In Which I Defy the President in a Sexy Red Dress

Three weeks in Guede-Chantier gives me a lot of free time between project meetings. So I'm going to take advantage of it by catching up on my written work. That way I'll have blobs and blobs of blog entries to upload when I come back to Dakar.

Preparing for my second visit to Guede was incredibly stressful. For one thing, I was sick with food poisoning. For another thing, the first visit had made me realize I was working within certain uncomfortable and unpleasant limitations. I was a stranger, in a way a sort of intruder in the village. I really wanted people to like and accept me, but I wasn't sure they would. My family was warm and welcoming, but doing projects with the villagers was another matter entirely. Older men had a tendency to ignore me and talk to Emmanuel. They smile at me as if I was a cute little mascot, instead of someone competent and sensible. I think I become even more loud and assertive in an effort to compensate.

Brooke says there are often problems with American woman and Senegalese men working together, since American women tend to overstep traditional gender roles within Senegalese society. I often get the feeling that I'm not being taken seriously. I also get harassed when I walk alone in Dakar. Strange men will call me "Ma cherie" (my dear) and "Ma belle" (my beautiful) and follow me down the street. If I respond politely to their questions, they cling to me like glue and I can't get rid of them. If I ignore them, they get angry at me and accuse me of being snobby. When I complain about this phenomena to my male friends, they laugh and thinks its funny. "What's wrong with being called beautiful?" But its not funny for me! Its scary! It's getting so I'm afraid to walk alone in Dakar. More than anything else, its the way they look at me. It makes me feel like prey.

Sydney, who is somewhat more adventurous and outgoing than me (and also very blonde) has had worse problems. Once a stranger walked up to her and kissed her on the neck! Luckily one of our Wolof-speaking classmates was there to defend her. Jess also had a stranger touch her without permission. She grabbed the arm that touched her and screamed at him in French, "You NEVER touch a woman you don't know!" It happened right in her neighborhood, and when the neighbors heard her screaming, they all came out of their doors and started collectively chewing out the person who harassed her. Jess said it was heartening to have her neighbours rally around to defend her like that.

The upshot of this is I've become a lot more feminist since coming to Senegal. I think in order to become really passionate about feminism you have to experience poor treatment. Its made me really touchy about words like "sexy," too. I snapped at my boyfriend for calling me sexy, but the poor guy was only trying to be nice to me. Then he told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, and I started bitching, "Why does it always have to be the most BEAUTIFUL girl in the world? Why not the most SENSIBLE or the most COMPETENT girl in the world?"

The Wolof language has at least six or seven words to describe different kinds of sexiness. The word "Pacha," means voluptuous and curvy. My friend Aissetou told me to compliment me that I was "Very pacha." I replied "No, no, no!" Then, after a little reflection, I replied, "Maybe a little pacha. But not much." For some reason everyone thought that was hilarious. Now whenever anyone wants to tease me, they start calling me "Pacha." For some reason it really embarasses me. I cover my face with my hands and start blushing and babbling, "No, no, no!"

So finally one day Aissetou asked me why I didn't want to be pacha. It took me awhile to figure out the answer. "Its because I want to be judged by my character," I told her finally. "I'm worried that if people are distracted by sexiness, they won't notice what I'm saying. I want people to listen to my ideas and take them seriously."

Aissetou nodded wisely, "You are right Charlotte, you are very right," she said. "I have noticed myself, when girls talk, often men are looking at the Boobies instead of at the face." I love the way Aissetou says "the Boobies." I don't know why slang words are so much funnier when used by non-native speakers.

"I want people to pay attention to my inside, not my outsides," I continued to explain. "L'interieur, pas l'exterieur."

"Is this why you do not wear make-up or....." and here, Aissetou made flapping gestures indicating the chest region. "Low-cut blouses," I decoded, nodding.

Aissetou sat up and shook out her thick black braids. "Your philosophy makes very much sense, Charlotte," she decreed imperiously. "Maybe from now on I will be more like you."

What a digression from the next episode of the Library Saga. Anyway, as I was trying to tell you before I got distracted by Other Matters, we returned to find a glum Mr. Saal. Five or six students had signed up for library cards, three or four books had been checked out, but very little had changed. "I could lie to you and tell you everything has been fixed," he said. "But what good would that do?"

"I'm glad you're being honest with us Mr. Saal," I said. I looked around. At least the library seemed marginally cleaner.

"It's all the student's fault," said Mr. Saal, and then went into a long rant about how the students didn't have any Culture and were uncivilized and all that. This is a concept that comes up fairly often in conversation with Senegalese people. It makes me uncomfortable whenever I hear them describing one another as uncivilized. I think it's part of the French colonial legacy; if a French man looks up his nose at you and says, "O!!! Vous etes si sauvage," (you are so savage!) often enough, maybe you start to believe it.

This time I was more annoyed than usual by the "Senegalese are so uncivilized," rant, since I suspected the real problem was Mr. Saal's tendency to keep the library door locked. A locked door, even if it technically opens on request, is a real discouragement to potential library-browsers.

So we did a bit more awareness-raising. Some classroom tours. I waved my arms and told them using libraries made you Super-Intelligent. They laughed at me. That was fun, but things were pretty frustrating on the whole. Once we were told to come meet the principal at 9:00. We waited in the library all day, and he didn't arrive. It turned out he was on a journey and his subordinates were ill-informed about his whereabouts. Things could have been worse. We met him the next day and he was a very nice man.

"This is my first year as principal of the school," he told us. "So I haven't been up to much yet. This year, the library is my principal project."

"Have you purchased a library card?" asked Emmanuel.

"No," the principal admitted with a blush.

We tried to talk to the teachers some more, but the problem was, they kept going on strike. Strikes here are so weird. I always think of strikes as "not going to work until your employer satisfies your demands." But here, strikes are more like an excuse to take vacations. The way it was explained to me, the government is supposed to pay the teachers extra for invigilating exams, but it doesn't. So in revenge, the teachers take time off whenever they feel like it. A Friday here, a Monday there..... lots of long weekends for everybody. The students get to help their parents with the tomato harvest, the teachers get to sit in their shady houses and drink tea..... a win-win situation, for everybody, including the government, who can feel justified in not delivering the extra wages to "those lazy strikers." Everybody, that is, except for the poor sustainable development students, who keep showing up for their appointments only to be told, "Sorry..... everyone's gone home...." This happened to us over and over again.

But it wasn't just us. Everyone, (the compost group, the community garden group, the food processing group, the ecology education group) was having similar trouble getting their village partners to show up for meetings. It's a passive way of resisting change. Nobody wants to be impolite to us, so they won't tell us "NO," to our faces, but they find other ways of manifesting their noncooperation. Little by little, we're winning their trust, but its a process.

I tried to forget my worries about the library in the enjoyment of being with my host family. The baby of the family had progressed from futile wriggling to high-velocity crawling in the short time I'd been away. However, he still needed to perfect his technique. He tended to propel himself with furious kicks of his left leg while letting his right leg dangle uselessly. He used his new-found mobility to get up to all kinds of mischief. His nickname is, "John McCain baby," because he was born during the campaign and his family decided he looked exactly like John McCain. Ha-ha! It's true! Except for being a black little baby, Muhammed is John McCain's identical twin. Did I forget to mention the baby's real name is Muhammed?

Our family is well-off enough to have a television and sometimes I think it gives them awfully strange ideas about the outside world. Kalidou (the nine-year old boy) is sitting in his little chair all the time with his eyes like six inches away from the screen, and it drives me crazy. Stop watching those cartoons, Kalidou! Look at them-- they don't even come from your culture! Everyone in them is white!

Houleye (the three-year old girl) seems to be a bit more active-- she's always running around and dancing and singing. She sang me the Senegalese National Anthem, and I was really impressed. She doesn't understand any French, but her grandma helped her to memorize the syllables by route.

We like to draw pictures together, me and Houleye. We're really good friends. One time she was getting bored and I rolled up some construction paper to make a telescope. Only she didn't think it was a telescope; she thought it was a megaphone for calling people to prayer. So she put it up to her mouth and started howling, "Allah Akhbar!!!" (God is great.) So young, and already steeped in both nationalism and religion. I could only sigh. Back in Dakar the mosques blast that on their stereos five times a day. Its enough to drive you crazy, except I'm kind of getting to like it; it reminds me I'm in Senegal.

I love my host mother so much! She's the grandmother of Houleye and Muhammed, and except for the Dumbledore spectacles perched on her nose, looks exactly like the stereotype of an African matron; a generous figure swathed in blousy, colorful fabric, a warm voice, always a child on the knee, always laughing. But below that warm and cuddly surface, there's a keen and piercing intellect. She's a teacher and successful business woman and has written a number of beautiful poems in her native language, Pulaar. She's my proof that you can be a career woman and a family woman at the same time.

She asked me what I was writing just now, and I told her I was writing a letter for my family back home. She said, "You must tell them that your mother in Guede-Chantier sends them lots of love and kisses! Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!" And she made kissing noises. I said, "Its funny you should say that, because I was just in the middle of describing you." And she said, "You must tell them that I am very old and ugly and fat." She's so funny that way. Its the African sense of humor. You wouldn't believe how much people joke around over here.

But let me tell you about the elections, because that was really a bit exciting. I was just pacing back and forth in the street in front of my house when a big group of woman came walking by dressed in these perfectly beautiful dresses. "On va danser. Vous dansez?" They kept telling me over and over, happily. (We're going to dance! Are you dancing?) I had an esprit ouvert (open spirit) that day, so instead of refusing I just laughed and said, "Pourquoi pas?" (Why not?) So I walked with them down the street and came to a HUGE gathering of people of all ages and genders. They were seated on mats around the edge of a big circle. In the middle of the circle, a young man with a microphone was speechifying energetically. I asked my new friends what he was saying, and they told me! "He's saying you should put your vote on the yellow ballot. He's saying that the green ballot is bad." I saw he was waving around a yellow piece of paper. Unfortunately, it was all in Pulaar, so I missed all the finer nuances.

My host sister, Awa, then magically appeared behind me with Houleye in her arms. "Fancy meeting you here Awa!" She tucked Houleye in my lap and I watched people wave their arms and jabber away in Pulaar for awhile. I had the impression that nobody really cared for the speeches, but were just waiting politely for the music to start.

Dances in Africa are really something else. The crowd forms a huge circle, and you wait for people who are brave enough to enter the circle and start shakin' themselves around. Strangely enough, the older woman usually lead the way. They waggle their behinds, they shake their fists, they swirl and twirl their voluminous skirts, they kick up their heels in the dust, they dance as if they were on fire with joy. It doesn't matter if you're eighty and shaped like a ball, you'll still bounce with the best of them, and people will cheer you on! African clothes are really rather flattering to the older female figure (you look like you're draped in flags, or maybe like you're a grand old ship with the wind in your sails.) And people are more colorful than whole gardens full of flowers.

I have trouble imagining a forty-ish American woman dancing with zest and gusto in the center of a cheering crowd. It's different here. Here, you don't have to be young to be beautiful. And the young people don't isolate themselves. Teenage boys will play happily with babies. Teenage girls will dance on the same floor with women old enough to be their mamas. Adults and children, married and unmarried, old and young, can all enjoy themselves at the same event. Its not like the US where people rarely socialize outside their age group.

During the whole length of our second visit in Guede-Chantier, people were preparing for the local elections. This meant that we would frequently hear the booming of loud music and speeches from some part of Guede-Chantier. Or we would go to a meeting with our village parteners, only to be told, "Sorry, they're all at the rally." Everyone was very excited, because Guede-Chantier had finally become big enough to have its own mayor. First they would choose which party they wanted in power. Then they would have a second round of voting to pick the mayor among the men of the winning party.

Anyway, all our host families were really hoping Ousmane would become mayor. You know Ousmane from my former blogs. He's the director of our program and one of my favorite teachers. He doesn't teach any of our regular subjects, but he's been trained by "Living Routes Ecovillage Study Abroad" in what I like to call the "hippie curriculum." So whenever we have something random, like a lesson on the "Gaia Theory" or a film on "Nonviolent Communication," he comes in to teach us. He also taught French class a couple of times when our regular teacher was absent. We had some of the usual grammar stuff, and then he threw up his arms in the air and said, "Hey everyone! Name as many animals as you can think of!" Something like fifty French animal names went on the board. Then he said, "Okay, I'm going to teach you what these animals say in French." (Did you know that animals speak differently in France than they do in the US?) He had all of us making animal noises until we were laughing like crazy. It was the best French lesson ever.

Its things like that which have Pete saying, "Ousmane's missing a few goats." O, but I must explain to you about the goats. Its something akin to, "bats in the attic," or "a few eggs short of a dozen." Except goats are incredibly important in traditional Senegalese society, so they happen to be the metaphor of choice. And its a wonderful metaphor. You can explore endless variations. That's all we did on the bus to Guede: tease each other about how many goats we had. "I think your goats have wandered off." "You better watch out-- your goats are looking pretty sickly to me." Or (should someone happen to say something particularly outrageous) "Oh my God! You must be missing ALLLLLLLLLLL your goats!"

Then someone started asking Alassane his opinion on the goat levels of various persons on the team. The more goats you have the better, you see-- the more sane and intelligent you are. He said that I had only two goats. But he gave Jess ten goats. And I know it was only something small, a silly joke, but I got SO MAD, and SO JEALOUS of Jess. I was outraged over his assessment of my goat levels.

Then later, when I met Alassane in the village, I made a point of refusing to hug him and very coldly saying goodbye. I told him I couldn't hug anyone who believed I only had two goats. Then he told me, "I think you have a hundred, goats, Charlotte!" And I gave him a big hug. Namuri said, "You have to watch out for Alassane, Charlotte. He's a real player. He's telling you sweet lies in order to worm his way into your affections." And I said. "Never, never, Namuri! Alassane is a very honest man. I really trust him, you know."

But then the next time I asked Alassane how many goats I had, he said, "Not only do you have one goat, Charlotte, but it a sick, sick, goat. It is a lame, crippled goat, with......" (here he paused to think) "only one eye and one foot." And then he was smiling triumphantly, and the whole room was shouting the Senegalese version of, "Ooooh, BURN!!!" But I had my revenge when Sydney told him his sole goat was a blind one with no testicles.

So anyway, maybe Ousmane is a few goats short of a herd, but he's really a very nice man. He was born in Guede-Chantier and splits his time between there and Dakar. You have to understand the distinction between "village mayor" and "village chief." The village chief is more concerned with daily manners of governance; settling disputes between people and so on. Village mayors, on the other hand, almost without exception, live in Dakar. Their role is to butter up the central administration and the various NGOs, so that their village will be in for a share of the dough when the time comes. The best mayor is the one who brings the most money back to his village. Of course, most of them embezzle like mad.

I don't think Ousmane would embezzle though, because he really loves his village. Let me sketch his personality a little further. Once I head some loud music and was walking down the street to see where it was coming from. It was another political rally, naturally. I reached the edge of the crowd and suddenly someone tackled me with a hug from behind. I screamed!!! What random Senegalese man was attacking me?? I turned around and it was, you guessed it..... Ousmane, with his usual goofy smile on his face. Oh Ousmane. Then he started talking about the "Free Hugs," video on YouTube. If you've never seen it, you should definitely look it up. Basically this guy gets this idea to write "Free Hugs" on a cardboard sign and walk the streets, displaying it. At first everyone ignores him, then they begin to take advantage of his offer. Soon there are mobs of people hugging him. It becomes this Thing. Soon Free Hug events are being organized in cities across the globe. Its all on film, you should see it.

That was the day I was wearing my pretty red dress that I bought in Dakar for the equivalent of five dollars. Its really gorgeous, its got rainbow tie-dye patterns and rainbow beads and stuff, I'll show it to you when I come back to North America. But when I came back from the political rally wearing that dress, my family was SHOCKED. They were absolutely DISMAYED. It turned out the president had made this big announcement on TV, "Anyone who is not in agreement with my regime should show up to the rallies wearing red!" So unknowingly, unwillingly even, I had been a dissenter. I was mildly amused by the whole event, but my family was distressed for me. I tried to excuse myself by saying, "the dress is more pink than red, really," and assure them I had no intention of returning to the rally. But all the same, I had to go to my room and change to a blue dress before they were happy again. The president has been known to jail journalists who disagree with him, but I don't think I was in any danger really.

I was sitting on the stoop helping Jess peel onions while the final rally was taking place. Ousmane dropped by at one point, all exhilarated from having made a speech. I asked him what he had spoken about, and he laughed and said it was untranslatable. Jess and I howled in protest. "Try, anyway! Try, try!" But then his phone rang, and he gasped, "They need me!" and before we could get another word in, he was swooping away to the rescue like a disorganized, flustered, super-hero.

And the next morning we found out his PARTY had won. But then we had to wait and see whether Ousmane himself would be chosen. (This business of chosing the party first, and then the man, is just the reverse of the way things are done in the US.) So I'm going to keep you in suspense a little. You'll find out when I tell you about my third visit. I have a whole shitload of blogs written, but I think it might be a bit much if I uploaded them all at once. So I'll just post one a day unti I run through everything I've written in Guede-Chantier.