Adventures in Water World: Cabo Verde and Brotherhoods

         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.