The beginning/ Yoff

I have been meaning to create a blog about Senegal since I arrived but I never had the time to do so. This should serve as a medium to gain information about life in Dakar.

I am currently in Yoff; a fishing village about 20 minutes North of Dakar. People have said it is a "magical place" but I have yet to feel any magic. There is a lot of mysticism surrounding the creation of the village. The Yoffoise believe that genies look after them and the keep them in good health. If you do not pay homage to the genie as often as necessary bad things will happen. This mysticism sharply conflicts with the prevalence of Islam, which is omnipresent. There are faces of Islamic leaders painted everywhere. I find the village to be far more traditional than Dakar. Women rarely leave the house and when they do they cover their heads. Many young men sit outside drinking tea and talking all day long. There is a lot of unemployment.

My Yoff host family is very nice. They gave me a Wolof name, Sufi Samba. No one calls me Stephanie is the house, I do not think many of the family know my real name. There are 11 people living in the house. There are three little girls who are sweet; one of the girls is 10 years old wears a hearing aid. I wonder how she is treated outside of the house. I also wonder if she goes to school because she did not really know the colors in French. She is a very kind and gentle child. My family speaks much less French than my Dakar family. My host mother in Yoff is an Arabic teacher and her niece who lives with us takes her classes in Arabic.

I am trying to learn Wolof but I am having trouble learning it outside of the classroom. My host family asks me simple questions and I learn that way. I think I progressed much faster when I was taking Wolof at the Baobab Center.

In this Yoff house, there are 2 goats living in my kitchen. I am pretty sure that they will be sacrificed for the end of Ramadan. I do not know if I will be able to handle that. They do smell very badly and their smell permeates the house from time to time.