November 24th- Busy busy busy- and hey I'm over my fear of roaches!

Apart from a minor touch of a stomach bug (what else is new?), today was probably one of the best days I have had in Senegal so far. Actually, scratch that, even with the stomach issues (which were minor, I swear!), today was one of the best days I've had in Senegal.

My mood from the moment I woke up was fairly jovial. I can't be sure if it was the return to routine (today marked my first day back at the school after the break for Tabaski) or my overcoming the major homesickness I was feeling a couple days ago, or perhaps it was neither of those things, but my day started out bright. I thoroughly enjoyed my rushed breakfast of baguette and chocolate before running to school with Thiarma. I taught the CM1 kids about the importance of trees and thought that the lesson went fairly smoothly. I was also glad to be entrusted with the class all on my own. The instructor had to go run an errand (something that happens with some frequency at Mbam II, and, I would think, other schools as well) and so I got to have some time with the kids. They are a lot different and more relaxed when it's just me around, so I had fun.

And returning to the house, I couldn't help but be in a good mood. I stopped at two boutiques in search of phone credits (which I successfully found!) and loved greeting everyone along the way. Upon my return, I almost immediately left again with Kumba to do our daily market run. I found out we were going to eat mafay- one of my favorite Senegalese dishes!- for lunch. Delicious! It's a thick peanut-based sauce that also has fish, tomato, and other veggies. So good. And filling. I helped her cook lunch and we enjoyed a leisurely lunch hour at home. There weren't all that many people around, which I think I found really relaxing after the craziness that was the week of Tabaski. The kids were mostly at school and some of the company has left.

After lunch it was apparent that Kumba was leaving again, and I asked to go along. She was leaving with Ndiaye (one of the neighbors who may as well live at the house) in search of peanuts. I love going to the fields to work, so I was really glad to get out a bit. It turns out that peanut cultivation in Mbam is more tedious than I ever could have imagined! The plants have already all been pulled and processed, but you can imagine that with all those little peanuts, many of them fall off in the dirt in the course of harvesting. So today we went to the field and combed it by hand in search of the individual peanuts that are left on the soil. It was a long, sweaty afternoon full of pricked fingers, aching backs, and really hot water. But it felt so good to be working, doing something, moving, that I hardly minded. Kumba and Ndiaye told me many times to “Repose-toi!” but I ignored them and kept up the work. We picked up a few buckets full of peanuts (that was a lot of work for what I thought to be a fairly paltry reward....) and headed home. On the way we stopped to pick the blossoms of red hibiscus plants (here known as bissap) and to gather firewood. At this point Ndiaye was carrying a seven-foot long log on her head and Kumba was carrying a bucket full of peanuts and millet with some firewood tied in a bundle on top. I was a little ashamed at my bucket full of peanuts and bissap blossoms, which paled in comparison to the loads these ladies were carrying, but I am still learning so I can't be too hard on myself.

After the field it was to the well! I did my usual ancillary tasks while wearing Birane on my back. The ladies are always so funny, making fun of me in Serer and Wolof, trying to see if I understand. Tonight I got the whole gamut: how could I have a baby already? No one even saw me pregnant! That couldn't be my baby- it's black! Who's the father? Where's my husband? Etc. All of it made me laugh and I was content that Birane didn't cry once even though I had him for more than an hour and he's usually a big mama's boy.

After the well was my typical bucket shower and the beginnings of my stomach discomfort. Ah such is life! But I ate a good dinner of cere with some sort of sauce and fish and now I am relaxing and enjoying a little 'me' time.

The last big development of the day is that I am definitively over my fear of cockroaches. You may be wondering how it is that I can know that so confidently when months ago I was trembling with fear over their very existence. Well tonight a large cockroach crawled out of the latrine while I was using it and rather than getting afraid, I was just glad that I didn't pee on it before it started trying to crawl on me. If that doesn't prove that my fear is gone, I don't know what does. I can't believe how living in the brush has desensitized me to everything. Snakes, lizards, roaches, bats, birds, you name it! I am really at ease with my surroundings.  

November 21st- A typical Mbamois day

A typical day

After living for a month (!) in Mbam, I feel as though I can begin to describe what a typical day looks like. Keep in mind that for me there really isn't a 'typical' day, so to speak, given my general lack of structured activities. Within a moment's notice I can be whisked away to a wedding or a funeral or to the river or any number of other things. But, on the whole, I feel confident that I can generalize to give the impression of how I live here.

Tuesdays and Fridays I teach at Mbam II, the local elementary school. This is my only true structured activity from week to week, so these days I can count on pretty well.

6:45 am- wake up, throw open shutters to sounds of cocks crowing, donkeys braying, and birds singing. Luckily, I can count on sunny, clear skies.

7:20 am- Take my breakfast. Here it is Cafe Touba (spiced Senegalese-style coffee) and a baguette with chocolate spread. Yum!

7:45 am- Wander down the dusty path to Mbam II with Thiarma, who is in CM there. She walks with her gal pals and they all speak in Serer, so I have absolutely no idea what they're saying. Occasionally they attempt to communicate in Wolof though, which is nice.

8:05 am- Class gets called to session. I head to CM II to wait my time to teach

Sometime before 11 am- Give my 30-ish minute lesson, which generally seems to fall unheard on an uninterested audience. Except the fact that I'm a toubab seems to make them care a little bit.

11 am- Wander back home with Thiarma, probably for the day. Sometimes I head back in the afternoon to plant trees or work some more, but usually not.

11 am-1 pm- Run around doing errands with Kumba. This usually means repeated trips to the 'marche,' a shady spot under some trees where lots of ladies sell spices, veggies, and fish.

1pm-3pm- Enjoy lunch and attaya (with so much sugar I am fairly certain I'll be diabetic on my return stateside). Lunch is always served with rice and usually is some fish and veggies with sauce. I LOVE the produce here. So much squash, cabbage, carrots, eggplant and manioc. Binta's family eats well!

2pm-4pm- 'Repose-toi!' Usually some lazy activity like reading, napping, journaling, blogging, etc. It's siesta hour so I never feel all that guilty about taking some really necessary 'me' time.

4 or 5 pm-7pm- Run more errands with the ladies. Usually involves me carrying a heavy bucket on my head that is not nearly as heavy as the ones the Senegalese ladies carry. We make daily trips to the well, where I carry a 20-ish pound lidded-bucket and the other ladies have multiple trips with open-topped, 30-40ish pound ones. The women of this house haul ALL of the water that we use- drinking, bucket showering, cooking, etc- from a well about 1/3 mile from our house. Oftentimes we also head to the mill, the tailor, or visit friends during this time. It's also the hour to prepare dinner! I am occasionally of use, but only occasionally. My skills are limited to using a mortar and pestle to grind pepper/other spices and chopping vegetables.

Sometime between 7 and 9pm- Dinner time! Binta sometimes makes me something special, like a rich sauce with baguette or pasta, but the average night is cere (millet-based cous cous) with fishy or peanut sauce! Yum! Neex na!

After dinner- Take my daily bucket bath. This has become increasingly unpleasant with dropping temperatures. It's still in the high sixties, but that feels cold when you're basically outside with a bucket full of well-water that was pulled only hours before, without the benefit of a day in the sun.

All night long- Lounge. Watch television (occasionally, when the power isn't out). Work. Read. Etc. Usually head to bed long before most Senegalese people. It's funny, but getting into bed with a mosquito net feels like a lot of work nowadays.

On days that I'm not at school, I spend the morning running errands with Kumba. We go to the river to barter for fish, or to the fields to harvest peanuts, or to hunt for fruit. Sometimes we head to the fields in the afterlunch lazy period too. Everyone works their hardest to avoid making any effort during the hottest hours of the day. This is especially true of me because I get made fun of a lot everytime I burn, or tan for that matter. The fact that my skin changes color almost daily really amuses my family here. For the most part, the days all blur together in a contented whirl of activity. The ladies of the house are my lifeline. Even when I am in the most foul mood, Kumba, Khady, and Ke manage to make me laugh and run around the village like a fool. There's something very nice about wandering around on dirt roads with the ladies at sunset. The sky turns lovely shades of pink, blue, and purple, and there is always a slight smokey haze rising out of the huts. Add the silhouettes of baobab trees, the random wandering of animals, and the fact that there is a full moon that rises before the sun sets and you can imagine that Mbam is basically the most picturesque place on the planet. I can already tell that this whole experience is going to feel very surreal when I leave.

November 20th- Jours feries and the post-Tabaski doldrums.

This week has been interesting. It was the week of Tabaski, so naturally everyone took the entire week off. For me, that meant that I was introduced to an entirely new, completely transitory, new cast of characters. Family from out of town flocked to Mbam, including three nephews of Binta's who were staying at my house. This was in addition to the fact that many of the people I'd grown used to seeing daily, including Ke, Thiarma, Khady, Jean and Joe went back to celebrate with their families in other villages. I had no work to do given that it was a holiday and was faced with a new social makeup. One of the houseguests made me feel really patronized all the time, so I got fairly cranky pretty quick. My emotions have been really up and down and I can't decide if its a result of hormones, culture shock, my headcold, or all three.

Even with my uncertain emotional state, I can't help but count this week as a success. I have eaten really well, given that the sheep came just in time to make up for the lack of fresh fish that's started. I got to see a ram slaughtered and celebrate a major Muslim holiday in a Senegalese village, with all the luttes and dances and accompanying gaiety. Really, I have done quite a few new things and will remember Tabaski fondly.

The funniest development this week was discovering the way that jours feries happen in Senegal. I needed to know which days school would be canceled, given that I volunteer at the elementary school in town on Tuesdays and Fridays. Tabaski was Wednesday, so naturally Tuesday and Thursday classes would be canceled to allow people to visit their families. Everyone at the house immediately started complaining that the break was far too short. After living in Senegal awhile, I have to agree. If anyone is planning to leave town at all, three days is barely time to make it out the door. But the decision had been made by the school authorities, so I figured that people would deal and I planned to go to school on Friday. When Thursday night arrived, Binta said that she wasn't sure if there would be class the next day. I asked how that was possible, given that I had talked to the director and he assured me there would be class on Friday. She told me that sometimes things happen and classes may or may not happen. Hm, vague and confusing. But I woke up the next day and headed to school anyway. When I arrived, I found about half the student body, one teacher, and the director at Mbam II. Apparently everyone else just couldn't make it back in time. How hilarious! The two men were trying their best to find a way to hold classes, I think more than anything to make a point, but they just couldn't manage. They ended up having short sessions with two or three of the classes, and afterwords everyone got to go home. It was so funny to me to see that the holiday was universally regarded as too short, so people just didn't show up. Even funnier, the high school usually has class Saturdays, but after canceling Friday they went ahead and canceled Saturday too, so the break turned from a three day break into a five day break.

I couldn't help but think of the lead-up to Korite, when everyone claimed that they weren't sure which day the celebration would be. I can't help but think that the Senegalese really knew all along that school would be canceled but didn't want to say it out loud for fear of jinxing it or something. Ke Ndiaye didn't even bother to come back to Mbam on Thursday, which to me seems to indicate that she was pretty sure there wouldn't be class Friday. I think it's really funny that a day off happened by the force of everyone's unified (but unplanned/undiscussed) unwillingness to rush their Tabaski for the sake of following rules and schedules. I guess this happens other times too. Every year the Senegalese celebrate the Magal de Touba, a day that celebrates the exile of a major Mauride religious leader, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, and everyone at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar decides not to show up. But I guess that's just the way things work here. I find it understandable, especially in the case of Tabaski, when everyone wants to go home and physically cannot make the trip in the three days allotted to them.  

November 19th- Peanuts!

One of the things that has most enchanted me so far with my internship has been the opportunity to harvest peanuts. Peanut production in Senegambia is one of the major vestiges of the colonial era and the chance to see the process in action made me really excited. Yes, I am the world's biggest nerd. I also love agriculture, so that is pretty exciting too.

The colonial powers used taxes as a way to draw the Senegalese into the cash economy and peanuts often became the answer to the problem of how to make money in the first place. The French encouraged peanut production because at the time peanut oil was used to make fine soaps. During the colonial era, peanuts were exported raw from Senegal for very cheap prices and then transformed into finished products in France that the French could then sell for high prices. It was a really nice system to make the French a lot of money. And Senegalese peasants needed to grow something of value to get the cash to pay taxes. So wasn't that a nice little system.

The point is that peanut cultivation is a really important part of Senegal's culture and history. Mafay- a rich peanut sauce- is one of my favorite foods in the village. In fact, peanuts are now used in many Senegalese dishes and most families (including mine here) have a field where they grow a combination of millet, peanuts, bissap, and other crops. I am astounded at the diversity that one little plot can contain. After spending my life in the Midwest, where monocultures are rampant, it is really nice to see an agricultural scheme utilizing a little more diversity. But yes, peanuts. I was bumming about not getting to visit the Gambia until I realized that getting to harvest peanuts in the Sine-Saloum River Delta is probably a lot cooler experience to report upon.

It is so cool to be able to see every step in the cultivation of the food I eat here. Admittedly, the family eats rice imported from Vietnam with lunch almost every day, but the cous cous (it's Senegalese cous cous- or cere- which means it's millet based) we eat for dinner was all grown in Mbam and processed in my backyard. All the vegetables and fish and meat that we eat come from the gardens, nets, and yards of men and women in nearby houses. Watching the women pound millet is one thing that will never cease to amaze me. I have tried to do it, and it takes a phenomenal amount of strength. They literally shake the ground with their efforts. It takes a lot of time and energy to make this local production work. People are never truly idle. The women almost always have a pestle or some food item in hand and the boys are constantly chopping millet for horses or wood for fires or reeds for palisades. Peanuts, I have learned, are a truly tedious food. There are so many steps to make them ready for eating. In the fields, a horse with a plow turns the plants. The harvesters (that's me!) follow the horse, dusting off the plants, and placing them in piles all over the field. They then sit to dry for a day or two before we stack them in pagnes and carry them home on the charette. Once home, everyone sits around with the plants, pulling the peanuts off the stems individually and placing them in buckets. But even then, we have to remove the shells before they can be eaten. Sometimes they are burned in a pile of brush before the shells are taken off and we eat them, fresh roasted from the ground, but other times we take off the shells and leave the peanuts out to dry in the sun. After all that, they are finally ready to be used in our food. It takes so much time. Particularly cumbersome are the steps where one has to individually remove and deshell the nuts. What a pain. It also really hurts my fingers cracking open all the shells.

It sounds like I'm complaining but in reality I'm having the time of my life! It's still sort of novel for me to be doing the tasks that I'm sure become menial after awhile. Life in the brush is work, as Binta is so fond of telling me. After living here for a month, I can see it is true. It takes so much time to make everything work. Water must be carried from the wells (I have learned to walk with a 10-20 kg bucket full of water on my head!), food brought from the fields and boutiques and markets, fires built and wood chopped. I understand why everyone takes a siesta almost everyday. I feel so worthless; my skills are regularly surpassed by the four and eight year olds living in the house. But I guess that's to be expected. My family here has hosted many toubabs and so I figure they understand if I fail a little bit.  

November 17th- Tabaski!

This semester I have been fortunate enough to get to witness some very important events. I was in Dakar for a large part of Ramadan and the celebration of its end, Korite, and now, a little over a month later, I am in Mbam and we've been celebrating again! Today was Tabaski, a Muslim holiday celebrating the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael that always takes place in the months after Korite.

I have been looking forward to Tabaski for a number of weeks now, especially after I learned that it is a holiday marked by eating all day long. The reason that so much eating gets done is that Tabaski is the ram-slaughtering holiday. Every household buys a male sheep and butchers it in the morning, eating all the pieces as the day wears on.

The days before and after Tabaski are always taken off work and school in preparation for the holiday (everyone leaves Dakar and heads to their villages...we had lots of company!), so naturally the celebration started the night before. After taking our tea and eating dinner, I headed off with the ladies of my house (actually just Khady and Sayjo and some of their pals) to a dance. It was at the elementary school, which made me laugh, but the school made a better forum than the party in a field I went to the week before, so I went with it. The dances in Mbam always feel like barn dances to me. The moon was full and the music could be heard all through the village. One thing that strikes me about fetes in Mbam is that there is a serious mixing of generations. Last night I went with ladies of high school age, but at the dance there were many people younger and older than any of us. The age range was quite honestly early teens to mid thirties. But that is normal for Mbam. The Senegalese habit of staying out all night apparently holds true in the village as well. I was made fun of for being a party pooper when I decided I wanted to go home at 2:30 in the morning...by a fifteen year old. But the party was very lively and I learned a dance that hails from Guinea-Bissau called “The Obama.” Obviously a night well spent.

But the adventure didn't end when we left the dance! Sayjo and Khady and I walked home and woke Kumba up to let us in. After returning from the restroom (you have to go outside to access it), Kumba was out in the yard looking around. She looked at me with a look of bemused alarm and said “LE BEGUE, IL EST PARTI!” She was referring to the ram that had arrived on the top of a bus with our visitors from Dakar earlier in the evening. Apparently he didn't want to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he had made a great escape effort just as we arrived. He was still wandering around the courtyard, but started to run as he realized we were coming for him. The entire house woke up to the cries about the escaped sheep and the whole lot of us ran around, weaving through the road and the yards of our neighbors, trying to catch the sheep. I was useless, laughing too hard to do anything and way too afraid of my lack of skills even if I did get close to the sheep. But there was something really wonderful about running around at 3 am trying to catch an escaped sheep under a full moon.

Poor sheep. I fell asleep to his perturbed “baaah”s after he was more securely attached to a tree out back. But I didn't sleep long! The ladies of the household wake up very early the day of Tabaski to finish preparing the sauces and vegetables they started preparing the night before. That way once the men return from the mosque to kill the sheep all that remains is the cooking of the meat! So after sleeping very few hours, I woke up and went out to see what was going on. I was fairly useless because I don't know how to cook anything, but it was interesting to watch. Senegalese women are pros at making food for the masses, using huge pots over open fires to make gigantic batches of onion sauce and french fries.

The sheep was still sitting and bleating sadly- knowing, I think, what awaited him. And he was right to be afraid. With the return of the men from the mosque at around 10 am, they set to work digging a hole to drain the ram's blood when they decapitated it. I was pretty excited to see the sheep get butchered actually. I had never witnessed the butchering of an animal before and I was really curious to see how it went. So the men dug a hole (using machetes because I have stolen all the shovels for my projects at the school) and the poor sheep was laid to rest. I was fairly surprised by how quickly they managed to remove the skin and finish the cutting of the meat. The whole process took maybe an hour. And they were using really dull knives. I was also impressed by how calm I was watching a sheep get killed. All the guys were making jokes and trying to get me to help and playing with its testicles (obviously the 8 year old and the 16 year old were taking the lead on that one). Oh yeah, and the guys were butchering the sheep on the door to my host brother's hut. Typical.

With the sheep freshly killed, Binta and Kumba set to work preparing the liver, which would be our breakfast! It didn't take long (remember they did all that preparation before!) and before you know it we were eating a delicious breakfast of lettuce, french fries, freshly slaughtered sheep's liver, and a rich onion sauce. So tasty! And it was only 11am!

The whole day passed in that sort of fashion. We hung around the house, making attaya, visiting, getting visits, and eating various parts of the sheep. I can't be sure exactly which parts I ate, but I do know that I ate a lot of things that I would probably not appreciate knowing the identity of. Actually I know I ate intestine and probably some testicle and a bit of the jaw, so I can't imagine that there is much more unknown that could bother me. There was a lutte and a dance tonight, but after last night's adventure, and looking forward to another adventure tomorrow, I think I need a break.

Oh Tabaski! What a rush. The sheep was too much. And we ate the entire thing. Literally the entire sheep, with the exception of its horns and its hooves (which are saved for another festival thirty days from now), is now gone. Oh begue!