Many many updates

It's been a good long while since my last post, as I thought it might be. I'll try to keep this as organized and brief as possible while I hit all the major points.

We finished batik up, and I'm fairly pleased with how one of my pieces turned out. It's a beach scene with a kora and tama player. I also made a shirt with a djembe player on it, and a blue cloth with red cracks, but I'm less pleased with how those turned out.

On Friday, we went to the island of Gorée, a tiny island which was a major hub in the Atlantic slave trade. Upon arriving, I was immediately struck by what I felt to be the strong contrast between the island's gorgeous architecture and its horrific history. Our first stop on the island was a boarding house where slaves were kept in pretty abysmal conditions before being shipped out to the US or Europe. There were some other tourists there, and it was weird to see them taking photos smiling in front of the slave quarters. We then visited a museum dedicated to women in Senegal, which was apparently the first of its kind in West Africa. There was a lot of interesting stuff there, but the heat made it a little hard to concentrate at times. After lunch, we wandered around the island for a while, and Jeannie and I got the opportunity to visit the old French fort on the top of the island, which has been converted into an artists' studio. After visiting another former fort that now functions as a sort of museum of anthropology, we headed back to the mainland. Overall, I was surprised by how tourist-y the island was. The locals seemed really eager to capitalize on the presence of visitors, and nobody seemed particularly eager to acknowledge the island's history.

The next day, we left for our village stay. I was put in Keur Demba Kebe with Allie and Sonya, and I got to stay with the very wonderful Mbaye family, who named me Tala for the duration of my stay there. While most everyone in the village spoke only Wolof, I managed to survive by recognizing key words and getting help from my host brother, Masila, who spoke French. Additionally, there was a Peace Corps volunteer who had been living there for the past couple of years, so she was able to do some very helpful translating when she was around.

The village itself was comprised of four adjacent compounds along the road from Thies, with a fifth across the street. None of the compounds on our side of the road had electricity, and water came from a tap in the center of the village. In the three days that I was there, it's safe to say that I did very little compared to an average day in Dakar. Men would generally work in the field in the mornings while women would do housework, and much of the rest of the day was spent lying around in the heat. It was nice not having a TV running 24/7, the food was pretty good, and the night sky was absolutely beautiful without the lights of the city nearby.

On our last night, we had a sort of dance party in the larger central village of Keur Sadaro. I'm certain I made a complete fool of myself, but such is the life of a Toubab. It was especially odd considering Muslim men don't dance at all, so I initially wasn't sure if I risked offending anyone by dancing. However, it became clear that the opposite was true--I risked offending people by not dancing. On the plus side, I did get to wear some of the ridiculous clothes I bought in the market a while back.

Also, we went to the former colonial capital of Saint Louis. Because I'm getting sick of typing, I'm going to save that for a separate post.