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!