Time Keeps on Slipping

I can't believe we're halfway through December already!  My family is coming in less than two weeks!

The circus show at the pool is a week from Friday, which is coming up fast.  Yesterday I was at circus from 3-7:30.  I'm a little sore today.

We went to Toubab Diallaw this last weekend, and it was gorgeous.  I got to take a drumming class, make a batik, and make a clay baobab tree.  I think I'll take my family back there when they visit.  Conveniently, it's not far from Dakar, and Lac Rose and the animal reservation are on the way.  Perfect!  Also, there's wifi there, the room we slept in cost $8/night, they provide toilet paper, the resort is right on the ocean, and there are hammocks everywhere.  Oh, and the food is fabulous.  And the landscaping is unbelievable.

I decided to just put up pictures of this place instead of trying to describe it.

Oh, there's a circus performance at Toubab Diallaw before the one at the pool, so I may be going back there soon.  They may also decide that it'd be easier not to take me (since they can't rig the silk there anyways), which would be fine.

I don't think there's anything else especially interesting going on, but I'm sure that will change soon.  Ba bennen! (Until next time!)

Circus

Finally, the long awaited post.  Awaited by me, anyways.

SenCirk is composed of somewhere around 12 young men and a woman named Valentina, who is French.  Anya is a Swedish woman who comes every year to help with training and shows.  Modou and Al Hassan are the leaders of the troupe.  Modou trained with Anya in Sweden in 2008 (I think?) and I believe Al Hassan trained at a Guinean circus school.

I paid 13,500 CFA ($27) to get 10 workouts with the circus people.  So far I've been to three morning practices and had two private lessons, so ten for the month will almost definitely not be enough.

I'm pretty definitely in the performance on the 25th, which is the one at the Olympic pool rigged under the diving board over the pool.  I've always (since I started doing silks) dreamed of doing silks over water, so I'm really excited about this

I'm pretty out of shape right now, given that I had 4 months with no circus workouts.  It sucks.  Still, I'm doing a lot better than I (or anyone else) expected.  I should be at about the same level as Modou (who I can call the national expert at aerial silks) when I'm back in normal shape.  He's a lot stronger than me, but I'm a lot more flexible, so it balances out.

Modou is great.  I'm really excited that he's the one I'm working with, because he's not arrogant, creepy, or discouraging.  He always seems a little sheepish, and his French is not very good, but he's an extremely nice guy and he knows a lot of tricks that I don't know.  We're doing a lot of exchanging, which is a lot of fun.  I'm thinking of ordering some rigging equipment to gift to SenCirk, because theirs is not nearly good enough.

I feel really lucky that everyone at SenCirk has been so welcoming and friendly, and no one has questioned my abilities or intentions.  It's great to see that circus people are circus people all over the world.  Everyone is silly and happy and loves playing around and making people smile.  No one is too serious to have a good time.  I feel really at home around them, and I can't express how glad I am to have found them.

Also, SenCirk is the top circus troupe in Senegal, and Modou is the best at silks, so I'm getting private lessons from the best guy in the country.  That'll be fun to put on my resume.  Bwahaha.

On a different note, my friend Rachel came to Dakar last night! She was one of my first childhood friends, and I had a great time hanging out with her and showing her around Dakar today.  I made her do a lot of walking, but it was fun (for me, at least.  Hopefully for her, too).

This weekend we're going to Toubab Diallo, which is a sort of resort.  They have classes in batik, ballet, acroyoga, drumming, and all sorts of other cool things.  I'm looking forward to it.

Sokone

I'm writing this on the bus back from Sokone on Sunday, Dec 5.  I'll try to get in the most important parts of my weekend, but mostly I want to focus on Saturday.

On Thursday night, we all went out for dinner and then dancing to celebrate Meredith's 21st birthday.  I got tired of dancing pretty quickly, and then happened to end up talking to a guy I'd danced with a little.  He's from Toulouse, a French Air Force paratrooper stationed in Dakar for the next few years. We chatted for a while and it was pleasant and he was respectful.  He asked if he could kiss me ("No.") rather than just trying to kiss me, he gave me his number rather than asking for mine, and he wasn't ridiculous and persistent like Senegalese men tend to be.  So that was good, but I'm not planning to see him again.

We left at 9ish on Friday morning and got to Sokone at 4ish.  Ate lunch and then had way too many things to do and the power was out until about 11.  The village near the hostel (pictures of the hostel to follow) threw us a dance, which was cool, but then they made us dance a ton.  I'm not huge into dancing, I had danced the night before, and they were doing traditional Senegalese dance and music, so I had no idea what to do, was intimidated, and didn't enjoy it that much.  Ah well.

The next morning, Saturday, we had a lovely breakfast:

Then we went to a honey-making place:

And were given a container of mangrove honey.  Oh yeah, that's a big thing: Sokone is known for its mangrove forests, which are super cool and gorgeous.  We then went on a little barefoot walk through the mud into the mangrove grove to see the beehive boxes they kept in there.  There were crabs everywhere!

They were these adorable little colorful crabs that were purple and red and white:

After that we went to a dock and got on a boat:

The boat took us to some beach that was a mile or so walk from a village called Bambou.  Bambou is a
preserve, where there is no fishing or farming or nature-reaping of any kind permitted.  We had a delicious lunch of yassa poulet:

After lunch we lounged in the shade and then went kayaking and swimming in some water.  We had to walk through a stream through a dense mangrove forest to get to a bigger river, and there were, again, so many crabs!  Literally herds of hundreds of crabs skittered away from us wherever we walked.  There were so many of them that there was a sort of rushing clicking sound from their collective skittering.
We did some handstands and cartwheels on the beach and then swam and then went back and had watermelon.  When we finally got back on the boat to head back, there was a brilliant sunset starting.  We watched from the boat and enjoyed the clean water of the river (unlike the Senegal River up by St Louis/Richard Toll) and the lovely sunset.

We were headed to l'Isle d'Oiseaux (leel dwah-ZOE), whatever that was.  It was getting pretty dark and we still weren't seeing any birds, until suddenly we came across this:

It was crazy!  There were so many birds on this one stand of mangroves, and for no apparent reason!  Also, possibly related, there were whole schools of fish around us leaping out of the water.

We finally got back to the dock at about 7:30, when it was full dark.  I had already decided that this was one of the most incredible days of my life.  But then, there was this man who had come from Gambia (20 mins away) to eat dinner with us.

Not just any man.  This guy was Papa Diop (our professor)'s brother-in-law.  Oh, also...he's a famous reggae singer, the lead singer, composer, and creator of a band called Black African Positive.  He played us his music, sang for us, hung out, and told us to call him if/when we come to Gambia (we're seeing if we can go this week).

Finally we went to bed and slept like rocks.

UNTIL 6:20, when we woke up to watch the sun rise.  We walked down to this nearby salt marsh and sat out and watched one of the most gorgeous sunrises I've ever seen and took pictures of it and of us in front of it.  I will probably be tagged in some on Facebook soon.  Another great breakfast, this time with fresh mangrove honey (which is fabulous), and then we took a nap.  Did some gift shopping, hung out with some Senegalese school girls, ate lunch, and then headed back.

This has been a wonderful experience.

Today also marks the halfway point in my program.  Today is December 5th (Happy birthday, Mom!), and my flight to New York and then Detroit is March 5th.  I never expected to be having such a good time, and I think it'll only get better from here.

Thank you for reading my blog.  It means a lot to me; I talk to my friends here about how cool it is that I can put this stuff online and then hear from friends and family how fun it was for them to read it.  Keep reading and commenting and I'll keep posting.  Deal?  Deal.

Dreams

I've dreamed nearly every night since somewhere around halfway through my junior year of high school.  I don't always remember what I dreamed, but I generally do have some sense of what happened during the night.  Lately they've been really interesting, and last night was fabulous, so I thought I'd share.

Last night started out at a party at some mountain cabin hosted by my friend Zack (I heard from him for the first time in a while yesterday, hence his appearance in my subconscious).  It was a very Senegalese bash--great music, lots of dancing, tasty food and beverages.  I don't remember much of this part other than being thrilled to see Zack again and having a great time.

Skip forward a little and I was taking a trek through these mountains, now covered in snow and in northern Michigan, I think.  Somehow I knew that I needed to be careful of moose, because the males could be dangerous if I got too close to their babies.  One of my goals for this trip was to see some moose, so I was thrilled when there was not one, not two, but TEN moose wading in a freezing river right next to me!

Naturally, the cabin where I was suddenly destined was across the river, and of course I had to swim it.  So I gingerly got into the (wonderfully warm) frozen river upstream from the moose family.  I was being careful to keep my distance as I swam along, but then they all started swimming towards me!  Soon, I was being swarmed by baby moose.  I tried to make it clear to their daddies that I was staying in one place and it was them approaching me, not the other way around. They, too, started coming towards me, and I was afraid they would attack me with their huge antlers.

They swam up to me, sniffed me, nuzzled my shoulder, and hung out.  I continued crossing the river and they followed me onto the shore and into the cabin.  I had a little moose party and it was fabulous.

The end.

I hope that was as entertaining for you as it was for me last night.

That sounded a little weirder than I meant it.

I should write about Papa a bit.  He had a stroke about two weeks ago, and he spent about 4 days in the hospital.  He's home now, and starting to regain control over the left side of his body.  He can sort of fling his arm around, and he can move his leg a little.  He can talk, using mostly the right side of his mouth, and his Wolof is fine, but his French is pretty incomprehensible.  He likes to try to talk to me, but he doesn't enunciate at all and I don't speak enough Wolof to understand him.  Someone translates for him when he talks to me.

Papa is in his early sixties, I think, which is past the average life expectancy here (58 for men).  His health has been bad since I've been here, and it's been much worse lately.  I know that he's recovering, but I feel like that doesn't mean much in the long-term.  To make things worse, my family doesn't have a car, so when they have to take Papa back to the hospital tomorrow, they'll have to take a taxi.  Papa can't walk, so a lot of the strain is landing on Youssou.

Youssou and I went out walking last night for the first time in a long while and had a nice talk.  He bought me ice cream and was relieved to feel the sea breeze since it was his first time out of the house all day.

I wish there was more I could do to support my family right now.  I'm spending more time just hanging out and being social with them, but I worry about the strain my presence puts on them.  We'll see.  Hopefully things will get a lot better soon.

Happy first night of Hanukkah!  Hopefully I'll have some good stories to tell about that tomorrow.

Stuff!

I finally figured out (a few weeks ago) how to change the background on my blog. Did you notice?  I've decided to change it more often now to mix things up.  It's kind of fun.

Big news!
I'm going to be in SenCirk, THE circus troupe in Dakar!  I'll have to rearrange my classes a little bit to make it work, but I WILL make it work.  It may mean that I won't be able to travel during my break, but it may also mean that I'll get to perform on silks during my break...so that's cool.  There's a performance they're planning at the Olympic pool (which is where they practice) which would have the fabric rigged from a diving board over the pool.  Aminata (the director) was telling me about it and said nonchalantly, "So you'll probably be doing that."  Since I learned silks, that's always been one of my fantasies: silks over water.

I'll also be able to train other skills (that I am currently completely unskilled at), which will be great.  So, potentially, I won't go back to school having not done aerials in 9 months.  AND, I'll even have other cool skills and be in great shape.  Yay!

Classes are almost over, which means we have a bunch of papers to do now, but soon we will be done.  This weekend we're taking a trip to Socone, and I have no idea what we'll be doing there.

More to come soon!

Thanksgiving in Dakar

I feel as content as I could possibly hope to be right now.  I just celebrated Thanksgiving in an apartment we rented in Dakar (for $50/night) and now I'm resting and eating and lounging about.

Wednesday I could barely focus on classes because I was too busy trying to figure out how we were all going to get the ingredients we needed and cook all our Thanksgiving dishes in time for dinner on Thursday.  Wednesday night, the plan was to make curried butternut squash and granny smith apple soup, applesauce, and pies.  We were missing ingredients for all those things by the time we were going to get started (and by that point all the stores were closed), so we just bought some apples from a local boutique and made the applesauce.  We finished at 2:30 in the morning and then woke up at 7:15 to go to the food market to buy what we'd need for the rest of the day.  By 9:45 we were back and ready to go.  We spent the entire rest of the day cooking, up until about 5:30 or 6.  By the time we finished, we had:
curried pumpkin and apple soup
stuffing (from scratch)
4 challahs
green bean casserole
turkey and roasted veggies
mashed potatoes and stuffing
yams
green salad
fruit salad
"cranberry" sauce (made by boiling hibiscus into "bisap" juice, which is common here, and then adding the flowers, some citrus, a little sugar, and some gelatin.  It really tasted exactly like cranberries, but there were none in it [or Dakar]).
applesauce
2 pumpkin pies
apple pie

The 8 of us, plus Dinah from the Baobab Center, plus our 4 usual Sene-boys, plus Katy's brother Amadou, ate until we could eat no more.  We managed to finish almost half the food.

We went around and video taped each of us saying (in French) what we're thankful for.  It was particularly moving because we had pulled off a beautiful, delicious, inclusive holiday without any of the resources we usually had.  We cooked all day without power or water, without enough knives (and they were all dull), without moms to tell us how to do things (like cut the head off the turkey?), without family to come and tell us how much they'd missed us since the last gathering.  Still, the sense of community was almost tangible.  Some of us teared up when we talked about what we were thankful for, and we all felt how much it meant to everyone to be together.  It was exactly what Thanksgiving should be, and I'm so proud of all the women in my program for being willing to take on such a huge task and pull it off with such grace and style.

I'm thankful for the fact that I have such opportunities in my life to do completely new and different things.  I'm grateful that I'm constantly given chances to take risks that allow me (and force me) to grow as a person.  I love being here, I love the women here with me, and it constantly amazes me that I'm finally feeling in my element in a country that I had barely heard of two years ago.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone everywhere.

Amusingly Bad Night

Yesterday was Sarah's birthday.  I had a great day and a wonderful evening.  I went to bed excited to meet some circus folks in the morning...

And then everything went wrong.

I mentioned that on Friday night on the island I was getting eaten by mosquitoes.  I didn't mention that I now have over 60 mosquito bites just from my knees down.  I'd taken Benadryl the last couple nights because I knew that otherwise I wouldn't sleep through the itching.  I didn't want to take drugs to sleep for a third night in a row, particularly since I'd been having some trouble waking up.

After over an hour of unsuccessfully trying to sleep, I took half a Benadryl at midnight.  Around two, I finally dozed off.  Only to be woken up at three by something crawling over me.  Something kind of big.  I turned on my flashlight to discover a rather large (1.5 inch long) cockroach in my bed with me.  It quickly began scampering all over my mosquito net and I ducked out and grabbed a shoe.  I spent close to 30 mins chasing around this stupid giant cockroach as it skittered under my bed, up my wall, behind some plastic bags...and then I managed to corner it and club it with my shoe.

After that, of course, I was pumping with adrenaline.  Also, my mosquito bites were all itching again.  I ended up taking the second half of the Benadryl and falling asleep about an hour later, at around 4:30.

This morning I had my meeting.  Or I would have, if the circus people had shown up.  Instead, the guy who was supposed to be introducing me expressed his deep love for me and all beautiful American girls of Polish descent.  Then his friend joined us and found out I was Jewish and was thrilled at having met a Jewish girl (he loves Jewish people) and so he hung around for about an hour.  I missed two classes to get proposed to and talked at and in the end didn't get to meet the guys I wanted to meet.

There is a plan in place to get me introduced to these boys, and I'm impatient to see some progress.  For now...this is life in Senegal.  Comme ci, comme ca.