Mboumba

Well, I am still rather exhausted from this weekend and we didn’t get back til late last night, so I apologize for the late update.

Last week was pretty insane. I will try to convey the madness as best I can. It was fairly tame at first but the extended weekend more than made up for that.

Monday we had 3 hours of French, 2 hours of Wolof and 3 hours of Pulaar (another minority native African language.) That was a mental marathon to kick off our week. 8 hours of languages, none of which I am fluent in! Monday was also the 1 month anniversary of our arrival in Senegal.

Tuesday we started our volunteer work. Rebekah, Leia, Alexis and I all decided to volunteer together at a sort of Kindergarten. The organization is called SOS Child Village, it is an organization present all over the world. They take in and house children who don’t have anywhere else to go. But the other side of it is they provide school for other children as well. So, we helped out with children aged 4-5 which were a mix of “Village children” and outsiders. Outside children pay for school and help keep the organization going. It was Mardi Gras, however, so we ended up just helping the teachers make masks for 2 hours. There were no classes because the children had a big performance that night for the holiday. We had our seminar discussion class and then 2 hours of History of Islam.

Wednesday was another 2 hours of Senegalese literature class discussing different chapters from Cycle of Secheresse. 2 hours of History of Islam and then we all had to pack up for the weekend.

Thursday we loaded up the van with 10 toubabs, our Wolof and Pulaar professor (same woman) our Music/Dance professor (Gaby Ba), plus about 12 other musicians. It was a long day, we left at about 8 (only an hour late, so that’s good for Senegalese time). We stopped a lot along the way to pick people up, see Saint Louis, drop stuff off and visit some historical sights. We got into Mboumba around 10 pm. Mboumba is a small village in northern Senegal, towards the center of the country. We drive north up the coast and then went inward. We were basically right across the river from Mauritania. After a wonderful dinner of meat and rice, we all crashed. It was hard to get a good night’s sleep all weekend. There were tons of mosquitoes inside or outside and no real good way to hang up mosquito nets. Inside it was too hot all night but outside was nice until about 4 am when it got super cold. The stars were amazing, though.

Friday we started to prepare for the festival. We found out it was called “Festival Sahel Ouvert” (Open Sahel Festival) and it was all about celebrating the culture, musique, dance, theater, and traditions of that part of Senegal which is made up mostly of the Peul and Toukulor minorities (both of which speak Pulaar.) Confused yet? We had 2 hours of djembe practice with Gaby. We went over the songs we had been working on in class and finally got the songs written down. It has been hard for us toubabs to learn songs orally in the traditional way. We explored the town a little bit and met the kids that we would be teaching for the performance. We couldn’t teach all the village children for the festival, there are about 400 in school, so Gaby had to choose randomly about 40 to perform with us. The village was pretty small and impoverished so when we rode around in our huge bus full of toubabs, we got more attention than usual. It’s safe to say that we were a spectacle all weekend. The kids picked up the songs pretty well but they were all a little bit excitable and we got mobbed everywhere we went. Once a kid jumped onto the ladder on the back of the bus and tried to ride along with us. Sayer, our driver, was not happy about that at all. After another late, but tasty, dinner, we set up a toubab tent town on the roof. We used steel rebar to drape our mosquito nets around the thin foam mats we had to sleep on and that gave us protection from the bugs. Most of us had warm enough clothing so it was easier to get some rest. We were roughing it in a lot of ways (pit toilets and bucket showers) which made going back to Dakar feel like life is pretty luxurious here.

Saturday things started to heat up. We were awoken by the sun every morning at about 7. And it went from cold to burning hot pretty quickly after that. We had another 2 hour session with the children, and they were a little better behaved this time. They were still pretty high maintenance mostly because all the kids that weren’t chosen tried to either sneak in or watch at the windows. After a big lunch, we had theater practice. Helping out with the theater production was kind of a surprise (as most things are here) but we tried to roll with it. We ended up borrowing big, flowing Senegalese traditional dresses (more like long robes with skirts underneath) called boubous. And we had a few lines in Pulaar that we delivered before the actual play began. We were quite the sight of toubabs. I think the villagers were pretty shocked that we could speak even a few words in Pulaar so our contribution was appreciated even though we felt kind of foolish at the time. We stayed to watch the play and didn’t understand a word of it.

Sunday was the high point for me. We had a final dress rehearsal to practice with the kids. They were getting the songs memorized and it was a pretty impressive effort given they only had 2 days to prepare. After lunch the whole schedule got jumbled up (as is likely to happen here.) We were supposed to play at 4 but it was too hot and we didn’t end up going to the festival grounds until about 6. It took at least an hour to set up children, toubabs, djembes and the sound system. Gaby played guitar with us and sang, plus Isa played the kora (a wonderful traditional African string instrument.) We all matched in cute, colorful vests with a simple blue skirt wrap. Sean got to wear Senegalese clothing too. As the only man, he is often our oddball. We ended up singing a song in French, 1 in Wolof, 1 in Youruba and a couple in Pulaar, plus some that we weren’t sure about the language. The 10 of us played djembe on a couple of the songs. This was my high point, it was very enjoyable to just sit outside and play music for this village of several hundred. It was not a huge festival, but it was certainly a good sized production. Afterwards, we introduced ourselves and I started with an intro in Pulaar “Minen komin Ameriknaabe” (We are Americans.) “Minen komin jangoobe” (we are students.) And then each person gave their name “Min ko Adama mbiete mi” (My name is Adama). I have been using my Senegalese name a lot since it is easier. We tried to rest during the evening because we had to go back and perform with Gaby that night. We had a starch-filled dinner of French fries, pasta, bread and meat. And then around 11 we headed back to the festival. Gaby went on at about 1 and he played 3 songs, we accompanied him on the last one. It was a pretty simple vocal back-up but he changed the song on us at the last minute! We were supposed to do one with him that we knew well and had the lyrics to, but he decided to do a different one that we had only heard once before. Oh well, it is something to look back on and laugh at now. At about 3 am the final act went on. It was Baba Maale, a pretty well known Senegalese singer. We headed home after that and crashed for a few hours.

Monday we tried to recuperate on the bus. It was difficult with a 12 hour bus ride in front of us, and we were all starting to get sick. There was so much dust in the air all the time because it is their dry season and it was much hotter inland than it is in Dakar. Plus, there was extreme temperature fluctuation at night. Couple that with sharing water, lacking a good night’s sleep and over-exerting our voices for 3 days straight…well it was bound to happen. We all pretty much have this low-grade gunky cold right now and I can feel my tonsils swollen with dust and exhaustion. But life goes on.
It was an epic weekend and easily a once in a lifetime experience! This was the first year that they did this festival and I hope that they keep it up.

Have a great week everyone, and take care.
Peace.