport!

Taxis are the most omnipresent form of transport in Dakar, almost all of them riddled with dents and missing various components of the interior (such as door handles, locks, entire door panels). The cause of the exterior damage becomes evident the first time your taxi driver bumper cars his way through a traffic circle. When a yellow and black taxi approaches me, I know before I see it since he honks repeatedly at me to see if I need a ride, as if foreigners are not capable of walking anywhere. And it’s probably true that most don’t walk, since taking a taxi to the downtown core will cost about 1500 CFA ($3.75 CDN) leaving from my house, and that’s for a 20 minute ride. And here's a taxi, complete with street vendor in background, who will sell you merchandise while you sit in the taxi. I saw a vendor selling entire fish on the side of the road yesterday. I didn't buy any.

Certainly for travelling after dark taxis are the best bet, but I prefer to try public transit during the day. Within Dakar, there are three main public transit vehicles, all of which are incredibly crowded and none of which follow regular schedules, which can lead to a lot of waiting. The bus is the least intimidating, as each follows a set route as distinguished by the number on the front of the bus (however, there is no map available to coordinate where you’re going with where the bus is going, you have to learn all of this by word of mouth). To take the bus costs 150 CFA, paid to a worker who sits at the middle of the bus and will even provide change! Another common form of transit is the Car Rapide, the brightly painted minibuses with an apprentice who hangs out the back door calling passengers aboard. To determine where the Car Rapide is going there is no labelling, you have to discuss with the apprentice who will then tell you whether to get on and how much your “pass” (Wolof for transit fee) is (usually about 150 CFA). Most Car Rapides follow the length of a street, and any time you want to stop you bang a coin on the ceiling and the driver will stop to let you off. The third type of vehicle is a Tata, which is similar to a Car Rapide, only more modern, painted simple white. The idea is that Tatas will eventually replace the Car Rapides, many of which are in a state of disrepair. Sidenote: many of the Tatas have a giant sticker of 80s-era Madonna on their back window.

Outside of the city, transit is another story. Again, there are no set schedules for transport between cities. So when you need to go somewhere outside of Dakar, you go to the Gare Routier Pompier (as in firefighter), where all of the vehicles sit until they are full of people going to a common destination, at which point they depart. The most luxurious choice is the sept-place or bush taxi. These cars are station wagons with two rows of three seats each and the passenger seat available for seven passengers. Once you find a car going to your destination, you discuss a fare with the driver, and there is usually much bargaining involved. Here's the view from a sept-place:

Minibuses are another option, they hold 14 passengers. We took one on my trip to Toubacouta the other week, and it was rather dusty . . .

Finally, there are Ndiaye Ndiayes, which carry either 35 or 55 passengers in a very small space. It is a large van, with 5 people sitting in each row, literally squished in against each other (the middle seat folds up to allow people to squeeze through to get in and out of the van). The problem with all of these vehicles is that they frequently break down, as happened when I was riding in an Ndiaye Ndiaye on Sunday. When this happens, the passengers have to wait until the driver tries to fix the vehicle, and if they can’t get it going again, the apprentice will transfer you to other Ndiaye Ndiayes with no additional pass required. But given the waiting, travelling in Senegal certainly requires that you be flexible with your schedule. Here's one of the 4 Ndiaye Ndiayes I took on Sunday.

There is one train line that’s functional in Senegal, it leaves Dakar and travels through to Bamako, Mali. However, the train takes 40 hours to do so and is notorious for stopping mid-journey and having other problems. Between some cities there is also boat service available, most notably the ferry service between Dakar and Ziguinchor. Unfortunately, this ferry route may be best known for the disaster in September 2002 when the ferry sank and some 1800 passengers, largely from the Cassamance region, were killed (only 64 survived). Regulations have been much more stringently followed since that incident, and travel on the new boat is much safer.

That lengthy catalogue about sums up the transit situation here (excluding air travel, which is also present, Air Senegal being an airline with an excellent safety record). It’s certainly difficult to get used to the lack of schedules, as I’m someone who likes to be able to plan everything ahead of time. But with clever planning (for example going in a group of 7 to fill a sept-place and thus having control over when to stop for rest breaks etc) travelling here can go relatively smoothly. Well, not literally smoothly due to the condition of the roads which lead many drivers to drive along the side of the road in the dirt instead of on the pothole-scarred pavement. It’s like going on a bonus off-roading safari adventure. Minus the lions.

Getting out of the city . . .

I've now seen more of Senegal than just Dakar! Last weekend, my friend Ellen (another Rotary student) and I were able to join a group for a trip to Toubacouta. There were 14 of us, so we filled a minibus to get there (rural transport is all paid by seat, and if you don’t fill the vehicle yourself you have to wait for enough other people going to the same town to fill the vehicle, so it’s definitely best to have a complete group). Toubacouta is a village south of Dakar, quite close to The Gambia, and it is on the Sine-Saloum Delta, a very beautiful area full of mangrove swamps. We stayed at Keur Bamboung, which is Senegal’s most successful eco-campement. All the proceeds from the campement go toward protecting the surrounding ocean reserve (boat patrols are necessary to enforce the fishing ban which has allowed some near-extinct species to begin recovering). Furthermore, the electricity is provided by solar panels and running water is supplied only from a reservoir sitting above the bathroom.

The lodging there is in traditional-style huts, with a few modernizations including concrete floors, mosquito nets, and toilets (though those toilets are open air). They also come complete with roommates! Our roommate was a lizard who proceeded to run around the room all night. Thank goodness for earplugs, I didn’t hear anything while the other girls lay there in fear of what was making the noise. Here’s a pic of the campement (that's my hut in the background):

All activities at the campement are included with your stay, and we were able to go canoeing and on nature walks. My favourite walk was through the mangrove swamps, which led us through water up to the mid-thigh (we went in the early evening when the tide was a bit too high) and mud up to the ankle. Mangroves are everywhere in the area as they grow in the salt water, their roots sticking out above the surface, and as they mature the roots form a structure allowing more mangroves to grow there. Eventually they’ll probably take over the world. The mangroves also make finding oysters easy, as they latch on to the roots and when the tide is low they can simply be picked off. Hey look, me with mangroves!

This week I started Wolof classes, and it’s been rather intense. Five hours a day of a completely new language is a bit much to absorb all at once, but I’m just taking lots of notes and will have to continue reviewing them once my week of Wolof classes is finished. My family also loves it when I bust out a few words in Wolof, so I’ll have lots of chances to practice.

I’m also starting to set up my volunteering project. I met with Gary Engelberg on Friday, and he is the head of ACI’s health activities. We discussed what I can possibly do to help out with HIV/AIDS organizations in the city and there are a couple of things I’m going to check out in the next week. First, ACI has a documentation center with hundreds of papers about the development side of the AIDS epidemic, and there needs to be some work done on organizing and updating the center. I may also begin writing summaries of some papers for quick reference purposes. The documentation center is used by many people who come to Dakar to do HIV research, so organization for accessibility is key. For more hands-on involvement, I may begin working with a pediatrician who has an NGO to support HIV-infected children. I’ll keep you posted on what I become involved in as it takes shape.

This week a number of students from the Baobab Center went to a concert by Cheikh Lô, and I stood at the back and attempted to mimic the dancers’ moves. Admittedly it was a pretty sad effort, but their dancing is insane! So, new goal: actually learn how to dance for a change instead of just faking. That said, if I learn to dance like they do here you may have no idea what I’m doing anyway. Some popular moves include flinging your legs out to the side and swinging them around sort of like your running while holding the front of your shirt out with one hand and swinging the other arm around and making an intense dancing face. Look forward to that.

There are a lot of cool students at the Baobab Center with whom I’ve become friends. But making Senegalese friends has been significantly more difficult. Of course I’m friends with my “siblings” in my host home, and I’m grateful to have people close to my age there. As far as meeting people in other contexts, most guys who talk to you just want to hit on you and most women are not interested in being friendly (most women my age are either maids or married so they don’t have the time to be visiting). Hopefully with time I can meet local friends, but I think it will come gradually as I build a network here.

Finally, in response to Emma’s request, here’s a pic of my bedroom:

I stay in a nice house; one of the few that has hot water and a guardian who sits outside of the front door of the wall surrounding the house six nights a week. Some other houses are organized as individual rooms around a central courtyard, but my house is quite similar to North American houses in layout, which makes it easier to mingle with my family. I would supply a pic of the bathroom also as per request, but currently the toilet is dismantled and laying on the floor, so it’s not really photo-ready. Perhaps later.

Ba ci kanam (Wolof for “until later”). I'll leave you with a pic of the sunset with a baobab tree that I took on the drive home from Toubacouta.