Mangi fi rek

I didn't watch the SuperBowl, but I did watch a REAL football game between Ndar's own La Linguère and the Mbour Diambar today. Home team prevailed, 1-0! 

This morning in Ndar: studies in light, color, texture. 

I will now forever associate this song with Meïssa Fall's bicycle workshop and an unforgettable moment there today. Meïssa is a great lover of traditional griot music, and always has it playing from speakers in his workshop. This song, Less waxul, one of his favorites, was playing as Emilia and I were leaving our final visit with him. Although I'm only leaving for a couple weeks (inch'allah), Emilia's time in Senegal is over, and she doesn't have any immediate future plans to come back.

As we said goodbye, I was taken aback when Meîssa clasped our left hands in his left hand, instead of using our right hands.  As in many places in the world where toilet paper is uncommon, the left hand is the designated dirty hand; to eat, shake someone's hand, pass something, or even wave, the right hand is always used.  

Sama xarit Makhtar

Makhtar is a friend I met through Aida toubab, the PCV who used to work in Ronkh.  He lives in Rosso, the border town with Mauritania that I have to pass through to get to Ronkh, and has always encouraged me to stop by and visit whenever I'm in the area. I finally took him up on the offer last week when I arrived in Rosso with Emilia and Pietsu.  

This was a hard week. Ronkh treated me to sickness, pest infestation, dehydration, family politics, transport adventures, and deadening, oppressive desert heat. But I'm really grateful to have gone anyway. A highlight was forging a relationship with the Peul (Fula, Fulani) community on the outskirts of town.  The Fulani are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, but a minority in every country except Guinea. In the northern region of Senegal, they tend to keep to themselves, setting up small communities independently or on the outskirts of larger Wolof towns, eschewing more permanent housing for simple grass and straw huts. Traditional herders, their love for their cattle is infamous: the cows are brought home every night to sleep in the village and are typically not butchered for meat.  

I made two visits out to the Peul village, once at sundown and once at sunrise: two times when I knew that the cows and men would be in the village and not out walking the sahel.  The first time, my two friends and I were effectively mobbed at first. But despite some language problems (only a few people in the village speak Wolof or French in addition to Pulaar), we eventually managed to have a good conversation about conditions in the village, the status of projects that the village's former Peace Corps Volunteer had started, and my language research in Ronkh.  I helped milk one of the cows for a while.   

When I wouldn’t let them braid my hair, my family mandated a headscarf instead.

Look 1: 'Mariame Arie' 

~ BOOKS BY AFRICAN AUTHORS OR ABOUT AFRICA ~

http://www.vlisco.com/

(Days without time)

I don't have a watch in Senegal. The only instances where time matters is my scheduled elicitation sessions.  But even then, it's better to be flexible: all plans are contingent on Allah's will. I find that I track time here only vaguely, through calls to prayer broadcast from the mosque, or changes in the light, or with the courtyard birds' agitation level.  Hundreds of tiny birds occupy the hibiscus tree in the courtyard and sunrise makes the tree a quivering, ear-piercing super organism--my alarm clock.   When the sun is so high and hot that the city becomes eerily quiet, I know it must be time to eat.  And later, when the sun dips down so that it starts catching everything at an angle and creating what Emilia calls "jesus light" in the residual smoke from cooking fires, I know that Paplaye will soon arrive for a lesson/elicitation session. 

Living without precise timekeeping is even more a feature of village life, and you can feel it even in the suburbs of Saint Louis, such as the one where Emilia, Pietsu, and I trekked yesterday afternoon.  Emilia and I both want to extend our Senegalese visas, so we were seeking out the old Saint Louis airport; it has been closed for some time except to tiny private planes, but we'd heard that they're planning to reopen to international flights and have installed new biometric Visa machines in preparation.

The charming Saint Louis airport: 

When we pulled up, we almost didn't get out of  the cab because the airport looked deserted.  But then I spotted a few men inside the compound lounging under a baobab tree drinking tea.  Sure enough, they were employees of the airport, and ended up treating us to a delightful early afternoon in the airport's air-conditioned waiting room/security screening center, complete with toubab water and satellite television. (We watched Wolof-language soap operas and hiphop videos.) Of course, despite a lot of phone calls, investigation of "protocol", and fussing about with the machines, they were ultimately not able to help us there.  But it was still probably the most functional encounter with African bureaucracy ever and a pleasant way to spend two hours.  

After leaving the airport compound, we made our way past goat fields and mango groves to the main road to wait for a taxi back to Ile Nord.  There we found an extended family all relaxing on mats on the ground along the little irrigation canal (which makes this area of Saint Louis so lush).  They were selling fresh coconuts, papaya, grapefruit, and sapotes.  Since we weren't seeing any taxis, we decided to sit for a spell and drink some fresh coconut water.  This turned into an entire afternoon spent with the Diop/Njiaye families, complete with attaya, exchanging family histories, a Scandinavian geography lesson, an invitation to dinner and to marry a brother currently studying in Dakar, a lesson on hair braiding techniques, and a tour of the family's exquisite garden compound.  I even got some good data. 

After a few hours, we walked down the road a little further with the two bothers in the family, Souleyman and Mohammad, who wanted to show us their business project: an airport hotel consisting of little cottages around a pool in the middle of a beautiful grove of tropical trees.  All the foundations have been laid and the pool has been dug and poured in concrete, but construction has halted for the moment due to lack of funds.  We talked a lot about the emerging eco-tourism industry and how this might be a good way to market the hotel, in case the airport never reaches its former glory. It is really an idyllic spot.   

In Senegal, one of the most religious countries in the world, the marabout shapes society from the realm of the neighbourhood up to national level. This series portraits the neighbourhood marabout as a Koranic teacher, mediator, and sometimes as a spiritual guide with esoteric powers.