Bloody feline births! Election violence! A mild case of the common cold!

It’s been almost two weeks since my last post, which might lead you to believe that nothing has been going on, but you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. A lot has happened, but I’m not really in the mood to try and remember exactly what it was. So I’ll just start with this morning and work backwards until I get bored with typing.

This morning I was supposed to have class from 8:30 to 1:30, but I’ve feeling like crap lately so didn’t go into school. I never thought I would get sick in Africa, but it’s been legitimately cold (legitimate in the sense that an American officially confirms that it’s “cold”). I probably caught it from my host brother, who caught it from my host sister, who caught it from my host father, who caught it because he had to get up at 6 AM and carry back ten kilos of vegetables and fish back from the market in the “freezing” cold. But last night I slept almost 12 hours, and I feel a lot better. (Skipping class might have made me feel better, too.)

My immune issues aside, the highlight of the week has been a birth in the family… a birth that I witnessed. Tuesday night, the stray cat that hangs out in our house (see previous post in which the cat was napping in my suitcase) gave birth on the floor in the spare room where I slept during the construction. Bitch just plopped down and squeezed a kitten out on an old foam mattress. We didn’t want to move them, and let them sleep there peacefully. The next morning, however, Papa came upstairs, threw his shoe at the cat, and ran away. He would later hire some neighborhood boys to shoo the cat out of the house. Emily had to step in to save the kitten’s life, because the kids would have probably taken it out into the street and stepped on its head.

People really hate cats here, and Papa in particular. In a lot of African animist traditions, each family has a “totem,” which is the animal that family members are forbidden to touch at any cost. Mama has it easy — her family’s totem is the camel, not exactly a city-dwelling animal. Papa has a lot harder, since the Thiam totem is the cat, and there are feral cats everywhere in this city. When there’s one in your house, though, you throw your shoe and get the hell out of there.

Emily put the kitten in a box with a towel, and left it on the street in front of our house. As of this morning, the mother hadn’t been able to find the box, even she keeps standing in front of the now-locked door to the delivery room. We brought the kitten with us to the Baobab Center, and Emily (after an unsuccessful attempt to buy an eye-dropper at the pharmacy) has been trying to feed it milk, although it can’t really swallow or open its eyes.

So that’s the cat story. Only in Africa.

Sunday is the big presidential elections, and you know what that means — ELECTION VIOLENCE!!! Yesterday some people got “gravely injured” in front of this restaurant popular with white expatriates, and the Embassy is throwing a hissy fit. They’re recommending that Americans don’t go outside after 2 PM and stay at home on all day Saturday and Sunday. OK, good advice.

Oh. Wait a second. We’re going to be ELECTION OBSERVERS all day Sunday. The Georgetowners and some students from the Wells College program are going to be scattered througout the city and voting centers, keeping an eye on shit and making sure things are free and fair. Contradictory? I think so. Although we were told a few times that voting centers are some of the safest places to be, since they’ll be heavily protected by the Senegalese Army and Dakar police. Apparently it’s not 100% sure that we’ll actually be going now (the Wells program director is questioning the safety of his students), and we’ll have to wait until Saturday night to find out.

In another potentially unsafe move, tomorrow (the last day of the presidential campaign), we’re going to do a brief internship with a political party. Mine is the Reform Party, but — true to their name — they’ve decided not to run a candidate this year, and instead to support the incumbent president. More like the Status-Quo Party.

In other news, I finally beat down my Jewishness and bought my plane tickets for spring break. I’m leaving the day before my birthday for Florence and the Villa, then heading to Paris on April 4, and then back to Dakar on April 10. Ben’s probably coming the week after that, so hopefully he gets malaria.

I’ve been on the Internet for too long, so now it’s time to buy some orange juice, go home and read Cold Mountain, and watch the 14 or so minutes of Lost I sucessfully downloaded this afternoon. And don’t worry, if a crazed mob attacks me (in the name of democracy), I can just hold up the kitten… that should scare them off right quick.

Seventeen steps to cereal

1. Get on the Line 20 Bus.
2. Realize that the Line 20 Bus is not following Line 20 today, and you’re about to end up very far away from the post office.
3. Get off the bus, and hail a taxi. Agree to pay 500 CFA.
4. Arrive at the post office, and receive your delivery slip.
5. Take the delivery slip to the back room, where a very friendly (if creepy) man finds your package.
6. Carry the package back into the front room to a man sleeping at his desk. Wake the sleeping man up.
7. Sleepy Man tells you “Those packages don’t belong to you yet! Put them back!” You return to the back room, surrender your package, and head back to Sleepy Man.
8. Sleepy Man writes some information down on a piece of paper.
9. You bring this piece of paper about five feet across the room, to the adjacent desk, where a man is busy doing crossword puzzles. Crossword Puzzle Man writes something else down in a log book. (That is Crossword Puzzle Man’s job: to write things down in a book.)
10. Following Crossword Puzzle Man’s direction, you go out to the cashier, where you have to pay 2500 CFA for “import duties,” a thinly veiled euphemism for bribes.
11. Now you’re done in the Customs Service part of the building. Time to head out back into the regular Post Office section, even though they are basically the same room.
12. You wait at the Post Office cashier’s window. You find out from the man in the adjacent window that the cashier is on break for the next 50 minutes. This man is just sitting there, but “it’s not [his] job” to help you, even though you can clearly see your packages in the back room, just waiting to be taken home and the granola bars inside devoured.
13. You get frustrated and, bending the rules, sneak into the back room. Friendly-Creepy Man is taking a nap on his desk — literally splayed out on his desk with a blanket. It’s his break, too. He can’t help us, even though the packages are about 10 centimeters from his head.
14. After some haggling and raised voices, he agrees to take your “post office tax” of 1000 CFA (bribe number two, which is completely arbitrary and made up on the spot) and give it to the cashier later.
15. You grab your packages and run into the “fresh” air of Dakar, shaking with anger at how fucking stupid and inefficient bureaucracies are. Twelve people to do one person’s job.
16. Take another taxi for 500 CFA, grasping your package like a first-born child.
17. But then you open the package and see Cinnamon Toast Crunch and fiber pills and you’re mildly OK with having paid almost $10 and three hours for something that should have been free and 15 minutes.

Scrubba dub dub

I washed my underwear for the first time. In a bucket. And I’m a better person for it.

A little Wolof lesson

“Nice na.” In Wolof, you indicate the past tense by adding na onto the end of a verb (or noun or adjective — there’s really no distinction between the parts of speech). Modern, hip “city Wolof” has started to bastardize integrate English words into the vernacular and as such lots of out-of-context sayings pop up all over the place. My personal favorite is “Nice na,” which has become an acceptable answer to the question “How are things?” I try to use it as often as possible, since people don’t understand that, being American, I’m basically mocking them to their faces. See also: “Cool na.”

“Benn _____, ñaata la?” This handy little phrase will get you the price of any single item available for purchase in Dakar’s boutiques, markets, and (most importantly) bars. Replace the blank with banane, orange, Fanta Orange, Gazelle, or bouteille de gin and you will being living the life of an American student in Senegal.

“Sour na. Baax na. Neex na.” Three different ways of saying that you’re full after a meal. Usually, such a statement will be disregarded by your host mama and papa, who will then proceed to push more rice, fish, mutton, beef, cabbage, or whatever is left in the bowl in front of you. You will then continue to gorge yourself on non-nutritious but still delicious food, and be disgustingly full for two to three hours.

“Am nga weccitu dix mille?” One of the more frustrating aspects of living in Senegal is the country’s absolute lack of change. The central bank seems to have no problem printing 5,000 CFA and 10,000 CFA bills, but small-denomination change just doesn’t exist. So you go from boutique to boutique, gas station to gas station, asking this question and praying that someone will have change for you. Usually you give up and buy some unnecessary but sufficiently expensive product — American cereal, extra cell-phone credit, things like that. Or you go to the bar and drink Gazelles until they can break your 10,000.

“Maa ngi dem ci école.” “I am going to school.” I do this too often.

“Maa ngi dem ci plage.” “I am going to the beach.” I don’t do this enough.

I hope this has been an enjoyable and educational experience. Stay tuned for more Wolof lessons that have absolutely no application to your daily lives!

Touba or Bust

Let me start off by staying that today is probably the hottest day since we’ve been here. I wanted to make sure I said that, since it was my justification for skipping my 3:30 class and coming to use the Internet, write a blog, and continue my painful download of Lost.

On Saturday I woke up an hour and half before dawn to go to Touba, the largest mosque in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the religious center of Mouridism, the sect of Islam practiced by Muslims in Senegal. The ride there was pretty depressing and desolate — lots of dusty huts, ancient baobab trees, solitary figures walking through the desert, bumpy roads, stray goats and ponies, dead goats and ponies rotting on the side of road. Your typical African road trip, I guess.

Touba was a moderately developed city, probably because of all the business that comes with pilgrims and visitors to the mosque. The founder of Mouridism was a man named Chiekh Amadou Bamba, a mysterious fellow who was a theological genius. He spent a lot of time in Mauritania, where all of the Arabs couldn’t believe that a black man could know so much about the Koran and the ways of Allah. Judging by the extremely extensive library of his writings, this dude was really smart: apparently he would dissect the Koran word by word, writing an acrostic poem using the letters from each word. Yeah, he’s better than you. Anyway, the mosque was really impressive and imposing, as I expected. Lots of marble and travertine and praying. All of the ladies had to veil (don’t you dare reveal your hair, you fucking whores!) and no one is allowed to wear shoes inside the mosque. (See my photos on Flickr for more hot mosque shots.) We also got to visit the source of the holy water that people come to Touba to drink. I had some; it was really salty and probably contaminated with many, many parasites. Let’s hope I don’t get me a Touba tapeworm. The ride back was equally depressing and desolate, although we stopped for chicken, French fries, and Fanta in Diourbel, a medium-sized city; and on the road outside of Dakar we pulled over to buy some extremely cheap bags of fruit. For $2.50 I got 10 tangerines and six heifer grapefruits to give to the family.

Saturday night we returned to the Gin Bar, where much whiskey and gin was drank. When that place shut down (read: we got kicked out) at midnight, we braved the darkness of Dakar’s streets and went over to Baobab 4, where we braved the awkwardness of Dakar’s drunk barflys. I went home relatively early to enjoy my Sunday not being tied or hungover.

Sunday I woke up late and went to the beach at Ngor. Usually we take the canoe-ferries across the bay to the island because the mainland beach is usually covered in goat’s blood, but this weekend it was very clean and full of white people. One gentleman was over 6′5″ and had the largest potbelly I’ve seen outside of America; so naturally he was in a skin-tight Speedo maybe five or six sizes too small for him. Thus the picturesque view was often marred by his enormous Scandinavian ass-crack. Another highlight was when this same Ass-Crack Man, playfully throwing his naked toddler up and down on the beach, chucked her into the air at least three feet above his head, only to have her fall straight down and almost break her neck. That was fun to watch. Then a rowdy gaggle of French children got into an intense mud-fight with a group of Senegalese children. Suffice to say it got violent; kids were hurt and nearly drowned, almost like colonialism in miniature unfolding right before our eyes. But at least I got a tan, right?

Last night I stayed in, napped, finished my book (The Shipping News, very good) and drank some tea. Today we had class in the morning and were supposed to go visit political parties to conduct some interviews, but instead we drank coffee and then went home for lunch. The verdict is still out as far as getting our schedule and/or credit allotment modified, which is really frustrating but not surprising. I think now I will venture out into the sweltering heat and go to the gas station to indulge in an American ice cream sandwich. God dammit, that country knows its ice cream.

UPDATE: The ice cream was not American, but Turkish. It was banana with a hard melted-chocolate shell. So delicious. Also, the vanilla-chocolate one was called “Mulato.” Pictures of it soon.

Silly rabbit, gin is for kids!

This has been an exhausting and frustrating week.  We’ve had class pretty much constantly, from 9 AM to 5 PM or later every day.  Not like there’s homework or any kind of exams, but it’s so tiring to just be sitting in classrooms all day, especially since the weather has been so nice.  It’s even more frustrating to know that for 20+ hours of class a week and full Georgetown tuition we’re getting 15 lousy credits.  Plus the people the Baobab Center and OIP are equally incompetent and unwilling to take any responsibility for what is quickly becoming a really horrible academic situation.

So that’s my rant, and one of the reasons I wanted to get very drunk last night.  Luckily Emily did too, so we went to the Gin Bar near our house — basically a liquor store with chairs and unemployed stoned-drunk men — and bought plastic flasks of super-cheap Old Man gin (that’s the name of the brand, even though we are indeed senior citizens).  Four flasks, too many cigarettes, and an indeterminate number of vomiting incidents later, we bought some heavily buttered alcohol-sponge brioche and headed home to fall asleep in our slowly spinning beds.  Moral of the story: beer requires too much effort; gin is the new drink of choice.

So my dull hangover headache this morning was only made worse by five hours of boring-ass class.  The class is Economic Sociology, and the professor preaches a thinly-veiled form of communism he calls “alter-globalisation” or “solidarity economics” — Western capitalism is evil, dependency theory, blah blah blah. And lots more blah.

On the brighter side: I got another episode of 24 finished during lunch and started the painful five-day process of downloading the new episode of Lost.  Plus I had a Chicken Madness-esque sandwich, which was delicious and cheap. (How pathetic is it that the highlight of my day was the successful download of a 42-minute TV show from iTunes?)

Tomorrow I have to get up at 6:30 AM to go to Touba, the holy city of Mouridism, which is the main sect of Islam practiced in Senegal.  I have to wear pants and long sleeves, which should be pretty uncomfortable, but then again I don’t want to mess with Shari’a law, now do I?

Sunday will hopefully be a beach day, wherein I do nothing but sleep, eat, and read all afternoon.

Well, this blog post has been sufficiently bitter and jaded. I hope the coming days will be more interesting (or at least less frustrating) than this past week. Keep an eye out for some hot mosque shots, and remember kids, capitalism kills.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I had TWO substantial and satisfying bowel movements this morning, which officially replaces the downloading of 24 as the aforementioned highlight of the day.

Born in the U.S.A.

Saturday was a Georgetown-caliber night. We went to Le Bon Samaritain (The Good Samaritan), a really sketchy bar with plastic patio furniture covered (literally covered) in empty beer bottles, and the requisite shitfaced Senegalese men dancing and smoking rat-poison-filled cigarettes. The bar is moving to a new location, so all their beer was on sale ($1.10 for Gazelles!) and as such we hit the booze hard. We stayed there until 3:30 AM or so, leaving only for a few minutes to find some bread to soak up the alcohol in our stomachs. Then we went on a search for fast-food, wandering into the so-called “bad neighborhood,” but eventually stumbling across what could be called the Senegalese version of an 24-hour diner. I got fatayas (meat-filled pastries, like Indian samosas), French fries, and a Coke for $1 and devoured it accordingly.

Suffice to say I was tired the next day, but was woken up early for the dead-grandma commemoration party. The fête was a good time, if really overwhelming. Lots of people, lots of incomprehensible Wolof. I was pretty wiped out from the previous night’s binge, so I spent a lot of time avoiding relatives, napping, and reading in my room. Every room was filled with people, and we even had some spillover into the street. Dead Nana must have been a popular old lady. The food was also really delicious: fish and rice (surprise!) but with lots of relatively expensive vegetables and a good onion sauce.

Last night we went to the U.S. Marines’ house near the beach to watch the Super Bowl, stopping at the gin bar first to drink some cheap gin and tonics. The Marines place was really surreal: lots of drunk white people eating pizza and drinking beer, but it was a good time, especially when one girl became unconscious and a Marine tried to shove a pen down her throat to make her throw up. God Bless America! These Colors Don’t Run! Good to know where our tax dollars are going. Disappointingly, we watched the game on the Armed Forces channel, so instead of funny Super Bowl commericals we got military propaganda and public service announcements: “War Trophies Are Prohibited Unless Authorized” and “Be Sure To Not Sexually Harass Local Nationals” were some of my favorites. In the end, though, I managed to steal a full pizza, and that’s all that really matters. (Hopefully I won’t be prosecuted for theft of U.S. Government property, or, in the words of George Bluth, Sr., “minor treason.”)

Today I was supposed to have class from 12:30 to 2:30 but the professor never showed, so I decided to attempt downloading some more 24 and to write this here blog. Now I have class again, after which I will go home (buying sugar-peanuts on the way, of course) and nap to my heart’s content, and watch Jack Bauer tear out some more jugulars with his teeth. And remember kids, the taking of war trophies is not allowed unless directly authorized by your commanding officer.

Mmm chicken

These last few days have a been a blur of relaxation and indigestion. My stomach has been really upset lately, with heartburn and all that. However, I think I’ve discovered the culprit: the super-hot dried “piment” pepper that I, being the badass that I am, like to put on my rice at every meal. I normally can handle and actually really enjoy spicy food, but I think eating super-hot two meals a day has done a number on the ole estomac. I’ve been chompin’ on the Tums, which has helped a little, but the best cure for an upset stomach seems to be carbonated beverages, specifically beer. So I’ve been drinking a lot of beer… for my health.

Yesterday was an awesome food day. For breakfast I had banana and peanut butter on a baguette, which was heaven in every bite. Last night I went to Baobab 4 with TJ (a newcomer from Suffolk University) and ordered their famous grilled chicken. I had been dreaming of this meal for days. It is, no lie, the best chicken I have ever tasted. Tomatoes, onions, parsley, mustard, and juicy juicy meat. We just sat there in complete silence and ripped flesh from bone like famished cavemen. Awkward when the Lewis & Clark College kids came into the bar, since 75% are strict vegetarians and we had chicken grease dripping from our faces.

After my feast, I went to Sennett’s house with Phelan and Molly, since her family sells beers out of their fridge for 550 CFA ($1.10) each, which is cheaper than the 900 CFA ($1.80) we normally pay. We sat in her room and drank Gazelles and theorized about which member of her host family stole $300 out of her wallet! I walked home around 1:30, ready to snuggle up, only to find a motherfuckin’ STRAY CAT sleeping in my suitcase. It scared the hell out of me, and now my suitcase smells like cat. No feces, though, thank God.

Today I finally moved back into my newly renovated room. It feels good to be home, to have a desk, and to sleep on a new fluffy mattress which I stole from another room. I also somehow found the motivation and energy to go for a run (first non-walking exercise in 28 days). It was intense and I was panting pretty hard at the end, probably a combination of me being ridiculously out of shape and the horrible pitch-black cancer-causing fumes that emanate from every single car, bus, and moped in this city. You also run a lot faster than normal when every single person you pass gives you a death glare or yells out “FOREIGNER!!!!”

Tomorrow marks one month in Senegal, and coincidentally should be a fun-filled day. The host fam is having a party to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a grandmother’s death. There should be lots of food, and they may even be sacrificing a sheep in our courtyard!!! Don’t let the exclamation marks fool you: I don’t want this to happen, for a variety of reasons. First, I hear sheep die hard, and make lots of horrible gurgling noises and shit. Gross. Second, judging by the fast that they ate sheep’s head last night (I was enjoying the chicken at BB4), I think we’re finally running low on mutton. One more sheep killed means another month of my least favorite of meats. I can only hope Allah intervenes.

The other reason tomorrow promises to be fun is the Super Bowl. The U.S. Marines posted at the American Embassy here are hosting a Super Bowl party at their residence, starting tomorrow night at 11 PM our time. There should be American snacks (I’m hoping for popcorn and/or Doritos) and possibly free drinks… Again, I can only hope Allah intervenes.

Now I’ll be headed home to perhaps watch some New-York District (also known as old-school Law & Order with Benjamin Bratt and Jerry Orbach) and snack on the teeth-rotting sugar-coated peanuts that are my newest roadside snack obsession.