Comparing Cape Verde

First impressions:

My first instinct was to compare Cape Verde with the other places I have visited on study abroad trips. I have been to Europe and India and both are very different from each other and from Cape Verde and Africa in general. I think that my previous experiences may have hindered myself from getting used to the culture and the way of life right away. I am well versed in culture shock and consider myself pretty understanding about varying ways of life - but this was much different.

I actually hated the first day we got there. I hated the fact that we got off the plane and were literally thrown into our homes without any communication about the next time we would all see each other or proper instruction on how to use our phones. I actually don’t even remember what I felt when I got to my house. Naya told me that when she left me I looked freaked out.

After the first night, the first thing I noticed was that I stood out. People on the streets would hiss and call out to me saying “blanca, blanca”. This bothered me. In my travels, I have always been told to ignore hawkers on the streets so that is what I did. However, it was difficult to decide when to ignore them. When I turned on to my particular street, those who were calling out to me ended up being people who I knew or who recognized me and wanted to get to know me.

When I travel, I usually like to observe the natives of that country – how they interact, how they travel, and how they walk. Then I mimic. In Europe it was quite easy to do this because it wasn’t immediately apparent that I was not from the country. Here, however, I was detached at first sight. Simply the color of my skin meant that I was not one amongst, but instead, an outsider. Once people noticed me on the street, they changed what they were doing and I could no longer see their normal activity. This is not to say the people I encountered were unfriendly – most were very welcoming and interested. But what I really wanted was to just sit and observe and I was never really able to do that.

My family consisted of one mother, Delci, and her two children Delço (boy, 11) and Nayma (girl, 2). Delci is a teacher and is also attending school for her master’s degree so she was not around a lot. When I did see her at home, she was cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, doing the dishes, or studying. She is a very hard worker and never seemed to get tired or stop smiling. Her mother, sister, and her sister´s kid, Ygor, lived below her so she could leave her kids with them when she went to work and to class. But when she got back at night and the kids came home, she was always very happy.

The language was another issue that immediately came up. I was lucky to have Ygor. He was 14 and he spoke English very well. We were able to have very in depth and intelligent conversations which was comforting, however, I also felt that it hindered my development with the language in comparison to others on the trip. When I was talking to Delci, I used a lot of hand movements and I was able to understand many of the nouns and verbs because of my knowledge of French.

Orienting myself in the city was also a challenge. I felt disoriented for the first week because I couldn’t get my hands on a map of any kind and because there weren’t many large landmarks that I could look for. To get my bearings, I usually like to have a map and just go out, walk around, and get lost. Once we got maps, we had all pretty much figured out where the important things were and could get around on our own quite easily.

Other observations:

HOME: My home was just a living room and small kitchen with one bathroom (it had all the fixtures but no running water), and 2 bedrooms. I had one of the rooms to myself (I am assuming it was the kids rooms but they slept with their mother while I was there). ALL buildings here are made out of concrete masonry units and do not breathe at all. The only way to ventilate the rooms is to open the front door or either of the 2 windows. It got stuffy in the afternoon but the nights were nice and cool. I had to get used to the cockroaches that lived in the bathroom though. They only came out at night so I tried not to go in there after all the lights had been out for a while.

CULTURE: The artifacts and culture of Cape Verde seemed to be a mixture of many different influences: Portuguese, Brazilian, American, and African. Since the country is so new and it was not originally settled by natives, there isn’t really true sense of African culture like there is in other African countries. I saw many women who were wearing what looked like traditional dress, but when I asked Ygor if there was a traditional dance, dress, or music, all he told me about was batuku. Batuku is a specific drum beat that is traditional for Cape Verde. Similarly, in the market, there wasn’t much in the way of “traditional” Cape Verde items. Most of these traditional items were knocks offs, made in China or in Senegal.

NIGHT: The night life was limited because of the safety factor. We were told that it wasn’t very safe for us to be out walking alone at night. But when we were with our families or with other locals, we were able to go out to some bars and clubs. The clubs really don’t get going until 2 in the morning. What was also interesting was the neighborhood nightlife. I fell asleep every night to the sounds of kids running around on the streets outside my house. I got invited to a birthday party for a little 1 year old girl by her grandpa. He told me to come over for food and cake at 8pm which I thought was very late for a childrens party. But the party was still going when I got there at 8:30 and I could still hear kids and party music until I went to sleep at 11.

WATER: No running water. There was a large bucket in the bathroom and another hand scoop pail. I had to fill the pail and poor it over my head over in the shower. There were usually smaller buckets on the floor of the shower that catch the shower water. I was usually able to use that water to pour into the toilet after I had gone to the bathroom instead of using clean water. I was very surprised that Delci used a washing machine to do her laundry since many of the other families did theirs by hand. She used the water in the large bucket in the kitchen that hooked up to the machine. The water then drained into a pail and she would dump it out the door on to the street.

FOOD: All of the restaurants that we went to seemed to feature the same foods: rice, beans, chicken, and fish - but mostly rice. The first day, Ygor gave me dinner and he put a chicken leg on my plate and filled the rest of the plate with rice and asked if it was enough. Ygor even said once that if he could only have one food for the rest of his life, he would have rice. It amazed me because it seems like that is all they eat. But it truly was good. They liked to make pizza for us as if it is the only thing that Americans like. Their traditional dish, cachupa, features beans, potatoes, corn, and sometimes chicken. Ygor told me that if they have leftovers of it one night, they will save it for breakfast and add eggs and sausage. They also never use recipes. I watched Delci make an entire chicken dish with marinade and everything, completely off the top of her head.

DELCI: My host mother had things figured out. She worked and went to school and raised two really great kids. And she never seemed to be stressed or ran around like a crazy person. I tried to observe her as best I could because I wish I were like her in many ways. She seemed to stick to routine, doing laundry on certain days of the week, hosting Delco’s classmates to do homework in the morning on certain days, doing her own homework while the kids were still at school or being taken care of by her mother. She also never rushed around. It wasn’t that she took her time and lazed around, she was always moving, but never in a frantic rush. It didn’t look easy, but it looked like it worked for her and for her family.

Re-Entry:

In keeping with the comparisons I have been making with all of my other trips, I once again related my return from Africa with other homecomings. My previous travels mostly consisted of touring buildings and places, moving around a lot, and hopping from one hotel to the next. I was never in one spot for the entire duration of the trip. This experience, on the other hand, began to resemble a routine. Leaving the routine seemed like I was just going off on a little excursion for a couple days. Actually getting back to the US and realizing that it was not just a small trip, that I wouldn’t be going back, was a little bit more shocking that I was expecting. I had gotten used to the simplicity: the fact that I didn’t have many personal belongings, the internet, or a phone with unlimited calling. Suddenly having all of these luxuries was almost overwhelming.

I thought about trying to explain to my roommates about the water situation and ask them to think about conserving their water usage. But the more I thought about how I would explain it, the more I realized that they really needed to experience what I did to really understand the importance. I took a hot shower for the first time in a month - which was great – and drank water straight from the sink. It was just a normal everyday thing, except for the fact that I knew it was not normal – that most people can’t just have water flow out of a faucet. I think this is something that everyone will take away from the trip. It is a small piece, but I think it is important to note and to not forget.