Lots of questions about my future, now. About whether I want to spend it in West Africa, where I feel that my strengths are highly complimented within this culture of necessitated charm and talk. Or whether my interests take me to Iran, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan. To Arabic and Farsi and the middle east, and the Taliban and guns and women in burkhas....I'd miss the food here. That's for sure. Replacing yassa with falafel would only make me sad, but wouldn't it be something else, to live in Tehran.....I'd eat falafel to live in that citadel of paradox.
But let's not forget that I might just get this one chance to visit Paris, turning it down seems traditional, backwards, dependent and wasteful. But maybe my default can't just be "travel and move when possible" which I adore for its simplicity. What my default CAN be, i don't know. Which I suppose means that there could also be a life sans default, which scares me, cause mostly I don't think I know enough about what I want and need to make decisions....save that I want to protect myself from failure. And that failure includes regret--it's too bad I don't know what I regret these days. It was easier, not having any friends...the junior high life. Now, wanting to do good by many people, shit's complicated, and I don't know What to think.

caste

la logique du caste, le stratification social.
everyone has a supreme power, like blacksmiths can use fire, or griots can sing praises of entire families, so they must necessarily be brought to a lower caste to be controlled, for the good of the community!

Ah! OK! We do it like this.

A truly Senegalese maxim, we do it like this stands for so much more than the taranga ji (hospitality) billowing so freely about the country like a strip of wind battered heavy duty damask cloth, battering us oh so sweetly at every senegalese moment....it's sort of how everyone, senegalese or martian has to function here in Senegal. With some flexibility, mindful of blacouts (coupe de courrants) and floods and malaria and other inconveniences that might cause a trafic jam or a late blog entry.....a really tardy blog, maybe two-months out of date type-blog.

My two months have so fare been marked with amour for my friends Senegalese and American, my glorious professors, for Waly, for yassa, for everything but my sweat, which plagues me every day under the hot hot heat.

But as the saying goes, ndank-ndank....if you continue to try, you will one day catch the monkey in the countryside.....roughly translating to sometimes shit just doesn't happen very fast!

More to come, and as always, love,


Olivia