pesach in senegal

This is me retelling the part of the story about the parting of the Red Sea.
If it weren't obvious enough without the gesticulations.

I know! I’ve been blogging so infrequently. The truth of the matter is that I haven’t had much to write about at all these days. The events in my life have slowed down to this tam-tam lullaby pace with little variation from day to day (as Africa was before I came, the way it will be long after I go). The familiarity of it all has grown on me.

Last night, though, we celebrated Passover. I've found something very poignant in the way our holidays, especially the Jewish holidays, have materialized in this faraway place. My friend Inbal and I planned a sedar for some friends and coworkers, and it was really one of the best I can remember! (At least, it beat last year’s marathon sedar at the Chabad House.) It was an interesting mix of people gathered, from all geographic origins (the States, Europe, Africa) and faiths (Muslims, Christians, Atheists, Vegans). Inbal masterfully created something like an abridged haggada/passover 101 guide that carried us through the rituals, the storytelling, the songs, distilling the lessons of the old festival and imbuing them modern relevance. On my part, I made a killer matza kugel and, as the youngest (per tradition), sang the Four Questions. Why is this night different from all other nights? Inbal and I fell pretty naturally into the role of Jewish Mother, and in typical fashion fretted about having too little food, when in the end our left overs could have fed the entire quartier. Our dinner was potluck and kind of Sephardic in nature, given the ingredients we’ve got at our disposal: Moroccan chicken tangine, Yemeni beef stew the color of cumin and turmeric, fresh fruit and chocolate, we made our charoset with dates and raisons and peanuts. We ate so much! We drank so much wine, as custom obliged. All night we lied around the terrace on woven mats, while orange candle-light illuminated our faces and danced on the walls. It’s so good, continuing this year after year after year.

Inbal found a poem to share with everyone, by Judy Chicago. One which resonates with the nature of all this, one which is kind of cheesy in a sunshine-hippie-lovin sort of way, but a valuable ideal nonetheless. One that’s worth trying to live up to anyways.

And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind

And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another’s will

And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many

And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life’s creatures

And then everywhere will be called Eden once again

such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there

I can tell it's been a while since I last posted anything, because the henna on my feet has long since faded. Except the toenails never lose the color. When you keep an eye out for it, you'll notice on the nails of all the women here strokes of burnt red, in crosses, stripes in some stage or another of growing out.

I have trouble grasping the idea that I've been here for seven months. It's gone so fast, but at the same time, it feels like a year or more. It still feels impermanent (my time here), but at the same time, I feel really at home. Almost. Although I can say the thought of family and Mexican food that awaits me in the ever imminent future is marvelous. I'm not sure what will become of my blog, though, when this journey's said and done.

So ever since I wrapped up my field visits a couple weeks ago, I've been nestled in Thiès and reluctant to move. Although my girlfriends and I make it to the beach some weekends, or Dakar when we're feeling really ambitious. I'm not stranger to big cities, but when I'm in Dakar I feel like a country mouse. My friends that live there like the ultra-swanky Lebanese bars where, no matter what I'm wearing, I feel very underhip. The bartenders ask my order in Wolof which means they think I'm in the Peacecorps. Which inevitably means I look frizzy, malnourished, and most likely wearing Birkenstocks. (Which respectively, I'm not, I'm not, and ok, I am).

The tilka's red for the brow of a bride / And betel-nut's red for lips that are sweet; / But, for lily-like fingers and feet / The red, the red of the henna-tree. 

Sarojini Naidu

presidential endorsement

Really moving piece by New York Times Op Ed Columnist, Roger Cohen. (With a foot on two continents, Cohen makes the connections that distance, economics, civil rights, etc ... have obscured but not eroded).

Beyond America’s Original Sin
March 20, 2008

There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!

The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.

Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.

The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.

A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.

A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.

The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”

But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”

This post is the latest in my own series of desultory responses to a fascinating and broad-themed New York Times series on global migrations. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/world/asia/17remit.html?pagewanted=1)

This one is about Dilip Ratha, the once shoeless Brahmin country boy turned Ph.D-touting World Bank man, who’s life work exposed the major impact of remittances (the money sent home by immigrants) in developing countries.

To highlight some outstanding points in the article:

- The International Monetary Fund said the Philippines received $122 million [per year in remittances]. Mr. Ratha produced an estimate 51 times higher: $6.2 billion. His tallies, first published in 2003, showed that remittances, once dismissed as the equivalent of a rounding error, were nearly three times greater than the world’s combined foreign aid.

- In subsequent work, Mr. Ratha has argued that the importance of the money exceeds its sheer size. Unlike foreign aid, it cannot be skimmed by potentates. Unlike investors who flee crises, migrants increase their giving during hard times. The money is directed to the needy. And Mr. Ratha contends it is well-monitored, too, by intimates on the sending end. “It comes with a lot of goodwill, advice, knowledge and punishment if necessary — keeping in mind the welfare of the recipient,” he said.

- Mr. Ratha agrees that migration is wrenching and the economic forces that drive it are often unjust. But, “Once people decide to migrate, benefits can occur for local development — that’s the point,” he said.

The matter at hand here is immigration and how it pertains to development in the home country. To me, at the heart of it lies this fundamental dilemma: on the one hand, immigration is key to development. Giving money - and whatever other psychological/social boosts - directly to the people who need it most is essential. On the other hand, immigration has a somber side. Starting with the population left behind, the receiving end I guess, remittances may alleviate the symptoms of poverty but not the embedded causes. Whether they invest or squander the money is up to them. (Freedom to spend has got to be an important aspect of development I haven’t yet fully thought through). Even then, they aren’t getting 100% of remittances. Money-transfer companies like Western Union can claim as much as 10% of funds sent home.

On the giver’s end, the impacts of migration are a heavy weight to bear. I don’t even mean economically or social justicely, we all know that immigrants who come from the developing world - whether they lack language skills or “papers” - take on the dregs of job barrel. (And their family members left behind don’t always understand this).

But when it comes to the immigrants themselves, I’m less interested in the economic aspects than the cultural and psychological ramifications of it all. What impact does it have when families are broken up by oceans? When new families are merged across language and ethnic barriers? How great is the sense of displacement - in the sense that the immigrant is at home neither here nor there? And finally, how do new immigrants relate to or alter existing immigrant minorities? For example, how do new African immigrants to the US fit into the African-American community. (Which is not really to suggest there is one homogenous African American community).

Just a couple weeks ago, a Senegalese friend of mine from Boston came home to Senegal for the first time in four years. It was funny to see him, because when I left Boston he was still living a little under the radar shall we say and I just didn’t imagine I would see him here. (Also kind of a bizarre clash between my past and my present, but that’s another story). We went dancing, it was fun. But I got him talking, about some things I’d never even thought to ask him six months ago, and he told me what it’s like, coming home. If not so much in words, in action. The pressure to prove success, to feign it if need be … the inability to express isolation with loved ones here - where no indigenous word for “lonely” even exists.

I guess this was sort of all over the place - starting with immigration and economic development and ending with immigration and identity crisis. (well, kind of). But at the end of the day it’s all part of the parcel isn't it?

Tonight I'm making a religious pilgrimage to Tivouane ... more on that to come...

points of view: black on white and white on black ... the very coolest artist Faith Ringgold mixes it up!! http://www.faithringgold.com/racialquestions/

Again I'm wrapping up another mission in the field.

Darkness falls as soon as the sun slips under the horizon, and the unlit room around me has as sunk silently from the blue shadows of evening to pitch black stain of night in as little time as it took me to write it. Up and down the corridor fluorescent light spills out of doorways. The cry of the muezzin marks the end of day as always, it just briefly interrupts the white noise of the quartier - bleating animals, tvs blaring soccer matches and repeated soaps, hushed, fast voices of women. I can hear Coumbis, the little girl who lives next door, suffering some awful fit of giggles. She has a barbie doll she calls Madame Toubab … something like the equivalent of Mrs. Whitey. Her little brother Abdoulaye is about as small as a peanut and he imitates everything she does.

I’m writing this from Tambacounda. Work has brought me once again out in the bush, and though I wasn’t much looking forward to this mission, it’s been pretty good. I’ve really been on the go since New Years, moving from here to there, never staying in one place for place for more than two weeks. It’s been wonderful to see as much as I’ve seen of the country but I’m looking forward to staying put for a while when I finally get back to Thiès. It’s getting hot, too.

I spent last week in in the northwestern region of Matam, right up there on the border with Mauritania in a small town called Ourosogui.

Old Ourosogui with your vaguely Japanese sounding name,
You old stomping grounds of traders and herders and tumbleweeds,
You dusty truckstop prelude to the three and a half million square miles of desert beyond you.

The winds are hot there and when there is no wind, the sitting heat warps the view into the distance. There is another volunteer who lives out there - a super Argentinean girl with a bad back but beautiful in all other regards. A breath of fresh air as they say if you can imagine … we spent one night up on the roof, sleeping under the stars, though I didn’t do much of that after all the café touba we drank beforehand. The people that live in the region are mostly Pular, it’s as if the border with Mauritania might well enough not exist. Islam and tradition weigh heavily in these villages that bake in the sun. A great many people have been resistant to our NGO’s presence in the area. You have to understand the education program that we implement in each village; while it brings truly great changes, in terms of health, literacy, alleviation of poverty, etc. - the image it’s gained within Senegal, and even more so internationally, is primarily as a combatant against female circumcision. A lot of people see that as an attack on their traditions, on Islam; a lot of people just don’t want to abandon a custom so integral and so meaningful to their cultures, histories … so not everyone welcomes our presence warmly and unconditionally.

Tamba was really good. Despite my protests, I left the village of Lounthji loaded with presents - calabashes, wooden spoons, indigo cloth, and a SHEEP! Oh little baby, he was soo cute and dyed BLUE. They must have cleaned him to where he was white as the day he was born, and then wrapped him up in indigo clothes because his wooly coat glowed in this lovely iridescent way. He had Xs carved into his ears. He cried a lot :( When I brought him back to the office, they asked me when we were going to eat him, but I told them as a rule I don’t eat anything I’ve known for over a half hour. I’ll have to leave him here, because he wouldn’t do so well on the long trip back west.

while we're on the topic photographer Antonin Kratochvil has produced a really moving series on African AIDS patients and their treatment with antiretroviral drugs. Haven't yet found the work in full online, but here's an interesting CNN segment on it: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIhd3UuHbrk.

Bush & Africa

It seems a president in his final year of office is a little innocuous. We can almost disregard all of his delusional worldviews and warviews, his inadequate response to a drowning New Orleans (and a drowning economy), his nod of approval to secret prisons, massive infringements on privacy, and funding for faith-based anything. As well as his multi-billion dollar cuts in domestic spending on health care and education, even his goofy pride in his one great domestic success (no child left behind) in face of sinking educational achievement rates as our peers in Europe and Asia outperform us.

That being said, Africa-wise he hasn’t done all too bad. Not outstanding either.

During his six day tour of Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin, and Rwanda, Bush visited several AIDS treatment centers that his own investment initiatives have helped fund. Writing for the Nicholas Kristoff (aah, my heart flutters ...) blog, Josh Ruxin claims the US has invested over $19 billion to date, 4 billion higher than what Bush committed in 2003. But who can really say which numbers are rosy and which are realistic? The breakdown isn’t as luminous as it may seem. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) spends only about 55% on treatment of individuals infected with AIDS, mainly through the distribution of antiretroviral drugs. 20% goes to prevention programs; of that, an absurd 33% is spent on programs that promote abstinence. (One of the several reasons abstinence education is so futile in Africa is that in societies that condone men's polygamy and infidelity, and silence women's voices, married women contract the virus all the time.) None of the funds are expressly apportioned to improving the health systems in Africa which, in their crumbling state, have dangerously thwarted the good intentions of donors aid organizations.

On other fronts … While Bush hasn’t sent American troops into Darfur (should we, could we?), he has announced just this week he would free $100 million from his foreign aid budget to assist African countries that send peace-keeping troops to the region. He needs to back this kind of military support with harsher diplomatic efforts with the government in Khartoum. It might be too little too late, but it’s more than the Clinton administration did for Rwanda.

Africa's never been a fast-lane kind of place. Love it or hate it, the pace of life, maybe the pan-African philosophy, is ndank ndank (slowly, slowly). That's not how our country rolls, but it seems we've let it define our foreign aid.

warning to readers. someone has been commenting on my postings, and in the comment they leave a link which contains a virus. So don't click on any links you might find in these comments! I have the feeling this could be a blogspot-wide trend soooo, as if we need reminding, best to not click on or open anything that looks suspicious ...