These are a few of my favorite things...

• The neckline of women's boubous: Traditional Senegal wear for women has a neckline with a soft curve that slips off the shoulder frequently and perfectly frames their elegant faces and hear wrapped in pulars of the same fabric.
  
• Bissap, juice and sauce: Bissap juice is made out of hibiscus flowers, is a fantastic deep fuschia color and tastes amazing with the right amount of vanilla sugar. My father is from the ethnic group Balante, which also uses the leaves of the bissap plant to make a sauce that we eat with caldo, the traditional Balante rice and fish dish. Yum. Below is me on my birthday with a bissap juice cake- awesome!
  

• Winter wear: Although it doesn't feel cold often to me, a popular item for men here is a knit hat that goes down to just above the ears complete with poof ball. There's also a surprising number of scarves.
  
• Music and community: Music seems to run through the veins of Senegalese people. Community gatherings are often organized around the drums. In the arid north, the stringed insturments like the kora are used and their notes travel across the sand. In the Casamance at the south the forest requires strong djembe drums to call everyone. We learned djembe in Toubacouta, where the lead drummer had played so hard his hands were bleeding, second picture below. The last picture below is women in Sokone, the native village of the program director playing drums on calabase gourds, also used for preparing food and carrying water. They used a discarded shell casing on their fingers.
  





• Waxataan and ataaya: Every afternoon, for some Senegalese, is an affair with friends and family, centered around a gas stove with a tiny teapot full of sugar, strongly Chinese green powder tea and other local tea leaves. Ataaya, or tea, is a respected tradition because making the tea is a repetitive process, usually there are three rounds from the same pot. They get progressively less strong, which I noted after my heart was beating quickly after drinking the first round. The tea isn't even the point of the get-together. Instead, it's to facilitate the discussion of anything and everything in raised voices or calm tones. In Wolof, ataaya is the noun and the verb- "To do tea" includes all of the above. Below is my host mother in the village outside Toubacouta where we stayed for a night.
  




• Respect for elders: The most important status here comes from your age. Elders are respected and family roles are determined according to your age and place in line. My grandmother stayed with my family in Dakar and I appreciate that you are exposed and submit to those with more experience in the world more often than in the States. But seeing that the demographic makeup of much of Africa is so young now, this may be in flux.
  
• Teranga: Senegalese are proud to be good hosts and they are indeed hosts to many foreigners, both from Africa and other continents. 50% of the migration in West Africa is to Senegal. My history teacher called it a "trampoline" for people to head to France, the US, or other places in Europe. I've found Senegalese people to be overwhelmingly welcoming, happy to have visitors, and willing to put up with annoying questions. Below is host family in Dakar.
  

• Salutations-Repetitions: I wish that each of you could hear and understand the way in which the Senegalese traditionally greet one another. Greetings are of utmost importance and it is rude when you encounter anyone you know to not take the time to properly acknowledge them and anyone they're with. There is a sing-songy way that greetings are done that makes me smile whenever I hear it. It uses the repetition of the same phrases while the tone of the voices gets lower and lower. By the end of time in Senegal I had got the hang of the repetitions but couldn't match the song.
  
• Baobabs and pain de singe: Who doesn't like baobabs? And their fruit makes such a unique tangy juice. They're all over Senegal! They really do feel ancient. Below is a picture I took looking out of a 500 year old baobab on the road to Saint Louis.
  

The Michelin man is alive and well in Senegal..

...and so am I. Just busy. Baal ma, or excuse me, as we would say in Wolof.

I hate holidays.

This post will certainly be unfiltered. I’m just going to tell you how it really is to do Easter in Senegal. The title is a direct quote from my host mother, on the eve of Good Friday. She said this when I arrived home from my travels for spring break and found her outside the house directing our maid and a girl hired for 4 days (for $1 a day) in the making of Ngalax.

Ngalax is a dish that all the Christians make on Good Friday and share with their Muslim friends in the neighborhood, in exchange for the sheep meat that they share with us on the Muslim holiday, Tabaski. It is a tool for neighborly and interreligious love at the same time. And it is good. It is a great example of a category of food whose texture would never fly in American dishes- the heavy sauce and rice/millet/couscous combo. Many Senegalese eat Thiakry every Sunday, which is ground millet or couscous eaten with “lait caillé” which is a soupy flavorless yogurt. Ngalax is more special, probably because it is a hundred times harder to prepare.

The ngalax sauce is made with a truly Senegalese mixture- peanut paste (Senegal’s largest product and export is peanuts) and buuy/pain de singe (literally translated monkey bread, this is the fruit of the Baobab tree). Now I want you to try to imagine a tart peanut buttery sauce (good luck, it’s bizarre). After pounding the buuy in the gigantic mortar/pestil combo that is essential to Senegalese cooking, you add the peanut butter (note giganto bucket which my host mother said would last the whole year).


I slept through the part where they cook it, but just know that they cook it. Then you serve it with Senegalese couscous, which is smaller and browner than your traditional Moroccan couscous, along with raisins. What results is a tangy, thick sensation with sweet tones from the raisins. Like I said, a weird texture that I can’t really handle too much of, but a good taste. Apparently one of our neighbors puts coffee in her ngalax, which is a travesty. Food drama.

I did get up in time to help my family share the ngalax with our neighbors. This was a process of finding all the medium sized containers in the house, filling them, then practically running around from house to house delivering the goods and bringing said containers back home and washing them. Receiving families seem to hide a huge pot where they mix all the ngalax they get and eat it for days. Other people have the option to come to your house and eat ngalax for the next few days and you’re expected to have it for them. Apparently everyone gets so sick of it that they don’t make it again for a year.

I can understand why my host mom does not like holidays. The division of labor felt heightened this weekend, as the men of the family sat around and talked and drank palm wine and the women became grumpy running around making food and serving it. I felt like I was integrating well because I got grumpy too, and my host sister got angry at me for not getting up early to help make the Easter dish. The other thing that may indicate that my family likes me is that a few of my uncles, at different points in time urged my 16-year old host brother to marry me. He somehow refused without making the situation more awkward and my host father said they’d just have to find me a husband in the village (unspecified location) and keep me here. Now that they know I can clean dishes, the next step appears to be marrying me off.

Other than ngalax, grumpiness, and arranged marriages, the big news of the weekend was church. We went on Good Friday to see the “living stations of the cross”, which was a dramatic retelling of Jesus’ crucifixion. Then on Saturday night we went to church from 9 pm to 2 am Easter morning, for the “Midnight Mass”. This mass is treated like prom. I should qualify that by saying that everyday is like prom for lots of Senegalese woman who can wear a boubou, a couple pagnes, a head wrap, heels, walk around the sand in Dakar, sweating in the 100 degree heat, and still look fabulous. So, it was quite fancy and included lots of shiny and sparkly fabric, which is really in here. I didn’t understand much of the Catholic liturgy that went into the mass, but it included lots of beautiful singing in Latin, lots of quick baptisms, two marriages, and a homily.

If you thought that the holiday was over, just wait. There was the biggest Senegalese wrestling match of the year between two gigantic men on Easter Sunday, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of Senegal’s independence and the inauguration of the infamous African Renaissance Statue. In fact, Senegal also has Easter Monday as a official holiday without work or school so that everyone can recover. But all of that will have to wait for next time. For now, I am thankful that we have made it through the holiday, we’ve eaten well, I’m still single, and Jesus is risen.

ABC

Here's a pic I took this weekend in Joal that demonstrates the Abstinence, Be Faithful, Use Condoms method rather explicitly. HIV education is always interesting!


I will write about our first weekend out of town soon.

Feast Your Eyes (And Ears)

Must sees of this week (All of them! I promise!):


1. Photos of Senegalese wrestlers that were awarded by World Press Photo. I will have to write another post on wrestling here, it is hard core and dripping in cultural differences.

2. Akon (Senegalese rapper who made it big in the US) was chosen to compose a song for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The video below has a traditional Senegalese beat, paired with the Soweto Gospel Choir. It also features my favorite African footballer, Drogba!



3. Salagne Salagne by Youssou Ndour- the most famous Senegalese singer. This song is played everywhere here and it's rhythm feels almost ingrained in my life here. It's beautiful.

Sorry Mom, I'm joining a roller-gang.

That's right. Today I was enlightened. I now have a goal in life.

As I was walking home, on the side of the VDN, one of the biggest highways in Dakar, where cars go pretty darn fast (I'm not good at estimating speed), there came buzzing down the road a group of 4 young men wearing roller blades and roller skates, holding onto the back of a truck. At the cross-street where I was standing they let go of the truck and did some spinny tricks and stuff (I'm not aware yet of the technical terms).

A couple of seconds later about ten more spun and rolled off. They then proceeded to catch other rides with trucks. Only one truck refused to let them roll along. All the others acted like this was normal. They either got the trucks as they were going slow turning onto the road or built up enough speed to catch a truck cruising by.

I have been searching for a cheap, yet fast way to get to school and I think I've found it. The only problem is that it's CRAZY AND DANGEROUS. Welcome to Senegalese extreme sports.

Everything's Gonna Be Alright

On Wednesday of this week my sister introduced me to my new favorite place in Dakar. I don't even know the name, all I know is they sell beignets (fried dough balls) and fried plantains for 25 and 50 CFA respectively.

Meaning, I won't be without my daily serving of fat and sugar anymore.

I do have friends too.

In case you were wondering. Which I know some of you were.

Here we are being dorks with a Dakar native, the fat white manican. Catering to the American tourists, perhaps? I just want to know where they got him from.