In Pulaar when you are overwhelmed by happiness and emotion, you say berndam buubi or "my heart is cold." Opposite from the western meaning of a cold heart, in a scorching place like Senegal a cold heart is a happy one, relieved from heat or hardship by the goodness and kindness of others. It made my heart so happy to have my family come visit me this past February, and I am happy to share their perspective here.
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"You can't believe that two places like home and here exist on the same planet" my daughter said during one of our skype sessions. I initially had no intention of going to Senegal. It scared me. Not the landscape or that I would be living out of a backpack - I actually thrive on that kind of spartan travel. It was more my own social anxiety mixed with the strangeness of the people and culture. I thought it would be better to visit her by meeting in Europe somewhere. But then she made another off hand remark a few months later, which I doubt she even remembers: "its difficult to talk to anyone from the US about my experiences here without having them having seen it". And that did it for me.
Reading and looking at pictures let's you see the ripples in the water, but not what caused the splash. I had no frame of reference for Senegal. I wanted to see what caused the splash. I became more excited about it as I let myself release control. I could not speak any of the several languages spoken there, so I put myself, Meg, and Joe in Emily's hands and let us go wherever we would go and do whatever we would do. Now, ten days is not two years (and two years is not a lifetime) so my descriptions are going to be one of the smaller, outer ripples of the place. If you want to get a better sense of it, then read the rest of my daughter's blog (it is really good) or go visit yourself and get out of the tourist area.
Senegal is a mixture of beauty and ugliness. When most people show off their vacation pictures they are usually beautiful, breathtaking places: resorts, mountains, beaches, lakes, and forests, with luxuries meals and exotic drinks. Senegal's landscape, at best, has a hard, stark beauty and is often just plain ugly. I loved the strangeness of it. The beauty I found in Senegal ironically lies in the thing that I anticipated would make me most uneasy: their people and their culture.
Emily had us criss-crossing the country going from the cities to remote villages to the resorts. The sand dunes had some height to them, but for the most part Senegal is flat as a pancake. I think the biggest change in elevation (apart from the sand dunes) was when we hit one of the deep potholes that plagues their roads.
We landed and spent a day in Dakar, the largest city in West Africa. It felt like it was right out of a movie. People, cars, push carts, street vendors all crowded the streets with the occasional Muslim hymn blasting from some speakers. The infrequent stop signs and lights meant nothing. When leaving for the airport at the end of the trip people would be running across the highway in the dark. In one of our drives, a single long-horned cattle walked right through a busy rotary.
Standing in stark contrast to their surroundings was the beauty of the people, both physical and in their demeanor. Of course you can't generalize to everyone, but many Senegalese are tall and lean, their faces have beautiful symmetry and bone structure. Tall, graceful women capable of being fashion models, seemed to walking down every other street in Dakar. They wore vibrant, brightly colored, beautiful full length dresses. Making it even more striking, the landscape itself was devoid of color, causing the vibrant color of the dresses to just pop. Once outside of Dakar the women in these beautiful dresses would be walking by garbage filled roadsides. Not just a little garbage - I mean completely covered so you'd have to dig to see the ground. The garbage lessened when outside of the more populated areas, but then would give way to droppings in the outer villages (cue Jeff Goldbloom in 'Jurassic Park', "droppings? did you say droppings?").
The beauty was more than their physical appearance. The people there were so friendly, social, happy, joking, teasing, frequently arguing, and helpful. I like to follow my old soccer team at Boston university, and of special interest to me, given that Emily was stationed in Senegal, was a BU player from Senegal named Dominique Badji (even more interesting was that he came to America with the help of a Peace Corps volunteer).
From the article [http://www.bu.edu/today/2011/
Which is what struck me as well in the opposite way. We would take a car several hours to another town, where the dominant language might change, and yet they all acted like they knew one another. When our car broke down late at night in a small town on the way to Lompoul my first thought was "how lucky that he broke down right where he knew someone. Of course he didn't know anyone. I could understand none of what was being said, but I imagined it went something like this (imagine many people talking at once):
"hey, my car is smoking, I'm taking back to that garage back there. These people want to go to Lompoul"
"anyone here speak Wolof?"
"yeah, they want to go to Lompoul"
"who knows where Lompoul is?"
"I do"
"Me too"
"Frank has a car"
"Bob and his friends need a ride"
"Me too"
"Who's driving"
"Ralph"
"I found them so I get some of the money"
"Me too"
"Me too"
"Me too"
At which point the bargaining would begin, both with Emily, and between themselves. Eventually when Ralph is ready, Bob and his friends jump on the roof of the car (you can see their sandaled feet outside the windows) and we take off. On the way someone slaps the car, hops off as the car slows, slaps the car twice again, and the car takes off again.
Bargaining took place all the time for the taxis and car rides. I think everyone knows what the fare is eventually going to be, but you have to haggle anyway. Again, I have no idea what they are saying, but it looks like they act offended, threaten to walk away, protest, refuse, maybe toss an insult or two, and eventually end up at the normal price and everyone is friends again. I think the garages were my second favorite experience while there. We would often be spotted walking into a garage, where spotters (often more than one) would lead us to a vehicle (often of questionable functionality) that was surrounded and blocked in by other cars (of even more questionable functionality) with no way to drive out. As we walked we would attract women and children selling oranges, peanuts, bags of water, and other stuff. The person leading us would also attract other men who seemed to have no real purpose for being there. We would then talk to someone to haggle over the price, and when we paid there would be another whole round of bargaining between the "spotter" and the car owner, as well as the other men (for which I now understand why they joined the group) who appeared to me to be saying they helped spot us or lead us.
Emily had been given a Senagalese name by her village family, a sign of respect there. When we were out traveling she would often be asked her name. She would answer Aissata Diallo (pronounced eye-sah-tah jahl-oh), which would chuckles and smiles, followed by trading of insults if they were from separate clans. Greetings, laughter, insults, laughter, arguing, and then everyone piles into the car.
More arbitrary thoughts. Street vendors selling arbitrary things. We'd drive through a busy intersection where we would have to slow and vendors would walk up to the window selling, literally, parts to a kitchen sink. No exaggeration. I mean they are in your face too. At one point Meg in an attempt to protect me from a street vendor, got in between the street vendor and me with her back to him and her arms raised, like she was halfway to signaling a touchdown. Instead of being angry he burst out laughing and said (translated by Emily) "what? do you think I am ugly?".
Cars are everywhere in Dakar, and Senegal is an automobile's afterlife. When cars die they go to Senegal. Actually I don't know whether they just keep them longer or buy junkers from Europe, but I had to admire their skill as mechanics to keep these things moving with little resources to work with. I also admired their skill as drivers since there are really few rules to driving. The city streets are often reduced to one lane from the people and carts, but then they magically expand with a quick beep of the horn (albeit slowly) to allow cars to pass. The horns also have a language of their own. In the U.S. the horns are usually used to express anger or impatience - long obnoxious and loud. In Senegal there horns are quick toy-like beeps, indicating anything from "watch out I'm coming", "sorry I can't pick you up", to "hey, how are you doing?".
Even outside the city on the long stretches of roads driving is an adventure because of the potholes. The drivers are especially careful of hitting potholes since a bent rim and flat tire can be disaster to their livelihood. So you swerve all the time, as do the occasional oncoming trucks and cars, all in this intricate little dance. Drivers would often drive half in the dirt or all in the dirt completely off the road, sometimes just leaving the road altogether to drive through the desert. It was pretty entertaining for a long car ride.
It is a little disturbing that over half the cars we were in had cracked windshields. And not the little nicks a pebble would cause, they were completely cracked, like someone dropped a goat on them. I use goats as an example because they are almost as prevalent as the cars - more so in the outlying towns.
As cool as the dunes were, and as nice as Toubacouta was, my favorite part of the trip was Katote, Emily's village. Emily organized the trip beautifully: a day in Dakar to decompress, a trip to Thies where she had some meetings at the PC training center, the resort and sand dunes at Lompoul (Joe's favorite), with the nicest resort in Toubacouta at the end. Nestled in between Lompoul and Toubacouta was the visit to Katote. It started with the long trip to Ourossogui (in a car with a cracked windshield). The next day we took a van, or maybe it was a small bus. Hard to tell with so many different parts welded together - kind of Frankenstein vanbus. Anyway I counted 25 people stuffed into the vanbus. Plus luggage. In the road side town Emily was heartily greeted, and we picked up a charrette (horse drawn carriage - not the romantic Central Park kind), for another half hour ride to the village. I can't describe it and do it justice. It was dry, sunny, dusty, and hot. By now the garbage had all disappeared but was replaced with goat droppings, but not the disgusting smelly things that stick to your shoes - they had dried into pebbles. Everything dries instantly.
Later in the trip when we stayed in the last and most luxurious resort, they offered excursions to "villages". I tend to think these places had lost their innocence with tourists tramping through them, maybe turning into something more like a Sturbridge Village in the states. Katote was different because it was still unspoiled. We were still something pretty special there. Emily had said when she first got there two years ago some of the children cried when they saw her because they had never seen a white person before. The village elders came and sat with me, and they killed chickens for our meal (a great honor according to Emily). One of my favorite times was when Emily showed me how to get water from the well, and I started to fill several buckets, first with Emily and then with Meg. At one point we went too fast and a bucket spilled all over me, much to the delight of the kids around the well. I then carried one of the big buckets of water on my head. The women of the village, Emily included, can carry these large buckets without using their hands - I had to cheat and use my hands to keep it from falling off of my head. As I was walking back the kids started to clap and march in unison. One of Emily's aunts came over to chide her for letting me do women's work. As I rounded the corner back towards the house, I was greeted by one of the village elders who, in an interesting turnaround, was taking my picture with a vintage old camera. I then noticed that all of the village elders were gathered to sit with me. Taken aback, I sat down and mumbled a couple of things which Emily "translated". Don't know what she said, but apparently I am very eloquent.
Another observation: outsiders that are visiting all seem to become experts on the problems and what they would fix if they had the chance (ok me too, I have this really great idea for a subterranean greenhouse - maybe for another post - Emily willing). I am not so sure that there is as much broken as one might think at first glance. There are things that need improvement: better nutrition, health care, and women's rights come to mind, but I also think about the mounds of garbage in the more "advanced" towns. Its all plastic. Maybe decades ago before the introduction from the West, the garbage would biodegrade, and garbage collection and disposal was not as necessary. Now, without that infrastructure and with the introduction of manufactured and packaged goods the garbage becomes an unsightly byproduct.
Even more pertinent - I saw happiness. Most people know that money and possessions won't make you happy. Good health, family, and friends are a great starting point. One thing that my family often talks about is getting together with cousins, siblings, and grandparents. We look forward to big family gatherings in Vermont and Beach Haven. We dream about having a family compound someday. And yet, in Katote that's what the kids have. They are running around and playing with their cousins all the time. Its a really big family compound. They need health care. They need food. But they also sure seemed happy to me.
A good part of the time we spent in village was roaming around greeting people (see Emily's blog post about this). Not knowing the language gives a different perspective in process, maybe like heightened senses coming with the loss of sight. I've thought (but never investigated) that positive or negative thoughts could influence the brain's processing, chemical or electrical, so that the self fulfilling prophecy actually has a physiological basis. I've often complained that small talk was a waste of time and didn't like engaging in it. I know you are supposed to ask someone how their day is, or their weekend was, or (the worst) how their vacation was, but usually I don't really care for the answer. The constant greetings in the village seemed at first to be useless small talk to the extreme, since it fell in such a narrow range of patterns. But now I think these constant positive greetings might actually make everyone happier.
And I see it in Meg. She may have been the only person I felt immediately comfortable talking to when I was younger. One of the things I've always said about Meg is that while I treat people as strangers until they prove to be friends, she treats people as friends until they prove to be strangers. I watch people light up around her. She actually really wants to know about their vacations. She'll know more about a person she will have stood next to in a grocery line than I will know about someone I have known for two years ("really? You stood next to her five minutes and she told you THAT?"). And Senegal seems to be filled with Megs.
It was cold when I got back from Senegal. While taking out cash in a small ATM vestibule I invited a stranger in to get out of the cold and got a smile and thanks. When leaving I told a woman to watch out for the ice that was in front of the door and got a thank you and a smile. Later walking to work I sneezed and got a "God bless you" and said thank you. I felt happy that day. Who knows, maybe I'll even ask a co-worker how their day is going, or how their vacation to Florida even was when I pretty much know what the answer is going to be. Probably should take this slow though.
Cheers friends,
-Bill Mepham, 2015
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