"What's been goin down around there?", you might be asking...
Well for starters I have a new "joking husband" who is this old guy somehow related to this lady by a tailors shop I was talking to two nights ago and then last night my host mom said "oh I hear that you are married now to Mr. Diouf!" and I said oh no no that's not true and she said "oh yes it is true! that's how we joke around here. Kodu (pointing to my seven-year-old host niece-daughter of my oldest host sister) has many husbands!" Oh okay then! All single people do it. When in Rome!
Also on Sunday night I had my first experience ever in life of being slightly grossed out by food. Now we eat goat all the time, and I'm a big fan of goat-it's great! Meat is meat. However before dinner we had what I can only describe as goat's head soup, with the jaws and a piece of the skull with the eye socket, like that, and some vegetables. I was sort of eating a bit of potato and poked at the meat and realized "oh that's the tongue there on that jaw" and stuck to the pieces of meat my host mom and sister handed over to me and then when I spit a bone out in my hand it was of course a tooth. I was not going for it. Only the two kids and those two adults were eating it. The way one of my other sisters looked at me, I realized she wasn't a fan either.
I'd eat it again.
The main course really made up for it though! It was Morroccan and was like little pasta balls in a milky sugary stew. Deeeelightful.
This week has been fairly low key because I've been at school most of the time studying/taking midterms. Now I am officially on vacation again, however because next week are our "rural visits" and my friend Sarah and I will be staying with the family of the director of our program a couple hours away outside Mont Rolland, which is outside Thies. We'll be harvesting crops, planting tomatos, helping at the elementary school, and hopefully will get to talk about the election on the community radio station.
(P.S. Obama's infomercial: kinda creepy. I'm not into the idea and this whole thing of making him an inpenatrable, sliver, packaged, changing America product. Obviously I want him to win, but I just am resentful of the way campaigns have to work today in the US and how removed and media and sound-bite and image driven they are as opposed to other countries where a candidate can have very little money behind him (usually him let's face it) and just does major footwork and gains clout with the people and even a poet can become president (think Vaclav Havel. Even Senghor-the first of Senegal-was a poet, but I'm not very into him). In any case, I will be getting election results over a transistor radio, maybe a TV, I expect to have to call my mom. It will be a late night.)

Have I yet mentioned that I think it's bull crap that all the schools here are in French? Wolof, which 80% of people speak, is never taught anywhere. It's written on billboards, but there isn't necessarily a standardized way of writing that regular people have access to. It's been an argument since before independence, whether schools should be in French, but if schools can be in Hungarian or Czech or Mongolian or Khazak or Cambodian-languages not widely spoken outside of their respective countries- then Wolof could be taught here. Only 30% of the population even reads and speaks French, kids don't speak it when they get to school at age 6, it slows down learning, it discourages kids from continuing in school if they aren't good at languages, it continues the pyschological colonialism by the French- and besides, English and Arabic are much more useful for international relations and trade.

Sarkozy had the nerve to come to Dakar in 2007 and talk about the underdevelopment of Africa, speaking mostly to Senegalese, and blame it on them for the lack of progress they've made. The French didn't even really end slavery in their colonies until after WWI (same for Britain) even though they had "abolished" it in 1848. They set up a net (trap) of beaurocracy that is impossible to navigate and is self defeating-it effects not just the government, but educational institutions and other areas of life.
Then there's the economic dependence and monoculture and then of course after Senegal was reprimanded for not being developed enough they got structural adjustment as the answer. How would you feel if the American dollar was devalued and everything you had yesterday was reduced in value by a half today? The American people would not deal with that-everyone would be in poverty- and that's exactly what happened. The promise of libralization actually lowered incomes and made countries like Senegal more dependent on loans and debt. Every step along the way, people here and other places have resisted what was being imposed on them in order to adapt (while elites within the country of course benefited/still benefit) whether it was growing millet and creating local peanut oil to increase food security in the early 1900s while the peanut price plumeted, or the first fully televised presidential election with intense youth and GOTV campaigning in 2000 after 30 years of the same party.
Stuff's crazy.

But in any case, last weekend I went a couple places. Three of us took a bus and then a taxi to see Lac Rose- a lake said to be ten times as salty as the Dead Sea, and which turns pink at certain times of day because of all the salt. It was indeed pink and we got to take a pirogue ride around the lake, and also we walked through a forest and over sand dunes to an unending stretch of beach with huge waves and no people. It made a great pitstop. After the lake we headed over to Kheur Moussa monestary, only 12km away but it felt much longer. It's a Benedictine monestary with a convent just down the road. The monks were mostly Senegalese, with a Canadian and a couple of French thrown in. Brother Andre was the housing coordinator and he was one of the friendliest, happiest people I've ever met in my life. I thought he was laughing at my bad French when I made arrangements on the phone, but I found out that everything makes him laugh. He made us dinner- potato soup, raviolis, bread with fresh monk-made cheese, and mangos. The three of us each got our own rooms and went to service in the morning. There was a lot of music-much better than the standard fare, and instead of an organ or piano they use jembes (drums), koras (like a lap guitar/harp) and a xylophone looking instrument. Its in a very peaceful surrounding, with many small farms-including their own. The monks make goat cheese, preserves, chocolates, and juices.
Muslims and Catholics seem to actually have a great relationship here. People display their religion proudly in their houses and through their clothing and jewelry, and give one another food on their respective holidays. It's an interesting dynamic that I can't do justice to right here and now, but suffice to say it's unique and refreshing after what I sometimes experience in the US (like uhh...Islamo-fascism awareness week by a couple groups at school).
(**If anyone is interested in some Catholic/Christian fabric, let me know now and I'll get you some.)

Also I've been thinking about media here, especially since we're going to a community radio station next week. Until about the 1990s most of the media people consumed, if they got any at all, was the government's TV station, the government's newspaper (in French only) or the government's radio station or the French world radio-so people were getting news about their own country from an international source. News was regulated, suffice to say. It wasn't until 1994 that radio really came into it's own and anyone could get stations. Now there are channels in every community (group of villages) that broadcast in the local language. There are more TV stations now, but the number of Senegalese one's are not so many, and newspapers are also more free and there are more of them-with strong readership- but they are mainly in Dakar and the big cities. It's interesting that here people don't have a loyalty to a particular newspaper-they just buy whatever looks interesting and it can be different day to day. It's hard for me to imagine now that information freedom has really only existed for about 20 years here. Now people can be informed about political candidates, domestic issues, and their communities. Oh how small things have big effects.

Anyway I'm off and will not update next week but will have one the week after.

Happy voting!