Monday, November 10, 2008

Ataya neppee; Obama a gagne; am jaay fonde!

Last week was amazing! and only one reason for that was that Obama won and the democrats increased by 6 seats in the senate. (The tickets for GW's inaugural ball sold out in less than 24 hours however, so I won't get to go. It will be next to impossible to get a ticket to the inauguration, but you know I'm working my resources to locate one or even two.)

**I should be doing research for my two 10 page papers right now, but I guess I do have a month to write them...the internet seems to work for my blog but it can't handle the weight of my email and school research portals at the same time. Alas...

Sarah and I spent the week in Ndiaye Bopp with Diouma, who was our "host mother." There are about 2000 people in Ndiaye Bopp, which is next to the larger town of Mont Rolland, and is the largest of an 18 village network about 2.5 hours outside of Dakar, but as usual it felt so much farther! There is electricity, but no running water, and farmers have to bring out all of their water with them in large containers on their donkey carts in the mornings from the wells. This is crazy because pieces of land are falling in on themselves, creating large ditches/dried up river looking things that indicate underground caves, which means an underground river network! Oh the possibilities!

We started off on Monday by going to a funeral with Diouma. It was the first day of the funeral, which lasts a week. It was for the "husband" of her mother, who was an old man related to the actual husband of her mother who died previously. I'm not completely clear on the relationship, except that he was very old and somehow was a husband figure. In Senegal, it's a big deal when an elderly person dies, but the younger they are the fewer the people who are invited-possibly a testement to child mortality? Diouma lent us some of her boubous to wear for the occassion. It took us the better part of an hour to cross a town that should take 15 minutes because we exchanged greetings with so many people. When we got there, all of the men were sitting outside the compound and all of the women were inside (by compound I mean a number of immediate families have their houses grouped together around a central cleared area and have a regular fence or small wall around the group- like we lived in a little house and there were about 4 others like it in a sort of circle). So we sat for awhile and ate some food with the women. There was a little bit of singing but it was mostly quiet and we left after awhile.
Back home Diouma and Astu, who might be her sister-in-law gave us names- I became Soxna Mbenng (Astu's 12 year old daughter) and Sarah became Diouma Ndiaye, and it was established also that I have a jaay fonde. These names were the only ones we used all week and my fonde was also a source of entertainment all week, especially because I danced whenever asked (or not). It's easier to dance when any kind of dancing is good dancing and it's all women and kids around.
And that was usually the case. (Oh positive reinforcement!) There seemed to be many more females around than men, and most of the men and older boys seemed to leave early for the fields-which is not to say women weren't in the fields because they were too, though maybe doing slightly different tasks, on top of all the preparation and processing of the products that come from the fields, the maintaining of everything around the houses, and the children, of which there are bountiful numbers. During the week we rode the donkey carts, planted some tomatoes, toured the fields-okra, millet, corn, manioc, julip, bissap, limes, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, and some other things. We also went to the community radio station and got to be on a show about malaria-during which we talked in French and a little Wolof. Community radio stations are the best! That was election day, during which we had no CNN, but we did take photos with real donkeys to celebrate an impending victory.
We also visited a couple of health stations, a maternity center, a church, the primary school (overcrowded-it's ridiculous that kids have to learn in French right from the first day, when their parents don't even speak/read French and it continues the colonial legacy and it's a miricale so many kids get to University and then there aren't enough jobs for them when they finish. I have a lot to say about the school system here. Not to mention that English is required starting in middle school and there aren't nearly enough fluent English speakers to teach it.)
and we visited the town hall and talked with some women who ran a women's business loan-giving cooperative, which was cool. It wasn't until the end of our trip that we found out many people go to one particular family to get wounds healed (like snake bites) through local medicine. We wondered how many people go to families like this for their ailments rather than/in addition to the official health centers...
It was hott hott hott and dry so most of the time we sat on mats in the shade and cut okra to prepare it for "the machine" which makes it into a powder for a popular okra soup, we shucked corn and popped kernals off dry corn to prepare it for couscous (which I have much more respect for now-its so work intensive and there are so many varieties of it!), and we sorted beans by taking out the bad or incomplete pieces. The elderly women do these tasks, but we felt pretty proud that we could too. Hard work and a jaay fonde earned me much respect among the women around us.
The family we stayed with, especially Diouma, were incredibly generous! All of the generosity here makes me reflect a lot on how I am back home and my interactions with strangers and just how to improve....

However French class is starting so I need to bust a move, but will try and finish this tomorrow.
-Election results
-Teaching children some "American" games
-Generosity of family
-Gifts and leaving
-Other French toubabs on the car rapide home
-Another bus strike

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