Phase Two: SICAP de Baobab

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November 4, 2005

Moving Day!!! It is like Christmas Eve in Senegal for two reasons: one, it is last day of Ramadan (the night before the big party where everyone eats all day) and two, we’re moving into the house tomorrow!! We’ve had an interesting couple of days…no French classes cause Gora (our teacher) has the runs, so we thought we’d be able to head our and discover some more of Dakar. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Magueye told us that there was a big party yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. He explained to us that some people celebrated on Thursday and some on Friday, it depended on the moon. Someone should alert NASA cause apparently there are two moons in Senegal….Anyway, Magueye and his family decided that they were going to celebrate the big day on Thursday. We had thought we would leave for the day because we were off from French class, but we thought we should stick around the discover what the day entailed. Plus, Magueye told us that it’s a big party, everyone wears traditional clothes and eats food all day long. So, in the morning, Magueye and his Wife were all decked out in their fancy traditional clothes, as was Cheikh, which was really cute. We had breakfast in the morning, then waited to see what would be going on. They told us that people would be coming by the house all day long. Well, two o’clock rolls around, and we haven’t seen a single person yet, including Magueye who had been gone for hours. We also haven’t seen a morsel of food. We finally get a glimpse of Magueye, as he drops off his newest volunteer at the house, a very white Dutch girl totally decked out in traditional Senegalese clothing. She turns red, and explains that she was told that we’d been dressed in similar outfits and forced to buy it. At this point, both Marian and I are wearing baggy t-shirts and the boys’ boxers. Alex did purchase some traditional clothes in St Louis and had worn them for a bit, but after several people pointed out that the outfit was actually Moroccan (perhaps why they were so cheap?!), he put them away again. So, we hung out with the Dutch girl for awhile, practically starving to death. They finally brought lunch out at five o’clock (food all day long?!?!). After lunch a few people came by, no more than usual and we had our normal dinner at eleven. This was not the big party that Magueye made it out to be. After lunch we went over to our French teacher’s house to say goodbye, and he clarified a few things for us. He said that most Muslims were still fasting because it hadn’t been long enough yet, and that the big party is to be on Friday.

Last night we got all of our stuff together so that we could move into the apartment as soon as we were woken up by Cheikh screaming in the morning. EVERY morning that we were at Magueye’s house we were awoken by Neherde bathing Cheikh. She would scrub at his face and eyes, and dump huge buckets of water on his head and he would scream at the absolute top of his lungs every time. This literally happened every single day at six in the morning. So, since the landlady said that we could move in at 7 am, we decided to get up when Cheikh started screaming and head out to our new life in Sicap de Baobab. Believe it or not, Cheikh didn’t have his bath this morning. Unbelievable. So, at around 9:30, we called the landlady to ask if we could get the keys from her. She told us that we had to wait until noon because the cleaning lady was here. So, we killed a few more hours at the internet café (there is literally NOTHING to do in Camberene Deux), and then packed a taxi full of our stuff and headed over to the house. Just like any other appointment we’ve ever made with a Senegalese person, she was late. Not as late as some, but we were standing outside, with no shade, for half an hour at noon, and it was hot. The sweat pouring down our faces couldn’t ruin our moods though, we were finally going to eat!!

Right after getting a bit settled, we decided to head down to the Petit Score (grocery store) and fill the fridge before it might close. We were unsure about the hours because it was the first day after Ramadan and all the parties were happening. We walked all the way down there, discussing the many possibilities for our first dinner in the new house, only to find it closed. Completely closed. Heartbreaking. We were beside ourselves. So, we walked down to the “On the Run”, which is the little store at the gas station that has some food items, and bought our stuff for dinner. It was ridiculously expensive, but we had no choice, and it was delicious. Never has pasta with tomato sauce been so exciting. After dinner we got all unpacked and then got drunk. Really drunk. It was a great way to celebrate our new-found freedom.

November 7, 2005

After spending a long morning in bed on Saturday, we headed out to meet an American girl named Kathryn. She had found Marian’s travelblog online and emailed her our of the blue. We arranged to meet at Ngor beach for a drink (juice this time!). She’s working at UNICEF, so we were hoping for a possible volunteer placement. We talked for awhile and she gave us some ideas for NGOs to volunteer at. We’re not sure that her ideas will actually amount to anything, but we really appreciated the fact that she was willing to help us. We’re starting to feel a bit antsy about getting a placement, because we really need to volunteer for as long as we’re here to get the most experience we can for when we get home. Marian and I have been really searching for placements, while John has been really flexible about waiting until we get ours to see if he will be able to find something too. A few weeks ago, Marian and I headed downtown to see if we could volunteer at UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund - the main organization within the UN that deals with Reproductive Health issues). We found the building and headed inside. After fumbling through an explanation with the guard (we’ve realized that high school French classes don’t really provide the kind of vocabulary actually needed in daily life - although our holiday vocabulary is excellent, and if we need to describe Halloween to anyone, we were set), he gave us a book. It was a place for people who wanted to volunteer to fill out their information so that they could be contacted for an information session on volunteering with the UN. We looked through the other entries before entering our own information, and it was quite obvious that everyone else was a native French speaker (who else would come to Dakar?!?!) and most people had a ton of work experience (one guy had 25 years…). We realized that putting ‘conversational french’ (which may still be a bit of a stretch) and ‘masters degree in Population and Development’ was going to be a bit of a joke, so we gave up on the idea of the UNFPA. We arranged the meeting with Kathryn because she worked for UNICEF and had implied that there might be internships there for us. She looked into it for us though, and the health department didn’t need anyone. She gave us the information for another couple of NGOs, so we’ve been looking into them.

We headed to the grocery store after meeting Kathryn, to stock up on some good toubab food. We’ve had pasta for almost every lunch and dinner so far, and oatmeal every morning, so don’t get any ideas that our diet is actually exciting. It’s just exciting compared to what we were eating, and we’re still really happy about it! We had already checked out the grocery store when we had come by to pay our deposit, so we knew what was coming. The store is pretty expensive, since a lot of it is Toubab food, but we’re managing to eat pretty inexpensively, and still really enjoy it. We’re getting really creative with a few ingredients, and since we’re all just so happy that it’s not rice and fish with peanut sauce, dinner always seems delicious. Since Senegal was a French colony, there is always an abundance of fresh baguettes and a selection of cheeses at the store, so we’ve been dining Parisienne style a few nights also. I should clarify when I say fresh baguettes, however. There are some places selling fresh baguettes, other places sell baguettes that have been driven all over town in the trunk of a car and are now covered in dirt and little tiny ants…these are not as nice. We have all agreed though, that despite the fact that our diet would be incredibly boring if we were at home, the horror that was our previous diet is still with us and will forever make anything normal seem like a gourmet meal (well, maybe not forever, but at least for the next month).

Sunday morning we decided to head out to Iles de la Madeleine. This is the third island off the coast of Dakar, and the last one that we had yet to pay a visit to. We headed out to the area that you catch the boat from, after going completely out of our way in the taxi. Apparently we managed to flag down a taxi driver who spoke no French at all. We did not realize this. We explained in French where we wanted to go, and offered a price for the ride. He accepted and we piled in. He proceeded to take us downtown. This was not the right way. I guess he just decided that a bunch of toubabs would probably want to go downtown, so he took us there. We were actively expressing our displeasure, when he finally pulled over to ask someone where we wanted to go. We explained in French to the Senegalese man, who told the driver in Wolof. We had a really hard time explaining to him, since he had never heard of the place we wanted to go. This was incredible to us, since it’s an island right off the coast of the city, but it seems like not many natives actually head out there. We were finally on our way after explaining that it was close to Magicland (a really cheesy, tiny, amusement park). We arrived and headed out on the boat to the island. We took a pirogue again, and luckily it was only the four of us and the driver, because I swear to God, I thought we were going under. We had contingency plans for the boys to grab the backpacks and hold them over their heads, and I was going to get Marian’s camera from her, so we wouldn’t lose anything important while we had to swim back to shore. The boat ride to Goree Island was on a huge ferry, and while the boats to Ngor are also pirogues, the ocean is really calm between the two beaches, and so there wasn’t nearly as much chaos. The ride to Madeleine was pretty rough, and we were heading through the waves sideways, teetering back and forth. It was really funny once we got about half way over, because I realized that we weren’t actually going to go over. I’m not so sure Marian was ever convinced of this… When we got to the island it was beautiful. All the islands around Dakar are volcanic, so there was a lot of rocks and very few trees. The island itself was covered in long grass, but easily navigated for excellent views of Dakar. There were giant rock pools, and an area almost enclosed by land to provide excellent calm, swimming areas. The guys really explored the island, while Marian and I saw as much as we wanted and then headed back down to the beach. After having our picnic lunch (pasta again), we spent the rest of the afternoon in the water. There were a ton of fish in the water, and a bunch of kids with snorkeling gear were really excited about this. We headed back around four, only to realize that most people were just heading out to the island then. This was hard for us to believe, but after tending to our sunburns for two days, we’ve realized that heading to an island with no shade in Africa is best done in the late afternoon.

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Photos

Isle de la Madeleine
View from the top of the island

Isle de la Madeleine
The rock pool