Day 15 - An Average Day in Dakar

We have had two power outages in the last two days.  My host brother says that this typically happens when it’s really hot out, somehow that messes with their electricity.  I suppose that balances out, since I think their lines must be underground or something (since I have yet to see anything that looks like it deals with electricity), so they aren’t frequently struck by cars or lightning the way ours are.  I did find out that my phone’s flashlight was actually strong enough to light up an entire room though, so that was nice.  We had another double-lecture today.  The first was on the role of women’s rights.  The guest lecturer got into quite a debate with our professor over what Senegalese women ought to be striving for, feminism seems to be quite a controversial topic here.  Then again, when isn’t feminism a controversial topic?  The problem is, no two women want the same thing, but we still expect the world to conform to our individual ideals.  It was interesting to find out that Senegalese women are almost trapped in their marriages, because they can lose their pensions and inheritance if they remarry.  However, they do have a tendency to leave their husbands, not in divorce, but for a short period of time in protest when they are angered by their treatment.  The second lecture was another one on Wolof.  Oumou and Papis have also been trying to help teach me Wolof, teaching me common phrases and going over the material from the lectures with me.  It is a really hard language to pick up though.  I do alright with pronouncing the strange sounds, and reading the language, but the phrases are so long that it is difficult to memorize them.  I also feel like we’ve been given way too much information to learn in such a short period of time.  After the lectures a bunch of us decided to head over to a local market, since a lot of people want to have African clothes made before they leave.  It is much cheaper here to buy cloth and have a tailor custom-make your clothing than to buy it in a store.  Chattondra and I decided to walk instead of taking the Car Rapide with the others, since we didn’t want to have too many Americans in one group.  Turns out, we probably should have stuck with the group.  We found a market, but we have no idea if it was the one we were supposed to be going to, since we never found anyone selling fabric.  There were a lot of booths though and I don’t think we got to more than half of the market before we got tired and decided to head back.  Most of the booths were selling clothes that looked as if they were most likely second-hand.  It is kind of frustrating shopping here as a white woman, because you can’t pause to look at something without being flocked by vendors trying to force things on you.  I miss being able to just browse and take my time looking at all of their goods.  It continues to amaze me how good Dakar is for connections.  The city kind of reminds me of D.C. that way.  Embassies are everywhere throughout the city.  Dr. Saydi, the Dakar professor who has been accompanying us most days, runs into people that he knows everywhere, usually people with really diverse and interesting backgrounds.  Thiam finds a lot of people that he knows too, despite the fact that he hasn’t lived here in approximately a decade I believe.  Thiam found out that our women’s rights guest lecturer was going to an interesting conference in the afternoon, so he decided to leave us with the second speaker and accompany her instead.  One girl who is studying with us actually hasn’t been coming to the majority of our lectures, because on one of the first tours we took of the city, we were introduced to a man who works in the burn care unit at the local hospital, and he offered her an internship for the remainder of her time here.  He is working on creating such a center in the US, since there are too many burn victims here for the hospital to handle, and many of the ones with money are transported to Europe for care, and I guess Ashley has experience in advertising so they decided to team up.  Everyone here seems to thrive on the connections that they make.  Apparently tomorrow we are leaving for another 3-day trip (it was in the schedule but no one actually understood that it was more than a day trip until someone asked a question about it this afternoon) so bear with me if I do not post anything for a few days.  Hopefully I will be able to find Wi-Fi there but I’m not making any promises.