teaching again

Arriving early, I stapled the copies of The Scarlet Letter and Of Mice and Men with a borrowed stapler.  Then I found a wet rag and wiped some of the dust from the table tops, benches, and even some of the floor in the corner of the room we use for class, wishing I had a hose and brush to really clean the windows, walls and floors.  I moved a couple of the benches that weren’t fixed in the floor to form a circle, or rather a triangle with two long benches angled facing the immobile bench/table combinations.  I opened the shutters and a window to let some air in the room, although dust blew thick off the screen onto my Xeroxes and books and backpack.  I wrote the titles of the books, their publication dates, and the authors’ names on the copies, and then waited for my students to arrive.  It felt a little bit like that first day as a teacher, being ready early, being unsure just what to expect.  Would they be on American time or Senegalese time?  Would I gain or lose students?  The class was entirely voluntary, after all.  Would they really be willing and able to endure Hawthorne’s dense writing? I had no idea.

On Monday, I asked what they hoped to get from this class, what they hoped to do, how often they hoped to meet.  We agreed on two hour classes focusing mostly on literature and conversation, with some asking for writing help as well.  Hawthorne was the only text common to all their masters level English Literature programs, and it was the most difficult, although the English Literature students read Dreiser, too, and not even Sister Carrie.  A text lit students at home woudn’t read outside of Phd programs.   Afterwards we shifted into political discussing the teachers’ strike, the possibility of a lost year, the elections, and the protests that have shaken the city some.  Only one student had participated, all the rest suggested it was too dangerous.  Allou described his participation in the first protest, admitted to some rock throwing, and seemed empowered by it. 

Yesterday we launched into Hawthorne’s vocabulary, long sentences, and symbolic description.  It was a tedious slog in some ways- reading silently, then having volunteers read aloud and try to paraphrase roughly, before I would walk them through each sentence encouraging them to use words common to French, reading it aloud myself, and finally translating into French when necessary.   Yet the two hours passed quickly and they seemed engaged and appreciative.  I offered extra classes on Tuesday/Thursday, and half said they would want to come in daily to do extra work on writing and conversation.  We got through three pages, arriving at the scene where coarse Puritan townswomen talk about the ‘naughty baggage’ (always a favorite line of mine), Hester Prynne, who is about to exit from the prison.  They bemoan the light sentence handed out noting that they would have punished the ‘malfectress’ properly.  And switching into my favorite teacher role, questioning the relevance and accuracy of a text, I asked them, ‘How are girls here who cross social/sexual boundaries punished?’ and ‘Are those boundaries the same for both genders?’.   Immediately, the class shifted to French and started arguing about double standards and girl gossip.  If there had been a bell, it would have rung right then.  Instead, I said we’d come back to this question in the text, and that I looked forward to hearing how Hawthorne’s story matched their experiences.  The conversations that connect the books to our lives are always the ones that make the work (in this case the very difficult work) worthwhile.

Politics again

On the day after Rick Santorum’s hat trick in the bible belt, it seems fitting to return Senegalese politics.  While I take great pleasure in the rare Republican inability to anoint a candidate, in their beautiful self-destruction this year, their more classically democratic public squabbling, a similar failure of the Senegalese opposition to unite behind a credible candidate has left some bloggers to conclude that Wade will win reelection, perhaps on the first ballot Feb. 26^th.  The campaign has officially started now, although that seems to just mean ramped up.  Large trucks loaded with massive speakers like this one troll the neighborhoods blasting music that if not compelling is at least attention getting.   Although I didn’t catch the show, this parade included 30 or 40 guys on rollerblades who were resting after some kind of performance I just missed. 

A new crop of billboards have sprung up overnight, and President Wade has a large number of them.  Again, the hand gestures, facial expressions, dress and slogans feel both similar and different from our own stripped down, stylized visual approach to visual candidate branding.  In these billboards, it’s hard not to start w/ the most disturbing one.  Wade’s face, which has a botoxed lack of expression, (at lunch today the WARC staff thought it was photoshopped) stares out with the joker’s rictus-like smile from the first Batman movie.  His hand gesture- is it beneficent?  Is it crying ‘halt’ as if to try and stop himself from running again?  But the Big Brother-like slogan, “He's the one who reassures” feels most creepy.  Senegal’s apparent inability to enforce the constitution, to stop a candidacy that seems eastern European in falseness, to unite behind a candidate or strategy to stop the juggernaut creates a deep sense of fatalism and cynicism in most people rather than reassurance suggested here.  And while Santorum is plenty creepy himself, Visiting the MN sweater vest factory is quite different from sacrificing 87 bulls, giving away 32 radios, and pouring out thousands of bottles of water as proscribed by some kind of spiritual advisor here.  I don’t know whether or not to believe this headline, but my students today assumed it was true.   

Tanor, the guy who’s arm gestures and expression I liked in the first round of posters has gotten a bit clichéd this round, claiming a return to ‘values’ and giving us all a reassuring thumb’s up.  That’s just more empty positivity than I can really stomach. 

Here, Mackey Sall, like Wade poses in alternating western and traditional dress, often is sequential billboards, seems stuffed into both outfits.  While American candidates clothes need to signal both power and the common touch, here this plays as both western and African, perhaps a larger span to bridge.  In both cases, however, his overripe physical quality suggests his widely known corruption, at least according to Pape. 

But the headlines on the newspapers clipped to strings along the VDN highway have settled into normal hysteria, one that suggests an acceptance of Wade’s third term, a relief over the end of violence and a fatalism over the ability of anything else to disrupt the power of an incumbent government that many believe will steal any vote that eventually occurs. 

Street work

This was a random shot of a street vendor from my taxi on the way home today.  He's one of the better equipped ones w/ cart, multiple products, and umbrella.  Most walk around w/ a few goods and try to get the attention of anyone passing by.  In some places it seems relatively obvious.  The coffee vendors (and no doubt this soda jerk) have a more or less regular clientele at a regular location.  Fruit vendors also tend to have some sort of shop location that holds their goods.  Many, however walk the streets looking for eye contact which most people studiously avoid.  One brief look in their direction and they're on you. The phone card vendors seem most ubiquitous.  I really don't understand how there can be a young man on each street w/ a plastic sheet of phone cards.  Each one is a recharge card w/ a code you type into your phone to add prepay minutes.  On my trip into town yesterday, I walking street vendors were offering flip flops, large hideous clocks, kleenex, scrabble games, sunglasses, phone chargers and phones, universal remotes, coat hangers, roasted peanuts, baked cookies and fruit.  It's hard not to wonder how many people driving in the city really want to add to their coat hanger collection. What I don't see often are cigarettes.  In Morocco there was always a guy selling singles in case you were in need.  Here, I see few people smoking anywhere.  I assume it's too expensive.

 On the road back into town from Bambey, the women fruit vendors stood out- literally.  The fruit of the season seem to be oranges, nuts, or Moroccan clementines.  In the horrifically exhaust filled roads, women gathered at each village or each place traffic slowed coming into the city.  At some places, a dozen women worked one side the street weaving in and out of traffic waving the fruit in the windows.  Stopping in the right place and looking at them in the wrong way earned you half a dozen holding them in the window each calling out the price- 500CFA (about a dollar for 6 or 7 clementines).  I couldn't help wonder why they wouldn't cooperate somehow, take turns, give each other a chance to get an unpolluted breath.  And some of them had babies strapped to their backs and others were pregnant.  Like much of those who live such difficult lives here, it was heartbreaking to see, especially over and over again.

A trip to Bambey

Pape's mother and visiting toubab

Pape and his aunt

For the holiday of the prophet’s birthday, Pape and I went to Bambey, the village (now town) he group up in. The drive was a 4-5 hour slog through miserable traffic including a detour on the new tollway, opened in one direction for the holiday but still sand in other sections.  On the main road every available vehicle was pressed into service moving people from Dakar to the countryside- from bikes and three wheeled motorcycles w/ open containers on the back filled with 5 or 6 people, to mopeds and horse or donkey carts to all forms of public transportation pressed from local service in Dakar to distance service for the weekend.  Many large buses with roof racks were filled beyond capacity and had people hanging on the back and riding in the luggage racks above.  A few cargo and cattle trucks as well as dump trucks were filled, too.  The exodus looked a bit like a refugee evacuation at times.  

We arrived at the mosque where Pape's Mouride marabout was positioned in a back room meeting with people while a large group crowded the anteroom and more stood outside.  Marabout lead Islamic sects somewhat like Franciscans or Benedictines, except with charismatic leadership handed down from father to son.  Many people display affiliations on their cars or in murals or on the wildly painted buses. In many ways, the Marabouts operate as a second government, and their role in the current election was highlighted by the lists in the papers today of marabout who called for change and those who didn’t.

On these holidays, they take a specific local government roll settling disputes about money, or family or marriage.  Pape has a long history with this marabout, having first followed his father and now being part of the son's congregation, so we were ushered into the back room immediately where he was taking petitions and making subtle judgments on each.  Entering the room, I was shown a chair to sit in, but I noticed that everyone else was on the floor.  I signaled that I’d be fine on the floor, but my position as outsider seemed to exempt me from that deference.  I did, however, quickly adopt the downcast eyes and the open hand gestures that ended each petition.  It felt as close to approaching royalty as I’m likely to experience.  In what was apparently a remarkable gesture, he said Pape and I should go to his house.  We followed the assistants there, and waited in his bedroom which held but one chair and a bed.  After perhaps a half hour of uncertain waiting, a large platter of grain and beef was brought in and placed on a cloth on the floor, and Pape and I ate.  Yes, it was odd sitting on the floor between bed and wall eating lunch, and even Pape seemed uncertain about the protocol or implication.  Eventually, we were led back to the room for a brief interview with the Serigne, as marabout are called.  His top aid, a childhood friend of Pape’s, told us about the Koranic schools in America that they had created, and said that on their next trip to the US in July, he hoped to be able to meet with me to discuss possibilities.  The purpose of the conversation remained quite general, and I had to ask Pape what I had implicitly agreed to do in my deferential head nodding.  I’m still not quite sure, of course.  

Four nieces

I got up early on Sunday with the older women and the youngest kids.  Pape's mother at 70 still raises grandchildren and other relatives who continue to end up there for diverse familial reasons.  Two of these girls are daughters of Fahma, his sister who lives there, too.   As coffee didn't seem immanent, and I didn't quite know what to do without it, I walked up the stairwell to what would be the roof of the one story structure- if it had one.  That was enough to put me at the top of this world looking into several of the compounds/yards around.  Cats were waking lazily on nearby rooftops, roosters crowing and donkey's braying. A little kid next door looked up at me quite surprised. 

Sister and brother with a cousin in the middle

The chanting/singing that started the day before and went on all night long had finally stopped.  I had awoken every few hours to the sound, adjusted my bivy sack against mosquitos, and fell back asleep.  So the relative silence of the animals felt different. This cat's eye view (for they're the ones who take most advantage of the rooftops) felt sufficiently apart to see some things.  The yards were arranged in smaller, walled grid-like midwestern sections that divided up the sand.  It's all thick, yellow sand, sometimes several inches deep in the passage/road ways.  From the stairtop, it was also green, however, with low, fast growing trees that Leopold Senghore, founding father of Senegal had imported from India to fight the deforestation he recognized even in the 60's.  Pape said the people here had been farmers, but the land was worn out and now they had become mechanics and tradesmen.  

After coffee touba- better than nescafe, but just barely- Pape and I went for a walk. The mere idea of an agenda for the day seemed strange somehow.  Pape didn't want to fight the holiday traffic back into Dakar and suggested we wait until afternoon to leave.  We walked around the neighborhood, and Pape greeted many people who were very glad to see him again.  The deaf mute man was particularly enthusiastic.  He gestured and grunted with animated expressions and gestures that I couldn't make out.  Pape, who had grown up with him, understood that he was saying he hadn't visited in awhile and hadn't come to see him.  We walked past compounds of stuccoed block and of moulded, patterned blocks.  A couple were painted red and yellow earth tones and more than a few were made of corrugated metal, flattened metal drums or thatch fastened to thin sticks.  Unfortunately, my camera battery had already died, and I didn't get the photos this all certainly warranted. 

Friday hot dish

 I'm going for stream of conscious here on Friday afternoon.  Consider yourself warned.  Yesterday I went to the Ile de Goree, an island 20 minutes out from Dakar that Clinton and Bush (43) and many others have visited to acknowledge the history of the slave trade.  It's a gorgeous place with colonial architecture in much better shape than St.Louis.  It has sweet streets like this one, good food (although still no good coffee) in restaurants like the red one here, and most significantly a restored slave transfer station which was the last stop on the continent for slaves being shipped to North and South America during the slave trade.  It's a simple and sad building with small ground level holding rooms built to await ships.  As a major tourist site, it's also become a sort of art colony with both crummy trinkets and cliched images and a curiously vibrant found object collage/art brut community.





This gorgeous relic beyond repair was the hospital, but the laundry, ocean, arched windows were just a beautiful shot.  Randomly, the George Soros Foundation has a nice place on the island and the building behind the laundry was the hospital at one time.  There was also a gorgeous stone building w/ a sweet balcony just behind the red restaurant.  As I stared at it, a guy walked by and said, "It's for sale."  I guess he might have thought I was George.

 And this, well, I'm not quite sure.  It's a dwelling, has a rather found/art brut/collagey quality to it and had a sign on the wall to the left that says, "Interdit de faire le con" which I'd translate as 'no stupid shit' but I'd welcome a comment from anyone with a better translation.  

Last night I went to a movie about the Talibe- orphaned or abandoned children brought into Koranic schools and too often abused and used as profit centers.  Some are well cared for, of course, but others are badly mistreated.  These five were in a larger group outside the cafe after I walked back

from the university.  When I took this picture from what I thought was a safe distance, the flash went off and they saw it.  Soon they were all standing in front of me silently gesturing and waiting.  The best strategy here is always to ignore approaches.  Any response tends to be perceived as encouragement.  Eventually, someone from a nearby table told them to get lost and they did.  Here, it's obviously hard to know where to give, because you could be doing so all day long.

And in the random discovery vein,  I found that the Goethe Center, a local German institute has a fabulous 5th floor cafe/restaurant overlooking the city just a few blocks from here- and their coffee is excellent!  Who knew I'd rediscover my German roots in Dakar!  I met w/ Mamadou there this afternoon to plan our Design Thinking workshop.  We're hoping to get hired by IMES, a local private K-14 school to do a 12 hour workshop with their oldest students.  It's a good proposal, and I hope we get the work.  As the university students still seem more interested in protesting than editing (not that I blame them) I don't know when I'll be doing the work with Pape's students.

And in the requisite political update, the M23 movement organized a Friday prayer in the city near the President's palace.  The purpose was peaceful, prayerful protest.  While I don't know the size of the turn out. there were no police clashes.  The movement needed to show it could rally w/o violence, too, and was successful.  Tomorrow is the prophet's birthday, so a quiet weekend is expected.  Happy Birthday, Mohammed!

creeping acceptance

Wednesday, I worked with the girls from the Lycee JFK on their video projects.  We met at the school which remains a hang out for kids despite the strike.  Mamadou works with these students in part because of the relationship with the Philadelphia school which isn’t, of course, on strike and still might move forward with an exchange, although the political situation may change that, too.

The students arrived on time, dressed in their uniforms mostly, and worked on their scripts diligently, apart from some requisite texting and facebooking.  They know the exchange might not move forward, but never seemed to question the effort.    They wrote sweet self-introductions that described families, hobbies, and mostly favorite television shows and singers.  They have a French habit of putting ‘etcetera’ at the end of each list which I tried unsuccessfully to extinguish.  I was more successful getting them to make their verbs all parallel, either infinitive or present progressive.  

As we worked, I realized I hadn’t reacted this time to the state of the classrooms, the graffiti, the dust, the broken doors, the fact that not much had been done to these buildings since Kennedy administration money built them in 1964. And it struck me that same sort of natural, perhaps necessary, creeping acceptance allows these students to accept the fact that they might well lose and have to repeat a year, (an ‘annee blanche’, a term we don’t even have).  University students understand the costs better and wear t-shirts protesting the loss of their education.  But somehow, the government and the people largely accept a dysfunctional education system that goes on strike regularly, that warehouses university students for years with too many students chasing too few diplomas with too few resources, and most tragically, that doesn’t create the educated population needed to function in the world.  

In St. Louis, a small, noisy two room Islamic school next door to my hotel taught elementary students through oral repetition.  Seated in rows on the floor, they chanted together for classes.  During lunch, they lined their wooden tablets w/ black charcoal script neatly up against the wall and ate together from large metal bowls.  I know that few US students would line their tablets/ipads up so carefully.  I don't know how much these memorized lessons and respect for authority will ultimately serve these students. 

It gets personal

Looking at my last post and then noting the silence, I understand how people might be concerned.  No, I didn't change my mind and run out to watch the riot.  The internet was cut off and that seemed to somehow mess up the wifi system in our house, so I've had no access for a couple of days.  Really, there have been two nights of protests in Dakar, and a few more outside the city.  Most of the city remains calm.  It's a natural part of media reality- while the conflict is important and does attract attention, it's not the larger "reality."  Here are a couple of entries I wrote the past two days-

Last night’s death deaths of a two students at the university seems to have focused the conflict on the university today.  As I write, the internet has been shut down again, leaving me uncertain about the larger picture and dependent solely on my own travels.  While I’m comfortable with the post-modern limitations on knowing truth in the classroom, trying to find it in Dakar these days feels more practical and frustrating. 

This morning, I decided to run through the university to see the remains of the conflict I followed last night on twitter.  Crushed rocks in the street showed where a couple of particular conflicts happened, and more burned tires, boulders and palm tree trunks showed where blockades had been set up.

This afternoon, when my thesis writing class was canceled yet again, I went back and found police and students engaged in a daytime conflict.  On balconies of the top two floors of a university building, students taunted and chanted at gendarmes positioned behind buildings near the street.  When the students drew fire- tear gas and rubber bullets, I think- they cheered.  Police seemed all too willing to engage them without any apparent purpose.  Nearby, traffic jams were worse than ever on this grey, hazy day, leaving the air worse than ever.   Some people came to watch, others filled the ‘cars rapids’ just trying to get home for dinner.   I walked back to the nearby café and had a beer.

Conversations with people today suggested a greater sense of hope that the president will pull out of the election.  Yesterday’s large protest and last night’s death seemed to shift the momentum again.  Sunday, the opposition candidates are scheduled to meet and discuss pulling out of the election in an attempt to nullify it.  And the papers on one side suggest the opposition has no leadership and on the other side portray President Wade sitting on six bodies of protesters killed in the past two days.   On the TV news, government ministers call for respect of the law and the democratic process.  Spokesmen for two religious leaders ask for peace during the festival of Mohammed’s birthday which will be celebrated this weekend.  Meanwhile, across the city, life goes on more or less normally.