Rotary and Television

The fourth Rotary Cultural Ambassadorial Scholar has arrived… so we're gaining force and beginning to take Dakar by storm. Today, I started looking into the possibility of us helping out with a school lunch program that was started by prior Rotary Scholars for poor kids in a neighborhood near us. I'm also interested in starting a "pen pal" program, even if just until the end of the year, for a French class in the States and an English class here in Dakar. One of the main things I'm supposed to do as a Cultural Scholar is to build cultural understanding between my home and host countries, and I think this would be a neat way to do that while letting students practice what they're already studying. How many Americans have African pen pals? How many Americans can point out Senegal on a map? I think it could be really neat, so if any of you know a French teacher that who might be interested in getting one of their classes involved, let me know.

The past few nights I've spent time watching television with my Senegalese friends. Last night, what caught my interest was music videos. We watched a handful of Wolof rap videos produced here in Dakar. They were all so very different from the rap videos in the United States which typically showcase immense wealth, or violence, or women with limited clothing. One of the videos we watched was for a song about a domestic dispute. A man and woman got in a fight, she served him his dinner and he threw it on the ground. They then walked into the courtyard of their house and start circling each other like a wrestling match. Very soon, all the men and women of the neighborhood show up, the women behind the woman and the men behind the man. They're all cheering on their respective competitor. Eventually, the man throws a punch at the wife but he misses and manages to lose his balance and fall into a bucket of water. The wife grabs a club and heads in his direction to slug him, but when she reaches him and holds the club up high, the women intervene and keep her from attacking him. The song is all about how relationships shouldn’t be violent and uncomfortable like that. The video would cut between scenes of the domestic fight, and the rapper surrounded by women all dressed the same (and fully dressed) who were dancing and singing the chorus.

Song #2: It showed a man and women arriving downtown Dakar together, holding each other's hands, sitting down on a bench together. Then the man got up to go buy a snack, and a white foreign man sat down next to the woman and started making conversation with her. The woman left with the white foreigner, so when the man returned she was nowhere to be found. He runs around Dakar searching for her, and finally finds her arm-in-arm with the foreign guy. He then tries to start a fight with the foreign guy, but the foreign guy gets scared and runs away. The man then brings the woman back home and starts asking her why she did what she did, and then leaves her alone in the room and puts a dog at the door to guard it. They make up, and in the end all is good. The entire video is absolutely hilarious and is meant to be comedic. The guy is really goofy, and my friends told me that all his music videos are funny like that.

I've also learned a lot about traditional wrestling. I watched it a bit last night and a bit today. The best way to describe it I think would be between sumo wrestling and American wrestling. The men wear short tight biker shorts, with a diaper-type piece of clothing over it. The men are also in extremely good shape. They don't look huge and built up, just very very in shape, aside from their thigh muscle which are massive. Each match begins by each "warrior" doing a dance with the people who accompany them. The actual competition begins kind of like how someone who isn't very politically correct would describe a fight between girls… almost like they're trying to scratch each other, but more like flailing their arms at one another. But then one gets hold, and that all changes. The objective is to get the opponent to the ground. If their head touches, they lose. If their butt touches, they lose. If the whole side of their body touches, they lose. My friends say it's very complicated, but that's what I gathered. And instead of the referees announcing the decisions to everyone at once, they tell one player, then the other, and then everyone else. The players are allowed to grab hold of each other's minimal clothing. They definitely have moves, a mixture of wrestling and judo. I'm not one who likes wrestling, but this is incredible to watch.