Ice Cream

Well I can honestly say, that there is rarely enough time for me to sit and dwell on things that I miss from home, most of the time… This first week of classes and getting used to travel back and forth to the home stays has been pretty busy, and by the weekend I am pooped! There are so many people at home that something is always going on, and most of the time I love it because I feel like part of something that is becoming familiar and a routine. My family is wonderful and they are helping me out a lot with things at home. The second day I was there, they taught me how to do laundry by hand… Oh my. It makes me not only miss having a machine that does it for me, but I find myself now looking for a laundry mat type place that I can just take it all to do on the weekend. I am finding that everything here is much cheaper and I have only taken out about $300 total since I got here, and haven’t even gone through half of it yet. All of the students are given money for lunch during the week and those who need to find transportation to school are also give enough to take a taxi to and from school every day during the week. Wellllll Kate and I were the first to brave the bus, and although people are literally packed in like sardines, and it can take a big longer than a taxi on some days, it is bar far cheaper and I not have extra money to devote to other things instead of a taxi… like ice cream. Woo! I eat it far too much to be good for me, but that along with running were two things that I had trouble giving up.

Classes are going good, and I have Wolof, French, an Arts and Culture Seminar and a Field Studies Seminar which will include my big research project in April, called my ISP-Independent Study Project. The classes seem to be relatively easy at this point in time, although most of the lectures we have in ACS are in French, and the speakers go far faster than I am able to understand yet. YET. But somehow I found myself to the point where I wasn’t really that upset about not understanding them. Technically, I don’t need to know them for anything else, I won’t get tested on them, and I was able to get the notes from other people after the lectures that gave me a good idea of what was going on. It was nice to not care. Not in the sense that I wouldn’t have loved to have known what was being said, but I freaked about enough when I got here, and I have started to let all the little things go, and that is by far the best decision I have made since I have gotten here.

All the other students seem to be very nice, and everyone is adjusting fairly well, although at their own rate. The first week with the family was by far one of the toughest, but then again, moving in with complete strangers, who more often than not with most of the families, have completely different lifestyles from the students, is a challenge to get used to. Almost all of us have our own rooms, and I think I was one of the few (if any) to get their own bathroom. It isn’t much, but when you don’t have to share, well sometimes that is the biggest blessing of all. It often is really stinky because I keep the door to my room and the bathroom closed so the bugs don’t get in, but I looked into incense and it seems to help. My room gets really hot, especially with the heat index rising close to 100˚ this past week, and I think I am going to have to break down and get a fan. I have tried to just patch up the holes in the screen with duck tape, and well, as ridiculous as it looks, it keeps those pesky malaria-carrying-mosquitoes out at night. My sisters seem to think it is pretty funny, and it is just one more reason I am strange to them. The noise outside never seems to completely cease, and whether it is people who are talking outside (more like screaming since no one here ever really controls their volume…) or animals making various noises or vehicles, well, ear plugs just don’t seem to be doing the job. One night I woke up to a horrible noise that I couldn’t even describe if I tried that sounded like something was dying…. Well what do you know, next morning, big dead rat looking thing in the middle of the road. Yuck. I had Kate look at it and she said she thought it wasn’t a rat, but I couldn’t look. The animal situation here makes me more upset than anything else, and it is weird to most people that I would want to take a stray animal and help it. I know better of course than to go playing with wild cats and dogs running around, but when I see them hurt or far too skinny, well my heart wants to reach out and hug them. I think I will buy a dog when I get back, which will happen sooner rather than later anyways, but after this trip, it may be sooner since I wasn’t able to help any animals here. Sad that I can encounter so many little kids that have been sent out to beg and not feel sorry for them, but as soon as a scruffy dogs runs by and gives me ‘the look’ (and all of you know this look if you have been around any animal) I want to buy it a big slab of meat. This is a really weird thing to want to do now that I think about it, but there really isn’t an abundance of animal food here since not many people have pets.

I have found a running buddy and it is wonderful to have someone that keeps me running, and it is definitely a stress thing, not an “I’m going to be a fat cow” thing… But we ran all around Ouakam, the part of Dakar I live in, and down by the beach, and it was wonderful. The beach doesn’t seem to be too far from anywhere we are, and I love it. Although I am still getting used to navigating the traffic while I run, there are not really sidewalks here, and the cars don’t really slow down for anyone, so that can be super scary when you are on foot. The taxies and other vehicles seem to honk constantly, when they turn, when they are passing someone or something in the road that needs to move, when they are empty, when they see a female toubaub… Heck. Really, they don’t even need a reason…

We have already had some pretty cool lectures and presentations on music and I am stoked about seeing more of the visual arts. Art here seems to be much more different that I have encountered anywhere else, and since there are not a lot of people here who are ‘art collectors’ with the economy not able to even support many of the people who live here anyways, there seems to be a lot of music and dance. This past week we have been learning Senegalese dance and how to play the djembe drum. Both are amazing, but both hurt my body far more than I would like to admit. I am just horrible and awkward at dance along with the other 20 students, minus the one dance major, who happens to be amazing at it. I had to stop dancing completely on two separate occasions when my fit of giggles started to impair my breathing, but when I looked at the drummer that was doing the music for us, he just smiled and nodded his head as if he agreed that ‘yeah, you guys are pretty bad.’ I am trying my hardest because this is not something many people get to do, but I think I would enjoy it very much if I got to see how it is supposed to be done, instead of everyway one can mess it up. We are split into two groups and most of the guys are in the other groups, which I am thankful for, because it seems to be their dancing ability that gets me in trouble anyways. The drumming is awesome, and although the teaching methods are different than I am used to, it is so much fun to learn. The guy teaching us, Mamadou Fall, is pretty famous and has traveled around playing for the ballet for many years, He doesn’t speak much French, but still seems to get the message across when we are doing it completely wrong, which is an easy message to interpret now that I have been here and have had to use gestures so much… The drumming hurts yours hands waaay more than I ever thought it would, and after an hour and a half session, whew. Lets’ just say not much of anything gets written about the days experiences anywhere.

We leave for a visit to some of the smaller villages on Monday and will be gone through the following Tuesday. I am really excited about this, but three days on a bus to get there, well, hopefully there will be lots of bathroom breaks…