Lady Oprah Winfrey Garden of the Children

Every day this week, we take a bus from our hotel to SIT's school in Point E. And on one of our most recent drives, I noticed a white building surrounded by a white wall decorated with colorful paintings of flowers and stuff like that. This is what it said across the top of the wall:

Lady Oprah Winfrey Garden of the Children

(in French, of course)

...which, of course, is pretty hilarious, especially because it's directly translated, although it really just means something along the lines of "Lady Oprah Winfrey Preschool or Kindergarten" (I'm not really sure which, yet.) I wonder if Oprah Winfrey has anything to do with this school or if they just liked her name a lot. In any case, it makes me laugh every time we go by.

Also, being in Africa, I keep thinking about this really annoying kid I had to work with at a godawful camp two summers ago. He was really rude and threw plastic bottles at his campers, and he loved to make up racist verses to one camp song we sang, which the kids at camp were then obliged to repeat. The song had a refrain of "With a ____, in my hand, I'm gonna be a ____ man." Examples are pizza and pizza man, etc. Anyway, one of the verses he proudly made up was "With a spear in my hand, I'm gonna be an Afri-CAN!"

So I found that pretty offensive, for a number of reasons having to do with blatant racism and stereotyping and colonization, etc. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that I was not the only person working at camp who found this kid's song lyrics objectionable. And just to dispel anyone's curiosity, the only African holding a spear that I have seen in Dakar was a wooden decoration on a sign for a shop.