2 Weeks Exploring Around Dakar

I realized I should probably post as I am officially half way done with my 6-month adventure.  I only have one month left in Senegal, which in its own right is shocking and difficult to wrap my head around.  So much has happened in the past three months, and yet I feel like I just arrived yesterday.  I wont get nostalgic now; you can look forward to that at a later date.  However, I do want to say that this place has become my home in the past three months and I fully intend to live up these next 4 weeks in order to say that I left Dakar in style. 

            These past two weeks I haven’t left Dakar on any excursions and that might be why I came to realize just how attached I am to this city.  I have spent the past two weeks recognizing how little class time I have left, sitting on a cliff on the most Western Point of Africa, visiting schools and adult literacy classes with my Education and Culture class, seeing the famous Senegal Baobab Orchestra at a private Senegalese school function and doing some Senegalese Salsa while there, drinking laît with my neighbors (a drink made of milk, mint, cheese, and sugar, it sounds weird but tastes like Christmas in a cup), helping my host family during a giant spring cleaning endeavor, learning how to make Mafé with my host mom and aunt (my favorite Senegalese dish), learning how to make Bouye Juice (my favorite Senegalese drink) with my American friends, planting trees along the highway by our school with our CIEE program and the neighborhood Senegalese community, stargazing on an island while listening to a Nigerian band, walking through Dakar’s nature park (Parc de Hann) and finally, enjoying and cherishing every moment I have left here.  Here are some pictures from the last two weeks:

The Most Western Point of Africa

The Baobab Orchestra

Learning how to make Mafé

My 3 year old niece Rahoya

Making Bouye Juice

Tree Planting across from our school

How Many Léegi's Does It Take to Get to the Gambia?

This past Thursday April 4^th was Senegalese Independence day and we didn’t have school.  My friends and I decided to take advantage of the four-day weekend, leave Senegal for Independence Day and travel to The Gambia.  For those who don’t know The Gambia (yes it has a “The” in the name) is a small country inside of Senegal.  It is surrounded by Senegal on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the fourth side, I like to say Senegal is eating The Gambia like a Pac-Man.  The British colonized The Gambia and therefore the national language is English, and by English I mean very broken sentences that dont make sense.  The Gambia is also currently under a dictatorship where the president is not to be discussed in a bad way (can you say Harry Potter), and there are billboards with phrases such as “All Gambian women rally behind him,” and “It is every Gambian’s sacred right and duty to vote for Him.”  Needless to say The Gambia is a weird place and we definitely discovered all of it’s weird glory this past weekend.

            We decided to leave Dakar after school on Wednesday evening, which led us to arrive at the Gambian border around 1:30am in the morning.  To our surprise and dismay, the border was closed and there were no hotels or places to stay nearby with the exception of under all of the trucks waiting to cross in the morning.  Because we were left with very few options we may or may not have crossed the Gambian border through back roads at 2am without receiving a passport stamp, but I will leave that part of the story up to your imagination. 

            We should have known at that point that the weekend would only get weirder, and it did.  On Thursday morning we left Farfeeni and travelled to a small village called Tendaba via the WORST and dustiest roads I have ever driven on.  We arrived at our encampment, Tendaba camp and were immediately welcomed by two guys who worked there named Aaron and Brown Skin (yes he called himself Brown Skin, I do not know his real name).  These two boys became our tour guides for the next two days as they took us on a pirogue ride through the Baobolong Wetland Reserve parallel to the river, and gave us a quasi-tourist drum and dance lesson.  On Friday we had a different guide named Lamine who took us on a 6 hour, probably 15km walk to the Kiang West National Park, which was about a 3km walk from our hotel.  The walk itself was beautiful and it was nice to see nature as it is lacking a little in Dakar.  We also saw about 3 groups of Baboons and my friend Bridget educated us on the baboons from her primatology class last semester, thanks Bridge!  The 6 hour walk was a little rough towards the end as the heat rose and we ran out of water, but we made it back to Tendaba camp thankfully and spent the rest of the day relaxing, and also jumping off a dock into the Gambian river with a random group of Gambians.

the group with Brown Skin and Aaron

Tendaba Camp

Wetland Reserve

Kiang West National Park

Just dancing with our new friends

            Sadly, on Saturday morning we left Tendaba camp for the capitol city, Banjul.  We had to leave at 6am because apparently there was a national cleaning day in The Gambia on Saturday and all of the roads were closed from 9am-1pm (have I mentioned this is a weird country?)  We only made it to Banjul because we kept convincing our driver that it was only 8:45 when it was in fact 9:30 and he was the only car on the road.

            Banjul was by far the weirdest leg of the trip and we decided that in Banjul you pick your poison, mosquitoes or men because there is an abundance of both and they just want to follow you.  The dictator does not allow a lot of things in Banjul and therefore the city was creepily cleaner than other parts of Africa we have seen, and there is absolutely no nightlife.  We spent the day having two picnics to save money, one at a park and one on the beach, walking around the city a little and then playing cards at our hotel to escape the men and mosquitoes.

The dictator

One example of weird signs in Banjul

these faces sum up our weekend perfectly

            Needless to say on Sunday we were ready to head back to Dakar, the city we have much more appreciation for now.  Little did we know the journey back would take 10 hours and would involve us taking a taxi to a ferry, a two hour ferry ride, a 20 mile car ride to the border, an hour at the border as we argued about our “sketchy” entrance into the country, a taxi to the garage, and finally a 5 hour sept-place ride back to Dakar.

            Overall it was a crazy weekend filled with unpredictable situations, delicious buffet meals, lots of card playing, swimming in the Gambian River, meeting a lot of Rastas, getting about 50 mosquito bites, and somehow making it back to Dakar.  Lets just say for The Gambia, “been there, done that, probably wont go back.”

Also here is my upcoming schedule:

-Next two weeks in Dakar

-April 26-28^th Sine Saloum region in Senegal

-May 3rd-5th Riding Camels in Lompoul Desert and visiting the old capitol city of St. Louis

-May 22^nd fly to Croatia to meet my parents

-May 29^th-June 9^th Bop around Europe (let me know if you want to join!)

-June 10^th-July 19^th SIT International Studies and Multilateral Diplomacy Program

-July 20^th Fly back to Washington!

-August 18^th Fly back to DC!

Sunrise Over the African Bush

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to see a very different side of Senegalese and African life by spending a week in a rural village with a Peace Corps volunteer and her homestay family. 

            In order to get to my rural village I, along with 3 other students from my program took the most common form of Senegalese transportation to far places, a Sept-Place.  The best way to describe a Sept-Place is an old station wagon with an added seat in the back in order to fit 7 people including the driver, as you can imagine not the most comfortable form of transportation especially for 7 hours in 105 degree weather, but we made it to Koumpentoum none-the-less.

            For the first three days I stayed in a road town called Koumpentoum with about 15,000 people, not exactly the rural village I was imagining but still very different from Dakar.  We spent the first three days wandering around Koumpentoum.  At the Health Post I met a women who 10 minutes before gave birth to a baby.  She was sitting on a bed with the baby next to her and looked as though she could dance around, not like a person had just come out of her.  The women who give birth at the clinic only stay for a couple of hours and then return to their village. I couldn’t believe how calm this woman was especially because in the United States giving birth is a huge ordeal involving medicine, personal hospital rooms, multiple doctors, nurses, and more.

            One day I was sitting with some Senegalese Women who sell Fataaya, the best bread ever made, and they took me over to the Koumpentoum women’s garden where I met a woman named Rosa Lee.  Rosa explained to me that the women in community all pool their money for the upkeep of the garden, sell the vegetables from their personal garden patches, and give most of the money back to the garden for sustainability.  This garden was just one example of how the people of Koumpentoum are pushing for change and development.  It was very inspiring to see how involved this community was in improving the lives of each member.

            On Thursday of that week I took a Sharete, basically a piece of wood pulled by a horse, 10 Km outside of Koumpentoum (about an hour ride) to the village of Daraw Salam 2 Sine Saloum.  This village is a conglomeration of huts surrounded by the African bush on all sides.  It was a pretty amazing experience as I spent time in a compound composed of two co-wives, the first wife was 26 with 5 children, the oldest child is 12, and the second wife is 21 with one 2-year-old child.  Unfortunately their husband does not spend much time at home and uses all of his money on other forms of entertainment, leaving the family with very little money means.  I spent a lot of time sitting in the shade observing the compound, trying to speak in Wolof while they responded in Seerer, and I even had the chance to pound some millet! 

Daraw Salam 2 Sine Saloum

Sunset from my compound

            I left the village early the next morning and watched the sunrise over the African bush while riding a Sharete, it was by far one of my favorite experiences of the past two and a half months.  My Rural Visit week taught me a lot about the many different types of people in Senegal.  It is easy to forget that there are 27 different languages spoken in Senegal and each ethnic group is distinct.  I also realized that throughout my studies I have learned about this thing called the “African Bush” and “Bush People” but you can’t just classify them as “Bush People.”  Everyone in the “Bush” is different and unique, from the village of Daraw Salam 2 Sine Saloum, to the bustling town of Koumpentoum, to the nomadic Pular villages I saw on my Sharete rides. 

            Overall the Rural Visit was by far one of the best weeks of my abroad experience so far and reminded me just how big this world is and how I want to continue to meet and see everyone in it.