wow, it has been a long and tiring week

So things are going well, but I am EXHAUSTED. It is exhausting and difficult to lead a double-life... one where I live in the 5-star Radisson Blu hotel and take taxis and go shopping and go out to dinner and people speak English to me and the outlets in the hotel room take American plugs and the concierge is willing to do ANYTHING for you, and one where I live in a run-down neighborhood with my Senegalese family and take Cars Rapides and have to go to classes and conserve money and plan my trip to Morocco which is in less than a week, and all these other things.

It has been wonderful having Mommy and Jenna here, don't get me wrong, but it has just been so surreal to be experiencing Senegal as if I am on vacation, because I am not, and there are certain realities, like having to go home to Ouakam every night to check in with my host family before going to sleep at the hotel, or going days without seeing my friends and classmates when I am used to seeing them within hours, that remind me that I have a life here that I am kind of just putting on hold to hang out with my (American) family. Not bad, not good, just very strange and surreal.

Somehow I have become sick again, with a very sore throat and clogged sinuses. I went to La Pharmacie and bought Oracefal, which is the antibiotic that I took last time, which worked like a charm. So far, it has not been working. I have had this sore throat for almost a week, and I feel like every day that is long and jam-packed only runs me down further and makes it worse. I just need some quiet time to relax and let my body take some deep breaths!!

This past weekend was wonderful, though. Jenna, Mommy, and I went to St. Louis which is north of Dakar, and it used to be the capital of Senegal in the French colonial period. The city is beautiful and filled with history, but unfortunately we were only able to spend half a day there before coming home, so I was most certainly not able to explore it and get to know it the way I would have liked.

We also stopped at Lac Rose, which is supposed to be this epic lake that is pink-tinged, but because of the position of the sun or something, the lake was not rose, but blue, like all other lakes in the United States, so that was kind of a bummer. However, we stopped with our tour guide at a Fulani village, which was interesting, and I think it was cool for my family to see the more traditional side of Senegal.

Oh, and last Friday, we went to Bandiya which is this animal reserve, south of Dakar. We saw zebras and giraffes and rhinocerouses and warthogs and antellopes and ostriches... so basically, pretty much the entire cast of the Lion King. It was SO COOL.

I talked with our tour guide about a lot of the things in Senegal that I have yet to experience, and probably won't get around to during my stay here. There is actually another psychiatric hospital that is outside of Dakar, which is allegedly even better than the one near my school, in Fann, that I was trying to get an internship at. Now, so late in the semester, I think it isn't worth my time to start pursuing another psych hospital and putting all the effort into an internship that will last only a few weeks, so I am disappointed that it was a missed opportunity.

However, I have gleaned a lot of information about my family's ethnic group (the Lebou people), a noble class of fisherman that inhabits Ouakam and Yoff. They are particularly into the voodoo, animism, traditional-based religion, while still believing whole-heartedly in Islam. What I learned in my "Senegal Today" course is that Senegal is 95% Muslim, 5% Christian, and 100% traditional, meaning that there is somehow a melange of traditional animist beliefs with everyone's own particular religion. Thus, I have found out that a very important practice to the Lebou people is something called a "ndepp" which is a ceremony held at a "xamb" which is the altar or sacred place, where they play the tam-tams (drums) and dance around in a trance and sacrifice goats and cows and chickens, and clear people of possessing spirits.

While that sounds fascinating regardless of its psychological ramifications or implications, the more I find out about the ndepps is that they are for curing psychologically-sick people, and that at the psychiatric hospitals in Dakar, during the intake, they actually have a witch doctor who assesses the patient to make sure that he is truly mentally ill, and not just possessed by spirits. If he is indeed possessed by spirits, then they do the traditional ceremony. If he is genuinely psychotic or mentally ill, then they admit him to the psych ward. But what I find so fascinating is that these ndepps are the Senegalese equivalent to psychiatric care. Before Prozac and electric-shock-therapy and all of our crazy Western inventions to treat the crazies of our society, they believed (and still do, in fact) that what is probably the Western equivalent of schizophrenia or psychosis is simply being possessed by spirits, and that this special witch doctor can cure the malades at a special ceremony.

Anyway, so long, convoluted and complicated, story short, I am realizing every day that there are more and more FASCINATING things that relate to psychology, right here in Senegal. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that 3-4 months is simply not enough to learn all that I want to learn about the culture here, so I am thinking that I will take one of Lizzy's blog comments as a catalyst to actually apply for a Fulbright in psychology in hopes of coming back here to do a more intensive study about the differences in psychiatric treatment cross-culturally.



Whew, that was long.


In other cool news, today I saw the World Cup. No, not the actual soccer game, but the actual golden trophy. Yes, seriously!! I had just gotten on the Car Rapide after walking home with Ryan, and after about a minute, we hit this insane traffic jam, and I could hear sirens coming towards us. Then I saw this crazy motorcade and thought maybe it was the President, Abdoulaye Wade, for some reason. However there were people dressed in Senegalese flags, hanging off the outside of cars and shouting and screaming and applauding, and all the cars on our side of the road were stopped. Then eventually this bus came by with people holding up soccer balls and in the very front of the bus, on the dashboard, was the World Cup. Everyone in the road applauded and was freaking out. I had heard that the Cup was traveling around Africa but I had no idea that it was here in Senegal. What a cool sight to see!!

Sorry this post is so scattered, but that's what happens when I don't write for a week. I will update more tomorrow, and hopefully my life will return to normal and I will become healthy once more (inshallah) soon.