Day 22: God's City? Or.....

Well, Touba was….. hot.  It was cool and all to see a really big place of worship, I’m just not sure it was worth a four-hour drive to the middle of the desert.  The majority of the people at Touba seem to spend almost all of their time napping, which I think makes them much smarter than us.  We took an hour-long tour in 110*F weather.  The architecture within the mosque was amazing, but it was difficult to pay attention to anything our guide was trying to tell us, because we were swarmed by young boys.  They tried begging for the first minute, but when it became clear we weren’t going to give them anything, they didn’t go away, they decided to follow us around and either listen to the lecture we were being given, or stare at the white people.  I couldn’t decide which.  Probably the most upsetting part of being at Touba was when we walked past a man lying on the floor of the temple whose face & body were covered in boils.  To be honest, I’m not even positive he was still alive.  It kind of made us all realize that it’s really common for people to go pray at major religious spots when they’re extremely sick, and clearly no one keeps them out here.  I can handle any kind of deformities or mental illnesses, but I’m guessing whichever diseases cause boils are probably a little more contagious.  Needless to say, we went through a lot of Purell when we got back onto the bus.  I was also amused by their insistence that everyone remove their shoes before entering the mosque.  This was intended to keep their place of worship clean, but the reality of the situation was that there was still sand everywhere and people were just getting sand on their feet instead of their shoes and tracking it all over the place.  I actually think that shoes probably would have been cleaner.  The gender bias in this country continues to amaze me.  I understood that it was important for the women to cover up when entering the religious city, to the point that the only thing actually showing were our faces.  However, I hadn’t realized that no such standards existed for the men.  I think they might have still been required to wear pants, but there were plenty of men wearing simple t-shirts.  It was really unfair.  No one should be forced to wear so much clothing when it’s that hot out, and clearly the men will never understand because they aren’t being forced to do the same.  I also really just don’t understand who decided that it was a good idea to build an extremely conservative religious city in the middle of the desert in the first place.  If you’re going to have one, at least put it somewhere cooler, like along the coast.  I think they actually chose one of the hottest places in Senegal.  And this isn’t even their hottest time of the year yet.  The one really cute touch the place did have was people outside of the mosques selling finches, you could buy one and release it to ‘release all bad feelings.’  It was a cute idea.  Also, a monkey ran across the road in front of our bus this morning.  I have no idea where it came from, or if monkeys are even native to Senegal.  I’ll have to ask the professor tomorrow.

P.S. The power outages have been getting more frequent.  We’ve probably had 5 or 6 during the past two weeks – at least during the time that I’m actually home.  Really not sure what that’s about.