Well, Mike has officially taken off to be home for a few weeks, and I am holding down the fort here and hoping to start editing the footage I’ve been running around town shooting next week (fingers crossed that my hard drive ships to Dakar by then!). Though his family is worried about me being here alone, yada yada, everything is actually really straightforward right now- my schedule is packed full between filming, dancing, and teaching! Today I realized that I needed a break actually, so I spent the morning doing yoga and meditating, which was really nice. My doorbell only rang once (people stop by a lot in Senegal, as there is no such thing as personal space), so I had time to read through the yoga magazine that Mike got for Christmas (last year!! Hehehe).
What else? My dance has definitely improved- yesterday in practice I was actually getting a few of the steps more than one of the newer Senegalese dancers- I think the girl who gives me private lessons once a week was pretty surprised- “Yacine, fecc nga buubax buubax tey!” (Yacine, you’re dancing really good today).
Otherwise, my English tutoring is pretty much the same, one of my students (whose mom I cooked chebu jen with in the post before last) is getting ready to take his TOEFL (a qualifying exam to study at a college in the US) in 2 weeks, so I am trying to help him get geared up for that. I met a cool kindergarten teacher at the International school who wants me to teach her new media workshops, so I may start up with that in a week or two, when my schedule gets lighter. She is a really strong, independent Liberian expat lady living in Senegal, though the rest of her family is in Europe and the US. It was interesting chatting with her about her decisions to live in Africa and take care of her mom and many of the family’s children there, in a house that she set up so that the whole extended family could come visit. She was very happy to have me set up her unutilized webcam for her in the classroom and show her how to use Skype to talk to her daughter in London (for those of you who don’t have skype yet, and want to talk to us FOR FREE, go here: www.skype.com , hit download, and set up a username).
Other than that, just living, starting to speak Wolof, and thinking about trash a lot, as trash is everywhere and inescapable here. That and nauseating pollution (that implicates and affects us all). About urban landscapes, “development,” the not-any-smaller gaps between poor and rich, what sorts of small and big things we can do to start to ameliorate these problems, scary articles I’ve read recently about e-trash.
An example: to get to my dance practice I have to sit through about 40 minutes of bumper to bumper traffic, breathing in under-regulated exhaust (I wrap a towel around my mouth) all the way to avoid feeling like vomiting. Once in the cartier, I either go right, to one dance center, which winds me through streets filled with children playing next to bored, tightly tethered goats and metal welders and mechanics, all along the asphalt trickling with the impossibly green tributaries of what can only be raw sewage, or left, alongside the “canal,” which is a pretty word for recessed open-sewer-river from which wafts the omnipresent smell of waste.
This is just on my way to dance class. Of course there are other, more photogenic parts of Dakar, such as the cartiers where expats drive their oversized SUVs home to whitewashed luxury condos, or the stretches of beach and cliff not yet earmarked for huge (and mostly foreign-owned) hotel complexes, but none of these are untouched by the spectacle of waste. So what? This is a problem throughout the “developing” world, and one that we haven’t solved at home, just learned to hide well. What to do with our waste, how to create less of it, how to be mindful of the way we consume, etc. etc. These are problems that will not go away, that are not limited to or affecting only the Third World, and that become depressing when left to rot, if only because of the children playing in the street alongside us.
