A week of Kora love

Another fast week has gone by (a little more than a week actually, wow) since I last wrote, and this amazes me. I warn you that I had a LOT of homework this week so I didn’t keep up with my journal as I should have, so I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of little things throughout the course of the week, but I’ll try to recount as much as I can:

Monday, March 9: We had classes as usual and began our music workshops. I started the kora—and immediately fell in love (with the instrument, in case that was ambiguous…). Our teacher’s name was Edouard Manga, and he is apparently VERY well known in Senegal for playing the kora. (There aren’t very many people who actually know how to play this instrument; originally it was played by only griots, traditional storytellers, but has spread a bit and can now be played by others. But since the only way to learn was from griots, and because women don’t normally play instruments here, it’s a very small population who now have the skill.) He was hilarious and very easy to work with. I have no idea how old he actually is, but I would guess around 27, and he has little dreadlocks in a bowl-cut shape. His favorite phrase is, “It’s a PIECE, of CAKE!” (in English), and he sang these “lyrics” to each song we played. When we played something badly he would tell us that there was a bit of fish in the cake, and when we did well it was a chocolate cake. (*Remember this, it comes up later.) Anyway I caught on surprisingly quickly (I wonder if it was because of my little experience playing the harp and I was used to the strings, or because of my musical blood from a certain piano teacher of my childhood?) so he called me “Super Woman” because each time he taught a new part of a song, by the time he came to my part of the circle I had listened/observed the other students enough to have learned it already. This was an amazing feeling for me; I realized it’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve felt I was somewhat good at something!

Oh, Monday (or maybe Tuesday, I was confused as to which day it actually was) was also the “Maouloud,” the celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, so from Sunday to Tuesday there were little parties going on everywhere and the streets were close to empty! My family was amazed that I had school during this celebration. Also for those three days I ate dinner around 11 PM because my mom and sister would go to the parties until that time, and my dad, brother and I would wait to eat since it was the women who had prepared the meal and it would be rude to eat it without them. I didn’t really get to experience the holiday, but there was very a different feeling to the city with no traffic and close to no one in the streets.

Tuesday: Classes took place as usual, and after kora class (which was, again, amazing) I had an online “interview” with the Director of Residence Life of Alfred University, regarding my RA position next semester. It was great to hear from her and really interesting to hear some things going on at AU, I feel like when I travel it’s almost like life stops in other places and it’s really weird for me to hear that things are happening even when I’m not there! I don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone else, but I feel it whenever I leave home for college, and I definitely feel it now when I hear from those people at home or at school. That night I prepared my part of the group presentation on my Bedik village from the week before, in French, only to find out the next day that:

Wednesday: The presentation was actually in English. It went alright but I think I was so used to thinking about it in French that I didn’t articulate anything in the way I intended…but it was really interesting to hear about other peoples’ village stay experiences and to see pictures and compare all the different ethnic minorities’ cultures. Later we had kora again, by this time we had learned two full beginner’s songs and started a third. Afterwards I had another presentation to prepare: a comparison between my Wolof homestay family and my Bedik homestay family, this one actually in French. I also had 9 Wolof exercises to do…so the rest of my night was consumed by homework, again. (Oh, side note. (My entries must be so confusing, nothing is chronological! Sorry!) That morning, my “friend” Babacar, a guard at a restaurant on the way to school, walked with me as usual. He gets off work at about the time I walk by so he usually catches up to me and we talk a little in French before he catches a ride home. But that morning he gave me a hard time for not eating at his restaurant yet, and told me he wanted me to come eat with him and he would pay, and I could teach him a little English while he helped me with my French. I admit that would be helpful and it’d be great to have a friend here, but when he started saying “I love you” and things like that, I had a big problem with that. I told him I was married and he said, “It’s no problem, he’s in America, right?” I’m getting very frustrated with not being able to be FRIENDS with any male here, it’s an awful stereotype to have of Senegalese men but the more men I try to talk to, the more it’s enforced.)

Thursday: Thursday morning was interesting. Babacar tried to talk with me and I told him to leave me alone. He said he had been riding a Car Rapide and got off just to walk with me. I told him that I didn’t want to talk to him, and to leave me alone. He caught another Car Rapide when he saw how serious I was, and he hasn’t talked to me since! Hopefully that will continue and I can continue to walk to school; if it becomes a problem again I’ll have to give up my morning walk.
At school, we had Wolof class and then French presentations, and it felt SO wonderful to be done with presentations for the week! At lunchtime I took a nice walk to the patisserie to pick up a little something for our kora class: *A PIECE, of CAKE! We all chipped in for some little chocolate cake-pastry things and during our break in kora class we shared them all with our professor. He thought it was pretty funny and really appreciated it, I think. I also video taped part of the last class, and at one point my professor took my camera and went around the room and interviewed each student about her feelings about it being the last day of the kora workshop. Each day of the workshop we got into a different deep conversation about something, it was really interesting to see this man go from goofy and rather childish to a sort of philosopher, but I feel like the more I talk with men around that age, the more I end up seeing that sort of contradiction. I was so sad to be finished with the workshops, but I really hope to continue for my ISP (more on that later). After kora, we set up the projector and started the “movie night” we’ve all been so looking forward to! We started “Can’t Hardly Wait,” a chick-flick comedy type movie, but didn’t end up finishing because it got to be dark and people wanted to go home and eat with their families. It was so nice not to have a presentation to prepare that night, so I just hung out with Moussa and with my family and it was very relaxing.

Friday: I took a long walk during lunch, and, stupidly, walked towards the mosque right before call to prayer (Friday is the holy day for Muslims so this call to prayer is MUCH bigger than on any other day). So when I tried to turn around and come back to school, every road around the mosque was blocked off by men praying in hundreds of rows. It’s bad to walk in front of someone who’s praying so I felt SO culturally insensitive when I turned a corner to find a group of hundreds of people praying!! After walking through a maze of side streets where there was room to walk, I found a route back to the school without being TOO much of an ignorant toubab. Back at school we watched a movie on excision, female genital mutilation, which until recently was practiced in many parts of Senegal (and is now illegal throughout but is still practiced in secret). It was a really interesting movie, in an African language with English subtitles; most of the lines made sense but some were just translated in hilarious ways that didn’t fit with the rest of the movie at ALL so it was really hard to take most of the film seriously!! Basically though it was about a mother who refused to have her daughter “purified” and then took in other girls who were against the “purification,” and the fight in the town about whether or not girls should be purified. It was a really emotional film and ended with the purification being outlawed in the town, so that was happy! That night everyone was supposed to go to this fancy Thai restaurant together, but a big group of people decided at the last second that they thought the group was too big and they went to a different restaurant downtown. So 9 of us went to eat Thai food, I got my fix of pasta and vegetables (both of which are severely lacking in my diet here) and, instead of going out dancing with other people, us Ouakam people (me, Alex, Avery and Whitney) went to get ice cream and then went home to our cozy beds. It was really nice to hang out with people outside of class, I haven’t done that much here!

Saturday: I slept in a little, which was amazing because it’s very hard to do in my household, and then ate breakfast with my mom on her bedroom floor in an effort to become closer to her. We talked about politics and her religion and the economic state of Senegal; it was great to finally be in a situation where it was just the two of us so everything was in French! I then walked over to Cité Asecna, where Alex and Avery live, because the 4 of us from the night before were going to go to the Ouakam lighthouse. It turned out that the Avery and Whitney couldn’t go until later, so once I finally found Alex (he lived nowhere near where I thought he did) he showed me around his town and we hung out at his house for a bit (about 5 hours, that’s “a bit” in Senegal) and I ate lunch with his family. Then we went and met Whitney, picked up Avery and walked to the Ouakam lighthouse; it looked old and creepy but the view was BEAUTIFUL—we could see the whole peninsula of Dakar—and a guy who worked there let us in and led us up to the top where the light was. He made us climb up into the place where the actual bulb was: the bulb was tiny compared to what I expected, in between the size of a Christmas-tree light bulb and a regular light bulb, but 1000 watts and was surrounded by hundreds of mirrors in a spherical shape. 4 or 5 people could have probably fit within the mirror-room but we did only 2 at a time, and the guy who worked there would spin the mirror-room walls while we were inside and that made us very, very dizzy.
That night back at home I sat with Moussa in the kitchen area for a few hours, and we listened to some beautiful acoustic Wolof music and for each song, he explained the meaning behind what the artist was saying and we talked about our feelings about the themes…another instance of a 20-something man going from joking around to philosophical that took me by surprise. I’m really starting to feel close to Moussa and will be sad to leave him because I feel like the few good relationships I have with Senegalese people are just starting to get deeper than basic, school-related conversations; that said, I’m not sure if that’s more because my French is getting better along with my comprehension, or if I’m becoming more comfortable with the people themselves. I guess I’ll find out when I move and live among others.

Sunday: I left my house around 7AM to begin my first excursion alone: the trip to the Keur Moussa monastery to research a possibility for an ISP. I had minimal information about how to get there, even less about what the monastery was exactly, and three hours to get there in time for the Sunday mass. I took a taxi to Garage Pompiers, which was a HUGE parking lot just stuffed with cars and vans and buses going to everywhere throughout Senegal. It took a few minutes to find something going to Thiès, and when I did it was a van, not the 7-seat taxi I was told to take. So after sitting in the van for a few minutes, waiting for the other 9 seats to fill, I decided to try to find the “sept-place,” assuming it would fill up quicker. I did find it, and it did fill up quicker. I sat next to a nice man from the Congo who knew a little English and who has siblings who live near Washington D.C., so we talked a bit on the way there. I got off in a town called Kilometre Cinquante and a man in the front seat of the sept-place who hadn’t talked the whole time explained to me the road to take and where I could find cars to drive me to the monastery. I thanked them and found a car, and got driven over to the monastery. To my great surprise I was not only on time for the mass, I was 45 minutes early! So I looked around the garden a little before sitting down. This monastery is a big tourist attraction so I didn’t feel very singled out (especially because I was in my traditional Senegalese boubou while the other toubabs were in capris and fanny-packs). The mass was really interesting—there were about 50 monks in white gowns, and they used djembes and koras and a lot of pine-scented incense in singing many, many songs, some including the audience and others not. I felt very peaceful surrounded by the chirping of birds and the chanting of monks, it was so different from anything I’ve experienced yet here in Senegal. The mass lasted for an hour and a half, and then I commenced my research: could I take kora lessons there for the three weeks of my ISP? The answer to this question, as I should have expected in Senegal, would not come until much, much later. I talked to a very nice brother who was really excited about my interest to learn the kora, and searched for the right brother to talk to about lessons. But right as he found him, it was time for another prayer. So all the monks ran away and I sat down to watch another prayer, and afterwards we went to lunch. I sat with about 20 Senegalese women who I think belong to the monastery, but at the end one of the monks had each of us introduce ourselves so I don’t think they knew each other. Through our introductions I met 5 Senegalese students about my age who also live in Dakar (Diana, Gisèle, Anne Charlotte and “the twins) and who have learned a bit of English; they became my companions for the rest of the day, kind of taking me under their wing because they knew I came alone, and they helped me find answers to most of my questions! They were really sweet and funny, it was really interesting to hang out with a group of Senegalese people around my age because I’ve seen how they act together, but never experienced it. People here are very touchy and friends (even two boys) will regularly hold hands walking down the street. So I held hands with Gisèle for a while, sometimes one would put her arm around me and lean her head on my shoulder—it was just immediate total comfort on their part and I was a bit, let’s say, confused, as to who they were and whether they were staying at the monastery just to help me or if they had planned to stay there all day anyway…but they brought me to the hostel, where I wanted to look at a room and check prices in case I do end up doing my ISP there, and on the way back we took a little detour to visit the “aunt” of Anne Charlotte (really her mother’s friend who used to live next door). We walked across a barren field to a fence that looked like it surrounded the house, so then went all the way back to the road and took the long way around, to find that the fence actually didn’t surround the house at all; on the way, Gisèle kept saying, “Il fait chaud! It is most cold!” And I was very confused, because it was hot, and “chaud” means hot… so after she repeated it 4 times I said, cold means “froid,” and she laughed until she cried on my shoulder while I told her how to say “hot” in English. That was a source of amusement for the rest of the day.
We sat in the entryway of Anne Charlotte’s “aunt” for about 15 minutes while they all spoke Wolof, and then returned to the monastery where I was going to talk to some brothers about my kora lessons and the possibility of living at the monastery. The girls knew a lot of the monks so that made it much easier to get to talk to them! We were led into a room by one monk and ended up sitting there for about 45 minutes until the one I was waiting for returned from his nap. He was very confusing and not as friendly as any of the others I had talked to, which was disappointing, but then I found one I had talked to earlier who was very helpful and helped me find the price of a room and meals, and who searched for a while to find the price of kora sessions but wasn’t successful and said he’ll email me soon about them. He explained to me that it’s difficult to know how much it’ll be because usually the sessions are in July and with other students, and that they’re very intensive sessions that happen in the morning, afternoon and evening of every day of the week. So pending an email from this brother and depending on the price of kora sessions as compared to my ISP budget from SIT, I would LOVE to live at the monastery (for about $5 a night with breakfast and $3/meal) and do an intensive study of the kora with the monks of Keur Moussa. As some of you know, my other option is this (and I had a lot of trouble deciding between the two, so if the Keur Moussa one doesn’t work out I won’t be TOO disappointed): I would like to go back to my Bedik village and study how they use natural resources for different parts of life: building houses, cooking, pottery and other arts, etc. So, two very different ideas, and I’ll let you know when I find out which one I can do!

Monday: Today we started our batik workshop! Our teachers are really quirky and artsy so it was very different from the kora workshops, where we were shown exactly what to do; this is more of a “do what you want” kind of workshop, and they help with the logistics. I started a “batik dessin,” where I drew a picture with the wax on a t-shirt and then put it in a basin of dye, so the dye only colors the parts of the t-shirt that aren’t covered in wax. Next I’m going to put the shirt in hot water to remove this wax, and then I’ll cover different parts in wax and dip the shirt in other colors to make new designs; I’m not sure how it’ll come out, but I’ve got three more days to experiment!

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I also realized that today is the 16th, meaning my plane out of Senegal leaves in exactly 2 months! In a way that sounds like such a long time but I know how quickly it’ll pass; I feel like I’m just beginning to realize the things I really want to do while I’m here and making real relationships with people and before I know it I’ll be on my way back to the U.S. Even more insane is that we have only 11 days of classes left before ISP period! Wow!
Maybe I contemplate the passing time in every blog entry and maybe that’s getting old for you, but each entry means another few days have passed and I’m still in awe of the concept of time here.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I’ll be in touch soon!