cultural schtuff

I'm learning a lot about Senegal, the Fouta region in particular, and working for a non-profit while I'm staying here. The primary purpose of this blog is "cultural awareness," though, so here goes. After almost two weeks in my town, Ourossogui, I'm learning the ropes. I'm really struggling to learn the language here, which I'll talk about in a minute, but I can get around my town and am starting to understand Senegal a little better. What I've been most happy to experience is teranga, or hospitality. People say that Senegal is the country of hospitality, and it really is. After eating lunch at a colleague's house for the first time several days ago, he invited me to come eat lunch with them every day. After going there twice more for rice with fish, the typical Senegalese lunch, they invited me over every day for dinner, too! I haven't gone yet (I'm going tonight) but it's astounding how generous that it, albeit completely taken for granted here. It's something most people wouldn't imagine doing in the United States or Europe, so I was surprised but excited at the same time. Besides a guard where I live, there's usually nobody else and going out to eat by myself can get a little lonely. So having the opportunity to eat with a nice family every day is awesome. Of course I'm going to reciprocate as much as I can. We're going to trade Pulaar and English lessons, their 7-year old son asked me to buy him a ball, and I'm going to leave one or two things that are hard to come by here, but valuable in a utilitarian sense anyways.

So on to Pulaar…. It's really hard. There's a few different dialects spoken between different regions of Senegal, Mali, Niger, Guinea, and maybe a couple other locations. Here it's called Pula Futa, and it's completely changed my paradigm of language learning. I just don't understand it. It's complicated because the conjugations don't work the same way. Words can change pretty much completely whether or not they're singular or plural, and there's a lot of words that mean the same thing. Commands or questions like "you do this?" and "she does this?" (same this) might sound completely different. Plus I didn't really have a language training before coming here, so I'm having some difficulties… Excited about it though because some Peace Corps volunteers have picked it up decently after 6 months, so I'm going to work hard to copy them.

The last thing I'll talk about in this post is the "toubab" effect. The word toubab comes from the Arabic word toubib, meaning doctor, or so I've heard anyways. Now it's used throughout a decent part of the world, especially West Africa, to mean foreigner, stranger, or whitey. Everyone will call me toubab here and it generally doesn't bother me. Kids usually just yell it to get a wave or a handshake or a "bonjour, ça va?" so it's typically pretty innocent. I've heard some people get frustrated with it because adults can use it with a somewhat negative connotation, and because a lot of times it accompanies assumed social status. As in "toubab, give me money."



Okay, that's it for the moment. More multi-media posts to come in the near future. Take it easy.