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Published: October 26th 2006
So the month of Ramadan has finally come to an end. On Sunday night the moon came out which signified the end of Ramadan, more importantly the end of fasting, and the beginning of the party. On Monday we didn't have classes and instead stayed home to celebrate Korite. Because my family is Catholic I wasn't anticipating a particularly exciting day, but it seems like everyone celebrates it to a certain degree. I started out the day eating a big bowl of laax (pronounced lakh), which is one of the many different traditional dishes for special occasions and it consists of warm millet soup/paste with raisons and sugary milk/yoagurt. It's very delicious, but difficult to eat large amounts, and let me tell you by the end of the day our entire dining room table was covered in bowl after bowl of this stuff. We now have enough laax in our refridgerator to feed a small town. The rest of the morning I sat around trying to figure out essentially what was going on that day, I had plans to go to a friend's house for lunch, but was curiously watching the intense preparation of food that was going on at my house. You have to understand that even though everyone around my might know what's going on, they are speaking in Wolof and i therefore rarely have any clue what's going on. People come and go, sometimes with gifts of food, sometimes just to say hi? it's great i love it, i always meet so many new people, but it's just frustrating because i have no idea what is going on 85% of the time. In any case around 1:00 in the aftertoon I left to go to my friend's house, she lives about 10 minutes away; there i did more of the same, sat around talked to family, hung out with the little kids and ate food. We had chicken and some sort of meat, probably sheep, with yassa which is this really good onion sauce, and fries -- a very typical senegalese dish. But before that they brought out a very special treat -- a vegetable platter! There were cucumbers, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, celery, carrots, and sauce to dip it in. It was wonderful. I rarely have fresh, uncooked vegetables here, if there are vegetables they are typically cooked in a vat of oil/water first so they glisten with multiple layers of grease before you eat them. It's really good, don't get me wrong, i love the food here, especially the ceebujen, the national dish-rice and fish-but my lips feel like they have a thick layer of lip gloss on them after i'm done eating. mmmm....
In any case, Korite was very fun, after eating we went out with my friend's neighbor, actually he's our dance teacher, and some of his friends. they are all muslim and we talked a lot about ramadan and islam and they had a lot of interesting things to say. í love talking to people here, because just in ordinary conversation you learn so much -- things you might never have thought of before. Just from hanging out with them we've learned so much about senegalese life and culture. even though we can't always understand what they are saying, i learn so much just by watching their interactions. but because they don't understand english when we speak it together, and becuase we don't understand wolof when they speak it together, we've made a pact to only speak french. it makes for a much more interactive conversation!
Speaking of dance classes, kind of, today is our last dance class because most of the people in the program are leaving on monday for their internships. i'm going to try to take some pictures but it's impossible to really capture the classes in a picture...they are so loud and the drumming so fast and the dances so filled with energy...but i guess a picture will have to do. i'll try to post the pictures as soon as i figure out how to get pictures off of my camera and onto the computer.
So tomorrow is our last day of academic classes too and we are starting our internships on monday. I will be staying in Dakar because one of my goals while being here is to improve my french and that is difficult to do out in the rural towns. i would also be a little nervous about switching families; it took me so long to get to know and get to be comfortable with the family i'm with now, i would rather stay here then move for a month and start all over. so i'll be working with an NGO called the International Office of Migration. I have no idea what i'll be doing for them or with them, i had to send in a resume yesterday of my experience with migration issues which isn't very extensive, basically just limited to classroom experience and research. which i've done quite a bit of on the topic of immigration, but we'll see. i'm really excited to see what it entails. I hope that i'm not just stuck in an office for 8 hours a day, though...that wouldn't be very fun.
I think in addition to the internship i'm also going to try and volunteer at a school in downtown dakar. Last week my education class went on a field trip to an "ecole de la rue" which is french for a street school. it was basically an elementary school for over 300 students where the classes are held either right off the street, litterally on the sidewalk, or in simple rooms/shacks behind the buildings and stands in the market. it was absolutely incredible. the man who started it in 1989 was a street kid himself and was given the opportunity to get an education. he then decided he wanted to give that chance to other kids that might be in the same position as he had been and so he started this school. he gets no state funding, instead it's all donations from individuals or outside organizations. he has a small farm in his home village where he goes to work on the weekends and all of the profit he gets from that goes straight into fuding the school. the school provides books, "uniforms", writing utensils for the students, but they also constantly need things like chalk, desks, mats, erasers, rulers, and everything else you see in a school. the teachers are all volunteers and his only requirement is that they successfully completed at least 10 years of schooling. the kids who are at the school either failed out of public school, don't have the necessary documents (birth certificats, ids, etc) because they are immigrants or more likely because they came from rural areas and were never given those documents. the curriculum is the same as the public schools, the kids go to class for the same amount of time, it's just there is absolutely no public funding. but it's really incredible what this man has been able to give to these kids who otherwise might not have ever learned how to read, write, or do basic math. He said that the goal of the school is to give the kids, at the minimum, a base of education from which they can succeesfully live in a city and get a job. because it is virtually impossible to do that without knowing how to read, write and speak basic french, or with out knowledge of simple arithmatic. but they also try to give some of the brighter students a chance to become incorporated into the public system after they have gone through all the levels the "ecole de la rue" provides. and there have been many students who have advanced all the way through university. it's a really neat place and they always need help so i think i'm going to try to get involved and maybe volunteer a couple times a week.
whew...that was a lot of writing. so i'm going to finish with my interesting africanism of the day. the other night i was with some friends we were trying to get a taxi to go home, it wasn't later than 8:00, and i saw a man across the street talking animatedly with a taxi driver like they were barganing a price. but then i saw that the man was leading a particularly large sheep and i thought to myself, oh he must just know the taxi driver because he obviously doesn't need a ride...he has a sheep with him! but to my shocked surprise the taxi man proceded to get out of car, walk around to the back, open up the trunk, and the two of them struggled to put the sheep into the trunk of the taxi. i couldn't believe what i was seeing. the sheep definitely put up a fight but they eventually got the poor animal shoved completely in the trunk and drove off. i sometimes forget i'm in africa because i've gotten so comfortable being in the city, but there are times when it suddenly dawns on me that, hey, I'm in africa right now, and this was definitely one of those times.
i must end here..i have a paper to write. more to come....
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Peggy
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Happy Korite!
I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce 'lakh,' but thanks for trying! Good luck in Dakar and in improving your French. I wish there was some way we could send a package of school supplies for you to give to the Street School. I wonder if it would be helpful, or if we should collect money for you to purchase things for them. (Eliminating postage costs we'd spend to mail them.) Let me know what you think. Love You! Happy Halloween! - Peggy