Back to Reality

After the Casamance, I spent a week with the family of my old Resident Director. Aloura is living with this family for the entirety of her 6 month stay, so once again, we were roomies. However, this time, we shared a king-sized bed and closet space. As a result, there are really no boundaries between us anymore. She had already started her two internships by the time I got back from the Gambia, so I spent the days with the family. Aloura is working at Manoore FM and a local NGO called G.E.E.P. Manoore is a local radio station out of Dakar which focuses on issues concerning women and children. She was told to create and organize a weekly broadcast based on her position as an American woman in Dakar, and how that related to Senegalese women. Most unfortunately, Manoore's building burned down a couple weeks ago (I think it was an electrical fire), and her position has switched to a solidarity/fundraising campaign position. I'll post more information when I can about what you can do to help this organization get back on its feet. It's the kind of organization that is making the right steps toward advancing/discussing the rights of women and children. As it is run entirely by Senegalese, it is their voice, rather than the preaching of Western "do good-ers." This is the kind of organization that will make real change, and it deserves to be up and running again.
Her second internship is at G.E.E.P., a Senegalese NGO which works with high school youth to educate them about HIV/AIDS. Senegal has one of the lowest rates of infection in Africa (0.7%), which is due mostly to an early intervention and control by the maribus, the religious leaders of the country. Though most sources will say that it was due to correct and prompt action of the government, it was initiated and culturally legitimized by the maribus who frequently encouraged preventative measures; and thus, influenced the government officials. Finally, it was sustained through community action and local NGOs. I'll talk more about the maribu-government relationship, but for now just let it be known that the maribus were pushing the government into action. Preventative measures included legalizing prostitution and giving the prostitutes health cards that they required to keep updated. They also implemented programs in public hospitals (like where I used to work) which support testing centers and fund treatment plans (as much as they can). G.E.E.P. seeks to create an early connection with high school students which stresses abstinence, the only true protection against sexual transmission. Aloura has been struggling with her experience a little, because although the science of abstinence is without a doubt, the reality of it is a little different. Social and economic factors are such that marriage often does not occur until later in people's lives here. Sometimes, not until men are in their early 40s, when they can find a job to support their families. The job market in Senegal is not inspiring, with an unemployment rate of 48% (and you thought the United States was bad, didn't you?) it's getting harder and harder for men to afford bride prices and the cost of supporting a family. Returning to the point, do you really think this country is full of 40-year-old virgins? I don't think so either. While women are pressured to get married early (in rural areas, sometimes at 12-16 years old; Dakar is more modern, with the ages hovering around 25 or so) while globalization is changing Senegalese society in such a way that the youth act a lot like Western youth. Though women are more inclined to abstinence than men, a changing culture means that that is slowly falling by the wayside as well. For Aloura and I, we see G.E.E.P.s battle for abstinence as a large waste of effort and resources, when the primary focus on sex education, and sexual transmission, should be protection and monogamous relationships. Not to say that those measures aren't talked about, but they are not emphasized. But, this is a locally run organization and Aloura is just an intern. As interns (well, for me, a former intern), we know that our positions are not to try and change their campaign but to facilitate it. We can draw our own conclusions, but in the end, it is not for us to interfere in how they want to run their organization.

Anyway, that's my rant about that.

When we were living together for that week, Aloura and I adopted a problem. That problem being...a small kitten. We found it, orphaned on the side of the road and looking like it needed love and attention. (A man who lived in the area told us the mother was hit by a car.) We obtained permission from our host-dad, named the kitten Michou, and thus became a rather adorable domestic partnership couple with our misfit child. A couple days later, I left my family to go to my next program, and Aloura kept Michou (we got a divorce, and she got custody rights).

The first week of my CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange) Fall Term was spent in Orientation. All the students stayed in a hotel close to campus, ate at one restaurant (next door to campus) and attended mandatory Orientation sessions. There are 52 of us in this program, and compared to the intimate group of 10 that I had all summer, being in room with 50 other white people was a culture shock in itself. The week, basically, was a down-comforter, hand-holding entry into the country for the other students... and I was the only one who had been here for any length of time, let alone roughly 2 months. This had several consequences. First, I had to get used to people saying, "oh! You're that girl!" Apparently news traveled fast, and everyone had heard of me (or rather, the length of my stay) before I could meet more than 5 people. Second, I made friends fast. More out of their thirst for knowledge than because I was trying to be a particularly outgoing person. Everyone wanted to know all the things I had done, seen, and learned about Dakar. It was a struggle for me, to not come off as a smug know-it-all, and seem more open and helpful. The last thing I wanted was to be excluded because I made it seem like I was too good to hang out with them. Third, Orientation was boring. To the point where I was close to beating my head against the nearest wall. I got swiftly bitter and resentful towards my last program, because for each session (ie. Travel, Health, Safety, Transportation, Culture, ect) I had a funny/embarrassing/awkward/scary story for each of their bullet points. My last program gave us no thorough orientation whatsoever, and we had to figure out a lot of things by  ourselves. Thus, the week of orientation was grueling. But somehow I managed to make friends that don't just want to use me for my knowledge and had a good time showing them around.

Little Michou, he fit in my pocket!

In the course of the week, Aloura called me with the news that most of the people in her host family were allergic to the cat, so I had to go back to my old house in Yoff, and smuggle him into our hotel. He became the program mascot, and he was big enough to curl up in my palm without falling off. He was too small for solid food, so I was feeding him fortified powdered milk (this is Senegal, there weren't many other options..). Sadly, little Michou passed away from an unknown illness after about a month. We got sick at the same time, and I think his little immune system just couldn't fight it off.

Left: Pape, one of my cousins, and Right: my brother Momar

At the end of the week, we got our host-family assignment. I live in Sacré Coeur 3, a district of Dakar within a 25 minute walk from my campus. I live with my 83-year-old grandmother (Maan Fall), my mom (Yaay Khadji), an uncle (Tonton Pape), my 16-year-old sister (Awa Balla), and my 10-year-old brother (Momar). I have an older brother about my age, but he lives in Toulouse, France, where he's studying law. I was picked up by (as I figured out later) one of the family maids, Bintu, and the family driver. I walked in with my bags and my cat, basically saying, "here's me and my baby!" Michou was readily accepted, as long as he stayed in my room. The weekend was a bit of a whirlwind, between figuring out who everyone was in the family and how they were related. At the time, my older brother, Mame Cheikh, was getting ready to leave for his first year at school in Toulouse. Like me, he wasn't going to see his family for a whole year, so we had some good bonding talks about studies, family, and living abroad. My second day here was basically a large party where I knew no one, as everyone was saying farewell to Mame Cheikh. But it was interesting, a little depressing, and heart-warming to see the same thing that my family and I went through happening here. There was advice from extended family members, cousins that sort of just lived here with him until he left, and several cars that all escorted him to the airport. So, the night before my first classes I was sitting at the airport at 2 AM with a new family, saying good-bye to a new brother, and was sort of enveloped in the event because I was so automatically accepted as part of the family. This was the moment when my homesickness starting the upward climb, because it reminded me of the moment I left my family and friends, and how much time I still had before I was going to be able to see them again. But the best thing that came from this was the feeling of acceptance that wasn't just in that moment, but has extended to every moment I've spent with my host-family.

Going off that, family adaptation has been easy, but language adaptation has not. Before I moved in with a family, I spoke passable French. I can do anything in Dakar that I want, I have the vocabulary for transportation, bargaining, and so forth. Even working at the hospital got easier. But none of that compares to living with a family. I felt like my language skills were back at square 1, like I hadn't learned anything in the two months that I was here. Living with a family that doesn't speak your native language makes it very obvious just how much your skills are lacking in their first language. When I first got here, I would sit in agony for a quarter of an hour, carefully forming a sentence to make myself sound competent...only to have the whole thing destroyed when they would respond very rapidly, and I would spend the next few minutes trying to work out what they said. Now, I just open my mouth and hope what I say comes out right. If I'm wrong, they make fun of me and correct me. Little by little, we've gotten more efficient at communication. This is fun, but it's not just French they are speaking. Most conversations between family members are in Wolof, especially with the kids. So all conversations are at least in two languages, because they freely mix the two together. There are lots of vocabulary words which might be French, or they might be Wolof, I'm not really sure. All I know is what the word means, and everyone understands me when I say it, so I just go with it. Sometimes they will throw in a random word of English that they know, and my mom knows a little Spanish. Thus, some conversations are between all four languages. We have fun with it though, even if it does make it hard to focus one language and really learn it when the mixture is so prevalent. One phenomenon my friends have discovered is that words are slipping into our own speech that aren't English. We've found that some words in Wolof or French just capture a better meaning than English, because they don't fully translate. So even casual conversation among friends is sometimes in 3-4 languages.

School is going very well, and this program is completely different than my first one. At every turn, everything is better organized, with better support, and more accurate advice. It's funny that some of the students who just got here complain that things are disorganized, because compared to my last program, everything here is laid out on a silver platter for us. There are even two small libraries in our building, one of school books, and another with light reading. When I say libraries, I mean there are two whole bookcases of books! It's mind-boggling.

My schedule is like this:
Mon/Wednes: 11-1 PM-Intermediate Wolof II (taught in French and Wolof)
                                   2:30-4:30 PM-Intermediate French II (taught in French)
                                  4:30-6:30 PM-Contemporary African Literature (taught in English)
Tues: 9-11 AM-Gender and Development Studies (taught in English)
                2:30-4:30 PM-Internship/Community Service Seminar (taught in French)
Thurs: 9-11 AM-Gender and Development Studies

Fri: No class, people in internships use this time to go to work. For me, until the Senegalese schools start up in mid October, Fridays are free.

More to come on my internship assignment, Toubab Diallow, and my week-long Dakar vacation... If anyone wants to hear about specific things/ask specific questions, just shoot me an email or comment, and I'll respond!