"So Much Things In My Head"

Typically, the only day off we have is when someone has died. The other class's Wolof professor died unexpectedly this weekend, so all classes are canceled today to allow people to go to the funeral. I'm not going, because I barely knew him, but all of his students are going. I could have gone for purely intellectual reasons, that is, to see a Senegalese funeral, but that seemed rather callous.

This weekend was our last group trip, to St. Louis. Next weekend are our individual/pair trips. We are all going to different villages to do "research," whatever that means. Leia and I are planning to go back to the village where we went weekend before last so we can learn how they do pottery. I was one of the few people who was allowed to do most of the hand building myself when we were paired off with local women to make bowls. I've done lots of hand building before, but I'm not stunningly good at it, and I was amazed by the celerity with which they added each snake of clay. I was reminded of watching Lola knit. My Wolof is still barely rudimentary, so it should be... interesting to stay in a village where most people don't speak French. Of course, in other villages where people stay they don't even speak Wolof at all.

I'm still frequently astonished by how aggressive men are here in their pursuit of women. There is no really socially acceptable reason for men and women to hang out together, and women are supposed to act proud and aloof towards, well, everyone, so men have to be persistent. Knowing that, it's understandable if slightly alarming that random men frequently come up to me, insisting that they escort me home and that they want to get to know me. Still, it's quite amusing to observe how quickly men leave when I claim to be married. One of the more ridiculous overtures came from a man sitting on the ground in a squalid market that we stopped at in St. Louis on the way to Mboumba, who looked up from the cloud of flies swarming around his wares and said to the group at large, "je veux marriage toi" ("I want marriage you").

An even more ridiculous incident took place when we were in the Sine Delta region. After a mediocre performance of drumming, dancing, fire dancing, etc, the men descended on us like locusts to grain. I can't even describe the dept of ridiculousness that ensued. The least ridiculous incident of the evening was when a man tried to get me to talk to him in private, mentioning that he had fallen in love with me during the performance. I managed to shake him off, and as I started walking away he immediately used the exact same lines on Alexis, who had been standing feet away from us during the exchange, and started using the exact same lines.

To our horror, the same men showed up the next evening, when we weren't even on the same island. I'm still not sure how they found out where we were going. Thankfully we had a gate to close against their intrusion at that hotel.

And it was an actual hotel. There was a swimming pool, and we got to take hot showers for the first time since we arrived in Senegal. That was slightly disturbing, actually, because of how unnatural it felt to bathe in hot water. I still wince before stepping under my cold shower, but it felt strange to use hot water, though enjoyable. My bed didn't have a mosquito net set up for it. I wasn't bothered by this at first, but then almost as soon as we went to bed I started hearing mosquitoes buzzing around. I dug mine out of my own net from my bag, and and Katherine and I hung it up in a ridiculous arrangement that involved the back of a chair, the cables of my iPod and camera chargers, Katherine's hat, and a number of hangers. Thankfully we only partially woke Katie up by giggling and congratulating each others' genius. I took pictures of it, which I'll post eventually.

Yesterday when we were in the usual Sunday evening traffic jam on the Rufisque-Dakar freeway (there's only one road in and out of Dakar) we waved at another Toubab who was in a taxi next to us. When we stopped, she randomly handed a CD to JessL through the open window, to general applause and laughter. I took the title of this post from one of the tracks of the CD. Ah, Franglish.

I posted my Mboumba pictures on Facebook this time instead of Picasa. If you want to see them and don't have Facebook email me, and I'll set the album to give you permission to see it without fb.