Say La Freak

For me, exercising is a ritual of sanity.  I do it to stay physically healthy, yes.  And I do it because I genuinely enjoy certain forms of exercise like playing volleyball, hiking or running.  But mostly I do it to blow off steam and to clear my head. Exercise keeps me sane.

Finding the time and place for exercise here in Senegal is a little trickier than it is in that States however. For safety reasons and because there are no indoor facilities (i.e. a gym) or other well-let areas to exercise at night, potential exercise hours are limited to daylight hours.  Furthermore, because of the atrocious heat that is thrust upon us during the day there are very limited hours in which the heat is not SO oppressive as to keep you from moving any muscle that you can’t help moving; namely the early morning or early evening. During the hot/dry season in particular (here we have 3 seasons: hot/dry, cold/dry and rainy) that lasts from about March to June, it gets up to 120 degrees in the day and settles in around 100 overnight in some parts of the country.

In general, I try to convince myself to go running in the morning because that is the coolest time to go. I will run from my homestay house down to the beach where a lot of Senegalese people (mostly men) generally go to play soccer, wrestle (Senegalese wrestling is a big sport here), and work out.  I will pause to stretch and do some calisthenics while watching the fishermen in long, colorfully-painted, wooden boats out on the water. Then I will run back. All in all it is a very pleasant form of exercise.

However, if I got to bed late and want to sleep in, or otherwise have things to do in the early-ish morning (the sun doesn’t rise until 7ish so my window for running is usually only open from 7-8am), my opportunity to go running disappears and my sanity starts to go along with it.

The other day, after several missed mornings for running, I was beginning to feel a little anxious and decided that I really want to go exercise but it was already nearing sunset.  I was pondering about where I could possibly go to exercise that would be safe when I realized that my host family’s home had an open roof! I threw on my leggings, grabbed my ipod and yoga mat, and headed up the stairs and outside. It was perfect! I was at home so I didn’t have to worry about being out of my house alone at night. It was cooler than inside the house since there was a decent breeze. Plus, there weren’t a lot of people hanging out on roofs nearby and nobody could see me from the street so I wouldn’t likely be disturbed.

I plugged my headphones in my ears and started going through what I could remember of a routine that we did in an exercise class at Tulane which I frequented. I started with jumping jacks to get warmed up, followed by fancier double-jump jumping jacks and some other kick-boxing type movements.  I was just to the point of blissful, heart-pumping, music blaring, sanity-restoring exercise when suddenly… I heard a snickering creep up behind me. Wearily, I stopped jumping and turned around.  Eight children, all under 4 feet tall, were leaning up against the wall on the roof adjacent to my roof with big eyes and grins so big you could fit a whole slice of cantaloupe in their mouths without moving their lips.

One of the smaller ones - a boy about 5 years old with charcoal skin, scrawny limbs, long eyelashes and a persistent aura of mischievousness, pulled himself up and over the wall from his family’s roof onto my roof.  He then began to hop up and down while flapping his lanky arms to imitate me for the entertainment of his friends and siblings. All of the children giggled and began to follow his lead.

It occurred to me that in that moment I had two choices.

One: Get embarrassed that the kids caught me making a fool of myself, pack it in and forego any exercise.

Or two: Own it. Keep going.

Suddenly, something a friend of mine who just finished her two years of Peace Corps service in Senegal said to me popped into my head:

“My job was basically just village entertainment for two years.”

At the time I laughed at the preposterousness of such a superficial summation of her two years of service but maybe being the village entertainer isn’t such a lame thing; maybe there is power in such a position.  Maybe in some run-around way my exercising production would demonstrate to my audience members that exercise is important. Maybe they would try it out and see that it was fun. Maybe just fun enough to do it themselves?

Say La Freak! is what I say.

Side Bar: Say la freak is a term I am in the process of coining to apply to these situations where white people/foreigners (tubabs as they are called here) in Africa can’t help but stand out and look ridiculous. Say la freak is phonetically how one proclaims in French, “this is Africa” (c’est la Afrique) but in English it sounds like you are embracing the freak-show life.

In this circumstance, say la freak meant that I was not about to stop exercising; I was going to embrace the madness.

Immediately, I ran downstairs to get my battery-powered speaker to attach my ipod so I could play my music aloud for everyone to hear and I proceeded to assume the role of exercise class instructor. Sixteen grubby little hands joined mine, lined up all the way around the edge of my yoga mat, ready for the first series of mountain climbers. Those were followed by burpies, then by Miley squats, then push-ups, lunges, crunches, Russian twists, etc. I offered encouragement with big eyes, big smiles, and overly zealous gestures since there wasn’t any common language that we spoke (these children spoke only Wolof since most were too young to be in formal school where they would otherwise learn French).

Song by song, exercise by exercise we went.  And an hour and a half later, I had completed a pretty good work out.

Many tubabs generally have a hard time with this say la freak attitude towards events. They perceive the laughter of children or adults or whoever as ridicule instead of teasing encouragement. They get embarrassed or frustrated. Often they get angry towards the onlooker for being seemingly disrespectful.  It is definitely understandable that when you have a group of people laughing at you for your weirdness when you don’t see what you are doing as being particularly weird you might easily feel alienated or ashamed.

At the end of the day though, you have to pick your battles and you have to do what you have to do. I had to exercise, so I did. Picking a fight with children over their perception of my work-out routine when they simply perceived it as funny or odd would not have been worth the effort of instigating an argument in a language I don’t speak with children who aren’t likely to care that much about hurting my feelings.

Plus, I just got 8 children to work out for an hour and a half! You know they got their little hearts beating and will sleep well tonight! I can’t say the event really inspired a sustainable behavior change but I can say it was acutely positive for them to get some exercise. And maybe, just maybe, they will show their friends tomorrow about the crazy things the tubab was doing and they will all do more exercise together.

So say la freak. Get weird. If you have an audience, use you stage. Let it empower you.