Gorée Island

Gorée Island (by the ferry dock)

Two Saturdays ago we took a trip out to Gorée Island, a sort of holding and launching location for the Atlantic slave trade. We visited the "House of Slaves" in which they locked up human lives while waiting for the ships to come take them across the ocean. Slave masters could choose to sleep with the young girls and women, no problem, but if they got pregnant, they were released to make a living for themselves on the island. We saw a tiny windowless cell underneath a stair case which was used to punish slaves who stepped out of line. They told us that after slave-trade had been banned, Nelson Mandela visited this place and went inside that cell. After two minutes he came out weeping.

House of Slaves

There is some controversy about how and where the slaves on Gorée Island were actually kept, and it was not as large a trading center as some other posts, but all the same: human life is God-breathed and therefore VALUABLE. Hunting humans to capture and place in lifelong captivity so that one can have a new weapon or trinket should never sit right with us. A girl is worth so much more than a mirror.

After the House of Slaves and a museum about it all, we explored the rest of the island before taking the ferry back to Dakar. The island itself was very picturesque and I took about a 900 pictures of the buildings alone (only a slight exaggeration..I seriously took a lot). Fun fact: there is so much smog you can hardly see the city from the island, though in actuality Gorée is just off the coast. The water was very inviting, however, and I was slightly disappointed in myself for not wearing clothes good for swimming (or a swimsuit...).

Here are some pictures I took on Gorée:

You don't need drying machines in Senegal

A street scene on Gorée (minus the tourists who usually stick to the streets with souvenir vendors)

Bizarre, quoi?

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.

Some Typicalities

I've been getting a lot of questions about the little details of my living situation. I suppose it is quite a deal different from my life in Oregon, so it is worth writing about.

CLASSES:

CIEE Study Center (where I take my classes)

I am taking 5 classes, all of which are taught by Senegalese professors at the study center for our program. We share the facility with a Senegalese law program, but we do not take classes together. Our classrooms are all named inspiring things like "jamm" (peace), or "jangeket" (study). It is right next to a pastry shop that has delicious quiche and is quite close to street-selling-peanut-lady with whose stand I am well acquainted. I am taking Advanced French, Beginning Wolof (the main language they speak here in Dakar), African Conflict Management/Law, Senegalese Culture & Soceity, and Environment & Development. All but one of those classes is in French. I'm getting quite good at listening and note taking during French lectures, but I'm realizing my verb conjugations are horrid. Room for improvement, right? A whole gymnasium size of room.

HOST FAMILY:
My Catholic Senegalese host family is a lot of fun. The household I live in is composed of the following: a mom, dad, 2 host sisters, a brother-in-law, 4 host brothers (one is away though), 2 cousins, a baby, another student from my program (he lives in the main house- I live in a side apartment with a couple other family members), and a maid (who basically lives with the family-- she only speaks Wolof, so we have fun trying to communicate). My shower is outside but connected to the building. Several sheep live next door and don't mind expressing themselves at random hours of the day and evening. You learn to drown it out. We have several rabbits and chickens living on our roof who roam free up there during the day beneath the clotheslines strung full of laundry.

My next door neighbor (the sheep are hard to see in this one)

In terms of my bathroom, the shower begins as soon as the toilet ends. No floor space is wasted! Just about every day I wake up and am greeted by cockroaches in the shower scuttling around my feet. They have become a sort of permanent installment in the bathroom. The door finally got fixed, too! I broke the lock after locking myself in the bathroom (doesn't have a light in it by the way) after dinner on my first night with my host family (everyone else was in the house). I tried in vain to get myself out of that small space for a good 5 minutes before finally deciding I should just try calling for help. It came, and they pried the door lock open from the outside. Because by that point the lock was completely busted, we had to wedge cardboard in the door every time we went in it-- not to lock it, but just to keep it from swinging open on its own and causing some scandals.  Sometimes I felt I was just holding that cardboard piece in place by sheer power of will. But now we have a lock and it is SO easy! The things we take for granted. Side note: I am borderline pro at snagging mosquitoes out of the air.

TRANSPORT:

Ouakam: a view of part of my neighborhood

I think I have mentioned this before, but I take the bus in the morning, and catch a "car rapide" home each day. As I was going to the study center today, I realized the rocking sensation of the bus hitting all the potholes in the road combined with the constant speed changes as traffic picks up or people want on/off-- this must be at least a bit comparable to how it felt on a real ship on the ocean. Real ship meaning one of the old ones with masts and sails. I've always wanted to get my "sea legs" but never had the chance till now! I think this is my golden chance.  A friend of mine who rode the car rapide home with me the other evening said that whenever he rides one he always feels hands patting down his pockets and can sometimes see hand prints on his pants after he jumps off...I can't say that I have ever had this experience, but it certainly adds a further element of fun to the day :) Getting the proper change is always a bit of a game for me. And if I do get it, I have enough to buy a delicious beignet from this lady who makes them fresh in the side alley I walk through on my way home.

BIBLE STUDY
Coming into this semester, I prayed that God would place at least just one other follower of Christ in our group or in country that I would meet. I wondered what it would be like to go for a whole 5 months without the fellowship of other believers. The sketchy reputation that study abroad students have racked up (with reason...) did not leave me with much hope of finding a strong community within my student body. But God gave me peace about it. We had our first Bible study last night on the roof of our study center (doubles as a cafe where we eat lunch)-- 7 people showed up, including one of our study center guards, a fellow missionary kid, and a pastor's kid. All committed believers. Each with a story of how God has been working in their lives and how we need fellowship. I look forward to hearing their stories. Thank you, Jesus. Amen. We are studying through Habakkuk, and I am enjoying getting a different sorta view of the passages by studying them in French (the language of the only complete Bible I brought).

A miniature Wolof lesson: when you ask someone about how they slept, how their day is going, how their morning was, etc. you always respond with: Jamm rekk, alxamdulilaa ("Peace only, praise be to God"). It struck me as profound: it is well with my soul, peace only, because God has given me that peace that surpasses understanding. I have such peace about where I am right now. I can be anywhere with anyone or lack of anyone and yet never be truly alone. He is with me. Always with me.