Day 6 - Our First Free Day

So, because I don’t actually believe in being intelligent, ever, I went to the beach today.  If I die of skin cancer, it will be my own fault and I give all of you permission to laugh at my funeral.  Today was a free day for us, and some of the members of my host family thought it would be fun to walk down to the beach closest to where I live.  The waves were really big there.  We waded out to about waist-height, and then had to jump when the waves came because the majority of them were over our heads.  I finally learned the name of the guy that I talk to the most in the family, it’s Papi.  He looks like he’s probably in his late 20’s/early 30’s, but I have no idea how he actually fits into the family.  Apparently today was some kind of anniversary of Bob Marley or something, so he was all excited about that.  I guess Bob Marley’s really big here.  Actually, in a lot of ways being here is like being in the U.S. in the late ‘90s, early 2000’s.  My family watches T.V. but it’s an older style, and everyone talks on the phone, it seems that texting isn’t popular here.  I’ve also seen several people wearing Bermuda shorts.  I’ve been enjoying watching T.V. with the family because it’s like my childhood all over again.  In the past few days I’ve watched Tom & Jerry, Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny & Road Runner, The Powerpuff Girls, The Land Before Time, The Pink Panther, Dexter’s Lab, and Friends.  They seem to also get some modern shows, since we watched an episode of Twisted the first day I was here, but they seem to prefer the classics.  I have no idea how people here stay so thin.  There is barely any fat on anyone I’ve met, yet they eat more in one meal than I usually do in an entire day.  My host mother is convinced that I don’t like the food that I’m eating because I don’t finish everything she gives me, but the truth is I eat until I am actually feeling sick and couldn’t possibly put another bite in my mouth, and it’s still only about a third of my plate.  The animals here are also very thin, I’m not sure that they are the same breeds as the ones in the states.  The cats are very lanky, and most of them seem to have a different bone structure (they remind me of the animals in Egyptian hieroglyphics, which I always thought were exaggerated, but maybe they are actually accurate depictions of animals in Egypt).  The horses are also different (DBAL, J&D).  They are thin, and much smaller than horses in the United States.  Most of them would probably only be classified as ponies, but they’re clearly full grown.  They are used to move carts for the street vendors, and it is not unusual to see them on the busy roads along with the cars, being forced to gallop. 

Day 5 - Adventure to Ngor

Welp, I’m sunburned!  My shoulders, neck and feet are all bright red.  To be honest I’m surprised it took this long.  Today was pretty cool though.  We didn’t have class, but we went on an optional trip to an island called Ngor.  Our professor basically grew up there, so he ran into a lot of people that he knew.  The island was beautiful, and the water was so clear.  The waves get really big here, it seems like it would be a decent spot for surfing.  I’ve also never seen so many crabs on the rocks of a beach in my life.  Four of us decided to pay for snorkeling gear, so we went out and took a look at some of the ocean life there.  It was pretty cool.  I’m kind of sad that I couldn’t find the charging cord for my camera in time (I was packing the morning that we left because I had come back the night before from a camping trip in Tennessee) because I believe it is supposed to be waterproof, and that would have been pretty cool.  Next time….  We got back to our houses pretty early, so Kenisha and I decided to text our African partners from earlier and see what they were up to.  It turns out there was a big festival going on for the English club, which Kikinette (my partner) was MCing.  They put on a series of performances, about African perceptions, both in Africa and in the occidental world, but it was all in English.  It was really cool.  The transition between performances seemed somewhat disorganized at times, but those who performed were really good.  I have some video, maybe I’ll be able to share it if I ever figure out how to force Blogger to let me upload videos.  I’ve been fighting that battle for quite a while now, and don’t seem to be making any progress.  I will say one thing for the African eating habits.  Although having everyone eat out of the same plate may seem somewhat less sanitary than American standards, especially as the matriarch is pulling apart the meat and sorting it out to everyone, it does work really well for feeding children.  Instead of getting bored and running off after a few bites the way American children do, the boys here sit quietly, waiting for the next piece of meat to be placed in front of them.  Honestly, it’s not a bad system.  I think one of my favorite things about this city (besides the fact that we are right on the ocean) is the cost of the taxis.  You can get across the city for roughly six dollars.  It’s wonderful.  Things in general are pretty inexpensive here, with the exception of the clothes – our professor explained that one to us the first day but I forget what he said, I think maybe the majority of clothes here are handmade or something?  Although during the performances today, one of the students cracked a joke about everything being made in China, so apparently that’s true here as well.  Of course.

More Senegalese Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day 4: Being Tourist-y

Good news, no one got lost!  Darra and I left about an hour and a half early just to be sure, but we all found WARC okay.  We got an official tour of Dakar today.  We saw a museum of African art, which was really cool.  The tour was guided, which was nice, although I’m not sure that I understood what they were talking about all the time.  One of the more interesting exhibits was about the pollution in Senegal. It made the point that the newer, more materialistic materials were ruining our world with pollution.  Although wooden bowls and clay pots may seem ancient and rudimentary to us, they are much better for the earth.  It was an interesting perspective on modernization.  We also got to see the President’s house, as well as The African Renaissance Monument.  This is a large statue of a man, woman and child.  It points towards the western-most point of Africa, because it is supposed to represent bringing the African culture to those who have moved to the western world.  It was built in 2010, under the supervision of a president (not the current one) who cared a great deal for the diaspora, although not everyone here likes him.  We actually got to catch a glimpse of him our first day in Dakar, because he was getting into his car as we walked past his house.  The construction of the monument was very controversial, because it was built in a very poor neighborhood, which could not really afford the construction, and a lot of corruption occurred among the contractors.  Afterwards, we had the entire afternoon to work on our first projects of the class.  They are easy enough, just a creative reflection on our first impressions of the city (Sean and I wrote a poem called Jàam a Baax, which in Wolof means peace is good).  It seems as if this class will be mostly a cultural experience, with occasional papers reflecting on what we’ve learned.  Most people seem to love their host families, and it seems that I am not the only one that was surprised by the size of their family.  I think most of the families in Dakar are a mix of extended family living under one roof.  Some of the luckier students have other exchange students in their houses, not from our program but from others.  Many are from other parts of the United States, and I think someone has one from Japan.  The only person who is having difficulty adjusting to their host family as far as I know is Kenisha, and she actually loves the family, but she is having problems with flying cockroaches that are apparently very prevalent in her house.  Hopefully she’ll be able to work something out to overcome it.  So far the only thing I think I am struggling with in this country is their taste for fish.  I really hate seafood, and even though I will occasionally eat some of the more bland types of fish, I would never be able to scrape the meat off of the bones while I am eating the way they do here.  I find myself forcing myself to look away from other peoples’ plates because the fact that the fish on their plates are staring at me freaks me out.  I’m not sure I could ever become accustomed to eating meat that is more or less in its original form.

O-H!

The obligatory O-H-I-O photo by the coast of Senegal...

 

Day 3 - Sorry I'm Late Posting, Finding Wi-Fi Here is Difficult

Moved into the host family’s house today.  They all seem very nice.  They are definitely not at all what I expected though.  I was told that I would be living with my host mom, her two daughters (in their late 20’s) and a twelve year old girl.  There are at least five other people who regularly come and go from the house, and I am not really sure how many of them live their all the time.  There are actually two girls around the age of 12, and then two boys, maybe 5 and 3 years old?  They are really cute.  The younger girls be-friended me really quickly, and we went on several adventures around their neighborhood in search of their friends and food.  They tried to explain to me the relations within the family, but things aren’t quite as clear cut here.  If they have very close friends, they tend to adopt them into their family, and children are often raised by sisters of their mothers, so the child calls their aunt their mother, and things like that.  It’s all rather confusing to me and I’ve pretty much given up trying to understand.  The hardest part is remembering their names.  African names are so different from U.S. ones.  The two younger girls are named Oumou and Aminata, and my host mother is Maman Collé, but I have yet to memorize everyone else’s names.  All of the Ohio State students live within walking distance of each other, but we do not really know where each other live, or how to get to WARC from our houses, so it will be interesting to see how many people get lost tomorrow morning.  Earlier today, we went to hear a lecture on Wolof, the language that most people here speak.  French is the official language, which is used for school and media, but most people use Wolof when they are speaking to one another in the streets.  The lecture was very interesting, although I wish we could have learned more useful phrases.  We learned how to greet each other, and we learned the alphabet as well as some basic words for each letter.  The language reminds me a lot of Arabic, they use very similar sounds, more guttural than English.  After teaching us the alphabet, the lecturer sang one of his poems for us, while playing the guitar.  From what I gathered, he often sings things songs to children in school.  The biggest culture shocks so far have been the traffic and the showers.  Almost no one here has hot water for their showers, it doesn’t bother them to shower in cold water.  I think that will be the thing that I miss the most this month.  The traffic is absolutely insane.  If there are rules of the road, it doesn’t seem like anyone follows them.  Everyone just kind of drives where they please, cutting other drivers off.  There aren’t any traffic lights, they use small roundabouts instead for their intersections.  The pedestrians rarely use the sidewalks, they prefer to walk along the edge of the road, right next to the cars, and they don’t have the right of way here so everyone just sprints across the street when there is a break in traffic.  They walk much closer to cars than anyone ever would in the states, there have been times when our bus was turning and someone was walking so close to the side of it that I was sure someone would be hit.  No one has so far that I’ve seen though.  It would be interesting to see the statistics for this country for how often pedestrians are killed by cars, and compare them to the States.

l'Art de WARC

Some of the cooler artwork around the West African Research Center.