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.