Words of Wisdom in Wolof
Wolof, one of six national languages which include Pulaar, Serer, Diola, and Mandinka, is by far the most widely used language in Senegal, spoken by about 80 per cent of the population. It is one of the Niger-Congo languages, like Chichewa, Xhosa and Zulu. Wolof spelling using the Latin alphabet was standardized only in 1974. As some readers may remember, Wolof has no word for please, which shocked me initially.
Equally interesting is that its verbs are unchangeable words which are not conjugated; instead, personal pronouns are conjugated to express different tenses or aspects of an action. Whereas grammar is something that only a specialized few can truly appreciate, however, proverbs are fascinating and can be appreciated by a wide audience.
Thirty Years World Heritage: Goree Island, 1978-2008
Goree Island exploded in a three day celebration, and I caught the tail end of it. I left early on a Sunday morning, in time to take the 10 am ferry, and stood patiently on a looong line surrounded by a bunch of people unwilling to queue up properly. (Ferry tickets, by the way, are 1500 CFA for residents and 2500 for visitors, who are also expected to pay a tax upon arrival which I have learned to avoid by moving quickly and decisively in another direction).
After you get the ticket you are still not home clear, because you must go through a manned turnstile and may once again have to show proof of residency – it would be far too easy to ask any local to buy your ticket for you, so the guards pay close attention. Once you are seated on the boat, you are a captive audience for all the musical instrument vendors and boutique owners (who all greet one another by name, the island is small and they are regulars on the ferry), who will smile brightly, offer you a seat, ask you all sorts of questions about your visit so far (remember just how easy it is to pick out the tourists here!) and then begin their relentless patter: “Please come and visit my boutique, pour le plaisir des yeux – just for the pleasure of looking.” This is insidious, because if you do stop by just to look, as they have suggested, they will make you feel so guilty that you will invariably end up buying something you did not want or need all the same – this has happened to me on more than one occasion.
Quality of Life Issues
Later on this year in the global issues part of my class I will be discussing topics as diverse as the death penalty, abortion, and euthanasia, but that is not what I wanted to touch on here. Rather, I wanted to reflect for a moment on my life as it was before I left Bay Ridge and my life as it has been since my arrival in Dakar.
From the Bay Ridge Avenue stop in Brooklyn, a 10-minute walk from my apartment, I would get on the decrepit and smelly R train, where I would usually stand patiently until my stop at Canal Street in Manhattan, a ride of about 35 minutes. I developed all kinds of strategies for saving time, such as switching from the express to the local, choosing my exits to get me as close as possible to my destination, etc. I would have to fiddle in the depths of my bag for my ID before I would be allowed to make the mad dash to the elevator, and there, unlike here, I would sit at a nicely appointed desk with phone, Filofax and binders and carry out the tasks entrusted to me.
Halloween, Senegalese Style
Let me begin by saying that it is rather odd to be in a place that is warm on October 31st. I remember hiking in the crisp clean air of Cold Spring back in New York this time of year, admiring the striking reds and yellows of the leaves and the carved pumpkins adorning most porches, then coming back down to the main street to watch the joyous faces of the children participating in the local ragamuffin parade. Here, if I were to carve anything, it would probably be a watermelon.
Here, also, I did what I typically do, from slathering on the sunscreen to going for a quick after-school dip in the ocean to unwind (though the temperature of the water has dropped considerably, another indication of Senegal’s little winter).
Sunday with the Monks
Bright sunshine illuminated the grounds of Keur Moussa when we rolled in at 8:30 a.m. Not entirely sure when the mass would start, we had left Dakar at 7 a.m. sharp in order to get to this Benedictine monastery (founded about an hour outside of Senegal’s capital back in 1962) on time. On the way, we stopped at a tangana to have a delectable smooshed pea sandwich (see http://www.traveling-stories-
Mass did not actually begin until 10, but many of the monks were walking about chatting quietly to one another while others were practicing their music. The brothers wore extremely simple tunics made of coarse white cloth tied with slender brown ropes around their waists, and most wore sandals. There were a few older white monks, generally French or Franco-Canadian, but many were young Senegalese who appeared to be no older than their late twenties, leading me to wonder what it was that made them decide to enter monastic life so early on.
Was that a CAT I Saw?!
“Now I see why this place is undiscovered,” Kerri remarked wryly. We had just spent 2.5 hours sitting in Dakar traffic trying to make our way to a resort area called Toubab Dialaw. Once we got to Rufisque, we had arranged to rendezvous at the big baobab tree so that we could be shown the shortcut to the highway.
“Promise me we’re not really meeting at a TREE,” I said in utter disbelief. “It is a hotel or something called the Great Baobab, right?” Sure enough, it was in fact a tree – on est en Afrique - but as always, things did work out as planned; we got to the highway in record time thanks to our guide and turned off at a village called Yene. From there we spotted various hand-lettered signs for Sobobade, our hotel, and found ourselves bouncing down a pitted dirt road guaranteed to set your granny’s hemorrhoids aflame.
From Sunny Senegal to Gray Britain
Over the summer, I took a trip to see friends in the UK, and my hostess did me the great honor of wanting to throw me a party in her lovingly planted and very spacious garden.
In typical British style, prep time was spent putting caviar decoratively on blintzes and raspberries on beds of whipped cream whilst looking fearfully out of the window to see if the weather would hold or whether we would have to move all the lawn chairs back into the garage. (Ultimately you will be glad to learn that the weather did hold and that we were able to swill champagne on the lawn just as my hostess had envisioned).
To Expat or Not?
One of the biggest difficulties you are confronted with when living and working abroad is developing a social circle. As a schoolteacher, you have plenty of daily social interaction, but of course evenings and weekends are a different story altogether. High-minded and lofty idealist that I am, I had decided not to seek out the local expatriate circles here in Dakar, arguing that if I just wanted to spend my time with US citizens, I could just as easily have stayed at home.
But take it from me: no matter how seasoned a traveler you may be, there is something inherently wonderful in interacting with someone who knows your culture intimately, who can laugh with you at a random reference to an Entenmann’s crumb cake or a Brady Bunch episode, who can enjoy the subtleties of your native tongue or appreciate a play on words.
Ode to Esslingen
You may remember my friend Nicole, who very sensibly decided when she visited me from Germany that travel via public transport to the east of Senegal was not something she particularly wanted to do (http://www.traveling-stories-
To top it all off, Esslingen even has a cinema located in a big industrial chimney (for you, dear reader, the cinema may not be thrilling enough to warrant inclusion, but I can assure you that seeing a film there was a big event for me, as there is no movie theater to speak of in Dakar. Having come from New York, home of the Angelika, the Film Forum and all sorts of other landmark cinemas which I was accustomed to attending fairly regularly, it came as quite a blow to learn that I would have no real opportunity to see recent films during my stay in Senegal). As it turns out, this trip to the cinema was my only one throughout my entire stay in Germany – there always seemed to be other things that were far more compelling, like coloring with the kindergarteners, hiking through the vineyards, watching my cousin’s daughters practice riding their unicycles and so on.
Paradise Regained
It was an incredible high to be speeding to Leopold Sedar Senghor airport two days after graduation (I am delighted to report that we had a 100% pass rate, despite those students who were notorious partisans of least effort, see story http://www.traveling-stories-
sleep - no haggling in stores = bliss.
