Hi all! As Amanda mentioned in her last blog posting, I was so blessed to be able to visit her in June! Let me tell you a little about our adventures in Senegal.
My first impressions of Amanda in Senegal were of a confident, graceful woman who has learned well how to fit in with the local culture. She negotiated a cab ride from the airport to the Peace Corps house in Dakar with drivers who spoke Wolof (not Puular, the language she speaks in village). She made jokes with the cab drivers and laughed when they quoted her an astronomical fare made just for Americans, and said "I live here! So how much is it going to be?" instead of getting angry, Ugly-American-style. I just stood to the side with my huge backpack and thought, "If I keep my mouth shut, maybe everyone will think I am an albino Senegalese woman!"
We ate delicious seafood that night, after walking around Dakar and taking in the crazy mix of cultures. Talk about creole. There were women wearing their traditional "comples," the beautiful dresses with headwraps and men wearing long tunics and prayer caps, right alongside women wearing skinny leg jeans and guys wearing baggy jeans with hugely oversized shirts promoting Money, Respect, Power, Bob Marley, etc. Bob Marley seemed to be hugely popular there, even in the remoter villages.
Next morning we ate these delicious breakfast sandwiches with pigeon peas, hard boiled eggs, homemade mayonnaise, and french fries served on the remnants of colonialism, the French baguette. Heavenly! While we were waiting for our station wagon to fill up with people, we were presented with an onslaught of people hawking a very wide assortment of wares. We tried to guess what the next person would bring to offer us. There were baby Senegalese clothes to choose from, squirt guns, washcloths, sticks used for toothbrushing, apples, sunglasses, posters of Michael Jackson. Walmart on foot, in other words.
On our way to Tambacounda, we ate thiebou djien - deliciously seasoned rice and fish - and it got progressively hotter as we went inland. I had never been hotter up to that point in my life. The scalding breeze that was going through the car just made your internal temperature increase! Also noteworthy during this trip was my first encounter with a Senegalese bathroom - aka a porcelain hole in the ground. Peed all over my feet, but luckily the bathroom's owners gave us a kettle of water to wash up with.
The next day we went to the Tamba market, where there were all kinds of beautiful crazily patterned fabrics. Most of it was open-air, but there was a section of it that was underground, lit with blacklights and was apparently the "black market" area where risque items were being sold: crocheted lingerie, incense, sequined fabrics, buckets of woods used for medicinal purposes,etc. As Amanda put it, "It feels like a bad club that you know you're getting roofied at, even though your drink is in your hands at all times." Well put.
In a country where malnutrition is common, if you're heavy, you stick out a lot. Amanda introduced me to the concept of "ceeb mamas" (rice mamas), which are the regal and enormous women who often sell food (and eat half of it themselves, as the story goes). The ceeb mama that we ran into at the market was hilarious, because she never stood up to do anything herself, she just sent others to do her bidding. Amanda had to take a few bolts of fabric off the wall and go make change at another stall while the lady just sat there looking queen-like and beautiful.
We bought a chicken at the market to make dinner with, and Amanda once again showed me how Senegalese she has become in carrying the beast through the market for an hour by its feet. It kept squawking and carrying on. We got on a pretty crowded bus and arrived to her village, where we greeted her host family, who was very excited to meet us. We ate pounded millet (with lots of crunchy desert sand in it!) with leaf sauce, which was actually pretty good. One of Amanda's favorite village foods now. After dinner, Ruby and her friends invited us to dance, and dance we did. We sang Shakira's "Africa," the first of about 30 times that we would hear the song in a week. It surprisingly never got old, and gave me goosebumps to think, "This really IS Africa! Man, I am so blessed to be able to be here!"
The next day was the end-of-the-year party for the school, which involved a bike race, a soccer match, tons of drumming and dancing, and a feast of beef and rice. Meat is a once-in-a-blue-moon thing in Amanda's bloc of villages. We went back and hung out with Amanda's older host brothers and sisters for a while, and I had the really strange experience of not knowing ANY words to communicate with. There are no cognates between English and Puular, nor Spanish and Puular, so I mimed animals and their sounds while Mamadian, the brother (who also would later be presented to me as my betrothed!), told me how to say dog, chicken, donkey, man, woman, corn, etc in Puular. Now armed with my Puular arsenal of important words, I tried to converse with Issatou and Hawa about menfolk. Apparently, the concept of "boyfriend" doesn't exist in Puular. You're either someone's "gorko" (husband), or their "kele" (casual sex partner). Errr. no in-between.
The next day we went to Wassadou, the closest village up the road where there was a Catholic church. Elie, the father of the Catholic family, gave the service in French and gave an explanation/homily in Puular. We said the Our Father, and gave the sign of peace, but the service ended there because there was no priest to celebrate the Eucharist. Amanda said he comes once every few months, if they're lucky. Made me sad to think that people can't receive God in Communion but a few times a year because they're considered a backwoods village.
We painted the Stations of the Cross in the church and had an audience of about 20 little kids just watching us in silence. We took a break for lunch and had my FAVORITE meal in Senegal, which was seasoned rice with dried fish and root vegetables with a tart hibiscus leaf sauce. Amanda's PC friend Spence, also known as Baba Nding (which translated means "Little Daddy") arrived and helped us paint the rest of the scenes, which we painted in Puular style with Mary and the women of Jerusalem wearing comples and headwraps! When we finished, Elie was ecstatic, told us that the paintings were a better gift than money, and said he was so happy that he wanted to sleep in the church that night. Talk about immediate gratification! :)
The daughters of the family offered Amanda and I a cup of palm wine, after which Amanda said "You should do your burp [which is my infamous hidden "talent"], they would think it was hilarious!" So I did, and it was NOT hilarious. It went over like a rock, and the entire compound fell silent! Haha, really popular. Amanda said, "Well, they probably just think we're drunk on a cup of palm wine now." It was a quick and shameful escape for me, and we biked back home. At this point, I had never been hotter in my life, and couldn't find a way to cool down, so I just poured water on myself, still clothed, and fanned away. Issatou, Amanda's host sister, could not fathom why I was doing this. "She's watering her gifundae (big butt)! She should just get a shower." However, first I needed to bring my 104 degree internal temperature down a notch before I showered and started sweating immediately afterwards.
The next day, we went out on our bikes to the Campement, a ritzy little place alongside the Gambia River where hippos and monkeys can be spotted. We went out during the hottest part of the day, and again, my internal temperature arrived at a new peak. I think I might have been a little dehydrated, as I started to seethe with intense anger at the most minor of things. I like to call it "boiling rage." We saw some baboons up close on the road, but they couldn't even distract me. All I wanted to do was to jump into that inviting body of water, but guess what? If I did, I might have contracted schistomiasis, a parasite that enters your body through your feet. Even my boiling rage couldn't convince me that it was worth the risk. To be continued in the next post! (Read above!)
No comments:
Post a Comment