Gaya and St. Louis

Apologies for the delay in this next installment of my entries from Senegal. I have been having fun and recovering from a sickness that I will go into detail later in this peace. I hope that everyone is doing well at home and that you are all enjoying your summer.


So last week we took a big program excursion to the village of Gaya. It is further away than our last trip, so Tuesday morning we pile onto the white "UCAD Ecole Normale Superieur" bus and head off out of Dakar for a new setting. We have affectionately dubbed the "Toubab Bus" because it alerts everyone in the area of our arrival. I really feel like a tourist on the bus. When we stop on the road at rest stops or even in traffic, people selling things on the street will come up to our open windows and offer us anything from bagged peanuts to Senegal T-shirts to phone cards for our cell phones. It is rather exhusting at times being in the city because of all the activity that happens in the streets. Needless to say we were all quite excited to get out of Dakar for a few days an experience a new part of Senegal that we had not seen yet.

Upon arrival we went to a small village just outside Gaya to speak with the chief and his counsel to learn about how a village is run. He spoke Wolof and Serer, so our program guides did most of the cultural and linguistical translation for us. It was very interesting to hear about how each man has the opportunity to run for a counsel position, and then some are born into families that have permanent positions within the power structure. At one point, a girl in our program asked if women could participate in politics. They chief answered that women could come to meetings and express their opinions, but they could never hold an official position. She then asked if a woman could ever become chief. When the question was translated, the men actually started laughing at us because the idea was so foreign and hilarious to them. Imagine, a woman . . . in power! This demonstrates the deeply engrained aspects of gender seperation within Senegalese culture, specifically within village settings. Men have their roles and daily tasks, and women have theirs. This has been something that I have been dealing with during this trip because, as a young caucasion woman, I have several strikes against me already without even speaking a word. Of course, I am always respectful to those that I meet and share time with, but sometimes I have to ask myself where does one draw the line between something that is cultural and something that denies people certain basic rights?

Anyway, Gaya is a farming community that grows rice and tomatoes for all of Senegal. After hanging around the town for a day in the super hot sun, we all decided to go for a swim in the river. At this time of year, the river is high and the current is actually pretty strong. Yes, that water was very brown and very dirty, but we were so hot that we didnt care. Across the bank was Mauritania. If the current hadnt been so strong I probably would have swam to the other shore just to say that I had been to Mauritania. There were people bathing in the river and doing their laundry as well. It turns out that the river is the main water source for the whole town of Gaya (11,000 people on a very spread out area), so there are always people nearby benefiting from the resource.
Meals in Senegal are served at very different times than they are in the US. Breakfast is eaten whenever you get up, and is not a social activity. Lunch is eaten between 1:00 and 3:00, and is the largest meal of the day, usually eaten with family and friends. Dinner is somewhere around 9:00 or 10:00 at night. Im not relly sure what happens between lunch and dinner, but I know that I sure have to have a snack.

So, the dinner is Gaya was really late, around 10:30. We were all starving because we had come back from swimming in the river and were ready to eat at around 7:00. When the trays were brought out, we discovered that they had prepared a special type of dish for us consisting of goat meat with a rich onion sauce. Yep . . . a plate of goat. Now I can say that I eat meat and I like it, but I have never sat down to eat an entire meal consisting of just goat. It was tasty, but my stomach was very confused that night.

Afterwards there was supposed to be some kind of big party that we were invited to in the center of the village. It had finally cooled off around midnight, and we wandered over to a place where lots of people were gathering. It was a traditional Senegalese wrestling match!

Wrestling is the national sport of Senegal, and it is a really big deal. People get super into it, and it is such a cultural thing to do. I guess it's pretty comparable to football in America. Each wrestler has his own "team" that comes out into the wrestling ring before the match to sing his praises and dance to his special rhythm that is determined by the local griots, or traditional storytellers. Griots are part of the caste system (a lower form) that know all the family histories in an area. They can tell you about what your father was like and where your mother came from. They can also give you good luck and are mainly part of events like wrestling matches to sing praises and to be the "cheerleaders" of the wrestlers. It was all very fun to watch. We even saw wrestlers in training as young as 5 go against each other. They both looked like spiders as they waved their arms at each other trying to distract their opponent for the fraction of a second that it takes to disarm them and throw them to the ground. Unlike American wrestling, the match is over once a challenger is thrown off balance and he is on his back. There is no holding that is necessary or referees with whistles. The whole match could be over in seconds! If anyone is interested, check out this youtube link. The first two minutes are boring, but then the action happens and it is suddenly over and the crowd is going crazy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onxGGxVz5a0

After Gaya, we went to visit St.Louis, which was the original capitol of French West Africa during the colonial times before it was moved to Dakar. The architecture and the layout of the town very much reflect this, and it is interesting to see the traditional western buildings against a modern fishing society. Fishermn use long skinny boats called "pirogues" to go out fishing early in the morning. They bring back their catch at dawn and sell it at the fish markets that are all along the docks. We visited a school which had a strong marketing campaign towards children from rural areas encouraging them (both girls and boys) to stay in school instead of returning to their parents' farms. The mural reads "There are no lesser jobs", and then proceeds to list occupations such as teaching, fishing, nursing, secretary, taxi driver, gardner, etc. The mural reinforces the idea that in order for a society to function, all the jobs must be done by someone, and that you are not a lesser person if you do them.


Unfortunately, I got a massive food poisoning bug on the first evening in St.Louis and was not able to even leave my room for the remainder of my stay in the city. There were many people who at this point of the trip became sick with similar symptoms, so we think it was some kind of virus. Lets just say that I saved a lot of money in St.Louis because I didnt go out and I didnt eat (at all) during my stay. I finally started taking anti-biotics once i could keep food down, and my body got back to normal a few days later. I guess the best place to get sick is really in a hotel though, so i guess it wasnt so bad. Out of the thirteen Americans on the trip, ten of us were sick during some point of the five day excursion. Here is a nice photo that a friend took of the sunset looking out over the water from our hotel.






To give a great ending to this story, we all boarded the bus saturday morning to drive the (what we thought) four hours back to Dakar to the comfort of our own beds. Little did we know that our van would receive a flat on the way home and that the group would be waiting on the side of the road in the heat with more than half of it's members ready to drop dead from dehydration. Looking back, it is quite comical . . . only something that would happen in the movies! But, oh, at the time I really wanted to dig a hole and crawl into it. Ugh, we were so sick on the way back home!
Overall, the trip was a great experience and we got to meet a lot of new people, practice our Wolof, and see new aspects of Senegal that will stay with us forever.