Voices

When I finally returned to Dakar, the dusty city streets, once lined with leafless trees and napping Senegalese men, were lined with hundreds and hundreds of mouton. Dakar’s relentless street vendors rapped on my cab window, with offerings of blow-up Santa Clause dolls and small faux-Christmas trees in place of the usual bunches of bananas. […]

Yesterday, I took the last of my once-per-week malaria pills. Somehow, I still have not acknowledged the empty medicine bottle as an indication of my rapidly-approaching departure. It seems impossible that it’s nearly time to leave this country, my family and my home for the last four months. Over the past few weeks I […]

After 14 hours crammed into a sept-place, a 7 person station wagon taxi, I arrived in Kedougou with a huge backpack, a bike and no way to get to my final destination of Saraya. Through some strange circumstances, I ended up hitching a ride with SOSETER, a construction company based out of Dakar who is […]

I knew that living with a Senegalese family here in Dakar would be stressful, but I never imagined how hard it would be to leave them.
According to my once a week malaria pills, I only have a little over a month left here in Senegal.  This past week I took my final exams, packed up my bags and […]

I cannot seem to get photos to upload on the slow computers that I have access to over here, but they can be viewed on Flikr. I posted some beautiful ones of the Bedik village:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8186719@N02/

I have taken enough West African dance classes here in Senegal to know how to properly shake my jaay fonde, the endearing Wolof term for one’s derrière. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for my days spent dancing while harvesting in fields of corn, and nights spent dancing while singing around a fire high atop […]

I’m off to the south-eastern part of Senegal for a week or so of hiking and harvesting while living in the small mountaintop Bedik village of Etchwar.  Needless to say, I will be away from electricity, running water and cyber cafés for a while.
My destination is the Bandafassi region of Senegal.  It is about 500 km from my home in Dakar, […]

For the past few evenings, I have been sitting outside with my family in front of our Dakar apartment chatting in Wolof and just watching the starry night sky. We were looking for the crescent of the new moon; its sighting would mark the end of Ramadan and the long, hard month of fasting and […]

It has taken nearly five weeks, but I have finally figured out who is who in my big, beautiful Senegalese mbokk.
Sama yaay, (my mother) Aicha, has juroom dum (five children):
Oumy, Ouly, Yacine, Douda and Ooleye.
Oumy, sa jekker (her husband) Babukar, and their two daughters, Maguette (age 9) and Zeyna (age 1) live on the […]

This morning, I ran along the beach from Saint-Louis, Sénégal, to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. We left just before sunrise and jogged through the sandy, still streets of Ndar, as it is called in Wolof, to the sounds of the morning Islamic call to prayer.
It is Ramadan. The large Muslim population of Saint-Louis was […]