Emily Chapman

So this is my third attempt to write my leaving Dakar post. The last two were whiny and introspective (I mean, as is like 90% of the rest of my blog), and went to weird places where I was talking about living a life of obligation (draft one) and the study abroad industrial complex (draft two).

But basically, they came down to the same thing: I don’t know how this experience is going to be written into my life history, yet. It was frequently unpleasant, but some really cool things happened to me here. I’m fairly certain that it was a valuable four months.

So, instead of talking about the experience, I’m going to jot down advice for study abroad kids in places like Dakar. Learn from my errors, blog readership.

Really consider why you picked the home stay: I chose a home stay because my dad lived in a home stay for his time abroad. This is literally it. In retrospect, this was stupid: I can go about a week into living with my actual family before I want to murder them, despite the fact that I love them more than words. This feeling is only amplified when you’re in a house full of people that didn’t feed you when you were a newborn. My home stay is the source for my deepest relationships with Senegalese people (and I do like my family a lot), but it was really, really stressful. If you pick the home stay option, write down why you’re doing it and paste that somewhere prominent in your room. That way, after your host mom makes you cry (again), you can remind yourself why you’re doing this to yourself.

Place yourself in a house with kids: Even if you don’t like kids. I don’t, but when my various nieces and nephews (aged 2-8) were here, life was so much easier. For one, kids are way more tolerant of you being an idiot. They’ll laugh at you, but they will not make cutting remarks to your face, because they know that if they do that you will probably not play with them. (And they want you to play with them, because the rest of their family is probably going to ignore them because they’re not new anymore.) In addition, small children are still being explicitly taught the rules of social conduct by the rest of the family, and if you pay attention you can often get explanations for behavior that’s confusing or that your family expects you to know how to do without being told, because you’re 21 and not 3. Also, kids are cute and will cuddle with you. Which brings us to our next tip–

Get prepared not to be touched: People in my program started realizing this a couple months in, but it is entirely possible to go months in a study abroad setting without affectionate touch. This totally sucks. So either work out a way to become a huggy person early on in your program, or (if you are like me and the thought of touching those outside of your kin group is weird) learn some self-massage techniques/find a spa.

Find yourself a boyfriend: I didn’t do this, but as a result I also know very few Senegalese folks my own age. Those with boyfriends (or girlfriends, but homosexuality is illegal here and there were like 6 dudes in my program) got instant access to a Senegalese peer group outside of the program. If your goal is to meet host culture peers and/or up your affectionate touch quotient, consider this as an option.

Get ready for talking about poop: A popular early discussion topic for my fellow program participants and I was how we had not pooped for days. (The Senegalese diet is composed of a good 1:1 baguette:everything else ratio.) Then, this moved into diarrhea discussions as we all got various bits of food poisoning/intestinal parasites. Your intestines will be borked when you travel. Just accept it.

Be prepared for your sense of self to be crushed: Though I did not admit it to myself until late in the program, part of why I chose to go to Dakar is because I like to think of myself as badass. I am too cool for Europe–I went somewhere intense. This is totally stupid, and also wrong. It turns out that I really like creature comforts and also not having people yell racial slurs at me all of the time. Realizing that I wasn’t one of the people who thrived here also required reevaluating how I conceive of myself. It is a uniquely unpleasant feeling, and likely one that you will have to confront if you go somewhere difficult.

When this entry posts, I’ll be on my plane out of Dakar. I’m spending the next five days in Paris, where I will hopefully eat lots of good cheese and drink lots of wine in parks while looking at lots of human remains and stained glass (ie my perfect vacation). I may have some more coherent view of this experience by the time I get back, but it’s unlikely.

If I break down crying because I hear Michel Telo on the radio, though, you’ll be the first to know.

So today was kind of terrible.

Not in a, “my host mom made me cry way.” Not even in a, “I worked on a group paper for six hours why god why,” kind of way.

Today was terrible in a, “Bank of America closed access to my debit card while I still have 10 days–including a trip to Paris–between me and home” kind of way. (Also terrible in a, “this is the 21st century, why does this have to be resolved on the phone, no, Senegal doesn’t participate in the international toll-free standard, I’m switching to a credit union” kind of way.)

So yeah, that happened. Apparently BoA somehow came to be aware that someone had stolen my card number and all of its accompanying security information. How they came to know this, I have no idea. The purchase that they had flagged on my account was legitimate*, so I assume something else tipped them off. At least, I hope so, because if not my bank has just made my life really miserable for no reason at all.**

The kindly customer service people told me that they could keep the hold on my account temporary. So now I just have to call them and go through phone tree hell each time I make an ATM withdrawal or a purchase between now and May 25th, at which point they’ll send me a new card. It’s a terrible solution, but it is some sort of a solution.

This whole experience was a nice reminder of how incredibly terrible American banks are at dealing with travel. For me to resolve the situation, I had to call the bank on a telephone (rather than providing my verification information online), because apparently I live in 1999.

American toll-free numbers are not free outside of the US (obviously), and the international toll-free number that BoA provided is international in the sense that it works in Europe–it is not recognized as a valid number by Senegalese phones. Google Voice does not allow free American calls if you don’t have an American IP address, so the last resort was Skype.

Of course, my school has completely nonfunctional wifi***, so when I tried to do this at school I was making the call over a stolen linksys connection. The call dropped and I had to go buy credit and use my USB modem stick to make the call at home.

Skype, weirdly, does allow free American phone calls even if you’re outside of the US. It does not, however, allow for your menu punching selections to be valid, which leads to a particular automated phone system circle of hell. SUPER FUN.

Once I finally got to a human, I was informed that there was no way to deal with my card except for them to send me a new one with a new, non-compromised number. Which would be fine, if a) I wasn’t going to be on two different continents in the next week and b) I was currently in a country with a functional post system. Debit card replacement strategies have literally no way to accommodate for those two things, which is sort of nuts to me, since I gotta figure that travelers are a high-risk group for having their credit cards messed with.

It was at this point that the customer service reps and I reached the compromise where I call them when I’m at the ATM and they don’t force me to starve in Paris (only possible because of my exorbitantly expensive international phone that my parents donated to me–this is going to charge their credit card some obscene amount, and I would have been screwed if I only had my Senegalese phone).

This entire system of debit card replacement completely, completely breaks when you introduce travel (particularly to somewhere other than Western Europe or the US) into the mix. Yay, banking!

I currently have about $8 to my name, $2 of which I owe to my program director. Here’s hoping the ATM trick works.

* It was $1. Paid to Google. For AdWords. No, really, this is my life.

** Making them, basically, the TSA.

*** CIEE Dakar, for the record. This issue drives me insane. That particular part of the brochure is a lie. Also, using some stranger’s wifi is quite possibly how I got my information stolen in the first place, who knows.

Here’s a fun thought exercise: come up with the worst-possible English-language name for a chocolate-based baked good that you can. Are you thinking? Good.

Now, was what you came up with half as weird as Choco Paste? (Answer: probably, because the image was at the top of the post. Shh.)

Because that is a real thing that exists and can be purchased on every street corner in Senegal for $.30/150 CFA. And guys? It is so good.

I had avoided Choco Paste up until these last few weeks because, well, its name is kind of horrifying. But on a whim, I decided to explore all of the little 100-150 CFA candy bars the boutiques here have to offer. Choco Paste was among them.

Imagine my delight when it turned out that Choco Paste isn’t a paste at all! It’s actually basically a cosmic brownie (what up, Little Debbie) with some sort of vaguely carcinogenic “chocolate cream” at the top. I just choose to think of it as unbaked brownie dough.

My love for truly crappy baked goods knows no bounds regardless of the place that I’m living, so as far as I’m concerned Choco Paste is just the greatest thing going. There’s just so many questions! Why is it marketed as paste? Why is it marketed as paste in English? Is there some post-Soviet state where there are terrible commercials for this product? Inquiring minds want to know!

I mean, until they lose the ability to ask because of the brain damage from eating too much of the chocolate cream. I’m not totally sure that stuff’s legal in the EU.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately for a variety of reasons–chief among them that my cold has evolved into what I am pretty sure is either bronchitis or the black lung. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching the difference between “your body is healing” sputum and “death death pain death” sputum. Yay, sputum!

On a related note, did you know that WebMD’s symptom tracker totally works in Senegal? It’s like my new Hulu.

But in addition to that, I spent the last few days out of town on a Public Health field trip. The trip was confusing on multiple levels, since none of the students knew where we were going, how we were going to do our work there, or whether the bus was going to show up.

It did, though, so on Thursday afternoon we all piled in and headed out on a 3 1/2 hour bus ride to Toukar, a Serer-speaking village near Mbour. The first night was completely weird, as it ended with the bus offroading us into a Catholic mission, where our professor emerged from the shadows with dinner.

But we didn’t get murdered, so that was pretty great. The Catholic mission seemed pretty legit (the buildings had names like Bethel and Shalom), despite us not seeing any priests or nuns. I’m not entirely sure who worked there or how we found the place, but I was just so glad to be off the bus by 10 PM on Thursday that I didn’t care. For the first time since arriving in Senegal, I ate my whole portion of the dinner bowl–we had vermicelli and meat. Yum! (That was non-sarcastic. Shiz was good.)

We woke up bright and early the next day to head into the village where we were doing our project. The class was divided into groups of four and sent out into the field to research respiratory illness. This involved us asking questionnaire questions in French, which were then translated into Serer/Wolof, with the answers translated back into French and then into English.

It was interesting just for what it revealed about the difficulty of surveys as a research method–people and their symptoms are often not binary, particularly when you’re talking about small children who might be chronically ill. There was also a hefty amount of moral ambiguity in terms of the fact that the survey was kind of exploitive. We would have had to have gotten clearance for something like this in the US, and we didn’t here. These people didn’t seem to be being offered the option of refusing to answer our questions. It was a lot to think about.

We learned at lunch that we were walking around for five hours in this village in 114 degree heat. So that was fun.

After lunch, we piled back into the truck and headed back to Dakar, stopping to let our TA out at an overpass. (I think he might be a troll.) It was a completely weird whiz-bang last trip out of Dakar, but I’m glad I did it.

However, I never want to be that sweaty ever again.

So of course after publishing that last post, my host dad gave me halvah, my host brother had me help him clean dishes while he told me about Paris, and I was able to get all of my laundry without bothering anyone. (Yes, these all brought me equal levels of happiness. My scales will be recalibrated when I return home.)

I still think I am probably not that good at being a host student, but that last post represented one of the lowest points I’ve been at in three-and-a-half months.

If nothing else, this has been the most emotionally tumultuous four months of my life thus far. We’ll see if the crunch leading up to my honors thesis or college graduation tops it, but I hope to god it doesn’t. I can’t handle another four months of being reduced to despondency and filled with glee approximately 20 times a day.

For those playing along at home, these last two posts have been illustrated by the pictures my host niece and nephew drew on my index cards. Too cute for words? Basically.

Today was a day of communication success and really, really frustrating communication failure. It was also a nice reminder that frustration tears are actually just a permanent condition of existing here, if you are me.

First, the success. Today at lunch, I ate around the bowl with my family. I managed to get yelled at minimally, and I understood the lunch conversation (mostly). Given that it was in Wolof, this was very exciting.

Granted, this was only possible because the conversation (a discussion about perfumed rice produced in factories) contained a lot of nouns. Nouns and adjectives are my savior, because most of them (particularly when referring to post-industrial things) are just the French word. It was possibly the most boring lunch conversation in the world, but it was the first meal conversation I’ve followed along with in the last 3 1/2 months, so I was pleased. Tiny victories!

Now, onto the failure and the tears. Today, after locking myself in my room for two hours to nap/do homework/attempt to recover from my third cold since moving here, I moved out into the living room to chat with my host dad. He, realizing that I talk pretty much only to him because his first language is French, sent me in to go socialize with the rest of my host family. Harsh, but well-intentioned and effective.

This conversation was also in Wolof, but I was able to follow along with it (mostly) because it dealt with people I know–primarily my host nieces who left a few weeks ago. A lot of it was describing silly things that the middle niece does, and since I was there for most of them I could figure out what was happening. (Did you know that people pretty much always mime along when they’re talking about children? True fact!)

This lasted right up until I tried to actually contribute to the conversation like a fully-functioning adult. I said (in French):

When we started to learn the imperative in my Wolof class, my professor asked if anyone already knew it. I said you add an “l,” which is true. He asked how I knew, and I said that it’s because everyone is always shouting at [my middle niece] “toggal!” [sit!]

Completely boring anecdote, but again, it’s the first time I’ve been able to contribute to a conversation in months. My moment of triumph was brought to a screeching halt when my middle-aged host sister said, “I didn’t understand anything you said.”

So I repeated it to her brother, with whom I had a 20-minute discussion last night. He didn’t understand.

It took a very slow third repeat for anyone to get my (not that exciting) anecdote. By that time, no one laughed, of course. My one window to demonstrate any sort of family engagement in three-and-a-half months, and it fell flat on its face. Not only was it frustrating on a failed-joke level–it was so, so hard to have people not understand my French after operating mostly in French since January.

I am proud of my French. It is one of the very few things that I’m good at that I actually had to study for (and have been doing since I was 12), and after a few months of doing pretty well it completely failed. Much like being called out for an ugly outfit that you tried with (rather than being ignored because you didn’t try), putting effort out and getting shot down sucks. It’s incredibly embarrassing, and all the more so because my immediate reaction to frustration/embarrassment is to tear up.* I am not good at hiding these sorts of things.

A few minutes after that, some family members who I do not know came in to say hi. I beat a hasty retreat, in part because I knew the conversation was going to continue in Wolof an be about people I don’t know and in part so I could go nurse my embarrassment. (Which, of course, I do by writing about my failures in a public internet forum. As you do.)

My host dad noticed me leaving and asked what happened. I said “nothing,” like the surly teenager I am and he let it drop. I’m fairly certain he’s noticed that I hide in my room if there’s new people visiting or if there’s more than a few people in any one room.

I feel like a failure as a host student, and again, that’s frustrating. By now, I should know how to arrange my body in the living room when there are guests, but I really, really don’t. I know I’m not the only one in the program to feel this, which is reassuring, but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like I should have figured it out by now. Figuring out where on the floor to sit rather than awkwardly hiding is a corner is not a skill that should take me three months to learn, and yet that appears to be what has happened.

Two more weeks. I want to go home to a place where I don’t have hide half of my personality and all of my sense of humor due to linguistic issues/appropriateness, and right at this moment I feel (as I have, on-and-off, since I got here) like I screwed up study abroad in a way that I do not normally screw things up. And that kind of sucks.

* This is either the result of doing well in school with basically no difficulty or the drive for it. I’m still not sure which. We’re working on it.

I think that this afternoon might have been the most enjoyable one that I have had since coming to Dakar.

It started after school–I walked with some friends to a nail shop that a few other girls in the program have visited. The place is a hole in the wall–very close to literally. Most boutiques in Dakar look like they’re set up in a vacant garage of someone’s house (and this is true for many of them). This place looked like it was a vacant half-bath that someone had set up shop in. There was barely room for five people in the shop.

Inauspicious beginnings aside, I managed to get a totally excellent (and vaguely Toucan Sam-esque) polish change and nail shaping for 1000 CFA/$2. It was bonkers cheap, the people were nice, and at the end of it my hands were covered in glitter. There is nothing about that situation not to like.

After that, we headed back towards my own neighborhood. On the way back, we passed the local beignet lady. (There are other ladies who sell beignets, but as far as my program is considered, she is the Irene Adler of the whole industry.) There is no beignet lady in my own neighborhood, and I had never seen this one out before.

Of course I bought beignets. I got eight of them for 200 CFA/$.40. They were fresh out of the vat of oil and served with a sprinkling of white sugar in a newspaper sack. They were pretty much the best.

After that, I stopped by Ousmane the tailor’s shop. I gave him requests for two skirts, a dress alteration, and a whole new dress–this was yesterday morning. He had everything finished by tonight, and then replaced the broken invisible zipper on one of the skirts in approximately 30 seconds. Why he had an extra eight-inch lilac zipper lying around is anyone’s guess, but my current theory is that he’s magic/has invested part of his 10,000 hours in setting up zipper supplies.

With the zipper fixed and necessary alterations made to the dress (he made me a shirt dress that doesn’t gap, you guys), I finally made my request. I asked him if–seeing as my mother had requested to see a picture of the man who makes all my clothes–I could take his photo.

He laughed and said sure*. I think a Wolof equivalent for “weirdo” was tossed in there, but whatever. If I get literally nothing else from being here, my relationship with this particular tailor will have made my time here worth it. (And it’s not just me. One of my friends in the program excitedly told me the other day, “I made Ousmane laugh!” And we were duly impressed.) Dude is incredibly talented and also has a nutso supply of zippers on hand. Cannot be stopped!

Is it a little bit depressing that my best day here was pretty much entirely related to consuming things? Totally, yeah. But on some level I feel like I kind of need to get over that and enjoy what things I can enjoy here. I have 18 days left as of writing this (and 14 as of posting), and I want to leave Dakar thinking that the last four months of vague discomfort and alienation were overcome by the good things that the city has to offer. And if it’s mostly cheap things for me to buy? That is within my power, and I’m going to take it.

Because seriously, that manicure? Totally sweet.

* The photo is not being used to illustrate this entry because I didn’t ask his permission. Feast your eyes on my sweet manicure instead. Ignore the fact that I appear to be the same color as a dead cod.

This past Tuesday was May 1st, which in Senegal (and other countries that don’t hate workers) is Labor Day. This meant that I got school off, which I took as an excuse to wander about Dakar with friends/bother Ousmane the tailor. (The self-employed, in Dakar as anywhere, do not have national holidays off.)

We walked from Ceaser’s (the local source for both knock-off KFC and milkshakes, beloved for its wifi and its ability to break large bills) towards Semboudienne, the craft village next to the big fish market. It’s along the Corniche, the main road in Dakar–it hugs the coast all the way from the airport to downtown.

The group estimate was that the market was nearby–maybe a mile and a half. The group estimate was wrong. Even given nice weather and the Kansas-level flatness of Dakar, we were walking for more than an hour.

When we finally got to the market, we explored the land of roughly-similar-to-everywhere-else souvenirs. I picked up a few things (including, for the first time, bindbinds–sexy waist beads worn by everyone here). For the most part, the merchants were not overly aggressive. No one called us names and only one attempted to physically move us into his shop.

Someone did try to sell me 4 bindbinds for 8000 CFA/$16, though, which was hilarious–they should have cost 1000 CFA/$2 at absolute maximum. I offered 1500 CFA/$3 and they let me walk away, so who knows what was going on with that. I was sad that the sale didn’t work out–one was glow-in-the-dark.

After that, we caved and caught a cab from Medina to the French Institute, which was unfortunately closed. After some tired and somewhat-aimless walking, we discovered to our delight that the Chinese restaurant on the same block was not observing Labor Day.

The place is authentically Chinese, as it caters to the Chinese expat community in Senegal (there either as merchants or working for Chinese companies here). Despite a not-totally-auspicious beginning (the one man at the front of the restaurant appeared to be drinking a handle of vodka, alone), the food was completely great.

Readers, there was deep fried eggplant. There are not words.

Eventually, more Chinese expats/employees wandered in. A table of men started playing what appeared to be an aggressive game of mahjong. It was fun to be in a setting that was so totally American and not American at all–I could very easily find a very similar restaurant or 16 on Buford Highway in Atlanta, but of course none of the folks in the restaurant were American.

The moment was also amusingly Senegalese, in terms of a bit of race handling. Two members of our group were white, one black, and one Asian. The restaurant owner gave the first three forks and the last one chop sticks. She’s Korean-American. The chop sticks got traded for another girl’s fork. Either the political incorrectness of the faint hallucinatory tiredness that came from walking so long got to us, and we couldn’t stop giggling about it for some time.

It was nice to be surrounded by a language none of us spoke (given that everyone else in the restaurant was speaking Chinese) without any pressure at all to understand it. The only time that has come close to happening to me in the last semester was in Spain, and even then most everyone knew English along with their Spanish and/or Catalan. It was really nice in a way that makes me feel a little bit guilty about my level of active linguistic engagement.

We hopped in a cab around 6:30, which was kind of nuts–we had been walking since 1 pm, and this was lunch for half of the group.

Overall, it was a lovely Labor Day, and a reminder that Dakar can be pretty interesting (and not nearly as homogenous as we think it is). There was a thread running through conversation at lunch that most of us felt frustrated at how afraid of Dakar the program made us early on, which made it more difficult to have normal, pleasant moments like the lunch and the walk happen until the end of the program.

Frustrations aside, it was a lovely lunch and a successful shopping trip. Much better than spending the day sleeping.

A few nights ago, I attended a Pular wedding. My host mother was late to come home due to attending what turned out to be the first part of the wedding, and–as I was helping with dinner–we had a conversation that went, in full:

HM: You’re going to help at a Pular wedding.

Me: Ok!

Because I am dumb, I assumed she meant sometime in the future. She did not, as evidenced by her watching me eat melon after diner and looking impatient. Finally, I got:

HM: I’m waiting for you!

ME: For…?

HM: *sigh* We’re leaving now.

And so we did. I put on a jacket and she shoved me into a taxi. As we arrived in the neighborhood where the wedding was happening, she cheerily pointed out the women’s prison. So that was fun.

When we got in, she said hello to everyone and left me in a room full of her distant relatives without much in the way of an introduction. As in, I don’t think people knew why I was there or what my connection to my host mother was. They thought I was a French woman there on vacation.* Nonetheless, they were very accomodating, and a younger relative turned herself into my translator for the evening. Let it never be said that Senegalese folks will not roll with the punches when a stranger shows up to a family gathering.

I explained that I’m a student and that I speak a little Wolof, which delighted everyone for the approximately 30 seconds it took for them to learn that I don’t speak Pular, the first language of most folks in the room. Once I told them I was American, they decided that either I couldn’t speak French/was a good target for English practice, so the rest of the evening carried on in a weird mix of Pular-to-Wolof-to-French–to (occasionally) English on their end and French-to-Wolof-to-Pular on mine.

However, things went pretty smoothly for the first two hours, as we were just watching Indian soap operas. I think the show’s actually a PSA about autism, because the protagonist’s autistic daughter drives most of the show’s plot. In this episode, she had run away, and her father was trying to convince the police to help find her. Despite not having seen the show for a month, the plot was easy to follow.

In the second Indian soap opera (no autistic child, and much more confusing romantic intrigue), the same wedding was still happening that has been happening every time I’ve seen it this month. They have a healthy 5:1 reaction shot to dialogue ratio, so it’s slow going.

By this point, my host mother’s possible second cousin (who looked to be all of 15) had adopted me. I think he was the younger brother of the groom, whose house we were in, but I’m still not sure. But–after a confusing three hours where I wound up being force fed fish and rice at midnight and then sleeping on the floor with my host mother while the griot woman prayed–he was the one to show me to the door when the bride rolled up.

It was, at this point, 3:30 in the morning.

The bride was fully veiled, but it kind of looked like they had just used a blanket to cover her.** She remained fully covered through her entrance into the house, ascent to the apartment, and the (long) sermon/blessing by the imam. Then she was led into the conjugal bedroom. My host mother tried to show her to me (like a zoo animal, I swear) and was annoyed that she had locked the door. I assume the poor woman had gone to bed, because it was nearly 4 in the morning at that point.

While she was doing whatever she was doing, the rest of us ate yogurt porridge. I love yogurt porridge, so this was fine, but since it was 4 in the morning my body was really confused as to a) why I was awake and b) why, if I was going to be awake, I was sober. So the yogurt porridge went down weirdly.

At around 4:30 in the morning, my host mother finally finished up her bride-attending duties and we left for home (the groom walked us to our car, so who knows when he got to go to bed). I still have no idea what the bride looks like, though I am pleased to have been a guest at her wedding.

If nothing else, the wedding was a nice reminder that I actually am a little bit integrated into my family’s life here. Even when not with my host mother, I recognized several of the guests–her sisters and cousins, mostly, and (to my delight) my teenaged host cousin, who made faces at me when we were bored. I was basically hanging out in a stranger’s house for six hours, but I got along okay, both linguistically and socially.

tl;dr: Went to a stranger’s wedding. Ate some porridge. Didn’t die. Hoo-hah!

* Not assuming this–this was the first question asked to gauge who I was.

** Almost no one here veils, so I don’t think it’s an article of clothing that folks have just lying around. Also, according to my French teacher this is a purely Pular custom, not a Senegalese one. She’s Wolof, and said her wedding party was pretty much nothing like this. Also, apparently the bride has to remain veiled for a whole week, yeesh. (Though this may be more of a “do it around the older relatives” thing now.)