Emily Chapman

So apparently my family is reading this blog. Hi, family! Welcome. I’m sorry that this is vaguely incoherently copyedited pretty much always. (Please don’t tell my English professors.)

ANYWAY. Back to what I was thinking about, which was: cold showers. Specifically, the fact that I have been taking one a day for–just checked the calendar–25 days (there were hot showers during orientation)–and I have still in no way grown accustomed to them.

At the beginning, cold showers seemed like a surmountable obstacle. Everyone else here does them, I figured, and so I should be able to too. It’s not like I’m hanging out taking leisurely, thinking-type showers. I’m basically doing a slightly glorified version of hair-face-pits-crotch-feet and bouncing. My mid-back has not seen water in literally two weeks, and I can’t tell if what’s going on back there is dirt or sunburnt skin that won’t peel or what, because it does not contribute to my overall odor factor.

(By the way, I realize that this is completely gross, but these are the Things I Think About now. This is what happens with Millennials don’t get to have wifi at home.)

But so far, we are in a no dice kind of situation on the cold shower acceptance. My body is still completely convinced that this is some shitty new regiment that–if it opposes it long enough–will go away.

Two nights ago, I tried to bathe my increasingly-gross back by just sucking it up and standing under the shower head while I turned the thing on. As soon as the water began to pour, my body–completely without my conscious input–veered out of the way of the water and slammed me hip-first into the wall of the shower.

Cold showers are so viscerally unpleasant for me that my quick-fire nervous system is actually circumventing conscious thought in order to avoid them. This is not a Healthy Situation.

All of this is a very long winded way to say that my parents are coming to visit in less than a week and during that time we’ll be staying in a hotel. I am totally and without shame locking myself in the hotel bathroom and using as much hot water as I can while they sleep off jetlag. Come hell and hot water, I will have a clean back by the end of spring break.

I could lie and say that I’ve quit updating as regularly because I’ve been off exploring Dakar, but that would be a complete lie. Mostly, my computer got knocked off a desk and its screen imploded, so that’s been putting a cramp in my style. Rather than using the extra time to learn Wolof/figure out how to barter at all successfully, I’ve been taking naps, reading, and talking to my host dad. It turns out that Dakar is a lot like the year that I moved to Atlanta, in terms of my active social life and propensity to take risks.

As an aside, yesterday my host dad told me that I need more friends. I may need to reevaluate some life choices here.

Life is not all incredibly boring, though! Last week, I went to the HLM market, the local source for all things fabricy, with a friend. (See, host dad!) I took the wax cloth that I bought to the tailor in order to have it whipped into garmenty shape, and I picked the dress up yesterday. The whole setup cost $17 (fabric plus labor), and fits wonderfully. Plus: fabric covered buttons and pockets. I think the tailor may have replaced the guy who works at the sandwich shop behind school as my favorite person I’ve interacted with this week.

I look like a cow, but that dress! It is beautiful! (And the sleeves and hem are being shortened, and the neck possibly altered, when I go home. This was the Senegalese standards version so that I could actually wear it around.) The pattern matching on the front and the sleeves! My heart beats for it. A billion points to Ousmane the tailor!

Basically, I may not be taking from this experience what I’m supposed to be taking from it, yet. I’m shy and I’m increasingly frustrated with my academic situation here, and the political situation makes it difficult to explore the city. So that sucks.

But! I have pitched and submitted a few articles, I have a sweet dress, and my French is clearly less terrible than it used to be. I’m going  to take those as positives and hope the rest sorts itself out later.

This was written during my first week in Senegal. Due to craptastic wifi coverage, it hasn’t seen the light of day until now. Enjoy!

It is an interesting experience having everyone who comes into contact with you assume that you’re slightly retarded.

That’s been my major takeaway from my first week in Senegal, where—I swear to god—every time I interact with a new member of my host family they look at me and say (in very sympathetic French), “Oh, so you don’t know French?”

I’ve taken French since I was 12. I used to be good at it. I have given up trying to explain that my French used to be better back before I didn’t speak it for two years, both because a) I don’t think anyone believes me, and b) I no longer possess the knowledge of the appropriate tenses required to express this sentiment.

For the record, my French used to be better before I didn’t speak it for two years.

Other than that, this week has been full of the sorts of things one learns when one watches a lot of foreign TV with one’s elderly host parents. For example, when they score a goal, the Ghanan soccer team dances (I swear to god that this is true) the Soulja Boy. Also, at 8:30 tonight the local news station played 3 Brittany Spears videos from the mid-90′s without any explanation. They weren’t even the classics—this was like the b-sides of her first album.

It appears that this (along with the goddamn Nokia ringtone) is my country’s cultural legacy in the former French West Africa.

I tried baobab juice for the first time. It tastes like the Senegalese bottled liquid plant icing. It’s possibly my new favorite thing.

I thought that my body was adjusting to the reintroduction of meat to my diet with aplomb and that I was going to dodge that particularly disgusting digestive bullet. I was wrong.

I learned that there is no non-awkward way to ask how many bathrooms are in a house after the third day of you not hearing anyone use the one next to your room. I only know of one, but either there are other bathrooms (and I have been very kindly given my own) or no one in this house pees, ever.

I discovered that—as I had suspected—there are literally three kinds of outlet shapes in this country, all coexisting in a seemingly completely arbitrary setup. This may exist entirely to drive foreigners insane.

I realized that the day my parents fly in to visit me (February 26th) is the day of the elections. Given that the announcement this weekend that the current president can run for a third term resulted in multiple riots and some tires being set on fire (as well as a cop being killed), this seems like it may be a really awkward weekend. Whoops.

So one of the news stations in Dakar (Walf TV, the favorite of my family) enjoys using the Rocky theme song as lead-in and lead-out music. Normally this is just an amusing bit of copyright violation, but tonight it took on a dimension of the surreal.

For those not up to speed on Senegalese politics, it was recently ruled that the current president can run for a third term. To make this happen, he bought off the constitutional council (who decided this). Folks are mad, and have spent parts of the last week rioting. End history lesson!

The favorite rioting technique of the Dakarian populace is to throw rocks at cops and set tires on fire. So, when there was a big demonstration tonight, that was what they did. Because Walf TV is a conscientious TV station, they went to go cover the events. Lacking any other music to use, I guess, they used the same Rocky theme that they use for everything.

I’ve spent most of the last hour watching people get teargassed while backed by the same 15 seconds of the Rocky theme played on an infinite loop. The police in riot gear, combined with the flaming tires and the weird music, give a truly surreal viewing experience.

Where I’m staying is reasonably far from the riots, and though people aren’t hanging out on the streets tonight it’s not a crisis mode. I spent most of the afternoon at a neighbor’s house chatting with folks at an open-house baptism. Clearly, people are going about the rest of their daily tasks–the folks dressed up at the gathering were worried about the riots in the same way that I worried about Occupy Atlanta, I think.

My parents are coming in to town on the day of the election, due to some unfortunate Spring Break timing. Who knows how that will go–I suspect more riots. But that will be the true test of how much life continues relatively normally in the face of politics.

So you know what makes people like 8 billion more times more likely to not think you’re an asshole? Stumbling through “hello” in their first language. (Shocking, I know.) I entered Senegal with the impression that this language was, for most people, French. It’s not. Instead, it’s Wolof–and now that I know how to appropriately greet people in it* people are substantially less likely to glare at me. Success.

As far as I know, Senegal is unusual in rejecting the colonial language in favor of a native language for the lingua franca. Though there are of course other major languages in Africa in general and in countries specifically (like Swahili and Hausa), countries like Kenya use the colonial language in public discourse in attempt to appear forward-looking to the west.

Senegal, despite having been the capital of French West Africa, seems to have rejected that. Of course most people here speak French (and Wolof, Serer, English, and Spanish), but it’s a learned language just like it is for me. There are some interesting identity politics going on behind what language people do their business and greeting in, I think. Of course I don’t speak enough Wolof or know enough Senegalese to really know much about this. It’s something I’ll be looking for as the semester goes on and my Wolof improves.

Otherwise, Dakar remains as the place with the most beautiful weather that I’ve ever lived in. Now that I’ve been here four days, I’m getting to know the neighborhood. I’ve managed to negotiate purchases in French and Wolof without horrifying people (not true, always), and I’m learning where things are. I don’t like the first few days of adjustment to a new place, so settling in is nice.

Host family move-in happens tomorrow, and I’m excited to meet my host parents and siblings. Apparently my family is well-regarded by everyone who knows them–in particular, everyone who I’ve mentioned my host dad’s name to has said that he’s super-nice and super-knowledgeable.

* The greeting, as well as several of the basic exchanges, seems to actually be pulled from Arabic. The fun and excitement of the Muslim world!

Today was my first full day in Dakar. (I got in yesterday, but after two days of more-or-less nonstop plane travel punctuated by actually falling asleep without conscious input, I think that yesterday does not count.)

The day was filled with the sort of awkward smalltalk that punctuates any first-time gathering of college kids. It was like the first few weeks of college, except that everyone talked about wanting to go into development. I don’t, and have neglected to mention that I am in fact an anthropology major. Some of the folks seem to hold us in disfavor.

My new commute to school (at least for the moment) involves jaywalking across a large highway. It is every bit as fun as you can imagine. (ie, not really at all. It is mostly terrifying.)

The food has been great, and with lots of it my goal to lose weight here is unlikely to come to pass. I’ve given up being a vegetarian while I’m here on the grounds that it will just be inconvenient to my host family, and as a result, my dinner tonight included the first red meat I’ve consciously eaten in 8 years. So far, my stomach hasn’t exploded. It was meaty pasta sauce, and for the most part I was surprised by how much it really does taste like fake meaty pasta sauce. Fake meats have gotten the research money pancreatic cancer needs, apparently, because they are on point.

Before dinner, we did tours of our neighborhoods, where we were lead by a 25-year-old university student who lives in the neighborhood and who was incredibly patient with our varying-levels-of-terrible French. I’m staying in Sacré Cœur 3, which is apparently the local bougie neighborhood. It’s very pretty, and there are approximately 8 billion places to pay people to make you clothes, so it’s got pretty much all that I need. (Also a pizza place. So there’s that.)

The tour ended with an adventure on a car rapide, one of the city’s local buses. They’re painted colorfully and packed full of people like firewood speaking very rapid French (and occasionally Wolof, which is actually most folks’ first language, with French being acquired in school). This reinforced my belief that public transit in foreign countries is cool and completely terrifying.

After a long day of being told how not to get murdered during election season, the group went out to a nearby bar. (Thus walking and being American at night, which are actually great ways to get murdered during election season, from what I have been told.) We passed unaccosted and annoyed the 3 people who were in the bar by bringing in 35 very chatty Americans.

I had a beer called Flag. It came in two varieties (PM and GM), and since they were unexplained about half of us ordered PM and the other GM. It turns out that those are size designations (petite and grande being the P and G, presumably), and so half of us wound up with 40s. I was not in that half, sadly. The beer wound up costing about $4 for the 40s and $2 for the regular bottles, and was perfectly fine. It was the first beer that several girls in the group (the CIEE group is overwhelmingly female; of 53 students we have 5 males).

Tomorrow I have to be at school by 8-ish, blech. I’m not jetlagged, but every muscle in my body is sore from constantly carrying things through airports, so I’m really looking forward to not moving this weekend. And buying some sunscreen, because the sun here is brighter than anything I have ever seen. (Also, the birds are all at least a foot long, which is a story for another time. Freaky mutant birds.)