Tag Archives: senegal

my mystery malady

Posted in French, travel by

This past Wednesday, I woke up feeling exhausted but otherwise fine. About an hour after eating breakfast, a dull sense of weakness and malaise began creeping over me and I had to lie back down. By the end of the next hour, I was unable to sit up, paralyzed by bodily fatigue. I had stitches of pain and muscle aches in my legs and sides and neck. I couldn’t find a comfortable position and every time I moved I moaned. I was chilly and sweaty at the same time.

I didn’t want to jump to malarial conclusions and I also didn’t want to go to the doctor without a very good reason, so I tried to wait it out, but by 7pm it was clear it was getting worse instead of better. I had gotten nauseous and head-achey, my aches had turned into pronounced pains, and I could barely crawl out of bed let alone stand up straight.

I hobbled with Mamie to the pharmacy next door where they pronounced their prognosis soon after my arrival: “un petit palu,” a mild case of malaria. I told them I take doxycycline every day as a prophylactic and they mimed the pill going in one ear and out the other. They gave me a fizzy paracetamol tablet to reduce my fever and told me to get to the doctor stat.

So we headed to the emergency room (salle d’urgence) of the hospital downtown, whereupon I began an epic journey / vocabulary lesson. Continue reading →

Youssou, encore une fois

Posted in le week-end, music by

YoussouNdourOn Saturday we went to see Youssou in a very different venue than last time. It was a concert space en plein air, as they say, and it was packed with a generally younger, more casual, and much more energetic crowd than at the Grand Theatre gala.

I almost skipped this show because of the fear it could never live up to the first one, but then I realized that would be incredibly silly. And in the end, the two shows had such different vibes that they were like apples and oranges.

One thing remained constant, however: the ungodly hours. Youssou is nearing 60 years old and yet he came onstage at 1:15 and finished performing at 3:49am. (I know the precise time because by that point I was checking my phone every five seconds.) He and his band kept asking the crowd, “Est-ce que vous êtes fatigues?” and my whimpered “Yes”es were completely drowned out by the delirious “Non!!!!”s.

But earlier in the night, when I was not yet falling asleep on my feet… here’s the moment that gave me chills. (That’s my beautiful and charming “host sister,” Cecile aka Mamie, at the end.)

I’ve now heard this song, “New Africa,” live three times. The first time was in New York and I got baby chills. In Senegal, the baby chills turned into enormous adult chills, and I felt a bit like a sucker for cheap thrills. But can you blame me?

It was an awesome night. There’s a longer video here (including amazing drumming and dancing) if you want to see more.

taking the bad with the very, very good

Posted in French, travel by

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I have loved every second of being back in Dakar… excepts for the seconds minutes hours days I’ve spent uploading videos to send out for review. I wish I could say the photo above was stolen from the Internet ether, but it is actually the current sad state of affairs chez Ruth.When all is said and done, it will have taken five hours (if I’m lucky) for a file that is less than 1GB to upload.

But tragic network speeds and all the other things that had at one time or another annoyed me about Dakar are rolling right off me now that I’m back from my trip. Being here feels positively glorious, and such a privilege. The sun is out, rainy season has not yet begun, I have spent no more than three hours in an office in 2016, and my French has miraculously improved rather than suffered in the absence of speaking it for a month. (More evidence for my “marination theory” of language, which posits that time away allows everything to seep into the long-term, intuitive part of the brain, even while it abandons the short-term, readily accessible part.)

As Lloyd Dobler put it, I’ve been “walking around feeling satisfied. Can you imagine that?” I keep having these manic bursts of happiness while on the street or reading a book or listening to music. Even in the middle of twelve-hour edit sessions I have found myself overcome with the shock of contentment.

While I was away on my shoot and missing Dakar much more terribly than I would have thought possible after only three months living here, a similarly “homesick” study abroad student at the language center, who had just gotten back to the States, posted this video to Facebook. It’s been stuck in my head since, and it’s now one of my go-to happy songs. I think it very nicely captures how I am feeling at the moment.

 

happy weekending

Posted in French, le week-end, music, travel by

Dakart

After ten days straight of nothing but eat-sleep-edit, by this past Thursday I was feeling out of the woods enough on my video deadline to take a little break. During this little break, which has inadvertently extended to today, I have inexplicably decided to continue staring at my computer screen, to set down a few links that will go completely stale if I don’t share them soon. Also to post some pictures from the Dak’art Biennale, which I managed to get to just under the wire, on its last day this week.

First, the links:

Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era. My friend Jennie posted this link to Facebook a few weeks ago and I have been meaning to tell her since then that it has made me so so so so so so happy. Right now I’m listening to music from 1960’s Congo and it is amazing. I could spend the rest of my life blissfully down this rabbit hole…

Anthony Bourdain has lovely things to say about Senegal, and I agree with all of them.

There will be a refugee team at the Olympics. This is amazing, and there needs to be a documentary about it (and I need to work on it).

In Morocco I kept telling shop owners I was just looking but might come back to buy later, and without fail they would respond, “Inshallah,” which I found hilarious because I had just finished reading this article.

Hyperintelligent commentary on the usage and interpretation of “woke.”

The ostensible reason I am posting this article about getting chills while listening to music is because I like that the word for that sensation is French, but the real reason is that I love beyond measure that Air Supply was part of the study.

A reminder to stay positive while learning another language.

The end of sleeper train service in France. 😦

When West Africans dress, the fabric is the message.

Instead of renting one apartment, sign a (pretty expensive) lease that lets you live around the world.

On the pleasures of traveling alone.

The seven joys of traveling, from a joyful traveler. 

In English, double negatives make a positive, but that’s not true for all languages.

15 slang French words every French learner should know.

Along the same lines, 20 funny French expressions. (Can someone French please confirm that number 19 is still in common usage? Because I would like this phrase to come out of my mouth as often as possible.)

Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants? I refer to a foreigner intending to stay someplace temporarily as an expat and one hoping to stay permanently as an immigrant but I guess that is also fraught.

And now, some Dak’Art favorites:

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The piece above, which at first glance appeared to be a sculpture wrapping around the gallery wall, turned out to be a photo-mural featuring real people. I loved it. The artist explains. dakart_africa

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The above were all at the IFAN Museum of African Arts, which I intend to revisit soon to check out the permanent collection. I mistakenly thought that one of the other Dak’Art exhibition sites was at the old railway station that I passed by and went gaga over on one of my first walks in Dakar. It was actually only for performances, and there were none the afternoon I visited. But what there was… was the most spectacular train station in disrepair I’ve ever seen. This may be my favorite place in the city. Also, I am in love with the French phrase for railroad: chemins de fer, literally “routes of iron.”

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And now I’m off to grab something to eat before getting back to editing. Enjoy the rest of your weekends!

I’m ba-ack

Posted in travel by

balconyviewI got back to Dakar at 1am Monday morning, after nearly a month away (excluding the less than 24 hours I spent here between my vacation and my out of town shoot). I was SO GLAD to be back. I wouldn’t say that returning to Dakar felt like returning home, but it did feel like returning to a home base with good food, a good mattress, clean sheets, running water, electricity, pleasant weather, basic infrastructure… All things that had been lacking in whole or in part over the past couple of weeks. 

I’ve been on quite an adventure or two or three since I last posted anything here, but it’s going to be another few weeks before I have the time to write anything about them because I’m now working around the clock to meet a nearly impossible deadline. I have until June 7 to edit all the material I shot in the field into two videos, one of them on the rather long side. 

So I’ll see you in June, with pictures from three fascinating, beautiful, and almost diametrically opposed countries. 

(The photo is the view from my bedroom’s balcony. I like standing out there and watching the taxis go by, and I remembered this week that I also loved doing that from the window of our apartment in London when I was five. The more things change…)

Lost in translation

Posted in French, travel by

impregnatedmatchesI can’t even begin to guess what they meant to communicate…

But now I can’t stop picturing bigger-round-the-middle mama matches giving birth to tiny baby matches.

Speaking of lost in translation… I’m off to Portugal tonight, to meet my friend for a much-needed vacation from my vacation that has turned out to be anything but a vacation. Two days after I get back it looks likely that I will start another video job. So I may be a little MIA for awhile…

I got the goods at HLM

Posted in travel by

HLMvendeur

I finally went to the city’s biggest fabric market last week. Dutch wax fabric, or bazin, is my inanimate spirit animal (an oxymoron, I know), and HLM is the best place in Dakar to buy it. It’s vast and magnificent, and I put off going until I felt mentally prepared to handle that vastness and magnificence without blowing my entire sabbatical’s budget on tissu alone.

I am happy to report that I came back with a mere 8 yards of fabric in 2 different prints. I showed quite a bit of restraint but only because I was so overwhelmed by all the colors and patterns and textures that I tuned out in order to prevent myself from internally combusting.

Here’s my haul:

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Not sure yet what I’ll use them for, which is why I bought 4 yards of each. That’s enough for a full dress or a set of two big pillowcases. (It is very, very cheap to have clothing and linens made to order here, and judging from the perfectly curve-hugging dresses the women wear, the tailors seem to be very, very good.)

I also made an unexpected non-fabric purchase after becoming enthralled with all the sparkly shoes on offer. It started innocently enough. I went into a store to document the awe-inspiring amount of bling filling the shelves.

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Everything was over the top bedazzled in the way that Senegalese women seem to love.

To wit:

holyhellthatssparkly

I was feeling like an anthropologist cooly detached from my subject matter, until I studied some of the shoes individually and my bemusement gave way to non-ironic admiration, and then to obsession. I had to have a pair. That pair turned out to be these:

disneyprincessshoes

They seemed like something Betty Grable would have worn while lounging on a velvet divan in her dressing room on the set of films from the golden age of Hollywood.

Since bringing them home, however, I have realized that they are actually more like my four year-old niece’s princess shoes.

Whatever.

The purchase appears to have set off some strange shift in me, because minutes later I became enamored of these:

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If they had fit better, I would have bought them, too. I asked the friend I was with, “Have I been in Senegal too long or are these legitimately the coolest shoes you’ve ever seen?” Her look gave me my answer.

Note to self: no more shoe purchases in Senegal.

Two years of “talk foreign to me” and two months of talking French while foreign

Posted in French, travel by

viewfromlasavana

Today marks two years since I wrote this blog’s first entry. I also wrote the “about” page that day. I just revisited both and was awestruck / deeply shocked at having done exactly what I set out to do up to this point, exactly on schedule.

Until I went to grad school, which I did not quit despite many moments of thinking I might, and where I learned and made things I once felt incapable of, I never really followed through on any of my dreams, big or small. The first one I remember extinguishing way before its time was becoming a ballerina. I took ballet lessons for three years in grade school but quit when I got impatient for toe shoes. I would have toppled right over, having barely learned a thing, but I wasn’t in it for the dancing – I was in it to wear tutus and feel pretty. Black leather ballet flats did not cut it.

I similarly harbored yet too quickly abandoned grand dreams related to ice skating, clarinet, drums, guitar, baseball, about six diaries, marine biology, anthropology, being a humanitarian aid worker, and, until two years ago – living abroad and learning another language fluently.

It took 25 years on this earth to figure out that any dream worth having doesn’t magically come true without a ton of effort (and in the case of grad school, a ton of money – that’s a pretty effective carrot on a stick).

It’s been more than 10 years since I turned myself around, but it still feels momentous any time I take responsibility for making something that I want to happen actually happen. The second anniversary of this blog feels momentous in two ways. First of all, personal writing is one of the things that I started and quit and started and quit all the time as a kid but have now managed to do consistently for nine years. That makes me pretty happy.

Much more importantly, the blog represents the commitment I made to my grandest plan: spending two years saving money and practicing French and Spanish so that by February 2016 I could move to Dakar and then somewhere in Argentina to become fluent. The idea itself had come to me not long before, during the very, very depressed week after I returned from the best vacation of my life in Argentina, to gray skies and snow-covered ground in New York. I remember getting back from the airport, dropping my bag on the floor, bursting into unexpected sobs, and wondering how I had not noticed that I was muddling through life in New York while neglecting a lifetime’s worth of (admittedly crazy) lists of all the places I wanted to live and languages I wanted to speak and jobs I wanted to do.

Other countries and languages came and went (Kenya, South Africa, Spain; Swahili, Czech, Arabic), but Senegal and French were always at the top of those lists. And now I’m in Senegal, (quasi-)speaking French, and my blog has transformed from a repository for my unhatched dreams to a witness to their unfolding.

So here’s to two years of Talk Foreign to Me and many more years of actually talking foreign.

Bookends:

Argentina, day one: February 10, 2014 (first selfie ever, in a bathroom, because I’m classy; and the endlessly fascinating Recoleta Cemetery)

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Senegal, day 60-something: April 21, 2016

piscinealasavana

(I’m at a fancy hotel on the Corniche after having given a presentation to a bunch of intergovernmental agency comms people on storytelling through video, in English, with conversation in French – including French accents from all over West Africa and Europe. It was nail-biting, the fear that I would not understand what was being said during a discussion that I was charged with leading. But I made it through, understanding 90% of it and faking my way through the rest, and then I got to eat lunch at an ocean-side table.)

Can you tell what this thing does?

Posted in French, travel by

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The first time I encountered it in my host family’s house I assumed it was simply an incense burner… because the smell of incense was coming from it. Then I freaked out when I saw my host sister rest her feet on top of it. I assumed the iron grill was incredibly hot (there was a ton of charcoal ash below) and that she either had superhuman feet or was about to get burned to a crisp.

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In fact, the iron grill is intended expressly for resting feet upon, to warm them up. Like a British hot water bottle, but with bonus features. I suppose the incense is to counteract the scent of warm smelly feet wafting through the air.

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It’s fascinating to me how so many of the same things are actually quite different country by country. 

In related news, as my 7-week homestay was drawing to an end last month, I checked out several apartments to move into, all north of here in more happening parts of town. But I ended up staying on with my host family after they offered to keep putting me up (putting up with me?) as long as I’m in town. I get along with them well and get tons of (and some days my only) French practice with them, so it seemed like the best option, even though it feels a little like being 17 again.

That has been awkward at times. But it’s also been oddly reassuring to finally be doing the French study abroad semester I regret not having done in my youth. A four-month homestay – just like this one is turning out to be – would have been my setup had I gone to Dakar back in my junior year of college. Better 15 years late than never.

Youssou N’dour. In Dakar. Mind and heart blown.

Posted in music, travel by

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Be forewarned: This is going to be a long one, and a little overwrought… Continue reading →