New Year's

Last night, I celebrated my first new year's abroad by eating cake on the roof of our dorm and watching a couple of Palestinian international students attempted traditional dancing. As we listened to famous Bollywood tunes and laughed at the pigs rummaging in the garbage behind the building, we kept an eye on our watches. 11:54, 11:55, 11:56...

At midnight, the whole campus began cheering to usher in a new decade - our dorm, the dorms around us, and the cleaning staff downstairs all joined in spontaneous, simultaneous celebration. From where I was standing, I could see fireworks erupt in six different locations throughout the city of Hyderabad, while hanging laundry dried in the night breeze.

I only hope 2010 can be as wonderful as '09!

Au revoir, Senegal!

On one of my last few days in Dakar, I took a long walk home from a friend's house, spending about an hour shaking sand from my shoes and observing the street vendors. I realized it was moments like these, where I find myself at peace with my surroundings, that I am going to miss the most. To my right, a woman was almost done peeling a green orange, with one long chartreuse and white ribbon trailing from the end of her dull knife. Across the road, a man waved a long, red watering hose over a field of cinder blocks, as if by watering them a house would grow.

On this walk, the sights and smells of Dakar were their most vivid, the air teeming with the mixed aromas of baking croissants, bus fumes and body sweat. Meanwhile, a shop selling used windows stared at me, each and worn, as if sharing a tiny glimpse into the life of some old colonial house. Beside them, a series of broken refrigerators clustered into a small dirty corner, hopeless, brown, and empty.

On this walk, I saw dozens of women with infants strapped to their backs as they balanced enormous buckets of peanuts and sweatshirts and fresh fish on their heads, while men gathered around a three-legged foosball table to determine a new neighborhood champion. Taxis honked continuously and Wolof words were thrown haphazardly across the road in a desperate attempt to grab anyone's attention. Meanwhile, Akon competed against the Muslim call to prayer. I'm still not sure which is more influential.

I spent this time thinking about the beauty that manifests itself along these roads. It's an awkward beauty, a graceless happenstance of noise and stench that combined creates this personable country full of generous people. I thought going to Senegal would be hard, but it turns out leaving it was.

Sandaga

"Hello my sistah!" I hear a Senegalese man shout at me from across the street. "Howareyoufine?" This phrase comes across in one quick breath as the man attempts to gain my attention. From there, he hurries across, shakes my hand, and demands to know what I'm looking for. Friday I made my last trip to Market Sandaga (alxamdulilaay!). Numerous men like this approached me, offering a tour around the market, to help find whatever goods I was searching for or simply share ataaya. From past experiences I've learned never to take them up on the offer, because this will inevitably end in an extended tour of all their relatives' stores that consumes the entire afternoon and results in no successful purchases.

In the heart of downtown, Sandaga, a triangular, dirty market, is the epitome of disorganized, chaotic waxale (bargaining). The winding, dusty side streets are full of colorful stalls of scarves and socks and bath towels and bootleg mbalax CDs, and tables fill the broken sidewalks displaying tissues and toothpaste and roasted peanuts. Meanwhile women balance enormous buckets full of fish and bananas atop their heads while sidestepping bags of garbage and food waste left in the road, while men offer "special promotions" for phone credits and clog the small open spaces of sidewalk to discuter. The mixture of vehicle exhaust, sand and dust, and sweat leaves me with a grimy feeling in no time. However, anything can be found at Sandaga, provided one has the time and patience to give a good search.

The pre-purchase waxale is culturally appreciated; in fact, many vendors take offense if a buyer agrees to the first suggested price, instead insisting on some witty Wolof banter, several expressions of how kind the other participant is, and a gradual convergence of prices. Usually, I have to pretend to walk away before I can reach the ideal price, but again, this is expected and received lightheartedly. Although fun, each time this is an exhausting performance. Fortunately, I have finished buying all the necessary souvenirs...

With Waves Like the Ocean

Last weekend, I went to a small pocket of desert hidden in along the coast of Senegal just south of St. Louis. From the village of Lompoul, our group of seven - the magic travel number here - traversed the scraggly, rolling hills in bouncy four-wheel drive jeeps to reach our final, sandy destination. The enormous, barren, orange dunes greeted us with perfect weather and a series of pristine, white, Mauritanian-style tents that could only be entered at a crawl. After an exhausting day of camel riding, drumming and dancing, sunset watching, and frolicking - yes, frolicking - atop the dunes, we donned (light) jackets for the first time this semester to lie in the sand and stargaze.

I'm still amazed by how peaceful it was to search beyond the clouds while sprawled across the cool sand. Because of the rolling landscape of the dunes, gusts of wind tunneled at us with the rippling force of the ocean before a storm. It was like listening to a conch shell and hearing home, although we were at least twenty miles from the nearest beach. Atop this mountain, we talked for nearly three hours about life and love and purpose, because the stars always inspire such conversations. This conversation of good friends and relaxing scenery led me to a tranquil, satisfied state. It's moments like these when a fresh breeze wraps around me and a shooting star passes overhead that I am reminded of the expansiveness of the world in which we live.

Social Butterfly

Just a short note...

Lately, the open hallways and courtyards of campus have been filled with hundreds of fragile white butterflies. The area around the buvette, or the little sandwich cafe, has been inundated with these gentle fluttering beings. Sometimes, the area will be empty of all life and suddenly, as if to coincide with the lunchtime rush of students, they appear. There are so many that it seems to be snowing despite the 80 degree F weather, except this snow can defy gravity and appear despite perfectly clear blue skies. I suppose Senegal is also entitled to a white Christmas. Since I enjoy an omelette sandwich from the buvette frequently, I often watch these delicate butterflies coming in and out of the courtyard. Because Senegal is so warm, it is a final destination for many migratory creatures.

Car Rapide?

Every day, when I leave school and head for home, I take a car rapide, a colorful, hectic, reckless bus that careens down Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop at a whopping 30 miles per hour (when there's no traffic). Though this might seem slow, the potholes and sandy ditches transform each ride into a miniature roller coaster, constantly bumping and sliding and jerking back and forth. They're known to stop without notice, and more than once I've seen one car rapide nudge another to get it going again. (Everyone knows the worst seats are in the front, where you have full exposure to the dangers of each ride.)

These small buses are always crammed full of about 30 people, with five or six standing in the middle holding on to a rusty, filthy metal bar and at least three stuffed into a one-person seat up front. There's no personal space once aboard, and frequently strangers who are standing will hand whoever is seated a bag, a water bottle, or a baby to hold for a while. I suppose this fosters the spirit of community upon which Senegal prides itself.

Occasionally, I'll happen upon a fancy car rapide that's been decorated with colorful cardboard slides covering the cagey metal ceiling and sporting a freshly painted exterior. The front of every good car rapide screams "Alhamdoulilaahi" in bold letters, the borrowed-from-Arabic Wolof word for "thank God". The dashboard is often bejeweled with gris-gris, or marabout sanctioned protection amulets and beads to provide for safe passage, along with a framed photograph of Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of Senegal's much celebrated Mouride Islamic brotherhood. The back of the driver's seat is usually also covered with photographic paraphernalia, either more images of Ahmadou Bamba or photos of famous Senegalese mud wrestlers - super buff men wearing skimpy jeweled wrestling uniforms, vicious scowls, and fancy flip-flops. Car rapides have open windows that allow for a nice breeze, providing a much more comfortable ride than the American-style Dakar Dem Dikk buses. During the rainy season, an easily accessible tarp is dropped to keep passengers (mostly) dry. The apprenti, or money collector, is always a young teenage boy who carelessly hangs off the back, ushering people into the bus, taking fare (a mere 75 CFA, the equivalent of about 15 cents!), and anouncing necessary stops to the driver by banging a coin or a knuckle against the metal frame. If you're lucky, you get to hang off the back with him and reap the full benefits of a breeze. Of course as a female foreigner, this is never awarded to me; instead I get cozy with the locals.

Friends who became family

For the first time ever, I spent Thanksgiving away from my family. On Thanksgiving day, I had eight hours of class followed by a typical Senegalese meal (french fries, fried fish, and onion sauce) instead of a day full of cooking and turkey. To compensate for this, over thirty students came together on Friday for a potluck Thanksgiving meal full of traditional foods, such as pie and sweet potatoes and green beans and stuffing. Together we had a feast, celebrating our flexibility in preparation (for example, instead of stoves, we have large Bunsen burner apparatus, etc.), a delicious American style meal, and good company.

Thanksgiving is a holiday about family and sitting in this room, I realized that over the course of the semester, these other students have been transformed from strangers into CIEE family. As we went around the room sharing what we're thankful for, I was overwhelmed by how fortunate I am to share this day with people I love. And this year, I have so much to be thankful for - the opportunity to come to Senegal (and India next semester), the ability to appreciate this experience while it's happening, my friends and family here and in the US, my health and the health of everyone around me, and all the beauty and wonder in the world that I've been able to observe.

After over three months in Senegal, I've come to realize how fortunate I am to be American, to have my socioeconomic status, to own a passport, to be able to drive, to go to Johns Hopkins, to go to university at all... So often, we get caught up in the daily grind that we forget to step back, take a deep breath, and be mindful.

Thanksgiving was magical this year and reminded me to enjoy being.