Pink Lake and Toubakouta

a camel at Pink Lake, you could pay to ride them for 15 minutes

So, I have had several adventures since I last wrote to report upon. The first is a trip that we took two weekends ago to the Pink Lake a little bit outside of Dakar.
    On Saturday morning, we met up on the VDN, which is a large highway that runs through Dakar. After flagging down several cabs and having them laugh at us and drive away for asking to go to Pink Lake, we got a driver to agree to go for 10,000 CFA. Once we got out of the city, we realized why all of the other drivers had laughed at us. The dirt roads through the little towns we had to pass through were flooded and about an hour into our drive we found ourselves sitting on the side of the road next to our broken down cab. Luckily our driver was handy and he got the car back up and running and we reached Pink Lake about an hour later. The lake is pink because of the population of pink halophilic bacteria that live in its water, which has a 40% salt content. Unfortunately, it is now the rainy season, so the lake was flooded and not very pink. It was also a little too dirty to swim, so we walked around the lake and watched the salt collectors. They stand in the lake and scrape salt off the bottom. This salt is then dried on the side of the lake. After a small snack at one of the restaurants near the lake, we headed back to Dakar with our cab driver. He had found someone to lead us on a safer route home, which ended up being through a cornfield. At one point we got stuck in some mud, but luckily a group of little boys were there to push us out. The driver was also an Avril Lavigne fan, so we were transported back to eighth grade on the ride home. The Pink Lake didn’t turn out to be too exciting, but I very much enjoyed seeing some of Senegal on our drive.

the salt industry at Pink Lake

    My second adventure was a trip to Toubakouta, a village near the Gambian border and close to my internship site, with the MSID program last weekend. I got up at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning (6am) and we drove for five very bumpy hours. We stayed in a quite luxurious hotel next to a river filled with mangrove trees and spent the weekend eating delicious French food there, swimming in the pool and dancing. On Friday we visited the Post de Santé in Toubakouta and met the nurse and the midwife who work there. They were really interesting and the midwife showed us here log of all of the women that deliver their babies there. There was one women recorded who was having her fourteenth child! Also on Friday we visited a village and talked to the villagers and danced with them. They told us about all of the problems they have with access to health facilities and schools for their children. It’s amazing how different the country of Senegal is from the city. The villagers said that many of the women have their babies in the back of horse carts because it takes so long to get to the Poste de Santé.

the river with mangroves and pirogues in Toubakouta

bitter eggplants

the walk down to the dock at our hotel in Toubakouta

village kids carrying mangrove seeds

    On Saturday morning we planted mangroves, which was really fun. I think I’ve talked about how you plant them here before and it is very simple. The trees drop their seeds and you plant the pointed end down in the sand when the tide is low. We rode a pirogue out to the spot where we were planting and proceeded to get very wet and muddy and plant about a million mangrove seeds, or at least it felt that way. In the afternoon we rode a pirogue around another rover and saw more mangroves. The mangroves and very peaceful and I saw a few really beautiful birds. On Saturday night, we went to another small village and saw la lutte. La lutte is basically wrestling and is the national sport of Senegal. The fighters that we saw were young men, but the fights that they have during the season in Dakar are a really big deal and the fighters a giant guys and huge celebrities in Senegal. It’s the only time that there’s really violence in the city because people go a little crazy after the fights and have riots near the stadium. Here’s a video of one of the professional fights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkfVozHUtNA
    We headed back on Sunday after a visit to a dara in another little village. A dara is a Koranic school. People send their children there to be boarded and learn the Koran from a marabout, a teacher. These schools are an issue in Senegal because the marabouts claim that part of the education for the talibes, the students, is to learn humility by begging. In the cities children are often forced to beg and are not really taught anything else and the marabouts don’t feed them unless they collect a certain amount of money. The government recently made this practice illegal after Human Rights Watch started noticing. I’m not sure that the new law has done anything, though, as I still see talibes every day. Here’s an article in the New York Times about it of you’d like to read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/world/africa/13dakar.html?_r=1&ref=senegal
    The teacher that we met seemed well-intentioned, though, and very eager to talk about Islam and his hopes for the development of his school. It’s very interesting here how parents have to choose whether to educate their children in the Muslim tradition or send them to French schools, although I think those that are able do both.
So that’s been my past couple of weeks. Here’s another link to some really interesting pictures of Dakar on the NY Times website (where else?): http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/senegals-changing-urban-landscape/?scp=2&sq=senegal&st=cse
I’m not really sure if I agree with the photographer’s assessment of Senegal and Africa and general, but the images give you an idea of how Dakar is really a city in transition.
Anyway, thanks for reading and please comment! Love!