Stet

I almost fell out of the taxi, holding baby J under one arm and dragging out her buggy behind me.

Source of great amusement to the devout beggars lining the sidewalk around the mosque. Baby J waved wildly at the old men and got big smiles in return.

Having broken the ice, I asked the nearest guy if I could take his picture. He immediately snatched up his reading and peered at it intensely — the look of a serious scholar.

Click for larger version

He loved the picture.

Ever on the lookout for the curious news story, I read in yesterday’s Sudonline of a new outbreak of mass hysteria at a Dakar secondary school. The first occurrence had been last Friday when some 90 students had experienced “hysterical” symptoms of screaming, trembling and falling into a trance-like state. Of the group, 88 were girls.

In the second outbreak, only 21 students were affected, all girls. They were taken to hospital for observation or treated on the spot before being released to their families. The school had been closed for 48 hours after the first outbreak, and has been closed again, indefinitely, following the second wave of attacks.

The writer begins by asking whether the school is haunted, goes on to describe the confusion of local medical experts and finishes with an exorcist demanding sacrifices.

This morning there was a similar article describing a prolonged series of hysterical outbreaks at another school, in Sédhiou. Strangely there was no reference to yesterday’s article or the events at the school in Dakar.

A little googling reveals that such occurrences, called mass sociogenic illnesses, are in fact more frequent and widespread than one might imagine. A fascinating overview of the literature can be found here.

One wonders whether the students at the Senegalese schools are subject to a particularly strict regime, or whether there is particularly high stress related to the forthcoming exam period. If nothing else, the thesis of air pollution is a strong contender, given the black clouds of exhaust fumes billowing from the car rapides and decrepit taxis stuck in Dakar’s gridlocked streets.

From a different perspective comes a series of “remedies” guaranteed 100%, offered by Xam Xam in his comment on the first article:

1. They (females, obviously) wear head scarves
2. They stop wearing “Jombakhts out”
3. They stop making love together
4. They stop drinking café touba (spiced coffee)

From which we can only conclude that Mister Xam Xam is afraid of women, their hair, their clothes, their sexuality and their drinking habits. I think those are symptoms of a more frequent and widespread mass sociogenic illness, found among men in Islamic countries. Discuss.

Still, I’d love to know what “jombakhts” are.

I signed up with Sonatel last week and got a phone line installed. The broadband services are predictably very expensive, and I chose the cheapest one, which gives us just 512k downspeed … or that’s what I thought. In fact I had already warned the salesperson that, annual tied contract notwithstanding, if I didn’t get the speed I paid for, then I would break the contract. So there I was, squatting on the floor, Mr B’s laptop balancing on a suitcase, primed for high dudgeon. I logged on to speedtest.net, and sighed when I saw the nearest server was in Bamako, Mali; hardly the centre of highspeed telecommunications, I thought.

The ping came out average and I waited for the downspeed test to begin. I blinked. The needle jumped and fell back in a microsecond. I looked at the measurement: over 9 Mbps. While I pondered that freak result, the upspeed test chugged round and clocked in a measly 65 kbps. Still, I tried the test again; again over 9 Mbps.

He-he-he. I thought to myself. I’ve got a fat tube and no one’s checked. I can hardly complain about the upspeed, however.

How long will it last before they realize? Have I got the Internet equivalent of the light bulb that never dies? I mean, the speed is obviously possible, and the reason everyone doesn’t have it is purely commercial, and not technical.

This morning, of course, when I wanted to take a screenshot of the test. The result came in at under 500 kbps. I tested it again immediately and got the following result:

So it is obviously very erratic, but I haven’t had any cause to complain about the speed in practice.

Of course, having no electricity for eleven hours (no modem) did slow things down somewhat.

One of my first questions to my prospective landlord was whether there was a mosque in the neighbourhood. He laughed and said no.

On the first night in the house, empty except for two double foam mattresses on the floor, I woke at 4:30 am to the sound of the muezzin calling for the first prayer of the day. He called, called again, then again and again, and … you’d think everybody had heard by now, no? Again? Is he calling each of the faithful individually? Madame Diouf … yoo-hoo!

I got up and fetched a roll of toilet paper, tore off a sheet and fashioned ear plugs by twirling it into an cone. Then I lay down again, stretched rigid on our superior density foam mattress (actually brutally unforgiving on any but the heaviest bodies). The pink paper ear plug stuck straight up from my ear, but who was looking.

The muezzin was as loud as before and seemed to be doing a full live broadcast of the service. It lasted until 6 am, by which time the tremendous dawn chorus of birdsong was beginning to drown out his voice in any case. Tweet bloody twitter!

I drifted off just before Baby J woke up at 7. Groaning, I raised my aching body from the ground to start the day …

Here is one of the few photos I’ve squeezed off since arriving two weeks ago.

Chez Ali Baba, central Dakar (click to view large). The best shawarma wraps around town.

And there’s a long overdue header added to the page. In case you don’t see it immediately and can’t be bothered to hit reload eight times, a slightly different version is available here.