September 18th - Thies

I am hot and sweaty; we've been driving on the highway in a rented van for the past couple of hours.  The van is filled to capacity - there's a narrow aisle squeezed between a row of one-person seats and benches that fit three comfortably and four squashed; once a row has been filled there is a collapsible seat that folds down between the two sides, creating a pokey, rickety seat for some unlucky person.  As usual, there are no seat belts.  I don't even look for them anymore.

Inside the van - note the falling apart ceiling on the right.

Another interior shot - note the photos of the driver's Marabou (spiritual adviser)

In front of Idy's father's home

Traffic inches forward, and on the side of the highway vendors sell batteries, bottled water, and phone cards.  They approach the vehicle, their hands inches from the open windows.  We exit off the highway and take a smaller road filled with pot holes that the driver swerves to miss, and drive past vendors selling meat in stalls - whole limbs of animals on tables in the open air, covered in flies that no one swats away.  The paved road ends and we continue on a red dirt road, a cloud of dust following us, until we approach a building in the center of the village Idy grew up in.  The moment the vehicle approaches, children start running towards it.

A young boy in Thies

Another interior shot

Interior of Idy's father's house

We descend the vehicle and are led to a building that is mercifully cool and dark inside, my eyes feel singed by the sun and my body weakened by the heat.  We are presented to a tall man with a lined face who is introduced to us as Idy's father; I can see the resemblance.  We're invited to rest in a bedroom off the main hallway.  Outside, children look in at us through the open windows.  I lie down on a rug and close my eyes, but my rest is interrupted shortly by a group of rangy teenage girls who fill the room and begin to dance to music playing from cell phones, pulling me away from the wall and asking me to join them.  Exhausted, I do my best to oblige, then find a moment to escape into the heat and sunlight of the outdoors.

I explore the compound; there are several buildings creating a kind of circle, and in the center several women prepare what looks like a huge meal.  On one side of the compound are a row of toilet stalls, which are comprised of a drain in a sunken hollow with foot-shaped indents on either side indicating where to squat.  There is no flushing mechanism, instead a colorful object that looks like a kettle rests just outside the stalls.  I've seen these kettles on the streets in Dakar and had misunderstood their functionality for several days; I thought they were pretty, and had considered trying to buy one to bring back with me.  The bathroom stalls are clean and airy, a lot more pleasant than the ones at the Centre Blaise Senghor, or the ones I've encountered on the highway between Chicago and Michigan, for that matter.

There are goats tied to fence posts, and at least one donkey, which appears on the road bearing the weight of a young boy.  I join my fellow travelers, who have found a place to sit just outside the main house, surrounded by children.   One little girl has installed herself on a lap; she is shy, but very comfortable where she is.  I find a spot to sit down, and momentarily I feel a strange sensation on my scalp, like I've backed up into some leaves.  I turn to see what it could be, and half a dozen children scatter behind me, giggling.  A boy who looks to be about seven or eight years old looks me in the eye and says: "Bic."  "Pardon?" I ask him in French, "donne-moi un Bic," he repeats.  He is serious in his request, no trace of humor on his face.  We were prepared for this; back in Chicago, the women who'd been on this tour before told us to bring gifts for the children: chap stick; hair-ties; pens; paper.  Idy collected them all and had distributed them from the van, where he held court like Santa Claus.  I don't have any more pens on me - I turned them all over to Idy.  "Desole," - sorry, I say to the boy.  He looks at me dubiously.  Later, Idy approaches me and asks if I have any more chap stick - I'd brought six with me as gifts and they were a big hit.  I don't have any more, and I quietly curse the moment at Trader Joe's when I made the decision to buy just six instead of two or three dozen; they came in packages of three for $2.49 each, would it have killed me to spend another $10 or $20?

Idy distributing gifts

I take my camera out, and immediately groups of children begin posing for me.  This is the only place we've been where people want me to take their picture, except for the women - who look at me and shake their heads "no" when I bring the camera to my face.  I hold my hands up and nod, and put the camera away.  The children, however, want to see their likeness on the screen of my digital camera.  One boy follows me from place to place, striking poses that he thinks will be interesting, in the hopes that I will take his picture.  There's a grown man who also wants me to take his picture; he poses with his son, placing the young boy on a drum. 

Father and son posing

We are called to dinner; our group gets a prime spot on the floor of Idy's father's house, outside the rest of the clan sits where they can.  We eat, and I am extra careful not to use my left hand - at the house in Dakar I've slipped once or twice, but it's understood that as visitors we don't completely understand the gravity of this offense, although Malaal once corrected S with unusual sternness.  S is a leftie, so this arrangement has been especially difficult for her to adapt to.  Afterward we walk to a small hill about a hundred yards from the house where drummers have begun to practice.  With light still left in the sky, the rest of the clan arrives, dressed to the nines.  There is dancing, and we are pulled into the fray - the teenage girls who had been practicing earlier take me by the hand and there is no refusing them.  A small child had planted herself on my lap and even this is no excuse; the woman next to me takes the toddler from me and I do my best to follow the dancing girl's lead; she stands across from me and looks me in the eye, I mimic her movements to the best of my ability, letting go of my inhibitions, and quite aware that all eyes are on me.  Moments earlier A had slipped and fallen while dancing, which caused quite an uproar.

When there is no light left in the sky some men bring loudspeakers and a microphone into the circle and begin singing praises to Idy, who enters the circle and dances to his extended family's delight.  I consider the fact that Idy is related to every single person in this village; I consider that this is where he came from, and that most of what he earns in Chicago is very likely sent back here.  I think about how much of the year he spends away from his family.  Entire villages, I've been told, have no grown men left - they've all gone to Europe or the United States to work, sending their earnings back home, some of them unable to return for years at a time.  I am sad and amazed and in awe all at once.  It is overwhelming, and beautiful, and exhausting. 

On the ride back to Dakar several older women ride with us part of the way; they talk and laugh, and break into song spontaneously, singing praises to Idy.

Slowly re-entering the world

I got back last Wednesday, and have been moving at a snail's pace ever since. SO much happened while I was gone - big things like the disaster in Haiti, smaller things like the Conan debacle, and I've been so wiped out it was all I could do to catch up on emails between naps.

I had an amazing time in Senegal, and am slowly creeping back into my "normal" life of applying for jobs, certifying for unemployment benefits, volunteering at various local organizations, and writing for myself and for Gapers Block.

I'm simply amazed at my body's capacity to adapt - for more than two weeks I was in another world, waking up at strange hours, eating different foods, pushing my body to the limit with dance and travel, and not once did I get sick. I think a love letter to my GI system is in order, along with my immune system and my muscles.

I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, and I'll get there, I promise!

Off To The Airport... Again

How is it that December completely took hold of me, leaving me frozen in my tracks, unable to move forward? I never even finished writing about Portugal, and I'm heading out of town again on another adventure later today. Four years ago, I took my first West African Dance class with Idy Ciss. He told me about a two-week dance-themed tour that he leads every year in December in his native Senegal, and I was intrigued. I took a brochure, mulled it over, checked flight prices, and decided I would wait until the following year. After all, I'd only just started taking classes with him, I didn't know whether I'd like it enough to fly all the way to Africa and spend two weeks with him and a group of my fellow dance students.

The next year I wasn't able to go due to my work schedule, nor the following year, or the year after that. After not taking classes for a couple years due to work obligations, I began taking classes with Idy again in September of this year. He recognized me immediately, and welcomed me back into the class. Out of curiosity, I asked if he still did his annual tour of Senegal. "Wait right here," he said, "I have the brochures in the car."

This year I'm unemployed; the only thing stopping me is the common sense logic of not spending money on an expensive airline ticket when I'm only earning what the Illinois Department of Employment Security pays me every two weeks. On the other hand, with adventures of this kind, its always a question of having the time and the money, and I rarely have both. I had just committed to doing the Habitat for Humanity project in Portugal, but I didn't want to let this one slip away for yet another year. At some point, I reasoned, I won't want to fly to Senegal to dance. Someday I might not be in the physical shape necessary for such an undertaking, or, more likely, someday I'll have a job that will keep me from traveling internationally for two weeks at a time.

I started looking at flights, which are expensive - its not cheap to fly to Senegal, flights typically run about $1,800. One day I was scanning flights and came across one at the unbelievably low (for flying to Senegal) price of $1100. I asked Idy about it; "oh, you won't find anything cheaper than that," he said, "book that today." When I got home I discussed it with M. "Is it crazy?" I asked, somewhat rhetorically. M convinced me to buy the ticket, reasoning that I've wanted to go for years and this might be my one big chance. I bought the ticket. The next day the price went up to $1,800.

All of this was months ago, and in the interim I've had all kinds of adventures, both close to home and far away. I've gone to the travel clinic for immunizations (yellow fever, typhoid, and would you believe polio?) and prescriptions for malaria and something called travelers diarrhea to take with me on my trip. I've watched the calendar with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, and once again, the date has snuck up on me. I spent most of this weekend preparing for this journey, and will be heading to the airport later today. As those of you in the Midwest and on the East Coast know, there's been weather trouble at a number of airports, and as all of you doubtless know, there's been an increase in security. With luck, I'll be in Senegal by tomorrow. If I get delayed maybe there will be time for one more post before the end of the year.

When I return I'll have a backlog of posts to write, but I guess that's not such a bad problem to have. Thanks to all of you for following my adventures, have a wonderful new year's, and I'll talk to you all in 2010.

More Gapers Block

I wrote a post for my own blog, but then thought it would be good for Gapers Block because it was so Chicago-centric. The original is here, which looks just the same as what's below, but I figured I'd put a link in anyway.

Graduation Week at The Old Town School of Folk Music

Last night was my final West African Dance class of the current session, and we had a recital onstage at the Old Town School of Folk Music. The school is housed in a grand building on Lincoln Avenue that was once a library and retains traces of its bookish past; above the stage is a WPA mural underscored by the words "enjoy toys, the world we live in, making airplanes, boats, books tell us of King Arthur, costume and pioneer days, building skyscrapers, electricity."

My fellow classmates and I - six of us in all, got on stage to the rhythm of live djembe drumming, and brought the house down. After spending eight weeks dancing in the studio classroom, it was gratifying to perform in front of an audience, and the group assembled at the Old Town School couldn't have been less judgmental - everyone in the auditorium had to get on stage at some point, making the atmosphere less American Idol and more like talent night at summer camp. We practiced our dance moves in the hallway as a group of musicians rehearsed Will The Circle Be Unbroken, it was a quintessential Old Town School moment.

The six of us stood across from each other on the stage, three on each side, and at the appropriate drumbeat - what our teacher calls "the break," we started moving towards each other in dance formation until we'd found our mark, faced the audience, and moved to the next step. Midway through the dance we formed a circle using dance steps and then moved back to our original spots, a maneuver that wowed the audience. I was standing up front at stage right, and could see the audience - mostly guitar students, with instruments in their laps or in cases sitting next to them. Our dance lasted all of three minutes, and we received a truly raucous round of applause and shouts for our efforts. It was fantastic. Three West African Dance classes performed in a row, ceaseless drumming spurring on one class after the next. After that came the Middle Eastern Belly Dancers in all their jangly, hip-centered self-confidence, the metal disks on their hip scarves bouncing in unison like a school of small, shiny fish.

Next came the guitar classes, who serenaded the audience with the following:
Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Were Made for Walkin';
Neil Young's Harvest Moon (which I sang along to);
Chris Hillman's My Baby's Gone;
The Eurythmics' Here Comes the Rain Again - which, if you've never heard played on acoustic guitar, is something else; and
Brandy Carlisle's Wish I Could Be There Tonight.

The guitar-heavy lineup was broken up by harmonica level one, and a class called "harmonica forever", who played Roll On Weary River and Bob Dylan's Beyond Here Lies Nothing, respectively. They had a backup band supporting them: a mandolin, two guitars, a standing bass and a tambourine, and I decided that if one instrument could follow me around in my daily life to provide a soundtrack to the most mundane of my everyday activities, it would be a standing bass; no other instrument underscores the moment in quite the same way.

Once the harmonica students moved off the stage there were more guitar classes, and picking up on the Dylan theme they started us off with You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, followed by America's Sister Golden Hair, and a song called Ophelia, (I'm not sure who wrote it). The evening closed with a rendition of Stone Temple Pilots Plush, which reminded me of an adage told onstage many Old Town School graduations ago - if you're looking for the definition of folk music, well... that depends on which folks you're talking about.

I sat in the audience and I watched it all; fingers squeaking along guitar strings as they moved from one note to the next, harmonica players hesitating before chord changes, and it reminded me of why I love this place. The first time I ever set foot in the Old Town School of Folk Music was before they moved into the Lincoln Avenue Location. I was visiting a friend who worked on Armitage, saw the Old Town School's music store, and walked in out of curiosity. A concert was about to begin, and the person manning the doors of the concert hall asked if I'd like to take a seat and listen for free; there were empty seats, and the musicians had come all the way from China to perform.

What I saw mesmerized me. The only Chinese music I'd heard up to that point in my life was played on the sound systems of cheap Chinese restaurants. This was different, it was beautiful and enchanting, and unlike anything I'd ever heard before. That's what I love the most about the Old Town School of Folk Music; whether it's a band from Uganda you've never heard of or a headliner that you bought the tickets to months in advance, you hear it in the intimacy of a 300 seat auditorium, and even if it's music you've heard a hundred times before, it becomes new to you.

When you become a student at the school, you become a part of a 50-plus year history of people who picked up an instrument, or decided to learn how to dance, or opened their mouths to sing, and allowed themselves to once again be beginners at something - perhaps for the first time in years. None of the people on stage last night were experts, and none of them were trying to be the best, they were just people who enjoyed learning a new instrument or a new dance and had a chance to get up on stage for three minutes and share it with a roomful of peers. Its one of the best things about Chicago, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

West African Dance

I didn't realize that I'd actually wanted the job until I got the rejection letter. Or more accurately - the rejection email. I opened my inbox and saw a message titled "Employment at RI" from the H.R. director. I scanned it quickly, enough to see that it wasn't a job offer (I pretty much knew that already, they would have called with an offer), and closed it again.

M really wanted me to get this job. We have repairs to make on the house, and our car is unreliable - we borrow his mother's car for any trip over twenty miles. And then there's the news. I've been avoiding it, someone told me early on that its bad for your mental health to hear job loss statistics when you're unemployed, that it will just get you down, and I haven't watched much news - or much TV at all, since I lost my job. The otherwise useless job loss counselor who was brought in the day after layoffs had sealed it with: "People who lose their jobs tend to get depressed because they watch too much Judge Judy." The words conjured up an image of me sitting on the couch - no, laying on the couch, in my pajamas, an open tube of Pringles on the floor and the TV remote in my listless, extended hand, slack-jawed and glossy-eyed. That was the moment I decided not to watch daytime television for the duration of my unemployment, and I haven't - apart from a couple episodes of The Ellen Show, and the one time I watched Barney Miller on channel 23 for it's inherent kitsch value. And who doesn't love Ellen? With her dancing and her disarming, genuinely upbeat attitude, she is the antidote to a thousand horrible daytime programming decisions. She even gives money away to her unemployed audience members from time to time. I love Ellen, but I don't even watch her show because she's on at 3pm and the TV stays off until at least 6.

I sat in front of the computer for a moment before pulling myself up off the chair, the weight of the flesh hanging from my bones feeling suddenly much heavier than when I'd sat down moments earlier. I had somewhere to go; I changed into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, took the glasses off my face and pressed clear plastic discs onto my eyeballs in their place, got onto my bike, and rode to the Old Town School of Folk Music for my dance class.

The first time I saw Idy Ciss' West African Dance Class was through the windows outside the school on Lincoln Avenue. I was on my way to another class, and as I walked up the street the riotous sounds of live djembe drumbeats escaped from the open windows of the dance studio. I stopped in front of the picture windows and watched as a roomful of students danced from one side of the floor to the other using big, expressive movements. The drumbeat was infectious, and the energy of the dancers captivated me. I enrolled for the next session as soon as I could get to the registration desk.

Something about the movements of the dance - big, uninhibited, fearless movements that take my whole body to create, makes me feel so fantastic. I was never what you'd call agile, I never did ballet as a kid and I don't have the flexibility or grace of a natural dancer. I can keep time with the beat, and I do my best with what I've got. The most intense dancing I'd done as a youth was square dancing at summer camp, which while fun in its own way, is calculated and careful in comparison, and has none of the unbridled energy of West African Dance.

Idy can make any step look lithe and effortless. I sweat so much during my first class that I had to take my glasses off and dance blind. I took several sessions of Idy's class, even moving to level II, until I got a job that took away the extra energy I needed for this kind of activity.

I got to the dance studio early. There was only one other student when I arrived, and we sat in silent communion on the glossy wooden floor, stretching our bodies and waiting.

Idy started us slow, but soon I was drenched in sweat. The force of drumbeats willed me to move past my depression and into another space entirely, forcing a catharsis. Idy clapped out the beats with his hands so loudly it sounded like wooden sticks making contact. People sitting at the Bad Dog Tavern across the street looked up from their drinks, passers-by on the street stopped and looked in the windows as I had once done, and small children pressed their noses to the glass door leading to the hallway. Everyone on the block knows when there's a West African Dance class in session.

After the class was dismissed I rinsed my hot face in the water fountain in the hall, stepped outside into the early evening breeze, got on my bike and rode home.