[Continued from the last post]

Last Saturday we (a good-sized bit of the group) journeyed to one of Dakar’s prime tourist spots, Ile de Gorée. Gorée is a small island accessible from Dakar’s port. With only one thousand or so inhabitants, Gorée’s bougainvillea-filled ruelles are car-free. The island is marked by its colonial history; tall and skinny buildings are painted in shades of pink and red. But such picturesque-ness comes with a price; Gorée has no paucity of vendors.





We visited two of the island’s four museums. Musée de la Femme (The Women’s Museum) presents a brief sketch of the history of women in Senegal while the Maison des Esclaves (The Slave House) houses dank dungeon-like quarters where slaves were supposedly once kept and a small exhibit on the history of slavery in Senegal. Some controversy surrounds the history of the Maison des Esclaves and the extent to which Gorée, on the whole, was used for slave trade. According to most historians, Gorée was something of a trade center in the 18th and 19th centuries, but most merchants were not dealing in slaves. According to my little Lonely Planet guidebook, the Maison des Esclaves was most likely used to house a few slaves of merchants.




We enjoyed lunch at a small restaurant (my first sandwich in quite some time though, admittedly, consisting of cheese, butter and baguette) and then strolled to the top of Gorée’s small hill to take in the view. We caught the 4 pm ferry back to Dakar and did a brief market run, attacking only the periphery of Dakar’s infamous Marché HLM. Quite the scene. Beyond over-stimulation. I bought several meters of textiles of different colors and patterns to be made into traditional outfits or bou bous for friends back home. I bought a ready-made little outfit-type deal, but need to take it to a tailor for some altercations. We then took a “car rapide” home and, really, words cannot do a car rapide justice. A picture is needed and I will supply one in a later entry.



We returned home exhausted just before the sun set. As my family eats dinner at around nine, I retired to my room for what I had imagined would be a couple of hours of reading, but instead awoke at dinner time to find my book resting on my chest and my florescent bulb glaring maliciously.

The four American college students (I add “college” because our group includes Gilda, a school teacher) had agreed to meet bright and early (9 am) on Sunday to travel to another island, Iles de Madeleines. On Sunday morning, I roused myself from bed and met Shannon and Loren (Kendall had decided to forgo the trip). Breakfast was baguette and chocolate spread from the Shell Station where we also purchased our lunch—chocolate, baguette, and cheese. For the first time, we toubabs ventured outside of Yoff without the aid of a Senegalese friend. We thought we had negotiated a fair price for our taxi ride, until it became apparent that we didn’t know exactly where we were going and our taxi driver demanded an extra 500 CFA (one dollar). Our guidebook noted that there was a casino next to the boat landing for Iles de la Madeleines and we ultimately went to the casino where a total stranger, upon our taxi driver’s request for directions, jumped into the passenger seat and directed us down in inconspicuous dirt road off the main highway. We were skeptical, to say the least.

Trailing baguette crumbs, we paid our fare and stepped out of the taxi into a small cluster of thatch-roofed huts. The village was literally asleep. In typical American tourist style, we had risen early to make the most of the day, forgetting that Senegal tends to operate on a different schedule. We finally found a poor sleepy soul, Dou Dou, to confirm that yes, we were in the right place and a pirogue (colorful Senegalese fishing boat) could take us out the island and bring us back at the hour of our choosing (we all shared visions of the Tom Hank’s movie where he is stranded on an island).



We spent five blissful hours on what we claimed as Our Island—for the first few hours of our stay, we were the only visitors. We explored the island as though we were five-year-olds, climbing the mini-baobab trees and dangling from their limbs, scaling small cliffs to access a tide pool, poking at abandoned birds’ nests and approaching the island’s one structure—a shack of sorts—with a certain degree of trepidation, imagining the horrors that may lurk within. After our explorations, we returned the island’s small beach for our overheated lunch (there was truly no shade to be found on the island) and some swimming. The swimming hole was piercing blue, clear and cold. Big black sea urchins lurked in the crevices of the island’s distinctive volcanic rock and schools of little fish darted about.



For a good half hour or so, I just sat at the edge of the water and watched, occasionally plucking up a hermit crab in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the creature within or poking at a sea urchin just to see what it did. I was reminded of the summers I used to spend at my neighbors’ house in Maine. My neighbor, a veritable sister, and I were capable of spending an entire day exploring tide pools. I found endless enjoyment from carefully pinching a crab’s sides at just the right spot, tossing it into a plastic bucket lined with rocks and seaweed, and watching it (the bigger the crab the better!) until the water grew too warm and the crab was placed back in it’s respective pool or set free into the ocean. In retrospect, we were probably catching the same crabs over and over again. Regardless, this simple activity was wholly engrossing. I miss those days. Now I would regard such an activity as mindless and therefore pointless, but my mind was fully engaged….so maybe it wasn’t so mindless.



Digressions. Digressions. Anyways, Iles de la Madeleine was wonderful and provided the perfect counterpart to our people-filled Saturday. Though, by the time we left Our Island, it was teeming with toubabs, most of them American or Canadian, oddly enough.

So that was the weekend in an unusually large nutshell.

Classes continue to go well. We are still in the midst of sorting out our Service Learning projects, but it looks as though I, along with a Senegalese student, will be examining the produce market and assessing organic produce’s potential in the mainstream market. If all goes according to plan, the project could be quite exciting.

A few of us have started taking Senegalese dance classes. We have our second class tonight, but my thighs are still quite sore from Tuesday’s class….it should make tonight’s class all the more interesting.

I guess that’s it for now from Senegal.

Oh, and I’m all better! I recovered quickly. Sorry that the last post was rather gruesome.