Kaolack time

Well, negligent blogger that I am, I ought to get around to telling you all about the internship phase of my time in Senegal, which is already winding up.

I’m living in Kaolack. Wanting to prepare myself for the city, I read up what I could and asked folks about it before coming here. The books and tourist reviews were all pretty unanimous in saying it’s a town to pass through, as it rests on a main road, but there is no reason to stop. Travel guides listed ways of “getting away” but mentioned nothing of “getting there” (which is really easy enough; it’s just a sept-place ride from Dakar). The Senegalese I asked about the city were, on the other hand, more unanimous in immediately responding, “Kaolack? It’s hot there.” My brother Souleymane in Dakar told me not to drink the water because people here have red teeth. I later found that this is due to “dangerously high fluoride levels.” Well, I guess a little fluoride would be helpful, anyway. I grind my teeth in my sleep.

So, despite the guides being right about this being a dirty, hard city where you “don’t come to live the good life,” as one guide put it, and those I spoke with being right that it is, in fact hot (around 108 every day), Kaolack is kind of pleasant. It isn’t pleasant to look at; the majority of streets are lined with, if not covered in trash and piggies eatin’ it up, and I often find myself walking home at the unfortunate time when someone has decided to burn a field of this trash. I also wish there was just ten minutes of the day when I wasn’t covered in sweat, but I got used to that after about a week. I even got used to the heat frequently being the topic of conversation. People here love to point out the obvious ("It's hot!"), which took getting used to when I didn’t know how to respond to someone telling me that I’m sitting or that I’m going home. Today I was walking home with a coworker who exclaimed (after mentioning the heat, of course), “Whoo! There’s a lot of sand!” This just made me laugh because we’re in the desert. The streets are made of sand.

But Kaolack certainly embodies the teranga that Senegal is known for. I might be walking home with inches of dirt caked onto my skin in sweat, thinking about breathing fresh air, but I will surely be invited to eat by multiple people along the road, and told to come and sit by almost everyone. This is saying a lot, too, since the entire community is constantly outside. People sit along the road or are visiting between homes of friends and family at all times. So as with most things I’ve encountered here, I have mixed feelings about the city, but nights are always peaceful in a picture-esque way, and I’ve met some truly amazing people, people always more than willing to teach me about their culture and themselves.

My day starts off with me happily peeling my mosquito net away from the foam pad on which I sleep and walking out to a table of baguettes and coffee. I have a bag of “Kinkéliba” tea, which is usually sold by the giant leafed-stem in the market, and called “Séxéw” when talked about, as not to loose the medicinal properties, so I usually have a cup of tea with the AMAZING gift of green beans my mom bought for me, snug and fresh inside my baguette. (She bought me a giant bag of them, knowing that I, unlike apparently anyone else in Senegal, enjoy fresh vegetables. Most people prefer to stay away from veggies all together, as it’s commonly believed here that vitamins and nutrients come from fat, so I suppose the saturation of palm oil is enough for most people). I head out to the health mutual where I’m working.

My work varies from days at the office, transcribing evaluation-type things we do with our clients, or translating. These are my least interesting days, though I fortunately have lots of time for my research and paper-writing. On other days, I go to different villages and talk with people about how the mutual is and isn’t working for them. In some respects this can be very interesting, though I have little interest in some of the things that I’ll never be working with, such as the economics of the mutual. My work is focusing on the literacy and function of linguistics in Senegal and, as things have moved forward, that means moving from looking at the more local state of language in health care for those living in poor or very remote places, to the more global place of linguistics in the livelihood of and communication between cultures.

So, if I’m in a village I eat a big plate of ceebujen with the folks there, if I’m at the office I go home and eat the leftover ceebujen. I secretly prefer this, because I get all the leftover veggies that the family left.
When work is over and I’m back home, I spend time with my neighbors across the street or at my house. There are always at least five people, whether they are relatives, neighbors, or both, I generally don’t know, sitting on the mat under our tree and talking while my cousin Batch or friend Sorna (or sometimes me!) makes ataya. The maids adorable little boy of six months runs around, and I usually play with him or talk to the family or read. There are usually one or two French-speakers around, in an otherwise Wolof-speaking family/community, so I get that pleasure as well as the fun of attempting to expand my Wolof.

I can usually help a little with dinner, but if I ask to help at 7, I’m usually told it’s all done, and we eat at around 9 or 10 when Momma comes home. Nights here are unbelievably peaceful and beautiful. After dinner I sit out with grandma and read my book in the nice breeze, until I go into Momma's house, where we and my spunky little nine-year-old sister often share a mango or two before I go off to sleep.

As is clear, life here isn’t always all that colorful, and I got the chance to run up to the coastal town of St. Louis a couple weeks ago with Renee, where we got to see Joey and Dylan and momentarily Allie, the other girl who lives with my family in Dakar, who work there. St. Louis is a quaint, fun, little town, with old French colonial architecture lining the streets of the island, where we found a mix of Senegalese and expat/tourist life abounding. The air there was a refreshing and welcome wet chill that soaked into my bones. Renee and I got a terrace-top breakfast each morning, where we got to revel in good ol’ English conversation as we patiently began our days and ate St. Louis’ awesome baguette (each town has different quality of bread, it seems). We both decided it would probably be best, if not necessary, to extend our stay in this lovely little place where goats wandered the streets.

Now things are winding down, and this weekend it back to Dakar for me, where I’ll regroup with the other students.