Direct from Dakar: The daily grind

I figure since I’ve been so emphatic that I’m settling back into my daily routine here in Dakar for the rest of my stay, I should probably give you a better idea of what exactly that daily routine is (though I’ve already thoroughly covered my food-related activities).

While here as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, I am required to be a full-time student for 6 months. At a university that would take the form of taking a certain number of courses, but since my classes are all one-on-one French instruction, I instead have a quota of hours to fill before my departure (480 hours to be precise). Currently I’m taking 6 hours of class a day, or 3 hours of class on the two days that I’m at the orphanage in the morning. I have two different teachers: Thomas for my morning classes and Oumoul in the afternoons. The other day Lucy and I were discussing how much the Baobab Centre (our school) is like a family, and to give you an idea of my teachers’ personalities, Thomas is the cousin that everyone always idolized as a child and Oumoul is the mother. While I recently switched to have Thomas as a teacher and thus don’t know him very well yet, I’ve been with Oumoul all along and she’s been an invaluable source of inside information on Senegalese culture and is always welcoming (understandably it’s she who welcomes the terrified/jet-legged/generally confused students as they arrive at the airport).

The Baobab Centre - my classes are actually in the yellow building that you can just barely see on the left.

In coming here I was a little bit unsure of what form my French classes would take, and they are certainly more informal than what I’ve been accustomed to at home. While my high school French class involved following a text book to memorize verb conjugations and vocabulary lists, my class here started as learning one day the conditional tense and the next day relative pronouns and the next the use of clauses, all without much apparent order (though, to be sure my teachers listened to what I was saying, saw where the faults were, and then targeted lessons to that in many cases). Now most of my class time is spent in discussion with my teachers, and as I’ve always found conversational French to be my weak point, it’s been very useful. However, I have had to let go of my perfectionism in wanting to learn every little grammar rule so that I can then apply it and write formal essays etc, because that’s simply not the goal of classes at the Baobab Centre, and it’s probably not what will be most useful for me later on either. Maybe I’ll try to audit some French classes next year at school to brush up on technical stuff . . .

Another important part of class time is the coffee break, particularly in the morning when all of the classes break at 10 to refuel. It’s there that I get to meet all of the new students coming through. It’s really interesting to see all of the short-term groups come and go, as I remember arriving to find people who had already been in Senegal for 4 months and thinking “oh, they must know everything about Dakar” and I wonder if people think the same thing when they realize how long Ellen, Lucy, and I have been here. (They’d be wrong, by the way, if they did think that because while I have learned a lot since arriving there are still days when I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing).

Krystal and I having coffee (well tea, or perhaps tea mixed with coffee and milk, a habit Krystal picked up in Uganda . . .)

As for the evening routine, it’s pretty low-key. I actually spend most nights sitting at home watching Mexican soap operas that have been dubbed in French with Illy and Nogaye. Though apparently my host mom’s daughter and grandchildren are arriving soon for a short visit of only two months and will be sleeping in the room that we normally watch tv in, so it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to keep pace with the latest happenings between Carlos Eduardo and Luisa Fernanda (they’re meant to be together, but you her fiancé just became paralyzed in a car accident and would be devastated if she left him, which she may be inclined to do because Carlos Eduardo has recently seen the light and is about to divorce his wife (who is laying on a heavy guilt trip over lack of attention) who is becoming a model and may be starting an affair with the director of her latest commercial. And I didn’t even get into the fact that their parents have started dating, except that Luisa’s father isn’t really her father, of course). Ya, I try to follow all of this in French, thus I pass it off as “studying”. And I’m only mildly concerned that this storyline may not be resolved before I head back home . . . how will I ever sleep at night without knowing their romantic destiny????