Ladies Who Lunch

Now that Khady (my host-mom) has returned to work in France, I’m eating lunch with the neighbors down the road.  For what amounts to about a dollar a day, I have my very own  place at the bowl and a spoon reserved just for me.  Senegalese families are all about welcoming people into their homes and being hospitable, but they’re also keen on earning a few extra CFAs whenever they can, so this is a win-win situation for everyone.  The head of the household is Awa Gueye.  She’s the president of one of the womens’ groups that works with Baol Environnement, the ecovillage with which I am partnered.  She’s also a Director of a school and a really smart lady.  Living with her are some of her children, her mother, her sister, her sister’s children, plus a few other random people whose relations I‘ve yet to figure out.  On any given day, there are about 20 of us gathered around the bowls.

Lunch is divided into two bowls, one for the males and one for the females.  Eating with the ladies is a pleasurable experience.  First of all, my ancienne, who also ate with this family, was a vegetarian so they’re in the habit of loading the bowl with vegetables which works in my favor.  Secondly, in a very motherly fashion, they all break off pieces of fish and vegetables with their fingers and toss them in my direction.  I just love that.  It seems like such a caring gesture.  Eating with this family  is a nice break in the day for me.  I often go a little early to hang out with them.  It’s a good way to pick up new phrases in Wolof and to just feel like part of a family.

Adji-Fatou is Awa’s niece, she’s  11 years old and was the first to welcome me to the family.  She and my ancienne were close and she’s made it very clear to me that she wants to be my new best friend.  She speaks French well and has been quite helpful to me.  Her brother El-Hadji (both of these names are variations on the Arabic word for the great pilgrimage to Mecca that is expected of all good Muslims), spent the first 5 years of his life in a hospital, where he underwent 4 surgeries for his cleft lip and palate.  He and his mom, Maram (Awa’s younger sister), actually lived at the hospital all of those years while other family members cared for the other children.  Among those other children are the twins, Assan and Houseinou, who look to be about 12 or 13 and were both born with malformed limbs.  This is fairly common in Senegal but these two seem to be much better off than the folks I see crawling down the street with cardboard strapped to their knees because they can’t walk.  That’s a terrible sight to behold.  Mané is the oldest of Maram’s children.  She’s 21 years old and a newlywed.  She and her husband were married 4 months ago, but she’s still living with her family while she finishes school.  I’ve heard tell that Awa was seen chasing her down the street with a stick when she said she was going to go to Touba to live with her husband.  Awa takes education very seriously and apparently, she got her point across.  Awa’s son Papis, and his young wife, Tabara, also live in the compound.  They have a one year old son named Cheikh.  Tabara, in her role as youngest wife living with family is responsible for cooking all of the meals.  She works really hard and doesn’t seem all that happy to me.  But then again, I doubt I’d be too happy if I were toting around a teething toddler on my back and cooking for 20 of my husbands relatives everyday.  Awa’s mother is a sweet old lady.  She’s an ever-present feature on the mat on the porch where we eat, seemingly leaving it only to roll out another mat to pray upon 5 times a day.  She sells frozen juice bags to the neighborhood children and is clearly a respected member of the family.  She wears lots of bracelets, a big smile, and even sports a couple of toe rings.

Awa Gueye at a training session in Oct

Maram Gueye with El-Hadi, Adji-Fatou and two other kids

The boys playing with make-shift drums (that's Assan in the green shorts)

Ladies Who Lunch (yes I'm the only one who eats with a spoon at this bowl.)

Yesterday, Mané took me to the market to buy materials for crochet and needlepoint projects.  She and the other women in the family spend many hours a day making tablecloths and bedspreads to sell with their womens’ group.  I just love working with my hands and was so I was excited to start learning this new craft.  What an amazing bounding experience this would be.  For projects like this, women buy fabric by the kilo (not by the meter), so when we got back to the compound we started ripping my kilo of fabric into manageable pieces.  I suggested that I start with a napkin set, thinking a smaller project would be easier to handle.  Mané started me off crocheting a border then handed the piece over to me to continue.  Ok, let me just say that I’ve been knitting for about 6 years now, but the apparently the skills don’t transfer.  The materials and hand movements may look the same, but let me tell you, they are not.  I was all thumbs.  It took me 4 hours to work my way around the edges of one napkin and the end product looks like some a 2nd grader did it (no offense to any 2nd graders out there).  The whole experience was so frustrating.  I broke the first crochet needle because my tension was too tight and I kept dropping stitches.  The worst part was that I couldn’t properly express my frustration in a language these ladies understood.  I thought my facial expressions, gasps of exasperation, and inappropriate swearing, would get the point across, but they just kept asking, “are you tired?”  I’m glad to report that today’s needlepoint went a lot better.

My finished border.  Ugh.

Whew! This was a lot easier and a lot faster.

Other news from the domestic front involves my new kitchen set-up.  Those of you who know me well, know that I love to cook.  Well, for past 5 months, I haven’t really done much of that.  At first, it was kind of a treat to have someone else cooking all of my meals for me, but after a while, I started missing that creative outlet.  My weekend at the beach over Christmas really enlivened my desire to start cooking again, so when I got back to site, I started addressing the issues in the kitchen that were standing in my way.  My host dad had been asking if he could unplug the refrigerator to save electricity.  I hadn’t been using it and it is really old and inefficient, not to mention the fact that each time I opened it, there were roaches crawling around on the inside.  I told him to go ahead and turn it off, but asked if he’d help me buy a new one on his next trip to Dakar.  We spent an entire Saturday back and forth on the phone and as he looked for second-hand mini-fridges for me, discussing features and negotiating prices with the dealers.  I’m so glad he dealt with that part for me.  He also had to deal with getting the one I finally purchased back to Diourbel on the top of a taxi.  While he was gone, I took “my new best friend”, Adji-Fatou, with me to town to get a new propane tank for the 4-burner stove, bought a few needed pots, pans, and utensils, and reorganized the room a bit.  By Monday evening, I had a fully functioning kitchen.  Now, my morning walks to town to run errands include a trip to the market where I buy stuff to make for dinner.  It’s all starting to fall into place now and I’m feeling better about what I’m eating.

My new refrigerator and organized shelves.

The "Pierre Cardin" cook stove.

Before I sign off, I’d like to draw your attention to the new pages I’ve added to this blog.  At the top of the page, you’ll now see new tabs entitled “My Spare Time”, “My Project Work”, and a revised “My Wish List”.  Take a look at these new pages to see what else I’ve been up to.  Also, if you sent me a package in the last two months and haven’t heard from me that I received it yet, you are in good company.  Remember, this a developing country and even government-run organizations like the post office are not run very efficiently.  One package I’d been waiting on for a month finally arrived today, so I’m hoping that others will follow.  I’ll be sure to let you know.

À bientôt mes amis,
Fatou

The Real Senegal - What's behind the Peace Corps Gates

Back seat of the Sept-Place

On the way to Tivouane

Last Monday, after just 5 days at our Training Center in Thiès, we were released into the wild and sent to our first home-stay villages.  Thanks to a renewed
interest in the Peace Corps and a grant from USAID, we are the largest Peace Corps Training group that has been to Senegal, since it's work began here in 1963.  We total 64, of which 21 of us are in the Small Enterprise Development (SED) Group.  During our first few days at the training center, we were assessed and divided into small groups based on our language and technical abilities and then were sent to host-villages within an hours drive of Thiès for language and cultural immersion.  My group is small, just 3 other trainees and a Language/Cultural Facilitator.  We live in a medium size town, called Tivouane, just 24K north of Thiès.  To get there we took a Sept-Place, a beat-up old Peugeot taxi that holds 7 passenger + the driver.  I was dropped off at the door of the Touré home.  It’s taken me a full-week to figure out the structure of my host-family, which I will explain below, however, it became clear from the first moments I was there that my main family contact would be Cheikh Mbacké, my twelve year old “brother”, as he’s the only one in the family who speaks French with any confidence (and confidence he is not lacking!).   The rest of the family, all nine of them, speak only Wolof.  As the Sept-Place drove off with my colleagues and trainer, I felt as if I had been left on another planet.  Back at the Training Center, we were pretty isolated from our surroundings and, although in the company of folks we’d just met, we at least had a lot in common.  The Training Center was kind of like summer camp: shared rooms, group meals; scheduled classes; communal bathrooms, etc.  The home-stay experience was completely different.  We were suddenly plunged into an existing family structure, very clearly as outsiders who had no idea how to do even the simplest things.  We are like children once again.  I had to be shown how to use the toilet, how to bathe, how to eat, and how and where to sit down, and when we can leave the house.  The Peace Corps had done a pretty good job of preparing us for this culture change and our L/C Facilitator is in the same village to help and support us, but there’s nothing like just being plopped amidst a new family in a foreign land, where everything around you is different from the norm.

My family consists of 4 adult siblings, one wife, and 5 children.  Only one of the adults is male and he owns a “boutique” (a small metal shed on the side of the road that sells basic necessities, like small packets of margarine, sugar, and laundry detergent).  He’s at work most of his waking hours, but his wife is home with us and very much apart of our daily life.  The other adults are all sisters and unmarried.  The oldest of the sisters is a “little person” (I think that’s the PC word for munchkin, right?), so that’s different.  The next oldest is my “mother”, Bousou, who is just 3 years older than me.  She seems to take in all sorts of stray children, like Cheikh the orphaned son of her friend, and Arram, a neighborhood girl who works and also lives in the house.  The youngest of the siblings, who’s just 25 is in charge of caring for another sister’s two children while they are on break from school.

Bébé Maty

Seynabou and Arram sportin' their new bou-bous

My room in Tivouane

Since we're in the middle of Ramadan, home life for my family is a bit lazy.  Not eating or drinking all day in the African summer heat leads to a lot of napping.  This napping takes place on mats in the courtyard or on the vinyl-covered floor in the “napping room”.  This room is the only room, aside from my family's bedrooms  that contains furniture (like a real couch and chairs) but it is never used.  People just seem to go in there and lie on the floor, sometimes all of them at once.

Ramadan brings with it many other interesting daily activities including, loud chanting from a loudspeaker at the mosque outside my bedroom window from 4-5am, followed by the family getting up to eat breakfast before dawn.  People walk around at a snail’s pace because they’re refraining from eating or drinking from sunup to sundown and don’t want to exert too much energy.  The loudspeaker chanting also carries on at other specific times throughout the day, from cars with speakers strapped to their roofs.  There’s also a lot of spitting that goes on because apparently swallowing your own saliva counts as eating.  If for some reason you forget that it’s Ramadan and accidentally eat something, swallow large amounts of spit, and/or, Allah-forgive, vomit during the day (also strangely considered eating??--go figure) then you must pay this day back by fasting for an additional day after Ramadan has ended.

Finally, at about 7pm, the family breaks fast together and eats dates and bread with a thin layer of margarine and spicy tuna, and drinks café touba, which is a finely ground coffee containing cloves, cinnamon and about a pound of sugar.  This activity takes place as a group on a mat outside in the courtyard while watching TV:  first a Muslim prayer session, followed by a half hour Wolof comedy show, and then a really bad Indian soap opera dubbed in French.  Dinner is served at about 9pm on a big communal platter that usually consists of a layer of rice topped with a whole stewed fish and several vegetables in a yummy sauce.  Dinner varies slightly depending on how the rice is prepared and what type of sauce is used, but the vegetables stay the same from night to night:  eggplant, cabbage, carrot, okra, potato, manioc root, and radish.  We kneel on the ground around the platter and eat together.  There is grand protocol regarding eating here which was quite stressful for all the trainees until we’d done it enough to begin to feel comfortable.  We actually had Peace Corps training for this.  My "mother" tells me where at the platter to sit.  I’m not sure if I’m being place with regard to proximity to some specific food or to some person, so I usually wait for her to tell me.  Most of us eat with a large spoon,  but my “mother” and my “uncle’s” wife eat with their hand (just the right hand--never the left, but I’ll leave that to another blog entry devoted to toilet protocol.).  The women who eat with their hand ball up a small amount of rice with a piece of veggie or fish.  They, squeeze out the oil, and pop lick it off their hand.  Then they pick off bits of fish or veggies for others sitting at the platter and toss pieces into their eating area.  This is generally done for the young children and to me and is the equivalent of cutting up a child’s piece of meat for them.  Everyone has a designated eating area on the platter, basically the hand-sized space directly in front of them and it is impolite to reach into someone else’s area for a piece of food.  Instead, the big food pieces are tossed back to the center when people have taken off a small piece for themselves.  It’s important that the small piece is first placed on the platter in your eating area before you can pick it up and eat it.  Taking it straight from the center of the platter to your mouth is rude.  Burping loudly while eating, however, is not, and is it is common to hear a belch or two while we eat.  I try not to laugh at this, because no one else does.  Not to say that dinner isn’t fun.  There’s a lot of laughter that goes on, the joking is mostly in Wolof, and I think mostly directly at me, but I’ve learned to just laugh along with them.  Whatever the crazy-haired Toubac (common slang for white person) at the platter did probably was funny and I’ll learn why later.

My language and culture classes have been great.  It’s amazing how much we’re learned in just one week.  The Peace Corps really has an impressive adult-learning program and they have many Senegalese staff-members who’ve been working with them for 10+ years.  We have language class every morning from 9am - 1pm (or so), then break for lunch, napping, and homework until 4pm, then return for 2 ½ hours of cultural training.  Our classes are usually held at one of two of our host-family homes (the ones who have covered courtyards (aka shade), furniture, and space for us to gather.)   Our small class size is nice yet because we're usually in someone's home, we often are interrupted by someone’s little brother or sister who comes over to greet us (greeting is also worthy of it’s own blog entry, so more to come on that later).

We arrived back at the Training Center yesterday afternoon, after having been away a week, and it suddenly seemed so luxurious.  Chairs to sit on, cold water that has already been filtered, real showers, wi-fi, and fruit.  Many of the Agriculture trainees who are living in smaller villages had less protein then we SEDers did, so we were served a dinner of beef and beans to pump up our protein intake.  We also had fresh salad greens and veggies, which we’ve all begun to miss.  Before dinner, many of us ventured into town for a cold beer which was a great way to catch up with one another.

List of My Most Prized Possessions Thus Far:

• Eventail (woven hand-held fan sold at the markets), used for swatting away flies and creating a small breeze during class
• Oscillating fan, purchased with great fanfare (pun intended) over a 4-day period
• French press and ground coffee brought from home, and enjoyed every morning “sans sucre”
• Shower-to-Shower body powder (applied several times a day)
• PC-supplied 3 gallon ceramic water filtration system
• Mosquito repellent,  mosquito incense coils, mosquito net
• French-English dictionary
• Bar of anti-bacterial soap
• Quick-dry camping towel

So happy about my new fan (and my water filter behind me on the left)

My "brother" Cheikh, who tirelessly helped procure my fan