Feb 6: Just before dinner, to whet the appetite, my host "dad" walks in holding a stiff headless rabbit...Then ensued a great debate over what had happened and how it must have been the cat and who was to blame for not putting the rabbit in the hutch. Just after dinner, at around 10:30pm when I was just beginning to drink my nightly tea with my "brother" Frankie, my host "dad" returns carrying a second dead rabbit-- this one with no obvious wounds save a broken spine. I guess it had just then been chased off the roof. What happened next was a combo of an investigation of the rabbit cages and the recent murders and a rescue mission for 2 newborn rabbits (being devoured by biting ants) that we didn't know were up there. All conducted over one cup of tea. Who knew.
Feb 7: New record finding in my bathroom-- 7 cockroaches scuttling around! Only about 4 of them were in the shower, though, the other three were running around the toilet. Sometimes you just gotta learn to share! ;) The newborn rabbits died today. When something sad/hard like this happens, you console someone by saying, "masa." Not to be confused with "maasa" which means "school"-- that one wouldn't be very consoling for some people. I hope I used the right pronunciation when I was talking with my sheep-neighbors whose really cute baby sheep just died as well without a known cause.
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Interesting observations: In Dakar, people care a lot about cleanliness and fashion. About the shoes being clean and the clothes being pressed. About the house being picked up and there not being any trash laying around the main living areas where guests might see. What is interesting, however, is that these rules are thrown out the window when you walk on the street. The world becomes your garbage can, the sand and dust of the roads get all over your newly cleaned shoes, and sometimes you often get coated in dark clouds of vehicle exhaust that leave you coughing and wheezing. A friend in my program said that her host mom wouldn't let her leave the house without cleaning her shoes. She wiped them off with a tissue, and her mom proceeded to take the tissue and "throw it away" outside on the street. No worries, right? It is not cluttering up the house and the shoes are clean! Interesting mentality. Public trash cans are hard to come by, and even in houses, they can be scarce.
Earlier on this week, we had both a bread strike and student protests on the same day. The bread strike came as a result of the price of wheat going up on the international market (we have to import it), but legally bakers cannot increase the price of bread without government permission (it is regarded as a staple food-- with reason). The meaning of "give us today our daily bread" took on a whole new meaning for me as I thought about the scarcity of it. I was kinda curious to see what would happen if the government refused to listen to the protestors, but I guess the Senegalese are too addicted to their baguettes for that to last more than a day. (I will admit I was happy to see my beignet maker back in business...)
That same day there was at least one burned bus on the main street we use to get to our study center. I am still unsure what the students were protesting, but traffic was stopped to the point that people on other buses who had places to be just walked the rest of the way to their destinations. A friend of mine barely made it to class for this reason. The bus was gone by the end of the day, but you could see the scorch marks on the pavement.
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