After nine months in
Senegal, I took my first vacation to the little known country of Cabo Verde.
Senegalese PCVs are the only people I know who have ever been to this island
nation, and I’d only heard about a year ago in my Portuguese class. In this
entry, I’m going to talk about my adventures on the high seas, paying my first-ever
bribe, my diagnosis of the health
situation in my village, and the Muslim brotherhoods of Senegal.
Aventura Cabo Verdiana
Adventures are
exciting, but not always. Thoughts like this ran through my head as I was
bounced around in the waves between the Cabo islands. The hospitality and
infrastructure in Cabo Verde felt like a fairytale-land compared to where I
live. This was juxtaposed against our mode of transport, the world’s most
diabolical sailboat. After multiple mishaps like ripping two sails, breaking
our motor, and the despair of no one answering our “mayday” radio calls, our
adventure frequently felt like a misadventure.
After a sojourn to brasil and an onerous intensive Portuguese class, I thought
I’d never again have a reason to speak portugués again. Little did I know that
I’d be off to another of the eight Portuguese-speaking countries, by sea, no
less.
We set sail on New
Years Eve. We brought a few bottles of wine which we didn’t touch until we got
to land, because as the sun set and we lost sight of the lights of Dakar, the
four of us started getting sick. As the French shouting increased, I realized these
were not good conditions. Capitan was the first to toss his cookies, and then
it was just me who hadn’t thrown up.
I thought to myself
“I’ve never thrown from motion sickness, and I’m not about to- BLAAGH,” except
it was more picturesque than that because I wasn’t wearing pants. Being on the
boat felt like a carnival ride that you couldn’t get off of, or like someone
was pushing you out of your chair every time wave hit. It was apparent only to
me that this boat was not meant for cross-Atlantic voyages. We ate nothing
first two days at sea. The violent motions of the ship left me with many
bruises from smashing against the walls and against my companions. No one slept
for more than two hours on any occasion. Going to the bathroom was an athletic
event, because you had a balance a bucket of seawater on your lap while trying
not to get pushed off the toilet. We also didn’t have a shower. A few PCVs
thought I wasn’t going on the boat and that that was lame idea. I challenge
them to stay 96 hours on a shitboat.
On the second day,
our motor stopped working. Again I was the only one even mildly concerned. The
volume of the sea seemed more menacing, no land was in site.
At night we took
turns manning the ship. This was kinda cool. During my shifts I saw shooting
stars and bioluminescence when the waves hit the boat. It was a little spooky
being the only one up and constantly having 15-foot black hills crashing
against you. One night, a fish hit Capitan in the head.
We saw a few lone
birds and sea turtles.
On the fourth day we
spotted land. Maio was an island none of us wanted to visit. But as the sun
started setting, we changed our tune. Now the lack of motor became an issue. We
needed help.
Luckily, we saw
fishermen. So my first words in Portañol were, “¿Pode llevar-nos ao porto?”
Then
dolphins attacked us.
Maio was a great
accident. The multicolored houses and people made me feel like I was in Brasil
again. As the boys talked to a mécanico in the morning, I went on walk through
salt flats.
This clam diver dove down and got our anchor off a rock
Que bonito
Santiago, the
capital city of 80,000 was very chill for a country’s largest city. Cabo Verde
is the only African country where most people are a mix of European
(Portuguese) and African. It’s really only “African” in name only. The islands
were unpopulated before the Portuguese kidnapped people from the mainland and
enslaved them on cotton plantations.
Brava was our
favorite island. It’s the least visited island in the archipelago, and took us
24 hours to sail there from Santiago. One day we hiked up a donkey path into
the crater of the volcano. We heard the islands only get three days of rain a
year.
Unlike
Senegal, no one called us by the color of our skin and no one asked us for
money, except for some illegal immigrants from Senegal
Going
from Brava back to Santiago turned ugly. After 36 hours of sailing we were
going .25 MPH. One sail ripped, and then another. We debated what to do. Food
and water would only last so long. We radioed for help in every language we
knew (seven, no big deal). No response. Andrew sent out an emergency GPS call.
TWO hours later a voice came over the intercom.
“Theese
ees the eSpanish warship, we come to help.”
Quoi?
Then a BIG scary military ship appeared coming full speed perpendicular to us.
A pontoon with a large fan sail came cruising to us. This vessel was manned by
a very sexy Spanish woman in a bright orange jumpsuit. We small-talked with the
Spanish for a while. They took pictures of us with their tablet devices. Seven
hours later we made it to port.
The
next day, my last day, we got into some trouble. I should say, some more trouble. Like the upstanding citizens that we are, we
went to buy our visas at the port. We were ushered into a room where it was
just an officer and us. He asked us where we’d come from. I said Senegal, one
of my partners in crime said Brava. Uh oh. The officer put on a sad voice, and
told us we’d been in the country illegally and we’d have to a $5,000 fine per
person. Did I mention that I said we’d come from Senegal, not another part of
the country?
We
brought up the fact that when we originally arrived in Santiago on a Friday
night, and the immigration office was closed till Monday. This was true; we
hadn’t wanted to wait three days. May I mention, our first island, had NO
immigration office. The officer continued with his “I hate to do this to you
speech.” I started dropping stories about our humanitarian work. After my
longest Portuguese conversation to date, the officer said he’d overlook the
incident and not fine us. Then he smoothly mentioned a 1,000 escudo “service
fee”.
Having
spent about two and half years in Africa and Latin America, I’m surprised it’s
taken so long for someone to solicit a bribe from me. In retrospect, it didn’t
matter what we told the guy, he was just going to get that $12.
Muslim Brotherhoods in
Senegal
In the states, you may only
read about Muslim brotherhoods in relation to Egyptian politics. Here,
brotherhoods are also in bed with politicians. Marabouts lead the brotherhoods,
and every Muslim Senegalese has a picture of their marabout in their house.
It’s tempting to compare brotherhoods and marabouts to different Christian
denominations and pastors, but there is little similarity.
In
the last election, marabouts urged followers not the vote for Macky Sall. Macky
won. Around election time, a marabout in Thies held a meeting of his young male
followers. Shortly afterward, two of the boys were found, murdered, in shallow
graves near the meeting-site. The marabout was put in an air-conditioned jail
cell and his followers waged destructive protests for weeks. As I drove through
Thies, I saw businesses that had been ransacked by these men. The marabout is
still in jail.
One day I was
talking to my midwife and our nurse’s teen bride. The skin around the girl’s
eye was darker than the rest of her face. I thought maybe her skin-whitening
cream had created a blotch, but my midwife pointed at her face and said, “Her
marabout did that.” What would compel a religious leader to punch a girl in the
face, hard enough to leave a baseball sized bruise? I never found out. But if
he is capable of doing something barbaric like that, I wonder what he’d done to
the girl that you couldn’t see.
Health Course at the Primary
School
I
finished my health class a few weeks ago. We commemorated our achievement by
listening to Youssou N’dour and eating bananas. Since nutrition was a theme of
the course, I wanted a healthy snack. The kids serenaded their teacher and I
with their newly learned song about preventing malaria. The kids even got Madame
Khady Diop to start dancing (that’s me, and I wasn’t exactly putting up
resistance). It was an end to a nerve-wracking, exhilarating class.
In the three weeks I
worked at the school, all three of the teachers I worked with were absent for
at least a few days. It seems teacher absenteeism isn’t just a problem in US
public schools.
Another challenge
was teaching the topics in a way that was relatable to the kids who are growing
up in a resource poor area, completely the opposite of my childhood. One theme
of the class was dental hygiene. Many health PCVs don’t deal with the topic
because no one wants to pay money to protect their teeth. Most adults have
green or brown, cracked teeth.
I
cut up some egg cartons to make them look like teeth, and had the kids brush
and floss them. The kids were all over the place with the floss. Here I was,
telling them how to protect their teeth, and this is a town that doesn’t sell
dental floss. These kids will NEVER see a dentist. I realized that the thing
they have control over is there consumption of sugar and cigarettes. Cutting
down on these things would actually save money.
When I talked about
nutrition, I started getting nervous when I saw that one child in class was
severely malnourished. There I was, telling them to avoid the popsicles that
are sold in plastic bags, and this kid was probably getting really hungry
hearing about different kinds of foods. The food pyramid was hard. One of my
teachers thought that bread was a protein and kids thought milk should be in sugar
category because you only drink milk with sugar here. Maybe it should be in the
sugar category then.
The class was a
success. Next year I’m going to do it completely differently.
