Music Under the Stars

My first music concert was magnifique! The group, Nhojke (sp?), incorporated the guitar, drums, oboe, and 3 or 4 traditional instruments (I’ll have to learn what these are). You could see how all the musicians were enjoying themselves and the lead singer successfully enticed the audience to get up and dance with his enthusiasm and charm. The mix of all the instruments and the rhythm était genial.

That evening before the concert a beggar came up to me, an elderly man with no fingers, and I couldn’t just ignore him. I gave him some money, chatted with him for a bit using my sparse Wolof skills and then in return he prayed for me. I was with Cheikh, so he interpreted the prayer for me. When the man left I had no doubt that he was a person of faith, of goodness and from God. In the States, one can justify not giving money because there is a high possibility that they could use it for something that might not actually benefit them, but here the presence of drugs and alcohol is not very prevalent (I have yet to see one intoxicated person). Whether completely honest or not, I think these people use the money to survive. Which then poses the problem of figuring out how to interact with all the beggars. What I’ve begun to do is make friends with a few people that I regularly pass by. Alando calls me Madame Meghan every time I see him and today he told me to stop giving him money because it’s not about that. I laughed and told him that I realized we shared a friendship.

Random side note: People on the track team have had trouble with my name and have repeatedly called me maggot. We all had a good laugh after I explained that in english a maggot is an insect that eats dead meat.

Oh I asked Assane about the labour laws here and the worker unions. These do exist and enforce rightful pay to those workers officially registered, but the people who do manual labour for entrepreneurs are day workers. They are not registered in any way, and without any contract, so there’s no way to enforce rightful pay or gather accurate numbers on how many people work under these conditions. It’s obvious that Dakar is expanding and many new private homes are being built all around the area, therefore you can guess that working all day for 2 dollars is a reality for quite a few people.