Cameron

Na nga def ? That means, “How’s it going?” in Wolof, which is the main language spoken in Senegal, where I just spent two weeks. It was probably the most amazing, surreal, and intense two weeks of my life, and it is hard to believe it is over. I went with ten other students in my class and one of my faculty members, Terry Setter, and we stayed with a very famous Senegalese drummer named Thione Diop (pronounced “Chown Jyop”), in his house that is right off the beach in the suburbs of Dakar. Thione and all his friends and family are the nicest warmest people, and made us feel very safe and welcome, while at the same time fully immersing us into their culture.

We did a lot of drumming and dancing, working with Thione and his friends who also were famous performers in Senegal. While the drumming lessons were great (we all had our own brand new djembes to practice with while we were there) and the dancing was fantastic (I had never seen dancers with such incredible moves and energy), many of my favorite moments came from the really simple moments when I truly felt presence in another country.

There was one moment when I was watching some local boys practice wrestling on the beach from behind an archway on Thione’s mom’s patio, when suddenly seven or eight little children start running along behind the wrestlers all in a line all rolling tires in front of them and laughing. It was like a scene from a movie, I swear.

Another day we were eating lunch in the sitting room in Thione’s mom’s house, and a goat just ran in through the open patio door and came a few inches from ramming right into Thione, when his friend Abdoulaye caught the goat by his hind leg and steered him out of the house like a vacuum cleaner. It was ridiculous. The goats were omnipresent throughout the trip. We even witnessed Thione sacrifice a goat as a way to cleanse his house of all bad spirits.

It was great just being able to watch the locals playing soccer on the sand (They are so freaking good!) and taking rides in these colorfully painted rickety sketchy buses called “Supers” (a back wheel fell off of one as we were driving to a concert in the middle of nowhere), and eating the delicious food and watching the sunset and moon rise and become full. It is a really beautiful place that has a charm all its own, and it was ceaselessly interesting to watch the struggle between new and old, and the blending of traditional culture and modern western influence. I saw factory workers walking down roads alongside a man in a horse drawn carriage. I saw beautiful women dressed in bright full length African outfits with a matching head scarf walking next to beautiful women dressed like they were about to step into a nightclub in New York City. I saw goats standing on parked cars. And while there were great new paved roads and public transit and banks and hospitals, there was also extreme poverty and trash everywhere and suffocating air pollution.

There really is no way to sum up all of my experiences from the past two weeks. I will post some pictures, but really, so much happened and I really was just a sponge soaking in all the culture and the sights and sounds and smells and tastes, and what I have written here is just a glimpse at what turned out to be the most incredible two week journey I could have ever hoped for. There truly could not have been a better way to see Africa.

As this trip pretty much ends the quarter for me, I honestly cannot imagine ever having a better freshman year.

Posted by hoscam18 at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The air was thick with excitement and scientific inquiry as Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the nation’s premiere astrophysicists and the host of PBS’s show, NOVA, took the stage.

He came to Evergreen to be the speaker at a seminar held annually in honor of one of Evergreen’s founding faculty members, Willi Unsoeld. Tyson is a great speaker, very comfortable on stage and always backing up his points with a joke. In fact, I first heard of him on the Colbert Report during the whole Pluto scandal. During his speech he used his sharp wit to poke a message into the minds of the audience members. The goal of his presentation was to show how terribly under funded and under respected in the USA.

For example, he told how shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, President Bush said, “Our God is the God that named the stars”, loosely quoting Genesis. He said this as a warning to the Arab terrorist groups that were responsible for the attacks. However, Tyson pointed out that of the known stars in the universe, 2/3 of them have Arabic names, and that he could have hooked Bush up with a better line if he had been on his Rolodex at the time. Tyson ended the night saying that if we think we are so much smarter than chimps, and we have only a 2.5% difference in our DNA, think about how much smarter a being that was 2.5% genetically different than us would be, and how with that perspective, how little we actually know about the universe.

He was awesome.

You know what slightly less awesome? My Hepatitis A and Polio vaccination shots. But I got a great deal on them at the Student Health Center, which is a great resource for students here on campus. And they really didn’t hurt that much… But at least that’s over with. Now I just have typhoid pills to take, malaria pills to take, and maybe a yellow fever shot to get. But it’s not like Yellow fever is that bad! Oh wait…

In other news, it’s true; the Black Front Gallery is in its last month. I went to check out their last exhibit and it was amazing. There were three local artists showcasing their work, and they were all awesome. The Black Front was a great venue in Downtown Oly, and I hope whatever takes its place will be as cool.

This week our class actually got to work with an artist who has had some of her work in the Black Front. Her name is Diane Kurtzyna, and she helped us all make dolls of ourselves out of trash and found objects. We also had a guest speaker come to our class who was a Maori artist from New Zealand named June Grant.

Overall, this was a very colorful, artistic, and slightly painful week for me, but probably one of the most memorable here at Evergreen.

Posted by hoscam18 at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)