Do you mind if we dance wif yo dates?

So I’m reading Karly’s blog yesterday (or rather today…I’m posting this tomorrow in what is sure to be a confusing mélange of verb tenses), and I feel the need to add my two cents (or one and a half cents – that’s about all they’re worth) about this whole “cultural assimilation” bit that they’re trying to feed us.

I will say that I wasn’t wholly unprepared for the fact that I would never fit in: after all I am the kid who wanted to repeat Otter from Animal House’s famous line when they step into the bar where Otis Day and the Nights are playing – you know the scene – when the band stops playing and everyone in the bar turns and stares: “Boone, we’re the only white people here.”

Unfortunately, two rather large obstructions got in the way of my moment of comic genious upon stepping off the airplane: 1) there was nobody in my immediate vicinity who would have cared, thought it was witty, clever, funny, or even knew what the hell I was talking about and c) we weren’t, in fact “the only white people here.”

No, Dakar has a sizable Toubab population. This we will return to later. But first, cultural assimilation (or lack thereof).

For rather obvious reasons, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to become “one of the locals.” It’s rather unsettling always getting weird looks (“you lost?” tends to be read in the faces of people walking down the streets), but I had resigned myself before coming here to the fact that everything I had learned back in the sixth grade about how to blend into crowds to avoid getting beat to a pulp by eighth graders would in Dakar be about as useful as a sequined winter parka. That is to say it would only be of use in our inevitable escape from an African prison. (Confused? So am I. Somewhere in one of the first posts I think I explain the whole sequin thing if you really care that much. If not, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, read on.)

No matter how much Wolof I eventually learn, people will always revert to French when meeting me. I’m starting to shake the feeling that people are only talking to me because they think I have money, but I feel that that will always be in the back of my mind when a stranger comes up to me on the street and says “Do you need a guide?” I fear that merchants will always hassle me when I go downtown, no matter how savvy I may be about negotiating Dakar’s streets, because toubabs apparently always have money to blow and just spend it on ridiculous things.

It seems that the only hope for myself and my fellow toubabs from CIEE lies in the aforementioned sizable toubab population of Dakar. But that would mean becoming like a crazy French ex-pat named Jean-Michel who runs the scuba-diving place in Dakar. I mean sure his crazy French girlfriend was crazy and French (not to mention kinda hot too), but I mean…do I really want crazy French guys who live underwater as my role-model?

I guess that is the question that I am here to answer.

Love
Jake