Julia L. Ritchey » Blog

HIV/AIDS in Senegal, Still a Stigma

julia — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:10:30 +0000

One of the more difficult assignments I had in Senegal was photographing a woman who was HIV positive. A Finnish freelancer contacted me about a story she was doing on Senegal’s relatively low HIV rate (1%) compared to other African countries. Many doctors attribute this to under-reporting because it still carries such a huge stigma, especially in a Muslim society. The 33-year-old woman who agreed to talk to us shared with us her story of finding out she had HIV, which her husband also has, and having to hide it from everyone she knows for fear of being an outcast. She told us she could no longer have children because she feared her family would ask why she could no longer breast feed. It was then she broke down in tears. It was hard for me not to do the same.

Eating Mad Fruit

julia — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:22:05 +0000

It’s time for goodbyes in Dakar. The other night, at a double feature showing at my friend Gina’s, pal Kim stopped by a few hours before her flight to bid adieu. She brought with her a funny little Senegalese fruit called Mad. I mentioned mango season before, but I forgot to add that Mad fruit are, in many ways, just as popular right now and visible on every fruit seller’s small tables. I didn’t know what they were for a long time, or how to eat them, but I would see cab drivers chewing on their seeds and spitting them out the window, just like you would with watermelon seeds. It screamed summer. The only problem I have with Mad is how hideous they are. They look like they’re in a constant state of decomposition. The one I bought below is pretty standard, actually. So how do they tell if they’re ripe enough? Apparently the ladies who sell them just know.

Anyway, Kim was so enthusiastic about us learning this tradition, I had to share. Only three day before my plane leaves and I’m still learning new things! Here’s a quick step by step for eating Mad.

So to start you slice off the top, which reveals the brain of the fruit, flesh-covered seeds nestled into a hollow gourd.

Next you scoop out the pulpy seeds into a bowl to add sugar and spices. Alternatively, you can do all this inside the gourd itself like the Senegalese do, but for sharing purposes it’s easier in a separate bowl.

Add sugar to cut the tartness…

…and salt and any other spices to taste. I put in a few sprinkles of cinnamon and a dash of chili powder for kick. I think honey would also be a good substitute here.

Stir vigorously to break up the seeds and incorporate all the add-ins.

Eat up! Take a seed, suck on it for a bit, discard. I like to spit the seeds into the hollowed-out fruit. It tastes like a cross between mashed bananas and a tart mango. You don’t actually eat anthing because the pulp is tenaciously attached to the seed, so just chew and extract the juices. As they say in Wolof: naax na!

Spit cup.

Jazz Hot

julia — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:38:33 +0000

Here are some pics of the Jazz Festival I went to over the weekend. Stand outs were Chico Correa & the Electronic Band from Brazil and Mina Agossi, a French vocal jazz artist.

Here’s some Chico Correa recorded by some person at the bar I was at in St. Louis:

This will likely be my last post on Gavelwrench before migrating over to juliaritchey.com again. I’m spending the last two weeks in Dakar contemplating life choices, applying for jobs and getting ready to see friends and family. It’s been a nice start to 2011. Hope to have a strong finish as well. Merci, Afrique!

A komodo dragon I came across in the awful resort town of Saly, Senegal.

LEE POST: Pie Charts Are Dumb, a.k.a. the “MyPlate” Debate

lee — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:49:18 +0000

Something I care about is the representation of information. Graphical representations of data can be very convincing. And it’s well known that different representations of the same data can convince people of different things. So this stuff matters. That’s why I just completely freaked out when Julia showed me the new USDA food guidelines. You can check them out here. The little graphic is the most offensive part to me.

So it’s kind of like a pie chart, right? But of course we notice that there’s no common center for the pie slices. Also what is dairy doing over there? When I was talking about this with Julia, we even ended up arguing over what the picture is actually suggesting. I believe that protein and fruits are the same size, implying that grains and vegetables are the same size as well, Julia disagreed. We both agreed that grains + protein is half the plate. The dairy portion isn’t even the same shape. Trying to compare the dairy portion size with the rest is just hopeless.

Honestly, I would still be complaining even if they had switched to a proper pie chart. If you were to look at the help file in R (a popular statistics program) for a pie chart, you would see the following note: “Pie charts are a very bad way of displaying information. The eye is good at judging linear measures and bad at judging relative areas.” This is actually something that has been studied empirically. And I can’t imagine that making the areas a different shape would make the task of comparing the areas any easier. In all fairness, the same criticism could be brought up against the old food pyramid. I don’t want to give the impression that I think the food pyramid was any better. But this new plate is just an awful way to display the information, whatever that information might be.

What’s another possibility? I think the default chart should be a bar chart. Most people understand them and they provide linear measures for comparison. Then there wouldn’t be any need for stupid arguments over what the USDA is actually recommending.

Paul Theroux: WASP or Racist?

julia — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:42:44 +0000

I wrote a longer review of this Dark Star Safari book by Paul Theroux on Goodreads, but thought I’d share the passage from it that made me put the book down. I really can’t stand this guy.

“Even at their best, African cities seemed to me miserable improvised anthills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams. Scamming is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police, a class of people who in Africa generally are little more than licensed thieves.”

Since living in Africa, I have met some men of Theroux’s generation. Old, wrinkly white men who believe years lived in Africa equals a free pass to criticize all its ills. Or that their worldview, that nothing will ever change or get better in Africa, is an accepted one. Luckily, there are some new people here, people who don’t come with the idea that “things are just fucked up and always will be,” that don’t exoticize its people and vistas as black voodoo magic, and who just love living here. Power cuts and all.

I will never read this joker’s books again.