EVERYONE THINKS MY NAME IS KAYLA

It has been a long time since I last posted so this post might run a bit long (I was going to say “it risks to be long” but then I spent 10 minutes trying to remember if that’s a thing people say or if that’s a French expression that I translated in my head and decided was acceptable, and I couldn’t figure it out so I went with “might”). 

After I finished my Fulbright, I took a job as Global Learning Manager with buildOn (https://www.buildon.org/ if you’re curious). Almost exactly three months later I found myself in a pickup truck stuck in the middle of a small river in the mountains in Nicaragua, squatting on the backseat next to a Delgado from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education as the water rose inside the truck and the Mayor of the nearby town, in his boxers, and his men heaved on the front to push us back out onto the bank. 

A week prior I did not even know that I would be in Nicaragua. But the Global Learning Manager position is new and buildOn is an international NGO so nothing ever goes as planned and everything about my job and life seems to change every week. I am based in Senegal, so I still live in my apartment in Dakar, but our Senegal office is actually in Kaolack so every Monday at 7 am I take the new DemDik bus (which is a public transport revolution in Senegal if you ask me, it’s a big bus that’s air-conditioned (sort of) and leaves on time and only as many people as there are seats are allowed on) 3 hours east to Kaolack and then I return on Wednesday afternoon. Kaolack, it is widely known, is the worst (it’s commonly referred to as the armpit of Africa) because it is literally, not figuratively, hot as hell, covered in a layer of trash and there is nothing to do or look at other than said trash and the abundant dust, which you have to look at even if you don’t want to because it’s all over you and on your actual eyeballs. When it’s the rainy season, most of Kaolack looks like this: 

You can just smell the infection. 

Anyway, my deep and abiding love for Senegal does not extend to Kaolack. I’ve made a home for myself in Dakar over the past year; I rent my apartment but I am basically a homeowner since my useless landlord wouldn’t even do anything to the place if it was on fire. I’ve stopped calling him when something breaks or leaks or whatever and started going straight to the day workers that hang out across the street. They, along with everyone in my neighborhood (called Ouakam (or Wakam, Wolof spelling is up for grabs), it’s objectively the best neighborhood in Dakar with the most character and spirit) are very amused by me, the toubab woman who lives alone in Dakar and takes the bus everywhere. One of the best parts about my apartment is that it’s just 50 meters from where this Vietnamese guy sets up a stand every night and sells the best fried spring rolls I’ve ever had for 200 francs a piece (about 40 cents). 

Like I said, my job is rather nebulous at the moment as it’s new, but here’s what I do officially (I screenshot-ed this from LinkedIn because I’m lazy):

Key to my job is the constant traveling. We work in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Haiti, Nicaragua and Nepal. We are on travel schedule no. 4 for 2017-2018 so I’ve basically given up knowing when I’m going to be where. Until a few weeks ago we were having a West Africa regional conference in Senegal in early December and now I’m in Nicaragua planning a conference here with just the Nicaragua staff for the end of the December. So. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun and a priceless experience. The local staff in Senegal and Nicaragua (and I’m sure in the other places we work) - all of our in-country staff are from the country - are absolutely the best people and I love working with them. I would characterize the first few months of my work as getting on a roller coaster and not having time to put my seatbelt on before it started going and then trying to get the seatbelt on while going 150mph around loops and through tunnels and down the drops. 

In each country, we have our office in a city that isn’t the capital but is the largest city in the area of the country where we mostly work. In Nicaragua, that’s the north so our office is in Estelí and the communities where we work are in the mountains north of the city. The landscape is stunning, and really reminds me of Rwanda (here’s a taste: https://youtu.be/HHaTlaE91fs - remember to put it in HD to actually see it). Being in Nicaragua feels like a luxury vacation compared to Senegal (I miss Senegal though). Nicaragua and Senegal are so different that I couldn’t even begin to compare them. Estelí has neat streets on a grid, lots of backpacker hostels and cafés and little restaurants. The grocery stores have American products just sitting on the shelves like it’s no big deal, which blew my mind. I’m loving having to wear a sweatshirt here (it’s hot season at home right now) but I wouldn’t want to live here, I miss the excitement and energy of Dakar. I am crazy for the breakfasts (and if you’re out in the country, lunches and dinners too) here:

^ That’s gallo pinto (rice and bean mixture), a fried plantain, eggs, cheese, cream and a fresh corn tortilla.

I helped make tortillas this week in the field too: 

Everyone was very impressed with how round it was. Making roti in India served me well. I dig the kitchens in the villages here:

When the team here goes out into the field they rent nice pickup trucks, whereas the staff in Senegal either takes a motorcycle, the one truck we have or a sept place, which you’ve heard about if you’ve read any other posts and generally tend to look something like this: 

But once you get out of the city, it’s a different story. The roads are steep and narrow and winding and rocky and my butt is almost never on the seat. 

So, how did I end up in truck in a river taking on water? One of the main things I’m doing on my first trips out to each country is spending as much time ‘in the field’ as possible to get a feel for how things are done. My first excursion with Danilo, the Nicaragua Country Director, Keyla (very confusing), the Finance Manager and Carlos, the Construction Manger, was to a community near a town called Waslala which is just as fun to say a you might imagine. We never actually made it to the community though. It took 6 hours to get to Waslala, We stayed in a hotel there and then picked up the rep from the Ministry of Education, who was just full of stories about fighting the Contra, there the next morning to go to the inauguration ceremony for a school that had just been completed. The Mayor of Waslala and a few of his guys drove in front of us in a different truck. We bumped along for about an hour and then stopped when we reached a “creek” that had become a river in the heavy rains that was neck deep on the guy who was running a raft across for people and motorcycles.

^ He’s the real MVP

In every culture, men stand in semi-circles around things: grills, broken down cars, raging mini-rivers. We all stood around for hours trying to figure out what to do: to try to cross or to turn back. Keyla and I immediately were like “this is a terrible idea”. We both knew that our well-placed concern was no match for machismo, so we just stood around giving each other knowing looks while the mayor’s guy put on a show of observing that the water had receded half a centimeter. Danilo was worried because the community was waiting for us and determined that if the Mayor went we had to try to too. So after 3 hours of standing around, during which the Mayor took his pants off and waded in to “see if there were rocks”, we all got back in the trucks. 

^ I’m serious, the guy in the red polo is the Mayor

I wasn’t worried about my own safety at all, the water wasn’t deep enough or moving fast enough for it to be dangerous to swim in, I was worried about the truck. We all were. We knew if we got stuck and the engine went off we would have to go out the windows and abandon the truck, which would get washed away with the current without the engine on. The Mayor drove into the water and made it 3/4 of the way across and then got stuck. 

They were just stuck in the mud so it only took a couple guys getting out and pushing to get them up onto the bank. But we could see the oil draining out of the car, the black streaks flowing down the water away from it. I was sure that we wouldn’t try it after that, but we forged ahead. 

The water washed over the windshield as we drove in and then BOOM we hit a rock and were sitting still in the very middle, the water up to just below the the windows, which we immediately rolled down. Carlos, who was riding in the bed just in case, jumped out and waded to the front. He messed around with the rope we had tied to the front in case of this exact situation for a minute and eventually they got it tied to the Mayor’s truck, the idea being for them to pull us out. But in the meantime, the truck had started to fill up with water. Slowly at first, but then a few minutes had gone by and we were up to our waists in water. The Delgado had a big smile on his face like he thought this was hilarious but he turns to me and goes “no puedo nagar” (”I can’t swim”) and Keyla goes “tampoco” (”me neither”) and I realized that I was the only strong swimmer in the truck and felt a flash of panic. 

The rope broke after the first tug from the Mayor’s truck so gave up on that. The car alarm was going off, signaling that it would shut the engine off in two minutes to prevent damage to the electric system. Danilo and Keyla had been yelling for the people on the bank to get in and push us back out the way we came and finally after what felt like hours a couple of the mayors guys threw their phones and wallets on the ground and ran into help Carlos. With four of them pushing, we easily backed out on the bank behind us. We threw open the doors and water poured out. We were all soaked and basically stood around for a second staring at each other and then all burst out laughing. Danilo got back in the truck and drove it up the hill to check on it, the alarm still going off. Carlos told the Mayor to just go ahead (he was yelling for us to just try again), we had to deal with the truck. By the time Keyla and Carlos and I got up the hill, Danilo had turned the truck off and there were half a dozen guys standing around it. We ended up having to call for a mechanic to come from Waslala with a new oil filter and more oil. We sat around for hours waiting, eating bags of chips for lunch from the one store on the road. Finally, a truck full of guys showed up and they got to work. Several more hours of tense moments later, we were back in the truck sitting on the wet seats bumping back to Waslala. 

First of all, I posted some short video clips from Morocco: 

Imlil - https://youtu.be/laZnpeIvUNs

Akchour waterfall drive/hike - https://youtu.be/dbahZRt1lBI

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When I got to Ronda I was really confused because I couldn’t find any taxis anywhere near the train station and my phone was telling me my hostel was a 40 minute walk away and the bus stand had no numbers or schedules on it, so I tried to ask a guy at the train information desk but he didn’t speak enough English so I basically just wandered in the direction of my hostel for about 20 minutes before I finally came across a cab. So glad I found one too because I did not realize that my hostel was at the bottom of the massive cliff/rock formation that Ronda is built on top of, so you have to drive all the way to the bottom of this huge hill and onto a dirt road which winds around next to the rock/cliff until you get to the hostel, which is next to the river that goes the middle of the rock (and Puente Novo, the famous bridge in Ronda, is built over). This picture is on Wanderlust too, but I figured it would put here it also for reference and also because I just really like this picture:

So the previous night I had broken out in body hives for some reason which escapes me still, and I had worn loose clothes and done the things WebMD told me to do but they were still there so once I set my stuff down I decided I would set out to try to find a pharmacy to get me some steriod cream and more anti-histamines. It was super hot and I was super itchy so I was not to excited to be walking up the giant hill, and then I heard a car coming behind me and I looked and recognized the guy who worked at the hostel in the passenger seat so I asked them for a ride and they were like sure. I got in the car and realized that Fernando, the guy who worked at the hostel, was wearing traditional Spanish ‘mountain bandit’ clothes (in his words) and he was like there’s actually a festival in Ronda this weekend do you want to come with me and my friends and I was like well I have mysterious body hives so I kinda wanted to go to the pharmacy but sure, but since that didn’t seem like appropriate we-just-met conversation, I stuck with “sure”. (We did stop into a pharmacy eventually and I got what I needed and it took like three more days but the hives eventually went away - the Spanish guys in a bar we stopped in, including the bartender, had a great time ‘helping’ to try to translate my steriod cream instructions). Fernando’s English was good enough that we could have basic conversation but he had a bit of a hard time explaining the festival, from what I understand it was to celebrate the era during which the mountain men in Ronda pushed Napolean away, so there was a parade with people from each surrounding village all dressed up and fake French soldiers being defeated etc. 

^ Note the guy plugging his ears, they were firing blanks but it was indeed quite loud

In the evening, there were stands with giant vats of potatoes and chorizo and huge coolers of red wine mixed with lemonade which, as it turns out, is amazing. There was a flamenco performance too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEj9xOYIn0). All of this was happening in the park that overlooks the mountains and fields (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWtzJf6EsD0&feature=youtu.be), although it was dark, but the festivities continued into the next day. 

Basically for a couple of days it was just me and a bunch of Spanish people dressed in fancy traditional clothes drinking sangria and eating a lot and celebrating in one of the coolest most beautiful cities I’ve ever been too. Ronda is known for its bridge and the whole cliff situation but if you walk a bit down the hill, its also got lovely winding cobblestone streets lined with white moorish puebla style houses/buildings which are typical to the region. There are pictures on Wanderlust. 

^ Fernando in his costume 

After Ronda I took the train to Granada, which is famous for the Alhambra palace/fort. But you have to get tickets for that online like 10 years before you’re even born, but I’ll get to that in a minute. My first full day there I took the bus into the Sierra Nevada mountains up to a little white puebla village called Capileira, from which you can hike down to another little village, Pampaneira, through a third village, Bubion. The mountains were amazingly beautiful and each village was more adorable than the next, with little narrow cobblestone streets up and down the hill lined with white adobe houses with flat roofs and these crazy looking chimneys (there are pictures on Wanderlust). 

So then the next day, since I wasn’t able to get tickets for the Alhambra online, I went at 5 AM to get in line (the way it works is that you can always go into the complex and the military part but to go into the palace you need a special ticket and those are the ones that sell out like crazy but if you get there early enough you have a chance of getting one of the few they keep on hand for the day-of). I wasn’t super excited about sitting around from 5-8 AM in line but I figured I was there I might as well. I was maybe the 20th person in line and I still wasn’t able to get a palace ticket, so I just went in with a normal ticket. I dilly dallied around for a while in the gardens waiting for the clouds to part and the sun to come out so I could get better photos of the view from the military fortress part, which was by far the best part of the whole place (https://youtu.be/aS_LST-9dT0). 

^ Not a bad view

Then I went to check out the view point where you can see the whole Alhambra from the old Jewish quarter, which was a hard spot to leave, despite the weird drunk guys selling jewelry there. 

Early the next morning I took the bus to Córdoba to spend the day on the way to Seville. As per usual, some great views along the way (including what I’m pretty sure was the original Windows background):

Córdoba is most well known for the Mezquita, which started as a mosque and around 1200 when the Catholics reclaimed southern Spain became a cathedral. I think that by that point the past two weeks of traveling were catching up to me and I was just about dead on my feet, I was so tired. So I mostly walked from bench to bench in the Mezquita, which was a truly awe-inspiring place (there are pictures of it and Córdoba generally on Wanderlust), resting and enjoying that the marble kept it cool in there. 

^ Mezquita selfie

After I left I walked in what felt like slow motion across the bridge and went into the tower/museum on the other side. From the roof you can see the Mezquita and most of the city, and the river was sort of green looking and the sky was super blue with fluffy white clouds, it was lovely. But I was exhausted so I didn’t stick around to check out the little miniature dioramas that seemed to make up the museum downstairs, instead I went to the gardens. There were orange trees everywhere and accordingly the whole area smelled like an orange peel. 

From there I wandered through the Jewish quarter into the newer area and back to the train station to head to Seville. Córdoba is filled with history and really a fascinating city so I feel like I should have more to say about it but I was so damn tired that day that’s about all I’ve got. But I recommend doing some clicking around about Córdoba. 

Anyway, I got to Seville that evening and took the bus to my hostel right downtown in the shopping district. 

^ Hostel rules, by doge

It was a huge place with lots of rooms with like ten bunks each and some people who were clearly living there. It was a holiday that day apparently so I couldn’t really find anywhere open to eat dinner and I can’t remember what I did, but I think I may have found some gelato open somewhere because I seem to remember eating ice cream for dinner. The next morning I took advantage of the laundry machines to wash my clothes and went and bought some pasta to make for lunch and later dinner since they had a nice kitchen and Spain was proving to be shockingly expensive after six months in Senegal. I basically toured Seville on foot for the rest of the day - I walked at least 15 km that day. I walked from the Cathedral to the river to the to Alcazar and around again. 

^ At the Alcazar. I loved the detail like this in all the Moorish architecture in Spain and just about everything in Morocco

Then that evening I went to a Flamenco show at a really small but famous Taberna (place to watch Flamenco) which was so cool - took me back to my days watching Riverdance/Lord of the Dance where there was that once scene with the really emotional lady in red doing Flamenco. I used to fast-forward through that part when I was little because it was too slow and I think maybe I was a bit freaked out by her intensity, but now that I am an ice-cream-for-dinnner-adult I can’t get enough. 

I had saved the Plaza de España for the whole next day (until I had to get to my evening flight to Barcelona) because they filmed parts of Star Wars (Phantom Menace, but still) there, so obviously it was important. 

^ !!!!!!

Finally, Barcelona. I got there around 9 PM and got the shuttle bus downtown and then the train to where my hostel was, which wasn’t actually in the city, it was in some sort of park in the hills about 15 minutes outside (because it was the cheapest per night by about $30). But I guess I was expecting a bit more civilization so I got of the metro and walked up this huge hill through this park to get to the hostel, which was absolutely massive. It was like three buildings, including an athletic complex with a pool and a full restaurant - I felt like I was at sleep-away camp. It’s staffed entirely by special-needs adults and is also a non-profit so that was cool. For some reason the rooms on my floor of my building seemed to be entirely filled with American and French school groups or scouts or something because there was a ton of 12 year olds with their chaperones everywhere all the time. 

I started my self-guided walking tour of Barcelona with La Rambla, the quintessential pedestrian walkway up from the water into the central shopping district:

I branched off to check out the cathedral, although at this point I feel like I’ve seen so many cathedrals that they all blur together and also I was pissed because they made me pay a euro to go to bathroom. Like a whole euro to pee?? Usually it’s just 50 cents and I already resent that. I passed by some of Gaudi’s buildings, which are crazy and look like something straight out of Dr. Seuss (just google Gaudi or look at the pictures I posted, you’ll see what I mean). I could always tell when I was getting close to one because there would be tons of people standing around on the street taking pictures for no apparent reason, until you got close enough to see the building they were looking at. I weirdly felt like the Catalan language, in my limited experience of hearing and seeing it for a few days, matched nicely with Gaudi’s work - it was sort of a distorted Spanish with a different rhythm, just like Gaudi made buildings that look like a reflection in a fun mirror. My favorite part of Barcelona was definitely the outdoor market, the name of which now slips my mind. There were so many stands with so many colorful delicious looking things that I ended up just getting some coconut and then walking around because I was too overwhelmed by all the choices to actually chose something. 

^ The market 

I walked all the way up through basically the whole city (I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much of one place in just a day) to this spot at the very top of the hill (the city gradually goes up hill from the ocean) to check out the view: https://youtu.be/DDqhBcSL0tU. Then I walked back down in the other direction to pass the Sagrada Familia, another Gaudi work and definitely not like the other cathedrals that just blend together (although technically it’s a basilica but I’ve never been super clear on the difference). Unfortunately it’s being restored so none of my photos turned out because of the scaffolding, so here’s a picture I got from the internet instead:

Then I made my way to a park by the water and then back up the hill again (can’t even tell you how sweaty I was) to Parc Guëll, ostensibly Gaudi’s masterpiece. It’s a big park on the hill and in the middle theres a large wiggly terrance that looks out over these two buildings that look like Dr. Seuss drew a gingerbread house, very surreal.

Okay so at this point, I’ve arrived in Fez, which I can tell immediately that I like more than Marrakech. It’s a bit more colorful and doesn’t remind me in parts of a weird suburb in a parallel universe. My hostel was in the medina, so I went straight there from the train station and dropped off my stuff before going out to try to grab a quick dinner and get the lay of the land before it got dark. The Fez medina felt much more alive, there were people everywhere selling everything and giant towering piles of Moroccan sweets dripping with honey and partially obscured by a cloud of bees along the alleys between cafés full of men in white thawbs and yellow babouches. I got some kafta and rice near Bab Boujloud, the big entry gate to the medina, which is exactly what it sounds like.  

The next day I’m pretty sure I was awake even before the hostel staff so I went upstairs to hang out on the roof of the hostel and enjoy the view until other people woke up and they served breakfast (Moroccan crepes, of course). Over breakfast I made friends with the two other guys that were staying the dormitory room (the hostel was a hotel too): Dilah, a Moroccan guy who grew up in Spain, and Nuno, a Portguese guy who had ridden his bike from Lisbon to Fez (yes, I am aware that there is an ocean between the two, he took the boat like I did later).

^The roof terrace of the hostel and Dilah trying and failing to get out of the way of my photo

So we explored together in the morning, which was really nice because since I was walking with two men none of the guys on the street bothered me. We tried to go to the mosque/library/madrassa that is the main attraction in Fez but the King was visiting that day so it was closed. We wandered around and found a spot where you could peak into the main courtyard through some holes in the wall and got a little glimpse. So then we headed to the tanneries, led by a little boy who took us there in the most roundabout way possible. The tanneries are where they make leather and accordingly you can smell them before you can see them. Some nice guys gave us some fresh mint as we went up the stairs to the area where you could look down into the tannery itself so that we could smell the mint to soften the stench of dead animal skin. The part that you can see, that’s in open air, is basically a huge area between the buildings filled with rows of vats. The first section of vats have a pale greenish concoction that includes limestone, which “burns” the skin off the hides before they go into these giant “washing machine” vats with manual turn things to get rinsed. Then they go for about three months into a dark brown mixture that includes pigeon poop, then they are dried on the roofs of the surrounding buildings before being dyed in the last vats. It was really interesting but we didn’t stay up there looking for long because there were a lot of Chinese ladies puking and shoving mint up their noses.

^ The tannery and the madrassa I went to later. There are pictures on Wanderlust too, but I’m including them here too for reference

That afternoon I broke off alone because I wanted to go to another, much smaller, madrassa, which turned out to be way better than I was expecting because I had the place entirely to myself for almost two hours. So I just sat in the courtyard listening to a podcast and enjoying the serenity. The scene outside when I finally left was decidedly not serene, it was very close to the barricade the security services had set up for the King and everyone wanted to get as close as possible so it was total insanity outside the madrassa and I had to be basically shoved through the crowd by the police to get to the other side and make my way back to the hostel. When I got back I went upstairs to the terrace to ask a question, I don’t even remember what it was now, and found the owner up there and ended up sitting with him for hours while he told me about the King and the hotel business and how Arabs are petty (except him, of course) and apparently everyone was so crazy trying to get as close to the barricade as possible because if you get lucky and give your ID card to the King you get some sort of lifelong monthly payment that I can’t remember the word for. We were still sitting up there when the hostel cook brought up lunch (at about 5 pm) so he invited me to eat with them, and it was some sort of big tagine that was alarmingly green but so delicious. It was olives and asparagus, which you ate using Moroccan style bread, which is round and only about an inch thick, like if you sat on loaf of sourdough or something.

The next day I took the bus early to Chefchaouen, about four hours away but a lovely drive into the Rif Mountains. Most of the people on the bus were asleep most of the time and they totally missed out. Once I got to Chefchaouen, which immediately shot up high on my list of coolest places I’ve ever been—it’s a small, mostly blue city nestled in staggeringly beautiful mountains—I basically dropped off my stuff and headed out to get a Grand Taxi to Akchor to hike to a waterfall. The drive there was only about 45 minutes but my god what a drive, we literally drove into a cloud. As we left the city I could see this crazy cloud formation over the mountains to the right, it basically looked like white cotton candy sitting on top of the mountain but it was moving so fast and it would hit a jagged peak and go soaring off it like someone was blowing on it from behind with a hairdryer. I have never seen such low, dense, white clouds. Then we turned and I realized we were going to drive into it. And actually, I did the first hour of my hike in the cloud too. Turns out being in a cloud is very wet and kind of chilly and the sky was this weird white grey color. The hike was spectacular too, probably the greenest place I’ve been in years. It felt like a jungle, with steep red rock cliffs on either side of narrow green valley. The waterfall was also stunning, there are pictures of both on Wanderlust.

^ Driving into the cloud

I spent the next day exploring the medina of Chefchaouen, which is smaller than in Fez by a lot but every wall, every house and sometimes even the path is some shade of blue. The very center is quite touristy but as you get further up the hill life feels more authentic and it was a nice break from the buzz of being surrounded by souvenir shops all the time. I had a coffee on the roof of my hostel, which had a superb view since it was quite a ways up the hill, while I waited for my laundry to dry and the whole time I was sitting up there were three guys taking turns playing the guitar and singing, but they were just making up the lyrics as they went along and it just got sillier and sillier until all of us were just sitting around giggling. Then I had my final tagine on the highest roof terrace in the medina, which happens to be a restaurant, and sat up there until I had to get my things and head to the bus station.

^ Me blending in to various surfaces in Chefchaouen in my new scarf, and my shockingly green babouche slippers (which everyone wears in Senegal too, but I can never find ones small enough for women’s feet since they’re a man’s shoe)

I was taking the bus to Tangier to get the ferry to Spain early the next morning and I was hoping to have a little bit of time in Tangier that evening, but the bus left an hour late and then we got caught in traffic that was so bad that it took five hours instead of two to get there and then when we finally got there the door for the luggage compartment under the bus was stuck so we all stood around for a half an hour while we waited for someone to come and fix it so we could get our things. So by the time I got to the hostel it was late and I was exhausted and in a terrible mood so I basically got a sandwich and went to bed. In the morning I went up onto the roof for a few minutes just to check out the view, but that was basically all I saw of Tangier. The new city part, where I got the bus to the port which is actually almost an hour outside of the city, was super modern kind of like Casablanca had been. And a lot of the people I interacted with didn’t speak French, but Spanish instead, which was interesting.

^ From the roof of my hostel in Tangier

This Moroccan/French woman and I ended up being the only two people on the bus that were headed to the ferry (I knew this because she asked me while we were waiting if she was in the right place and I was like I don’t know I hope so because I’m going there too) and then basically the only people in the station and the only people on the shuttle bus to the dock. There were a bunch more people actually on the ferry but I don’t know how they got there so much earlier. The woman, Jemaa, was friendly if a bit jaded and a chain-smoking adventure seeker who had clearly made some questionable decisions in her day. She was trying to get back to her home in central France as fast as she could because her daughter had called the day before to tell her that her son was in the hospital. Jemaa found a ride up to northern Spain with a truck driver who was on the boat and figured she could get a car share from there. I wasn’t entirely clear on why she couldn’t get a train ticket or a bus ticket but I think she might have had some issues with her identification paperwork because when we went through customs as we were getting off the boat into Spain the police pulled her aside and they were standing around talking/arguing a bit and I waited for a little while but I had a train to catch so I had to duck out and head to the station.

^ Jemaa on the boat

I stopped for a coffee and a cheese sandwich and then got my train to Ronda, a smallish city in the mountains a few hours north of Algeciras, where the boat had docked. Algeciras sort of sticks out into the ocean right next to Gibraltar, so as we got closer the Rock of Gibraltar was on the right and the mountains on the left. Plus the water was so blue, it was lovely.

^ The Rock of Gibraltar and me blending with the water

Also, I talked a lot about and ate a lot of Moroccan crepes so here are some pictures:

I’ve always wanted to go to Morocco, so when I got to Senegal and was putzing around on the internet, as one does, and discovered that flights from Dakar to Casablanca were only like $100 I decided I was going to make it happen before my Fulbright was over. Then, when I was in the planning in my head but not actually scouring travel blogs and booking stuff stage, I downloaded VirtualBox and started running Windows parallel on my Mac (see an earlier post about that) and the default background for Windows was a photo of a beautiful landscape in a magical-looking place. I did some image-based searches and discovered that place was Ronda, a small city in the southernmost Spanish province, Andalucía. So I decided I would go there too. Ronda is indeed a magical place, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

This trip was a bit more than two weeks total so these posts might be a bit long, so I’m going to divide them up into smaller parts. I’ve already posted some of my favorite pictures on Wanderlust and will be uploading a few more as well as some videos shortly.

So! I flew into Casablanca, which I had heard was nothing special from a touristic perspective so I just went to see the big famous mosque, Mosquée Hassan II, hung out in a café for a bit and then took the bus to Marrakech. I flew through Madrid to get to Casablanca (ironically, since later I went to Spain but not Madrid) and I realized while I was tying to sleep on the couch at Starbucks that the last time I was in the Madrid airport was when I was leaving Senegal in 2014. It was raining when I got there, which was bizarre because I hadn’t seen rain in at least seven months (since the rainy season here hasn’t started yet).

Anyway, my taxi from the airport took me right to Mosquée Hassan II. They are not messing around with that thing, it is absolutely one of the largest and most beautiful structures I have ever seen. I happened to be there at the call to prayer, which was deafening from directly below the minaret but I love me a good call to prayer so that was a bonus. I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in a café in the main plaza, marveling both at how I seemed to be the only woman sitting at a sidewalk café out of the hundreds of patrons around the plaza and also at how if I didn’t know where I was and someone told me I was in Europe I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Seriously, Casablanca looks and feels so European. Then I went to the bus station and was totally mind blown by how fancy it was and then was even more mind blown by the bus I took to Marrakech, it had the most leg room I’ve ever had traveling in something that wasn’t a train and maybe even then and each seat was like a small lazy boy recliner with like a foot rest thing that popped up and everything. I guess since I was coming from the Senegalese context I was expecting Moroccan travel to be a bit more similar to the sept-places and mini-buses of Senegal and perhaps that was unfair or presumptive but man, was I wrong. To be fair, even once I got to Spain I kept almost burning myself in the shower because it never occurred to me that there might be hot water. I get so wrapped up in however/wherever I’m living.

Marrakech was kind of meh. The proverbial ‘everyone’ is always like “obviously Marrakech is a must for any trip to Morocco” but everything was the exact same color (seriously, by law everything has to be a terra-cotta orangey color because otherwise sandstorms make the buildings too dirty) and the medina is cool but parts of the newer part of the city kind of look like when rich suburbs try to give their “downtown” that “downtown” feel by unnecessarily putting the shops and restaurants into strips and the parking lots in the back, but all the stores and restaurants are still chains and you’re like “well, you tried”. There was even a Fudruckers. Like. What?  What even is Fudruckers? But I digress. 

Like I said, the medina was cool as always – every mid-size to large Moroccan city has a ‘medina’, or at least it would seem to me that’s the case, which is basically the “old city” and generally only accessible to pedestrians (except in Marrakech motorbikes were allowed which meant that my life flashed before my eyes every two minutes, it’s okay though it made up for the uniformity of color in the excitement department). The medinas are always labyrinthine and full of narrow alleys and little maze-like paths with vendors selling sweets and tea and scarves and oils and accordingly they’re generally the main tourist attraction. Plus all the cool monuments and mosques are usually inside the medina. The Marrakech medina was the same color as the rest of the city, but since it was my first medina I enjoyed wandering around, until I got to the souks, or market area, which is when I realized what a couple of my friends who had been to Morocco meant when they said that Marrakech is mostly for tourists to shop. In the middle of all of this is a huge square that has at least 50 of the exact same—seriously, they’re all identical—juice stands set up in rows in the middle surrounded by some ladies doing henna on little benches under umbrellas and snake charmers playing for giant cobras which were just casually hanging out on the street which seemed like a good idea. I got a lot of juice from those stands, it was so good and it was so hot outside, but it was always a bit stressful because when you get close they all start yelling and trying to get you to come to their stand but since there is no distinguishable difference between them it’s hard to choose and I would think okay I should go to the first guy I make eye contact with but then it was always too much pressure and I felt bad for the guys that I didn’t buy juice from. As I write this I’m realizing that maybe that’s the point…

The highlight in Marrakech was actually my hostel, which was right in the center of the medina and was exactly how I would picture a hostel in Morocco. It was ‘riad’ style, which meant it had an open air ‘courtyard’ in the middle and then each floor looked down into that, except instead of a garden in the ‘courtyard’ as is required to be an actual ‘riad’ it was a bunch of rugs and cushions and low tables and the whole place was dimly lit with those metal lanterns with the holes punched in them in cool patterns. When I got there I knocked on the door and the guy who opened it immediately said “Kyla?” which surprised me and then he gave me my first thé a la menthe (mint tea, Moroccan signature, so good) and some weird things that were either crackers or cookies. There were only two other people there, a Congolese guy who appeared to be living there while he worked at a travel company call center (probably practical, the place only cost like 3 euros a night) and a Slovakian guy who was touring the world on his motorcycle.

^ Lighting wasn’t great for photos, but I tried

While exploring, I came across a café where you could also get henna, which I did because I missed having henna on my hands and arms all the time like I did in India since the girls would practice on me. Then I had my first ‘Moroccan crepe’ from a lady making them on the street, she even put an egg in mine for me and made me a little sandwich and I had that with some tea for lunch for a dollar. Thus began my love affair with Moroccan crepes.

^ My henna, while drying and the next day, and lunch

To get to my next destination, Imlil, up in the Atlas mountains about an hour and a half outside Marrakech, I took a ‘grand taxi’ which is as close as you’re going to get to a Moroccan sept-place except it’s a 2013 model Toyota minivan and it only seats six which means that being in the way back doesn’t break both your neck and your spirit which was good since I was in the way back. As you drive out of Marrakech the mountains quickly come into sight behind the clouds and then all of a sudden you go from the desert to the forest and mountains so fast that I actually missed it because I was selecting a podcast to listen to.

Imlil is tiny and quiet, most people use it as a base to climb Mount Toubkal, the highest peak in the Atlas, which I did not have the time nor the gear to do. So instead I decided to try to find this waterfall that I had heard tell about. However all this hear-tell had not included the factoid that there are in fact two waterfalls, one which is about a mile up the mountain and the other which is about 20 miles up the mountain. So, long after I had passed the impossible-to-see turnoff for the path to the waterfall I was actually looking for, people I was passing in the little villages and trekking teams with their mules were telling me “yeah, yeah, just keep going you’ll come to the waterfall”. Eventually it had been several hours and I sat down on a rock and said to myself okay, you’ve definitely walked more than a mile at this point. Since the hike had been lovely so far, with great mountain views complete with bubbling springs and wildflowers, I decided to just backtrack. I made a pit stop at a rooftop restaurant I came across in a little village that seemed entirely dedicated to housing trekkers preparing for the ascent, except I was the only person there so when I asked the guy hanging out at the bottom of the stairs if the restaurant was open he looked at me like I had just asked him to marry him for a second and then recovered and said uh yeah sure and led me upstairs to the terrace which had a stunning view but all the chairs were on top of the tables and he scrambled to put them down and then came over and asked what I wanted to eat and I said well what do you have and he was like well what would you like and I was like uh do you have tagine and he said no, we only have Berber omelets, which seemed pretty straightforward so I got that. No regrets there, turns out Berber omelets are really good—they’re basically deep-dish omelets made in a tagine (the cone shaped thing that they make Moroccan food in) with tomatoes and onions and all kinds of yummy spices.

^ My Berber omelet and the view 

They guy who brought the omelet upstairs, not the same guy as before, put the omelet down in front of me and then pulled up a chair and sat sort of across from me and said absolutely nothing for like five minutes before getting up and leaving while I stared with great determination at the omelet waiting for it to cool down a bit which was really strange but turned out to be a theme in Imlil. When I got back to my hotel, which I had wisely chosen based on the quality of the roof top terrace and view (10/10, plus my room was also on the roof so all I had to do was step outside to enjoy it) I took my first hot shower which was super exciting and then sat outside for dinner, which was vegetable soup and then a vegetable and chicken tagine that was as breathtaking as the view, the guy who seemed to be the sole person running the place also sat silently adjacent to me while I ate for the most amount of time possible without me exploding from confusion and awkwardness before getting up and leaving. I always thought it was annoying and invasive when men outside of a normal social setting in which such behavior would be acceptable (i.e. a party) asserted their ‘right’ to my time and attention but my god this was so much weirder.

^ Tagine and the roof terrace 

But anyway to get back to my hike, I was just about back to town when I saw out of the corner of my eye a small path going straight down next to me and a tiny sign that said “waterfall” with an arrow…and so I actually did find the original waterfall, which was full of day trippers from Marrakech and some industrious locals had set up a little restaurant on the rocks next to it and everything. I took a different way back, following the irrigation canals down to the main street.

^ The waterfall 

The next day I was pretty tired so I mostly hung out on the roof and read and ate more tagine and Moroccan crepes and drank tea, but I also spent a few hours trying to find and eventually finding the radio tower, to get the panoramic view of the valley. One would think that since you can see the radio tower from almost everywhere it wouldn’t be hard to get to but one would be wrong. I spent a lot of time making false starts up the steep rocky hill below it before I finally found the actual “path” that led up there, and when I got up there I couldn’t stay long because despite the view being beautiful it was so windy that I couldn’t stand up during one of the gusts because of a legitimate and well founded fear that it would blow me clear off the top of the mountain. (My pictures from these hikes are on Wanderlust)

Last week Brittany and I took a “ladies vacation” as my mom called it to Cabo Verde (until recently “Cape Verde” in English although it’s “Cap Vert” in French which is how I think of it since all the planning was done here). You could be forgiven for not knowing anything at all about Cabo Verde - it’s a tiny country made up of 9 also tiny islands off the coast of Senegal, just south of the Canary Islands. We visited three of the islands throughout the week, so I’ll divide this post up by island. I made a video compilation of all the little clips I took of the landscapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfdJw9M1Pw (set it to high resolution so you can see the images better). 

1. Santiago - Praia side

Santiago is the biggest island (it takes two hours to drive from top to bottom and about an hour to do the width) and we flew from Dakar to the capital, Praia, which is on the south side of the island. We took the Cabo Verde national airline, TACV, which I was expecting, given that the flight was about $100 round trip and was going to be an hour and TACV mostly does island hopping within Cabo Verde, a puddle jumper plane with a bring-your-own-folding-chair to sit on type deal but boy was I wrong. The plane was the size of a regional jet in the US and pretty new and they even served us all sandwiches, which blew me away. Granted, the sandwich was a hotdog bun with some cheese slices, but still, I was so impressed.

We arrived in Praia in the evening and quickly made friends with a French guy who was in our hostel and he explained that apparently Praia is dangerous at night because of gangs so we went the three of us to get some food at a restaurant near the hostel. I was blown away by how dead everything was. It was only 8 PM and there was almost no one outside and practically every shop was closed. It was the quietest city, even during the day, that I’ve ever been in. The next day as we were exploring the city, I was struck by how small it felt, especially coming from Dakar, and how orderly and calm it was. It almost felt European at times, and occassionaly even kind of reminded me of Goa in India (Portuguese colonization being what the two places have in common). We went and explored the ruins in the old city where the Portuguese had first arrived and walked up to the fort. We came across an old abandoned bar/restaurant, which was wild - it's state wasn’t so dissimilar from the ruins of the old cathedral which were several hundred years old, but it was probably only a couple of decades abandoned (I would imagine that has something to do with weather wear). You could see all the old spots where there used to be a bar and bar stools and the bathroom, but it was totally gutted.

^The abandoned bar/restaurant

We ate dinner at a jazz club/restaurant downtown which was great because Cabo Verdian music is lovely and we got to try homemade “punch” which was everywhere and was basically rum with honey and coconut and tamarind (there are other kinds too, every sort of flavor you could imagine) and it’s so good. However I was massively annoyed because we both ordered the “vegetarian” dish which I was expecting to be like a vegetable curry of some kind which sounded good and I asked if it came with rice (the waiter told us he spoke French and seemed to be telling the truth) and the waiter said yes but then it came out and it was a plate with like 10 slices of raw vegetables on it and nothing else and I was absolutely furious because it was like 8 dollars which is completely insane given that most dishes in restaurants were in the $3-5 range.

2. Sao Vicente

The next day we went back to the airport at 5 AM, which, armed with the unfortunate knowledge that Praia is not a good place to be hanging out in the dark, was not fun because we had to stand around on the empty street waiting for a cab with our phones and passports in our underwear like idiots because the hostel owner never showed up the previous evening so we couldn’t ask him to call us a cab for the next morning (not that this was a surprise, he had messaged me before we left Dakar asking if we wanted to be picked up at the airport, to which I said sure, and no one showed up to pick us up). We found another woman standing waiting for something and waited with her, luckily only for about ten minutes before a cab drove by. We felt bad leaving her on the street but with the language barrier (Cabo Verdians speak Creole and Portuguese) we couldn’t get across that she could come in our cab to wherever she was going also.

Just as in Praia, when we arrived in Mindelo, the cultural capital and the only big city on Sao Vicente, the cab that the hostel was allegedly sending us didn’t come. I was still stoked about the hostel because it’s also a cat shelter so there were cats everywhere.

^ Some of the cats at the hostel; they had their own special area and every time I came in they would go nuts and start chatting away and meowing like crazy and trying to climb up me

Mindelo is much bigger and more alive than Praia and also absolutely gorgeous. The city is nestled in a half-moon cove with a lovely marina on the most perfectly blue water that looked more like the light blue Gatorade than the ocean. We spent most of the day sitting in the floating cafe we found in the marina enjoying the view and the perfect weather and tranquility and then Brittany went to nap in the hostel and I walked up to the old fort that looked like it would have a good 360 view. When I got to the top I discovered that it was private property but that sign was accompanied by only about 5 feet of fence so I just walked right by it to do a quick round and take some pictures, since there was absolutely no one around. Those pictures are on the photo blog. Then we went to the store and bought a bunch of chips and snacks and went and sat on the beach. We swam but neither of us had bathing suits so we wore our PJs, which was bizarre because that meant wearing shorts in public which I would never dream of doing in Senegal, but in Cabo Verde most of the women were wearing mini skirts and short shorts most of the time.

^ From the floating café. We stole the label off our Cabo Verdian beer 

We had been trying to taste the national dish, catchupa, which appeared to be some sort of beans and rice deal, but every time we ordered it they came back and said “no catchupa” (we were mostly getting by with Brittany mumbling in Spanish and hoping for the best, but sometimes when that didn’t work I would try French and then we would speak to each other in English and people would just stare at us in utter confusion and back away slowly). So for dinner we went into this little local looking restaurant and ordered some catchupa and Brittany was trying to explain that she was a vegetarian, but apparently the Spanish mumbling didn’t work because we thought we were getting catchupa with egg and potato instead of with meat - we were sitting there waiting and laughing about how funny it would be if we ended up with just eggs and potatoes when she came out with two plates of french fries and a fried egg. She looked really confused when we both broke down laughing. Every time we ordered in a restaurant after that we were half expecting to be served a plate of eggs and fries.

3. Santo Antão

The next morning we took the ferry from Sao Vicente (the island Mindelo is on) to Santo Antão, which was easily one of my favorite parts of the trip - I already love boats, plus the islands are so close together and both so mountainous that at any point throughout the hour long ride you can see both (those views are in the video I mentioned at the top of this post). Plus the early morning light on the water and the cool breeze, and there was a cafe/bar thing on the boat so Brittany and I were even able to get some coffee. 

^ Coffee on the ferry 

When we arrived we grabbed an aluguer, amid some confusion. The aluguers aren’t taxis but they aren’t buses either, they’re generally big Toyota 15-seater vans (in fabulous condition, we couldn’t believe it - and the taxis in Praia were late model Toyota Corollas which for some reason was hilarious to us…not quite as much character as my beloved dilapidated Renaults with weird furry seat covers) and you pay your spot like in a bus but unlike a bus they don’t all have a set route. Some do, some have names of towns and/or cities painted on the side and they just go back and forth between those places but others just go where they decide they’re going to go that day and pick up people along the way. Anyway, we were jostled around a bit by the competing aluguer drivers but eventually got one to Paul, the city on the coast at the foot of the valley that we were planning to hike. It was a striking drive, the edges of the mountains of Santo Antão are baren and dotted with dramatic cliffs and drops into the ocean below, which was raging and wavy like I’ve never seen. But in Paul, it starts to get really green, palm trees start to pop up and I’ll get to it in a minute but once on the interior of the island its lush and green everywhere you look. Paul, or Vila das Pombas, I never figured out why some people called it one thing and some the other, is a tiny but nice little town on the water that stretches the coast before shooting up into the hills directly behind it. 

^ Vila das Pombas 

Our hotel was a few minutes up the hill and owned by a really friendly Italian guy who spoke no English or French but enough Spanish to sort of communicate with Brittany. Despite the language barrier he tried really hard to be helpful and answer our questions about the hiking etc. and his little hotel, with just two rooms, was absolutely adorable. Plus I was excited because he had a cat, one of the cutest most beautiful cats I’ve ever seen, who was super duper pregnant - it looked like she had swallowed a football. She would come sit outside our room and purr so loudly the floorboards would shake until I opened the door and then she would dart into the room, much to Brittany’s dismay.

We got a different kind of aluguer, kind of like a bush taxi here in Senegal, just a pickup with some benches in the back, up the mountain(s) about an 45 minutes (it probably would have taken twenty if we didn’t keep having to stop and reverse for 100 meters down the tiny narrow mountain road to accommodate the occasional car coming the other way, once we had to do it three times before we rounded a single bend).

^ In the aluguer 

The hills just kept getting more and more massive - I suppose in some circles a “massive hill” is known as a “mountain” - and steep and green and there were little villages here and there but mostly just lots of banana and sugar cane and what I think was maybe corn and of course palm trees. We hiked the rest of the way up (about 2 hours of basically walking straight up on this absurd winding path) to Cova Crater, which is nothing special but the view from up next to it is extraordinary, especially since you can look down over the hills you just crossed through and see the ocean where you started and all while you’re above the clouds. Saying that walking back down was harder than going up would probably be overstating it, but it was not easy. In most places it was so steep that you couldn’t help but run down it failing your arms around like an idiot, and as we got closer to the bottom the dirt got looser and looser and there weren’t rocks and roots anymore and we were sliding around almost breaking our ankles every five seconds. But we made it down, exhausted and sunburnt (I put on so much sunscreen, religiously reapplied, and still got burnt to a crisp). We found a pizza place in town and basically dragged ourselves inside but it was totally empty and smelled like weed and then the Italian guy who owned it (I’m not sure why there are so many Italians living in Cabo Verde) came out from the back and told us that they didn’t start making pizza for another two hours because island time so we went back to the hotel and laid prostate on our beds half conscious until it was time and then we sprinted back to the restaurant and seriously contemplated getting two pizzas each. The pizza was great (Italians) and the owner, who spoke only Italian and Portuguese (it’s amazing how far one romance language gets you with the other, I understood almost everything that was said in Spanish and Italian throughout the week but since Portuguese has a totally different sound to it the same did not really apply) was so nice and served us some homemade “punch” and also gave us free shots of some sort of Italian lemon-y liquor.

The next day was quite relaxed because we were both basically zombies. We went to the edge of the island and did a short hike along the coast to a small village built into the cliffs called Fontainhas and then drank some coffee by the water before getting the aluguer back to the port city to get the ferry back to Sao Vicente. This time I stood all the way on top the whole time and it was so windy that I couldn’t wear my hat and I was half convinced that my face itself was going to be blown off. It was so windy I was terrified to take pictures and videos because I was worried about the genuine possibility of the wind blowing my phone out of my hands, so I white-knuckled it whenever I took any pictures.

4. Santiago again - Tarrafal side

We flew back to Santiago and stayed in Praia just for the night since we arrived late and couldn’t keep traveling until the next day. So early the next morning we got an aluguer to Tarrafal, the biggest city (which is not saying much at all) on the far north of the island. When I say we got an aluguer, I really mean we found one going to Tarrafal and sat in it falling asleep for two hours while we waited for other passengers and these two guys used some weird blue filmy material to tint the windows of the van. The drive was about two hours through rolling baren hills and dramatic peaks and then about halfway there the hills grew into mountains and we reached a certain point where you could see Tarrafal on the coast below but unfortunately it was quite overcast so none of my photos from the drive came out. We had been planning to hike in the nearby national park but we were so beat that we ended up just wandering around the tiny deserted city, or town really, sitting on the beach and going to bed at like 8:30 PM. We finally got to try catchupa, after a great deal of confusion and negotiations regarding Brittany’s vegetarianism, and while eating it it was good but it was perhaps the heaviest thing I have ever eaten in my life, I can’t understand how Cabo Verdians eat it for breakfast every day. It literally felt like someone had opened my stomach, placed all of the catchupa into it and then closed it again, and then it sat there like that for 24 hours. For dinner we had a plate of plain rice and some mild cheese cubes because we were incapable of eating real food with the catchupa still in us and I think our waitress thought we were insane.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write another post for a while now but since my head is no longer preventing me from having a coherent thought (I do still get occasional headaches), I’ve been working on coding my interview data and by the time I’ve done that all day I just want to lie down and not use my brain. Coding is so exhausting - it requires such intense concentration. I had to jump through all these absurd hoops to get the software for it too, I had to download VirtualBox to run Windows 10 on my MacBook in order to run the coding software, QDA Miner, and getting Windows 10 for free or really downloading anything is a huge challenge with crappy internet. So that took almost a week. But now I’m in the groove, so to speak. I’ve got giant pieces of paper hanging in my apartment so I can work out my ideas etc. and I’ve got all of my transcripts back from Oumoul as of this morning. 

^ My giant paper  

Starting next week I’ll be in Thies (about 1.5 hours east of Dakar) for almost two weeks for a training that Tostan is doing on their human-rights based non-formal education approach to community empowerment. I didn’t know about it until last week but they’re letting me slip in at the last second for a fraction of the price that the other representatives from other African development NGOs are paying for room/board/training (I think that’s basically who’s going to be there, but we’ll see) since they’re my sponsoring organization and my research, which the training will be useful for, is going to be helpful for them.

Last weekend Brittany’s friend from the US, Teresa, was here visiting so we went to spend a night in Simal in Sine Saloum, a region on the coast of both the ocean and the river about three hours south of Dakar. I think I’ve probably already talked about this, but to get anywhere outside of Dakar you have to take a “sept-place” the ridiculous old, worn-out circa-1980′s Renault station wagons which hold 7 people, hence the name “sept-place” which means “seven places”. To get a sept-place you have to go to the garage baux maraichers, which 3 years ago when I was here was the apex of chaos in the universe but has since gotten a bit cleaner and more organized. So we found a guy going to Fatik, which is past Sine Saloum but we were just going to get off early. We had to wait a little while since no one else was there for Fatik yet but that actually worked out okay because we got the three best seats (the passenger seat and the two window seats in the middle, you have to be a contortionist to sit comfortably in the way back). It took forever, as per usual, to get out of Dakar and Rufisque, the next city which at this point is being swallowed up by Dakar, because there was an insane accident that seemed to involve a giant truck flipping over into a ditch so a crane had come and pulled it out and so we sat in completely stand still traffic (engine off and driver nowhere to be found) for at least an hour. So by the time we got out of the sept-place in Tataguine (which I enjoy because when you say it with a Senegalese accent it sounds like Tataouine) it was dark. After much negociation and confusion we found a guy who had a car and who claimed to have a vague idea of where Simal, the coastal village where we were going to stay, was. However once we got closer to the village it became clear that he in fact had no idea where he was going, and we proceeded to drive around in the sand for approximately an hour, asking random people who clearly did not know where the campement was either for directions, at one point a little boy even got in the car to try to help but he kept changing his mind about which way the driver should turn so that was useless. The driver kept calling the lady from the campement, which was likely also useless since the only descriptor of where we were at any given moment was “near some sand and a fence and some donkeys”. But eventually we made it and boy, was it worth it, we sat at a table right on the water and had tabouleh and chicken and then the next morning had an assortment of jams with tappalappa (the village bread that I like) and coffee that wasn’t instant. Then we had a ride on a pirog that came with the room, so for about two hours a very nice man steered us down the river and through the marches on a very large pirog (there are pictures of that on the photo blog). He explained how the women would wade out and plant what looked like tiny mangroves in the marsh in these perfect rows, and showed us the shrimp nets that were tied to long bamboo poles propped up in the trees, which you have to come collect in the middle of the night. Then I had a headache so I hung out in the restaurant area while Brittany and Teresa kayaked, which was fine because it was serene and beautiful and I was happy to sit and do nothing for a while. 

As we were discussing how we should get home and when we should leave, this young French woman came up and said she couldn’t help but overhear and explained that she and her husband were about to drive back to Dakar in about ten minutes, did we want a ride? We obviously wanted a ride. Her husband was Senegalese but they met in France and they turned out to be the absolute coolest people ever. We all chatted the whole three hours back and he let me borrow a book about microlending in Bangladesh and Brittany promised to show the woman, Sophie, around the art scene in Dakar (since she’s an artist and they had just moved here when they got married in January - she had some incredible stories about the marriage rituals Souleman’s mom had guided her through). 

^ Where we stayed, Campement Simal

Other than that little jaunt to Sine Saloum (and I would say another day trip to Ile des Madelines, but I’ve been there so many times it doesn’t really count anymore, although this time I did ride in the trunk on the way there), life is fairly normal (by Dakar standards).

^ In the trunk on the way to the island, at the top of the cliff once there

I go home for lunch a couple of times a week and over to Moussa’s for attaya every couple of days. During the day I mostly code and work and read either at home or at a café. My new friend who works in the monitoring and evaluation department of Tostan invited me to come use the extra space in their office to work but I have’t gotten around to doing that yet because it’s not super close to where I live. Every Thursday Brittany I go to “Marché Jeudi” (Thursday Market) which is a labyrinthine collection of people selling giant piles of clothes and various other random things that pops up around the corner from my apartment every Thursday and you have to really dig (literally) but everything is about 200-300 francs and we’ve had some amazing finds. Like last week I got an Eddie Bauer button down and a top from Zara (for less than 50 cents a piece!!). Right next to Marché Jeudi is the “beignet lady” and I go to her fairly often and bring beignets (which are fried balls of sweet dough) to Moussa’s to go with the attaya. She’s legendary and always surrounded by a huge crowd waiting, but it’s a very modest set-up, just a woman sitting on a stool on a particularly narrow street surrounded by a giant vat of boiling oil, buckets of dough, and a big bowl where she deposits the beignets when they’re done so her daughter can wrap them in Swedish newspapers (my bread I get from the boutique next door also is wrapped in Swedish newspaper…I don’t understand where it’s all coming from…maybe Sweden…but why???) and bag ‘em.

I go every now and then to Marché HLM also, which is the fabric market in the HLM neighborhood, which is like the projects but for Dakar. I love Marché HLM for a couple of reasons. The fabric is so vibrant and beautiful so I enjoy being surrounded by it (it’s also only about $1 for a yard) but I also like that it’s one of the only spaces in Dakar that feels ruled by women. Most of the sellers and shoppers are women, and even if they’re men they aren’t crazy aggressive like they are at markets like Sandaga where they gets lots of tourists so when they see a Toubab they descend and won’t leave you alone until you buy something. At HLM I’m pretty much always guaranteed to be the only Toubab and it’s also just quieter in general even though it’s absolutely massive and ten times as labyrinthine as Marché Jeudi. There are tiny little corridors lined with fabric stalls and you can only pass through one person deep. It’s also my favorite place to practice my Wolof, because everyone there is super game to speak Wolof to me instead of French and because of the repetition of buying and selling and each stall owner asking me the same questions over and over I learn the words better and it’s easier to repurpose them later.  

^ Some of the fabric I’ve gotten at HLM that hasn’t become clothes

I’ve really gotten to know the bus and informal public transportation systems (car rapides, kolandos) even better and only take cabs if it’s too late at night for buses. It’s great because I know the city so well now and taking public transport everywhere makes me feel more connected to Dakar and my fellow Dakarois (most ex-pats just take cabs all the time, since relative to the West it’s cheap, but relative to the buses here it’s astronomically expensive). It can be frustrating as public transport can be anywhere else; waiting forever, insanely crowded buses (like the kind of crowded where you don’t need to hold on to anything because you can’t move at all anyway), people accidentally stepping on you or elbowing you in the head etc. But now that I’ve gotten used to it I can never justify a cab to myself. 100 francs (16 cents) versus 1500 francs ($2.50) for the same distance…not a hard choice. That might seem petty but it’s all relative, I don’t convert currencies unless I’m making a big purchase when I’m living abroad.

One instance where I do convert and allow myself to splurge a bit (by Dakar standards at least) is this new restaurant about 10 minutes from my apartment called Mawa’s Taste of America, which is owned by a Senegalese woman who lived in the US for decades and makes absolutely incredible American breakfast food. I’ve also been obsessed with clementines (about $1.20/kilo…I eat A LOT of them) but the season is ending soon and I’m so bummed. Speaking of food, Brittany and I also recently tried some sort of weird cake called the Dakaroise from the bakery near my apartment and it was not only twice the size of our faces but one of the strangest things I’ve ever eaten. It was fairly dry yellow cake with layers of filling that was what I can only assume pure butter whipped with some sugar in it. It was like if I was making cookies and stopped after the first two ingredients and then used that to fill the cake.

^ Brittany’s head for scale 

Also here’s the most adorable picture ever of me having a tender moment with my baby cat who fell asleep with his paw on my face (not at all my cat, but I like it more than Brittany and it’s her families’):

So, where were we? Oh yes, Goudiry with my messed up hand and head. I spent the final night in Goudiry sitting in my pajamas in the Goudiry radio studio (which was on the second floor of the building we were staying in, which was not a hotel but also not not a hotel) talking to the owner of the station, a dreadlocked reggae artist and painter. I was in my pajamas because I was wandering around looking for a bucket to flush the toilet and I ran into him and he was like you’re doing research here why haven’t you come on the radio to talk about it?? He wants me to come back to Goudiry to do so and also to go to the music festival that he organizes there at the end of February, so we’ll see. 

The next morning at 6 am we got a sept-place (the late 80s model Peugeot station wagons that are all about ten minutes from doing that ridiculous Looney Tunes thing where literally every part of the car falls off and the people inside are left sitting in the open air on the seats on the ground) to Tambacounda, a fairly painless 2.5 hour ride. We then waited for almost 5 hours at the garage in Tamba for a sept-place to Dakar to finally leave. I got the seat in the front which is key but the seat had this cover on it that was made of faux-fur which is not ideal when you’re sitting on it while driving through the plains in the sun and also only going like 45 mph the entire time because the driver had no idea how to drive a stick and was always in the wrong gear. But eventually, around 9 PM, I got back to the house and was swarmed by the family because everyone wanted to see my hand. I spent about 45 minutes explaining what a concussion is and also that the scabs on my hand, which everyone was freaking out about, were not the problem, it was in my bones that there was a problem. But in any case the next day Issa took me to the hospital, where they called me in to the consultation just to tell me the x-ray machine was broken and send me to a different office about 10 minutes away. We ended up taking another girl and her mom with us because the girl had a broken ankle and couldn’t walk but they didn’t have a car. So I got my x-ray and then we had to take it back to the original place so the doctor could look at it and by the time we got there Issa was about to have a stroke because there was a soccer game (part of the African Cup) that Senegal was playing in starting in 10 minutes and we weren’t home yet. But then the doctor took forever to tell me that my hand had a small fracture and that I just had to wear a brace for three weeks because he was too busy hitting on me and asking me irrelevant questions about my life. Then he made us go to the pharmacy next door to get the brace and then come back so he could put it on for me as if I don’t know how velcro works. I thought Issa was going to jump out of his skin, I even asked the doctor if we could speed the process up so he wouldn’t miss too much of the game. 

So since then I haven’t done much other than prepare to move in and move in to my new apartment, which my friend Moussa (he’s the middle child in another CIEE family and he’s probably my best Senegalese friend other than Issa, mostly because I trust the two of them completely to not get weird and profess their love for me, which Senegalese men have a tendency to do sometimes) found for me and then helped me buy furniture for and move in to with Issa’s car. It’s actually right down the street from his house, where his mom has quasi-adopted me and where I am almost every night for attaya because Moussa makes incredible attaya. I generally go back home to eat lunch every other day or so because if I don’t for more than three days in a row Maman calls me to ask if I’m alive. Anyway, my apartment is in a neighborhood called Ouakam (or Waakam, it depends on how who you ask, Wolof wasn’t a written language until recently so spelling tends to be up for grabs, which can be really confusing when you’re trying to learn it) which is a really vibrant, young (as in the age of people there) neighborhood where a lot of big lower middle class families and also students live. There’s always lots going on, markets (including the one where I bought my bed and table and chairs, which we transported from the market to my place by putting the entire table upside down on the roof of a taxi and then rolled the windows down to hold it on ourselves as we drove), etc. and people call it Dakar’s village because everyone tends to know the people in their “cité” which are the sub-neighborhoods of Ouakam (mine is Cité Ascena, if you’re curious, go into google maps and search the Brioché Dorée Ouakam Cité Ascena and my building is about three minutes from there). The building has three floors and I think there’s three apartments per floor. I’m on the first floor. Here’s a video tour: https://youtu.be/jezNEnjQIEQ. 

The new CIEE students are here now (which is actually the reason I got an apartment, since because the new student arrived there wasn’t room for me at the house, I shared a room/bed with Mimi until I moved out). Seems like there are some cool people but it’s a bit tough right now because they’re still in the phase at the beginning where no one wants to miss anything so they do stuff in groups of at least 20 which is just too much for me especially since they all always have a thousand questions for me and my head just starts to hurt. But Issa introduced me to another former CIEE student who’s back her writing her undergraduate thesis and living with the New York Times West Africa bureau chief as a nanny for her kids, which is cool because then I get to go over there and play with their cats and use their washing machine and eat their cheese. Her name is Brittany and when we met it was one of those sort of instant “did we just become best friends???” moments; we’re basically introvert and extrovert versions of the same person. 

^ Playing with Spotty

Also here’s a ridiculous photo of Issa and I at Lac Rose: 

Our eighth village was Sinthiou Saliou, which was about an hour by moto from Dianké Makhan, and it was the most terrifying hour of my life. This really young guy was driving my moto and he was going way to fast and we were just flying through the air over the bumps and curves and I struggling to stay on the moto and I kept yelling at him to slow down because he spoke French but he was determined to go as fast as the moto would go. When we arrived I just about rolled off the moto and Oumoul looked at me and burst out laughing because i was so covered in red dust that she said I looked like a human brick. I don’t think I’ve ever been so filthy in my whole life. I washed off and we got settled in our hut with our awesome hosts Yéro and his wife Sirah. 

^ My clothes, my body was dirtier because my clothes were mostly covered by the driver, who was so dusty I couldn’t look at him because I knew I would laugh

^ Our hut and the little kitchen area behind it

Everything was going really smoothly and they even said they could guide us to a village that hadn’t done the Tostan program, which was super exciting because I had been trying and failing to make that happen for the past three villages and I wanted to speak with women who hadn’t done the program too. So the next day after lunch we climbed onto two motos and headed off. The village was only about 4 km away and we were about halfway there when there was a flash of white in front of the moto and before I knew what was happening the moto was sliding sideways and then I was flying through the air and then I was on the ground about 10 feet away. It all happened so fast but over the past couple of days I’ve put together that a cow stepped out in front of the moto and Hassan, the driver, had to brake and swerve to avoid it and in doing so the moto started drifting through the dust and I pulled my leg up to avoid it being crushed and then when Hassan stabilized the moto by slamming his foot into the ground, I went flying off. I must have instinctively covered my head with my hands because I knew right away that I had landed on my head and right shoulder but I had no cuts on my head, only my hand and arm. I sat up and did a quick damage assessment: probably concussed, missing most of the skin on the underside of my right arm, shoulder, and the top of my right hand, which must have taken the majority of the blow instead of my head, which was good, no deep cuts but I can’t move my right arm at all. 

Still in the post-accident adrenaline state and not wanting to give up after trying so hard to arrange the visit, I climbed back on the moto and we continued to the village. By the time we arrived I was bleeding everywhere and the fact that I couldn’t move my arm at all was starting to alarm me. Oumoul helped me rinse the wounds and someone called the Imam who showed up and I explained that I couldn’t move my arm and he poked my shoulder a bit and then did something (I don’t know what because I wasn’t looking because I was trying to play it cool, hyper aware of the fact that I was in a cultural context in which women who make faces of discomfort during childbirth bring shame on their families) and there was a loud popping sound and a blinding pain in my arm for a minute and then all of a sudden I could move my arm.  So we started doing the interviews and I was getting increasingly frustrated because my head was spinning a bit and my hand was starting to swell up and I was getting blood all over my notebook. By the second interview I couldn’t hold my pen anymore and by the time we were greeting the chief my hand looked like someone had blown into a rubber glove.

The rest of the evening is kind of a blur, we got back and as we pulled into Sinthiou Hassan (who wasn’t injured except a cut on his toe) was yelling things and they must have been alarming because by the time I was in my hut there were at least 50 people gathered in and outside and I was in a lot of pain and filthy and there’s nothing quite as comforting as 50 strangers staring at you and trying to touch your wounds. I was finally able to explain that I needed to wash myself and so I got into the latrine area and realized that taking off my clothes was going to be extremely difficult and I got my pants off and then Yéro’s mom shows up out of nowhere and starts asking if she can take my pants to wash and I was trying to explain that she should wait and take my shirt too but my Pulaar isn’t that advanced and I’m not even convinced that I could have explained that in English at that point so she’s just standing there staring at me and then she realizes I’m trying to take my shirt off so she helps me and then takes it and leaves and I stood in the latrine covered in blood and dirt and cried because I was so overwhelmed and washing myself was so hard. Eventually I put on new clothes with great difficulty (and I wore those same clothes without changing at all for the next three days because I literally couldn’t change). When I got back to my hut and everyone was still there and they were killing a goat for dinner to make me feel better I almost just threw myself on the ground and started screaming bloody murder. I had to stay up until like 11 waiting for the goat to be ready and then eat a bunch of nasty meat and oil with my left hand in a separate little bowl which meant I had to actually eat a lot because they could tell how much I was eating and my hand was huge and my shoulder and head hurt and then I was up all night with diarrhea from the goat and I was about at the end of my rope. 

So I’ve made a couple of lists. Here’s a list of things you can only do with your right hand in Senegal for cultural/religious reasons:

1. Shake hands (and, you know, greetings are only the single most important part of Senegalese culture)

2. Hand people things

3. Take things that people are handing to you

4. Eat

I’ve also made a list of things I can no longer do with my right hand:

1. Shake hands

2. Hand people things

3. Take things that people are handing to me 

4. Eat

You may have noticed some crossover. The list could also continue to include things such as holding a pen, zipping things shut and opening them again, plugging things in, etc. Turns out only having one hand is SO HARD. People are being really understanding and I get to eat on my own little plate on the side so I can use my left hand but I’m not very good at that, it turns out, so I mostly just end up covered in rice. Plus, we have no electricity so my laptop is dead so to take notes I’ve been using voice memos because this took me like twenty minutes lefty:

^ That’s blood in the corner 

So it’s a challenge. But we had interviews to do, so the next day I bucked up and we put my arm in a makeshift sling and walked a kilometer to Boutoucoufara, which would have been village 9 but we had decided that since it was so close we were going to spend the just the day there instead of trying to move all the stuff, etc. 

As we walked there we reached a river of sorts and we couldn’t find the log they apparently usually use to cross so we just hiked up our pants and skirts, respectively, and waded across. We stopped at the clinic they had and the doctor was having lunch so I sat on a log and waited for a half an hour while he ate his rice and chatted with some other guy and then he came over and looked at my hand and said “that doesn’t look so good” and I was like yeah I know it hurts and he goes “okay well you should cover it” and gave me a gauze wrap to put on it and I asked if it was broken and he disappears and comes back with a tube of something and hands it to me and goes here hold this with your right hand and I tried but since I can’t move my fingers except the very tips I couldn’t and he just shook his head and said “yeah probably, try not to use it”. 

^ Next to one of the smaller termite mounds with Oumoul and my sling and protective head equipment

So then we went and spent the rest of day doing interviews and waiting around for lunch (they killed a chicken, but not before it drooled all over my foot, apparently chickens drool when you hold them upside down). I was dead on my feet by the time we got back to Sinthiou, so the next day Oumoul and Yéro took motos to the final village, Béli Waamé Daka, about 20 minutes away and Oumoul did the interviews without me while I rested in the hut and had lots of attaya with Hassan and the team of like 6 guys that had been left in charge of taking care of me while Sirah actually did take care of me. With great difficultly, several breaks and one tantrum in which I threw things at a goat I managed to pack my bag without my right hand and when Oumoul got back we went with Yéro and couple of other guys to wait in this field near the village for the cotton pickers to drive by so we could try to hitch a ride with them to Dianké Makhan. 

After a couple of hours they showed up and let us sit in the back of the truck which was awful because it was so bumpy I thought my brain was going to come out my ear. We slept at Khadijah's (the woman who took care of us when our hosts forgot about us) and she is incredible let me just say we showed up with no notice at all and she didn't even bat an eye. Then at 6 am we got a bush taxi to Goudiry, which was way easier and quicker than I thought it would be, we were in Goudiry by 9. 

Now we're hanging out here finishing up some things and then on Wednesday we'll head back to Dakar and I'll go to the hospital on Thursday to have my hand properly checked. 

I keep saying this to anyone who will listen but I can't believe how quickly this went. I thought that it would be weird for me to come into a village and have Oumoul start interviewing people the next day and just leave once we had spoken to enough people, but right from the moment we arrived in Goudiry Harouna thought that was hilarious and was like no no it's the opposite it would be weird for you to show up and just hang out and do nothing for a while before interviewing, the people will start wondering why you're there and didn't bring them anything. I think I almost didn't believe him at first but it's certainly true that it would be weird if we had stayed in each village for a week or more like I thought we would have to. We arrive and everyone is pretty excited and the women we came to speak to are always very eager to talk to us and everyone else wants to be interviewed too. I was most concerned about taking time away from the women's busy days but Harouna thought that was also hilarious. He compared it to if someone from Singapore traveled by plane, bus, motorcycle and charrette to come all the way to my home in the US specially to speak to me because he wanted to learn from me - wouldn't I be excited? I suppose he's right. 

We spent almost as much time getting to this village as we did here. Dianké Mahkan is the seat of the next commune over from Komoty and it's insane here right now because everyone from the villages in the three or four surrounding communes have been called here to register for their new ID cards. 

From Tambala we took a moto (the two of us on one again, I really almost couldn't squeeze on this time it's a good thing I've only been eating rice and milk) back to Komoty to get our things and get the bush taxi to Dianké. For seven hours we sat around and everyone kept saying it's going to come soon, we had lunch and then dinner and by eight thirty I was 100% sure we were spending the night in Komoty and a bush taxi shows up and it's full but the guy said there was another behind him. Then I was only 95% sure. But sure enough around nine another one came along and we ran out and grabbed it. 

Let me take a moment to explain what a bush taxi is. It's usually a pickup truck with wooden sides on the back and a metal cage type thing around the top and there's usually wooden benches along the sides in the back and they fill up the whole thing with everything you could imagine and then you sort of perch yourself on the bench and put your feet on a sheep or some rice and pray. But this one didn't have any benches so we just climbed into the back with the containers of fuel, bags, sheep, giant sacks of rice and various inventory items for stores like juice and boxes of seasoning. Then they tied a bike to the top of the cage and another guy got in the back and then three more but then there was too much stuff so everyone else just sort of climbed on to the cage and held on for dear life as we sped off into the darkness going about 60 mph (because there's a semi-smooth path through the bush to Dianké from Komoty). I really wish it hadn't been too dark for a photo or video because it was the most insane thing. I thought Oumoul was going to faint but I was absolutely loving it. 

Our host in Komoty's father is is the chief of Dianké so we went to his house when we arrived about 45 minutes later and there was a lot of confusion because I guess they had forgotten that Khadijah (our house in Komoty) had called because they didn't have room for us since everyone and their mother is here for their cards so every house in the village is full of people. So they ended up kicking a young guy into someone else's room so we could take his hut along with a couple of other people who came for their cards. The downside of the arrangement was that Oumoul and I shared a bed not much larger than a twin and made of sticks tied together and I think tonight I'm going to sleep on the floor because I know it will be more comfortable. Plus it's so cold at night (which is confusing considering how hot it is during the day) and all I had again was my mosquito net which just doesn't cut it. 

This morning there were hundreds of people everywhere for the cards and we were totally lost in the shuffle so we finally found the women we were going to interview and one realized we had been forgotten by our hosts so she brought us breakfast from her house on the other side of the village and then we spent most of the day there finishing the interviews, showering and having lunch. Tomorrow we're going to just head straight to the next village because it's just too crazy here and we're only in the way.

I like this village a lot and we've only been here for the afternoon. Our room has two doors and one of them looks out right where they cook so I'm getting to watch them prepare the chicken they killed for us for a late lunch. 

^ The view

Here, in Tambala (Oumoul absolutely cannot keep track of names she kept calling Banta Nani and Tambala "Bantala" and "Tambanani" and she keeps calling our host, Penda, Maimouna) we're back in to the usual; the warm Senegalese welcome and friendly and curious women hanging out and having tea. I think we're both relieved to be out of the weirdness that was Banta Nani. 

I think I'm finally used to the women being topless most of the time but I'm definitely still absolutely floored when they grab hot coals with their bare hands out of the cooking stove to put on the ataaya stove. Both here and in Léwa they let me help with the couscous a bit; Senegalese couscous (which you have almost every night for dinner with milk, kind of like cereal almost) and like I've mentioned before it's the same texture and grain size as damp sand basically. But it doesn't start like that, they pound the crap out of it with a mortar and pestle that is taller than me and probably weights almost as much as me too and they all have insane arm muscles from doing this for hours every day. I was sore for three days after doing it for 30 minutes in Léwa. 

Oumoul is beside herself because here instead of fields they have tons of cows so they also have real (not powdered) milk. I'm traumatized by my experience with extremely fresh milk in Rwanda but it's a bit different here. 

The further south we get the more green it is and the cooler the birds are. My two favorites are a fairly large iridescent blue one and then a smaller really weirdly shaped one that's just plain brown with a white head but it has these ridiculously long legs, like at least 7 inches, and it hops around on them instead of flying and it's hysterical to watch. 

Last night we did a tour of the village to say hi to each family and then went to sleep, but I don't think I slept for more than an hour because our host Penda was in bed with us and she was snoring incredibly loudly and she's also a rather large woman and Oumoul sleeps all curled up so I was barely even on the bed, my right leg and arm were kind of hanging off and I was using my mosquito net again but it kept falling off. But this morning the sunrise over the field of hundreds of cows was so beautiful it made up for it. 

I guess perhaps the fifth village, Banta Nani, was a bit difficult to get a hold of because when we got there they were not prepared for us like the others were, Harouna having called them. We took a moto there as usual, the two of us on one so we had to leave most of our stuff in Komoty which we'll be passing through again after the next village, and then spent a while sitting around while everyone tried to figure out what to do. Eventually we were led to a room with an actual bed, albeit with a mattress made out of a bunch of foam pads rolled up and haphazardly stuffed into the frame, which apparently belonged to someone's husband who was in Dakar. From the moment we sat down in there to the moment we left there were about 8-9 kids sitting in a row just staring at me, with the exception of when we did the interviews with the two women, who chased them out temporarily, and when they had to go to sleep or eat. Being constantly watched is starting to become very stressful. We still haven't figured out a day later who's actually hosting us because we can never find anyone and so we just hope that people will remember we're here around meal time (as guests it would be weird to seek people out apparently). 

Yesterday we had a small bowl (which is not super common here) of plain white rice that I think was mixed with some peanut powder. Oumoul was horrified by it for some reason but I was super hungry and the rice wasn't oily at all so I was actually really excited. 

^ Lunch

Then about two hours later, at like 6 pm (which is about 3 hours before you would normally have dinner, two different people that we hadn't seen yet brought us a bowl of macaroni and onion sauce with some chicken on top and I was thrilled to see a source of protein after four days of plain rice for lunch and powdered milk for dinner.

One of the women we interviewed took me to this spot out in a field under a huge neem tree, which is apparently the only spot in the village with cell service so I could check my messages and the whole time the entourage of kids followed me and they all sat around me in a circle watching me check my phone and playing with the skin on my feet and legs (pinching it and petting me etc). 

We didn't get any couscous and milk around actual dinner time which Oumoul was very frustrated by so we ended up just going to sleep. No one gave us a sheet so I used the mosquito net that I annoyingly have with me because Harouna insisted we get one even though it's useless because it's winter, as a blanket because I was freezing. I almost went into cardiac arrest when, in the middle of the night, some little kid came in (we couldn't lock the door), climbed up onto the bed and grabbed my leg and started pulling at me and talking and I realized quickly it was a kid, alxumdililay, and yelled "achu" which means stop and he ran away. 

In the morning another person we had never seen before brought us a bowl of some sort of porridge and then twenty minutes later the woman who actually seems to live here brought us a tin of coffee but nothing else and then ten minutes later some other woman brought us sugar and hot water and some bread and cups and then an hour later one of the women we interviewed brought us almost the exact same thing and the woman who brought us the first bread was coming to get her platter and the two of them got into some sort of argument regarding the provision of our bread. 

^ The goats help themselves to the porridge.

We're going to another village nearby too but about eight people are involved in figuring out who's moto we can take but they aren't communicating with each other so it's very confusing and I've given up trying to keep up. 

Our fourth village is really quite large compared to the other ones because it's the title village of the commune, Komoty. There's no electricity but there is a shop (they don't have water though which is unfortunate because I think I'm going to run out soon and we won't hit another big village for at least 5 days) and cell service, which is new. I can't really use my electronics though because I can't charge them. 

We took motos here also and it was really rough, very long and the path was terrible and bumpy and eroded from the rainy season (there was one point where we drove down into a gully and we were next to a bridge made of logs, which I assume was for when the floods come). I felt Iike the guy in that game for your phone where he's running and you have to tap and turn the phone to avoid obstacles and collect coins because I really had to apply myself to avoid the low branches on either side as we zoomed along. I didn't collect any coins though. 

Our room here is quite different; the past three villages we've had a completely empty room with a foam pad or two on the floor, but this time there are two beds with frames (although I have no idea what the bed is made of it's so hard and lumpy in the weirdest possible way) and there are chests and a couple of bags stacked all over the place and things hanging from strings and hooks on the walls. So people keep coming and going getting stuff and right now there's a girl asleep on a prayer rug in the corner. 

There are also lots of those giant wasps here, as in here in the room I think there's a nest, and everyone else is super cool about it but they're so big that in order for them to fly their wings are also enormous and so even from far away they sound like helicopters and it's very distracting (or it was, now that it's dark they're elsewhere I'm scared to know where). The people here are much less interested in us; almost no one has come to greet us (we'll like 10 people but that's absolutely nothing comparatively) and it's kind of a relief but also a bit weird. 

They killed a chicken for us for lunch here too and this time they brought into the room to kill it in front of us. I'm leaving a trail of dead animals in my wake. I shudder to think how many more victims our mere presence in a village will take. 

Tonight I'm exhausted after spending 4.5 hours sitting in a classroom in the school (this is the first village with a school) for a rural counselors meeting with the mayor of the commune (every village has a woman and a man counselor and once every month they all come to the commune title village to meet with the mayor). This was the budget meeting which essentially meant that everyone talked for four hours and then they spent the last thirty minutes in a frenzy actually making the budget and then voting. I was excited to go at first because I wanted to observe the women in action (I'm interviewing the female counselor in each village) but I quickly realized my mistake. I got some interesting notes on their behavior and how many times they spoke etc but mostly I just sat there listening to people complain in pulaar/mandika while another guy shouted whatever was being said in the other language after every sentence. It wasn't exactly an efficient meeting. And we didn't finish until almost five which is when we ate lunch (plain rice that I was totally stoked about because it wasn't very oily). I've started drinking the water here because they have a tap in this house and that's safer for my intestines than well water. 

This guy came up to us after the meeting and said he wanted to talk to us and it turns out he was the most interesting guy, he just came by and we interviewed him. This village is the only one where the men refused to participate in the class, so we've had a lot of interesting conversations here. He was the only one who wanted to participate and he had a lot of useful things to say. He and Oumoul talked for a while and apparently 20 years ago while he was living in France (there's a lot of men who aren't here because they're in France, and the ones who've come back somehow don't seem to speak French) he saved up for years so his brother could come join him and then his brother drowned when the pirog he was coming over in capsized. Then like 5 years ago he sold his cows to help his other brother get to Europe and he told him not to take a pirog but he did anyway and he also drowned. I was glad that Oumoul told me about it later because I don't know what the appropriate reaction to that is. 

In any case, incredibly sad stories aside and returning to women's accessories, here there are less piercings and scar tattoo things but a lot of the women have really huge versions of the red and gold earrings I described and then there's a black cord that connects them and holds them up (they look enormously heavy) and sometimes the sides of the cord like over their temples have gold rings waterfalled down them and sometimes there's even a little extension that hangs over the middle of the forehead. I haven't figured out yet what secures the cord to the top of the head. In our other villages something like that would signal a new bride but here apparently it's just a fashion statement (Oumoul had to ask because we were like there's no way 4 out of 5 women are newlyweds here). 

I won't actually be stopping in Goudiry so it's going to be a little while before I can add photos to these posts. Probably another 10 or so days. I can't believe how fast things are going, my plan of three months was wildly inaccurate it's going to be more like a month in the field. It's just going so much more smoothly than I could have imagined. Probably for the best, I'll have more time to analyze and write and also this is absolutely exhausting. 

This village is especially exhausting because I'm pretty sure it's the loudest place on earth. Even if we had our own room and there weren't people coming and going every five minutes and shining lights in my face until like 2 in the morning there's this goat that seems to live in the hallway and it does this awful cry for hours every night that doesn't sound like a noise that a normal living thing should make and is so loud that it makes my ears ring (the acoustics of the open air hall covered by a tin roof doesn't help). Plus in this village like the others people listen to the radio on full volume from around 10 to midnight at least and there are always people running around and yelling. And by 5 am people are up and yelling and talking and doing things in our room so we're also up at 5 am. The sleep culture is so hard to adjust to, it's very jarring to watch someone shine a light in their child's face and scream at them to wake up and move so they can sit on whatever bed they're sleeping on to talk loudly with someone else. The concept of trying to be quiet while people are sleeping or not disturbing people who are sleeping or trying to sleep just does not exist. People come in and wake me up at midnight (not that I'm ever really asleep by then here) to greet me and then sit on our bed and talk to us. 

Our last night there was better except the stupid goat, that thing sounded like it was being tortured. We were able to get more water too because someone was going to see family in a big village nearby where they had a store that had water, so I am all set for our next couple villages with wells.

The girls woke me up this morning at 6 am after a wild New Years of feasting on plain noodles with peppery oil sauce and millet and sitting on the roof moving two feet every ten minutes to get service and then going to bed at 10 to try to get me to let them cornrow my hair. I decided against it on account of not wanting to look like a cast member from Orange is the New Black or a 90s punk-pop singer. 

In any case, we left after breakfast on two motorcycles and rode for about an hour through the bush until we reached a really big village right off the paved road (it's the road to Bamako so there are always huge Malian semis that shoot by and somehow even though they're the same size as in the US somehow they seem ten times larger here). We waited for an absurd amount of time, stocked up on water and then finally two guys from the village we were headed to showed up with their motos and it turned out they had rented the motos instead of using the ones they had I suppose because they wanted to make us pay for the rentals and so we had to call Harouna and he got them to reduce the price but it was still so much more expensive then I was prepared for so I was already all frustrated and then we get started and we've driven ten minutes and haven't even left the village yet and the giant rubber band thing holding my backpack to the back of the moto snaps, whipping me so hard it drew blood from my back in the process, and my backpack goes flying through the dust (it's throughly brown now). While we were trying to attach it out of nowhere the village chief from the village we just came from comes over and is like hey look we're all here! What a small world. 

^ Hiding from the dust on the moto

The guy driving this moto was young and he was going way too fast and driving like a maniac and this path thing was way worse than the last one and he also kept stopping every time we passed a small village to show me off to his friends (literally - we wouldn't even get off the moto he would just shout so they could come stand around and look at me) and then he would speed away all fast and furious. It was a cool part of the forest (don't think US forest think like what movies like Madagascar suggest the African savannah might be like, but denser) but I didn't dare take any pictures because we were going so fast and bumping around and I didn't want my phone to go flying. It took us almost two hours to get there and when I got off the moto it took me a few minutes to readjust to walking and having my legs together. 

This village is probably the smallest yet, it's called Talico Fulbé and it's waaaay out here in the bush. I love all the big baobabs all over the place (they are so massive it's so impressive) and the trees and tall grass on the way here, it's so much prettier in this region than up north where it's nothing but flat and dry with the occasional brown grass or tiny bush. 

As I'm writing this we've just finished our rice - I feel like I joke about eating plain oily rice all the time but let me just be clear that it's literally plain rice that's been cooked with a ton of oil so it's sort of a brownish color (but it's white rice before they add the oil) and we get a giant bowl of that and then on top there's a fist-sized chunk of what I think is boiled squash or pumpkin. There are a bunch of kids working together very hard to stand on one another to see through the window into our room and watch us lay here exhausted. I can't imagine it's very exciting but there's at least 20 of them pushing and shoving out there. 

^ Oumoul hard at work in our room

In a shocking turn of events, Talico has electricity!!! They apparently have a solar panel. We have a lightbulb that works in our room and I gave my external battery to them to charge. We're feeling pretty bougie sitting around being able to see things without my headlamp. Also there is a hole for pooping! I'm beyond stoked, and as an added plus the toilet area is only a two minute walk away. However we don't eat lunch until about 4 pm which means from around 1:30 until 4 my blood sugar is so low I can't do much. And it would be rude to have snacks so I can't have snacks. It also means that when dinner comes at like 8:30 I'm not really hungry yet, but luckily everywhere we've been so far they insist on serving us privately in our room so there's no one around to push me to eat a massive amount of food. 

I love showering (bathing, really) here, the house we're staying in happens to be the last one in the village so when I go out back to the little walled-off area to wash I'm at the very farthest edge of the village and I usually shower as the sun sets so I don't need a flashlight and there's something very soothing about showering while looking out over a field with the forest in the background and the pink and blue sky and white sliver moon. They don't give me a cup though to move the water from the bucket to my body so I end up squatting next to the bucket splashing it on myself very un-elegantly. But I digress. 

Last night they killed another chicken to make for us for breakfast. I wasn't thrilled because that meant I had to come face to face with the fact that the "sauce" that chicken is prepared with and put over pasta or rice in all the villages so far is actually just a massive amount oil with some onions (probably a 2 cup of oil to half an onion ratio - in Dakar its 2 cups onion to half cup oil and it's still too oily) since it was served in a bowl to go with our bread (its easier to pretend it's less oil when it's soaked up a little bit by something).

We just arrived in our second village, Loridije. It looks quite similar but it's not even half the size. Our room is identical, a cement square and there's no electricity or service (so far, we were told there was going to be so we'll have to go look for it). 

^ From the roof

For about twenty minutes 25 or so people stood in our room and stared at us while we met the two women were going to be speaking with. Then everyone was ushered out by our host, the nephew of the village chief, and we sat around unsure what to do until two little girls brought us 4 enormous bowls of rice. Well, two of them were just rice and two had something that sort of looked like yam on top of it and one had a chicken bone with about one bite of meat on it, which I gave to Oumoul. The rice was really good, it tasted totally different from rice I've had here (as in, in Senegal) before. I went outside after to try to figure out where I can pee and as I was greeting people and building up to asking them where to go to the bathroom, two young women came up to me holding a chicken and said a bunch of stuff in pulaar and then proceeded to snap its neck. By the time I got back from the bathroom (which again has no hole) they were pulling its feathers off. When I came back into the room Oumoul told me they had killed a chicken for us for dinner and I was like um yes I'm aware. 

This village definitely has less resources, there is no boutique, for example. Moving every few days from village to village is going to be, and already is, exhausting, but it's interesting to compare and contrast. Everyone we've spoken to here does this loud clicking noise with their tongue as a way of agreeing or saying "ok". How the women accessorize is a hot topic as well, they're all very interested in my earrings - I have three bottom piercings and two cartilage which have small hoops in them and they also have lots of hoops all the way up their ears, and the older women wear these beautiful small but very thick (it functions as a gage and stretches out the hole and lobe) hoops that are half wrapped in red string and half in gold wire. They explained to me through Oumoul that they bring out your beauty. In Léwa a lot of the women had these scar marks on their face, like for example three little vertical lines on the forehead and three even smaller ones next to the eyes or on the cheeks. Apparently they make cuts, put some sort of paste on it to keep them open and then remove it, let it start to scar but put hot peanut oil on it every day to make it scar nicely and shinily. Some of the women here have those but most have tons of facial piercings, even little girls have lip piercings and nose piercings.

Today we did our second interview and ended up having a fascinating conversation with one of the men in the village too that ended up turning into sort of an informal interview. I also washed my hair for the first time in a week (although to be honest I think the water I washed it with was dirtier than my hair) which was weird because I had been wearing it wrapped in a "fular" and so no one in the village had seen it and about thirty kids and young women came into our room to watch me brush it. Oumoul was out washing so we sat there for a long time cracking up trying to understand each other and then I took out my pulaar notebook and was reading to them from it and they went nuts. My favorite girl who's been hanging out a lot, she's probably my age but she has four kids, one of her sons who's probably one was terrified of me at first but then he spent all day getting closer and closer to me and finally touching my leg and then my arm and I touched his arm and he got all excited and everyone was clapping like yay he's overcome his fear of the toubab! 

There was a new bride who had been here visiting her paternal uncle, our host, and she was leaving so they gave her a chicken but then they couldn't find it when it was time to kill it and everyone was running around looking for it but the aunt, the actual gifter of the chicken, was just sitting there watching, delighted because she wanted to keep it. I assume they must have found it because when we all went to see her off she had a dead chicken strapped to the motorbike. 

I'm not sure what's going on but right now there are a bunch of giant fires burning all over the village, I assume maybe they're clearing away dead brush? All of the goats and sheep and donkeys and chickens are absolutely freaking out about it though and it's deafening. 

^ I’m no fire marshall, but this seems unsafe

Research wise, Oumoul and I have come up with a system where after the interview she orally translates it for me on the fly using the recording so I can take notes and analyze and modify the questions as necessary or try to call them back for follow ups if I feel like it's needed. I think we're getting pretty good data but this whole experience is so overwhelming that it's hard to tell. I'm doing work that would be hard and stressful and intellectually taxing under normal circumstances except that I'm doing it with about fifteen people watching me most of the time, often in the dark with a headlamp, with no way to access the outside world for help and I have to stop every ten minutes to greet more people. So it's exhausting but I love it, it's so fun. Plus it's manageably hot during the day and actually chilly at night and there are no mosquitos really because it's not the season which is absolutely incredible, past me was a genius for planning my entire grant period around doing my field work in the winter because there's no electricity in all but one village so there would be no fan and if I was hot and sweaty on top of being dusty/sandy all the time this would be a totally different experience. Especially considering that it's like 120 degrees during the day here starting in April and like 100 at night. 

It feels counterintuitive that I'm writing more while out here but I think it actually makes sense given that the only person who speaks French is Oumoul so I'm spending an unsettling amount of time alone with my thoughts (actually I'm never alone. ever, but you know what I mean). Luckily I'm often distracted from thinking about the meaning of life and the human condition and my future by things like the insect that hung out with me while I washed my hair. I have no idea what it was but to be honest I'm 95% sure it was a dinosaur, it was about the size of a small mouse but it looked like a wasp and it flew and it was black and shiny and I was just trying to wash myself, like this seems like an bizarre way to die but it didn't care about me it just flew around and sat on my shampoo bottle and gave me excessive agita. 

Tomorrow we're going to the next village (this isn't going to take as long as I thought, I was counting on a week in each village so we could explain ourselves and not take too much of the women's time on a given day but Harouna explained to them and told them we were coming far in advance so they've been ready and excited to talk to us) I should be passing through Goudiry soon because I'm almost out of water so I'll add pictures then.

I wrote this in "real time" because I'm not going to be able to post this until we leave this village since there's no 3G here, but I arrived on Tuesday. I'll probably do that for other villages too, so don't be thrown off by the verb tenses... 

I can't add pictures from my phone so when I have internet on my computer I'll go back in and add photos. 

So I have arrived in the first village, Léwa Diofoubé, which is biggish by village standards and in the middle of the Forest of Goudiry, which is cool because we're surrounded by giant baobab trees and brush. Harouna's (the regional director of Tostan) friend who has a pickup truck drove us here from Goudiry and I got so excited when we entered the forest and there were actually trees, albeit small trees with the exception of the baobabs, everywhere and bushes and not only some tufts of tall yellow grass (there's that too though). 

I think almost the entire village surrounded the car as we got out and we greeted about a million people and then they all followed us to watch us explain our presence and present our gifts (tea, sugar, cola nuts) to the village chief and then the Imam and to Maimouna, the woman who is hosting us in her home and also the elected rural counselor that we're here to interview. She has one of the only houses in the village that's constructed out of cement and isn't a thatched roof hut. However the house has no bathroom, just a small area about 50 yards from the entrance that is fenced off and full of rocks and you just squat over the rocks to pee. To shower she brought me to her childhood home (this is her married home, although her husband isn't here I think he might be in France) because their toilet area has a hole and then on the other side of the wall a spot dedicated to washing. This morning Oumoul and I stood in the area where all the goats are tied up to brush our teeth, and then I took the pot (it looks like a plastic tea kettle and it's what they use to store water for bathroom use, in Dakar it's only for wiping because there are generally sinks, but here it's for hand foot and face washing as well) and squatted over the pee rocks to wash my face, which is actually quite challenging with one hand and a pot of water. There were some chickens in the pee rock area that freaked out when I came in but couldn't figure out how to get out so they just ran around squawking and flapping and they kept running into me and then freaking out even more. 

^ From the roof and our room 

I've come to the conclusion that if you can't squat for very long periods of time and do other things at the same time, you couldn't survive in this society. Or Indian society, for that matter. 

There's absolutely no cell service (not even to call other Senegalese numbers etc) in Léwa, likely because we're in the forest, we went on the roof to check if we got it there and Oumoul did in one specific spot (literally only there, she shifted her weight and the call dropped). Last night for dinner we had lettuce with onion sauce and bread (I was so excited to see lettuce, they have a community garden apparently) but the village chief also sent us a bowl of what would translate as couscous but it looks almost exactly like slightly damp sand, and normally I don't really like it very much (I'm a very texture-oriented eater) so I was less than thrilled when it became clear that we had to finish both the bowl from Maimouna and from the Chief. But instead of having it with sauce like we often have, we made some milk with powdered vitalait and water and had it as cereal essentially and actually it was pretty good if you got a good ratio of milk to couscous (like 70:30). Every time we eat or really when I do anything I feel like a child because everyone thought it was hilarious that I knew how to eat with my hands, that I figured out how to walk to the latrine without a guide (you can see it from the door), etc. 

We came here with a woman who works for Tostan named Khadijah because it's the first village and she spent last night here and snored so loudly that I could feel the vibrations in my chest. Then this morning she was like oh you could hear that you have a cold last night, making little noises trying to breathe and she was laughing at me and I wanted to say um no I highly doubt that since I wasn't even asleep because someone else was snoring...but I obviously can't say that. It is true that I have a cold though I've had it for three weeks and it's very annoying. 

Today after having bread and mayonnaise for breakfast (that was a new one for me) we started our interview, there's just one woman to talk to here so we're leaving on Friday, and it seems to be going well so far. It's a bit hard for me to tell, though, since the interview takes place in pulaar and I just sit there and make sure the recorder is working. It's so hard for me to sit there and not know what's going on, I want to know how she's answering the questions and be able to probe further if she says something especially interesting but I just have to trust Oumoul to do that. Not that I don't, but it's so hard for me to not be involved in the most important part of my project until it's over and Oumoul has translated the transcripts into French. 

The biggest challenge that I didn't anticipate is all the greetings. We basically sit in this room and every five minutes someone comes in and greets us. I wonder if I could sneakily record it because I know how to do greetings in pulaar but I can't get a word in edgewise because they come in and literally everyone mutters things over and over again for two minutes and it's so choppy and short and before I know what's happening they've left again. But this continued into the interview, even though we closed the door, so I kept having to pause the recording. I'm also hoping the animal noises won't make it too hard for Oumoul when she's transcribing. 

There are an astounding number of goats in Léwa, and every day about an hour before sunset they untie them all for some reason and they all go stampeding off towards the fields making all kinds of noise and it's rather terrifying if you're in the way, which I was yesterday and now my feet are all bruised from the goats running over them. But it's okay one of them had a baby today and it's cute and tiny. I also love all the baby chicks running around all the time they're absolutely the fluffiest. 

Yesterday I was sitting around listening to the radio with all of the women and Maimouna started dancing and singing along but replacing every fourth noun with my Senegalese name, Salimata Sow. It feels like we've been here for about two weeks even though it's only been four days.