Blogs from Senegal, Africa - page 44

Since they didn’t have much of a program planned for our time in Mbamb, we asked to visit the elementary school. It’s located in the outskirts of the village. When we got to the school, the kids were about to go on break. The principal invited us three Americans, as well as Absa and Mirama, into his office. We sat down on the only five chairs in the school, while the teachers stood in the doorway. The principal asked us to introduce ourselves and to tell him what we were interested in hearing about. After we responded, he told us some about the school. There are 260 kids, and almost half are girls. This is way better than the national average. The principal explained the both the teachers and the village women’s organizations have campaigned hard ... read more

Monday was the day that we needed to get back on track with finding a volunteer placement. I had an idea for John and Alex after talking to our landlady. She was telling us that her son goes to the American school around here. It’s a bilingual school where they teach the kids French and English at the same time. In most schools here, French is taught to the elementary school kids and English isn’t taught until high school. All the volunteers we know here speak French, and a bunch are volunteering at the schools where the kids are supposed to be learning French, but currently only speak Wolof. The volunteers are taken anyway, to speak in French all time and get the kids used to hearing it. Based on this information, I figured the guys ... read more

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 ... read more

November 1, 2005 John’s entry : Alex and I have been going to a local school to play basketball most of the days since we’ve been at Magueye’s house. We weren’t sure what to expect from the guys who would be playing there, especially since we’ve heard that basketball is a really big deal here. When we got to the court, there was a guy that was about 6’7” and another that was about 6’2”. They were both throwing the ball off the backboard and dunking it and doing reverse dunks. Alex was used to that kind of stuff, coming from the States, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to fit in. We’ve played a bunch of times since then, and seem to have gotten into the swing of things, including learning their rules ... read more

Around 2pm on Thursday afternoon, my Gender and Development class left Dakar in two minivans. We were headed for Kaolack, a poor city even by Senegalese standards, in west-central Senegal (check out the Senegal map on the bottom right of this webpage). It used to be a successful peanut growing region, but then the peanut market plummeted in the 70s and 80s, leaving the region with limited means of survival. Consequently, it’s a hotspot of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a good place for a fieldtrip. Since the traffic was so congested, it took 4 hours to get to our rooms in Kaolack. We stayed on the upper story of a nice new building. A collection of woman’s organizations pooled resources to buy it, because they needed space for conferences and meetings. They turned the upstairs into ... read more