Traveling Stories Magazine

A Memorable Weekend

So last Saturday was an exciting day, as I hosted a nine-year old friend from the nearby island of Goree. I was not entirely sure how it would go, as we’d never spent quite so much time together before, plus there is a bit of a language barrier (her native language is Wolof, see ), but I wanted to introduce her to my world since I had been a frequent visitor to hers.
I met her at the ferry depot and she then took her first taxi ride ever (her usual means of transportation is of course the car rapide), so she peered rapturously out the window the entire time. She was fascinated when we came to the school in which I live, too, no doubt imagining herself seated behind one of the little wooden desks or playing in the yard at recess.
We then went to the beach around the corner from me, at the surf school at the Ngor restaurant, where the water can be quite rough. My little friend was cautious, as she does not know how to swim, though we did splash in the waves a bit. When she spied her first ‘chapeau de chinois’ (apparently these are called ‘limpets’ in English and are a type of saltwater snail. I had never heard of them before, but the locals enjoy eating them), she at once became very industrious, prying an inordinate number of them off the rocks and wrapping them solicitously in a tissue.
I cautiously asked her what she intended to do with them. “Take them home and cook them, of course!’ she responded brightly. “Oh,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to find ways to distract her enough so that she would forget to take them home, but she was astonishingly single-minded about it: she was a girl with a mission.

Once we arrived home, she set the dread things to boil and said that we must have a ‘sauce’ to accompany them, a ‘sauce’ that accompanies a variety of different Senegalese dishes. It consists of chopped raw onion, mustard, vinegar, lime juice, salt, pepper, and Maggi (a sort of consommé cube that is basically pure MSG, used in virtually every dish throughout the country, including the famous tangana sandwiches). Despite what you may think, it was absolutely delicious and the perfect accompaniment to our, um, sea snails. As she was chopping the onions on my counter (which she was just tall enough to reach), she spied a little plastic bag full of ‘pain de singe,’ or monkey bread, and gleefully announced that she would now prepare a local drink called bouye. She added soursop extract, milk and banana to make a truly luscious beverage and beamed shyly when I told her how impressed I was with her mastery in the kitchen – I had been matter-of-factly relegated to the role of spectator, which was perfectly fine by me.

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A Day at the Zoo

According to Tamara Vodovoz, a trained veterinarian I know here who volunteers at a local zoo, most African zoos offer animals the worst imaginable conditions. Though the management willingly takes your money, there is hardly any subsequent investment in the zoo; there are neither clear objectives nor a plan to improve the park in order to reach international captive wildlife wellbeing standards.

There are few tools available to conduct any meaningful work. Though
there is a veterinary technician on staff, he has spent far too much
of his time reading the newspaper because there are neither medicines
nor resources for him to carry out de-worming or vaccination for the
animals. Any zoo should have basic equipment such as a blow dart and
anesthesia and a staff that knows how to use them, yet here they do
not. In one disheartening example, five little jackals that were kept
in far too small a cage escaped, but not for long: one of them ended
up with neurological damage because a keeper hit him on the head with
a shovel in order to return him to his cage.

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Hail to Obama 009

The way things work here always astonishes me slightly, but I guess this is all part of the charm of being in Senegal. I have been to a lovely fishing village called Toubab Dialaw about three times now (http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/726/ ), and have become friendly with a local woman named Marieme as a result.
Marieme is a necklace seller stationed just outside one of the more upscale hotels in the area. Her ‘shop’ consists of about a yard or so of fabric spread on the ground. She removes the necklaces from her enormous woven basket, (which is generally perched atop her head on her way to work), arranges them carefully on the cloth, and voila – she is ready for business.
I think it was her baby Babacar that caused us to enter into our first conversation, as he is utterly adorable. Three unneeded necklaces later, we were all fast friends. When I returned to the area last weekend for a visit, bringing copies of the photos I had taken last time for Marieme and her family to keep, I asked where I could eat a really good thiebou dieune, the national rice dish with fish and vegetables (http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/waiting-for-the-barbarians/ ).

It never occurred to me that I might be invited home, but that was exactly what happened as a result, and around two that afternoon she left her colleagues to attend to her wares while she walked me through her village to her home. Like the majority of local homes, there was a stereo and electricity, but neither a stove nor a fridge. Since the locals often have neither the luxury of gas supplied through a mains pipe, nor the certainty of being able to pay a regular monthly bill, gas must be bought in containable units stored in canisters, and continually replaced when the canister runs out.

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Musings

So the time is drawing near where I will have to make a decision: do I stay or do I go? And how come someone who is normally so decisive is in this quandary, anyway? When I first came on board, I made it quite clear to my bosses that I would stay for two years and then leave – after all, besides the fact that I do not have hot water, there is also no 401 K option here, and certainly no extra money to put away for the proverbial rainy day.

I was so culture-shocked when I first arrived. Not only did I hate the daily morning call to prayer at 5:45 a.m. or so and the lack of sidewalks anywhere, but I was paranoid about mosquitoes (I have given up the Mefloquin and sleep without a net), I was paranoid about the vegetables (the worst case of the runs I had was when I tried using bleach to wash my veggies), I was paranoid about the stray animals, I was paranoid about street crime, and in a conversation with my mother I recently established several important things:

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