Back in Dakar and armed with a camera

Well here I am back in Dakar for the duration of my stay (or so I thought, I’ll actually be heading to St. Louis next weekend for the International Jazz Festival and a Rotary event). Matt and Dad were here for a week and left on last Saturday night. When they arrived I had this brilliant idea to take them downtown the first day so that they would be buffeted by everyone trying to sell them things or take them places, and then after that everywhere we went would be an improvement. And it worked! (The market in downtown Dakar is generally a place I avoid to preserve my sanity). They enjoyed their stay, and I think Matt might eventually come back to see some other regions of Senegal that we didn’t have time to get to.

In other good news: they brought my mom’s camera for me, so I should be able to put up photos soon (provided that I remember to take them despite the fact that I’m now used to not having a camera).

To tide you over until I’ve amassed my photo collection, I thought I’d post a couple photos that I entered in my school’s “Suma Senegal” (my Senegal) photo contest but which have not yet made it onto the blog (other ones that I entered which have already been posted were the girl with baby on back in Iwol and the woman making Ceebu Jen in Khardimir Rassoul).

This is the guard at the gate of the Phare des Mamelles, Dakar’s lighthouse. When my friend and I went to visit the lighthouse, we greeted him on the way in and the way out, and he didn’t respond either time. Which left us uncertain as to whether we were supposed to be entering the lighthouse grounds or not, but hey, he didn’t stop us. The building of the lighthouse itself has been neglected and you can’t go inside. And that’s probably a good thing because as we were walking around we came to realize that there were people living in the lighthouse.

Here are three girls studying at a Koranic school in the holy city of Touba. Most students of the Koran are boys, but there are now some schools for girls only as well. They memorize the Koran in Arabic by memorizing one or two words at a time, and then adding to the sequence once the previous phrase has been memorized. After about two years of memorizing in Arabic, they are taught the language so that they can understand the meaning of all of the verses they’ve memorized. All learning is done in a traditional outdoor space with two walls of thatched reeds where the girls rock back and forth with the rhythm as they repeat verses and sing songs.

Touba is the holy city of the Mouride brotherhood, which is the largest Muslim brotherhood in Senegal. Here, all Muslims belong to a brotherhood, and each brotherhood has one or two religious celebrations specific to them and has a different set of leaders called Maribous. The founder of the Mouride brotherhood was Cheikh Amadou Bamba (my host brother is named after him) and it was he who declared Touba holy. Although he lived most of his life outside of the city, he requested that his body be buried in Touba, stating that any man involved in transporting his body there without a white man touching it would have a place in heaven (this all happened during colonial times).

The tension between French influences and the Mouride community in Touba continue through today. The city now has a million inhabitants, but does not have any French schools for academic learning, instead children have access only to Koranic schools. This was not always the case, but has been since the 1990s when all French schools in the city were closed. The Senegalese government is currently trying to re-establish the French schools, even suggesting constructing new buildings so that whoever has been using the empty schools since their closure won’t be displaced. But there has been strong opposition from the Khalif, a religious leader whose permission is ultimately required to build any schools. It remains to be seen how this conflict will play out. (Ok, that turned into a long photo explanation, forgive me).

And I think that’s about it for this time. Things at the Baobab Center are getting a little crazy as a new short-term groups of students arrive and people who have been here for a long time leave to go home (this week Cody and Krystal have already left, and Lies will be leaving on Tuesday). It will be pretty much more of the same until I leave as the summer brings many short-term groups who show up for a week to a month . . . but there’s a group coming from Boston at the end of May and I’m hoping to mingle and acquire friends for next year. Wish me luck!

The Cassamance

I just got back to Dakar this morning after about a week in the Cassamance region which is found in south-western Senegal, under the Gambia. If you’ve heard about the region, you probably know that there is a separatist movement that has caused violence in the past. But since 2004 a peace treaty with the government has kept things under control and the tourism industry, which had been huge in the area before the violence, is beginning to return. And although the military checkpoints and trucks rolling around with large pivoting machine guns were a bit unsettling at first, you soon realize that the military presence everywhere would be able to quickly react to any resurgence of rebellion.
The trip was a series of pleasant surprises from the very beginning when we boarded the ferry. We had all heard that the boat was nice, having replaced the Joola ferry which sank, but none of us were expecting that it would have hot-water showers (many of us don’t even have those in our host family homes) and comfortable beds in our cabin, each with its own curtain and reading light. I’m sure that our roommate (the 8th in our 8-bed cabin) was also surprised when he opened the door to find seven young foreigners already eating, playing music, and generally having a little party which may have involved wearing 80s-style headbands in our little cabin. But we shared our food with him so in the end I think he was happy with the situation.
Arriving at the port in Ziguinchor, we were immediately approached by several people wanting to show us the route to our hostel. And we soon realized that unlike the people who approach you in the street in Dakar, most folks in the Cassamance are being genuinely friendly, suggesting friends who can drive you places or organize a tour from you and benefit from talking to you that way instead of just asking for money, as we’ve been accustomed to.
Our most notable experience in Ziguinchor was having dinner at a friend of a friend’s house where his family prepared a special plate typical of the Cassamance region. It was a sauce made of manioc leaves, smoked fish, and palm oil, served over rice. Another exposure to Senegalese life that came along with our meal was watching Almamy, our host, talk constantly on his cell phone via the earpiece/microphone that he had connected to the phone in his pocket. It was more than once that I thought he was participating in our conversation and he was actually on the phone . . . but ya, the whole earpiece thing is very popular among young guys here.
From Ziguinchor it was on to Cap Skiring, by far the most popular destination in Cassamance due to its miles of sandy beaches (there’s even a Club Med there, though it closed at the end of April). Yet despite being a touristy place, we saw virtually no tourists there because the high season ended when Club Med closed. While this seems like it would be a good thing (and we did have the beach to ourselves) it also meant that anytime we left the beach to head into the village, all of the taxi drivers and store owners and random guys in the street directed their attention toward us. So we stuck around the beach, spending most of our time with the jelly fish who washed up on shore (and were therefore definitely in the water we were swimming in . . . I tried unsuccessfully not to think about it).
To go from Cap Skiring to Ile de Karabane, we hired a pirogue. Pirogues are small motorized boats often used for fishing. They’re made of wood, and the base of the pirogue is hollowed out of a solid piece of wood. When in Ziguinchor we saw some boat-makers and they told us that it takes one and a half months to finish carving the shape of the pirogue. Then the pirogues are painted colourfully with designs in white, yellow, blue, green, red, and black. The pirogue trip was beautiful, passing through mangroves and stopping at a couple of villages along the way. But the moment that made the trip was when a dolphin came and swam by the front of the pirogue. And since I happened to be at the front of the pirogue, it was less than a metre away from me. We all started yelling with excitement, which was a probably a bad idea because the dolphin didn’t come back . . . oops.
Ile de Karabane itself was my favourite place that we visited. It used to be a French trading station in colonial times, and the buildings from this period lie in various states of ruin. The most stunning ruin was located just around the corner from our campement. It was just four brick walls with arched doors and windows, right next to the ocean. But what’s amazing about it is that almost all of the walls are over-taken by tree roots, and the roots even hang down in the middle of the room as trees grow on top of the walls. It was an awesome visual metaphor for the survival of African culture through years of colonial domination.
The last stop on our tour was in Oussouye where we were able to go on a walk to nearby villages and see a local woman making pottery and a cashew farm. Cashews = really difficult to produce. First the fruit falls off the tree, and you break the nut off the end of it. The fruit can be eaten or pressed to make cashew milk. Then the nut (at this point still in the shell) is boiled or steamed. After that, the shells are placed one at a time in a sharp metal press to break them open (this has to be done carefully or the nut inside will break). Then the nut which has been extracted from the shell is roasted in an oven. And after all that, the bitter membrane surrounding the nut has to be scraped off by hand. No wonder cashews are expensive!
So that’s about it for the trip. Yesterday morning Lucy and I took a Ndiaga Ndiaye from Oussouye to Ziguinchor and walked to the port to board the ferry, arriving in Dakar at 6:30 am. And now, in the mid-afternoon, I’m still swaying back and forth when I stand up as if I’m still on the boat. I’m also getting excited to see Matt and Dad, who are arriving tonight! It’ll be great to show someone else what I’ve discovered here in Senegal!