In a country where the average income is less than $1000/yr wrestlers can earn the equivalent of quarter million dollars per match. This financial incentive as well as the respect and admiration the wrestlers have earned has thousands of young boys training daily hoping to make it into the professional stadiums.

For some background on the sport look at this BBC article from 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8617738.stm

Today is the last big match of the season and was sure to draw a full crowd. The match is between a Senegalese wresting pioneer Muhammed Ndao alias Tyson (yes, after the American boxer) and a current star Omar Sakho alias Balla Gaye 2.

All week at the Institut there has been talk about the upcoming match and who will be victorious. When asked who I supported, my response was that I’m a neutral observer. Apparently that is not a good enough answer and I really need to pick sides, but it appears my colleagues have already decided that I will be supporting Tyson because he is the ‘American’ wrestler.  Tyson has been known to appear ringside in an American flag pancho.

The match is held at the stade Demba Diop in central Dakar. Oumar meets Tad and I at the Institut around 3pm and we proceed to the stadium. Apparently the stadium has been open since 8am and people have been chilling inside, their version of tailgating. The match does not actually start till about 8pm with some minor matches beforehand. The closer we get to the stadium I can feel the excitement building; Seeing people carrying pictures of their favorite wrestler or hearing someone yell out in French ‘The Power is back on” (good news for those that did not have tickets and would have watch the match on TV). The road to the stadium is blocked off half a km away with riot police guarding the barricade.

Once we get to the stadium we get a bag search and a weapons pat down before we can enter.

Full house - Hey look riot police

Inside the stadium it’s absolutely electric with people screaming their preferred wrestlers

This stuff is awesome its got chunks of mango in it

name and waving posters. Men and women are walking up and down the rows selling sodas, bissap, chips, backed goods, etc.  To give you an idea of the energy think Charger/Raiders game (for my people in SD) or Yankee/Red Sox game (for my East Coast people) combined with a Word Cup soccer match.

We find an open spot on the concrete benches that make up the stadium seating and proceed to

One of the minor matches

watch the crowd and wrestlers warm up for the next 2 hrs. At about 6pm the minor matches start. Senegalese wrestling seems to be a combination of Greco-Roman and boxing. The goal is to get your opponent on the ground before he gets you.  The matches start off with the two wrestlers throwing what could best be described as ‘bitch slaps’ at each other before one finally locks his arm around the other and attempts to throw him to the ground.

There is a time limit of approximately 30 mins to a match and the match is over either with the first throw down or when time expires. So a match could be over very quickly or seemingly never end. People seem to hope for matches lasting around 10 mins with several throw down attempts and escapes.

Watching the Tyson and Balla Gaye prepare for the match is entertaining in itself. They both come out into the stadium around 4:30 (almost 4 hrs before their match actually started).

Tyson and his American flag pancho

They strut around, warm-up and get their fans pumped. Some of the more interesting preparations seem to involve what was described to me as ‘black magic’ performed by a ‘witch doctor’. Each wrestler has one, who hangs around preforming rituals before the match. It seems that Senegalese pro wrestlers are very superstitious and take every advantage they can in hopes of getting one up on their opponent. Another seemingly odd practice involves the wrestler being completely soaked multiple times before the match in a dark liquid. Oumar doesn’t even know exactly what this liquid involves but the wrestlers seem to use it as cleansing oil, perhaps another superstitious action???

It’s time for the big showdown, it starts and it’s over in less than a minute with a Balla Gaye win. Really?? I sat on a cement step for 4 hrs for this. Yep, that’s exactly what I did and I’d probably do it again.

one of the homesteads in the area around the village where we placed traps

Bankedji is where the Institut has had a field station since 1992 to conduct vector surveillance

Bankedji,,,, The spaceship is a water tower

(mainly looking for Malaria, Rift Valley Fever and West Nile).  Every year at the beginning of the rainy season (end of June/beginning July) till December the Institut sends out a team every two weeks. It’s important to get out there immediately after the first rains in order to survey the Ades sp. (they are the first to appear since their eggs are laid the previous season and remain dormant during the dry season).

To collect the mosquitoes there are 4 ways:

• Place live bait near ground pools between 6 and 10pm (2 goats, 2 sheep and a human)
  

  Setting up the live bait near a groundpool

• Place 6-10 CO2 light traps in different human/cattle populated areas that surround the
  

  Ibrahim setting up a CO2 trap

  village (collected at 7am the next morning)

• Send out a team of locally hired catchers (young men) who have a shift 8pm-12 or 12-6am. They sit out and let mosquitoes land on their legs where they immediately capture them in a tube (the night’s catch is returned during the next morning)
• During the day more locally hired young men are sent to randomly selected residences
  

  Instructions for the day catchers

  and spray the inner rooms to collect any mosquitoes hiding there

On the road

On this trip was myself, Tad, Ibrahim (The Malaria guy in Entomology and Tads supervisor), Yamar (Also Entomology, doing the RVF and WN study) and the driver Che. We head out on a Wednesday and will return the following Tuesday.

I was told that the village was only 4 hrs away but I learned long ago to double the time someone gives you as a better estimate of travel time. I was spot on with the 8 hrs. Dakar has notorious traffic and between that and stopping for 45 mins so the guys could go on a fish hunt in a market we did not actually get out of Dakar till noon. Senegal has fairly good roads compared to other countries in Africa I have visited; this is partially due to a series of recent re-pavements done by the government in order to curry favor in the upcoming presidential elections. The longer than expected journey was mainly due to traffic in larger towns (Thies and Touba) and herds of goat, sheep and donkeys that decided the middle of the road was a good place to hold a confab.

Fun with food

When we arrive in Bankedji it’s already around 7pm, so we get the house/field station put together and start preparing dinner. I should have seen that evening’s dinner as an ill omen of

Breakfast

future meals. I had been assured that as a Vegetarian I would have no problem out in the field (Yeah, I should of known better). For the whole week our food schedule went as such: 8am –Breakfast (French bread, butter, eggs, chocolate and coffee), 1pm – Lunch (Fish and rice, rice is cooked in fish), 9pm – Dinner (Goat and rice, rice cooked in goat). There was one gas stove burner (like a camping stove) so all the meals where a one dish type of thing.

I had a hard time convincing my companions that ‘no I cannot eat the rice that has been stewing with the goat meat for 4 hrs, if I do I will more than likely throw-up and monopolize the bathroom ‘. So for 6 days I ate French bread, eggs and white rice (I cooked it separately after the other cooking was complete).

Oh, I was downing about 3 liters of water a day and I still felt dehydrated. How everyone else was able to drink coffee I have no idea.

Thursdays market

Thursday was the big market day in Bankedji, so we all walked over to get some goat and sheep from the hundreds of herders that were present selling their stock. One goat was slaughtered immediately and was ‘what’s for dinner’ for the next couple of days.  Two goats and two sheep are being kept through the rainy season for the field stations use as live mosquito bait. The other three goats were slaughtered the last day we were in the village and the meat was taken back to Dakar by Yamar, Ibrahim and Che. Apparently it’s a lot cheaper out here so people always stock up before the return to Dakar.

The day to day

This was our schedule for 4 days:

• Wake at 8am, eat breakfast, identify the previous night’s mosquito catch
  

  Mosquito Id - I see your proboscis

• 1pm – lunch
• 1-5pm – Nap time (It’s why too hot to do anything, I’m talking high 30’s Celsius or triple digits Fahrenheit, everybody kinda just sleeps off this part of the day)
• 6ish pm go layout all the traps
• 9pm – dinner (we eat so late because it’s too hot for cooking girl to start and sooner in the day)
• 10pm – go and collect the live bait

Yet another language barrier……

So it turns out that French does absolutely no good out here, most people only speak Wolof or Pulaar. So my laughable attempts at speaking French are even more pointless when the family where the next trap is being laid only speaks Wolof. My companions speak the local languages and I’m happy that they are keeping me in the loop with the occasional translation.

My Camera

I had my camera with me every time we went out in order to take pictures of the traps, I typically don’t take pictures of people in settings like this unless I have their permission or the

Tad,Ibrahim and a gaggle of kids who wanted their picture taken

insist on one being taken. If there are kids around I will not be able to escape without taking a dozen or so pics then showing them.

Toobob

Until now I had been pleasantly surprised that I had not noticed any particular name for white people being yelled out at me (In east Africa I’m constantly being called out to ‘Muzungo, Muzungo’). Well that ended in Bankedji. Toobob is the Wolof word for white man or anyone not African, It changes slightly to Toobaka in Pulaar (sounds like a name for a wookie). I had children yelling out at me ‘Toobob’, but none of it was in a demeaning way. It’s kind of like the kids saying ‘hey strange person’. The adults did not call us Toobob which was nice. I really dislike being lumped into a generalized category of ‘White man’ and all the stereotypes and connotations that come with it. I’ve gotten into some really interesting talks in the past about racism and racist names.

Did I mention I scared a baby??? When we were out placing traps one woman came over to say hello and her baby saw me and started screaming, I was probably the first white person they had seen. The incident made everyone else laugh, so at least it was entertaining to someone, just not the baby.

Hey look another white person…..

The whole time that we were in Bankedji people kept telling us that there was another white person in town who is with the Peace Corps, but I never seemed to run into her. On the day before we left she magically showed up at the field station, supper excited to speak English and take about stuff to other Americans.  Ann Marie is working at the health dispensary in the village and was a little over a year into her stay in Bankedji.  We spent a good portion of the morning and evening just talking about random things. Apparently in Kedougou there are a number of PCVs and she took it upon herself to give Tad and I an introduction via phone. She even gave me her Wolof language manual so maybe I can be less awkward when I try to talk to people.

One of the property owners wanted me to take his picture, the kid seemed less thrilled - the childs expression is common among small children when they see me. Kind of a ' who are you and why do you look so different than everyone else I know'

Wednesday – Tad needed groceries, I knew the way so we walked straight into town and towards the market. One problem, Tad reminds me of my Mother. He talks to everyone and is way too polite to tell someone to buzz off.

Two guys manage to keep talking to Tad and we end up stopping just short of the market (Darn). One guy is selling things and is mute; the other is acting as a ‘translator’. First they want us to go to his shop real quick so he can give us his card, not going to happen. Then he hands Tad a bracelet (and throws one at me after I refuse to take it) and says they are gifts for being so nice and talking to him. Then something happens, did not catch the whole exchange and Tad is giving the mute guy money. The ‘Translator’ walks over to me and says that the bracelet will cost 4000CFA, I throw it back at them.

Downtown Dakar - Don't let the lack of cars fool you, Dakar is known for its horrible traffic (this was taken on a Sunday afternoon)

Place de l'Independance - Downtown Dakar

Saturday – We decide to just walk around town and explore a little bit.

Walked by the American embassy (only a ½ Km away from the Institut), it’s the only one I have seen so far that has the entire road blocked off. Woohoo for American paranoia.

As we walk closer to the center of town the more crowded it gets and the more I hear people shout after me “Hello my friend….”. Several groups of guys try to latch on and direct us to their shop or a ‘good restaurant’. All of them had a similar opening, “Hello my Friend, you are from America”.

Sidebar: I have found it interesting that every single person that has approached me in the streets in Dakar has guessed American right away. This usually doesn’t happen to me when I’m abroad (anywhere abroad not just in African countries).  People usually guess a number of different European nationalities or Canadian way before they go for American. For some reason when I was in South Africa everyone tried to talk to me in Afrikaans.

Anyway, when you get rid of one guy, another one pops up without fail. Tad is talking to them while I’m walking ahead a few feet completely ignoring them. I don’t want to be shown around town, I don’t want to go to your shop, I know where the restaurants are, I just want to be left alone and walk around discovering things by myself. Some people (other Americans, white people, westerners, whatever they wanna call themselves) think I’m rude or not getting the full experience by taking to the locals. Guess what I have lots of experience and lots of knowledge as to how a vast, vast majority of these kinda guys operate. When you get to where you are going they will want:

a)      money for showing you around as a self-appointed tour guide, even if you never asked them a darn thing and they just latched on without asking first.

b)      For you to go a little further to their shop, not to buy but just to look or just to get their business card.

c)       You to buy them lunch because they are so nice and you should be nice in return. They may also go for the sad story of how they have 5 children and are very hungry and you need to help them.

Now some of you are going to read way too much into this and think that I am over reacting or just being a bitch. I guarantee you neither are true. I’m not making wide generalized statements about an entire country, continent or ethnicity/race. I’m talking about a very specific kind of person (a man 99.9999% of the time) that if he were in the US may be called a con man.

Still think I’m full of it. When Tad and I decide to stop for a bit to eat, I turn around to the guy currently following us and politely say ‘Au Revoir’ and walked inside as his face had a mock look of hurt on it. I’m sitting just inside the restaurant watching the final exchange between ‘Brother Ali’ and Tad, there is the gesturing and the hurt looks and then Tad handing over some money. Mind you this is after Ali had repeatedly stated that “I don’t want anything, I’m showing my countries hospitality because we are all people, we are family”.

Hey LOOK! Harry Potter!! For three days only - but its dubbed in French

What is there around the Institut exactly? There’s the German, English and Belgium Embassies across the street (which never seem to be open but always have a guard sitting in a booth reading the newspaper). The neighbor to the north is Centre Hospitalier Universitairie-Artistide Le Dantec. This means that the street is always busy with taxis and street vendors. At the end of the street there is a Shell gas station, yes that Shell.

On Friday, Tad and I decided to find the beach that was said to be just a few minutes away walking along Route de la Corniche Est; A road along the eastern coast of Dakar that runs from the port down and around the tip of the peninsula, I have nicknamed it ‘The 101’.

On the road I saw a billboard advertising the hot match of the summer, I’m thinking most of you are guessing that it referred to a soccer game and you would be wrong. Nope, here in Senegal wrestling is the numero uno sport. Apparently this match at the end of July is going to be epic (probably why the fee is going to be 10,000 CFA, just over $20). You can read a not to recent article from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8617738.stm

The Hot Match, guess where I'll be on the 31st

We find the beach, Plage de l’Anse Bernard. It’s just a small little stretch of sand but looks perfect for cooling down. I did not wear a swim suit since I was unsure what the ladies dress code would be, I happily found several women wearing one pieces and bikinis. Next time people, next time. I have to say that I will definitely be wearing shoes at all times considering that in addition to copious amounts of smooth sea glass the beach is littered with many sharp glass shards as well.

While the beach was not at all crowded, I also noticed that it seems people had taken up residence on the beach in makeshift housing. Whether this is considered temporary or permanent housing I cannot say.

Friday is the Islamic holy day and Friday prayer is an important element of observance. In a country where 90% of the population practice Islam it makes sense, to me at least, that Friday is held in higher esteem than other days of the week.

I was told by my new co-workers that on Fridays most people will wear more traditional dress, instead of jeans and a t-shirt or suit and tie. This seems to be a practice of everyone at the Institut, both Muslims and the Christians.

After lunch around one o’clock I noticed a lot of people leaving the Institut grounds with prayer rugs. When asking about this I was told that workers are granted time off during the afternoon to attend Friday prayer at the Hospital’s mosque next door.

At 4 o’clock it was ‘Bon Weekend’ (I think it’s a universal thing to want to get out of work on time or early on Friday).

In the Arboviral lab Oumar told me that usually Thursdays were English days but now that I was here every day was English day and by the end of my 6 month stay everyone’s English would be perfect. I respond to this with the statement “I need a French Day”.

I’ve noticed a trend with a number of people; they’re excited to practice their English, but not so much let me practice my French. I’m sneaking it in here and there. Each time I walk into some office I try to extend the greeting and conversation in French even if just by a sentence or two. Eventually I hope to get to the point of seamless conversation. Lots of work ahead.

After I ran a few dozen RT-PCRs, I decided how much I really like the simplicity of the Real-time, less steps, quicker and it includes a pretty computer printout instead of a messy agarose gel (that I need to take to another building to photograph). The lab has a portable Real-Time PCR that I will be taking to Kedougou, which is really awesome for lack of better descriptive vocabulary.

There were a few points during the week that if someone from outside the lab decided to drop in they would see all 5 of us (the supervisor, the post-Doc, two lab techs and myself) sitting in the office on our computers and probably think that we weren’t working. But when the PCR is running there really is not anything else to do besides hop on the computer (which by the way does include some real work related stuff, it’s not all Facebook status updates).

I’ve started to identify samples from the 2009 and 2010 Kedougou cohorts that were a + for Malaria so that I can test approximately 10% for an arboviral co-infection (thinking around 25% will show signs of concurrent infections).

By Friday I had received my own @pasteur.sn email, a lab coat, lab notebook and ID. Now I look all official and stuff. OK, so I only received my temp ID card. I promise my permanent one is coming with my picture and everything. Still it feels nice when you being to settle in and become part of the everyday.

I have found being a vegetarian is often a point of curiosity and sometimes contention. Conversations in multiple languages usually go along the lines of “Sorry I don’t eat meat”, “No, I don’t eat fish either”, “I’m allergic to meat, it makes me vomit”, “No, really I can’t eat any meat”. I can say with certainty that this has made me the punch line of several jokes made by groups of Massai men.

Since many of the cultures and regions I have lived in are heavy into meat dishes for every meal of the day, cooks and hosts have admitted to know not what to do with me and my peculiar eating habit. I am usually left with massive amounts of starches (potatoes and rice) and vegetables soaked so heavily in butter-like substances (How I loathe you BlueBand) that they lose all nutritional value beyond adding to the calorie count. I try, every time, to mitigate the foreseen weight gain with fruit. Yet despite my best efforts one cannot live on mango and avocados alone. Even with walking everywhere and not having a driver take me (a trait that usually gets me strange looks from the ex-pats), I inevitable have a need to lose 5-10 lbs when I return stateside. I actually find it a little amusing considering most people assume that one would lose weight while in Africa (yes, many people still refer to it as if the whole continent was one country).

In the same mindset as usual, I start my 6 month stay in Senegal with the optimistic thought that “this time it will be different”. Fat chance, pun intended. The Senegalese national dish, Thiéboudienne or Ceebu jën, consists of fish and rice. In addition this Francophone country is presenting me with a great challenge: Can Stephanie produce enough will power to not eat a foot log fresh French baguette every morning?

My first venture to one of the central markets in Dakar, Marche Kermel, was on my 3rd full day. After the first day of work at the Institut I asked one of my supervisors, Oumar, what would be the best bus to take into the center of town so I could go to the market. His response was “by yourself?”, to which I responded “Yes, why not?”. He then politely told me that I was still too new to the country and my French not the best so he would drive me and I could take the number 9 bus in two weeks’ time when I was more familiar with everything. The stubborn part of me wanted to say, “No, I can do it all by myself” but the practical side won out with the thought that it would be dark in an hour and a half, I did not exactly know where I was going and my French is rather poor (closer to non-existent).

So we drove the short distance to the market which was starting to wrap up business for the day. The market smelled of blood from the animal carcasses that had been sitting out since early morning mixed with rotten fruits and vegetables cast aside to sit in the afternoon sun. This was actually a familiar aroma to me and brought back memories of other open air markets I had frequented in East Africa. I saw rows upon rows of vegetable and fruit stales. The first item that caught my eye, as they usually do, were the mangos. A good three times the size the ones I typically find in a US supermarket, I think I actually started to salivate. Not having practiced my bargaining skills in a year or so I was cautious about how to approach the vendors. The first man when I asked ‘C’est combien?’ said he wanted 500 CFA (about $1) for a kilo. Saying no thank you, not wanting to deal with the first person I talked to, I walked down a little ways to another vendor who stated he wanted 900 CFA for a kilo. At this point Oumar spoke up saying the man down there wanted 500 (I’m paraphrasing what I could understand from the French taking place). The man said 700, I said 300 then the conversation took off without me and 30 seconds later Oumar told me the price was 350 a kilo. I agreed and the vendor asked if I wanted 10 or 15 kilos, trying not to laugh I said 5 than seeing exactly how much 5 kilos of mango actually was I went down to 4. I still walked away with an obscene amount of mango, I think somewhere in the back of my head was a small voice was saying “If you have more mango the less bread you’ll eat”.

I’m joining a project that is studying the ecology of and characterizing the human infection phenotypes of Dengue (DENV) and Chikungunya (CHIKV) in eastern Senegal. The project is run by the unit here in Dakar and a group in Galveston, TX and began running in July 2009. So, how do I fit in? The project focuses on DENV and CHIKV only but they have found that ~70% of the patients that present to the clinic sites have something not DENV/CHIKV. My job for the next 6 months will be to run PCRs and ELISAs on those ‘other’ patients to see if they have West Nile, Yellow Fever, Zika, Kedougou, Rift Valley or something else. If I find something I will start conducting an outbreak investigation and bring in those Epi skills they have been teaching me at Mailman. In addition I will be looking at each etiology and assessing case definitions and risk factors. Once again, Nerd Moment.

The Lab

Dr. Oumar, who did his masters and PhD at the Institut and has been working here for 9 yrs, will be supervising me for the first 2-3 wks teaching more than I ever wanted to know about PCRs. Classic, RT, Real time; ‘don’t worry about the instructions being in French it’s easy like cooking just through in the reagents’. I’m familiar with PCRs and they are not that difficult to grasp theoretically or in practice, but he makes it look as if you can do it in your sleep.

The Institut has a cafeteria which dishes out fix meals for lunch, oh how fun it is explaining that I don’t eat meat. I did however find something that I will be partaking of on a daily basis. Bissap is a cold, sweet hibiscus tea and they serve it every day at the cafeteria. Almost makes up for the fact that I dug meat out of my rice.

The institut grounds

I have with me a French Textbook used at my local community college back home in San Diego. It has 11 chapters; I would like to get through them in the next two – three weeks. After trying to introduce myself to the front gate guard as I was going on an exploration of the surrounding neighborhood I realized I should sleep with French grammar and vocab playlists on in the background. Most of Sunday was spent on just that, French.

Except for a power outage that nearly fried my computer on Sunday night the weekend was restful. External hard drives are my best friends right now.