Percussion Festival and Youssou Ndour

Happy Holidays! I hope you are well and sitting around a fire wearing big wool sweaters, singing carols and drinking eggnog. Okay,we all know Christmas isn't really like that, but that's what we pretend when we are far away :)

I'm still having computer issues, so sadly pictures are still delayed

I went to Dakar the day after Christmas to run a bunch of errands and have decidedthat I am not ready for the city. So I promptly returned to Louga (this is a really good sign--I actually want to be here and want to work). But first, I went to Dakar with a fewother volunteers and Kari and I found a movie theater, which happened to be showing the new Harry Potter movie ( the only movie available, and in French, and in a 100° theater, but none of this mattered) I was particularly lost because of my poor French and the fact that I haven't read the book, but we were helped along by the audience..... throughout the entire film the audience responded by wild clapping, cheering, booing or tsk-tsking depending on Harry's predicament. It wasmy first movie that resembled a southern Baptist religious revival, and we loved it. I didn't get much out of the film, but I did enjoy the Senegalese.

This was followed by a Youssou Ndour concert in Louga. As I think I've mentioned before Youssou Ndour is a grammy-winning Senegalese artist who is dubbed "the voice of Africa" He has been wildly successful, but has chosen not to leave Senegal andinstead has re-invested part of his fortune in developing music and the arts in Africa. In any case, he did the concert for 1500 CFA, the equivalent of 3 dollars and it was beautiful. If you ahve the chance to check out his music I highly recommend it.

Finally there was the International Festival of Folklore andPercussion inLouga--for the past 5 years they have held this free five day festival which hosts excellent music, singing and dancing from all over Africa and French speaking European countries (even South Korea is in attendance this year!!!) so I've been fully entertained the last few days. The dancing and music here is absolutely unique and compelling. The center of everything is the drumming--done on different kinds of traditional drums similar to bongo drums. The interesting thing is that the music is polyrhythmic-- I'm not sure if I can explain this well-- but the dancing is so wild you would think that it is random, but after watching for a while you can see that the dancer chooses one drum to focus on and moves with it-- it's a kind of communication between the dancer and the drum beat. maybe you have to see it ( shameless plug for coming to visit....)

now that I've been so serious, one little story. Okay, kids here are bastards. seriously. i don't know what it is, but they are all little trouble makers, rude and mean. okay, they aren't all bad, but itis stort of accepted that this is how kids behave. anyway, part of the culture here is moving into the sort of age system-- you don't have to do anything someone younger than you asks... It has been weird,but I amlearning that I have to assert my authority over kids-- they run errands for me, they do the cleaning around the house, etc. and I absolutely should not tolerate rudeness from kids (or else they will walk all over me and make me miserable) even to the point that volunteers pull switches from trees to hit kids with ( I know, we may not agree, but that is how it is here)

okay, now that I've hopefully explained.... Walking through the festival the other night Kari and I are completely badgered by kids-- they call us names, they touch us, they shout at us-- the new thing is to light firecrackers and throw them at people-- and it isn'tjust us, but being white people we are major targets... So finally after this happens so many times I finally take a kid (probably 12 years old) as he is brushing past us and I smack him, hard, on the face. The stupid grin drained from his face and we were left alone for the rest of the evening. So Martin Luther King might not be proud, but it was the most gratifying action I've taken in recent past. and Kari and I got good laughs from it for the rest of the night too :)

I've changed...

Happy holidays! watch the bowl game for me-- I amexpecting updates!!!!